By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 17 November 2014
John Swinney, who has run Scotland’s public finances since 2007, is tipped to become deputy first minister later this week.
Swinney, a former leader of the Scottish National Party, is expected to take over the role of deputy first minister after the present incumbent, Nicola Sturgeon, is confirmed by MSPs on Wednesday in the top job as Scotland’s fifth First Minister.
Sturgeon was elected unopposed as SNP leader at the party’s weekend conference in Perth, taking over from Alex Salmond who announced his resignation from both the party leadership and the office of first minister after September’s independence referendum.
The conference, held in a mood of jubilation over the party’s massive membership rise since the referendum and the disarray of their Scottish Labour opponents, elected Treasury spokesman Stewart Hosie as deputy leader, in preference to Holyrood Ministers Keith Brown and Angela Constance.
But though the post of deputy first minister has no statutory basis, all first ministers in the devolved parliament have appointed a deputy, whose principal role is to substitute for first ministerial absences at Question Time. Hosie, as a Westminster MP, could not do that.
Though Swinney was felt to lack the dynamism for leading the party during his spell in charge in the early 2000s, his performance as Cabinet secretary for finance throughout both the minority and majority SNP governments since 2007 has been widely admired.
Among his major achievements was the concordat with Scotland’s local authorities, which implemented a council tax freeze – still in place – in return for a reduction in ring-fencing within council allocations and consequent increase in municipal spending discretion.
He has also managed to mitigate the effects in Scotland of some of the more unpopular elements in the UK Coalition’s austerity programme, notably the so-called bedroom tax, despite cutbacks in Scotland’s block grant from Westminster. He has continued to find funds for popular but expensive SNP policies like free prescriptions and pensioner bus travel.
The deputy first minister post has so far always been combined with another Cabinet portfolio, and Sturgeon may choose to leave Swinney at finance, where he has the respect of many of those he has to deal with. But after long years of close association with Salmond, she is also expected to reshuffle the Cabinet sufficiently to give it a distinctive look from his era.
