Wings Over Scotland

In the wake of a duller-than-usual First Minister's Questions, most of the press today is covering the report released by the Electoral Commission detailing the various parties' spending in the 2011 Holyrood election. The headline soundbite is that the SNP's expenditure was, in the words of The Scotsman, "close to the combined total of the three other largest parties", at £1.14m compared to £1.27m for Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories together.

Predictably enough, Labour seize the opportunity to complain about large donations, with MSP Drew Smith pouting that "the SNP is addicted to big money, reliant on huge donations from a small number of wealthy individuals", in the light of the SNP having received two such large sums in recent months from the will of the former Makar Edwin Morgan and lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir.

We're not aware of Mr Smith having raised any such objections when, for example, Lord Sainsbury donated £2.5m to Labour in 2003 – eclipsing the SNP's two big donations put together – but we'll gladly publish any corrections should he have done so. We're also not sure that Mr Smith's party will enthusiastically welcome his objections to large donations from wealthy individuals, as a cap on such contributions (currently being proposed by the independent Committee on Standards in Public Life) would have slashed Labour's income by 72% over the last five and a half years.

Most of the coverage today notes the growing financial health of the SNP compared to the other parties relative only to the situation in the 2007 Holyrood election, with its spending rising while that of the Unionist parties declines. What we found curious, though, was that none of the papers took the trouble to also make what would seem to be the most obvious comparison in a recent Scottish context – the parties' expenditures in 2011 compared to the 2010 UK General Election.

We had a little dig around on the Electoral Commission's website, and turned up its 2010 report, whose figures reveal some moderately interesting things.

The EC report contains a figure for the SNP's spending in 2010, which was £316,000. (Unhelpfully it doesn't list the other parties' Scotland-specific expenditure, just their UK totals and the overall total for Scotland, which was £3.09m.) At barely over a quarter of what the party spent on the Holyrood election, the sum throws the SNP's priorities into sharp focus. As we've previously noted on this blog, standing in Westminster elections is basically just an inconvenient distraction for the Nationalists, something undertaken more for show than practical purpose.

With the SNP's expenditure making up just over 10% of all-party 2010 spending in Scotland, it also shows that the others have plenty of cash when they need it – they just prioritise the UK Parliament massively over the Scottish one.

A quick burst of Googling revealed the precise magnitude of that priority. In 2010 the Conservatives spent a whopping £1.27m in Scotland – almost exactly £1 million more than for the Holyrood election – in order to win themselves precisely one seat. (Which means their MSPs cost a bargain £18,200 each whereas poor lonely David Mundell cost almost 70 times that much to send to Westminster. See table below for more.)

Labour, meanwhile, found £0.97m in the coffers – £160,000 more than for Holyrood – to secure its large Westminster block, and the Lib Dems burnt through £0.47m, more than two and a half times what they spent on the Scottish Parliament, but got more than twice as many MPs as a result.

(If you apply the 9.8% recorded by the EC report as the Scottish percentage to the various parties' UK expenditure, you find that the Tories actually "underspent" on Scotland by around £360,000 – 9.8% of their UK spend would have been £1.63m rather than £1.27m. Labour proportionally overspent by just under £200,000 and the Lib Dems spent exactly the "right" amount, devoting exactly 9.8% of their UK expenditure to Scottish seats. They are the Unionist "baby bears".)

What we've learned, then, is that the Scottish Parliament is of vastly more importance to the SNP than the Westminster one, of slightly more/less importance to Scottish Labour (depending on how you measure it), of equal importance to the Lib Dems and significantly less importance to the Tories. We could probably have predicted as much without too much trouble, especially Labour not knowing what they thought. But it's odd that the Scottish mainstream media doesn't consider this fact worthy of a single mention when discussing the SNP's economic bludgeoning of its opponents.

The Nationalists did indeed expend a lot more money than everyone else in 2011 to secure their history-making majority (although at cost per head their MSPs were the best value for money). But only because the other parties chose to effectively surrender Holyrood to them in favour of Westminster, not through any unfair imbalance in overall funding. Nevertheless, we should probably expect the issue of the big bad SNP's financial bullying to suddenly become a lot more prominent in Scotland's almost-uniformly Unionist media in the coming years.

COST PER MSP ELECTED

SNP: £16,500

Conservatives: £18,200

Labour: £22,100

Lib Dem: £35,300

Green: £66,000

COST PER SCOTTISH MP ELECTED

Labour: £23,600

Lib Dem: £42,800

SNP: £52,667

Conservative: £1,273,000