How the SNP can avoid a defensive General Election campaign

They also have considerable experience as the third largest party in the Westminster Parliament. It is, however, the case, that they have never truly been in power.

The devolution settlement was always intended to massively constrain what Holyrood can achieve, and there has been no way round this, and the Tories and Labour at Westminster are meanwhile displaying an attitude that I am inclined to describe as anti-Scotism.

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Both situations matter. What they mean is that the electorate in Scotland is too inclined to hold the SNP to account for matters over which they have little or no control. With a General Election coming up, this troubles me.

My concern is it the SNP will go into the General Election on the defensive. For a party that has been in charge, but not necessarily in power at Holyrood, that might seem to be inevitable – but I think it would be wrong. When Labour are the threat to the return of sufficient SNP MPs to Westminster, they have to be on the offensive. That is particularly true when discussing how they will hold Labour to account for their actions if they form the next Westminster government.

The SNP will have a unique role to play when it comes to doing this. It is quite likely that only they will have the skills, experience and organisation to create that accountability during the first few years of the life of that new parliament. This requires that the SNP have a policy agenda for what they will demand from Labour, which would in turn both reflect what they think to be the needs of the people of Scotland and what the priorities might be if they were to have the power to really run Scotland as an independent country. Let me note what I think some of those issues might be.

First, the SNP should demand that Labour take back control the UK’s money and interest rates. The last few years have seen massive economic mismanagement of the UK as a whole as a consequence of the Bank of England raising interest rates wholly unnecessarily to supposedly tackle inflation, and because the Bank of England has kept rates high by undertaking wholly unnecessary sales of hundreds of billions of pounds worth of government bonds that it bought between 2009 and 2021.

The result has been a cost-of-living crisis, misery for those with mortgages, business failures, and recession. The SNP should demand that Labour restore democratic control of our economy in the interest of everyone by taking back power over these issues from the Bank of England so that the economy might in future be run for the sake of people and not the City of London.

Second, to extend this theme, the SNP should demand that Labour increase taxes on the wealthy, whilst leaving those for everyone else alone, or cutting them. I have shown how this might be done in the Taxing Wealth Report 2024. In that report I suggest that up to £90 billion a year could be raised in this way.

I have also shown that by altering the rules for pension and ISA tax relief, which together cost the country more than £70 billion a year, more than £100bn of funding for investment in the UK economy each year could be made available each year. The SNP should be saying that this is what the economy as a whole demands, with a fair share of the money going to Scotland, of course.

Thirdly, the SNP should be demanding that Labour deliver a proper Green New Deal. We all know that climate change is real. We know that the UK is not prepared for it. And we know that millions of households are suffering fuel poverty because they have not had the help that they need to reduce both their fuel bills and their carbon emissions. Business also needs help. The SNP should be demanding that Labour deliver this.

Fourth, the SNP need to make clear their commitment to public services, and investment in them. There is much disquiet in Scotland on this issue, particularly around education, but also about much else that the Holyrood government does. We know that these failures in Scotland are all the fault of under-funding from Westminster. The SNP have to say that they will continually call on Labour, if they form the next UK government, to increase that funding for the benefit of Scotland and to make clear that they would do the same if they were in office after independence.

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Finally the SNP have to talk about, and demand, the investment that is required for all of our futures. This is not just about climate change. Housing, transport, hospitals, schools and much else in the state sector require investment. So too is support needed for green business, in particular, through an active industrial policy. The SNP should be demanding all this.

The goal of all this is simple. The SNP need to show that by having an active campaign of engagement at Westminster on what is required not just for Scotland, but the UK as a whole, that it is prepared to run a fully accountable government in Scotland when the time comes for them to do so.

It would be all too easy for the SNP to campaign solely on Scottish issues in the coming General Election. That, however, would be a serious mistake. By making appropriate demands of Labour and showing that alternatives to that party’s current desperate plans are available, the SNP could prove that they are ready to assume the full responsibilities of power. Nothing less will do.