The Guardian view on Scottish politics: mind the gap
|
Version 0 of 1. Even at the end of a very bad year for opinion polls, few would risk disagreeing with the current polling on Scotland’s 2016 election. In 2011, the Scottish National party won an outright majority at Holyrood on the back of a 46% share in constituency votes and a 44% share of regional list votes. But in recent polls, the SNP is still maintaining the increased 50% vote share that the party won in last May’s UK general election triumph. All the indications for next May are that Nicola Sturgeon’s party is on course for a third successive win, leaving the SNP masters of all they survey for another five years. It would be perverse to suggest that the SNP’s political ascendancy shows any signs of faltering. Ms Sturgeon and her party remain sufficiently popular to withstand a few setbacks. Yet events in the past month contain some intimations of nationalist political mortality. The closure of the Forth Road Bridge until at least the new year because of structural cracks is the kind of embarrassment that can happen to any government. But it has happened on the SNP’s watch, not on anyone else’s. The closure is high-profile, bad for the Scottish economy, cannot be blamed on the Tories, and inconveniences a lot of people. What is more, having at first insisted the fault was unforeseeable, it soon became clear that the SNP government had slashed a repair programme in 2010 that would have replaced the cracked section that caused the closure. Holyrood is to mount an inquiry. But the transport minister Derek Mackay is not out of the woods, and if the closure overruns, his position will be at risk and the SNP’s reputation will have been damaged. A more important potential political stress fracture was exposed by reports by the Guardian’s Scotland editor, and then by the finance minister John Swinney’s budget last week. The SNP has persuaded left-of-centre Scots that they are better defenders of social democratic principles than their opponents. But the budget harshly highlighted the financial penalty that some, including the education and culture budgets and the poor, are paying so that NHS spending is bolstered and expensive universalist policies including free university tuition and free prescriptions maintained in the run-up to May’s election. The SNP’s reluctance to raise personal taxes or unfreeze the council tax, which benefits the middle classes disproportionately, is another powerful echo of George Osborne’s approach in the rest of the UK. The biggest price will be paid by Scottish local government, which faces more than £350m of cuts that unions, which put the figure nearer £500m, say mean 15,000 job losses. Most things in Scottish politics must be understood in the frame of May’s elections. They explain the SNP’s reluctance to cut universal benefits and raise personal taxes. They explain Labour’s caution on the same issues. They explain Ms Sturgeon’s eagerness to pick a fight with David Cameron over future financing for Scotland. They explain why the Forth Road Bridge closure matters. And they explain why, with the oil price at $37 a barrel, not the $110 on which the SNP made its pre-referendum calculation in 2014, there is less talk about a second independence referendum too. The SNP still commands Scottish politics. But they promised Scots that they could have it all and, right now, the gap between that claim and reality is beginning to show. |