Houdini of the Highlands

Kate Forbes’s Budget made millions in council funding disappear while conjuring up more cash for independence.

Kate Forbes is the greatest illusionist since Harry Houdini.

The Finance Secretary puts on a spellbinding show in her Budget speeches, a dazzling display of diversion, misdirection and sleight of hand. You know she's up to something but can't quite figure out how she's doing it. Only when the spectacle is over do you realise your watch is gone and your wallet is missing a tenner.

In fact, substantially more than a tenner if you're Scottish local government. Forbes's fiscal plans contain a real-terms cut in council budgets of £137m. You might have thought there was nothing left for the SNP to slash from councils (or at least that they might have learned lessons from the social fall-out of years of this approach) but the progressive party of Scottish politics always finds a way to cut — progressively, you understand.

Forbes has also given town halls 'complete flexibility' over the rate of council tax, the first time the SNP has permitted this since coming to power in 2007. If you're wondering what 'complete flexibility' means, your next council tax bill will explain all.

Not everyone is getting the hair shirt treatment. By contrast, spending on the Constitution, External Affairs and Culture portfolio will rise to £370.5m in the coming fiscal year, 2022-23. For reference, that’s more than has been allocated to support unpaid carers, to finance police and fire pensions or to fund NHS Dumfries and Galloway during the same time frame. The Scottish Government will spend more on Angus Robertson’s brief next year than it will on reducing drugs deaths over the next five years.

Now, not all of the funding allocation in question will be going to pushing separatism and there are responsibilities in this portfolio that are valuable, even if they aren’t terribly sexy. Historic Environment Scotland and National Records of Scotland do necessary work. While arts funding isn’t at the top of most people’s priorities list, the £23m allocated to national performing companies seems a reasonable investment in the nation’s culture.

Yet this is the portfolio that also boasts the ‘International and European Relations’ budget, a spending priority that preceded the SNP’s arrival in government but which under them has grown at an exponential rate. It’s not that foreign affairs and international development aren’t important; it’s just that, properly understood, they are the responsibility of the UK Parliament. Nonetheless, this budget is going up again next year, despite having already increased 94 per cent over the past five years.

You might cavil that ‘it’s only £33.3m’ — trust me, people in politics really talk like this — but it’s more than has been handed to victim support, the Best Start Grant, or the Low Income Winter Heating Allowance, and almost three times as much as this oh-so-radical government has allocated to land reform.

The problem isn’t the money but the principle underlying it. The Scottish Government has to have an International and European Relations budget for the same reason that it must have a Constitution portfolio: these are things that governments of independent states have.

One regard in which the SNP is leagues ahead of its pro-Union opponents is that it understands symbolism. They can’t be quantified but symbols matter more than most things that can be. They speak to us on a basic, intuitive level and because they do they have a better chance of shaping minds than all the graphs, charts and GERS reports in the world. The more the Scottish Government looks like an independent outfit, the less of a leap it becomes to vote to make it one.

Westminster is hopeless on this subject because, for all that some ministers, special advisers and strategists grasped the importance of symbolism to the Brexit cause, they are too remote from Scotland to understand symbolism’s centrality to the independence movement.

As I argued a few weeks ago, Nicola Sturgeon will not deliver Scottish independence. She lacks a UK Parliament willing to grant a do-over and she is too gun-shy to go down the UDI route. While the Tories seem hellbent on losing the next election and constitutional headwinds within Labour don’t look encouraging for the Union, Sir Keir Starmer would not want the first Labour government in over a decade to be sucked into the political quicksand of an independence referendum. Time is not on Sturgeon’s side.

Sturgeon knows this but dare not admit it publicly. The SNP exists to achieve independence and that is supposed to be the primary goal of an SNP leader. Were Sturgeon to front up and say that, despite winning election after election at Holyrood and Westminster, she cannot deliver an independence referendum until the UK Parliament agrees to one, either she would have to split or the SNP would.

That doesn’t mean that her strategy of regularly dialling up the rhetoric on independence is innocuous posturing. On a fundamental level, talking about independence as a real possibility and doing so as head of the Scottish Government has symbolic import. It contributes to the long-term weakening of the Union and grants independence a legitimacy and credibility it has never earned. Imagine the administration on Shetland Islands Council using its offices, platforms and public resources to promote independence for Shetland to the same degree the SNP does with the Scottish Government and you’ll understand what I mean.

There are more tangible and immediate consequences, too. Every time Sturgeon or her ministers wheel out the big shiny distraction called Indyref2, it reminds potential investors that this is a constitutionally unstable country that could plunge itself into years of campaigning, voting, negotiating and state-building in the near future. That is not a prospect likely to convince most to part with their money.

Even though Sturgeon’s referendum games are hollow politicking, they inevitably distract ministers, civil servants and the apparatus of government from the matters they are properly responsible for. If the choice comes down to closing the attainment gap or putting on a constitutional show for SNP members, be in no doubt which will win out.

It's for all of these reasons that the UK Government must act. While the Johnson government indicated some interest in devolution reform in its early days, that has given way to a love-bombing strategy amounting to little more than Cameronism without the concessions. Instead of adding to the constitutional vandalism, they've agreed to pretend the vandalism is art. This approach is better than what went before but only modestly so.

Even if ministers will not countenance a full-scale overhaul of the devolution settlement, they should consider one minor but worthwhile reform. Currently, the Scottish Government can instruct civil servants to prepare for a future referendum on independence or engage in any other work related to Scotland leaving the United Kingdom. This is despite the constitution being reserved. To close this loophole, ministers should put forward an amendment to the Scotland Act specifying that civil servants may only perform duties related to Scottish independence once the UK Parliament has legislated to permit another referendum on the matter.

Needless to say, the SNP-Green administration and its amen corners in Civic Scotland would wail and gnash their teeth about a 'power grab' but all such an amendment would do is prevent the misuse of the UK Civil Service to advance the break-up of the UK. It is the sort of measure that would be entirely uncontroversial in most countries because, in most countries, the state is not so wracked by existential self-doubt that it believes it must facilitate the whims and desires of those who seek its abolition. It's the sort of measure, in short, that requires nothing more of the UK Government than that it shows a bit of guts.

Kate Forbes's Budget gives Scottish councils a fiscal kicking but that is nothing compared to the economic brutalism that independence would represent, or to the harm routinely done to Scotland's economy by the constant threat of another referendum. The UK Government has a responsibility to prevent the misuse of devolution in a way that undermines the Union and harms the economic well-being and good governance of Scotland. It's time ministers took that responsibility seriously and acted on it.

---

Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on December 13, 2021.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it on social media:

If you haven’t subscribed yet, hit the button below to get my posts emailed directly to your inbox:

You can follow me on Facebook here:

And on Twitter here: