[Robin McAlpine Blog] Why does Swinney look like he’s panicking?

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Why does Swinney look like he's panicking?

Forget the image of the political strategist as a chess-playing genius, most political strategy approaches are cookie-cutter – don’t rock the boat if you’re in power, time for change if you’re not and so on. No cookie-cutter strategy is more consistent than that of someone who is going to win.

That strategy is ‘don’t do anything and definitely don’t say anything’. By ‘anything’ here I mean of consequence or that might be even a minor risk. If you’re going to win anyway, you are more likely to talk yourself out of a good result than you are of bolstering it, particularly towards the point that a campaign is kicking off properly. For a case study see ‘Starmer bores for Britain in election’.

The SNP is going to win Holyrood, there is no doubt about that. It is inevitable. So why does John Swinney’s strategy look like someone who is panicking? Far from veering towards caution, he is swinging wildly into the void. At first glance this doesn’t make sense, but it is definitely happening.

So let’s just look at things that happened since everyone went on Christmas holiday. First, Team Swinney seems to have provided a briefing for a newspaper on what his Christmas card means. If you want an example of ‘a pointless swing into thin air’, I can’t think of a better one.

Apparently the Swinney you think you’ve known for the last 30 years isn’t the ‘New Swinney’. Nope, he’s a rugged, risk-taking action man and definitely not a provincial accountant. You can tell because he’s in a rugged, outdoor place where he took the picture himself. That’s the message. He’s tougher than you think.

Except if you have to explain it it really isn’t a clever message. And nothing is less convincing than the idea that anyone is fundamentally different today than they were yesterday (you know, like Tommy Robinson discovering god in prison). This is one of those ‘naw he isnae’ moments when saying it is worse than not saying it because you are provoking people to disbelieve you for no reason.

Then Action John becomes ‘here’s a brown paper envelope, take it and say no more’ John as he drops a bank holiday because of the football. To be clear, I’ll take your extra holiday quite happily and I’ll also draw the conclusion that this is pathetic and desperate and rather embarrassing.

Onward we go, Swinney running around telling us that voting for independence supporting parties who might get list seats in the election is a wasted vote but voting for the party which definitely won’t get list seats isn’t. Perhaps he’s targetting a tiny number of casual voters who don’t know better, but it is an insult to the intelligence of the rest of us.

And the week isn’t out yet and he’s in the newspapers absolutely guaranteeing that, if he gets an overall majority at the election, he’ll definitely deliver a referendum, no doubt about it. Even SNP loyalists can’t buy that one. No-one can guarantee anything in politics and only a fool says otherwise.

This stuff doesn’t win votes but it does make you look like you’re panicking

This is a barrage of ‘what the fuck is going on’ stuff, a procession of rapid-fire bollocks. I literally don’t believe or believe in any of this and neither does anyone else. Swinney is not action man, the public holiday is a measly bribe, the voting strategy is factually incorrect and his guarantee is delusional or dishonest, one or the other.

So let’s revert back. The reason people don’t run risky strategies when they are in the lead is for a simple arithmetic trade-off – what chance I gain votes if this works versus what chance I lose credibility if it doesn’t? Everyone has their own risk appetite but it is always geared heavily towards keeping what you have unless gambling brings big results. This is the risk spread.

I can promise that there are no votes in his silly Christmas card briefing. Likewise, his guarantee is definitely counterproductive because no-one could possibly believe it. It is possible some stray, ill-informed voters buy into the idea of voting for smaller parties on the list being a wasted vote, but there can’t be a lot of them and there are an awful lot more people who will feel insulted by this.

The public holiday is the only one of these interventions which has anything in it for anyone other than Swinney. So let me ask you this; how many people are going to change their mind and vote SNP because of this day off? Really?

Which is to say whoever is doing the arithmetic on the risk spread is getting it badly wrong. This stuff doesn’t win votes but it does make you look like you’re panicking. Why would you want voters to risk getting the sense that you are panicking if you’re going to win?

My guess is that it is because Team Swinney genuinely is panicking. At first glance this won’t make sense to most of you, but actually if Team Swinney are indeed panicking, they certainly have reason.

By the end of this year Swinney will have fought (I think) six elections over his two tenures (two Scottish, two UK, one Europe, one local). Every single one has seen him lose vote share, and at the moment he looks like he’s going to shed an unprecedented 14 points of support. In normal times that would be devastating.

This makes Swinney look like that least valuable thing in politics – a vote loser. I mean he is a vote loser, but six for zero and two big setbacks in a row would make him look like a liability. The parliamentary arithmetic will bail him out because of the collapse in Labour, but that brings its own problems.

To remind you, people called the Hamilton by election badly wrong not because they missed signs of people shifting parties in polling but because small shifts in arithmetic and differential turnout make a very big difference when the poll is this split

The word I hear is that Swinney wants to govern the next five years largely on the basis of dealing with the Lib Dems. Probably not a formal coalition, but Swinney (I am told) is desperate not to be wholly reliant on the votes of the Scottish Greens. Swinney is a well-meaning One Nation Tory by inclination and that is how he has governed so far. Working with the Greens would make his life hell.

But the Lib Dems are looking at eight, nine or ten seats at the moment (though a couple of polls have them higher), and so that means that the SNP needs at least 55 seats to be able to rely on a party with that number of seats to give them a majority. That is not a given.

In fact it is not impossible that the SNP can’t find any one party with enough seats and which is willing willing to give them a majority, and that would make governing for five years next to impossible. It would risk Swinney’s career fizzling out in abject failure.

And that is before I tell you that people who have access to the leadership have told me that there is information floating around that the SNP may underperform. I’ve been repeating this for a while – SNP voters are demotivate and if even a percentage point or two don’t turn out, it could look very different.

Likewise, a lot could depend on the regional breakdown of votes. That could undoubtedly lead to a weaker outcome than currently appears likely. To remind you, people called the Hamilton by election badly wrong not because they missed signs of people shifting parties in polling but because small shifts in arithmetic and differential turnout make a very big difference when the poll is this split.

But in any case, none of this is Swinney’s biggest threat. That is his own fault – he has set a condition for progressing independence which he can’t meet. He has to get a majority (and he almost certainly won’t) and then he needs to persuade Westminster that a majority based on 34 per cent of the vote is an undeniable mandate. That will almost certainly fail too.

Then what for Swinney? He wasn’t a popular choice as leader and the SNP membership are only pacified when they believe progress to independence is being made, or that it is within their grasp. Ruling it out for five years because of hubris and underperformance is not going to go down well.

And I suspect that is why Swinney is swinging at fresh air here. He knows he’s made promises he can’t deliver, he knows there will be consequences, he knows he’s going to reinforce his voter-loser status, he knows no-one really wanted him in the first place and to all of this you can add the fact that he knows it could be difficult to govern for a number of reasons.

I don’t know John Swinney well, but someone who knows him much better than me told me that people underestimate his ego, and that he stood as leader again mainly to try and erase the memory of his first reign as leader. It is quite easy now for this tenure to go even worse than his first.

People who are actually winning don’t take risks. And I suspect it is because what the political class and what Swinney mean by ‘winning’ here is quite different…

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