SNP programme of cuts – What is the fighting alternative ?

Matt Dobson

SNP first minister John Swinney’s ‘new programme for government’ was drowned out by the outpouring of anger at his finance minister Shona Robison’s £500 million cuts package for 2024/25. Part of the £500 million will include reintroducing peak rail fares, scrapping a plan for free bus travel for asylum seekers and the digital devices programme which would have seen school children given devices for learning.  

Swinney’s central pledge to tackle child poverty is a joke. Latest figures show 26% of children in Scotland live in relative poverty – the SNP target for 2024/25 is 18%. Children’s charities said there was nothing in the programme for government that would “move the dial” on poverty. Promises of extra funding for childcare, early learning and affordable housing simply do not compare or catch up to the levels the year-on-year cuts in these areas.  

Promises of 2,800 mid-market rent homes, when the Scottish government has already declared a housing emergency is pitiful. There were some weak proposals to allow councils to enact more rent controls at stage two of the Housing Bill, we already know from the temporary controls and eviction bans that were implemented by the SNP/ Green coalition that landlords are adept at finding loopholes unless a socialist housing policy bringing housing under democratic public control is implemented. Swinney’s programme even gave lucrative gifts to big business, new investment zones and “green” freeports and subsidies for road builders.  

Swinney’s pronouncements while Robison swung the axe turned into a farce. Especially as Swinney promised more mental health support, cuts to NHS waiting lists and more outpatient appointments when in all these areas the health service is in severe crisis. Robison’s letter to the Scottish Parliament Finance Committee stated £116m of the cuts will come from the health budget, including an £18.8m reduction in mental health services. On arts funding the SNP government has u-turned twice on Creative Scotland’s “Open Fund”, the latest is that it’s still funded, after a large protest by the trade union Equity – but other arts funding will be cut. Robison has already implemented “emergency spending controls” on government departments, including to health advertising. 

The cost of not ‘means testing’ the pensioner’s Winter Fuel Payment was originally meant to be met by the Scottish government at a cost of £160 million. Swinney and Robison now say this is too much… at a time when the energy multinationals are making billions in profits. Disgracefully Robison has blamed workers and the trade unions demanding pay rises in the public sector as a “significant driver” in the fiscal pressures her government faces.  

None of the SNP’s pay offers – the highest being 5.5% to NHS workers, 4.27% for teachers down to 3.6% for local government in any way meet the losses and fall in living standards suffered by workers since 2007. Do Swinney and Robison think that workers have forgotten that the cuts continued even when below inflation pay offers were made? 

Robison is drawing down £460 million to balance the books from the scandalous Scotwind leasing auction of seabed plots for offshore energy wind projects that were sold off to capitalist multinationals in 2022 under Sturgeon’s leadership. Already this £700 million pot is now squandered. This makes a mockery of Swinney’s ‘just transition’ promises which include the carbon storage project at Grangemouth. Which in no way will make up for Ineos’ threat to close the sites oil refinery, threatening jobs. 

As Socialist Party Scotland argued at the time, the creation of a publicly owned energy company to run the offshore wind projects would have delivered billions of pounds for investment to cut bills and invest in a workers’-led energy transition. Instead, there was a fire sale for big business to cash in for a pittance. Ironically, there is now an investigation into Scotwind, which should include how those licences were allowed to be sold off to the energy multinationals on the cheap.  

The political opposition at Holyrood are in no way credible in opposing the SNP’s cuts. Both the Tories and Scottish Labour rather than stand up for public services have just criticised the government for being “fiscally irresponsible”. Sarwar is silent on Starmer’s cruel policies, attacking children and pensioners and the cuts to funding of devolved government. Green MSPs Ross Greer and Lorna Slater are now threatening to not support the SNP budget in December. Of course, it was they in government with the SNP who not only supported the biggest cuts budget since devolution but also the Scotwind sell off of Scotland energy resources to capitalist vultures in 2022.  

In the minds of working-class people questions are arising about how the mass investment in public services, wages and incomes that is needed to solve Scotland’s social crisis evident in rising drug deaths and over ten thousand children in temporary accommodation, could take place?  

Socialist Party Scotland fights against the logic which has begun to raise its head, even in the workers’ movement, that trade unions should pause demands for pay rises in case it leads to further cuts.  

The pro-independence Greens and Commonweal think tank have put forward limited proposals to generate revenue for Holyrood, including ending the council tax and taxing property and land and ending the small business bonus scheme. The STUC have gone further raising that the SNP government could use its considerable income tax powers to raise £3.7 billion. The STUC proposals are worthy of campaigning for but by themselves do not go far enough in terms of meeting the scale of the fiscal crisis.  

Socialist Party Scotland demands the Scottish government and local councils set emergency no cuts/ needs budgets utilising all financial mechanisms, including borrowing, debt management, underspends, the cancellation of PFI/ PPP/NPD projects to end all cuts. The building of a mass campaign for the return of the billions stolen from Holyrood after a more than a decade of austerity is a vital task.  

A genuine left, socialist government at Holyrood would call for mass demonstrations against Rachel Reeves’s cuts budget on 31st October to help mobilise support for such a fighting emergency needs budget. Such a government could link up with the trade unions and working-class communities to help organise mass action – strikes and civil disobedience – to demand the Labour government in Westminster return the billions stolen from Scotland in austerity. These billions could build the council houses we need and deliver a high quality, fully funded NHS.  Not only would this win mass support from the working class in Scotland but it would generate mass enthusiasm from workers across the UK, thus aiding the struggle for self-determination.  

But rather than this, Westminster SNP leader Stephen Flynn is writing to Labour MP’s demanding they vote against the cut to pensioners’ fuel payments while his government in Holyrood are about to pass £500 million further cuts to this year’s budget. Ultimately the SNP, like Starmer’s Labour, are opposed to mobilising the most powerful force in society, the working class, and prefer to appease big business. All the more reason why urgent steps towards the creation of a new, trade union-based mass workers’ party with socialist policies in Scotland are so vital.   

Such a fighting approach would need to be linked to a programme of socialist nationalisation – we would for example nationalise all energy and seabed resources under democratic working-class control. This would have to be extended to transport and all major infrastructure. Ultimately to fundamentally change society we need the banks and all big industry under public ownership as part of a socialist planned economy that ends the rule of profit