A new way to govern Scotland: co-opposition

Labour and Plaid Cymru ran Wales pretty successfully for three years (2021-24) without a formal coalition. Could Swinney and Sarwar take a leaf out of the same boat?

Every day, a new diatribe about Labour betrayal from the SNP crosses my computer screen. It can be as many as five or six daily news releases either accusing the party north and south of the border of betraying Scottish workers, business, civil society and/or of imposing a huge new tax burden (currently +£2bn) on Scotland. And this deluge has been going on since around mid-July.

In that sense, the governing party in Scotland for the past 17.5 years mirrors the front pages of the increasingly rabid right-wing press, the Daily Mail and Telegraph to the fore, which declared war on Keir Starmer at around noon on July 5, the day after the landslide but strangely unconvincing win for Labour. It's relentlessly negative and, often, unfair.

Of course, we're already in campaign mode in the run-up to the Holyrood elections in May 2026 - likely on May 7 or just over 17 months away. And, of course, Labour is equally critical of the SNP's performance in government - and gloating over the SNP drubbing in July when it shrank to just nine MPs. Labour wants to win power so the party governs in Scotland as well as in Westminster and (probably) Wales: a UK version of the American trifecta.

But here's the rub. All this sound and fury contrasts savagely with the latest appeal from the First Minister, John Swinney, for a cross-party collaborative approach to resolving Scotland's fiscal crisis ahead of the December 4 Budget statement just six days away. Here's what he told Holyrood today:

"Opposition for opposition's sake is all well and good where governments have comfortable majorities, but put simply, in the Scottish Parliament today, if there is no collaboration, there is no Budget Bill. We can choose to be mired in party politics, or we can choose to put first and foremost our duty to the people we represent." In other words, pass the Budget or face an early Scottish election with a highly uncertain and unstable outcome. Not least because of Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

Another way

This autumn a few commentators, including Kenny Farquharson on his Jaggy Thistle Substack and this week my European Movement mate Martin Roche in the Herald, have begun taking seriously the threat the Faragistas and the likes of #Together, organisers of the petition urging a fresh UK general election, pose to liberal democracy, tolerant multi-culturalism and well-being.

The suggestion is that Labour and the SNP should combine in some form to defend and foster the social democratic, internationalist and pro-EU policies they both (really) espouse against racist, xenophobic, misogynist forces who are, as in the US and the EU, gaining ground. Reform UK is already polling around 11-12% here before it even gets started. There's bound to be huge sums of money flowing to the Far Right, not least from evangelical Christians and their corporate sponsors in the US.

This goes well beyond the possible Budget deals being cobbled together by Swinney and his finance secretary Shona Robison - whether with the Scottish Greens (despite their manifold resentments) or the LibDems. But it need not be a full-on coalition for government like the Grand Coalitions in Germany under Angela Merkel's chancellorship or indeed the broken SNP-Green deal that gave Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater ministerial office.

It could be a Scottish variant of the "contract parliamentarism" or that lay behind government in Wales during 2021-24, with Labour running a minority government with support from the Nationalist Plaid Cymru. My old friend John Osmond, a former director of the Institute for Welsh Affairs who served as special adviser to Adam Price, Plaid's then leader during that period, describes this as "co-opposition" in his recent book*.

He shows how this co-operation agreement, drawing upon earlier models in Sweden and New Zealand, helped deliver through the Senedd big strides in childcare and parliamentary reform (full PR and more AMs) among 46 policy areas where it worked. It collapsed in May this year after Mark Drakeford stood down as first minister and was replaced, controversially, by Vaughan Gethin. There was no coalition - and no Plaid minister. But it notched successes.

A big ask

Could such an arrangement work here? Ah hae ma doots, natch. But we in Scotland need positive momentum to get us out of the stasis that blights the country - and lift us out of the self-regarding parochialism that stifles policy innovation. Of course, this would require a considerable change of politics, with enemies agreeing to act as friends while working to improve people's outcomes. Tackling poverty, the educational attainment gap (at last!), health and housing, the twin digital and green transition and so on.

This could, above all, bridge the binary divide in Scottish politics between nationalism and unionism, with both big parties agreeing that independence remains on the back-burner, seeking greater devolved powers and promoting a distinctly Scottish reset in relations with the EU while mitigating the self-harming damage wrought by Brexit - and the harm yet to come under Trump 2.0.

* The Politics of Co-opposition, Welsh Academic Press, 300pp, £20