THIS is a peculiar election campaign. Normally, we would expect the party of government defending its policies and the other parties to be attacking them and arguing for their own alternatives.
Instead in Scotland we seem to be having an irrelevant re-run of the independence and Brexit referendums. The Conservatives are reluctant to discuss any of their policies and instead are arguing that only Theresa May is capable of negotiating the terms of the Brexit divorce – but without giving us any clue at all of what she hopes to negotiate, how it might affect us or what we might have to concede to achieve it!
The only discernible domestic policy they have produced, so far, was an attack on pensioners – proposing an end to the triple-lock pension increase, a dementia tax to pay for care, and means testing of the cold weather heating grant.
Bearing in mind that most older people vote, these could be described variously as brave, foolhardy, or iniquitous, depending on your point of view.
The backlash these manifesto policies produced, as shown by the polls, forced the government into “We didnae really mean it” mode.
So have pensioners been saved from cuts in their standard of living? Or is it just a delay until after the election? Who knows, but anyway, we are now just back to the “I am better negotiator” line.
We can’t look for clarity from Ruth Davidson. She seems to be completely detached from the whole Westminster election process and is instead fixated on a possible independence referendum that doesn’t even have a date yet. She goes between urging Nicola Sturgeon to concentrate on the day job and deflecting any questions about policies such as the bedroom tax, dementia tax, rape clause or heating grant with a blithe “They don’t matter as Nicola won’t let them happen in Scotland!”. I think it is reasonable to focus on the Westminster government’s policies – or lack of them – as it was May who chose to call an unnecessary election. But the other peculiar thing is that in Scotland many of the debates have been on the record of the Scottish Government on education, which is basically irrelevant to a UK election.
The Scottish public deserve better. We will continue to be governed by Westminster for the foreseeable future, so deserve to know what we can expect in terms of taxes, benefits and public services.
The tragedy is that at a time when thousands, possibly millions, of people – young, old or disabled – are facing drastic threats to their wellbeing, real issues are being smoke-screened behind soundbites in a kind of political Britain’s Got Talent contest.
Tom Berney is chairman of the Scottish Older People's Assembly
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