Sturgeon’s shameless conjuring trick won’t fool voters
NICOLA Sturgeon hailed her party’s manifesto as a blueprint for a ‘better Scotland’ – ‘packed full of progressive policies’.
But in reality it’s a conjuring trick – amounting to the biggest and costliest wish-list in Scottish political history.
Billions are pledged for an array of giveaways, from free bicycles to a minimum income guarantee.
In one commitment after another, money is no object – yet most of them come with a massive price-tag.
And yet, implausibly, we’re told income tax will be frozen, raising an important question: who on Earth will pay for this extraordinary spending splurge?
In her preface to the manifesto, the First Minister said we have ‘all discovered this last year how much we rely on each other’.
But nowhere in the document is there an acknowledgement of how much we’ve relied on the broad shoulders of the United Kingdom.
We’ve weathered the worst of the Covid crisis thanks in large part to our membership of a strong alliance that allows the pooling and sharing of vital resources.
And without tax hikes, much of the SNP’s proposed agenda depends on the largesse of a partnership it wants to end. The respected Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said the Scottish Government now has 30 per cent per person more to spend on public services compared to England.
That is a sum made possible only by our membership of the UK – and it would be unachievable in an independent Scotland.
The IFS also points out that the SNP plans to use part of its temporary Covid funding – about £10billion from the Treasury – to pay for a number of ‘more permanent’ policies. These include an expansion of free school meals and bus passes and ‘potentially some of the costs of higher public sector pay’.
How much more of this vital cash will be siphoned off to bankroll the catalogue of pledges the SNP unveiled yesterday? Some £10million has been set aside to ‘allow companies to pilot and explore’ a four-day week – an utter fantasy in the aftermath of the pandemic.
The planned National Care Service relies on a 25 per cent increase in funding for social care, though it’s not clear how it will function and what it will do.
Nearly £2billion will be used for tackling the climate crisis alongside a green transport ‘revolution’ and the nationalisation of rail services.
Yet there’s no serious plan for boosting business as it attempts to recover after more than a year of lockdown-induced paralysis.
A ‘legal duty’ will be imposed on businesses to force them to ‘consider’ their economic and environmental impact. But businesses, entrepreneurs and start-ups need a reduced tax burden, not reams of red tape.
The minimum income guarantee is seen as a prelude to a Universal Basic Income (UBI). The IFS warns that ‘paying a genuinely meaningful UBI to all people resident in Scotland, irrespective of their other income, would require a substantial increase in expenditure and hence in taxes to pay for it’.
The repercussions of Covid for the economy mean spending constraints are inescapable – meaning key elements of the SNP’s pie-in-the-sky programme are simply unaffordable. Some of it is re-heated, such as the vow to look again at council tax – a review first mooted by the SNP ahead of the 2007 election.
Yet any objective analysis of the SNP’s track record suggests that many of these uncosted policies are destined never to materialise.
According to the Conservatives, more than a dozen flagship SNP promises have been broken during 14 years of failure. Among them are an unfulfilled 2017 promise to introduce an Education Bill, giving more power to headteachers.
Reform of state schools was said to be Miss Sturgeon’s top priority when she was appointed First Minister in 2014. In her 76-page manifesto, education appears on page 62 – and there’s little evidence of a cogent plan for change.
Closing the attainment gap remains an unrealised goal after seven years and another £1billion has been earmarked for the task.
Miss Sturgeon wants to protect ‘our NHS from Tory governments’, including the current Conservative government, which masterminded the Covid vaccination scheme.
Her own administration, in which she once served as Health Secretary, has failed to achieve a 2007 commitment to ensure no patients have to wait more than 18 weeks from GP referral to treatment.
There’s an unavoidable conclusion – the SNP is prepared to promise almost anything, but it can’t be trusted to deliver.
Fifth on the list of the party’s priorities yesterday was another independence referendum ‘after the Covid crisis is over’. As ever, its overriding mission is to smash apart the United Kingdom – a divorce that would leave it unable to pay for the ‘progressive’ society Miss Sturgeon wants to build.
In reality, the Nationalists have no other long-term ambition than destroying the UK – and it’s an obsession that can only lead to yet more division and economic turmoil.