Sketch: John Swinney dreams of spring

We all know John Swinney is a religious man, but most recently he seems to have been flirting with a bit of paganism. The first minister, for reasons only known to the first minister, keeps banging on about the changing seasons. He’s very, very excited about spring.

He insists this is because spring will bring to an end a “long dark economic winter”. “No winter lasts forever,” he wisely advises a room of people in his first major speech of 2025. “Longer, brighter days may still be a distance away, but they are coming, of that I have no doubt,” the first minister declares. It’s good to have people in power who know how time and the inclination of the earth’s axis works, rather than just howling at the moon.

Of course, you might assume Swinney just likes a good metaphor. Or at least some focus group has told his communications team that they like a metaphor. And what better way to put the Scottish economy waking up from hibernation and the flowering of fresh political ideas at the forefront of people’s minds than talking about spring?

Perhaps it is just coincidence, then, if Swinney is still first minister in spring, it means he has survived a brutal round of budget negotiations with his sap still flowing. And also, that he is well on his way to staying in post longer than his immediate predecessor. The change of the season has become John Swinney’s personal milestone.

That’s why he’s also enjoyed many Scottish New Year traditions in recent weeks – they involve fire, which “herald the return of the sun; they herald also the coming of the spring”. All those torchlight processions and firework displays must have got him all tearful.

Fire is also a convenient way to get rid of stuff you don’t like. A bonfire of bad ideas, you might call it, and atop that pyre is the National Care Service, the independence prospectus, and cheap trains.

But the FM isn’t all warmth and light. He knows there is a chance he won’t make it to spring, and therefore starts to paint a grim picture of what not passing a budget could look like: cancelled operations. Cuts to art funding. Fewer teacher numbers. Armageddon.

Those with their finger on the political pulse might notice that these are all things that have already happened under an SNP government, bar the actual Day of Judgement. Realising this, Swinney lays it on thicker: public buildings unable to keep their lights on. Medicine rationing. Damaging the “most vulnerable in our land”. Not passing the budget is truly the fifth horseman of the apocalypse. Disease, war and famine will follow, and then… death (at least of a political career).

Unless, of course, MSPs back Swinney’s budget. Catastrophe could be avoided for the low, low price of a handful of votes. It is on the opposition, he insists, to pass this “cohesive and unifying” budget. Not to do so just to make a “political point” would be dangerous. Swinney, the selfless public servant that he is, has never done anything simply to make a political point, you understand. That’s only something charlatans and rogues do.

Still, the OTT end-of-the-world scenario the first minister paints appears to have its desired effect. The next day Anas Sarwar confirms, with a begrudging sigh, that yes, his colleagues “will not vote this budget down”.

His reasoning, he explains, is because the SNP already “has the numbers” to see it pass – with an unnamed “other opposition party” set to back it. And so, since it will pass anyway, regardless of whether Labour backs it or not, Sarwar has decided he will do absolutely nothing at all. He doesn’t believe it is bad enough to vote against. Nor good enough to vote for. A gold medal fence-sitter, is Sarwar.

He does dangle the prospect of Scottish Labour support in front of ministers though. He urges them to “stop pretending that this budget contains an ending of the two-child benefit cap” and actually mitigate it from 1 April. That would get his vote. But perhaps not that of anyone else in his party, given the track record of Scottish Labour MPs only recently voting against the policy’s abolition. He’s probably just hoping you forget that inconvenient fact.

Anyway, his plea falls on deaf ears. Moments later, a press release from the Scottish Government includes a comment from Shona Robison. “People in Scotland will never forgive the Labour Party if it does not vote for… the ending of the two-child cap,” she says.

Sarwar may have got himself in a muddle of his budget position, but he does at least have a point – SNP ministers continue to pretend to be progressive. So much for a new spring under John Swinney.