So the SNP has published its “difficult” budget. In a tight funding round, ministers set out to limit damage to public services and bear down on poverty.
But this budget was meant to deliver politically as well. With an election a year away at most, it was designed to remind voters who the real lefties are in parliament and embarrass Labour.
Well, it hasn’t worked. Labour are unruffled and the SNP are under attack from all sides. The approaching general election won’t be about the two parties’ socialist credentials in any case, but hope versus disappointment, and the SNP are on the wrong side. They have outflanked Labour on the left with their tax plans, but trust in the SNP is draining away and that’s a far bigger issue.
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In other years, the finance minister Shona Robison might have sat down from giving her budget statement with a smug smile, directed at Labour. A council tax freeze billed as helping out hard-pressed householders, an increase in the top rate of income tax and a whole new tax band for wealthy suburbanites, are policies to warm socialist hearts.
Had she been smirking across the chamber at the Corbynite former Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard, a die-hard class warrior, then it would have been one-nil to the SNP. In those days, which weren’t so very long ago really, the SNP were still the mighty monarchs of Scotland and Labour looked like mice in their shadow.
But we........