A sign of things to come? SNP passes budget with Tory votes

[Anarcho-Socialist]

MSPs agree to pass Scots budget

The Scottish Government's budget has been passed with Conservative support, after ministers made several last-minute concessions. The SNP's £30bn plans went through after the minority administration agreed to boost business rate cuts and cash for bus operators. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens all abstained in the crunch vote at the Scottish Parliament.

(snip)

Ministers also agreed to boost police recruitment, give more cash to fight climate change and award capital city status funding to Edinburgh. Labour and the Lib Dems hit out at an earlier threat by First Minister Alex Salmond to quit if the budget failed. The budget was passed by 64 votes to one, with 60 abstentions.

(snip)

The spending plans - which will also offer cash to local authorities to freeze council tax - will now see a total of 1,000 new police officers recruited by March 2011 - an increase of 500 - and an extra £4.3m will be pumped into the Climate Challenge Fund. Mr Swinney also announced that, from April next year, business rates would be abolished for up to 120,000 small businesses and a further 30,000 would see rate cuts of between 25% and 50%.

(snip)

But Labour's finance spokesman, Iain Gray, said councils had not been given enough cash to provide vital services, adding that his party would continue to press for the budget to be directed to "social justice". He told MSPs of the "unedifying pantomime of a first minister threatening resignation from behind the safety of deals already done". "An act of vacuous bravado which sums up his government's approach not just to the budget, but to government in general," he said.

Tavish Scott, the Liberal Democrat finance spokesman, branded the spending plans a "Con-Nat budget", while describing Mr Salmond's resignation threat a "landmark strop". Mr Scott said: "Mr Swinney indeed has done a wonderful job buying off the Tories and buying them on the cheap," he said. "It's akin to Northern Rock. Mr Swinney has done a Darling and nationalised a private entity in all but a different name." The Tories claimed credit for several of the concessions, including those on business rate cuts and police numbers - as well as a national drug strategy. The party's finance spokesman Derek Brownlee said: "Today is historic - not because of what (the SNP) has done, but because it marks the final humiliation of the Scottish Labour Party.

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7229507.stm

Not even the Greens stood with the Tartan Tories on this. The SNP has supplanted New Labour as Scotland's main neoliberal party and is cozying up with the Tories. Despite Scotophobia amongst many English tories, a neoliberal SNP-led Scottish state taking Labour seats away from Westminster might seem a favourable outcome to the Conservative Party in England and Wales.

[non sociopath skin]

1. Gosh! So the Tory Neoliberals supported the SNP Neoliberals ...

... against the NuLab Neoliberals and the LibDem Neoliberals.

And the Greens.

How rich, diverse and exciting a political landscape we have in the UK nowadays!

The Skin :spank: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke:

[RogueTrooper]

2. I'm not quite sure you have a good handle

on Scottish politics there, A-S.

The Labour Party, in Scotland, is less "new" than it is sexist, bigoted and reactionary. We are talking about a country where the Catholics vote Labour and the Protestants vote for all the other parties. Something that is a) hardly healthy and b) a state of affairs that got considerable worse under a Labour controlled Scottish Parliament.


What is it about the budget that is particularly neo-liberal?

[non sociopath skin]

3. Must be a helluva lot more RCs in Scotland than I thought, RT!

The Skin

[RogueTrooper]

4. Swinney's herding

I think this article may have some useful analysis.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/iain_macwhirter/2008/02/swinneys_herding.html

Minority government seems to work. The Scottish National party has only 46 seats out of 129 in the Scottish parliament, but yesterday it managed to get its budget onto the statute books largely unscathed. Only nine month ago, the consensus was that the SNP government would never get their high-spending policies endorsed because it simply lacked the numerical strength in parliament.

It was a remarkable achievement by the SNP finance secretary, John Swinney, who deployed a kind of legislative jujitsu, turning the combined weight of the majority unionist parties against them. He won over the Scottish Conservatives by tactical concessions on business rates and police numbers. The Liberal Democrats became irrelevant, and Labour ended up their getting their amendment on skills and apprenticeships accepted, but then not voting for it. Well, except for the one Labour MP, Cathie Craigie, who voted for Labour's own motion by mistake.

It was the final humiliation for the party that, until the May election, had dominated Scottish politics for 50 years. With a failing leadership under Wendy Alexander - who, last week, was reported to the procurator fiscal for failing to register campaign donations - the party simply couldn't risk precipitating an election. Alex Salmond had made clear that if his budget was defeated he would resign. The consequences would have been severe for the national finances, since there was no time to bring forward another budget bill. Schools might have been closed; public employees laid off; council tax would have risen dramatically. The opposition would be blamed.

But the fact remains, Labour had an opportunity to deliver a coup de grâce to nationalism, but in the end decided to abstain and keep the nationalists in power. Instead of planning carefully to use the unionist majority to shred the SNP budget in committee, it resorted instead to a kind of "refusenik" approach - delivering empty denunciations of the "Nat-Tory" alliance which Labour claim is now running an informal coalition government.

[SweetLeftFoot]

5. Baws!

The SNP are not neo-liberal.

The Greens actually supported the budget by abstaining. If it came down to their votes to pass it, they would have supported it.

The deal Swinney did with the Tories actually did little more than make the SNP honour a few of their election promies.

Scottish Labour though - Alexendar's shamefully get out of free card from the Elec Commiss today included - are gone.