The SNP needs to look forward, not back, and spurn the Greens

The Greens, guided by the strategically excellent Ross Greer, have been adept at exploiting the SNP’s vulnerability for many years, no more so than in the immediate aftermath of the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, when they extracted an extraordinarily heavy price in the form of the Bute House Agreement. For the SNP, a party which was merely one vote short of a majority, to give away two strategically significant ministries and an effective veto on a raft of other policies, will be remembered as a “what on earth were we thinking?” moment if ever there was one.

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But desperate people do desperate things, and Mr Greer senses he may get yet another bite at the cherry. He may yet be right. The temptation for the SNP to fall back into the binary nationalism versus unionism construct is strong and, in the short-term, is probably the path of least resistance.

In the long-term, though, it would be remembered as an act of extraordinary self-harm. This is true, first and foremost, from a policy perspective. We have tested high tax to destruction, now. Last year, in the dying days of the SNP-Green coalition, we saw the most pernicious increase in income tax in the devolution era with the introduction of the Advanced Rate on earnings over £75,000, and a further increase in the Top Rate, on earnings over £125,000.

Reader, you are unlikely to feel too sorry for those on a six-figure salary, and of course you would be justified. However, the perniciousness of high tax is not most harmful to the taxed individual; it is most harmful to the rest of us.

Take the NHS for example. As the BMA has said repeatedly, for a country which already struggles to recruit consultant doctors to put another financial barrier in the way of that recruitment makes very little sense. For young doctors in particular, they are applying for jobs all over the UK; why take a job in Edinburgh when you can make more money in a job in Newcastle? And, of course, it impacts the doctors already here; there is now plenty of anecdotal evidence of consultants reducing their working week from five days to four in order to escape the tax trap.

Who wins from this? Not the patients whose waiting lists will grow. Not the public purse, which will shrink, not grow.

Less politically palatable examples have emerged from the financial and professional services sectors, whose Edinburgh centre continues to be an economic backbone for the country, and yet whose growth is being stifled by an inability to recruit senior workers.

This is not about politics; it is about policy. It is the real life, grown-up reality of our post-Smith Commission devolution settlement. John F. Kennedy, most famously, said that “it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the taxes”.

Tax rises are not left wing, and tax cuts are not right wing.

There is no shortage of politics in this too, though, sitting alongside the policy. It will not have gone unnoticed in SNP ranks that their star has begun to shine rather brighter. With the Labour Party ostensibly only opening its mouth in order to change foot, a gap has emerged for competence, and First Minister John Swinney, along with his Deputy Kate Forbes, are doing a pretty decent job of trying to fill it. They are not spectacular, at least not yet, but as I wrote on these pages last week, they have created an air of calm competence which is making life awfully difficult for Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar.

Competence works well for the electorate, whereas chaos does not. It is time, now, for Mr Swinney and Ms Forbes to lean further into this as they try to pass their Budget. It is time, now, for Mr Swinney and Ms Forbes to divert their gaze from the Greens, and look to Labour and the Liberal Democrats to help them pass a Budget.

Could Alex Cole-Hamilton's Liberal Democrats do a deal? (Image: PA)

There are reasons for both to cooperate. For Labour, there is a stick called an early Holyrood election. There is very little reason, right now, for Labour to be particularly confident about its chances. Indeed, there are some murmurings around the SNP that, were Labour to take the keys to Bute House for a year or so ahead of the statutory 2026 Holyrood election, the SNP’s chances of taking them straight back would be enhanced.

For the Liberal Democrats, there is slightly less stick and slightly more carrot. With their currency rising but likely to rise higher, an early election would be sub-optimal. And the kudos they could gain from extracting a raft of concessions from the Scottish Government would be of high electoral value as they try to increase their baseline support sufficiently to start winning seats through the list portion of the Holyrood voting system.

All parties will be wary of constitutional cross-contamination; of their own supporters’ views about them working across the independence divide. However this is highly likely to be misplaced. If the collapse in the votes at the General Election for the SNP and the Tory party told us anything, it is that the electorate is already moving on from the binary constitutional argument. Voters are ready to move on; they have grown out of constitutionalism faster than the politicians who represent them.

On the contrary, they just want their country to be better. To be more prosperous and more functional. The politicians who deliver that, whether from the SNP, or the Labour party, or the Liberal Democrats, will be rewarded.

Conversely, the politicians who fall back onto the comfortable pillow of binary constitutionalism, at the expense of good governance, will be punished. As well they should.

Andy Maciver is Founding Director of Message Matters and Zero Matters