First in a long line of election years gets underway

As far as legislation is concerned, it was agreed with little or no fanfare. Only eight MSPs – including the minister charged with its passage, as well as the convener of the committee asked to scrutinise it – spoke during this month’s Stage 1 debate, which lasted a mere 46 minutes.

The Scottish Elections (Dates) Bill, which will extend the next Holyrood term to five years to avoid a clash with the UK general election, is more about procedure than policy. Yet, it promises an election of one sort or another in six of the next seven years. The electoral merry-go-round, then, shows no signs of slowing down.

As MSPs returned to Holyrood, it was clear that campaign mode is fast kicking in. Amid the prospect of two referendums over and above two elections in the space of two years, it is easy to see why. Last week, Nicola Sturgeon used her first Bute House press briefing of 2016 to declare she was “increasingly concerned” in the wake of reports a vote on the UK’s future membership of the European Union could take place as early as June.

The pro-European campaign, which two days earlier had drafted in former SNP senior special advisor Kevin Pringle, “need to get away from, and David Cameron in particular needs to get away from, the very narrow focus on these renegotiation issues and make the big picture case for staying in,” according to the First Minister.

The time to do so, Sturgeon suggested, is running out if a snap referendum is the Prime Minister’s chosen course. For Cameron, the sooner a referendum is held the better.

The PM last week insisted that the UK Government must remain a “united, harmonious, mutually respectful team” as he laid out the rules for ministers who find themselves on different sides of the referendum campaign. The longer the lead-in, the more chance there is of those rules being less well observed. With the PM hoping to have a deal forged within weeks, it is unlikely to do him any good to run out the clock on his ‘by the end of 2017’ pledge for holes to be found and cabinet ministers to squabble.

After all, it is much more helpful if talk of internal ructions remains confined to the opposition benches. Shadow attorney general Catherine McKinnell last week became the fourth Labour MP to quit the frontbench. The Newcastle North MP joined Jonathan Reynolds, Kevan Jones and Stephen Doughty, whose face is now much more familiar outwith Westminster circles given he resigned live on air.

Indeed, it was the fallout from Jeremy Corbyn’s reshuffle – in truth, it didn’t really live up to the hype that accompanies the word’s very mention – that claimed more casualties than the actual event. Only shadow Europe minister, Pat McFadden, and shadow culture secretary, Michael Dugher, were shown the exit, while Maria Eagle was dropped from shadow defence secretary to the culture brief.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell claimed the three shadow ministers who stepped down on the same day “pursued their own particular narrow politics” as he turned his ire on the Blairite campaign group, Progress. That led Scotland’s only Labour MP to enter the fray, with Ian Murray stressing that “some people in the shadow cabinet, including the shadow chancellor, should really ramp down the rhetoric”.

Of course, Murray can speak from a position of strength – even if his party’s polling fortunes north of the border belie such an assertion. Having found himself in a contingent of one, his shadow Scottish secretary job is his for as long as he wants it.

The same cannot be said for his colleagues at Holyrood, however. Voting is taking place throughout this month after the party released the candidates for its regional lists ahead of May’s Scottish Parliament election. The fact deputy leader Alex Rowley – within three months of landing the job – U-turned on a pledge not to take an automatic spot at the top of his party’s Mid Scotland and Fife regional list, captures the level of optimism within Labour circles. The Cowdenbeath MSP said the party “needs stability within its leadership”; a roundabout way of saying his majority of 5,488 rests on somewhat shaky ground.

For Labour, then, there is a need to accentuate those policy areas that demonstrate different priorities from the SNP. For the SNP, there is a need to accentuate those policy areas that demonstrate different priorities beyond independence. Hence, Sturgeon insisting last week that boosting educational attainment is “the key plank of what I want to achieve in a third-term SNP government”.

There is a history, after all, to the “once-in-a-generation” phrase Kezia Dugdale used on 5 January in her first policy speech – which promised to help Scots on to the housing ladder by offering additional cash towards a deposit – ahead of May’s election.

It didn’t help that McDonnell – in an interview with Holyrood a few weeks earlier – had singled out one of Labour’s principal failures upon entering Downing Street in 1997 as being “we inherited a housing crisis from the Tories which we then exacerbated by not building”. Sturgeon duly exploited it in the first FMQs of the new year.

In fairness, Dugdale had underlined the “urgent need to build more social housing, more affordable homes to rent” 48 hours earlier, telling an audience in Edinburgh that the party leadership would “say more about that in the weeks ahead”.

Weeks became hours as communities spokesman, Ken Macintosh, confirmed in writing to the FM that Scottish Labour, if elected, would meet the demand made by housing charities and build 60,000 affordable homes over the lifetime of the next parliament. It had the same ‘anything you can do, we can do better’ whiff of former leader Jim Murphy’s 1,000 extra nurses pledge, given the SNP’s commitment to build 50,000 affordable homes over the next five years. Importantly, though, it could help position the election campaign beyond the new financial powers coming to Holyrood and onto their potential use.

It was a message that Secretary of State for Scotland David Mundell was keen to underline last week as he urged the parties to set out how they would use powers transferred under the Scotland Bill sooner rather than later. “So significant are the changes to its powers and so immense the potential for their use, the Scotland Bill will create, in effect, a new Scottish Parliament. In tech-speak, you could say that this will be ‘Holyrood 2.0’,” Mundell declared in a speech in Edinburgh.

A clever soundbite, though one that, ironically, falls foul of so-called tech speak given Twitter doesn’t allow hashtags containing punctuation.

That apart, this election promises a different dynamic. Finance Secretary John Swinney was able to wriggle out of raising income tax in last month’s budget by claiming that powers under the 2012 Scotland Act did not offer the flexibility to target any particular hike. With the UK and Scottish governments both saying they’re keen to reach an agreement on the fiscal framework underpinning the Scotland Bill by next month, Swinney has confirmed that he’ll be back before parliament ahead of May to outline his “longer term intentions” on income tax.   

As for Mundell’s own party, forecasts of a resurgence are likely to resurface as we get closer to May – even though the Conservatives secured their lowest share of the vote north of the border in 50 years in last year’s general election. Mundell has said it is “perfectly possible” for the Conservatives to overtake Labour in four months’ time after a ComRes survey for the Independent on Sunday last month showed a seven-point lead.

Ruth Davidson has even likened her party to Czech car manufacturer Skoda and their subsequent takeover by Volkswagen, in an effort to encapsulate her attempts to breathe fresh life into the Scottish Conservatives. Perhaps she saw the latest Skoda Octavia used by Swinney sitting outside St Andrew’s House as a sign of hope she is on the right track.