NICOLA STURGEON made a pitch to working-class voters yesterday, as the SNP set its sights on an unprecedented third term in office with a promise to boost benefits and childcare in the least well-off communities.
With Labour in crisis under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and the SNP soaring in the polls, nationalist strategists are confident the party can make further gains at Labour’s expense with a promise, as Sturgeon put it yesterday, to be a strong voice for “people of progressive opinion”.
In her keynote address to the SNP conference in Aberdeen, Sturgeon sought to heap further damage on the Labour brand by claiming that the party’s left-wing leader was not changing Labour but was “allowing Labour to change him”.
Adding that Labour’s disunity threatens to consign the UK to another decade of Conservative rule, she said the SNP would always be “a left of centre social democratic party, standing up for the values, interests and aspirations of mainstream Scotland”.
Pledging to stand against poverty and inequality as “Scotland’s voice of hope, fairness and social justice”, she promised a revolution in early years education and childcare — announcing that 450 nurseries in Scotland’s most deprived areas will get an additional qualified teacher or childcare graduate.
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She also vowed that by the end of the next parliament an SNP government would double childcare provision to 30 hours a week for all three- and four-year-olds and vulnerable two-year-olds.
In the first year of the new parliament, she said, the SNP would also publish a Scottish social security bill setting out how it will use new welfare powers becoming available under the Scotland Act. “Fairness and dignity will be at its heart,” she said.
Sturgeon said the allowance carers receive is the lowest of all working age benefits which she described as “simply not fair”. She said the SNP would raise the allowance from £62 a week to the same level as the jobseeker’s allowance of £73.
Her pledges yesterday follow commitments made earlier in the week to build at least 50,000 new homes, as she seeks to assure voters that the party’s continuing support for Scottish independence will not be at the expense of progress on bread and butter issues in the next parliamentary term.
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Sturgeon also used her speech to make a £200m pitch to older voters by announcing plans for five new NHS treatment centres specialising in hip or knee replacements and cataract removal which the SNP expects to reduce waiting times.
Recent polling has consistently shown the SNP on track to win a bigger majority at Holyrood in May, with a membership which has more than quadrupled to 114,000 giving it an unmatched activist base.
However, some senior SNP sources are concerned that polling has also found that just a quarter of voters think the party has done a good job on crime and justice while about a third rate its record on the NHS and education.
Political opponents accused the SNP of doing a poor job in office. Scottish Conservative chief whip John Lamont said: “The SNP has had eight years to get it right and they have failed drastically. Poor attainment in our schools, a police service in disarray, overly projected oil figures, a growing jobless rate, the T in the Park scandal — the problems are stacking up under the SNP.”
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But Sturgeon insisted that over the past nine years her party had laid “strong foundations” including free university education and modern apprenticeships.