The latest shock to hit the nationalist blogosphere is the revelation that the First Minister Humza Yousaf has recently broken bread with the billionaire Sir Brian Souter, the Stagecoach bus magnate. The encounter took place at a prayer breakfast last month and is regarded by some as a sign that Yousaf is trying to build bridges with the business community.
No one knows what transpired in Yousaf’s meeting with the independence-supporting philanthropist. It may simply have been an attempt by the First Minister, a practising Muslim, to show his ecumenicism. Souter, after all, attends the evangelical Church of the Nazarene in his home town of Perth. However, there may also have been a more pecuniary motivation for the head-to-head.
Souter used to be one of the SNP’s biggest donors, contributing at least £1 million to SNP coffers before 2014, at which point Nicola Sturgeon became leader. He hasn’t contributed a penny to the party since then. Indeed, the SNP has managed to alienate nearly all of its wealthy supporters. As The Spectator reported last month, the SNP hasn’t had a significant donation from a living person since 2021. Those it has received have been bequests from SNP supporters who’ve passed away. This has left the party increasingly dependent on public money and subscriptions from its dwindling membership base. This is in contrast to the party under Sturgeon’s predecessor: business-friendly Alex Salmond, a former economist for the Royal Bank of Scotland, managed to attract over £8.2 million in donations from individuals and companies in the seven years he served as First Minister.
This donor drought may not be unconnected with the fact the SNP has hardly enamoured itself with the business community since Salmond stood down. Sturgeon showed little interest in the private sector, though she went through the motions, and was clearly more concerned with redistribution of wealth than its creation with measures like the Scottish child payment and free childcare. She opposed development of the North Sea oil industry and, in her 2019 TED talk, called for economic growth to be deprioritised in favour of the ‘wellbeing economy’.
Sturgeon’s deposit return scheme, which has been postponed again until 2025 ‘at the earliest’, alienated thousands of small businesses who said that the charges could drive them to the wall. The circular economy minister Lorna Slater has insisted that the scheme is ‘based on the polluter pays principle’, a statement that was interpreted by drinks manufacturers and others as an attempt by the SNP government to blame them for choices made by consumers. Meanwhile property owners feel like they’re having a hard time of it too: private landlords took the Scottish government to court over the 3 per cent cap on rent increases, which doesn’t apply to social landlords. The minister for tenants’ rights, Patrick Harvie, has also threatened to ban the letting of private properties that don’t meet tough new environmental standards.
During the March leadership election, Yousaf’s main rival former, finance secretary Kate Forbes, upset the Scottish Green party and the nationalist left by campaigning on an explicitly pro-business agenda for which she was criticised as a closet Tory. She promised to ‘reset the relationship with business’ and ‘make Scotland an attractive place to do business’. Forbes ran Yousaf close in the final leadership vote and he now appears to be adopting her rhetoric word for word, insisting he too wants a ‘reset‘. To that end, he set up a New Deal for Business Group.
But the actions of the ‘First Activist’, as Yousaf likes to call himself, go some way short of a reset. Admittedly, he has paused plans to curb advertising of alcoholic drinks and toned down his rhetoric on oil and gas — yet David Lonsdale, director of the Scottish Retail Consortium and who initially praised ‘the new accord with commerce’, is already disillusioned. Retailers are angry that Yousaf’s promised review of non-domestic rates hasn’t lowered them to be on par with those in England. And, in more bad news for the SNP, it has been predicted that businesses will likely demand millions of pounds in compensation from the Scottish government over the deposit return scheme. The party’s own politicians aren’t happy either: the failure to deliver promised upgrades to roads like the A9 has provoked threats of resignation from SNP MSP Fergus Ewing.
The Scottish government is also committed to increasing taxation on higher earners. Yousaf and his wellbeing economy secretary Neil Gray — there is no dedicated minister for business since the resignation of Ivan McKee in April — promise more progressive taxation. The Scottish budget was forecast to face a billion pound ‘black hole’ following increased spending on social security alongside other policies. However the awkward truth, as the independent Fraser of Allander Institute has pointed out, is that there just aren’t enough wealthy individuals left in Scotland to pay the higher taxes necessary to close it. Unfortunately, wellbeing doesn’t pay the bills.
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