Glasgow Letter: SNP still nurses ambitions in divided Scotland

Scotland's finance secretary, John Swinney, made history yesterday, becoming the first Scottish minister in more than 300 years to levy on Scots a tax made in Scotland.

Named the land and building transactions tax, it replaces house stamp duty with more rational, progressive rules but it was a paltry thing for a man who a month ago dreamed of controlling all of Scotland’s taxes.

In the wake of last month’s 55 per cent/45 per cent referendum defeat for the independence campaign, Scotland feels an unhappy place, where the victors are not behaving as if they had won, nor the defeated as if they had lost.

Much of the public is exhausted after a two-year battle that was supposed to deliver "a clear, decisive" outcome. In fact, it appears to have settled little. But there have been beneficiaries. Membership of the Scottish National Party (SNP) has tripled, and the party has already turned its attention to destroying Scottish Labour in next year's general election.

Currently, Scotland has 57 MPs. The SNP holds six of those places. Labour has 41, all of which party leader Ed Miliband needs if he is going to be in power after next May.

‘Red Tories’

However, Scottish Labour is in poor shape, with an atrophied organisation, now branded by the SNP as “Red Tories” for siding with the Conservatives in the referendum.

"The Liberal Democrats were supposed to deliver the highlands and the borders in the referendum, and we did. The Tories were supposed to deliver the money, and they did. Labour, on the other hand, was supposed to deliver its traditional heartlands in the central belt, and it didn't," said Liberal Democrats president Tim Farron in Glasgow this week.

The scale of the SNP’s ambition is vast. Already enjoying a Holyrood majority, the party is targeting more than 30 Labour seats in the House of Commons to add to its half dozen.

Swinney's limited power over tax is part of changes made in the Scotland Act, 2012, that will come into force over the next couple of years. More changes will come, on foot of a pre-referendum vow by British prime minister David Cameron, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and Miliband – one directed and led by Cameron's predecessor in 10 Downing Street, Gordon Brown.

In the hours after the vote, Cameron cack-handedly tried to tie extra devolution in Scotland to greater powers for English MPs over English-only legislation in the Commons. That strategy has since been abandoned but it has fuelled the belief among many Scots that Westminster's word could never be trusted and cannot be trusted now.

Disagreements still exist between the Conservatives and Labour over the degree of tax powers that can be devolved to Holyrood, with Labour the reluctant party, not the Tories. However, a settlement will have to be found – and a credible one. The difficulty is that any package will fall short of the pledge made by three party leaders on increased devolutionary powers, or be very easily portrayed as having fallen short.

Farewell tour

Meanwhile, SNP leader

Alex Salmond

is preparing to say goodbye as first minister with a six-week “farewell” tour kin which he wants to talk to “ordinary Scots”.

For his supporters – and he has many – it will be an opportunity to pay homage to a man who brought the United Kingdom to the brink of collapse, a UK that will never be the same again because of him. For his enemies – and he has many of those too – it is a vanity tour by an arrogant leader who refuses to accept in his heart that he was beaten.

In the days after the result, Salmond blamed the elderly for “impeding” the ambitions of the young and left open the possibility that independence could happen without a referendum.

Understandably, there is post-referendum gloom, anger, even despair amongst Yes supporters, who believed in the campaign’s final days that they were going to win.

However, there is an ugliness, too: a refusal by a minority to accept the result, amid a welter of conspiracy-fuelled – but utterly rejected – online claims of vote-rigging.

More worringly, there is a refusal on the part of a far greater number, if still a minority, to accept that the 55 per cent who voted No had the moral right to do so.