Why Sunak, Starmer and Swinney should promise less to deliver more - Brian Monteith

Sadly, there is little coming from the leaders of the main parties that offers any hope of trust being restored.

Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives start from a bad position in that over the last few years we have seen the manifesto pledges of 2019 thrown in the bin. It’s not enough to say, “but Covid”, or “but Putin” – the reality is governments have choices to make and the current one has made some especially bad ones resulting in painful consequences we are paying for.

A short three-week lockdown to save the NHS became a two-year period featuring on-off restrictions, despite it becoming clear the collateral damage was far worse than was being admitted.

The interventions by the Treasury and Bank of England to help fund generous lockdown subsidies and the price shocks of Putin’s war created the cost of living crisis and led to the highest taxes in sixty years. All of that could have been avoided if policies on repeated lockdowns, fracking and gas storage had been different. That Labour, the SNP and Liberal Democrats were all baying for the bad policy choices to be sooner, to be harder and to last longer does not excuse the bad decisions of Conservative leaders.

So we know Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives have a trust problem and no amount of fearmongering about what Keir Starmer’s Labour will be like will save them from the reckoning they face at the hand of discontented voters who once gave them a thumping majority.

And yet Keir Starmer has his own trust issues to address. His handling of the disciplining of Diane Abbott and the confusion over where he stood about her being a Labour candidate last week only served to highlight his ability to flip-flop on issues. Eyeing-up the green vote, only a few months ago Starmer was committed to a climate investment pledge of £28 billion – but that has been abandoned in favour of using PFI schemes that will mean high taxes for our children and grandchildren for decades to come. The cost of Blair and Brown’s PFI splurge twenty years ago is still being paid for and will not finally be settled until the 2052/53.

Starmer has also made the argument for reintroducing freedom of movement with the EU only to now be talking of tighter control of our borders and being tougher on migration. If Starmer finds it so easy to abandon policies designed to attract people normally sympathetic to Labour how sincere are his promises to past supporters of other parties? No new taxes beyond what he’s already announced? No accepting of EU laws without a say and the consequential granting of oversight by EU courts? Talk is especially cheap during elections.

Then there’s SNP First Minister John Swinney, who keeps telling us his party is the one sure route to rejoining the European Union. Funny then we learnt over the weekend his Scottish Government is facing having to return £451 million of EU funds that could not be spent within the timeline allocated. The man that never stops talking about “Tory austerity” and lack of Westminster spending and yet here we have funds that could have been used on economic and anti-poverty measures going a begging?

Swinney’s government could be returning some 28 per cent of EU structural and investment funding – that we paid for through UK taxes – after failing to spend the money in the time allotted. This compares badly with the return of funds being only 9 per cent in Wales, 6 per cent in England and 2 per cent in Northern Ireland. So much for being the party most committed to EU membership.

This is the same party that cut the housing budget by £200 million, could not find the means or the money to dual the A9, or fund the PlGF pre-eclampsia test that is available in England and Wales. No matter which stone you turn over the promises of the SNP are found to be worthless.

The great architect Mies van der Rohe was right when he said “less is more” and it is a phrase that our politicians should adopt.

The former First Minister Jack McConnell and I disagreed on many issues but one I thought he was absolutely right to articulate was the idea that his Labour-Liberal Democrat administration should “do less better.” He took a good deal of stick for saying that, being accused of lacking ambition, of not doing enough – but we would be in a far better place now if Holyrood had listened to him.

Today’s breed of collectivist politicians are all infected with the “something must be done” virus when in fact the cause of the symptoms they are exercised about is often their own previous interventions resulting in unintended consequences and perverse outcomes.

A current example of this is how Scottish Government rent controls have had the opposite effect of that intended; instead of protecting tenants, landlords are being driven out of the market, creating a scarcity of supply that results in higher rentals. It is no surprise that Scotland’s rental costs are now the highest in the UK.

We need to remove the rent controls (that were originally an emergency Covid lockdown measure) and also remove restrictive planning approvals to build all types of houses, including more expensive ones.

Only when our politicians promise to do less, but do it better, will they restore trust with the public.

Brian Monteith is a former member of the Scottish and European parliaments and editor of ThinkScotland.org