The SNP has accused Scottish Labour of “completely rewriting” Rachel Reeves’s spending plans, as the party leaders took part in the first televised debate of the election campaign. The clash between the the SNP, Scottish Labour, Scottish Conservatives and Scottish Liberal Democrats was screened by STV, without a studio audience, and involved intensive cross-examination of each leader by his political rivals. With recent polling suggesting that Labour could make significant gains on 4 July, in particular in seats in Glasgow and across the central belt, the SNP leader, John Swinney, told Anas Sarwar that his pledges for more spending on the NHS, schools and renewables projects contradicted the constraints laid out by Reeves.
“You have completely rewritten the Labour finance strategy. You cannot escape the fact that you have signed up to the Tories’ fiscal agenda, the austerity agenda,” said Swinney. “You are locked into that and you will not be able to deliver those commitments.” On Tuesday Reeves, the shadow chancellor, will visit Edinburgh, where she will unveil plans to boost the country’s financial services industry and promise to “unleash Scotland’s economic firepower to deliver jobs and growth”. Sarwar, Swinney and the Scottish Conservative leader, Douglas Ross, also clashed over the future of the oil and gas sector, with the SNP and Tories facing off in a number of seats in north-east Scotland most affected by transition plans. Sarwar accused Swinney of being “on the side of BP and Shell, not nurses” in the middle of a cost of living crisis. “You support higher taxes for people earning £29,000 a year in Scotland but not higher windfall taxes on the oil and gas giants making record profits,” he said. With growing speculation that Swinney plans to ditch the presumption against further oil and gas exploration adopted by his predecessors Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf, Swinney repeatedly failed to answer direct questions put by Ross about whether he supports new licences. In a debate that did little to clarify for viewers which policy areas remain reserved to Westminster, and which are devolved to Holyrood, Ross also attacked Swinney’s recent handling of the row over Michael Matheson’s iPad expenses, asking him: “Why are you still defending a liar?” Swinney told viewers that voting for his party could “get rid of Tories” and elect a strong group of MPs to represent Scotland at Westminster. Sarwar accused Swinney of telling the electorate “don’t vote Labour because they can’t lose”, suggesting that left-inclined voters could afford to pick another party as Labour was so far ahead in the UK opinion polls. The Scottish Greens earlier described as “outrageous” the decision to exclude them from the 90-minute programme.