You can tell a Government’s priorities by what they don’t say
A full two weeks after the Scottish elections, we finally know what the new Scottish Government looks like. The SNP have built another minority administration without a formal coalition with another party, though that help will still be required when they start looking to pass legislation.
Following his election as First Minister on Tuesday, John Swinney appointed his Cabinet Secretaries and junior ministers yesterday. As of the writing of this briefing, we still don’t know the full details of the portfolios of each of these appointments, but we can tell a lot about the priorities of the incoming Government by the titles of each of these appointments.
In the Scottish Parliamentary system, there are few roles that are actually formally fixed (Scotland can’t not have a First Minister) and there are some roles that would be unthinkable to not have (like a Cabinet Secretary for Finance – as this role is responsible for setting the annual budget) but other titles are much more about signalling the priorities of Government as they are about the job themselves or the person who gets it. Whether a role like “Energy” is made a senior Cabinet Secretary position, is given to a junior minister or is absent at all would all say a lot about what the First Minister actually thinks about energy as a matter of policy and politics.
As it stands, this new team does, in fact, relegate Energy from its previous position as a Cabinet job to a junior minister, which given that the energy transition is very likely one of the most pressing jobs in national politics everywhere at the moment, is a fairly glaring choice. The complete absence of “Net Zero” (previously a Cabinet position and prior to that one of the major roles involved in the SNP/Green cooperation agreement) is a massive signal that climate obligations are simply not a priority for the First Minister.
The dropping of a dedicated Housing Secretary to the role being just the second part of a Cabinet position after Social Justice is similarly stark given that the second most important job in Scotland right now is fixing the housing emergency (in fact, both the housing emergency and the climate emergency are intimately linked – a fact made clear by the UK Climate Change Committee just yesterday when it said that the UK’s houses were not designed for the climate they are about to experience).
Another role folded into a much bigger portfolio has been culture – previously ignored in favour of Angus Robertson’s other jobs in international affairs, it now risks playing second-fiddle to education within Mairi McAllan’s brief.
Care is another concerning loser here. One of Common Weal’s big concerns with the Government’s policies towards care was that it would be subsumed under the much more headline-grabbing crises within the Health brief and the combined role of a Cabinet Secretary for Health and Care is certainly a sign of that, as is the splitting of care responsibilities between three different junior ministers (Alison Thewliss getting Community Care, Maree Todd responsible for Mental Wellbeing, and Siobhian Brown assigned to Children, Young People and The Promise). This risks a fragmentation of care responsibilities, a disconnection of strategies and possibly even a blurring of who should be taking care of a particular issue at a particular time (which of those three ministers is ultimately responsible for a child with mental health problems who is in need of support from a community social worker?).
It’s arguably worse for older people than for children. Not that long ago, Scotland had a Cabinet Secretary for Older People, but this role was dropped in 2023, and the role folded into the portfolio responsibilities for the Equalities minister. Once again, we do not see Older People get mentioned at all in any of the Ministerial titles, so we’ll have to see if and where it appears in the list of portfolios when they are published.
Independence and the Constitution are also both gone, as Swinney appears to have taken them into his own portfolio.
It’s not all downgrades, though. One new Cabinet Secretary position, now held by Ivan McKee, is the role of Public Sector Reform. Not the public sector as a whole, just the reform of it. It is widely being briefed as a ‘Cuts Commission’ rather than something that will reform the public sector in the upwards direction to restore already-lost public services. This, again, says much about the priorities of the First Minister and his agenda for the next five years.
Common Weal will, of course, keep pushing the Government and its new (and returning) ministers with our own agenda, and a minority government may well give some scope for lobbying the other parties to help us. Just because something is no longer a priority of the Government right now doesn’t mean that we can’t push them into making it one.