MANIFESTO AT A GLANCE
INDEPENDENCE
THE first key pledge listed is ‘Scotland’s future in Scotland’s hands’. It says that Scotland must become ‘an independent European nation’, and that the country must have the power to choose ‘who has the right to determine our future’. It also claims there is already ‘a clear mandate to hold a referendum on independence during the current term of the Scottish parliament’ and says that ‘Scotland has already voted for it’. However, the SNP failed to win a majority in the Holyrood elections in 2016, and its manifesto then said only the Scottish parliament should have the right to hold another referendum ‘if there is clear evidence independence has become the preferred option of a majority of the Scottish people – or if there is a material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will’. While the SNP and Greens united in 2017 to vote for the power to hold another referendum, the Greens did not make a specific manifesto pledge ahead of the 2016 election.
BREXIT
The party want to ‘escape from Brexit’, and its preferred method of doing so is a second referendum – although the manifesto does not set out whether this should happen before or after it proposed independence referendum in the latter half of next year. Its manifesto also states that revocation of Article 50 must be considered if it is the only way to stop Brexit. While critics say that, like the Liberal Democrats, this shows the SNP want to go against the will of the people, Miss Sturgeon insists that it is democratically acceptable since a majority of Scots voted to remain in the European Union in the 2016 referendum.
NHS
Nationalist MPs will attempt to introduce an NHS Protection Act at Westminster to guarantee that any post-Brexit trade deals, such as with the United States, do not open up the health service to multi-national companies. The manifesto points out that health spending in Scotland per person is higher than in England and calls on the
UK Government to close the ‘spending gap’, which could result in an extra £35billion for the NHS in England in the coming years, meaning Scotland would get an extra £4billion as a result. However, it comes in a week that figures showed around a quarter of a million Scots have been failed by an SNP 12 week treatment target – and Miss Sturgeon was skewered on her record in charge of the health service in a live interview.
WELFARE
The SNP will campaign to end austerity, scrap the two-child benefit cap, halt universal credit and end the benefit freeze. It also calls for a ‘triple lock’ to ensure pensions continue to rise by inflation, earnings or 2.5 per cent, and to support WASPI women in their campaign against the way in which the state pension age was changed.