As the General Election campaign enters full swing pundits and pollsters are falling over themselves trying to find out who will become the next Government, based largely on the fates of dozens of swing seats – most across the south east of England. Very little attention so far is being given to Scotland. This is despite Labour driving around Glasgow constituencies asking for folk to vote Labour to “keep the Tories out”. Never mind that Labour’s majority in most Glasgow constituencies is massive – 60% in some cases, that the Tories struggle to hold their deposit in many Glasgow seats and across Scotland Labour hold 40 seats compared to only 1 Tory seat.

Scotland’s been ignored in most of the election coverage because it is taken for granted that it will overwhelmingly vote Labour. It doesn’t matter which way Scotland votes in the national picture, because swing seats in middle England will determine who governs the UK. This meant despite Scotland repeatedly voting Labour throughout the 80’s had no effect on who governed us.

The electoral contest in Scotland has always been different from the UK, as it’s dominated by a rivalry between Labour and the SNP (and in recent years the Lib dems). The SNP have always stood on a platform of “standing up for Scotland” and argued that the only way to keep the Tories out of governing Scotland for good is to go independent.

With a hung parliament now a likelihood, a small but significant SNP group (alongside Welsh Nationalists) could extract concessions out of the larger UK wide parties as part of a coalition Government. The SNP say they’ll bargain with the major parties to spare Scotland harsh Westminster imposed cuts – that More Nats means Less Cuts. While in England a variety of smaller parties – Greens, BNP, UKIP, Respect – are trying to get seats, and have had some success in the past in other elections the SNP make that harder in Scotland. This is because as a party the SNP can play to an extremely varied vote – they can be a party of rural conservatism in the North East of Scotland, and to the left of Labour in Glasgow.

Despite this variety the SNP’s overall programme is still significantly to the left of Labour – opposition to war in Iraq (but not Afghanistan), opposed to Trident nuclear weapons, against the unfair council tax, against privatisation of schools and hospitals. When the SSP has done well in elections, it has been predominantly SNP votes it takes. The SNP has always had a vote from progressive, Left-wing Scots who are angry at Labour’s shift to the right. But do the SNP deserve the reputation of being progressive, left of centre, and in this election, champions of Scotland who will stand against cuts?

The SNP might be able to pose left and opposed to cuts when they stand for Westminster but their record in Holyrood and local councils speaks different. Right after winning the 2007 elections the SNP alongside the Liberals in Edinburgh City council tried to cut 22 schools. Thanks to the opposition of school pupils, unions and their parents – which SSY and the SSP both took part in – the SNP backed down from their plans to slash education in Edinburgh.

They’ve been a lot more successful in other places though – in Renfrewshire the SNP council has imposed hikes in charges for the warden service for the elderly, and is proposing shutting down the school bus service for kids and Johnstone swimming pool. They’ve also got Edinburgh’s services back in their line of sights again – proposing to cut 6 community centres. The SNP have also attacked council workers pay and conditions in West Dunbartonshire and suspended SSP councillor Jim Bollan for supporting the workers in this council.

When the SNP took power one of the first things it did was to freeze the council tax. The SSP spent years campaigning against the council tax, which was a marginally fairer version of the poll tax, but still a tax which does not take account of how much income the taxpayer has. The SNP was shifted to the left by this campaigning and has won support on demands to abolish the tax entirely. Freezing council tax is quite right given how it disproportionately punishes low paid workers, and the SSP has proposed a Scottish Service Tax that would raise more money and shift the burden of tax from the poor to the rich. Unfortunately just freezing the council tax, as the SNP have done without changing the tax system has meant less funds for public services and a necessity for cuts.

The SNP faced opposition from other parties on the issue of the council tax but never pushed forward for reform of the council tax to shame the lib dems in particular for not backing some alternative. Nor did they seriously try and mobilise community organisations, unions, etc to demand Scotland have real control over it’s resources to pay for decent services. The reality is that the SNP whilst having some Left wing MSP’s and councillors has also had a Thatcherite wing who don’t believe the rich should pay more tax. Alex Salmond declared that Scots opposition to Thatcher was based on her social policies not her economic ones – a bit astounding when you consider most popular revulsion of Maggie in Scotland lies in the destruction of industry, mass unemployment and poverty her economic plans caused.

The SNP continue to argue for Thatcherite economics – one of their flagship policies for big business is a cut in corporation tax from 30% to 20%.  Corporation tax was already slashed under the Tory governments in the 80’s and early 90’s, and lost revenue increased through the use of indirect taxes like VAT which spiked up to 17.5%. This now means that the poorest fifth of society pays more in tax as a % than the richest fifth. Under the SNP’s plans, the poorest section of people in Scotland would pay almost double a % of their income in tax than corporations would in tax. This tax cut is justified on the basis that wealth will “trickle down” – that tax cuts for the rich will increase investment in the economy, and this will eventually benefit the low paid and working class majority. The reality however is that when the Tories enacted these tax changes child poverty in the UK tripled. If the SNP are allowed to cut corporation tax there will be less money in the coffers for jobs and services, and more cuts.

There is a whole other raft of issues that the SNP are on quite a different wavelength from some of their left-wing and progressive supporters; on Afghanistan they only call for a “rethink” of the mission, not troop withdrawal; they took money from homophobe Brian Souter and dropped their commitment to re-regulating Scotland’s rigged and privatised bus transport. Alex Salmond also calls for a lowering of the abortion limit from 24 to 20 weeks, which would force a small but abused minority of women to seek the backstreets if they wanted an abortion at 24 weeks.

Voting for the SNP may be more left-wing in many respects than Labour, but they are by no means committed to opposing all cuts like the SSP is, or to redistributing wealth from rich to poor. Their plans for corporation tax would just be another salvo in a continuing war to extract more and more money from working class people to the wealthiest. Their independence was based on Scotland being like Ireland, a “Celtic Tiger” of low wages and lwo taxes with our economy based almost entirely on the finance industry. The SNP have done great damage to the cause of independence by attaching an independent Scotland to an economy based on the casino. Only the SSP has consistently stood against any and all cuts to public services in the past 10 years, with a commitment to a Scotland that is a republic, that abolishes poverty, low pay and involvement in foreign wars. If you want left-wing champions for Scotland don’t vote for a kiddy on SNP to do it, vote for what you wanted, vote SSP.

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