SNP and Reform’s obsessions with borders won’t help us as economic and social revolution looms
Huge changes are coming at a scale and speed we are only just beginning to understand
Not for the first time, on Thursday the Holyrood Hotel opposite where this newspaper used to be produced was at the heart of a Conservative leadership drama.
In 2016, it hosted one of Theresa May’s first meetings with grassroots members as newly elected Prime Minister and, being hastily arranged in mid-July, attendance was thin. Looking somewhat nervous, she was ushered in to deliver an unremarkable five-minute address and, after a few handshakes on the way out, she was gone.
Maybe it was the weight of being PM rather than opposition leader, but the difference on Thursday was marked. Looking relaxed after an extraordinary day, Kemi Badenoch gave a bullish speech to a gathering of MPs, MSPs and members in which she repeated her message that the party was better off without people like Robert Jenrick who, like the other defectors, she said, were only in politics for themselves.
Other lines, like Sir Keir Starmer being not so much a weather cock swivelling with the wind, but a directionless carrier bag blown about by events, went down well. As she happily hung on to chat with members, candidates queued for pictures.
Badenoch grabs the headlines
OK, I voted for her, so readers might expect me to say I feel a corner has been turned, she’s shown real steel, grown into the leadership role and all that. But that’s not to say it’s not true, although by Thursday night commentators were split on who had come out on top – Kemi Badenoch tactically on the day, certainly, but longer term maybe Nigel Farage held the advantage in the expectation of further defections as he gleefully showed off his latest trophy.
But only time will tell how big names like Malcolm Offord, Nadhim Zahawi and Robert Jenrick rub along together in a party already marked by public clashes, having seemingly joined Reform less on principle and more because ambitions were thwarted or egos unfanned. A Labour scalp will be claimed next week, said the beaming leader, and one name being bandied about is a prominent Scottish figure from the Blair-Brown years. Whoever it is might need sharp elbows.
READ MORE: Kemi Badenoch unfazed by Scottish Tories' dire Holyrood polling and dismisses Reform mass exodus
However things play out, it gave Kemi Badenoch the platform to demonstrate a sassy determination, taking the initiative from Reform and dominating the headlines on a day when her visit to Scotland could have been relegated to a punctuation mark at the end of Scottish bulletins before the sports news.
Keir Starmer should thank her for knocking his sojourn north down the agenda, having ignored Anas Sarwar’s ‘stay away’ demand, on a day when a new Survation poll made grim reading for the Scottish Labour leader who before the 2024 general election could have been measuring for new soft furnishings in Bute House. Instead he’s in a dogfight with Reform to be a distant runner-up.
SNP’s left-wing doom loop
Nigel Farage’s people might be content with consolidating at around 18 seats, but their advance seems to be stalling, while the Conservatives are showing tentative signs of clawing back support, with renewed optimism in Edinburgh where Reform polls much lower than the rest of Scotland.
But SNP supporters should be cock-a-hoop to be heading for around 60 seats so soon after their general election pasting, even if only on 34 per cent of the constituency vote. And after Tuesday’s lacklustre Scottish Budget, it seems only an Act of God will shock Scotland out of John Swinney’s left-wing managerial doom loop into which the country seems inextricably locked, as Reform splits the anti-SNP vote and the Greens scoop up disaffected younger middle-class voters.
Finance Secretary Shona Robison gave a depressingly familiar illustration of an administration lacking any real sense of direction since the 2016 Brexit referendum, and it’s hard to remember the 20-month interlude after the 2014 independence vote when Nicola Sturgeon seemed to accept the only option was to make devolution work.
Shona Robison was certainly able to show how the SNP makes devolution work for the SNP by spending billions more than it raises but never, ever admitting to anything other than a rum deal from perfidious Albion. She trilled off a list of giveaways without for one instant acknowledging how it’s all funded: free prescriptions, free eyecare, free tuition fees, free bus passes, free £400 baby box, to which can now be added free breakfast clubs and free swimming lessons. And that’s on top of generous benefits, now including an increase in the extra child benefit payment to £40 for all babies under one.
A false choice
Far from rewarding aspiration and enterprise to encourage vital economic growth, her programme disincentivises work at a time when labour is in short supply. It maintains an income tax regime which progressively discourages the ambition to progress for anyone earning over £30,000, with the envy-driven Mansion Tax the epitome of a government whose goal is the deeper embedding of a dependency culture revolving around the ever-munificent SNP.
“Scotland is a nation of innovators and wealth creators, and this Budget is designed to support those whose efforts are essential if our economy is to grow,” said Ms Robison without a hint of a smirk.
Yet nothing, not one syllable, indicated the SNP has a plan to meet the challenge of an onrushing economic and social revolution on a scale and speed we are only just beginning to comprehend.
Maybe Nigel Farage is right that May’s election could be a two-horse race between the SNP and Reform. But with the workplace about to be upturned by artificial intelligence and all past assumptions about what represents a good job upended, that’s a contest between a party which thinks the only answer is closing down borders and one which thinks it’s throwing up a new one.
At the very least, Kemi Badenoch shows it’s a false choice.
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