Bernard Salmon was quick off the mark with the new Scottish leader’s speech this morning, and is rather better informed about Scottish politics than I, so I shall just make a couple of Anglocentric observations.
Scott’s speech (what a gift that man’s name will be come election time; if the Scottish publicists don’t come up with a killer line to rival “Labour isn’t working” they should be fired) was very much written in collaboration with Clegg’s speechwriter. The emphasis was on the economic downturn and, yes, those ordinary families (what about all the extraordinary families, that’s what I say?) and the main meat came in the form of a proposed 2p cut on income tax.
A full-on assault on Labour followed. The measure of a successful political party is the speed with which they respond to people’s needs and this is what Labour is so signally failing to do. To say they are dithering, said Scott, would be to credit them with too great a sense of urgency. And he finished up with a rather marvellous reference to Up-Helly-Aa, the annual Viking festival on his home island of Shetland, in which burning ships are pushed out into the sea by a lot of very fierce-looking people in funny hats. The burning ships are Scottish Labour, and that would make us the funny hat people standing on the beach giving them the big push. As Tavish put it, sending Labour to a flaming horizon. Fighting talk indeed. The full speech is here.
Possible cover shot for next year’s Scottish manifesto
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4 Comments
Be interesting to see what the Scottish Party as a whole makes of this announcement – this isn’t party policy yet up here and hasn’t been passed by any conference motion. My first reaction was that I’d like to see the fag packet this was dreamt up on so I can see the calculations – there’s also going to have to be fairly substantial cuts in services in Scotland to fund this, some of which will doubtless be policies we supported in government.
I’m not particularly comfortable with the way this is going…
Great Stuff from Tavish – leading from the front and putting real pressure on the other parties in Scotland to come up with an alternative. As to how to fund £800m – nobody can seriously tell me that from a budget of over £30 billion a year, £800m cannot be found? That’s only a little over 2% of the budget. Even those lib dems who favour public spending must see that in a budget that has doubled since 1999 and where the public sector now crowds out the private sector in Scotland, there must be opportunities to save money, manage things better and stop wasting money on ineffective projects. I’d be amazed if you couldn’t find double that and spend half on cutting tax and half on better targeted public investment.
Here, here.
I’m sick of all these politicos grandstanding about how families are struggling without coming up with solutions for them. Well done to the Scottish party for taking the initiative.
Sounds like good news to me – some direct action to help people out. I for one am struggling with my electric and heating bills and I don’t see the government doing much for me. How can they justify all the money going on press officers and advisers when there are old people who can’t afford to heat their homes? Thank goodness someone finally is getting back to basics and trying to do something for people – I don’t care if it’s left or right or whatever, it’s the right thing to do.