I do not believe that John Swinney would introduce price caps if he could. I would support him if he did, but I don’t believe him. Why not? Because the only action he has ever taken on price caps is to buckle to the landlord lobbyists and scrap a modest price cap on rents. Supermarkets are more powerful than landlords, so if he folds to the latter I do not believe he would stand up to the former.
That is what makes the SNP manifesto commitment to introduce price caps feel so incredibly cynical to me. The policy is almost certainly illegal. It doesn’t so much run counter to the UK Singe Market act as rip it up, throw it on the floor and dance all over the top of it. This proposal is not real and I don’t believe they think it is real.
Now, a couple of important points here. The only thing consistent in every financial crisis we’ve had is that the economically powerful will use it to screw the public further. Remember, 60 per cent of price rises during the cost of living crisis had nothing to do with rising costs but were pure profiteering.
I support price caps. In fact I support both price caps and price floors – if you can sell a loaf of bread for ten pence then you should’t because it can’t contain any real nutrition. The market has been useless at what you might call ‘social pricing’. I am no longer content to leave them to it when people can’t eat.
And I do have sympathy for the Scottish Government on the cost of living. It is under real pressure to do something but has very few powers to do something with. If you can’t tax and you can’t regulate you can only really subsidise, and that is both expensive and gives the wrong people the money (it is the over-chargers who ultimately get the subsidy).
But the solution to this is not to lie but to be honest. Honestly, we can’t do anything because we can’t regulate and we can’t tax. I’ve long advocated that a pro-independence political party should regularly produce a short manifesto on what it would do with the powers it wants as well as with the powers it has.
In this instance the SNP could have written a proper set of proposals saying ‘if we had independence, this is the package of measures we would pursue’. It would have had to stand by those measures, but it could then honestly say ‘why aren’t you doing this?’ and the politics of it all would be honest and legitimate.
How many new ways to say ‘Council Tax reform’ and then not do it are there?
If any of you have read through the SNP manifesto then (a) my sympathies and (b) you’ll have noticed it is filled with stuff you probably thought already happened. From childcare to climate change, Council Tax to free school meals, I actually know where these policies got to and even I find myself thinking ‘didn’t they do this already?’.
That is because the Scottish Government has over-promised and under-delivered so much that repetition of the same rhetoric on things that didn’t get done last term now makes up a majority of the manifesto. That is pretty cynical in itself. How many new ways to say ‘Council Tax reform’ and then not do it are there?
The climate change section is a case study in this. They are still claiming to be world leading and yet there is constantly less and less in terms of actual policy, action or spending. The Swinney administration keeps dropping aspects of what was already a woefully underpowered policy plan (certainly in relation to stated ambitions), yet it clings to the ever-less credible targets.
But there is something about this price caps stunt that sits particularly uneasy with me. I think it is threefold. First, it is raising hope on an issue that is of the most crucial importance to people who need help desperately. I shudder to think that a single mother who has been skipping meals to feed her children votes SNP and thinks this will actually happen.
Second is the almost certainty that there is no chance of this going ahead. The SNP is five-for-zero at the Supreme Court and this one is more open-and-shut than any of the preceding ones. If a deposit return scheme is a market distortion too much for the Single Market Act, actual price caps very clearly are.
Now, I’m not celebrating the Single Market Act. It is a piece of neoliberal unionist-baiting shit, and if a deposit return scheme is distorting a ‘single market’ then surely differential business rates in different local authority areas is doing so times ten.
But I am saying that like it or not the law is the law and pretending you can do things which you know you can’t is also a piece of shit thing to do. If you don’t like the UK Single Market Act, get out of the UK. That is the SNP’s choice. They could also campaign to repeal it (though that would be futile other than politically).
If Swinney doesn’t deliver, this all flips round and it is him who will need to answer why he led Scotland up the garden path
Instead what they have gone for is my least favourite thing in politics – a cheap gotcha. Why is Swinney announcing something he has no intention of implementing? Because he wants the Labour Party to have to veto it before the election. He wants to embarrass Anas Sarwar, no more, no less. (If Sarwar’s team are competent he’ll simply fire back ‘I’m not taking lessons from the man who scrapped rent controls that were protecting the most vulnerable in society’ and the needle returns to the start of the song and we all carry on like before.)
That’s my third discomfort – it is cheap and cynical politics which will do no more than fuel further political cynicism. If they know they’re lying to you, if they know they’re making promises they can’t keep, and if they are doing it on a subject as important as whether a child can eat or not, it just isn’t pretty.
So the pattern is simple; Swinney supports this until the election and will keep asking over and over if Sarwar does, but then he will more or less pray they veto it afterwards so he doesn’t need to take the political pain of implementing it and he gets another nine-month grievance dispute with the UK Government.
Some will think this all smart politics, but I’m a long-termist. If it makes you look a little good in the short term but quite a lot bad in the long term, don’t do it. Short-termism is often morally wrong, but it is also strategically unwise. If Swinney doesn’t deliver, this all flips round and it is him who will need to answer why he led Scotland up the garden path.
I was communicating with a senior academic this week and asked if I am being too worn-down cynical myself or if this is the worst election campaign in my lifetime. He concurred completely – and this awful, corrosive nonsense is a large part of it.
If politicians are putting out manifestos made up of former broken promises interspersed with future broken promises which they know they’ll break before they make them, non-voters are right, there is nothing to vote for. This isn’t restoring trust to politics, it is flushing it down the toilet.