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As the new year begins there are reasons for the SNP to be in good heart. The haemorrhaging of support has arrested. The party in government is behaving with more of a sense of purpose than for some time.  A discussion is planned on party organisation with a general acceptance that reform is needed.

2025 could be the year when the party really gets its act back together. Reorganised, replenished, reactivated. But in the room where that debate is taking place sits the biggest of elephants. Operation Branchform. And we can’t not talk about it for ever.

When I say talk about it, I don’t mean discuss the matters being investigated, nor comment on the evidence being considered, nor opine on the guilt or innocence of any individual. All of that is a matter for the courts and I have no desire to be in their contempt.

But that does not mean that it is impossible to comment on the process itself or on the political impact that it is having.

The investigation of allegations of misconduct by senior officers of the SNP has been going on for three and half years. And there is no indication by the agencies involved as to when it might conclude. This is having a corrosive effect on Scottish politics. At some point it has to end.

I fully accept that the allegations are serious ones, and I will not try to minimise their import. But as Jim Sillars observed before Christmas the SNP organisation is actually a pretty small one with an HQ staff of around 20. It’s not as if we are talking about a major complex international organisation here.

Police Scotland said some time ago they have interviewed everyone they need to. Presumably by now whatever evidence there is has been collected. Now someone has to decide on it.

That decision might be complicated, perhaps not clear cut. But making the judgement whether to prosecute on the evidence is exactly what prosecutors do. Decisions are not made any easier by delaying them.

At the most basic level the people facing accusations have the right to have them dealt with. In 1868 British Prime Minister William Gladstone said justice delayed is justice denied. As senior Scottish advocates have observed that dictum is now becoming relevant in this case.  This cannot go on indefinitely.

The SNP has already changed its financial procedures as a result of concerns raised around this case, and of course, the people accused are no longer there. But until the outcome is known the party will not be able to deal with the issues it raises. It will not be able to move on.

In the meantime, Branchform hangs like a spectre over the nationalist side in the Scottish political divide. This puts the SNP at a great disadvantage, the subject of suspicion and investigation.

In many ways there’s a great unfairness to this. The allegations of wrongdoing were lodged against individuals, yet it is the wider party that suffers. After all, no one is suggesting that whatever happened came about as an act of deliberate policy agreed by SNP members. Quite the converse. The charge is precisely that senior officers of the party acted against policy and without the consent of the wider party.

Looked at this way the SNP is the victim not the perpetrator. If something bad happened, it was done to the party, not by it. Yet the press now universally describes the case as an investigation into the SNP’s finances, implying culpability for the party as a whole.

It is difficult to know the exact electoral effect that the Branchform investigation is having. Those who strongly support or strongly oppose the SNP probably won’t have their minds much altered by it. I doubt that it even has that much influence on whether people are minded to support independence.

It does though provide powerful ammunition to those whose strategy is not to attack independence but to portray the SNP as incapable of delivering it. No smoke without fire. Irrespective of the outcome, the existence of allegations of corruption undermines the party’s credibility.

But where it is having a political effect is in motivation. We know the SNP did so badly in last year’s election not because people switched to other parties, but because one-time supporters stayed at home.  For many of these people Branchform is one ingredient in the mix of their disengagement. They are not coming back until it is dealt with.

The biggest challenge for the SNP is to rebuild itself as the political wing of the independence movement. That requires changes in how we organise. It requires personnel and money dedicated to recruiting and training new activists. It requires better communication with and mobilisation of members.

Central to all of that is confidence. We need to believe in ourselves before we can ask others to believe in us. Whatever the conclusion of Branchform we can deal with it. We can put things right, make changes, move on. But not until we know what it is.

It’s still not six months since advocates of Scottish independence suffered a huge electoral setback.

As the year turns, are things looking better? Are we back?

Not yet. I see a lot of people getting excited this month about opinion polls showing a majority for independence. In particular there’s been spate of linking Indy to various alternative hypotheses. How would you vote if Nigel Farage were Prime Minister? If we had a republic?  If we had a well-being economy?

The problem is not that these questions are fanciful. It’s simply that they are not a good guide to the likelihood of people voting for Scotland to become an independent country.

We’ve been here before. Remember all those people who said they would embrace Indy if Brexit happened? And if Boris Johnson became PM? In the end they didn’t.

That’s because there is a world of difference between people thinking something is agreeable and them being prepared to make it happen. To win we need not only to persuade people that being and independent country is a nice idea, but that it is necessary to achieve the type of society they aspire to. Then we need to convince them that it is also possible by presenting a plausible road map to that end.

Opinion polls are important. A sustained period of majority public support will speed the journey to independence. But it is not a shortcut. It doesn’t mean you can just miss out a few stages and avoid the hard political work.

Besides given the dreadful mess Labour are making of UK government, and the unsavoury contest between the Tories and Reform on the British right, who wouldn’t consider any alternative the status quo. But we need to be better that the least bad option.

2025 must be year when we go beyond mitigating the effects of Westminster and create a convincing narrative about how the political power that comes with independent self-government is necessary to make our lives better.

Some of this is pretty obvious stuff. Take energy policy. The terrain of Scotland is blessed with a magnificent bounty of clean renewable energy. Yet the people who live here pay through the nose for power, many cannot afford to stay warm and comfortable, and the big corporations are recording record profits.

Our energy should be owned by us. Not that there’s no role for private companies, but they must operate within a public interest framework. This cannot happen overnight. But it will not happen at all unless a Scottish government has the political authority in Scotland to regulate energy companies and create new public ones. You need independence for that.

Another example is housing. If we want to tackle the shortage of homes in years rather than decades, we need to build public housing on a scale not seen for fifty years.

This requires state action. It requires the marshalling of resources on a national scale and over several generations. It requires major public borrowing and investment, and the ability to direct private equities. You need independence for that.

We must also present political independence as necessary to reset an ossified system of governance from which so many have become alienated. This is part of the attraction of Reform.

I don’t argue, for instance, that abolishing the monarchy should be a pre-condition for supporting independence. But there can be no doubt that the notion of electing the country’s head of state is an attractive alternative to a hereditary monarchy which epitomises the British class system. You need independence if people are ever to get that choice.

Democratic renewal has other aspects too. A better network of councils than the one imposed by Michael Heseltine for starters, with more scope and more agency. Genuine decentralisation and localisation of power in communities. Bold imaginative proposals to change how we are governed will help overcome cynicism and despair.

Creating a new believable prospectus for independence is only part of what needs to be done. We must also explain to people how they can make that choice. Which brings us to the right of self-determination. 

Ten years ago, there was no question that the people who lived in Scotland had the right to determine how they should be governed. Indeed the 2014 referendum was exactly the exercise of that right. The UK parliament accepted and respected the right of Scots to make their own decision.

This is not the constitutional situation we find ourselves in today. The Supreme Court has ruled that people in Scotland being able to choose their own future is not a right, but a dispensation to be granted by Westminster and entirely dependent upon the consent of the UK. This is now the law. It must be changed.

Which is why as we prepare for the next election, we need to be clear that what is at stake is not whether Scotland becomes independent, but whether the people who live here are ever again allowed to consider that option.

A vote for the SNP will always be an indication of support for Scotland’s independence. But the mandate we should seek from the people is for a campaign to change the law of the UK so that they have the right to choose it.

As we grind towards the end of 2024, what of the body politic? Next week an end of term report on the SNP’s comeback from disaster. But for now, let’s check in with the Labour Party.

By any measure this has been a thoroughly depressing and uninspiring year for humanity, in these islands and across the globe. It would be quite something if the UK government were to buck that trend. Though whether it needs to be quite this bad is arguable.

The character and content of this Labour government is defined by the manner of its creation. The people now in control of the Labour Party decided years ago to abandon any pretence of changing the world. Better to acquiesce in the conservative mediocrity which afflicts the British psyche than to challenge it.

So, Labour presented themselves as alternative managers of a failing British capitalism, offering stability and security. Steady the ship. They offered a safe home for anyone upset by the actions of the Conservative government, but no solace for its victims. The strategy was be quiet, sit back and wait, let the Tories lose.

And in its own terms it worked. Swathes of Tory voters deserted the old conservative party for a new one, secure in the knowledge that this change of allegiance didn’t require a change of belief or attitude. From benefit scroungers to immigrants, Labour offered a more humane version of their prejudices.

Traditional Labour supporters and anyone who did actually want to change the world looked on in horror. Legions of them stayed at home as turnout plumbed new depths. But it didn’t matter. The swing from the conservatives, and crucially the split in the support that remained, was sufficient to cover the loss of enthusiasm on the left.

As it usually does the first-past-the-post voting system corrupted the expressed opinions of the electorate and threw up a parliament whose composition was miles away from the views of the people. With barely a third of the votes cast in an election where two in every five voters stayed at home, Labour won a “landslide”.

So, Labour has a massive majority in parliament. Not only that but the Stepford candidates that make up the new intake in the parliamentary party can be relied upon to do what they are told. So, they could do what they want, right?

Wrong. The problem is this. Not only did Labour not promise anything much in the run up to the election, but demonstrably most people did not vote for it. It’s like having a double mandate to do nothing.

This might go some way to explaining the more bizarre decisions of the UK government in the last six months. Now in office their first concern is to earn their spurs as the natural party of government in Europe’s most unequal nation.

The people around Starmer calculate that there are no votes to be won in removing the two-child limit of state support for the poorest. But continuing it gives the impression to global capitalism that any social obligation they might face will be limited and controlled by a government happy to keep its population in line.

You’d think that by now Labour might be looking for a public relations win. Yet even in the week before Christmas the scrooge mentality triumphs as WASPI women are told to go way empty handed. The government pretends that their claim competes with funding for stretched public services. This is sophistry.

The proposal for compensation for 1950s born women came not from a campaign group or party, but from the Ombudsman service after a lengthy investigation which found the DWP guilty of maladministration. Compensation would have been paid from the National Insurance Fund rather than general departmental spending and defrayed over a number of years. Even at the full cost of £10Bn it would have been less than the surplus in the fund in the last year alone. 

Labour’s stance on WASPI and their reversal of previous support is all about image, a pretence that they are a tough government prepared to take hard decisions.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I still prefer Labour to the Tories. It is good that, however minimally, they are increasing public spending. It’s just such a pity their argument for doing so is some technocratic nonsense about the figures not adding up, rather than a validation of collective provision. They seem almost ashamed about spending more on public services, doing so because they have to, not because they want to.

And they seem determined to fund the state by placing further obligations on ordinary people with average means, as the wealthy are excused.

None of this is working. All of it is depressing. But it is the long-term effect that is most worrying. Labour have switched off hope. By refusing to challenge the structural inequality of Britain they are creating the space for others who will. In England, those answers are now coming from the right.

In Scotland, we have the opportunity to give a different answer, rooted in taking control of our own affairs and making better choices. To realise that we will need a political party capable of galvanising and mobilising public opinion. A party that can unite the people behind a credible strategy for change.

We’ll look at how that’s going next week. In the meantime, season’s greetings.

The unrestrained joy of the Syrian people is plain for all the world to see. Their revolution enters the second week. After decades of brutal repression, the dictator Assad is gone. The prisons are emptying. Families reunited with loved ones who disappeared many years ago. Millions of refugees are going home.

And the signs are encouraging. The leader of the main Jihadist group HTS talks of religious freedom and women dressing as they like. In the north Kurdish and Islamist factions declare a truce. A Jesuit priest describes on British radio how in the run-up to Christmas, Christians appear to have more freedom to worship in Damascus than they do in Betlehem.

The big powers, taken aback at the speed and depth of the revolution, are grasping for a foothold in the new political geography of Syria. But in public, at least, they are welcoming the new government and trying to establish relations. There is goodwill all round and although cautious, everyone wants the Syrians to succeed.

Everyone apart from Israel. Even as Assad was running for the airport the Israeli military started operations. They seized the UN controlled buffer zone on the Eastern side of the Golan Heights and invaded further into southern Syria.

And all week they bombed Syria. Over 1800 raids on more than 500 targets. Israeli commanders proudly claim to have taken out 85% of Syria’s air defences.

In a complete abuse of the English language Israel suggests these actions are in self-defence. Anywhere else in the world they would be regarded as acts of war. They are. And not a war against the Assad regime, but against the Syrian people who have ousted it.

So why is Israel bombing Syria after the fall of Assad? Most countries in the world, many even in Washington, would view the creation of a tolerant unified Arab republic in Syria as a positive development. The Israelis do not. The emergence of a pluralist society and strong democratic state on their borders is a nightmare for those who control the Israeli state and military. Far better to have unstable governments with factions fighting each other.

But Israel also sees Syria as the road to Iran. IDF commanders have said so openly this week in the Israeli media. They are now seriously eyeing up the possibility of an all-out strike on Iran, knowing that they have full control of the skies over Syria.

Israel does this because it can. It is to all intents and purposes a rogue state. Driven by a lethal cocktail of paranoia, victimhood and brutality, it sees no need to answer to the UN or anyone else. Its state institutions are now in the hands of far-right fanatics who aspire to a greater Israel and the elimination of the Palestinian people.

The fact that Netanyahu is elected is of little solace. Israeli public opinion is now dominated by anti-Arab racism and respect for minorities within the country, or notions of co-existence with people outside it, have been marginalised. This is not the hallmark of a democratic society.

This weekend the death toll in Gaza topped forty-five thousand. Seventy percent of the deaths are women and children. Israeli maintains its assault on Gaza unabated. Entire families are killed in the tents in which they seek protection from the elements. Much of northern Gaza remains under siege as civilians run out of food and medicine.

Two weeks ago, Amnesty International published a major 300-page report detailing the genocide which is now being prosecuted against the Palestinian population in Gaza. The evidence is there for anyone to read. Most of the world is horrified, but the wealthiest and most powerful nations turn away and let it happen.

Most of the blame lies with America, the world’s superpower. It has bankrolled and politically guaranteed the State of Israel since its inception. This is the only way a country of less than ten million people could ignore world opinion and get away with serial breaches of international law.

We cannot control what happens in the US. But we can influence what happens here. To its eternal shame the new Labour UK government is now complicit in the genocide in Gaza. It is providing both the physical means and the political justification for it. To their credit many Labour MPs stand opposed to the actions of their government, but the cowardly connivance of the majority allows it to happen.

And what of Scotland? The Scottish government has been clear in its condemnation of genocide and has called for the UK to suspend arms sales to Israel, lacking the power to take such action itself. But some of these arms and components are manufactured in Scotland, and whilst the Scottish government has no power to stop that, it can do other things. As many, most recently Amnesty International, have pointed out, it is inconsistent to have a policy which says no arms sales to Israel whilst at the same time providing public grants to the very companies who are selling them.

Companies are corporate legal entities. It matters not that the arms are made by one part of a company but not another, its still that company. Scottish Enterprise, who distribute this public money to BAE Systems and others, claim that they check that grants aren’t going to companies who breach international humanitarian law. Perhaps they should check harder.

It is time to stop spending public money on arms companies who bolster the Israeli war effort. It’s called leverage. We don’t have much of it, but what we have we should use.

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.

The publication last week of the annual UK migration figures sparked the usual depressing ill-informed rhetoric. The headline figures showed that in 2022 net immigration topped a record 900,000, and that last year this fell back by 20%.

Sir Keir Starmer called an impromptu press conference to blame the Tories and to promise effective action by the new Labour government to drive the figures down. The Tories did a mini mea culpa and then claimed their polices had led to the drop since 2022. Farage went radge as per. Everybody agreed that immigration is bad, and too much of it is very bad.

They are so wrong.

The first thing to say is the Office for National Statistics’ figures are a poor measure of whether the population is  growing or declining. They use a UN definition of migrant as someone who has moved from one country to another for more than 12 months, irrespective of whether that person has the faintest intention of staying there.

90% of all the people who come here do so to study or to work. Their plans – and their visas – are time limited. These people are either paying massive university fees or paying taxes whilst doing a job which their employer cannot find anyone else to do. The figures even include 58,000 Brits who’ve been abroad but are now returning home.

To suggest such people are a drain on the economy is an abuse of the English language. The truth is that people coming here to work is not just a sign of a buoyant economy, but in itself contributes to economic growth. That’s why in every instance migration has been to the net benefit of the country to which people move.

Casual xenophobia aside, it’s probably not the foreign students and skilled workers that rile the racists. It’s the one in ten who come here seeking sanctuary, most now forced into dangerous and illegal passage.

They give up everything. Make arduous journeys in perilous craft. Get exploited and abused by organised crime. And finally, they make it here. Desperate. Vulnerable. Alone.

They are what most people mean when they talk about immigration. The people who seek sanctuary from us are met with hostility and indifference. They are put into a system which is so mismanaged that it creates new problems all by itself.

The political debate om immigration rarely asks who these people are and why they come here. But that’s where policy needs to start.

The world is a shit place for many, many people. The global economic system has overseen the looting of the southern hemisphere and the impoverishment of its peoples. The inequality is staggering. Combine that with civil war, religious and sexual persecution, starvation and increasing natural disasters as the climate changes, and its little wonder that those who can afford to will try move give their loved ones a better life.

The countries of the earth seem incapable of action to deal with the drivers of mass migration, as seen recently in the half-hearted commitment of COP29 to compensate the poorest countries for the tribulations visited upon them by the consumption of the richest. So, people do what they can themselves.

We know that vast majority of asylum claims are justified. Three quarters are granted on first application, and currently half of those rejected are granted at appeal.

Yet the Home Office regards asylum claimants as fraudulent until proven otherwise. So, people are kept in specialist accommodation, prevented from joining relatives and forbidden to work. The government long ago ran out of designated accommodation and over the last few years has looked at disused hotels, old army camps, and floating dormitories in which to house asylum seekers.

Three things have happened as a result. One, already vulnerable people, often with young children, have been detained in unsuitable accommodation for long periods, isolation and idleness forced upon them. Two, crass and insensitive decisions about inappropriate placements have incited local populations and provided ammunition for racist campaigns. And three, it has cost a fortune – almost five and a half billion pounds at the latest count. A price which ironically is being paid by the world’s poorest people as most of the money is diverted from the overseas aid budget.

When people do get through this wretched system, the four out of five who are granted asylum are pretty much evicted from wherever they have been billeted for years and dumped without preparation or support into the hands of local authorities unable to cope.   

It is crap and depressing. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a simple alternative. Once you have made a claim for asylum and after an initial period in a reception centre, you should be given a temporary resident permit and a temporary national insurance number. That way most people could choose to join the families and communities they already know in this country, get work, pay tax, contribute.

This is exactly what happens in other countries. In Spain, asylum-seekers get a “red card” after six months of their application which allows them to work across the country. To help facilitate their social and labour insertion, reception centres organise vocational and language training.

We hope to see backlogs decrease, applications speed up, detention centres closed in the months ahead. We hope, but given the Labour PM’s macho stance on this, that hope might be in vain. In the meantime, as part of plans for independence we need to think through how we can play our part in alleviating humanity’s suffering in a way which allows a new Scotland to prosper.

Time to check in on the SNP’s journey back from its biggest ever electoral defeat. A clutch of recent polls and by election results give us an immediate insight into the public’s perception of the political choices before them.

The story is not of SNP recovery but Labour implosion, with the latest poll suggesting the party has lost fully one third of the voters it had in July. It took the SNP five years to lose that amount of support. Labour have done it in less than five months.

Against this haemorrhaging of support for Labour, the SNP’s performance looks relatively good. But it is a chimera. The improving fortunes are illusory, and do not show lost voters returning to the fold.

Actually, the people who can take most comfort from votes in recent byelections are Reform UK, who have come from nowhere to establish themselves as the fourth party in Scotland. Some of these new Reformers will be Tories disillusioned by Douglas Ross switching to a more robust champion.

The most worrying thing, however, is that the combined vote of Tories and Reform is considerably higher than Conservative support over the last decade. So, it looks as if Reform are attracting people not just from the Tories, but from supporters of other parties – and none. This means that Reform is acting as a gateway to reaction, building support for anti-immigrant anti-independence views. Bad seeds which could germinate and bloom if and when the right in the UK and Scotland get their acts together.

But the biggest story of the spate of recent byelections is the abysmal turnout, ranging from 20% to as low as 12%. This means that between eight in ten and nine in ten people don’t give a toss about who will represent them in their local council chamber. It is that absence of motivation, of even the lamest political conviction, that undermines our flawed democratic system. And without changing it, there’s no basis to win an election – never mind set up a new country.

It is difficult to inspire people when the official government line is things can only get worse. The new Labour government, elected on a single word mantra, Change, is determined to change very little. Worse, it has so constrained itself by ruling out policies that might offer real change, that it now says little can be done. It’s the political equivalent of tramadol, taking the edge off aspiration and hope. If you can’t do anything about it, why bother trying?

It’s clear Labour’s Scottish lieutenants know there’s a problem. But the response of flipping from support for Starmer, to promising Labour in Scotland will overturn his polices, is unedifying to say the least. And it will just double down stoking cynicism and disillusion.

The SNP needs to do better. And to rebuild hope it must take care to challenge Labour from a radical perspective, not join Tory attacks from the right. There is, for instance, much that needs to be done to support Scottish agriculture but protecting millionaire farmers from inheritance tax isn’t part of it.

In the aftermath of the general election, I identified three key tasks for the SNP. Get better in government with the powers and money we do have. Be very clear about the limits of devolution and show how in every area of policy independence allows us to do more. And provide a viable and believable strategy to challenge the denial of the right of people of Scotland to choose an independent future. These challenges are all still there.

The coming budget will an opportunity to move forward on two of these fronts. It can embody decisions that reflect the priorities of people here for social justice and equity. It can offer policies that are different from those south of the border – different because a different government, with different priorities, is making them.

But it must also explain what cannot be done and how Scotland’s choice is heavily constrained by others. It should exemplify what could be done if a Scottish government had the same fiscal powers as the UK. The power to tax corporate profits to protect small businesses whilst realising greater revenues from global monoliths. The power to invest in and take public control of our vast green energy reserves and accelerate the drive to renewables. The power to tackle the housing crisis with a social housebuilding programme the like of which has not been seen for generations.

It is by making these arguments that we present the case for independence as an opportunity to improve the lives of ordinary people. Not an abstract notion. But real power. Real change.

Unless we do that, why would anyone want to drag themselves out the despond of disillusion. And in doing it the Scottish government will also have the tools to face down their own critics, snipers and hypocrites who will try to make us take the blame for the constraints and constrictions of devolution.

Things aren’t going well for the new Labour government. The figures for the first quarter of their tenure of the economy say it is pretty much flatlining – growth of one tenth of one percent. Not good news for a crew whose only mantra seems to be growth, growth, growth.

Some have pointed out this might in part be a consequence of Labour’s talking up economic gloom and doom. One big factor in the economy is the willingness and capacity of people to part with their money in shops and elsewhere. The things can only get worse message will induce caution in even the most enthusiastic of consumers as people hold on for rainy days ahead.

The UK economy is integrated into a global capitalist system. So, it will be affected by world events the same as other developed countries.  But individual countries can take decisions which either mitigate or worsen the effects of worldwide economic turbulence. That’s why there are variations in economic performance and relative national wealth between countries.

So why is it that the UK economy is currently growing at a quarter of the European average? What possible decision might have been taken here to make things worse? The answer is Brexit.

Brexit is bad for us. Not really an argument or discussion anymore but an uncontested fact. Just how bad is a matter of disagreement. Opinion is divided. The well-respected National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) reckons the UK economy would be 2.5% bigger now if we had remained in the EU.

In fairness, that’s probably at the lower end of the estimates. According to Goldman Sachs, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union has hampered the economy to the tune of 5% versus other comparable countries. Loads of other experts have pitched in too. None of them have suggested that the economy has got better.

So, a hit of somewhere between 2.5 and 5 percent of GDP. In real money that’s between £55 and £110 billion. Call it five black holes.

The damage done by Brexit results from three key factors: reduced trade; weaker private investment; and lower immigration from the EU. All of these are damaging the Scottish economy too. Last week’s Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee of the Scottish Parliament heard just how much.

Boris Johnson’s Trade and Cooperation Agreement came into force in May 2021 and allows free trade without quotas or tariffs. But it doesn’t do anything about non-tariff barriers; checks and paperwork which make a once frictionless process costly and cumbersome.

The EU requires all imports to meet their quality and safety standards. Not unreasonably. Since Brexit the only way to make sure they do is to physically check what is passing across the border. That takes time and money. And it is this that is pushing up prices and slowing down exports.

Salmon Scotland, for instance, reported that while over 53,000 tonnes of Scottish salmon was exported to the EU in 2019, this had reduced to around 44,000 tonnes four years later. They estimate this represented a loss in export value for Scottish producers in the region of £80-£100 million.

The Governor of the Bank of England pointed the finger at Brexit last week. The Chancellor agrees. And yet she refuses to countenance not only rejoining in years to come, but ever participating in the Single market or Customs Union. God only knows what particular demons she is still trying to exorcise from the Labour playbook, but Labour’s stance on Brexit defies common sense, the wishes of unions and business, and even popular opinion.

It is really hard to know what Labour are scared of. I get that it would be difficult to get back into the EU but the process of building the goodwill that will enable it to happen in the next decade ought to begin now. One way to do that would be to commit to alignment with single market standards so that a deal might be struck as the TCA is reviewed to dispense with paperwork and cut costs. But even this seems too Europhilic for the new Labour Government.

The Scottish Government is committed to align with the European Union where appropriate and has commissioned experts to report on how it can. In two reports over the last year Dr Lisa Whitten from Queens University Belfast says there has not been significant divergence between Scots Law and EU Law. The problem is this that only refers to devolved matters, which of course, exclude trade. So full implementation of the alignment policy in Scotland could only ever partially mitigate, any regulatory divergence between the UK and the EU.

Which is of course an argument for control over these matters passing to the Scottish parliament through the process of political independence. With Labour so firmly set against any formal participation in European trading arrangements, this option offers Scotland’s exporters the best hope for the future. And with Trump about to implement a fortress America policy with protectionist barriers erected against us, Scotland looking eastwards to the European mainland makes more sense and is more urgent than ever.

Tomorrow the Court of Session in Edinburgh will begin a three-day deliberation on an application to stop the development of the Rosebank oilfield. The case, brought by two environmental charities, Uplift and Greenpeace, argues that the UK government acted unlawfully last year in granting a license without considering the effects on our climate of burning the oil and gas extracted from the field.

The Rosebank field lies 80 miles off the northwest of Shetland, and it is by some measure the biggest ever to be discovered in the North Sea. This week’s legal move is             the latest in a series – both in the UK and abroad – which has seen the courts take an increasingly robust attitude on the environmental impact of new drilling. For the sake of the planet, we must hope it is successful.

At school in the 70s, we were told that the biggest threat to human survival was that oil and gas would run out. Economic infrastructure would collapse as finite supplies dried up. Famine and global conflict would be the consequence.

But as the century turned it became clear this was bollocks. In fact, there was a new reality. Not that we would run out of fossil fuels, but that the atmosphere couldn’t afford for us to burn them. To survive we would have to leave them in the ground.

That’s a hard message. One that still has not been absorbed by many. In particular those who have got rich from the exploitation of hydrocarbons. It is, as Al Gore observed, the ultimate inconvenient truth.

But truth it is. For millennia humanity thrived on this planet. The earth existed in an organic equilibrium. Carbon was oxidised through fire and decay, and then extracted from the atmosphere and reconstituted into living matter through the phenomenon of photosynthesis. But in the last hundred or so year we have destroyed that balance as carbon gases have been pumped into the air at unprecedented levels, principally by burning oil and gas.

As result the ability of our atmosphere to protect the planet from radiation has been compromised and the earth has become warmer. This in turn has seen sea levels rise as the icecaps melt and dramatic disturbance to weather systems. Climate change is already killing many thousands of people every year, the latest victims in Florida and Valencia. If the process continues that becomes millions and the very existence of our species will be in doubt.

This is the context in which the future of our oil and gas industry must be planned. The only plan that is compatible with survival is to stop. The only future that works is a managed decline and replacement of fossil fuels with clean renewable energy from the elements.

None of this is even that contentious anymore. The science behind understanding climate change and the role of carbon emissions in it is universally accepted. Well, perhaps not in the new White House. And yet the world seems capable of knowing that it is on a path to destruction whilst equally incapable of getting off it. 

The oil companies have a vested interest. They are the last people who should be anywhere near energy policy. Governments are meant to take a wider view.  On paper UK policy is clear. The legislation is in place. We need to phase out oil and gas. That’s official.

Yet, this time last year, then PM Rishi Sunak announced over 100 new licenses for oil and gas exploration and extraction in the North Sea.  Rosebank sits at the top of that list.

The government turns logic and common sense on its head. It claims you can phase out something by having more of it. Any number of falsehoods are marshalled to bolster this deception. They claim that Rosebank will make UK energy supplies more secure. Not true, 90% of its output will go for sale abroad and never be used in the UK. They claim it will bring down bills and help with the cost of living. Not true, Rosebank oil will be sold on the international market where prices are rigged by a cartel of producers. And it is far more expensive than renewables.

The SNP opposed Sunak’s bonanza and believes there should be no new extraction in the North Sea unless compatible with net zero targets – something it would be impossible for Rosebank to achieve. Last year Labour too said they would oppose any new licenses but adopted the bizarre policy of not reversing any already agreed. That provided a powerful incentive for the Tories to push through massive expansion in the year before the election.

The new UK government has got itself in a weird position now. It has said it believes that the licensing of Rosebank was unlawful by not taking climate effects into account and it will not therefore contest the court action. But bizarrely, it will not reverse Sunak’s decision. It seems it will be up to campaigners and the Scottish courts to do the job for them.

All of this begs a bigger question. Why is it that the Scottish government can issue licenses for onshore energy production in Scotland, but not offshore? Independence means that control over the exploitation of Scottish waters would lie in Scotland, but even whilst that it being debated there is an overwhelmingly case for these licensing decisions to be devolved. If they had been, I’m pretty sure tomorrow’s court case would not be necessary.

As the right-wing media go apoplectic about what they describe as the biggest tax rise in history its worth getting a sense of perspective on last week’s budget. Increasing the proportion of a country’s wealth spent in the public realm is always a good thing. It’s a measure of just how civilised a society is.

But by their own admission less than half of Labour’s proposed £40Bn uplift in government revenues is a real increase. The real increase is more like £18Bn. That’s a big number. But it is only about one and a half percent of total public spending. Indeed, it is less than one percent of the annual turnover in the economy. Maybe best not to get too carried away.

The problem is not how much is being raised by the exchequer, but how they are raising it, and who from. The new Labour government tied its own hands in a ridiculous manner before the election by making promises not to increase income tax, NI or VAT – the things that raise most of the money.

So, it had few targets to pick when looking to increase revenues. Some changes are welcome but small beer – VAT on private school fees, scrapping non-dom status, and changes to capital gains tax.

Predictably those in the firing line are squealing unfairness and victimisation. Scotland’s millionaire landowners are joining the fightback against inheritance tax now being applied to farmland. Its hard to feel sympathy. A better question than why is inheritance tax being applied to farms might be why farmers get a tax-free allowance three times that of anyone else.

The blunt instrument of raising employer’s national insurance contributions and extending it to many more part time workers is more of a problem. Some of the reaction is hyperbole with owners of pubs claiming it’ll put 70p on the price of a pint. How could a 1.2% increase in payroll costs mean a 15% hike in prices?

It is true that hospitality and retails sectors which rely on a greater number of part timers will be disproportionately affected. An odd target given they have already borne the brunt of the Covid and cost-of-living squeezes. Harsh too to bring the changes in all at once without any phasing or with no regard to the ability of small businesses to pay.

Any reforming government ought to try to rebalance the split between profits and wages. I’ve heard some Labour spokespeople suggest this is what the employer NI hike is intended to achieve. But it won’t. Business will simply pass the charge on in the form of higher prices to consumers or reduced wage increases to their workers. Either way profits will be protected.

The way to ensure that profits serve a social purpose is to tax them. Yet that is exactly what Labour has ruled out.

Labour’s Britain is the most unequal country in northern Europe. You might have thought that in their first budget Labour might want to do something about that. Not a bit of it. The two groups of people least affected by this budget are the poorest and the richest.

People living on the breadline have seen their subsistence incomes fall sharply during the Tory years. Rachel Reeves has dashed any hopes they might have had of restitution from Labour. Not only are benefit cuts not restored, but she also talks the same talk of benefit fraud and the need to get people back to work as if they were workshy wastrels.

And Britain’s three and a half million millionaires can rest easy with this budget. Money may be tight, public services in crisis, but there’ll be no additional obligations on the rich. The absurd ruling out of income tax increases even for the likes of Chris O’Shea, the CEO of British Gas who made £8.2m last year, means others will have to pay.

Moreover, new Labour’s refusal to countenance any levy on accumulated wealth leaves the structural inequality of the UK intact and unchallenged.

There is nothing inherently bad about tax. It is the membership fee we pay to be part of civil society. But tax policy must be seen to be fair to command widespread support. One that protects extreme wealth whilst increasing pressure on the majority will ultimately fail.

Clearly, Scottish ministers will be preoccupied by the effect of this budget on public funds in Scotland. We shall have to see what is left once consequentials are given with one hand and extra costs levied by the other.

But those of us who believe that Scotland should become a new independent country need to do more than simply rail against the decisions and the indecision of Westminster. We want all of these choices about tax and spending to be made here. To win support for that we need to show how we would do it differently.

We need to make the case for an economy regulated in the public interest with a fair system of reward and obligation. For progressive taxes on income with top rate of 50% for the super wealthy and improved allowances at the bottom end. For new taxes on wealth and assets which allow the country’s capital to be deployed in the interests of us all. And for a progressive approach to business taxation too, with bands that protect small businesses with low profits and raise more from the largest corporations.