{"id":550057,"date":"2026-04-25T13:49:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T13:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/550057\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T13:49:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T13:49:10","slug":"keir-starmer-has-given-scottish-nationalism-a-booster-shot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/550057\/","title":{"rendered":"Keir Starmer Has Given Scottish Nationalism a Booster Shot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sixty-one years old, bald and bespectacled, with the inoffensive bearing of a mid-level German administrator, Swinney is an unlikely nationalist savior. He is a ranking member of Scotland\u2019s devolutionary elites; a career politician who has raised<\/a> income taxes, junked<\/a> landmark election pledges, and cut<\/a> college funding. He has none of Salmond\u2019s strategic brilliance and even less of Sturgeon\u2019s celebrity appeal.<\/p>\n

Sixty-one years old, bald and bespectacled, with the inoffensive bearing of a mid-level German administrator, Swinney is an unlikely nationalist savior.<\/p>\n

Logically, he should be despised by the Scottish electorate. But he isn\u2019t. Instead, the SNP leader enjoys a modest<\/a> approval rating of plus 1 percent and remains more popular than any of his potential rivals for the position of first minister. Why?<\/p>\n

Explanations vary. One theory is that, following the chaotic departures of Sturgeon and Yousaf, the rancid fallout<\/a> from Salmond\u2019s resignation, and the Covid-era splintering<\/a> of the independence movement through social media, Swinney has reimposed discipline on the SNP, ruthlessly ditching the party\u2019s most controversial<\/a> policy proposals and streamlining its pitch to the Scottish public.<\/p>\n

Another is that Swinney\u00a0radiates stability at a time of rampant populist angst. According to Ipsos MORI<\/a>, Scottish voters view Swinney as the Holyrood leader who \u201cmost understands the problems facing Scotland,\u201d who is \u201cmost in touch with ordinary people.\u201d and who is \u201cmost honest\u201d\u00a0\u2014 remarkable feedback for a politician with nearly twenty years of incumbency under his belt.<\/p>\n

Latter-day Blairism remains central to Swinney\u2019s politics. In recent months, he has worked with global fossil fuel firms to attack<\/a> Labour\u2019s Energy Profits Levy,\u00a0a windfall tax on the returns of oil and gas companies operating in the North Sea. As part of a broader drive to slash Scotland\u2019s budget deficit, he has also proposed cutting up to twenty thousand<\/a> public sector jobs over the next five years if reelected.<\/p>\n

Such policies are typical of Swinney\u2019s enduring neoliberal instincts. However, Swinney 2.0 has shrewdly sought to deepen, rather than dilute, the SNP\u2019s center-left identity. Like Sturgeon, he cites the \u201ceradication<\/a>\u201d of child poverty as his defining mission. Like Salmond, he casts the SNP as an anti-imperial party, opposed on principle to nuclear weapons and critical of Western support for the \u201cgenocidal<\/a>\u201d Israeli state.<\/p>\n

As the election nears, Swinney, ever the pragmatist, has sought to amplify the SNP\u2019s redistributive credentials. At the party\u2019s manifesto launch in Glasgow on April 16, he announced<\/a> plans to cap the cost of essential food items ahead of the anticipated inflationary impact of the Iran war. He also promised to expand state-funded childcare support and to pilot an Irish-style minimum income for artists.<\/p>\n

These ideas echo the populist achievements of his predecessors: the scrapping of drug prescription charges<\/a> and university tuition fees<\/a> under Salmond, and the creation of an incipient Scottish social security system<\/a> under Sturgeon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sixty-one years old, bald and bespectacled, with the inoffensive bearing of a mid-level German administrator, Swinney is an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":550058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-550057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/550058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}