As Scottish budgets go last weeks was a good one. It gives me hope that the SNP can re-establish a reputation for running things well. For making decisions that fit with the public’s priorities. And for demonstrating in practise the case for political autonomy by showing that when we have the power to make decisions ourselves, we make better ones.
There could have been more. There always can. In particular, this might have been the time to bite the bullets on the linked issues of land reform and council tax replacement. But these are policy rather than financial decisions and they might still come.
Budgets are financial expressions of a political programme. About which choices you make when you cannot do everything you want. And given that the amount of money available and the rules on how it can be spent are heavily constrained by the straitjacket of devolution, this was a good set of choices.
It feels like a package that chimes with a majority of the public. It feels like it will get through. I say this in large part because of how the opposition parties received it.
Perhaps most at sea were the Tories. There is a right-wing argument on public finances, involving major cuts to taxation and public spending. It’s not one the Scottish Tories even tried to make. An indication, perhaps, of some self-awareness at just how out of tune such ideas are with Scottish society.
Instead, the Tories argued that the Scottish government should cut taxes by over a billion and increase spending on business support and other areas at the same time. Their position does not even command an internal logic or consistency.
Next up the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, both claiming that various budget items were as a result of their pressure and persistence. Alex Cole-Hamilton appeared to think that pretty much everything good in the budget was down to him. Mental health, GPs, dentists, affordable homes, ferries and more would not have happened without the LibDem gang of four. Sorry to disabuse him but the truth is these measures are all in the budget because they are areas of agreement between his party and the SNP.
But it is Labour’s reaction that is most disingenuous. Labour’s strategy for 2026 is play up the notion that Scotland is beset with catastrophe and crisis, and that a change in government, any change, is necessary. This depends on always describing the glass and half empty, casting everything in the worst possible light. So, everything the SNP does is bad, and if it weren’t for the benign UK government increasing the Scottish budget things would be worse still.
There are a few problems ahead for Labour if it continues this strategy. The first is that whilst the rhetoric will undoubtedly cheer the partisans who already have nailed their colours to the labour mast, it won’t gain traction with non-labour voters unless it accords with their personal reality.
Cast your mind back to 2011 and the reorganisation of Scotland’s further education sector by amalgamating institutions to form a much smaller number of colleges. The process involved a lot of courses disappearing, and on paper it looked like a lot of places were disappearing too. So, the Labour opposition ran a major campaign about the bad SNP government cutting thousands of college places. It didn’t work. For one simple reason – there were not people who had been expecting a collage place and then didn’t get it. The allegation didn’t fit with the lived reality of the people.
The party that doth protest too much is in danger of doing the same thing with health. To listen to Labour spokespeople, you’d think Scotland’s health service was in dire straits, paralysed by crisis and unable to provide care to the populace. I find myself using the Scottish NHS more than most. And whilst there are certainly problems accessing the health service when you do it is bloody good.
The biggest problem is the time between diagnosis and procedure. And the biggest cause of that is not that we don’t have the capacity to do more operations, but that we don’t have enough beds for people to recover in. That is why two new targets in this budget, investing in social care to increase that sector’s capacity to accommodate hospital discharges, and expansion of the Hospital at Home service (which is brilliant by the way) are so vital.
Labour’s other main strategic problem is that promising change in Scotland won’t work if they abjectly fail to deliver change in the UK. Already many in the electorate are saying once bitten, twice shy. No matter how many pillars and missions and milestones the Starmer government announces, it won’t work unless people see real change on the ground.
Meanwhile the SNP should make use of its limited powers in Scotland to illustrate what change actually looks like. That’s why mitigation of Westminster decisions is such an important strand of the Scottish government’s decisions. We’ve done that for years to blunt the worst Tory policies such as the bedroom tax. Many hoped Labour would change UK policy and remove the need for mitigation efforts here. Instead, change hasn’t come. New policies like abolishing energy support for pensioners only make it more necessary.
But we can’t mitigate forever. Which is why hand in hand with explaining what can be done, the Scottish government must at every turn point out how much more could be achieved if we had the full powers of a normal country.