Where do SNP voters think Sturgeon is getting her money from?

Sturgeon is playing a clever game: by driving a wedge between English and Scottish taxpayers, she is shoring up her core vote

 “We’ll provide free bikes for all children of school age who can’t afford them....#BothVotesSNP.” Yes you read that right. No need for Scots to buy their children birthday presents this year, the government will do it for them. And if they already have bikes, they can always shove them on e-Bay. Winner! This egregious vote buying follows on from promises to buy every schoolchild a laptop, a £20 per week child payment, free school meals for all….I had better stop, lest it induces apoplexy in Daily Telegraph readers, most of whom will be funding this largesse, whether they live in Bude or Bute. The final insult is the SNP’s announcement that Scottish tax rates will be frozen. 

You have to admire their brazen chutzpah. They know their core vote is people under forty with school age children. They also know that likely SNP voters believe the Big Lie: that Scotland puts more into Her Majesty’s Treasury than she gets out. So that insulates them nicely from the obvious question: “How on earth would we afford all this without the Barnett Formula?” And the more fury it induces among taxpayers in the rest of the UK, who know that the Big Lie is a lie, the better. It feeds the Little Englander narrative that says, “We’d be better off without them whinging Jocks, let them go, they’ll be bust within a year.” Those who scoff at the ‘Champagne Separatist’ Ian Blackford, as he huffs and puffs and flaunts his telephone number expense claims, haven’t been paying attention to a highly skilful political operation to irritate the English taxpayer. If Boris caves and grants another referendum it will be partly because of a growing antipathy towards Scotland south of the border.

If you think that this is state sponsored corruption then that’s because it is. All governments bribe the electorate with their own money to some extent; it takes a special sort of dishonesty to bribe voters with other people’s money. The strategy has been evident since the inception of the Covid business support grants last year. Kate Forbes, the young finance minister with the demeanour of a Sunday-school teacher, has been carefully siphoning off some of Rishi’s millions into a pre-election war chest. As a farmer who relies on self-catering holiday cottages to underpin the vagaries of agriculture, I have special reason to be aggrieved. While our competitors in the Lake District were receiving £10,000 per empty cottage, Scottish ones only received £7,500. We saw where some of the money was going when Scottish NHS workers received a tax-free pre-election bung of £500 each as a thank-you for their service during Covid. Wealthy dermatology consultants, who had little to do during Covid, received a bonus, while ironically many care home workers did not. But in the cynical world of Scottish politics that didn’t matter. The SNP had decided that, while Sturgeon was portraying herself as the saviour of Scotland on television, health workers would be another part of their core vote and they got their headline. 

If the polls are accurate, for every demoralised business owner, few of whom would ever vote SNP anyway, there appear to be more voters who are prepared to take the money and not ask too many questions. The unionist parties are still splitting votes by standing against each other in every constituency. The Labour and Conservative leaders are fighting over who will come second – Anas Sarwar’s posters even argue that he will be the ‘best opposition’.

Only mass tactical voting, as the Alliance for Unity argues, can save Scotland from another four years of corruption now.