Rubber stamping UK cuts feels like Holyrood crossing a wintry Rubicon

Autumn has happened gradually this month with the Scottish Government axing schemes.

No free asylum bus passes for asylum seekers. A resumption of rail peak fares. No more Open Fund for artists, writers and musicians. £5 million removed from the nature restoration fund to finance pay settlements for local government. No Warsaw office to extend Scotland’s international office network. And of course, the means testing of Winter Fuel Payments in Scotland.

There are also indirect cuts with axed teacher posts being planned by Glasgow and almost every political shade of Scottish council. Parent groups blame the councils. Many of them blame the SNP’s council tax freeze and others the austerity set in train by Labour’s new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves.

Yet more cuts lurk within the latest NHS waiting lists.

READ MORE: John Swinney responds to reports of possible 'end' to free prescriptions and other benefits

Of course, more generous Scottish pay awards have reduced the economic and social cost of strike action should cut key worker reliance on top-up state benefits, help reverse demoralisation and the use of more expensive agency staff. But if there’s a Scottish recruitment freeze, then over-burdened doctors and nurses will still head for better-resourced lives elsewhere.

It’s suddenly winter.

The question is what to do and who’s to blame.

According to the Scottish Fiscal Commission: “While UK Government policies contribute to the pressures on the Scottish budget, much of it comes from the Scottish Government’s own decisions. Higher than expected public sector pay deals, the renewed council tax freeze and welfare spending – matters within the SNP’s control – have all added to the difficulties of balancing the government’s budget.”

Really?

The council tax freeze is indeed hugely debatable.

But when even Labour are agreeing pay rises with public sector workers instead of spending billions on long destructive disputes, could Scotland lag behind? The Brexit we didn’t vote for means fewer European workers, and since Labour won’t revisit Brexit or apply geographical policies (lest that acknowledge Scotland’s status as a nation) we must compete with the wealthier, better-resourced south of England for staff. Although Scotland has so much to offer, it’s not a fight this or any other northern country tends to win.

Equally, UK-wide curbs on the Winter Fuel Payment look equal but will obviously hit Scotland worse, and energy-rich but fuel-poverty-stricken parts of the Highlands and Islands worse again.

Geography matters – but that’s off the Westminster table.

So, should a Scottish Government really not be trying to mitigate that?

Indeed, is anyone but the Tories really saying that Scotland could afford NOT to agree pay deals that give our public services a better chance of recruitment and retention?

And as for welfare spending, should we just enable the bedroom tax like Tory/Labour England when we know, 75% of those affected are disabled folk who need a spare bedroom for equipment or for a partner to sleep in?

Perhaps though, the commission is eyeing larger budget items – like free prescriptions and free university tuition.

According to a recent Scotsman leader: “Means-testing prescription charges, with provisions for the most expensive drugs, would ensure no one would be denied treatment on the basis of cost and free up extra funding for life-saving frontline services that are bordering on collapse… it seems Scottish exceptionalism comes at a price we cannot afford.”

A poll sponsored by Gordon Brown’s Our Scottish Future last October found 54% of Scots believe universal free prescriptions should end so the NHS can be improved.

(Image: PA)

Alex Salmond’s SNP government abolished prescription charges in 2011. By 2020/21 the annual bill had reached £1.4 billion – though that covers both the cost of items dispensed and of providing the service.

MEANWHILE, in a Labour-led Commons debate calling for free prescriptions in England earlier this year (!) Andrea Leadsom said: “In 2022-23, those contributions gave about £670m in revenue to England’s NHS – a sum equivalent to 12,500 full-time nurses and health visitors for a year.”

Now, I’m no health economist.

But the likely income from paid prescriptions in Scotland is likely to be about an eighth of that English sum. It’s not nothing. But it doesn’t come anywhere near offsetting the overall prescriptions bill or transforming hospital waiting lists – as England has already found.

BMA Scotland has already stated its support for free prescriptions pointing out they particularly benefit folk with complex, long-term conditions: “Any reversal of that threatens to be costly and have a negative impact on population health, building up further costs and pressure on our NHS in the long term.”

Well quite.

And of course, many Yessers will discount means testing as an essentially Unionist position.

Yet, the argument is already falling on fertile ground.

At a recent conference, working-class community leaders were talking about means-testing, prescriptions and even folk on state pensions felt they were in a position to pay, scoffing at the old argument that means-testing costs almost as much to administer as it ever saves.

Perhaps the Scottish Government’s reluctant decision to rubber stamp Westminster’s means testing of Winter Fuel Payments means a Rubicon has been crossed.

Now it will get harder and harder to resist the erosion of the universality that characterises progressive Scotland and is so admired by public health experts in other parts of the UK and abroad.

And with the loss of that stance, Scotland’s national distinctiveness will also wither, unless there is resistance or a better, well-explained, front-footed strategy.

This is a very high-stakes game, yet so far there has not been an effective, alternative narrative-creating response from the SNP/Scottish Government, save a few cagey interviews on Radio Scotland and “I told you so” tweets from Stephen Flynn.

Now, the SNP’s Westminster leader certainly did tell everyone the £20bn black hole in UK Government spending would force cuts or higher taxes from the new Labour government during the recent General Election campaign.

Labour speakers chose their words carefully, but basically lied through their collective teeth – especially about energy costs, which will once again soar this winter.

But we’re here now. And simply pointing out Labour lied and could currently choose otherwise, isn’t enough.

How will the SNP leadership respond? If the SNP won’t point out that independence gives us the chance to handle our whole public finances differently, then when? If the SNP insists Labour should have the courage/decency to stop keeking endlessly o’er their collective shoulder for accusations of being spendthrift closet-Corbyns, will they boldly go where Labour fears to tread and raise taxes?

Will the SNP be honest and pro-active, setting out spending and constitutional options in this austere, winter-like new normal or will they just try to cut quietly and weather the storms of public discontent?

And how will the SNP conference tackle this spending crisis, bubbling up as it has since motions were submitted and the agenda created?

A FEW motions could produce more cash for the Scottish Exchequer – but given past resistance to a land tax, the SNP leadership will likely oppose or just ignore that proposal if passed. Will there be calls to raise the Scottish income tax to protect services? And above all, will John Swinney produce a strategy or let cuts keep raining down mixter maxter, meaning few in the public or third sectors will be able to plan ahead because they fear their service will be next?

Of course, as Craig Dalzell and Richard Murphy have eloquently argued in this paper – with agreement from the far from radical Institute for Fiscal Studies – Reeves could and should borrow more money rather than imposing cuts. What’s happening is indeed the product of a political choice by the new Labour government using the weary metaphor of belt-tightening deployed by Thatcher, Osborne et al. Except that metaphor works.

No matter how many well-argued pieces demonstrate that cuts to folk who actually spend just damage them and shrink the economy, the enduring meanness of the British public realm compared to any other north European democracy has produced a public resigned to losing “benefits” instead of asking where their taxes have actually gone.

And sadly, that includes Scots.

So, we can become boiled frogs with a Scottish Government drip feeding cuts in the hope no-one will notice – randomly administered to new programmes or anything due for renewal. Or we can have a brave debate about all of this.

Which will it be?