SNP

Brexit and Devolution: a Quick Primer

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These guys look REALLY pissed

Last night’s Brexit votes and today’s Parliamentary shenanigans have certainly drawn attention to legislative amendments in a way that, quite frankly, I have never seen. Naturally, the Scottish National Party want to be seen to be “standing up for Scotland” (they have to be seen to be doing something, I suppose), but beyond the sphere of a handful of hardened politicos and legal academics, I suspect that there is little appreciation, if any, of what was actually at the core of this debate.

For my first blog in quite a while (I’ve been trying to devote my time to that thing I actually get paid for), I thought, therefore, that I would write a quick primer in order to cut through some of the rhetoric.

What is clause 11?

At present, the Scottish Parliament may not legislate in a way that is incompatible with European Union (EU) Law. Clause 11 of the European Union Withdrawal Bill transposes that prohibition to what will, after we leave the EU, be known as “retained EU Law.” The effect of this, as introduced, was the prevention of any competences whatsoever transferring from Brussels to Holyrood. This was the principal reason for SNP, Labour, Green, and Lib Dem MSPs voting to withhold legislative consent for the Withdrawal Bill in Holyrood.

What did the Lords’ amendment do?

The House of Lords made a number of amendments to the Withdrawal Bill. One such amendment, amendment 26, vastly improved clause 11 of the Withdrawal Bill. The amendment removed the blanket prohibition on legislating for retained EU Law, and replaced it with a clause that was more limited in scope, and would be time limited to a period of two years for UK Ministers to make rules in these areas, and those rules could not have any legal effect after five years. After this period, all EU competences that would otherwise have fallen within the scope of the competences of the Scottish Parliament will transfer automatically to Holyrood.

The Tories voted for this amendment; not being perfect, but being better than the old clause 11, Labour and the Lib Dems abstained; the SNP voted against.

Why did the SNP vote against amending clause 11?

Quite simply, I have no idea. Voting against an amendment doesn’t remove the clause from the Bill, it simply leaves the Bill unamended, meaning the Bill progresses with the original version of clause 11 which the SNP, apparently, so vehemently opposed. By voting against the Lords’ amendment the SNP actually voted FOR the total power grab they purport to oppose.

But the SNP stood up for devolution today, didn’t they?

Quite simply, no. Through today’s pre-planned stunt (Pete Wishart has all-but admitted it was planned) Ian Blackford rendered himself ineligible to vote on today’s crucial amendments, including on continued membership of the single market. SNP MPs had questions on the order paper for PMQs which they were unable to ask as they flounced out of the chamber. Furthermore, having secured a motion to have an emergency debate on devolution (which the Speaker was willing to grant), their walkout meant that there was no one from the SNP to make that application and it was too late for another MP to do so. The SNP’s walkout meant that there was no chance for a debate on Brexit’s impact on devolution.

While I love a bit of Parliamentary theatre (and John Bercow is certainly wrong when he says the public don’t enjoy it), it becomes difficult to justify when it has a material effect on your ability to scrutinise one of the most important pieces of legislation to proceed through Parliament in over 40 years. Furthermore, while Nicola Sturgeon, naturally, has to go along with today’s tomfoolery, it is difficult to imagine a politician who has spent 30 years helping to mould the SNP into a credible party of government approving a stunt that is more befitting of a student union meeting.

The road ahead for Sturgeon is fraught with danger

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For the second year in a row the prize for most spectacular self-inflicted political wound must surely go to the Prime Minister of the day. Despite having piled on support for the Conservative Party, Mrs. May severely underestimated her opponent (as, I am happy to admit, did I), who piled on more votes and so deprived the Prime Minister of her majority, and her authority.

However, Mrs. May is not the only politician who until recently was walking on water to have had a disastrous night on Thursday. In relative terms the biggest vote loser was the SNP, as well as the biggest seat loser in absolute terms. While it is certainly true that the SNP’s starting point was astonishingly high, in only two seats did the SNP start with a majority of less than 3,000. The average SNP majority was 9,966. Save for a handful of seats the SNP’s grip on Scotland looked solid for a generation.

While the expectation for Thursday’s election was that Labour would be squeezed from both sides; it was the SNP, in fact, who lost votes to both left and right. After Thursday’s mauling, the SNP have been deprived of 21 seats. In Angus, and Coatbridge, the Conservatives and Labour, respectively, overturned SNP majorities in excess of 11,000. The SNP’s overall vote share declined by more than 13 percentage points, with the Conservatives, in particular, but also Labour, adding hefty chunks of the vote to their respective piles. The average majority in SNP-held seats now stands at a mere 2,292.

The SNP’s impressive coalition of support in 2015 can broadly be broken down into three categories. The first is voters who aren’t nationalists, but voted SNP either because they had a decent local candidate and/or believed a vote for the Nats did not equate to supporting independence. The second is voters who are nationalists because they believed that Scottish independence was the most credible route to a more left-wing government. The third is existential nationalists, who support independence for Scotland above all else.

Having spectacularly misjudged the public mood in calling for a second independence referendum, Nicola Sturgeon drove support in that first category away from her party and towards the Conservatives in the magnitude of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. However, provided that this was the only direction in which the SNP were losing support, their grip on Scotland looked safe enough.

Explaining the increase in the Labour vote is somewhat more difficult. In what were once Labour heartlands there was a palpable shift in anti-SNP Labour supporters towards the Tories, believing Ruth Davidson to be the most doughty opponent of a second independence referendum. In many working-class seats across Scotland the Tories more than tripled their vote, and a sizeable chunk of that was from voters who stuck with Labour even in 2015.

At the same time, having spent much of the past two months canvassing there is at least some anecdotal evidence of disquiet about the SNP’s record in government. Kenny Farquharson also posits that among the younger and more radical voters many now no longer see independence as the only road to a more just society. In any event, it appears that the SNP has begun to lose voters within that second category too, which goes some way towards explaining Labour’s increase in support despite discernible losses to the Tories.

Which is why the road ahead for Nicola Sturgeon is more dangerous than ever.

No fewer than 30 of the SNP’s 35 seats require a swing of less than 5% to fall to another party. The vast majority of these seats face towards Labour.

Nicola Sturgeon’s next step is critical. The expectation is that the First Minister does as many of her proxies have been hinting and takes a second independence referendum off the table in an effort to win back some support within the first category of voter. However, in doing so, she runs the risk that working class unionists no longer feel it necessary to lend their support to the Tories and shift their allegiance back to Labour. If even half of the 2017 increase (note, not the total, just the increase) in Tory votes in largely working class seats found its way into Labour’s pile then Labour could expect to pick up a further 11 seats from the SNP.

However, such a strategy also risks alienating those voters whose support for the SNP is motivated by a belief that independence is the most viable route towards a more socialist Scotland. Why on earth would such voters support a party who have just closed off that path to a more socialist Scotland when another, increasingly viable, alternative exists in Jeremy Corbyn?

Furthermore, such a U-turn by the First Minister may also risk losing support to the nationalist fringes. After all, if you can’t rely upon the SNP to push for independence then what’s the point of their very existence? Expect Tommy Sheridan to be licking his lying lips at that one.

It may well be that after a decade in power and with little to offer but a single issue the safest route for the SNP is to press on with the strategy that has cost them almost a third of their support and almost half of their parliamentary seats in two years. Either way, expect the next set of Holyrood elections to be very interesting…

SNP makes the case for scrapping tax-free personal allowance and imposing a “Flat Tax”

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Sturgeon ParliamentLabour (and the Liberal Democrats) have called the SNP’s bluff, by proposing a 1% tax increase in order to offset cuts to public services. Surely, the left-wing SNP warmly embraces slightly higher income taxes over austerity? It seems not, and the SNP’s spin machine has gone into overdrive, inventing new meanings for words, which hitherto had a commonly understood meaning.

In order to defend themselves against the claim that the SNP, while speaking the language of Syriza, bear a far closer resemblance to the Tories or New Labour when it comes to taxation; the SNP’s spin doctors (another trait they share in common with New Labour) have invented a new definition of “progressive”. Any tax expert will tell you that a progressive tax is one in which the effective rate increases with the value of the base. Income tax is progressive in that respect, because higher earners pay a higher proportion of their income in tax than lower earners; Council Tax, by contrast, is regressive to its base (property values) because the effective tax rate is lower for higher value properties. Simple stuff.

However, in response to Scottish Labour’s proposals to increase the Scottish Rate of Income Tax (SRIT) by 1% in every band, the SNP invented a novel definition of progressivity. The SNP described Labour’s proposals as “regressive” because the relative increase in the proportion of higher earners’ income tax is smaller than the relative increase in lower earners’ tax. In other words, the proportion of the proportion of income.

The SNP’s cyber-warriors went into overdrive, lovingly embracing this new definition of progressivity, seemingly without the slightest clue about what they were actually saying. For example, the first £11,000 of income is tax-free. A certain amount of tax-free income is a feature in almost every tax system and is, surely, progressive? Well, no longer, according to the SNP. Because we pay no tax on the first £11,000, the first penny of income tax is an infinitely higher burden than zero.


As can be seen on the above graph, the rate at which the tax burden increases (green line) is significantly higher at the lower end of income tax, because the tax-free personal allowance represents a much larger share of total income. Because of the withdrawal of the personal allowance above £100,000, the rate at which the tax burden increases in the top brackets approaches zero (the only constant being the weekly National Insurance threshold of £112). Under the SNP’s new definition of progressivity, the personal allowance is regressive, and presumably therefore, has to go.

By contrast, taxing us on every penny we earn at a single rate – a flat tax, without any personal allowance – would be much less regressive under the SNP’s conception of progressivity.

The SNP’s measure of progressivity is what’s called a derivative, and by the SNP’s new definition of progressivity, it’s not just Labour’s proposals that are regressive, but also the whole of income tax itself! In their attempts to spin Labour’s proposals as regressive (which I hope is clear by now, they are not) the SNP’s spin doctors and their online infantry have been making the case for scrapping the personal allowance and imposing a flat tax. And if you believe that’s “progressive” then you really will believe anything.

 

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