Government spending and a whole load of pain

A shorter version of this article appeared in The Scotsman on 28 September 2024

If you have ever been a member of a political party, trade union or local campaign group, you will know that securing the role of treasurer is rarely an ambition.

For activists, meetings can be great fun. Lots of ideas for action. Lots of plans for campaigning. Lots of discussion about when we could all get together to do good things. But then from the corner of the room comes a sigh, a muttering, and the treasurer intervenes. “Really? All these things? Immediately? Have you thought about the cost? Or the purpose? Or who would benefit? Did you look at the accounts I presented?”

And the meeting settles back a little huffily to consider the minutes. Who would be a treasurer, raining on the activist parade?

I do not wish to work the analogy too hard (as in Margaret Thatcher’s “a country’s economy is like a household budget”) but what passes for the “debate” on Scotland’s finances makes one yearn for “a grumpy treasurer” to be incorporated – alongside wisdom, compassion, justice and integrity – into the Scottish Parliament mace.

The habit of endlessly devising new ways to show voters how much the Parliament cares by offering free things is an easy and addictive one, but it all too often fails to pass the grumpy treasurer test. No thought for actual benefit, alternative approaches or unintended consequences. And only denunciation for those who might ask challenging questions.

Covid and all the trauma, disruption and cost it brought to bear on individuals, families and communities should surely have been a wake-up call, an opportunity to break with past certainties and establish serious politics where spending is about doing good, not just feeling good.

The shock of Covid exposed the vulnerabilities and inequalities baked into our society. We all suffered, but the impact of poverty and disadvantage was heightened and cruelly exposed. Surely now there would be rigorous analysis of how government acts and how, in the epidemic’s difficult aftermath, monies should be directed relentlessly to social and economic recovery?

It remains utterly bewildering to me that in the Scottish Parliament election of 2021, the manifesto offer from the SNP reverted to goodies – laptops and free bikes, anyone? – and the total absence of anything that approached the scale of the challenge that the post-Covid world presented. For example,  a substantial education recovery plan – reflecting the horrendous impact of closed schools on so many young people – remains largely undeveloped.

There is a serious debate to be had, of course, about the balance between universal provision and targeted spending; the cost of creating eligibility tests in comparison with the simplicity of a universal approach; the challenge of ensuring that the support to those most in need is not diluted; that targeted spend must also be accompanied by support for uptake and an access to entitlement that is not deterred by complex application forms and unnecessary barriers.

But that debate is throttled in Scotland. Far easier to deny that these competing pressures, arguments and consequences exist. Just divide the world into good and bad, compassionate and monstrous, day and night.

Cartoons are fun, but politics and the choices they determine deserve better than sketched-in thinking.

This is surely not because we lack the capacity or ability to do the heavy lifting. The fear that, in acknowledging there are choices to be made, ground could be ceded to those who care little for social justice, equality and the need for action, is to deny the context of current political thinking across the mainstream.  

I believe it would be fair to say that there is no longer a significant debate in Scotland about whether state intervention should be resisted or harnessed in the interests of social and economic priorities. There is a general acceptance in the political sphere that public services need to be funded and healthy public spending can have economic as well as social purpose. So the argument is not whether to spend, but what to spend and where that spending would be of most use.

Consequently, there really should be more seriousness – not less – in examining those choices.

But no. The comfort of the “retail offer” is embraced. The unintended consequences are waved away and the opportunity to harness the public purse in the interests of fairness and opportunity remains largely lost.

So, we can have baby boxes, with no analysis of their benefits, alongside a reduction in family support for vulnerable mothers and children.

We can have free tuition for those who make it to university, alongside attacks on second-chance learning through the cuts to further education funding; or the limiting of help (via home links, family support, support for learning in school, attendance initiatives) with the consequence that all too many bright youngsters drop out of school long before they can achieve their potential – or benefit from tuition fee funding.

We can have free bus travel and fewer bus routes in the communities most reliant on public transport.

And we can have free school meals of poorer nutritional quality alongside the virtual disappearance of the necessary support for vulnerable children and families in their own homes.

We can freeze council tax and watch as the services from libraries, social care and education falter.

So far, so obvious, you might think.

But, of course, the truth is that a serious case can be made for – almost all – of these universal offers. Free bus travel can help climate change targets if it takes people out of their cars and or it can reduce the social isolation of some older people. Free prescriptions may provide simplicity of administration and remove any deterrent to seeking medical help.

That there are serious arguments to be made is why politicians have backed away. The tentative steps of Humza Yousaf when First Minister to test the presumptions around some universal benefits were interesting. But that curiosity about what options might be examined lasted no longer than the First Minister himself. One can almost hear the sigh of relief as the SNP leadership settles back into its happy place of blaming ‘Westminster austerity’ for all our ills.

And thus we are back to the basics. The “arguments” around the political choices being made are boiled down again.

This is a good thing. 

Opposing it is a bad thing.

There are no other ways of achieving our aims of doing good things.

It is as vacuous as it is maddening. There is never an acceptance that in public spending we are not choosing good over bad, but choosing and prioritising one good and worthy approach over another. The current approach encourages people to accept decisions that in reality are not in their interest. Their need for reliable services is too often squandered in the cause of political self-interest.

This cannot go on. In an uncertain world still stressed and challenged by Covid, there needs to be a renewed commitment to rigour and rational policy and decision making.

Herein lie further dilemmas. It is not easy to draw back from an approach where people have seen individual benefits and appreciated them. Where parties have benefitted politically.

We see it now in the reaction to Labour plans to end the winter fuel payment for those not on pensioner credit on the grounds that it is costly and services are under severe pressure. The motives of a previous Labour government in the payment’s introduction were rational and at a time where a process for means testing would have come at a disproportionate price.

It is evident it is paid to some people who do not need it. But people are up in arms. And instead of a testing of options to look at thresholds and the uptake of qualifying benefits, the discourse, with some notable exceptions, has all too often been about why a Labour government is prepared to allow pensioners to freeze to death.

So past political failure to employ rigour in spending choices makes it more likely that politicians will back away. Who wants to be the person who has it as their political purpose to freeze the elderly, starve the young or leave the ill untreated?

There needs to be an understanding that past hyperbole about these benefits in order to make an electoral offer now results in political paralysis – with those who most desperately need change suffering most.

But there are other consequences, and these are insidious too.

In a system where some policy choices are deemed untouchable – because they offer political opponents too many sticks for the purpose of back-beating – cuts in services fall most on areas where there is indifference, or a lack of awareness of services which most people will not need. Cuts to care services, largely unseen but felt in the further burden placed on unpaid carers. Cuts in school funding, which reduces resources and school trips which better-off families can make up for in their own budgets. Cuts to drugs and rehabilitation services, community and justice social work,  among others, where support that looms large in the lives of some go unnoticed by most of us.

The refusal to be serious is played out in a thousand ways every day, at the expense of those without the voice, means or energy to demand better.

And of course, we now see tough choices of a sort being made. With council tax set to rise, we end up asking people to pay more at precisely the same point where the services they get in return – in education, health and even in cleansing – are poorer and more unreliable.

This is the further consequence and unhappy conundrum for politicians. Having broken the link between taxation, our personal responsibility to contribute, and our benefit from such investment, it is doubly difficult to reestablish that principle when the services we seek to fund seem broken.

This is the worst of all places. Paralysis and slogan swapping neither match the seriousness of these times nor the aspirations of a Scottish Parliament that was established to bring political decisions closer to our communities and make change real in people’s lives.

We need maturity and seriousness. We need government to think about how we can start doing serious policy-making again.

And one last thing. There has been a deeper malaise that goes beyond the universal/targeting debate.

Those with power should understand and respect the huge privilege of having the power to make spending decisions with public money. It is a privilege that should not be taken lightly. Too often we have seen monies spent without apparent thought, then written off as failure with little apparent regret. There is too much spending without account, whether on copious amounts of ministers, or in increasing the number of spin doctors, or on special advisers, or on the latest wheeze which generates a good press release but little more.

It is not right wing or unprogressive to test all spending options and be frugal in decisions. After all, every penny spent on one area without much thought is an opportunity lost elsewhere. And while the housewife analogy is outdated and not entirely appropriate, thrift and respect for the power of spending choices should not be dismissed.

This seriousness should shape the work of the opposition, too. Their job is, of course, to challenge, test, and provide serious alternatives. But they should resist at all costs the easy hit, the quick denunciation. That will entrench the paralysis, not liberate us from it. Whisper it – aspire to consensus where possible and honesty and rigour always.

There is a huge privilege in power and having the capacity to spend public money. My advice?  Embrace and channel your inner grumpy treasurer.

‘Really? What is the cost? What is the benefit? And are we doing this to feel better or to do better?’

Serious times demand no less.

Johann Lamont was leader of Scottish Labour from 2011 to 2014, and an MSP between 1999 and 2021. She is a member of Reform Scotland’s Commission on School Reform