With the zeal of the convert, John Swinney is excited about a brand new idea he’s just discovered – economic growth.
In a speech last week, he said he wanted to promote a ‘can-do attitude’ and stressed the need to remove obstacles to investment. Back in January 2020, Nicola Sturgeon told a conference that ‘collective wellbeing’ is as fundamental as GDP and that bolstering quality of life should be an equal objective. It was a jaw-dropping statement given that growth in Scotland has been running at roughly half the UK level since Ms Sturgeon came to office in 2014.
Now he’s embarking on yet another ‘reset’ of his party’s relations with business – surely even he’s lost count of abortive previous attempts to build bridges. In his speech, Mr Swinney didn’t mention the tax hikes he imposed on higher earners while standing in for Kate Forbes as finance secretary in 2022, using the fig leaf of boosting ‘patient care’ as the justification.
Some unions are more acceptable than others, it seems, and of course many of those ‘decisions’ would be taken in Brussels and not Edinburgh, assuming the EU would have us back – and we know that it wouldn’t, or that the price of re-admission would be punitively high. Mr Swinney is now trying to undo some of it by ratcheting up the warm words about the importance of the economy.
For starters, there’s the £9million handed to the firm set up to run the Deposit Return Scheme – which later collapsed owing £86million.