How the Scottish Tories are being brazenly dishonest about the 'car park tax'

Unably assisted by Labour’s James Kelly pointing at steak bakes in an industrial estate in Cambuslang, the Scottish Conservatives hope to throw up a hue and cry about new tax-raising powers for local authorities, passed in Thursday’s Budget. The price of Scottish Green support for Derek Mackay’s spending plans, the new provisions will empower local authorities to raise workplace parking levies – if they choose to.

The SNP have been inconstant friends of the idea of greater local autonomy. But here, you might well think, is a modest but significant extension of the powers of councils, which can be tailored to the circumstances of their own burghs and towns. Councillors need not use the power at all.

It mirrors powers already available to councils in England and Wales. The idea found support in – of all places – Labour’s local government manifestos for both Edinburgh and Glasgow at the last election, and as recently as a few months ago, in the mouths of Tory councillors, who noted “the merits in principle of pursuing the power” to introduce a Workplace Parking Levy on the streets of the capital.

You might expect the champions of greater localism to welcome the opportunity for their councillors to take decisions in Perth and Kinross, Aberdeen City and East Dunbartonshire. In their 2016 manifesto, the Scottish Tories argued that “the SNP Government has sought to take power away from communities and centralise it in Edinburgh”.

All of that, however, is now to be forgotten. The ferret has been reversed. The policy is now “the SNP’s hated car park tax” or the “poll tax on wheels” – delete as your political inclinations tend.

There’s a cynical school of political analysis which says that political lying is only a problem when the punters don’t buy your snake oil. The logic goes something like this: everyone is economical with the actualité. Politics is a world of effective and ineffective liars. If you wish to prosper in politics, take care to be an effective liar. Whoever lost money by under-estimating the intelligence and political engagement of the voting public? It doesn’t matter whether what you are saying is true or not. All the mug punter is looking for is a plausible line which chimes with their prejudices. If shameless opportunism works, you have a duty to be as shameless and opportunistic as possible. Get a bus. Stick a big number on it. Bingo.

Finesse it if you like. Dress it up in savvy, insiderish terms as a political gambit. If your response to a flat-out falsehood is to brand it as “canny politics”, you’ve got to ask yourself what you are doing in political reporting.

I first encountered Jackson Carlaw when I was 16 or 17 years of age. The Scottish Conservative deputy leader was a governor at my high school. If we were favoured with a visit by a local Tory politician, there was Jackson at their elbow, toadying furiously. That is, presumably, what he thought he was doing when the late David McLetchie sat down to lunch with a handful of teachers and teenagers. McLetchie picked this moment to roll out his thoughts on his parliamentary colleagues in the Scottish Socialist Party, describing them as “pre-Raphaelite fishwives”. Jackson, I remember, provided a biddable toad chorus to this bit of casual misogyny. The memory hardened.

Big Jock has made a solid job of standing in for Ruth Davidson during her maternity leave. And to be fair to him, the Tory depute has embraced some surprising and enlightened causes in his day. But in Ruth Davidson’s absence, the policy drift in the Scottish Tories has only continued. The party is still frozen in an opposition mindset.

There is a doldrum tide in political opposition, where the duties are light and the living’s easy. Let’s call it the LibDem zone. Parties marooned in this relaxing corner of politics can forget the burdens and compromises of government. Relax. You need no positive policy agenda. No positive vision for the country. Instead, your principal tasks are to disagree with anything the government proposes and the generation of snide press releases.

As a political rent-a-gob, it is your first duty to condemn, accuse and manufacture synthetic fury about everything from the quantity of custard creams being consumed in Bute House to the cost of ministerial cars. In Scottish politics, this doldrum zone is crowded, with the LibDems, Labour and Tories duking it out for the most gormless press release of the day.

This week, the First Minister was in Paris, opening a new Scottish Government hub in the City of Lights, and testifying at a French parliamentary committee. The day before, she met with the republic’s European affairs minister Nathalie Loiseau. Earlier this month, she went on a similar trip to North America, encompassing a whistle-stop tour of Washington DC and the tri-state area, before heading up to Ottawa and Toronto.

“Another day, another jaunt,” mused Glasgow Tory Annie Wells. Maurice Golden – Ruth Davidson’s chief whip – drawled: “Nicola Sturgeon should focus on growing Scotland’s economy instead of attempting to grandstand on the world stage.”

This was like catnip to the Tory base, well-balanced with chips on both shoulders. But I wonder what the public at large is meant to make of this outbreak of tall poppy syndrome on the Tory benches.

Listening to Wells and Golden, you’d think the SNP leader should have crossed the Atlantic in the rusting berth of a Russian herring tanker. If Nicola Sturgeon really cared about the Scottish public purse, she’d have snaffled a kip under the stars on the La Rive Gauche before heading off to l’Assemblée Nationale. If the official residence springs a leak, fetch a bucket, First Minister. You can always dodge the collapsing plaster. You’d think the First Minister should be spending her afternoons filling in pot-holes in Aberfeldy, handing out jotters in primary schools and throttling pigeons outside Glasgow’s Death Star.

TO say the cringe is strong with this one is a dramatic understatement. It is easy to write this off as the empty carping of 24-carat pissants. But in its own way, the Tory reaction to these foreign delegations tells its own, quietly eloquent story about how the rag-tag bag of grey men, greying men and greyer men in the Tory group still see themselves.

If you are the major opposition party, criticising ministers for promoting the country abroad, you aren’t imagining your people taking up those duties. If you’re counting the pennies being poured into ministerial cars, you aren’t seeing your colleagues inside them.

As this budget round starkly exposed, the LibDems have embraced irrelevance, preferring to let Mike Rumbles rumble and Alex Cole-Hamilton peacock in the local paper. Under Richard Leonard and James Kelly – well, they might as well be a couple of Dysons for all the good they’ll do. But much the same can be said for the Tory benches.

The next Holyrood election – scheduled for the May 6, 2021 – may still feel half a world away. But mentally and emotionally, Ruth Davidson’s party still isn’t projecting itself into office and out of the comfort zone of opposition. Talk up Ruth Davidson’s chances as much as you like. From Darth Murdo’s budget performances downward, the Tories still show negligible serious interest in forming the next Scottish Government.