When is a "power grab" not a power grab?
As the UK Government bypasses ScotGov and hands grant funding for 'levelling up' direct to Scottish councils, the SNP politicians are struggling to all agree on a response
SNP Westminster Deputy leader Kirsten Oswald MP indignance at the Westminster government was plain to see back in February. In a speech to the chamber, she condemned the ‘Tory government’ for its plans regarding grant funding for levelling up. She found it an outrageous proposition that the UK Government would agree to hand levelling up funds direct to Scottish councils whose applications were successful.
The Tory government's move to bypass the devolved governments and dictate spending over devolved areas is yet another sign of its naked power grab plans.
Indeed, doesn’t Boris and Rishi Sunak not understand that dictating spending plans to underfunded Scottish local authorities was the SNP’s job? Ms Oswald’s remarks revealed more than just a territorialism, but also reveal just how centralising and controlling the SNP’s instincts have become. Ms Oswald insisted that levelling up grant funding for Scottish local authorities should actually go to…central government
The funding for Scotland should be passed to the Scottish Government to administer on behalf of the people of Scotland.
Perhaps someone should break it to the SNP’s deputy leader in Westminster that part of the reason Boris is determined to work directly with councils is because he doesn’t trust the SNP to actually hand levelling up money out. After all, this is the same SNP that was handed £14.5bn during the COVID pandemic by UKGov to be handed out to Scottish businesses as support. But strangely enough, the Scottish Government's Budget Outturn for 2020/21 revealed that £449million of its £48billion spending pot was unused at the end of the financial year in April. The Westminster government minister Michael Gove at the time reflected on the lack of transparency concerning how the SNP are actually spending the money Westminster hands it for specific purposes
When I was in the northeast and when I was in the western isles recently, it was the case that I heard individuals and businesses crying out for economic support.
"When I explain its as the case the UK Government had given significant sums to the Scottish Government in the Covid crisis in order to deal with the emergency, the question was 'how has it been spent?'
"There has been no accountability and no transparency on the part of the Scottish Government.
"We have no idea how that money has been spent."
So given past experiences such as this, it is not all that inexplicable that the UKGov might decide to deal one-to-one with Scottish local authorities concerning the handing out of levelling up funds. Actually, it seems that Westminster has finally learned the appropriate lessons from past experience.
SNP politicians at Holyrood and Westminster must all have received the same memo in recent months, as their talking points all echo a consistent accusation against UKGov. A theme of ‘assault’ or ‘attacks’ on Holyrood is peddled. SNP MSP Kenneth Gibson spoke to The National that
“I’m all for empowering communities to help secure local facilities but this is less about that than it is an insidious and barely-disguised Tory assault on devolution. It also begs questions about where this public money will end up
Mr Gibson is asking you to believe that Westminster giving levelling up funding represents ‘an insidious and barely-disguised Tory assault on devolution’. I cannot avoid the view that that verges on the tin-foil hat territory. Do you think the allegation that if Westminster gives a Scottish council funds to rejuvenate its high street, this is an existential threat to devolution? No, of course not. It isn’t credible.
So why the SNP outrage? Perhaps it is because this new UKGov approach represents an existential threat to ScotGov’s desire to monopolise all political decision making across Scotland. It represents an assault on the SNP’s fake narrative of ‘Britain bad’, as they seek to indebt Scottish local governments to the SNP controlled ScotGov.
It is perhaps proof of the synthetic nature of SNP outrage that two SNP run local authorities have actually applied for UKGov levelling up funding! The Westminster plan to deal direct with Scottish local authorities - bypassing ScotGov - is so dangerous to devolution…that SNP councillors are applying for grants.