MARIANNE TAYLOR
First Minister must be bold to tackle challenges ahead
FEW among us haven’t taken time over the last couple of days to look back at the year just gone. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have been getting a tad too melancholic about the regrets and disappointments, and overly sentimental about the good bits. How frustratingly Scottish.
And what about 2016, that 12 months already named and numbered and as of today begun, but with no story yet written? Will this be a big important year, or the sort that just slips by seemingly without ever making its presence felt?
Particular years stick out, of course, and sometimes they even define us; I believe 2016 will be such a year for Nicola Sturgeon.
As the bells sounded in the wee small hours, I’ll wager she raised a glass to it with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. If all goes to plan for the First Minister – and there is not a shred of evidence to suggest it won’t – she will win her mandate emphatically in May’s Holyrood election. Let’s not forget that despite massive popularity at home and having made a significant impact across the UK and further afield, voters have not yet had the opportunity to give their formal seal of approval to her leadership.
And the possibilities for this particular leadership are far more intriguing, exciting and full of potential than they have been for any First Minister in the job’s relatively short history. No other FM will have had the power – both legislatively, and in terms of likely mandate – or the personal goodwill that awaits Ms Sturgeon in May.
But such power and such possibility are also fraught with dangers, perhaps the biggest of which would be disappointing a hungry, engaged but diverse – and in terms of the constitution, divided – electorate. Barack Obama knows only too well how quickly hope can turn into disappointment and apathy.
With this in mind, she must be both canny and bold in 2016. That won’t be easy. But she must find a way to show us her real mettle– the sort of agenda she wants to pursue, the change she covets most and how far she is willing to go to achieve it.
Of course last year was also a pretty big one for the First Minister – winning all but three of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats and forging her place as a major figure in British politics saw to that. These were big ticket achievements, both symbolic and tangible. But they did not in themselves do anything to change the lives of ordinary Scots.
Scotland is a country hungry for change, particularly around poverty and equality of opportunity, where frustratingly little progress has been made despite plenty of rhetoric.
So, what about these bold measures? Ms Sturgeon has said in interviews she is cautious by nature, and we saw evidence of this over the last year, as she deftly steered the narrative away from an immediate second referendum, towards a focus on Scotland as a progressive, pro-European country more or less running its own show, albeit shackled by nasty Westminster. This generally plays well with most voters, including many who voted No in the referendum, but she’s going to have to do more on the “progressive” bit.
When Scotland puts all its eggs in the yellow basket in May, it will expect big things in return. Frustratingly for Ms Sturgeon, of course, “big” means different things to different people. There is only so long that more radical SNP members and activists will go along with her playing down a second referendum. I certainly don’t expect to see it feature prominently in the party’s forthcoming manifesto. Of course, this position could change should Scotland find itself voted out of Europe later this year. But with little genuinely pro-European sentiment currently on show in Scotland and polls suggesting the pro-Yes vote is fairly static, even such a “material change in circumstances” – what Ms Sturgeon says would be required for another referendum – may not be enough.
She could call the bluff of those calling for indyref 2 – mostly people on the left who say only independence can bring about a fairer society – by being more radical in her current policymaking. How about a new replacement for the council tax that increases the burden on those with properties valued at over £150,000? Or Scandi-level income tax? After all, there’s no denying the European countries with the most equal societies are those with the highest taxes.
Or how about scrapping some of those much-coveted – but costly – universal benefits, the free higher education tuition fees and childcare for all, free travel and winter fuel payments for pensioners that middle class voters love so much?
As revealed in The Herald this week, the Scottish Government’s poverty tsar, Naomi Eisenstadt, has made clear her staunch opposition to such benefits on the basis that the better-off get far more out of them than the poor. She recommends instead targeting the cash towards those who need it most.
And therein lies the rub for Ms Sturgeon. Can such circles really be squared? Can even the most popular politician in living memory, really keep everybody happy? The First Minister is probably losing sleep over this already because she knows fine well that real, defining change will be hard to achieve but even harder to sell outside of the left. How do you keep these voters happy as well as the ones who would never dream of leaving the centre ground?
It’s a conundrum that faces many western democracies, of course. And with this in mind, perhaps Ms Sturgeon plans to follow German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s massively successful long-term example by tweaking rather than innovating, compromising rather than boldly going your own way. Mrs Merkel, of course, is not at the same time trying to persuade people to make a momentous constitutional change. Neither are the Scandinavians.
No wonder the First Minister will be facing 2016 with trepidation. This is the year when she can and must finally define what sort of leader she will be.
It could determine the length of her tenure, and her chances of leading Scotland towards independence. There is much at stake. How does one be radical, at a time of austerity, while keeping the mortgaged majority happy? And keep persuading unbelievers to take a chance on independence. It’s enough to give anyone a splitting headache on January 1.
But in the spirit of the new year, I will venture that if anybody can have a bloody good crack at squaring all these particular circles, it’s Nicola Sturgeon. A proper social democrat with a genuine feel for what makes ordinary folk tick, she also has an enviable intellect and an ability to bring people round to her world view. And by the looks of the opposition, there is no person, no party, in her way. But make her mark she must – and soon. The goodwill won’t last forever.
‘‘ It could determine the length of her tenure, and her chances of leading Scotland to independence. There is much at stake