Elections are meant to be about making a choice. Not, it would seem, in Scotland, where the two main parties pitching for victory on May 5 are now in the business of presenting to voters a passable version of McTweedledum and McTweedledee.
On the two main policy issues facing the next administration at Holyrood — local government finance and higher education funding — both Labour and the SNP now occupy exactly the same ground.
Both say that they would not impose fees or a graduate contribution on Scottish students, and both now say that they would freeze the council tax for the next two years.
Not that the Nationalists can be blamed. They are in government and have pursued these policies over the past four years. They are entitled to defend their record in an election.
But opposition parties are supposed to offer voters something different, fresh and original. The poverty of imagination within Scottish Labour’s ranks can be summed up by the thought that for the past three years they have been (allegedly) examining ways of replacing or reforming local government finance and have emerged from their deep contemplation with the policy of doing exactly the same as the SNP. Why did they bother?
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As for higher education, Labour’s “Let’s match the Nats” policy verges on sophistry. Having told us that some sort of graduate charge was inevitable and that the SNP was in the business of offering a “cut-price” solution to the financial hole facing the country’s universities, Labour now apears to be saying: “We were only kidding.”
Des McNulty, Labour’s thoughtful higher education spokesman, has been put back in his box by the combined forces of Andy Kerr, the finance spokesman, and, to a much lesser extent, Iain Gray.
Scottish Labour’s high command may well be congratulating itself that it has shut down two possible lines of SNP attack, but in doing so, it may also have opened up a trap for itself. Where voters are confronted by two parties saying exactly the same, they will look for a difference.
Labour might argue that the difference still lies in the parties’ approach to the constitution. But that doesn’t hold water. The SNP is an independence-lite party. As one SNP minister replied recently when asked whether his party still believed in full independence: “It depends what you mean by independence.”
With Labour now pursuing a Calman-plus agenda in terms of new financial powers for Holyrood, there is convergence on the constitution issue, too, further cutting down the space between the two parties.
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Labour may well be ahead in the opinion polls, but over the past week or so it has put itself in severe danger of losing the election war — especially if voters conclude that as they are being offered no choice on policy, it all comes down to a question of leadership.