Andrew Tettenborn

Sturgeon’s foreign policy power grab

(Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

There is certainly a lot to catch the eye in the SNP’s manifesto published on Thursday. If you look you will find a promise of free bicycles and laptops for schoolchildren, a national care service, and a £33bn National Infrastructure Mission, not to mention an undertaking that there will be no income tax rises to pay for it all. Rather less expected, however, is the large proportion of the document devoted to another topic: Scottish foreign relations.

Foreign relations in the context of elections to a purely regional assembly in a country where international issues are reserved for decision centrally? Absolutely. Here are a few examples. Commercially, we read of proposals to develop direct connections between Scottish ports and foreign countries, it being seen as somehow important for Scottish trade not to be demeaned by having to pass through England. There is also an idea to establish Scottish ‘investment hubs’ overseas. These institutions are not elaborated upon but presumably would be something a bit like the Agent-Generals’ offices set up in London by Australian states. Whatever they are, they are apparently to be set up throughout the Nordic and Baltic regions.

Political links get even more coverage. You may not know that Scotland has its own modest taxpayer-funded aid budget, quite independent of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, known as the International Development Fund. This is set to increase by fifty percent, from £10m to £15m; and presumably that is over and above the tidy sum which Holyrood already designates as its ‘external affairs spending’ (up from £24.4m last financial year to £26.5m now).

Besides that there will also, we are told, be a Scottish Council for Global Affairs (to ‘develop critical thinking on international issues’), and in addition a Scottish Institute for Peacekeeping. More widely, the SNP also promises to ‘create a new global affairs framework, underpinned by Scotland’s fundamental values and priorities’, and to make Scotland one of a small number of countries across the world ‘to adopt a feminist foreign policy’.

Downing Street should sit up and take notice of these developments.

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