They're doomed: Private Frazer was ray of sunshine compared to Swinney

At least it was a plan, even if an exceptionally incoherent one which has duly disintegrated in line with the opinion polls. I doubt if Nicola Sturgeon Limited, ensconced in a TV studio in the hated imperial capital on election night, will be interpreting the Scottish results as a “referendum on independence”.

But what has taken its place? I now find genuine difficulty in discerning what Mr Swinney is offering any market beyond his hardest core vote as the reason for voting Nationalist on July 4. There was certainly nothing in this week’s BBC debate to provide an answer to that question.

Instead, the new strategy does not seem to extend beyond repeating the words “18 billion pounds” as often as possible. But what do they mean? As far as I can trace, they are drawn from a pre-Budget report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies in March which anticipated, on current projections, a UK-wide spending gap of that sum by 2028-29.

Nobody should know better than Mr Swinney that an awful lot can change in four years and the purpose of politics is to transform outcomes, not to accept and bemoan them as predestined. Even if this figure was accepted as immutable, which the IFS certainly does not suggest, I’m not sure why it would be considered the SNP’s most deadly debating weapon.

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 I know £18 billion sounds a lot but let’s play a little game with numbers. Scotland’s proportionate share would be £1.5bn which is less than the ScotWind licences were undersold for, compared to England and Wales. Throw in a couple of ferries, the Deposit Return Scheme and unclaimed money from the EU, and we’d have been comfortably quids in against a hypothetical figure which Mr Swinney relies on to frighten the weans. So let’s be serious.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of Mr Swinney’s performance was the reliance on a purely fiscal argument to deny the possibility of radical change. I can’t help harking back to the early days of the Blair government when we were committed to adopting the Tory spending plans we inherited. Yet it was the most productive and stimulating period of government I was involved in.

The challenge of spending money better, according to different priorities and disciplines, never seems to feature in debates. Yet it is just as important and a lot more difficult than simply spending more or, in the case of the SNP, blaming every failure on not being provided with enough: the easiest of all cop-out clauses.

If Labour wins and implements the commitments it has made based on well-defined sources of revenue and also applies its own priorities to every corner of departmental expenditure, there would be plenty of change to celebrate over the coming months - or, in Mr Swinney’s case, to fear.

Everyone knows there is no instant money tree for an incoming Labour government. So what exactly is Mr Swinney’s message meant to convey? That change is pointless? That it is impossible for different policies and priorities to make a difference to both fiscal outcomes and the quality of people’s lives? That we are all doomed so we might as well stick with status quo, pending the great day of Scottish independence when the burdens of life will lift? Private Frazer was a ray of sunshine compared to this guy.

How indeed the mighty have fallen. They have gone from grandiose claims of a “de facto referendum” to pound shop Rishi Sunaks whose debating strategy is to repeat a meaningless number over and over again, in hope that the mud of despair will stick. Stands Caledonia where she did if that is the best we can do for political leadership?

Is it not bizarre for a party leader to base his case on the powerlessness of a potential new government to bring change? If he really believes that, why is he in politics other than to count the beans? And if a new government is, in Mr Swinney’s view, so tied into fiscal forecasts that it cannot avoid them, what does that say about the prospects for a party of permanent opposition, which the SNP is at Westminster?

John Swinney debates with Anas Sarwar (Image: PA)

For a decade, there have been at least 40 SNP MPs. Can anyone point to a single substantive achievement on behalf of Scottish interests, far less for wider society? In whose interests is it, other than their own, to continue with Scottish representation which from the first day of a potential Labour government would be committed to the same politics of noisy denigration, with neither influence nor outcomes to show for it?

The overwhelming Scottish interest lies in being part of that government and ensuring that distinctively Scottish and constituency interests are represented within it. That is the prospect which Mr Swinney fears most because the logic would be to go a step further in 2026 in order to have two governments, in London and Edinburgh, working in harmony rather than encamped mutual hostility.

Tuesday’s BBC debate gave cause for hope that the SNP’s style of politics has finally been rumbled. Where once the attempts to blame everyone but themselves for Scotland’s condition on health, education and the state of our towns and cities would have won applause, it now plays like a worn-out gramophone record, more likely to attract collective derision.

Like the Tories in Westminster, they have been there too long and the great majority of Scots are looking for something better and more hopeful. That is not what they see in John Swinney.

Brian Wilson is a former Labour Party politician. He was MP for Cunninghame North from 1987 until 2005 and served as a Minister of State from 1997 to 2003.