Labour’s leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, has stepped up his campaign to oust the SNP from governing Scotland. There’s a little under two years to go before Scotland votes for who will win control at Holyrood and run the Scottish Government. Labour’s attacks on the SNP have been relentless since Keir Starmer led his party to a huge parliamentary majority that included crushing the SNP as a Westminster force. Sarwar’s latest tactic is to publish a paper blaming the SNP for “Scotland’s economic decline and financial mismanagement.”
Labour is to be congratulated on learning one of the great lessons of public relations. It is that a drip, drip, drip of negativity about political opponents over months and years is far more likely to bring electoral success than the wham-bam of frenzied activity in the immediate run-up to an election. It’s a strategy that was successfully employed by the Leave side and its media supporters in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Year upon year, the EU was positioned as the root cause of Britain’s problems. Now, we have Labour in Scotland telling us day in, day out, that the sky will be constantly blue and our bank accounts overflowing if only we can rid the nation of the SNP. Spin not substance.
Spin and reality
The Scottish unionist press – once the flag-bearers for the Conservative party north of the border – has sold its soul in the belief that the union is more precious than any alternative. Labour now equals union, so Labour gets a free run in most of the Scottish media. In a rapidly declining newspaper market, it is a strange site to see once great newspapers cling to the beliefs of a dying readership in a country where all the evidence is that the young – the generations newspapers should be seeking as readers – want to be rid of the union.
At the heart of Anas Sarwar’s latest salvo is the argument that Westminster holds no responsibility for the condition of the Scottish economy or for the spending constraints faced by the Scottish Government. There are without doubt failures in spending choices and the application of funds by the Scottish Government. Failure is true of every government that ever was and will be true of Labour in London or Edinburgh. The SNP’s mistakes are well documented, but it is only one of the players on the stage. The starring role in Scotland’s economic troubles is not Edinburgh but London. This is not the politics of grievance (a lazy phrase as all politics is rooted in grievance) but of the constitutional, structural and economic reality of Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom.
Some of the blame for Scotland’s flatlining economy assuredly falls on the SNP administration. But it is not the master of its own destiny, and it certainly cannot be blamed for England’s baleful economic performance. The UK economy has been stagnant for much of the past decade. Who has overseen the UK economy? Not the SNP.
Labour’s charge for Scottish decline is not credible
What is indisputable is that Scotland can spend only what it gets from Westminster and what it raises in local income taxation and oil and gas revenues. It is, in a phrase used by economists, an inelastic envelope. In short, it has hardly any room for manoeuvre. Unlike Westminster, it can’t go to the world’s money markets and borrow to make ends meet. It must live within its means.
Businesses in Scotland have, over the past four years, had to manage Brexit, Covid, cost and wage inflation, higher energy bills, staff shortages caused by the end of freedom of movement, and the disaster of the Truss government. None of those issues are in the control of the Scottish Government. Anas Sarwar’s charge that the SNP is responsible for Scottish economic decline is simply not credible. To quote Scottish Business News, “Trading and investing activity across Scotland hinges upon the overall prosperity of the United Kingdom.” Or, as Labour’s Health Secretary Wes Streeting recently said. “All roads lead to Westminster.”
Scotland’s national finances simply cannot be divorced from the policies and actions of the UK government. The late Ludovic Kennedy, in his 1995 book In Bed with an Elephant, about the relationship between Scotland and England, forensically demonstrated that any significant policy measures made in London have an almost immediate impact on Scotland. If the big elephant England turns over in bed the smaller occupants of the bed cannot but be affected.
Brexit wreaking great damage
The most telling of recent examples of this is Brexit, a policy that keeps wreaking great damage on the UK’s public finances and those of Scotland. As recently as May this year, the Office of Budget Responsibility confirmed its previous analysis that Brexit will see a 4% fall in UK productivity for the foreseeable future and recorded a 15% fall in exports and imports.
A study by Cambridge Econometrics, carried out for the Mayor of London’s office and published in January, put the fall in UK output at 6% and the cost to the UK economy at £140bn to date. Scotland’s population is 8% of the UK’s. 8% of £140 billion is £11.2 billion, so some £2bn a year since Brexit. The Scottish Government’s current annual shortfall is projected at £1bn a year for day-to-day spending. This is the real price of Brexit, and the real price being paid in homes, schools, hospitals, police stations and town halls across Scotland.
Keir Starmer’s Labour government holds no responsibility for Brexit, but the longer it refuses to acknowledge the enormous economic benefits to be gained from taking the UK back into the Customs Union and the Single European Market the harder it will find sustainable economic recovery. Consequently, the pain of Brexit will continue to be felt in homes, schools, hospitals, police stations and town halls across Scotland.
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