Latest news with #RebeccaMcQuillan
The Herald Scotland
09-05-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
SNP faces two big problems as it kicks off election campaign
At next year's Scottish election, his party will face two main foes: Labour, and voter disaffection. His latest Programme for Government, a ministerial to-do list for the next year, is a battle plan to address both. This, the last pre-election legislative plan to go before Holyrood, is about trying firstly to rebuild trust with voters by showing he can keep promises while, secondly, persuading them that the SNP will do better than Labour. Read more Rebecca McQuillan Mr Swinney is having a good go at point two. He is attempting to embarrass Labour on traditional Labour ground, by abolishing peak time rail fares and restoring the winter fuel payment after it was slashed by Rachel Reeves. It adds to a list of benefits and free stuff available in Scotland that can't be accessed down south. The UK Government's determination to be 'fiscally responsible' has forced it to cut benefits and slash the overseas aid budget, making it a sitting duck for wounding comparisons with the Scottish Government. How sustainable all this spending is for the Scottish Government is another question, but the politics is effective. So will Mr Swinney's 'year of delivery' make people trust the SNP? Well, it's certainly cute politics to focus on this, as a relatively new leader trying to distance himself from his predecessors. The hint is clear: the SNP's failures are not my failures, I've moved back to the centre. Judge me by what I deliver as First Minister, not by what happened before. And he will deliver on this short to-do list, probably. But will it restore trust? That's much more doubtful. Top of the list of Mr Swinney's promises is that pledge to deliver 100,000 more GP appointments a year across Scotland. It might sound like a lot, but as the British Medical Association has unsportingly pointed out, GPs in Scotland already provide 650,000 appointments a week, so the First Minister's promise will provide one extra day's worth of GP appointments across the year. Put another way, it promises a whole two to three extra appointments per GP surgery per week. Deliverable? Yes. A good rejoinder to criticism by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar? Yes. But the end of the 8am phone lottery? No. John Swinney (Image: free) And that's the obvious problem. While these new policy pledges are fine as far as they go, they won't end the steady stream of reportage about public services in various stages of crisis. They won't help the SNP hide from its rather long list of ongoing failures, some of which date back years. It brings into focus the problem with targets and promises. Too ambitious and you miss them by miles, leading to disaffection. Too timid and they don't change how people feel on the ground. The party has been haunted by its own shortcomings over the last five years, from failing to boost education standards and close the attainment gap to fuel poverty levels, homelessness and waiting lists. Those failures won't stop intruding upon the moment and no one's likely to forget that John Swinney as deputy first minister, finance secretary and education secretary was implicated in most of them. And how much does delivering on any single promise really count anyway, when the underlying democratic malaise is about wider, more systemic discontent? SNP, Labour, Conservative: in the minds of too many voters, they're all the same – which is to say, none of the parties are seen as making a significant difference to people's lives. Reform UK is not about policies or delivery. Reform is about sentiment. Nigel Farage's party took more than 677 seats in the English local elections last week in a show of anti-incumbency sentiment. Mr Farage's status as chief cheerleader for Brexit, which has damaged economic growth and delivered none of its promised benefits, has been no impediment to his success. So much for policy. Reform's policy platform is barely known to voters, the only policy he's ever helped deliver was a disaster but he's considered by a quarter of UK voters, and around a fifth in Scotland, as preferable to the mainstream parties. Why? Because those voters are desperate for change. Read more Oh to be the change candidate. Mr Swinney might be positioning himself as Mr Delivery, but knows the limitations of that strategy, so he can't resist hedging his bets by telling people he's also the change guy. Just 24 hours after presenting his Programme for Government, the First Minister opined that there must be a referendum if a majority of pro-independence MSPs are returned in the next Scottish Parliament. 'Westminster has scarcely looked more distant from the people of Scotland and their everyday concerns,' was his somewhat contestable claim. So we're back here again. It was inevitable, given the current atmosphere of voter discontent, that the SNP would dust off its old demands for an independence referendum, but Mr Swinney will need to take care. He doesn't want voters to start noticing unfavourable parallels between himself and Mr Farage. Brexit never did deliver on the promise of milk and honey. There's no sign voters have any appetite for another rammy about independence. And it doesn't wash to try and portray the UK Government of Sir Keir Starmer, with its 37 Scottish MPs, as out of touch with Scotland. This is just the sort of divisive nonsense that puts people off the SNP. But put your tin hats on: we'd better get used to it. Rebecca McQuillan is a journalist specialising in politics and Scottish affairs. She can be found on X at @BecMcQ and on Bluesky at @
The Herald Scotland
08-05-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
SNP faces two big challenges as it kicks off election campaign
At next year's Scottish election, his party will face two main foes: Labour, and voter disaffection. His latest Programme for Government, a ministerial to-do list for the next year, is a battle plan to address both. This, the last pre-election legislative plan to go before Holyrood, is about trying firstly to rebuild trust with voters by showing he can keep promises while, secondly, persuading them that the SNP will do better than Labour. Read more Rebecca McQuillan Mr Swinney is having a good go at point two. He is attempting to embarrass Labour on traditional Labour ground, by abolishing peak time rail fares and restoring the winter fuel payment after it was slashed by Rachel Reeves. It adds to a list of benefits and free stuff available in Scotland that can't be accessed down south. The UK Government's determination to be 'fiscally responsible' has forced it to cut benefits and slash the overseas aid budget, making it a sitting duck for wounding comparisons with the Scottish Government. How sustainable all this spending is for the Scottish Government is another question, but the politics is effective. So will Mr Swinney's 'year of delivery' make people trust the SNP? Well, it's certainly cute politics to focus on this, as a relatively new leader trying to distance himself from his predecessors. The hint is clear: the SNP's failures are not my failures, I've moved back to the centre. Judge me by what I deliver as First Minister, not by what happened before. And he will deliver on this short to-do list, probably. But will it restore trust? That's much more doubtful. Top of the list of Mr Swinney's promises is that pledge to deliver 100,000 more GP appointments a year across Scotland. It might sound like a lot, but as the British Medical Association has unsportingly pointed out, GPs in Scotland already provide 650,000 appointments a week, so the First Minister's promise will provide one extra day's worth of GP appointments across the year. Put another way, it promises a whole two to three extra appointments per GP surgery per week. Deliverable? Yes. A good rejoinder to criticism by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar? Yes. But the end of the 8am phone lottery? No. John Swinney (Image: free) And that's the obvious problem. While these new policy pledges are fine as far as they go, they won't end the steady stream of reportage about public services in various stages of crisis. They won't help the SNP hide from its rather long list of ongoing failures, some of which date back years. It brings into focus the problem with targets and promises. Too ambitious and you miss them by miles, leading to disaffection. Too timid and they don't change how people feel on the ground. The party has been haunted by its own shortcomings over the last five years, from failing to boost education standards and close the attainment gap to fuel poverty levels, homelessness and waiting lists. Those failures won't stop intruding upon the moment and no one's likely to forget that John Swinney as deputy first minister, finance secretary and education secretary was implicated in most of them. And how much does delivering on any single promise really count anyway, when the underlying democratic malaise is about wider, more systemic discontent? SNP, Labour, Conservative: in the minds of too many voters, they're all the same – which is to say, none of the parties are seen as making a significant difference to people's lives. Reform UK is not about policies or delivery. Reform is about sentiment. Nigel Farage's party took more than 677 seats in the English local elections last week in a show of anti-incumbency sentiment. Mr Farage's status as chief cheerleader for Brexit, which has damaged economic growth and delivered none of its promised benefits, has been no impediment to his success. So much for policy. Reform's policy platform is barely known to voters, the only policy he's ever helped deliver was a disaster but he's considered by a quarter of UK voters, and around a fifth in Scotland, as preferable to the mainstream parties. Why? Because those voters are desperate for change. Read more Oh to be the change candidate. Mr Swinney might be positioning himself as Mr Delivery, but knows the limitations of that strategy, so he can't resist hedging his bets by telling people he's also the change guy. Just 24 hours after presenting his Programme for Government, the First Minister opined that there must be a referendum if a majority of pro-independence MSPs are returned in the next Scottish Parliament. 'Westminster has scarcely looked more distant from the people of Scotland and their everyday concerns,' was his somewhat contestable claim. So we're back here again. It was inevitable, given the current atmosphere of voter discontent, that the SNP would dust off its old demands for an independence referendum, but Mr Swinney will need to take care. He doesn't want voters to start noticing unfavourable parallels between himself and Mr Farage. Brexit never did deliver on the promise of milk and honey. There's no sign voters have any appetite for another rammy about independence. And it doesn't wash to try and portray the UK Government of Sir Keir Starmer, with its 37 Scottish MPs, as out of touch with Scotland. This is just the sort of divisive nonsense that puts people off the SNP. But put your tin hats on: we'd better get used to it. Rebecca McQuillan is a journalist specialising in politics and Scottish affairs. She can be found on X at @BecMcQ and on Bluesky at @
The Herald Scotland
01-05-2025
- Business
- The Herald Scotland
You could raise Scottish Child Payment if you wanted to, Mr Swinney
Hmmn. The trouble is, this jars with pretty much everything he and his ministers have said about it before. Just last summer Mr Swinney hailed 'our game-changing Scottish Child Payment', which had helped keep '100,000 children out of relative poverty'. It has been hiked several times before, with each increase explained as part of the drive to meet what Mr Swinney calls his 'top priority' – meeting the target of reducing relative child poverty to 10 per cent by 2030. Child poverty is falling in Scotland while it rises in other parts of the UK largely because of this policy, a source of justified pride for ministers. How strange then that just as the latest accounting shows an interim target has been significantly missed, the First Minister backs off raising the child payment any further. Read more by Rebecca McQuillan Campaigners are fed up and confused, and understandably so. They want to understand what Mr Swinney is basing his concerns on. After all, most recipients of the Scottish Child Payment (SCP) are in work, are they not? The Scottish Government's own analysis shows the child payment isn't putting people off getting jobs and campaigners are aware of none that suggests raising it further would do so, certainly not at a scale that would outweigh the benefits. It's easy to overemphasise the impact that social welfare has on working rates. The effects depend on which benefits are raised and by how much, the nature of someone's work and their individual circumstances. The academic literature does not show that incremental benefit increases significantly impact working hours. Anti-poverty organisations have been asking for the child payment to be increased over time to £40 from its current weekly level of £27.15. One told me that the idea this would stop people getting jobs was fanciful. Recipients are more likely to say the payment helps them overcome obstacles to work, by going towards transport, childcare costs, education or training. Many households are still reeling from the impact of years of inflation, and the inflation rate is still above the Bank of England's target. The Scottish Government itself has always made clear it sees welfare benefits as critical to reducing poverty. Scottish ministers promise to start mitigating the two-child benefit cap next year and loudly attack the UK Government for reducing welfare benefits – but now, at the same time, are slamming the brakes on the SCP. Mixed messages indeed. The IPPR think tank says 20,000 children would be lifted out of poverty if the SCP were set at £40 per week. So why would Mr Swinney, who has staked his reputation on driving down want among low-income families, suggest limiting the most effective anti-poverty measure we have? Find all articles in our Scotland's Forgotten Children series here Cash, of course. Funding the SCP already costs the Scottish Government more than £450 million a year and the public finances are stretched to breaking point. Swing open the big iron safe under St Andrew's House and there's a cavernous emptiness. The UK Treasury is in the same impoverished state. Perhaps it's not surprising that Mr Swinney doesn't want to put the financial argument front and centre since if he did, he'd have to parry endless questions about how he was finding the cash for road-building or civil service pay rises or arts funding but not child poverty. But it's just a bit too convenient to suggest the benefit is a work disincentive. If you were really concerned it could eventually have that effect, there would be things you could do without freezing it. You could taper it down as a person's earnings rose. A more straightforward alternative would be to allow people who went into employment to continue claiming it for a period, so they could adjust. All governments have a duty to use public funds responsibly, but there are few more responsible uses for our cash than this. Independent modelling suggests a rise to £40 in the SCP would cost £261m more. Money well spent: far too many children live in damp cold homes, miss out on the joy of trips and activities, and know what hunger feels like because there isn't enough money coming in. Lifting children out of poverty is a moral mission, but it's also the soundest of investments. John Swinney during his interview with The Herald (Image: Duncan McGlynn) Poverty is wildly expensive. One of the underlying reasons for the UK's sluggish economic growth is poverty. Poverty is hugely costly to the NHS. Children who grow up with financial security do better at school and have better health throughout their lives. They work more. As Mr Swinney himself puts it, there is an 'economic and social imperative' to tackle child poverty. The Herald and 23 anti-poverty organisations are calling for the two-child benefit cap to be lifted by the UK Government and that is an essential staging post on the route to eradicating child poverty. If Labour don't abolish it, they will face their own reckoning. But the target Mr Swinney talks about so much is Holyrood's and many of the levers lie in his hands. Is there any realistic hope of reaching the 2030 target without substantial increases to the SCP? No, say campaigners. Employability schemes, expanded childcare, free school meals – all of these will have to be boosted further but even then it's very hard to see a route to success without a higher child payment. Here is the danger: the target disappears down the plughole and the collective failure to tackle child poverty turns into a mutual blame game between SNP and Labour. What a sickening thought that is. If Mr Swinney isn't going to raise this benefit any further, then he needs to explain how he is going to reach the 2030 target by alternative means. Otherwise people might suspect him of relying on optimism and crossed fingers. Rebecca McQuillan is a journalist specialising in politics and Scottish affairs. She can be found on X at @BecMcQ and on Bluesky at @
The Herald Scotland
24-04-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
This posturing politician has done trans people no favours
Feelings about the judgment understandably run high, but there is a chasm of difference between expressing regret about it and stating without a shred of evidence that the judges themselves are motivated by hatred. This from an MSP and deputy convener of the equalities, human rights and civil justice committee who has an explicit duty to uphold the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary. If she were on the hard right rather than the hard left, her attack on judges for doing their job would be called Trumpian, but Chapman seems to imagine herself entitled to say whatever she likes from deep inside her bubble of self-righteousness. Read more by Rebecca McQuillan Is it that she just has poor judgment? Does she really see every political issue in terms of moral absolutes? Is she hopelessly clumsy or, forgive me Maggie, not very bright? I claim no insider perspective on that, but struggle to understand what she imagines she is achieving by behaving in this way. Maggie Chapman seems to be deeply challenged when recognising the limits of acceptable political discourse. This is the person who shared a social media message from another account a few days after the Hamas massacre of 1,300 people in October 2023 which stated the attack was not terrorism but rather an act of 'decolonisation'. It was met with a wave of revulsion, forcing her to delete the tweet and apologise. Even her fellow Greens disavowed it. Now she is attacking the judiciary. There is such a thing as standards. If Holyrood is going to accept this conduct, we might as well festoon the place in red and white bunting and call it a circus. Attacking the Supreme Court like this is extraordinary. The judges were not assessing the rights and wrongs of restricting women-only spaces to biological women, their task was to judge what MPs meant by 'sex' in the Equality Act of 2010, legislation which gives protection against discrimination on the basis of sex as well as other characteristics. They ruled, unanimously, that the only interpretation that made sense was biological sex, though added that the legislation continued to give transgender people protections against discrimination and the ruling should not be seen as a triumph by one side over the other. Even if you are disappointed with the outcome, it is evidently a reasoned legal judgment on a highly contentious subject, handled with care. Except not to Chapman: to her, it must be motivated by bigotry. Roddy Dunlop KC, representing the Faculty of Advocates, calls Chapman's comments on the Supreme Court 'irresponsible and reprehensible' and has warned they 'create a risk of danger' to the members of the court. Dunlop said that the Faculty didn't normally involve itself in politics but had a 'duty to speak out in defence of the judiciary when it comes under attack' as it did when the Daily Mail branded judges 'enemies of the people' during the Brexit era and when the previous UK government attacked so-called 'activist lawyers'. He added: 'It really should not require to be said, but the Supreme Court – indeed, all judges – are in post to apply the law. They do not take sides. They decide without fear or favour, consistently with the judicial oath. 'For Ms Chapman to claim that they were swayed by 'bigotry, prejudice and hatred' is outrageous.' The Faculty has called on her to apologise and argued, quite reasonably, that she should consider her position as deputy convener of the equalities committee. Roddy Dunlop KC (Image: PA) Chapman is refusing to apologise and refusing to budge. One wonders how on earth she imagines all this can possibly help trans people. For them, this is a frightening and dispiriting moment. They are waiting anxiously to discover how this ruling will affect what changing rooms they may use or what hospital beds they can access, and feel worried that the ruling will be misrepresented as a way to challenge the legitimacy of their identity. Trans people report feeling afraid of what will come next. What has never helped their cause one iota, however, has been intolerant, abusive rhetoric from their self-appointed spokespeople. For a long time now, there has been a powerful reluctance among the most vocal trans activists to acknowledge that any concerns raised by women about their rights and safeguards might be legitimate, as if this were a zero-sum game in which trans rights can only be advanced if women's concerns are ignored. Infamously the tactic has been to imply that those who raise such concerns are transphobic – even Nicola Sturgeon did that. The charge of bigotry has been hurled about almost indiscriminately. Chapman's attack on the Supreme Court is very much in that vein. Does she not understand that her behaviour makes it all too easy for opponents to dismiss her as an extremist? If Chapman believes that women-only spaces should be open to anyone who feels themselves to be female, she is entitled to express that view and push for changes to make that explicit. What she is not entitled to do is make politically motivated attacks on the judiciary, or wage a campaign to smear and misrepresent anyone she regards as an impediment to her campaign. When the dust settles on this episode, trans people will have an opportunity to reflect on the way those who have led the trans rights campaign have conducted themselves. They may well conclude that some, like Maggie Chapman, have done more harm than good. Rebecca McQuillan is a journalist specialising in politics and Scottish affairs. She can be found on X at @BecMcQ and on Bluesky at @
