Fit for Government or Grievance?

NIcola Sturgeon has gotten by on sheer personal popularity and shaking her fist at Westminster, but How Long Can That LAST? Image Credit: Ninian Reid via Flickr cc

     Throughout much of its history, the SNP has made much use of grievance politics – claiming that Scotland is held back by being in the UK, and in particular, by the UK Parliament at Westminster. Even after devolution and being in government, the party has continued down this path of blaming big, bad Westminster for Scotland’s problems, and using this as a reason for Scotland to secede from the UK.

     Trumped-up and manufactured grievances were a big part of their campaign to break up Britain last year, and though they failed, they have continued to use this tactic to stoke resentment against the Union and the political parties that support it. This resulted in their electoral landslide at the UK general election, and without fail, they intend on doing it again going into the election next year for the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, where they are expected to win another outright majority and an unprecedented third term.

     However, grievances take can take you only but so far in anything, let alone politics, and especially when responsibilities lay at your feet and people demand to know what you are going to do, with an expectation that real action will be taken.

     For the SNP, this has become increasingly true as Holyrood gets beefed up with extensive new powers under the Scotland Bill going through its final legislative stages at Westminster, and in the course of this week, the party – having been in government for eight years – showed signs of being a bit off message with regard to tax credits.

     The main issue at hand was whether the new devolved powers contained within the Scotland Bill would allow Holyood to top-up tax credits in Scotland following them being cut throughout the UK under proposals by Chancellor George Osborne, which ran into a stumbling block last week in the House of Lords.

     Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale announced at her party’s conference last weekend that if elected into government, she would use new Holyrood powers over taxation to retain the current rates paid by top earners (and not going along with planned tax cuts by the Conservatives at Westminster), as well as keep (soon-to-be devolved) air passenger duty as is and not going along with SNP proposals to cut and eventually abolish it in Scotland. Together, these proposals are expected to free up £355 million to restore the tax credits.

     But the SNP’s Social Justice Secretary Alex Neil claimed that Holyrood would not be able to restore the tax credits    and on that basis, the SNP MSP’s voted to reject a Labour motion to have them restored, and instead pushed through a motion that claimed that Holyrood would not have the power to reverse the tax credits unless they were devolved.

  However, the Scottish Parliament's own information service (SPICE) states that with devolution through the Scotland Bill, the Scottish Government will be able to "provide a permanent top-up to a reserved benefit" such as Working Tax Credits. This means that even though tax credits are a reserved policy with the UK Government, the Scottish Government can use devolved powers to restore any tax credits lost to Scottish residents if they are cut by UK Government.

     This had already been confirmed by Scottish Secretary David Mundell, and after repeated statements by the Scottish Government that it could not top up credits - including a press release by Alex Neil just hours earlier to that effect and demanding that credits be devolved - Neil admitted that the government could indeed do so during a rancorous debate at Holyrood.

     In a further sign of the SNP's confusion on the issue, this was the same rancorous debate at which SNP MSP's rejected Labour's motion to restore the credits and claimed that the Scottish Government could do nothing about the issue.

     Speaking on this rather embarrassing U-turn, Labour's public services spokesperson Jackie Ballie lambasted Neil for putting on a "pantomime dame performance" in his defense of the SNP's opposition to Labour's motion, as well as for his apparent waffling and/or incoherence on the issue. She also accused the SNP government of putting "grudge and grievance" above action to help those affected by tax credit cuts, and devastatingly turned a common SNP talking point against it by asking: "Why can't the SNP just embrace the new powers instead of always talking Scotland down? "

     Neil responded by claiming that Labour had "no credibility" on opposing Conservative welfare reforms, and that the SNP would continue to seek a full reversal of the proposed tax credit changes at Westminster. To this end, he further stated that the Scottish Government would wait for the announcement of the final tax credit proposals and George Osborne's autumn statement before considering what "corrective action needs to be taken on tax credits, when such action should be taken, how it shall be funded, and how it will be administered."

     Sure enough, at First Minister's Questions the next day, Nicola Sturgeon said that her government would present "credible, deliverable and affordable plans to protect low-income households" from the cuts and dismissed Labour's plan as "back of a fag packet proposals", though offered nothing in the way of specifics regarding the SNP's plans.

     In his analysis, the BBC's Brian Taylor said that aside from needing to know about the autumn statement and tax credit proposals, Scottish Government ministers - especially Finance Minister John Swinney - were also waiting to understand what kind of fiscal framework they would be working with under the new devolution arrangements (and the full scope of the new powers) before making "costly commitments."

     This is actually a sensible policy, so that public money is spent wisely and effectively. Then again, for a party that claims to be for bold, radical action, and being "stronger for Scotland", this apparent reluctance to set out proposals to deal with the tax credit issue may well represent that whatever else the SNP stands for, their main and overriding objective above all else is secession.

     To this end, almost nothing can be done by the SNP without it being figured into the greater context of advancing the independence cause. Former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill admitted as much when he explained why he blocked the extension of voting rights to prisoners last year, despite supporting the idea. It was he said, "the wrong thing done, albeit for the right reasons", and for MacAskill, the right reasons were to "avoid any needless distractions in the run-up to the [independence] referendum, to deny the right-wing press lurid headlines that could tarnish the bigger picture."

     In the context of the tax credits debate, if the SNP were truly a party committed to social justice first and foremost, it would not have turned down a motion to support having the tax credits restored via the powers it will soon have at its disposal. But it did to that and then claimed that they didn't have the power to top-up any credits reduced by the UK Government, before having to admit that it did.

      The reason why it did this of course, was so that it could pick another fight with Westminster over constitutional process and powers, and to continue their narrative about Scotland being the helpless, defenseless victim of the Union - always being flogged senseless and mercilessly by Westminster and belonging to a hopeless constitutional structure that does not work for Scotland and the Scottish people.

     God forbid it if the SNP actually used the powers that are - and soon will be - at its disposal as a party of government to help people, because then it would demonstrate that the constitutional arrangements of the United Kingdom do work for Scotland. If that were to happen, it would blow a massive hole into their argument for independence, and indeed, I remember reading a Herald (or Sunday Herald) article in 2013 which argued that if anything, the SNP's participation in devolved government may have blunted the case for independence because the party was seen as competent in running Holyrood and standing up for Scotland's interests within the safety and security of the Union.

     So the SNP cannot allow such thinking to marinate in the minds of the people of Scotland. This is why they have to almost continuously pick fights over the constitution and keep the constitutional debates going - stoking up manufactured grievances and resentment - so that the very idea of independence remains in people's minds and continue to blame Westminster for all of Scotland's problems and demand still more powers, because after all in their eyes, it does not go far enough.

     Well, of course it does not go far enough for them, because they wanted a "devo-max" arraignment which would have been independence in all but name (though still relying on the pooling and sharing mechanisms within the UK). On top of that, their all-consuming goal remains full and complete separation, which the voters rejected last year, though this has not stopped them from complaining about the supposed "inadequacies" of the Scotland Bill. As the Daily Record said in an editorial this week:

"Moan, moan, bitch, bitch, whinge, whinge. Their response [to the Scotland Bill] has been as negative as it was predictable. A cynic might argue that the SNP don’t actually want those new powers because it makes them more accountable to the people of Scotland."

     Herein lies another reason why the SNP would rather argue over process and powers, because with more powers comes more responsibility and accountability, as well as potential pitfalls for the SNP. With regard to tax credits for example, there is the possibility that they may have to raise (soon-to-be-devolved) income taxes on higher earners and/or hike up other taxes and duties usually paid by the more well-off in order to finance top-ups of welfare benefits.

     Throughout the referendum campaign, one of the many refrains from pro-independence campaigners and writers was that Scotland was a more egalitarian society from that in England, and unlike the English, Scots were more amenable to paying more taxes to help the well off. However, almost all polls and surveys have shown that Scots are not much more interested in having their taxes raised than the English, and the SNP knows this. After all, a big part of their success has been to capture "Middle Scotland" with initiatives such as free tuition, free perscriptions, and the council tax freeze - all of which disproportionately benefit the better off - without having to worry about paying for it out of Holyrood.

     Despite the rhetoric of social justice, the SNP knows that in order to win anything, you must win the middle ground of the electorate, and heaven forbid if they decide to take away those gifts to the middle and upper classes or raise their taxes to pay for topping up tax credits (in other words - talk left, walk right). After a while, people may see them as any ordinary political party that needs to be replaced by another at some point in the near future, and worse, the cause of secession will stagnate and fall by the wayside.

     Against this have been the charge that big, bad Westminster is setting up a fiscal "trap" for the SNP by forcing them to raise taxes to pay for the initiatives they want funded. This is nonsense, for the only reason this is a "trap" is because it will force the SNP to make choices that will be politically unpopular and cost it support from one group or another within its broad church of socialists, neo-liberals, progressives, environmentalists, fossil fuel promoters, free-marketers, social democrats, and hard-core nationalists. Perhaps the "wait and see" strategy is at least partly about coming up with a plan that somehow keeps all of these factions onside and keep the secessionist movement going.

     This is why the SNP is not fit for government, for every decision and policy is thought in terms of not what's best for Scotland, but what's best for "The Cause", and if what may be best for Scotland conflicts with what's best for the The Cause, what do you think is going to win out? As MacAskill said, wrong decisions can be made and justified for the sake of independence.

     This is why the tax credits issue and the issues surrounding other devolved powers of a beefed-up Holyrood may become a big issue going into the 2016 Scottish Parliament election. This presents an opportunity for all pro-Union parties to set out their respective stalls and present the SNP as the party that's so obsessed with independence and getting powers, as opposed to actually using them for the benefit of Scotland and its people.

     For the Labour Party in particular, they can use this in an attempt to reclaim the mantle of acting in the interests of social justice and ordinary working families. Kezia Dugdale and her party were given credit by Iain Macwhirter for “reframing” the tax credit debate and forcing the SNP's U-turn, while Jackie Ballie did well in her sparring match against Alex Neil when she said that the "tax credit debate exposed what really matters to the SNP government – constitutional grievance rather than helping working families in Scotland." Kenny Farquharson of The Times said simply in a tweet: "SNP wants to have powers, Labour wants to use powers."

     First Minister Sturgeon sneers at such a prospect - the idea of Scottish Labour being in power, and partly dismissed their tax credit plans on the basis that they came "from a party that knows it has little chance of ever being in a position to implement them."

     If I were advising Scottish Labour, I'd place that quote around party offices and remember it well as motivation going into next year's elections. Right now, it seems very unlikely that the SNP will be dislodged from government, but as we have seen in the last couple of years, anything can happen in politics within even the shortest space of time - especially in the current febrile atmosphere, and Labour - along with the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats - ought to treat this election as though there is all to play for.

     Indeed however, there is much to play for in the upcoming election. It will decide if Scotland will have a government dedicated first and foremost to using its powers for the benefit of the people (and especially the most vulnerable in society), or if it will continue having a grievance machine that puts constitutional questions before everything else. The people must think hard and choose wisely.

Praise the Lords?

     Yesterday marked a truly dramatic moment in modern British politics as the House of Lords voted to delay Prime Minister David Cameron’s government from cutting over £4.4 billion of tax credits to low income families and individuals, which are part of an overall £12 billion deficit reduction plan by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.

     It’s remarkable because the Lords, the unelected upper house of the UK Parliament, usually does not take a strong stand in the way of legislation supported by the elected government and the lower house of Parliament, the House of Commons. Indeed, the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 stripped the right of Lords to veto “money” bills, and placed a maximum of two years (reduced to one year by the 1949 Act) for the Lords to delay other public bills coming before it. These acts asserted the near-supremacy of the Commons and limited the Lords to providing scrutiny to legislation.

     However, this isn’t to say that the Lords is entirely meaningless, for their ability to scrutinize, hold up, or turn back legislation to the Commons (even if only temporary) is can used as a check on the government and force it to rethink its proposals. This is what happened yesterday during a highly charged and emotional debate in a packed Lords chamber on whether to either allow the cuts to go through, delay them, or block them entirely.

     In the upper chamber, the Conservative Party – which has a majority of 12 in the Commons and therefore forms the UK Government – has the biggest number of peers at 249, but is faced with the combined numbers of 213 Labour and 112 Liberal Democrat peers, along with hundreds of other peers among smaller parties, independent crossbenchers, non-affiliated members, and Church of England bishops.

     Anticipating a possible defeat on the matter of tax credits, the government and people on its behalf warned against any move to delay or block the reductions, saying that along with contravening the Parliament Acts, this would break a 300 year old convention of the Lords not to interfere with finance bills and spark a major constitutional crisis. Professor Vernon Bogdanor, a leading constitutional scholar who was David Cameron’s tutor at Oxford, told the BBC:

     “These rules date back to the end of the seventeenth century and they say that the House of Commons had exclusive financial privilege – that is the House of Lords should not interfere with the financial privilege of the Commons or the power of the government.”

     He further stated that there was “no source” from which the Lords could derive the authority to defy the Commons, where the tax credit changes have been passed by the elected Tory majority. It was simply a matter of the “very fundamental principle, no taxation without representation”, and the Commons he said, was the “only representative chamber that should decide on matters of taxation.”

     However, Labour, LibDem, and crossbench peers defended their actions to table motions to delay or block the cuts under the notion that the cuts were not actually part of a finance bill or primary legislation. Instead, they were enshrined in secondary legislation known as a statutory instrument (or regulation), which according to The Guardian, is not "subject to the same line-by-line Commons scrutiny as legislation, but instead stand or fall on a single quickfire vote." However, by going about getting through the changes this way, George Osborne “forswore the ‘money bill’ exemption” with regard to the Lords, and therefore set it up to be more closely scrutinized there with the possibility of revisions being sent back to the Commons.

     In addition, the opposition and some cross-bench peers believed that they were within the limits of the Salisbury convention, which states that the Lords will not oppose government legislation if it was promised in the election manifesto of the government party.

     This then, leads to crux of the matter. The Conservatives spent the general election promising not to touch the tax credits brought in by the previous Labour government as part of its overall deficit reduction agenda. After the election, Osborne announced the creation of a UK National Living Wage, which would replace the minimum wage (currently at £6.50 per hour), and be gradually raised to £9.00 an hour by 2020. However, tax credits would also be reduced – with the government claiming that the National Living Wage would make up for the lost tax credit income.

     However, as the scale of the proposed reforms became known (that millions of families and individuals would be adversely affected to the tune of an average £1,300) and as there were questions regarding whether the National Living Wage could fully make up for it, opposition and unease increased. People who claimed to have supported the Tories in the election expressed their anger and the feeling that they had been lied to, including a single mother who unleashed her frustration on the BBC’s Question Time. Conservative politicians, including backbenchers in the Commons and Scottish leader Ruth Davidson, as well media pundits also expressed their displeasure and the need to at least find ways to blunt the effect of the cuts for the poorest working individuals and families who are beneficiaries of the credits. The idea of many of their constituents being told around Christmas that their benefits (and therefore a substantial part of their income) would be cut became increasing untenable in Tory ranks, but the reforms got through the Commons anyway.

     However, some peers contended that since the tax credit reforms were not featured in the Conservative election manifesto, they could at least be held up in the Lords for further debate and possible revision under the Salisbury convention.

     Following a passionate debate in the packed Lords chamber, a motion tabled by Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Manzoor to block the cuts outright was defeated. This was a so-called “fatal motion”, which is rarely used since peers are wary about overstepping their powers to throw out legislation from an elected government. However, the Lords did pass a motion tabled by Labour peer Baroness Hollis of Heigham to delay the cuts until the government produces a plan to compensate affected workers during a three year transition, as well as a crossbench motion tabled by Baroness Meacher to decline support for the cuts until the government outlines how it will help those affected by the cuts and responds to research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which claimed among other things, that only about a quarter of the income lost via cuts in credits would be taken up by the National Living Wage.

     This was a huge defeat for government of David Cameron and a personal blow to George Osborne, who responded that he would delay the policy until he finds a way to compensate the workers, and wait until his Autumn Statement next month to make an announcement about this. In the long-term however, he said that the events of last night raised “constitutional questions that need to be dealt with” and criticized “unelected Labour and Liberal Democrat Lords” for interfering on a financial matter passed  by the elected Commons. David Cameron’s office responded by saying that the Prime Minister will seek a “rapid review” with regard to the status of the Lords, saying that a “convention exists and it has been broken”, and that it must be restored to ensure that ensure that the Commons has complete primacy on finance issues.

     Other Conservatives made similar comments in expressing their outrage and fury towards the Lords, but some people who opposed the tax credit reforms appreciated the actions taken by the Lords, including some of its critics who believed that the chamber needs to be reformed into an elected body or abolished outright. Many commented it was good to see the Lords actually proving to be useful, while noting that it was sad that it took the unelected body of Parliament to force a climbdown by the elected government on this contentious, controversial, and quite personal issue.

     However, SNP members and politicians (including First Minister Nicola Sturgeon), never to be satisfied with anything the “Westminster parties” do, expressed criticism against Labour peers for abstaining on the Liberal Democrat motion to kill the cuts altogether. In response, Labour people said that their peers abstained because the “fatal motion” would have meant that Osborne could have just brought the cuts back again, and that delaying them to extract protections for those affected was more effective.

     Another reason for not passing the “fatal motion” was that it may result in a Conservative retaliation whenever Labour returns to government. To this, some Nationalists said this showed why the Lords needed to be abolished and replaced by an elected chamber that can actually take action without constitutional concerns, but as this is a more long-term concern and would not do anything to help those to be affected by the proposed reforms, it made more sense from a Labour perspective to do something that would force Osborne to think again, rather than do something that may have turned out to be ineffective and quite potentially overstep the power of the Lords more so than the delaying motions did.

     In many ways, this showed how the SNP is obsessed over constitutional arrangements they don’t like, rather than working within the existing system in the here and now to achieve positive outcomes for the day-to-day lives of their constituents. Certainly some of their members don’t seem to understand the intricacies of parliamentary procedure and strategy, for process matters as much as principle and the latter cannot be achieved without the former. Instead, they prefer to just wanting to tear things down and not observe necessary processes (and of course, having another go at the Labour Party for being “Red Tories”).

     One personal I interacted with said that along with “lack of principle”, the UK has a problem with process and tradition, as if to say that they get in the way of governing or taking certain actions. However, process and tradition are some of the things I admire and respect about the UK. Yes, they may perhaps be archaic, but they give character to the country and make it stand out – mostly in a good way, I might add. Many people look at such processes and traditions, and think, “Yep, that’s how the Brits do it”, and say it in a positive light because that’s simply how things have been done going back hundreds of years.

     That being said, there is always room for reform, and indeed, the British system has reformed it time and time again through many changes over the centuries – some revolutionary, others for more evolutionary and gradual. The monarch is no longer absolute, but constitutional; free elections are regularly held to Parliament with a universal adult franchise, as opposed to elections by the propertied elite; and the Lord’s are limited to a revising and scrutiny capacity, as opposed to an outright and perpetual veto.

     On this last point, yesterday’s developments showed how the Lord’s can be useful in these roles as a check on the government of the day, and it seems that people on both the left and right agree. Stephen Bush of the left-leaning New Statesman tweeted that it was “not a constitutional crisis for the Lords to return to sender. It’s just the constitution.” Adam Tomkins, a Glasgow law professor and Conservative candidate for the Scottish Parliament next year also tweeted that “it’s the House of Lords’ job to scrutinise legislation. That’s what they did today. It [would] be a constitutional crisis if they didn’t do it.” Conservative writer Tim Montgomerie of The Times emphasized in a tweet that the actions of the Lords had more to do with giving MP’s time to rethink, especially considering that "tax credits weren't specified in [the] Tory manifesto", and that for this reason, democracy was not "being undermined." Meanwhile, in relation to politics north of the Tweed, Kevin Shoefield of PoliticsHome.com commented on Twitter that the Lords “does a better job of holding the executive to account” than the SNP-dominated committee’s at the Scottish Parliament (and many others on and off social media expressed similar sentiments).

     Nevertheless, the Lords still attract controversy for being viewed as not much more than a gravy train for former politicians and party favorites – a symbol to some people of a self-serving elite and of Westminster decadence and corruption. Furthermore, while there were expressions of pleasure and even "high-fiving" with the way the Lords acted yesterday, those who did so may not be pleased tomorrow if they are on the losing side of an issue taken up by the unelected body.

     Of course, the reality is that the House of Lord’s does have many people who take their membership seriously and actually work hard. There are elder statesmen who actually bother to read legislation (as they did in their previous political life) and serve to question the agenda of the government and provide counsel for particular areas of public policy for which they have a specialty.  There are also many others from all walks of life who also bring particular qualities and experiences to the upper house, and help to guide its decisions.

     Given what happened yesterday, it may very well be that the Lords acted as it should have done in scrutinizing legislation and turning it back to the Commons for revision, and that fears of a constitutional crisis are overblown. However, reform may be needed to make the Lords more legitimate in the eyes of the British public and therefore more able to take the kind of stands as it did yesterday.

     Among other things, perhaps there should be reform of the nominations process to the peerage, so as to reduce the use of Lords as a reward for party hacks and donors, and to encourage the nomination of people who can bring valuable skills and expertise in the Lords. In addition, there should be attendance requirements to ensure that peers are active in their job, as well as limitations on expense claims to prevent abuse of the system. Even more boldly, it should not be outside the realm of possibility for the Lords to represent the nations and regions of the UK on an equal or near-equal basis, in similar fashion to upper houses in Canada, Australia, and the US, where such representation gives constituents parts – particularly those with small populations – a greater sense that they have a role on running the country on the same terms as the larger areas. This, and perhaps eventually, a partially or entirely elected House of Lords would give the ancient upper chamber a more firm legitimacy in the eyes of the public and allow it be a more effective and meaningful body.

     For now though, the Lords will continue to operate as it has, and if the developments over the tax credits leads to long-term and positive constitutional reform, then that can only be good for British democracy going forward.