Labour conference in Liverpool was mobbed by the usual mix of activists, lobbyists, MPs and media drawn to power. Conservative conference in Manchester was, er, not mobbed.
It will be interesting to see what kind of crowd this weekend’s SNP conference in Aberdeen attracts. Does Scotland’s long-governing party have much pizzazz left? Can it still pull in businesses? Are activists still as fired up about independence as they were during the party’s glory years? Or have fatigue, failure and familiarity taken their toll?
Seven months out from the next Holyrood election, John Swinney will be hoping to show strength and vitality. After a troubled few years, he has certainly been balm to the SNP’s soul, restoring order to the government and putting it back on course to win in May.
But while things appear better in Natland, there are still plenty of problems. Voters are generally disillusioned with devolution and an administration that has been in control for two decades without much in the way of big achievements. If the SNP wins next May it will largely be because of a split in the unionist vote, driven by Reform.
This week, the Scottish Social Attitudes survey, charting public opinion over 25 years of devolution, found that only 47 per cent of Scots say they trust Holyrood to act in the country’s best interests. In 2019 the figure was 61 per cent. In 1999, at devolution’s advent, it was 81 per cent. Meanwhile, satisfaction levels with the NHS have dropped to just 22 per cent – an alarming stat given health is the main public concern going into the election.
A lot of this must be on the SNP, given its prolonged grip on the state. So what is Swinney’s response to rising disaffection? Well, he launched yet another paper on independence this week, promising that households would be £10,000 better off after leaving the UK. This is the kind of pie-in-the-sky figure that was thrown around during the independence referendum in 2014. It wasn’t believable then, and given the growing Scottish deficit, it’s even less believable now.
Something has gone wrong at an intellectual level in the SNP. Its arguments on key indy issues such as pensions, currency and fiscal matters have barely developed a jot in the past decade. Using the civil service, it has continued to produce swathes of documents on independence and all the glories it would hold, but less and less attention has been paid by a media and public who have heard it all before. If Scotland said no to these arguments in 2014, why would it say yes today? “Britain is a shitshow” is not a winning argument. What is the new, developing offer?
Launching this latest paper (the last for now, he says), Swinney declared that devolution had “reached its limits” and that for Scotland to improve it would need to take the next constitutional step.
This strikes me as a foolish statement. Has the SNP used the powers of the Scottish Parliament to their maximum over nearly 20 years? I don’t believe the First Minister believes that to be the case for a second. In fact, the debate around Holyrood’s first quarter century has focused on how poorly and unambitiously those powers have been deployed.
Scotland has the highest drugs deaths in Europe, ferries for its islands are heavily delayed and vastly over budget, its schools continue to slide down the global rankings and the NHS is in a mess. Most fair-minded people would agree that the SNP, through years of constitutional obsession, has failed to deploy the might of the state to tackle these issues.
There are other routes and methods available. Lord Offord suffers from a triple reputational risk: he is a Tory, a peer, and previously worked in private equity. This is not the kind of CV that has often proved popular in Scotland’s social democratic political climate. Yet since entering politics (becoming a Scotland Office then trade minister in the last Conservative government) he has emerged as a thoughtful and persuasive voice on Scotland’s problems and how they might be addressed.
In a recent pamphlet, “Healthy Nation, Wealthy Nation”, he called on Scotland to reclaim the legacy of Adam Smith, “to create a virtuous circle of entrepreneurship and economic growth, a high level of educational and employment opportunities, and healthy lives with a quality provision of healthcare.”
We should, he argues, set aside the constitutional debate for a generation and instead concentrate on making Scotland “the most prosperous and best-governed part of the UK.” Only once that milestone is achieved should we think about returning to the constitutional debate. “The Scottish people can then decide their future direction, but from a position of strength, not weakness,” says Offord.
He is not impartial, of course. However, he criticises his own party as well as the SNP for its fixation on the constitution, saying the Scottish Tories have focused on short-term political gain rather than developing considered policy on the major issues. And he argues that while nationalists have sought to use devolution as a stepping stone to independence, unionists have merely “tolerated” it as a mechanism to stop nationalism from spreading. There is blame all around. It is time to do things differently, to try something new.
Unless you are a blinkered diehard on one side or the other, it’s hard to disagree with this analysis. The prospect of a politics focused on raising economic growth and reforming public services, with its practitioners working across the aisle in pursuit of the national good, will likely remain a dream, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a noble and necessary one. How many groundhog days must Scots live through?
Of course, with SNP conference upon him, Swinney must play to the party gallery. Independence will be the main focus of debate and conversation, as it always is. Some delegates are angry at Swinney’s caution around pursuing a second referendum, even though his prescription – a majority of SNP seats at Holyrood – is a sensible and fair one and is based on the 2014 precedent. We will see whether tempers fray in Aberdeen.
The bigger problem is that until we change the conversation at a national level, the work of change – so very badly needed – cannot begin.
[Further reading: Bridget Phillipson: “I’ve had to fight tooth and nail”]
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