No Sympathy For The Devils

In the 17 years since the SNP took power in Scotland, it has often been accused of making some poor choices in policies .....

SNP Makes Great (But Expensive) Claims

... this is particularly so with financial matters, where there have been accusations of profligacy, and poor decisions making e.g. implementing a national council tax freeze, which simply put more pressure on local councils (who then asked for more help from the SNP Government .. DUH) ... all while apparently sitting on a mountain of unspent European structural and investment funding totally £450m, that the Scottish Government is now set to hand back to the EU sometime this year.

This unspent hoard, was from monies allocated for the 2014-20 period, and although the UK has since left the EU, under the terms of the funding agreement, devolved nations could access the cash up until the end of 2023, but for reasons unknown, the SNP Scottish government left £450m (28 per cent of their fund pot) unspent (Wales returned just 9% of its allocation, and England an even more frugal 6% with Northern Ireland upholding Celtic honour returning just 2% unspent).

Other accusations are that since 2007, the SNP Scottish Government has wasted £1.6bn on NHS agency staff, with delayed hospital discharges also costing the Scottish NHS over £1.3bn, and the cost of new Scottish ferries for the islands now being £330m over budget. The replacement for Barlinnie Prison is said to be £300m over-budget. A further £96.4 million has also been invested by Scottish health boards on a series of new facilities and improvements, before the Scottish Government ordered a halt on work in February 2024 for at least 2 years leaving the facilities unused. 

But somehow, despite many saying that the SNP party that has presided over the spectacular decline of education, healthcare and key public services, the books have apparently been balanced every year since 2007, as per legal requirements (presumably some nimble accountancy practices have been employed to cover up underlying long-term problems). Possibly it helps that “The Barnett Formula” means that public funding per head from central UK taxes in Scotland is higher than in England: meaning that the Scottish government has more to spend per person, compared with England. 

Of course the problem with all Left Leaning governments is that they like to spend money on their supporters, notably the public sector workers (both Civil Service and Council Staff), NHS staff, and transport unions ... thus buying their votes. But these are very greedy and ungrateful clients (especially with the Scottish Labour Party courting them in the background), and their demands can never be satiated.

So the annual budgets unsustainable issues have simply been growing in the background, with for example, public sector pay now making up more than half of the Scottish SNP government’s day-to-day budget. For example the SNP government had budgeted for a 3% limit to pay increases in fiscal year 2024/2025, but this will be exceeded by the agreements struck already this year, and with more negotiations still being negotiated that will also be non-financed.

• 3.6% - or £1,292 per year if that is higher - for council workers.
• 4.5% for ScotRail train drivers.
• 5.5% for NHS staff - including nurses, midwives, paramedics, allied health professionals and porters.
• 4.27% across the board uplift for teachers.
• With more settlements waiting in down the line.
  

The newly devolved social welfare benefits budget, was quickly overspent by £900m more than the UK Treasury allocated for the costs, in a block grant in the first year, as SNP Government ministers chose to give a more generous set of welfare benefits, and this overspend is on course to reach £1.5bn pa within five years.

Having thus completely trashed their budget, and faced next year with cuts in the central UK governments grant next year, as part of Keir Starmers new governments cuts to plug a national budget deficit of £22bn, then the only option left to the SNP Government is to fund their current deficit with a sudden in-year cuts. This is essentially instigating immediate cuts across the board, to try and balance the books by end of fiscal year (April 2025).

They have now announced an immediate halt to all non-essential spending across all government departments, as well as a recruitment freeze for all but the most pressured jobs in the NHS to help fund the public sector pay deals. As well as this, they have announced introducing means tested the winter fuel payments for pensioners (essentially taking them off all pensioners but those on benefits), the return of peak rail fares (they had kept prices at a standard non peak rate, hitting commuters), scrapping free bus travel for people in the asylum system (a woke policy that only a country that knows that the majority of asylum seekers head south to England, would ever dream of), and delaying a digital devices programme (they planned to give free iPads and laptops to people who are "digitally excluded" mainly those on benefits - notice this was the most expensive devices rather than cheaper Android devices because they don't want them stigmatised by not having iPads ... this author has Android or Windows devices and doesn't mind the stigma).

On top of this, desperately needed funding for other important physical projects (including flood defences, nature restoration), as well as their less urgent socially motivated plans, such the expansion of free school meals, will now also be diverted (cut), simply to fund excessive council wage settlements. None of the wage settlements agreed had been fully funded and these will require further cuts from other areas (as will any other settlements over the rest of the year), and these will be announced in the Scottish parliament next week by First Minister John Swinney, presumably in his scheduled Programme for Government speech.

The SNP Scottish government will announce a more comprehensive (and presumably scaled back) spending plan for the fiscal year 2025-26 in its budget later this year ... its expected that this will also include tough spending decisions. But with the Scottish tax system now having six separate personal tax rates, and that these punitive taxes (someone for example on £50,000 pa in Scotland pays £1,542 more tax than in the rest of the UK), have all but stifled private sector investment, the economy has low growth and there is little hope of the situation getting better next year, or indeed any other year soon, as according to the Scottish Fiscal Commission living standards actually fell between 2021-24 by the largest ever recorded amount, and are not expected to return to their 2021-22 level until 2026-27 .... that was before this weeks cuts announcements.

Now, many had predicted that given long enough, the SNP would reach the stage of running Scotland into the wall, going bust, or at least having to make drastic budget cuts .... so as you might expect, amongst the other Scottish political parties there has been no sympathy for the SNP devils .... and they can expect no sympathy either, from the Scottish voters impacted by the cuts, and who are not getting the benefits of the pay rises that are being paid for by the  cuts.