John Swinney and Kemi Badenoch's pie-in-the-sky promises are why trust is low in politicians
Politicians need to learn how to relate to ordinary people in a way that doesn’t sound like they are willing to say anything for votes
Don’t worry Scotland, the solution to all our problems is at hand. For, after John Swinney leads the SNP to a landslide election victory next year and swiftly negotiates independence, every household could be more than £10,000 a year better off.
That’s the headline the SNP wants people to read from their latest independence paper but, as ever, the small print is important. It’s the SNP’s take on research by the Resolution Foundation, which found UK households would be £8,300 a year richer if average income and inequality was the same as other similar countries.
That’s a ‘big if’, and the SNP paper admitted the figure “does not mean Scottish households would instantly be more than £10,000 richer each year if Scotland was a nation state... Instead it shows... what we might be able to do if we were able to make our own choices...” Presumably it would also be possible to become substantially poorer if “our own choices” turned out to be the wrong ones.
Moon on a stick, anyone?
While Swinney was fantasising about independence, Kemi Badenoch was cutting our taxes at the Conservative conference. She promised to abolish stamp duty paid on main homes, prompting calls for the SNP to ditch the equivalent tax in Scotland, LBTT, and pledged to scrap VAT on private school fees.
However, with the Tories on about 16 per cent in UK polls and an election four year away, she might as well have promised voters the moon on a stick to go with Swinney’s £10,000 pie in the sky.
READ MORE: Kemi Badenoch's conference speech may have appealed to Tory members, but it will likely be her last
No wonder trust in politicians is so low. The latest evidence for this comes from the Scottish Social Attitudes survey, which found 47 per cent trusted the Scottish Government to work in the country’s best interests, down from 61 in 2019 and 81 in 1999.
Politics does strange things to people. So often, it seems the simple act of quitting politics can transform the most robotic of ministers into a reasonable, thoughtful person. This is what voters want their politicians to be. We need leaders who tell it like it is, who talk like human beings, and, most of all, who under-promise and over-deliver.
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