6 September 2024

The SNP’s reign is ending with a whimper

For a supposedly radical party, the Nats are strangely small in their thinking.

And so Scotland must continue to wait. This week’s Programme for Government, Holyrood’s equivalent of the King’s Speech, was yet another damp squib, the latest and probably the last missed opportunity for the SNP to show it still has what it takes. If it wasn’t clear before, then it certainly is now that only a new government will have the guts and the energy to face up to the many challenges confronting the nation.

There isn’t much money to spend – stringent cuts are being imposed across the public sphere due to the SNP’s past profligacy – but John Swinney might still have shown that he understands the scale of the crisis facing schools and hospitals. Instead, there was only more of the same: limp, peripheral tinkering that is unlikely to make much of a difference.

This wasn’t a surprise, of course. As I revealed last week, Swinney’s decision largely to maintain the Sturgeon-era cabinet has hamstrung any real prospect of a new direction – as a senior government source told me, “too many ministers are ideologues and just can’t get out of the rut. You think you have a chance of getting change through, and then the risk-averse, the fearful folk, push back and win. You’re just told things can’t change.”

It’s hard to avoid drawing the conclusion that the Nats have largely given up. As the 2026 Holyrood election draws closer, I expect Scottish Labour to pull ahead in the polls. They simply appear fresher and more up for it. The electorate knows a zombie government when it sees one. It recognises when an administration’s time is simply up.

You could see as much on Swinney’s grim face as he listened to his legislative agenda, such as it is, being pulled apart by the opposition leaders. This included the Scottish Greens, recently the SNP’s coalition partners and now something like its worst enemy. The Greens have said they won’t vote for Swinney’s Budget, such is their anger at the brutal spending restrictions that have led to key left-wing programmes being cut or abandoned completely.

So much for the First Minister’s stated desire to usher in a new era of cross-party collaboration. The only collaboration in sight appears to be the determination by the other parties to finally finish off the once all-powerful Nats.

Swinney’s rhetoric remains ambitious – his priorities would be “eradicating child poverty, building prosperity, improving public services and protecting the planet”, he said – but the measures are minimal. There’s no rethink of the failed Curriculum for Excellence that has seen Scotland’s schools plummet down the international league tables. The approach to fixing the NHS is perfunctory, at best – “the idea of NHS reform is a mirage”, as one civil servant in the health department told me this week.

For a party that exists for the radical purpose of launching a new country, the Nats are strangely small in their thinking on so much else. Their conservative, or perhaps timid, approach to policy in the major areas in the devolved government’s purview is really quite baffling. They’re not going to win the next election by carrying on as they have for the past decade. And yet that seems to be exactly what they’ve decided to do. On with rent controls, and with changing the nameplates on the state’s education institutions, and with blaming Westminster for every bad thing that happens. It won’t do.

It says something that there were only really two moments of note in Swinney’s speech. The first was a brief, passing reference to independence, a word that usually dominates set-piece Nat speeches – the FM has clearly understood that message from the voters, at least.

The second was the announcement that the Ministerial Code of Conduct will be strengthened, with new powers given to independent investigators. Even this came from weakness, stemming from the scandal surrounding former health secretary Michael Matheson, who claimed £11,000 in expenses for roaming charges racked up by his family watching football on an iPad while on holiday. Swinney defended Matheson until the end, which cast serious doubt over the First Minister’s judgement.

One has grown used to major parliamentary events being raucous affairs, with SNP MPs, cheering, whopping and applauding their leaders while barracking their opponents. There wasn’t much of that in evidence this week. The odds are against them, and growing longer. They chose Swinney to get things back on track, but he doesn’t seem to have it in him to do so, and the air has gone out of the party.

The end of SNP hegemony and its departure from government – for that is surely what is unfolding – is a curiously tame affair.