The accidental socialist: Understanding the SNP's John Swinney
What is the Scottish Nationalist strategy in the general election?
I admit I laughed out loud. The email from the SNP press office said John Swinney was about to launch “the only left-wing manifesto” of the general election campaign.
John Swinney? Left wing? Surely some mistake? A case of mistaken identity, perhaps? Maybe they meant somebody else?
But no. This was same John Swinney I had recently described in The Times as the most right-wing first minister in the history of Scottish devolution.
Sure enough, at the SNP manifesto launch Swinney attempted to present himself as Scotland’s left-wing saviour. Comrade John was ready to rescue us all from the Labour party.
For people like myself who have been following Scottish politics for some time - I wrote a newspaper profile of Swinney in the early 1990s, tipping him as a future leader - this was a bit of a stretch.
Is my verdict on Swinney as the most right-wing first minister in the history of devolution fair?
Here is a short summary of the case for the prosecution, examining Swinney’s record over the past quarter of a century:
In his first stint as SNP leader, Swinney ditched the party’s "penny for Scotland" policy of raising income tax to increase spending on health, education and housing.
Swinney’s focus as leader first time round was not the poor but the middle class. He said he wanted to appeal to the "aspirational Scots" of Middle Scotland.
As finance secretary in 2007 his first budgets were only made possible through a deal with the Tories that provided funding for Conservative priorities in policing and business rates.
The “freebies” that characterised that first SNP government - including free university tuition and free prescriptions - were giveaways to the middle class because the poor already got these for free.
Swinney was so against tax rises he let the Scottish Parliament's statutory income tax powers lapse.
His signature policy as finance secretary was the council tax freeze, which spent scarce resources on a tax break that disproportionately benefitted the wealthiest Scots, while frontline council services suffered.
Swinney failed to scrap council tax and replace it with a more progressive tax, as he had promised in 2007.
He resisted mitigation of Westminster welfare policies for the poorest Scots saying he didn't want to let Westminster "off the hook". In other words he would rather their suffering was used as an argument for independence.
Swinney only agreed to limited mitigation of bedroom tax under pressure from Shelter and critical opinion polls in the run-up to the independence referendum.
He rejected mitigating the Tories’ two-child cap on benefits. The Scottish government’s child payment, a much lauded anti-poverty measure, was only introduced after Swinney had left the finance brief.
I have a pet theory that Swinney eventually proved too right-wing even for Nicola Sturgeon. Let me briefly explain.
Cast your mind back, if you will, to the 2016 Holyrood election. Sturgeon looked deeply uncomfortable in TV debates whenever Kezia Dugdale, the Scottish Labour leader, challenged her to raise the top rate of income tax on the wealthiest earners.
Swinney, her finance secretary, had opposed such a rise. His Perthshire conservatism had overruled Sturgeon’s Ayrshire socialism. Then, in the final days of the campaign, Sturgeon did a handbrake U-turn, suggesting she was indeed minded to increase the top rate at some stage in the future. But the damage had been done.
A few weeks later, having been returned to power with a smaller number of MSPs than before, Sturgeon used a cabinet reshuffle to move Swinney from finance to education.
Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Only after this switch did the SNP government move to being a more recognisably centre-left, tax-raising administration.
I think the case against Swinney the socialist is a strong one. So, in the 2024 general election, why is this centre-right politician cosplaying as a lefty?
The answer lies deep in the chaos that has gripped Scottish nationalism since Sturgeon announced her resignation as SNP leader in February last year. Yes, that was just 16 months ago. In that short period Scotland has had three SNP first ministers.
I recently asked a Labour candidate what the mood was like among long-time SNP voters he encountered when out campaigning. He said they were like the people you might find sitting on the grass verge at the side of a road next to a particularly nasty car crash.
They were dazed. They were wondering what just happened. They were struggling to process everything. They were in shock.
In large part this is down to Operation Branchform, the police investigation into the SNP’s finances. This has seen Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell charged with embezzlement and Sturgeon herself questioned by detectives.
This unedifying saga may still have some surprises in store.
Less tangible is a vague SNP discomfort at the prospect of an extended period of Labour hegemony at Westminster. This unsettles Scottish nationalists. Their unspoken belief is that Scotland will only become independent as a direct reaction to Tory rule.
The very idea of a Labour England undermines a foundational belief of modern Scottish nationalism, as I explained in a Times column in 2023.
A popular argument for independence in recent years has been the irreconcilable differences between the English and the Scots. Our neighbours in the south are irredeemably Tory, the argument goes, their right-wing values alien to ours. We Scots, more in sorrow than in anger, should recognise our incompatibility with the English and cut ourselves loose for good.
England was a lost cause. This was presented calmly as historical fact, an incontrovertible argument for a breakaway Scotland. We had simply been left with no option. What else could we do when the division was so deep, the people so dissimilar, the two nations so clearly mismatched?
The possibility of a Labour landslide across the whole of Britain forced Scotland to see the UK in a new light.
England, in short, is on the brink of delivering to Scotland a Labour government at Westminster. Seems the English and the Scots were not as incongruent as indy folk would have had us believe. We were not, after all, drifting ever further apart. We were not, as human beings, inconsonant with our nearest neighbours.
The othering of the English promoted by the SNP and its fellow travellers is revealed as a hollow sham. It is exposed as cynical opportunism. It is unmasked as a ploy to turn neighbour against neighbour, to foment distrust between people with more in common than divides them, to encourage the most lamentable nativism.
What was presented as a permanent sundering of common interest was nothing of the sort. The ease with which the SNP managed to plant this narrative so securely in the Scottish national consciousness shames us all.
For a while there really was a prevailing view in this selfcongratulatory nation of ours that the dotted line on the map between Solway and Tweed marked not just an administrative border but a moral one.
On the other side was a foreign land. Here be dragons. Here be people not like us. Here be people not as enlightened as us. Here be people, let's face it, not as good as us.
Shame on us for giving houseroom to an attitude so base.
Existential questions aside, the SNP campaign in this general election has lurched between left and right in a fruitless search for a position that reconciles conflicting objectives.
And here we need to remind ourselves how we got here, and in particular what has happened in the past 16 months.
Sturgeon, in partnership with the Greens, had positioned the SNP on the progressive centre left. When Humza Yousaf replaced her as first minister he wanted to move the party further to the left to meet the challenge of a resurgent Scottish Labour party. He did this by proposing a new band of income tax for middle earners.
This did not go well, as I explained at the time in my Times column.
One of [Yousaf’s] big ideas was a new income tax band for the middle class. This was a tank on Labour's lawn.
What happened next was significant. Scottish Labour could have wrestled with the SNP for the bragging rights of which party was more socialist. It didn't.
Instead, Anas Sarwar, leader of Scottish Labour, leaned in. His message to Yousaf was: OK, you want to be the party of the left in Scotland? Be my guest. Here you go. It's all yours. There's some milk in the fridge. See ya.
This repositioning by Sarwar changes everything. It allows him to say, as he did a few weeks ago, he might not back Yousaf's income tax rise for the middle class. Scottish Labour, says Sarwar, has a "presumption against any increases to income tax".
It allows Sarwar to say, as he did this week, that the SNP is costing Scottish families hundreds of pounds extra in council tax. It allows Sarwar to attack the SNP's proposed £15-a-day low emission zone charge for old cars in Glasgow city centre.
In short, it allows Scottish Labour to attack the SNP for piling unwelcome financial burdens on working families who are already struggling in the teeth of a cost of living crisis. It allows a clear distinction between the two parties on the most potent election issue of them all: the dire state of household finances.
Yousaf can have no complaints. He and his party are now exactly where they wanted to be. SNP strategists were spooked by a Labour resurgence. They shaped a response. The SNP now outflanks Labour on the left, exactly as planned.
Yousaf had gifted Sarwar the centre ground of Scottish politics.
Panic ensued in Bute House. On the eve of the SNP conference in Aberdeen last autumn, Yousaf convened a crisis meeting of his closest aides and cabinet colleagues. Swinney, who had been enjoying a more relaxing life on the back benches, was invited to join them.
A cunning plan was hatched. Swinney’s signature policy of a council tax freeze would be resurrected to help address the cost of living crisis. And the expected loss of SNP seats to Labour in the urban central belt would be offset by SNP gains from the Tories in rural Scotland.
This would require some policies that appealed to Tory voters. The answer was a return to an SNP trope from half a century ago: North Sea oil.
I explain in this extract from another Times column.
Nicola Sturgeon, when first minister of a Scottish government that relied on the Greens for support, said she opposed any new licences for oil and gas exploration in Scottish waters.
Cue a torrent of lobbying by Big Oil, using former SNP staffers to gain access to Scottish ministers. This had little effect on Sturgeon, but the oil giants' powers of persuasion had more success with her successor Humza Yousaf.
Minutes of a dinner between BP, Shell and the Scottish government showed Yousaf wanting a more "nuanced" transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy.
Now, with Yousaf replaced by John Swinney and the SNP no longer in power with the Greens, a warmer embrace of the oil giants seems on the cards.
In truth, this seems dictated less by economics and more by expediency.
In a tough election for the SNP, one glimmer of hope has been the possibility of winning a swathe of Tory seats in the northeast of Scotland. To do so the SNP needs to compete with the Tories on who is most concerned about the loss of existing jobs in the energy sector.
Hence the curious SNP position of opposing a windfall tax on the profits of oil giants, and Swinney accusing Labour of wanting to turn the northeast into a Thatcherite "industrial wasteland".
There is a retro feel about this conversation. The Nationalists are trying on their old clothes from the 1970s and looking out their old badges that say: "It's Scotland's oil." And like many a rummage through an old wardrobe, this has resulted in an awkward clash of styles.
Does this chumminess between the SNP and Big Oil really make sense for the party as a whole? Doesn't it make it harder for SNP candidates in the urban central belt to fight Labour from the left?
There is an incoherence about the SNP under Swinney. The party cannot be socialist in Govan while protecting the profits of Big Oil in Buchan. At some point it may have to decide which to prioritise, and which to sacrifice.
And so the SNP manifesto became a contradictory mix of left and right, of green and petrolhead, of fundamentalist and gradualist.
Here and now, with less than two weeks to go before polling day, the SNP campaign is unfit for purpose. The Scottish Labour resurgence is eating much deeper into the central belt than the SNP feared. And the Scottish Tory vote is proving more resilient than anticipated.
There is a strong possibility that neither of the SNP’s key aims will be met. The party may well surrender most of its urban seats to Labour and fail to win Tory seats in rural Scotland.
Limiting the damage in the central belt is now the SNP’s priority. Hence the “most left-wing manifesto in this election” and Swinney miscast as a socialist.
I admit to an occasional worry that I am doing Swinney an injustice. Despite our political differences I have always liked him as a human being and found him warm and empathetic. I have always enjoyed his company.
I find myself anxious not to misrepresent him. Have I read him wrong?
In a recent Times column I posed a question.
Is the current resident of Bute House the most conservative first minister in the history of Scottish devolution? Or is he another kind of man entirely? I ask because people keep telling me Swinney has been on a bit of a journey.
I know, I know, the whole “journey” schtick can be tiresome. But hey, if life isn’t a journey what is it, exactly? We are moving through a constantly changing world. If we don’t think we are changing too we are surely not paying enough attention.
Where has Swinney’s journey taken him? For years he sat in cabinet as the SNP government became more socialist, more green, more interventionist, more redistributive, more socially progressive on contentious issues such as trans rights. Did Swinney cross his fingers behind his back while nodding all this through? Or was he persuaded of this new agenda?
In short, has he changed?
Swinney has only been first minister for six weeks. The heat of an election campaign in circumstances not of his own making is perhaps not the place where he can present his authentic self.
That will have to wait until after July 4, when Swinney will have a chance to steer his own course towards the 2026 Holyrood election, conducted within a Labour UK.
Only then will we see if Comrade Swinney is a confection or a conviction.
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“A chield’s amang you takin notes, And faith he’ll prent it.” Robert Burns
Fascinating piece Kenny. Many thanks
Very good piece Kenny.
Janus man is alive and well. Those of us oldies remember the northern SNP types to be very different to their central belt brethren. Salmond and Sturgeon forced everyone into line. That coalition has broken down.
July 4 is going to be fascinating