At the point where the assumption was that Council Tax in Scotland would have to be freed to rise, we are on the record as saying that the existing freeze on this tax would have to be extended to offer some support for households hit with job losses and reduced income with the coming cuts.
Otherwise many would be hit with a squeeze from which there would be no escape – a significantly decreased ability to pay, alongside increased demands from the local authority.
This situation is, ironically, about to be focused on the public sector in Argyll. Very shortly the Council is about to go into a phase of trimming its middle management stratum. These are not people with immediately necessary or transferable skills. They face hard times. If Council Tax in Argyll were simultaneously to rise they would not find it easy to cope.
We also commented critically when Iain Gray, leader of the Holyrood Labour group, committed his party to raising Council Tax should it be in government after the 2011 Scottish Election.
It was, in fact, numbing to see the Labour party – in Neil Kinnock’s memorable words ‘the LABOUR party’ – abandoning the social justice agenda necessary in the face of the very straightened circumstances to come for the most vulnerable.
Watching the hapless Gray instead deliver an unnecessary commitment to make Labour in Scotland a tax raising party, bred profound questions about his political judgment as well as his sense of social responsibility.
The commitment now given by the Scottish Government to maintain the modestly funded freeze on local authority budgets is a clear signal that the tough times of financial constraint and the moderate shelters available are to be shared as best they can across the private and public sectors.
Rural schools
This same understanding of the condition of the threatened is extended in the welcome announcement made recently by Education Secretary Michael Russell that legislation is to be introduced which will be based on a presumption of not closing rural schools.
This recognises the centrality of such schools to the sustainability of their rural and remote rural communities.
The traditionally urban Labour movement has no depth of understanding of rural life – of farming, of fishing, of the fragility of small communities.
The other parties in Scotland, the LibDems, with their traditionally solid Scottish rural and northern island constituencies, the Conservatives with their farming and landowning experience and the SNP with its strengths in the western islands, the coastal fishing communities and the rural hinterland, all understand these things.
Argyll and Bute is second only to Highland in having a highly dispersed population. Our communities are small and far flung. They need their local schools if they are to keep the young families on which so much of their social and economic ssustainability is based.
The 2011 Scottish election is already shaping up to be, as it should be, a collision of policies, of mind sets and of values – to add to the raw struggle for power between the unseated Labour party, calling upon its tribal strengths and the SNP, running on its record of sound government.
Coalitions?
The really interesting question will come after the election – almost whatever its result.
The strong likelihood will be coalition. In such circumstances, what will the Scottish LibDems do or seek to do?
There can be no doubt that former Scottish LibDem leader Nicol Stephen’s decision not to go into coalition with the SNP after the 2007 Scottish Election badly weakened his party.
It removed it from the post-devolution role in government to which it had become accustomed. It left it without focus, without involvement in decision-taking and without a weight of presence on the Scottish political scene.
Will Tavish Scott seek to balance his party’s books by going into coalition with Labour since, down south, it is in coalition with the Tories?
He is certainly enjoying the reflected glory of being in a party so emphatically in power in the UK and he will want some of that for himself and his group in Scotland. But what relationships will he be open to exploring tin order to grab it?
And what will the Scottish Conservatives do? Like the Lib Dems, they are connected to the new UK coalition government but unlike them are in a position where they may be cast off to build their own future north of the border – or may chose to do so.
There is no likelihood of replicating a LibDem-Conservative coalition in Scotland, with the power positions reversed. The constituency numbers are not going to stack up, even if the politics could be squared.
But might both coexist in a tripartite coalition with the SNP?
Might the Scottish Conservatives alone enter a coalition with the SNP? Annabel Goldie has been the only opposition leader to make sense of the reality of an SNP minority government. This success has been born from a marriage of the happy accident of personality and pragmatic political judgment.
Interestingly, Goldie brought real gains for her party out of her sail-tacking in these waters – yet it was unable in campaigning to being these gains to bear to its advantage. Indeed it seemed not to be aware of the advantages won. Let’s just say the words: ‘town centre regeneration’. Who remembered that this was a Scottish Conservative concession won in exchange for support for the first SNP administration budget?
Unfair as it may well be – as the party organisation must centrally be responsible for this failure – it is not unlikely that it will be entered on Goldie’s record and that she may pay the price for it. What coalition would her successor consider?
Labour has not yet been able to govern post-devolution Scotland on its own and although poor Iain Gray has said bravely that he would consider a minority administration, it would be unlikely, on merit, to last as long or run as steadily as the far more talented SNP minority administration has done. It would also face, in organised opposition, that talented and seasoned party scrutinising its actions and bringing the capacity for analysis and the results of recent experience to bear in accurate firepower.
Up close, a minority administration for Labour might seem increasingly unattractive.
This will be a lively spectator sport.