Adopted Domain

"Naw they couldnae" as Holyrood Chronicles succinctly put it.

The SNP lost three out of 1, 2, 3 elections to Labour this week. Even though Labour themselves thought they were losing right up to the call. Needless to say Labour are delighted, nay overjoyed , at the fact that there seems to be some substance to the Brown bounce.

Are there lessons to learn from all this? In Glenrothes and Fife, Labour made astute candidate choices. They rejected the old guard, and chose new, but well kent, local faces with no previous public political convictions. This contrasts to the SNP whose candidates political exploits and ambitions were well known. The similarities don't stop there though.

In both Glenrothes and the Forth Ward, Labour could easily campaign on local social justice issues against the SNP who are in power in both local authorities. In Glenrothes, the issue was means tested care for the elderly. In Forth ward, the issue was the huge cuts made to a range of services in the area as a result of a reallocation of 'regeneration money,' to better off areas. Certainly there are people in Forth ward who almost take this personally and see it as Cllr Cardownies (the leader of the Edinburgh SNP group] personal crusade to settle old scores against his old Labour colleagues. Despite the fact that he defected to the SNP from Labour because he didn't like the New Labour drift to the right.

So local elections, won on local issues. But is that the whole story? It's notable that over in Baillieston Labour won, even when they control the local council, and in an area that had swung so far towards the SNP a few months before. Were those previous SNP victories down to local people punishing corrupt local Labour politicians and nothing to do with a general swing to the SNP afterall?

All the papers are claiming that the way Alex Salmond has handled the banking crisis has lost the SNP critical momentum, whilst Brown has benefited. There is perhaps some truth in this, but also I wonder whether there has been an "Obama effect" that has infused left leaning voters with a new confidence. I know - everyone is claiming an Obama effect on everything, but bear with me. Where people had become very cynical of the New Labour narrative, could it be that Obama has articulated a new vision of a vaguely progressive left politics that might rub off on voters wavering between the SNP and Labour?

Afterall, Obama has had more media covereage here than any of the local Scottish elections. And concious that this perhaps sounds trite, the US election has perhaps inspired people to believe in the power of democracy to change things and shown everyone that politics can be about a little bit more than just the narrow constitutional issues that animate the SNP. Whether it comes to pass or not, the hype around the Obama victory has given people hope that they can come together, despite their differences, around a progressive project. This message is anathema to the divisive politics of the SNP.

This, combined with the ongoing economic turmoil, says to me that parties that can successfully lay claim to some form of track record on social justice and dealing with crises are going to benefit. If this is the end of the SNP honeymoon, then it is because the gloss is coming off their populist polices for the people who aren't represented by a lobby group with a loud voice - the SNP losers. The fact is that the origninal lobby group for the poorest people in Scotland, who seem to be the main SNP losers - is the Labour party. Even if they haven't been very good at coming up with any solutions.

However, we can take the Obama link too far. His rhetorical skills may have encouraged people to lean leftwards, but his central theme was "change." And, the fact that Labour won all three elections means nothing will change locally. Labour are still in power in Glasgow and Westminster, and the balance of power in Edinburgh remains the same. It means the Gordon Brown will probably lead Labour into the next general election even if Labour in Westminster are still faced with the same problems. If Labour learn anything from this success, I'd hope it is that they must find a way to connect, and show they can move beyond the New Labour project. If Labour see this as an endorsement of the status quo and fail to change, then their traditional voters might yet be tempted to vote for another party instead come the next general election.

How did the other parties fair? The SNP did make gains on Labour in all the elections, but usually at the expense of the other parties and the LibDems in particular. The LibDems lost their deposit in Glenrothes,as they did in Glasgow East, coming in fourth behind the Tories. Tavish Scott must surely be starting to worry. It seems that far from challenging Labour, could it be that in some parts of Scotland the SNP are really becoming the credible protest vote for the more conservative, middle way, (with a small 'c') middle classes that the LibDems used to be?

The Greens stood in both council elections. Kate Joester, the Green candidate in Edinburgh did well to roughly hold onto the Green share of the vote, despite the SNP squeeze, so the Greens remain in fifth place in the ward. The talk in the Edinburgh branch is of how much extra work it would take to get Greens into fourth place. Afterall, it is a ward that elects 4 councillors. That is probably a decision that will need to be taken at the next local government elections. Sadly, the Green candidate in Glasgow got just 32 votes, beaten even by the BNP.

The Scottish local tax discussions lurch on one step further with the recent admission from John Swinney that the SNP are considering some of the LibDems proposals for a Local Income Tax (LIT) that is set by local authorities.

Although regular AD readers will know that I'm a fan of a Land Value Tax (LVT) not LIT, it must be said that Labours description of the proposals as having 32 different rates, for each local authority, is disingenuous to say the least, and doesn't do them much credit really.

The SNP propose to cap the maximum tax at 3p in the pound, so there will in theory be 4 different rates between 0p and 3p. However, I doubt very much that any local authority is going to choose to go below the 3p cap, particularly as the SNP have effectively given the green light to the 3p rate as this was the level the SNP themselves proposed.

Realistically then, employers will be unfortunate if they have to cope with more than 2 different rates of LIT. But even if they do, they're already set up to make these deductions. Employers already deduct trade union dues, bike to work fees, pensions, national insurance, charity donations, student loan repayments and goodness know what else from peoples salaries. In fact, I think the proposals would cut some council costs and bureaucracy, as they wouldn't need to employ hundreds of people across the country to chase people for council tax.

To me, that aspect of the SNP/LIT plan is perfectly workable so all those parties who deride it as unworkable probably need to come up with a different way to fight it.

However, the SNP may decide to tax income from shares too. Now, this is a good thing, in principle, as one of my main concerns about the LIT is that it really will affect the middle classes and the poorest workers disproportionately. If you subsist from 'unearned income' from owning shares, than you won't have to pay much in the way of LIT, unless income from shares is included. However, policing this really is going to be tricky, and it will require a bureaucracy of some sort to make it happen. Even then, I think the LIT proposals if implemented will still spawn a whole rash of offshore, or maybe just English based, share based tax avoidance schemes.

If I was self-employed, or had a nice employer, what's to stop me paying myself the minimum wage in Scotland, and paying the rest of my salary as dividends to an English based family member, or trust or whatever it is that people do to avoid income tax as it is? One of the reasons I prefer a LVT is because you can't hide land in an offshore trust, or move it south of the border. Perhaps the opposition parties should therefore be critiquing the LIT supporters not for producing unworkable proposals, but for favouring unfair ones?