Borrowing Time with Borrowed Money – The SNP Near the End of the Line

Scotland votes in the nationalists for a fifth straight time, but nobody seems too happy about it. A pro-independence majority, made up of the SNP and the Scottish Greens, looks increasingly like a majority of arithmetic over conviction. The SNP didn’t win this, the other parties simply failed to capture the imagination of the country. The Tories’ vote collapsed into Reform, Scottish Labour was weighed down by its incredibly unpopular Westminster government, and the Greens hoovered up the vote from soft-SNP voters who couldn’t stomach voting for Swinney. The seat count looks like an endorsement. It isn’t. This is a loveless landslide.

What happens now, however, is Scotland’s biggest challenge.

Independent economists were explicit before the election: the books won’t add up over the parliament. The SNP government faces the most difficult budget since devolution. A habit of using one-off revenues to fund day-to-day spending has left the Scottish government with a daunting challenge. 

The consequences of this are already becoming visible. Real-terms cuts of 2% for local government and justice annually, 1.5% for education each year till 2028-29 are already in the spending review. Despite this the election was focussed on fiscal expansion with all the major parties’ manifestos viewed as not being fiscally credible. Visions of larger and smaller states were offered, but none of the pitches survived contact with the numbers.

The harbinger of what's to come was visible during the campaign itself. In the weeks before election day almost a third of the CalMac fleet serving Scotland’s island communities was out of action, disrupting almost all the major island routes on the west coast. Hustings were cancelled on Islay as candidates could not get there. Hospital appointments, business activity, and tourism all slowed down with technical cancellations having increased nine-fold over the previous decade. The SNP had led Scotland for all of it, offering a £10 million resilience fund to the communities that had lost hundreds of millions as a result of the fiasco. 

The electoral punishment was real. These communities were most exposed to how the Scottish government operates: bold announcements leading to blame distributed across quangos followed by a derisory offering before polling day. The SNP lost the constituency seat of Na h-Eileanan an Iar, the Western Isles, to Labour and many of the Highlands constituencies to the Lib Dems in May. The rest of Scotland is about to get similar spending effects, yet at a far wider scale.

What makes the next five years more difficult for the SNP is that the budgets Swinney will have to pass will have few supporters amongst the other parties. The Scottish Greens, the ideologically closest partner to the SNP, will be seen as the natural fit to reach a majority in Holyrood, yet on finance will prove to be unhelpful. Green demands would likely include many of their expensive manifesto spending pledges such as universal free bus travel and various climate commitments. However politically attractive these policies seem, they point in the opposite direction to the consolidation needed. The Bute House agreement collapsed in 2024 under this tension, reliving it under even tighter conditions would be less a coalition, more a managed argument. 

Unionist parties offer little relief. Scottish Conservatives and Reform are obviously not very sympathetic to the SNP’s plight, and while an informal agreement for finance with Labour, or more likely the Lib Dems, would be possible neither party would be eager to associate themselves with an SNP budget especially after campaigning, and winning, in the Highland and Island regions where previous SNP budgets have already failed communities. 

The SNP’s problem is not just in parliament. It is five terms of government that have exhausted their credibility as an agent of change. The constitutional question is closed – that was made clear by the Supreme Court in 2022 and then by Health Secretary Wes Streeting during the campaign. The government has deferred bold promises and missed targets. Swinney’s government cannot defer the hard choices any longer, the spending review has already made them.

Scotland voted for continuity, if only because it disliked the other options more. The SNP still has a mandate, and there is a version of this parliament where Swinney summons the political will to enact the reforms that the previous nineteen years of governments never got round to. The question is whether a government that has spent nearly two decades governing through announcement can govern through delivery and get through a fiscal crisis largely of their own making. Scotland didn’t vote for transformation. It may be about to get it, one way or another.

Image: Flickr/Scottish Government

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