It was predictable, and indeed predicted. There has been no shortage of ill-advised policies unveiled by Scotland’s political parties during this election campaign and the SNP’s proposal to cap supermarket food prices is right up there with the craziest.
Retailers have reacted as you’d expect: badly. Advocates have questioned the Nats’ ability to intervene in the way they intend. It has been pointed out that food prices in the UK are already among the cheapest in Europe due to the hyper-competitive market. As I wrote before when the policy was announced, it failed the sniff test: a bad idea in theory and practice, destined for the bin. Nothing that has happened since has changed my mind.
Last week, a shocked John Swinney appeared ready to make a swift U-turn when he said he would consider a voluntary scheme instead. He then flashed the U-turn, insisting he would go ahead with his plan to fix prices if supermarkets did not act first. Frankly, it’s all a bit Trumpian, both in its chaotic origins and its use of the bully pulpit to force independent institutions to bend to imperial will, or else.
With the manifestos all launched and two weeks until the vote, it is possible to step back and look at the overall nature of this election campaign. I’m afraid it’s not a pretty sight. It has turned into a war of free gift offers, school bags and bus rides, increased childcare and increased teacher numbers. More of this and much more of that – take your pick. It’s hard not to see much of it as fantasy politics. Indeed, one could accuse our leaders of malfeasance. The conversation that should have dominated is the one that didn’t.
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You can see it in the frustrated analyzes of the Institute for Fiscal Studies manifesto, bemoaning the useless and/or expensive pledges being thrown around like confetti. You hear it from senior civil servants staring down the barrel of a £5 billion spending gap in the next parliament and wondering if their would-be masters have lost their minds or are just too cowardly to face fiscal reality. And you hear it from voters, who are well aware of the bleak prospect they face and the evasions of their politicians. Much of the electorate has simply opted out of this frivolous debate, and who can blame them?
The government cannot continue to function as it has for the past few decades. It cannot continue to expand the state’s footprint, raise taxes on an already overburdened nation, extract benefits far beyond Westminster levels, pay lip service to economic growth and private enterprise while blanketing the public sector.
Every economic analyst and think tank worth a damn is warning that a crisis is coming. What this election campaign should have been was an honest conversation with the voters about the difficult choices that would have to be made. What will the government have to cut to close the fiscal gap? What should he stop doing? How can freebie culture continue (it can’t, or at least it shouldn’t). People need to prepare for the harsher climate that lies ahead – they are not weird and can smell that a change is coming, but responsible leadership means engaging in a national discussion about what that will look like.
No such discussion is taking place and I hear more and more from political analysts and economists that it may take a crisis before Holyrood rises to the challenge. This could be one or more universities in decline due to the extreme funding crisis of the sector. It could be that the NHS is collapsing further. It could be the ONE that wipes out jobs in finance and law, seriously hitting tax receipts. It could be a struggle. We are a long way from 1997.
What we’re headed for in the short term looks likely to be a frightening re-imagining of the SNP-Green alliance that caused so much damage during the last parliament. The most convincing polls suggest the Nats will win this election, giving them a third decade in power, but will return as a minority government. In that situation, the expectation is a kind of faith-and-supply deal with the Greens (and possibly the Lib Dems), which will only take us in one direction: a sharp jump to the left. Swinney has sought to shift his administration to the center after the dismal experiments of the Sturgeon and Yousaf years, but he will need the numbers, which means he will have to hold his nose and make some deals. Whatever your political stance, the idea that Scotland needs more leftism and a bigger, more generous state in these troubled times is surely for the birds.
If ever a nation needed a whiff of headstrong leadership, a display of intellectual rigor and a rethinking of how things are run, it is today’s Scotland. The rest of us are big enough to handle it, but our curse is to have politicians who show only pettiness, complacency and self-preservation in the face of really important challenges.
(Further reading: NPSH remains the party of “free things” – and of imminent independence)
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