Proposals for a price cap on staple foods have dominated coverage of the SNP’s election manifesto.
This has been a spot of good fortune for John Swinney. Every minute spent on the economic illiteracy of price controls is a minute not spent scrutinising the rest of his manifesto, which is scarcely more credible.
The pledge to introduce an artificial price ceiling on certain essential grocery items is particularly egregious.
For one, it denies us information – for that is what prices are – on market trends and the impact of inflation.
For another, it is a perennially counterproductive mechanism that hurts the consumer in the end.
As the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) warns, price caps ‘could have the unintended consequence of creating shortages of these items, by causing demand to exceed supply’.
They could cause suppliers to ‘deliberately restrict the availability of these items in Scotland’ and, especially worrying, might see ‘reformulation’ of existing products for the Scottish market – i.e. the replacement of quality ingredients with cheap alternatives to cut costs.
Trickery
The cost of living crisis is hitting families hard, especially at the supermarket checkout, and how we all might wish there was an easy answer to the problem.
John Swinney at the launch of the SNP's manifesto last week
There is not, because every intervention in the market supposedly on the side of the consumer produces a reaction from the retailer or supplier.
Imperil their profits and they will discern another way to maintain them, and in doing so they will most likely cause more pain for the consumer.
Markets respond best to aggregate behaviour, not centralised diktat, and a distorted market will always find a way to undo the distortion.
Prices can no more be capped than a top-flight football team can be prevented from scoring goals.
A market is what it does. Telling it to do something else creates a new market and with it unforeseen consequences.
Price caps are bad policy because they are bad economics, but the caps are bad for another reason: the SNP has no intention of introducing them.
They are a piece of electoral trickery, a conscious deceit of those voters to whom this policy is targeted.
If you tasked an AI bot with producing this manifesto, it would refuse on ethical grounds.
Who is the audience for this pledge? Families on lower-middle incomes who are struggling to maintain their quality of life as inflation and taxes gobble up ever more of their earnings or savings.
Families on much lower incomes, for whom the cost-of-living crisis is not about having to change supermarkets or forgo holidays but a matter of parents skipping meals so their children don’t go to bed hungry.
Preying upon these people and their desperation, peddling false hope to trick a vote out of them, is beneath contempt.
Swinney with candidates at the launch of the SNP's election bus
John Swinney and his ministers extract lavish salaries and frankly decadent pensions from the public purse.
They have no clue about the kind of nerve-shredding, soul-deadening precariousness some families live in.
They know this policy isn’t going to happen. They know it would require further devolution of powers to Holyrood. Know it would wreak havoc on supermarket suppliers and other firms that do cross-Border business.
Know it would only result in prices soaring for items not covered by the cap. Swinney is dodgier than a second-hand car dealer: the old banger he’s flogging won’t even make it out of the forecourt.
True, all political parties tell porkies at election time, and the rest of the year round, but there is something inexcusably cynical about misleading the electorate on their ability to feed their family. All is fair in love, war and elections, but there ought to be red lines.
There are no red lines for Swinney. This melodramatic humbug prates at every opportunity about his reputation as Honest John, about his essential decency, about how his opponents are down in the gutter. How unsporting of them to encroach on his territory.
The duplicity is by no means limited to price caps. The manifesto brags of ‘the lowest business rates poundage’ in Britain. As the IFS points out, this is simply ‘not true’; the poundage rate is lower in England among buildings with an annual rateable value above £18,000.
The vow to expand childcare funding sounds bold, but dig into the details and it becomes clear that those with the greatest need of this support could end up benefiting least.
In theory, extra subsidies should help out-of-work parents return to employment, but since the expansion is means-tested, the additional subsidy would stop the moment parents began earning over a certain level.
For the unemployed, it could function as a disincentive to find work, trapping them on Universal Credit for even longer.
The Nationalists have sworn off increases to rates of income tax but this promise stretches credibility given the scale of additional spending being proposed. While they insist this would be covered by additional backroom efficiencies, their sums don’t add up.
Even after cutting bureaucracy to the bone, there would still be a shortfall that could only be met by ramping up taxes, taking an axe to public expenditure, or doing both.
This manifesto is a masterpiece of mendacity, a farrago of fabulism, a slick and shiny collation of all the worst ideas and instincts in politics.
It puts a fresh gloss on long-debunked and deeply destructive Scottish superstitions: that the state is the answer to every human need, that a society can tax its way to prosperity, that aspiration is something shameful, and that self-interest ought to be punished and deterred.
Courage
The SNP is supposed to be a nationalist party and yet there is no ambition for Scotland in its manifesto.
No spine of courage, no keenness of mind. This is not the prospectus of a party bursting with ideas, raring to tear up the old verities and attack the problems of today with fresh thinking and new approaches.
Tax cuts to stimulate growth? Root-and-branch public sector reform? A bustling financial services hub, a nuclear-powered clean-energy mecca, a defence or medical technology innovator? No, just more of the same.
Even its vision of independence is stultifyingly stale. Twelve years on from the referendum, the most basic questions of currency, deficit and pensions remain unanswered.
But it is truly remarkable that after more than a decade to reinvigorate the case for separation, and to reflect new global realities (Brexit, Trump, Ukraine, energy crises and global instability), the SNP’s offering is much as before.
Revolutionaries for the status quo, they want to change the constitution but not the country.
Any party with a shred of dignity would be ashamed to place this manifesto before the voting pubic.
To admit that, after 19 years in power, this was the best they could do. When this is the calibre of sales pitch from the governing party, I would not be at all surprised if the big story of this election proves to be a low turnout.
The public has every right to be scunnered by the state of Scottish politics, though they must also recognise that nothing can change until they oust the SNP.
On the strength of this flimsy, facile document they ought not only to evict John Swinney from Bute House but see to it that an SNP leader never again sets foot in the place.