Five weeks is a long time in politics

THE change, over the course of just over a month, has been stark. On 6 February, John Swinney delivered a parliamentary masterclass when he opened and closed for the Scottish Government in the Budget debate – goading, taunting and ridiculing his political opponents to the delight of his back-benchers before getting his Budget through a minority parliament and humiliating the Labour Party at the same time.

On Tuesday of this week, Mr Swinney went on BBC's Newsnight Scotland programme to defend his plans for a local income tax. He was hesitant, passive and flat, repeatedly failed to answer straightforward questions and was left buffeted by the withering attacks of Gordon Brewer, the host.

The finance secretary looked less like one of Holyrood's most professional and experienced performers and more like the the shy bank manager that his political opponents have ridiculed him as in the past.

Unfortunately for Mr Swinney, he has been here before. It was nine years ago and he will remember it well because that crisis was also caused by income tax.

In 1999, Mr Swinney, then the SNP's finance spokesman, unveiled plans to raise income tax in Scotland by 1p in the pound. The "Penny for Scotland" plan was designed to reverse an income tax cut announced by Gordon Brown in the previous Budget and to use the money for front-line services in Scotland.

It was an electoral disaster. The SNP was beaten into a poor second place by Labour several weeks after the Penny for Scotland launch, with many people, both inside and outside the party, convinced that the strategy had played a major role in turning voters away from the SNP.

When he became leader of the SNP the following year, a contrite Mr Swinney ditched the idea of raising income tax as soon as he could and tried to rebuild his party's battered fiscal reputation.

Now Mr Swinney is at it again, announcing a plan to raise income tax on middle and high-income earners and giving a passable impression of Scrooge to Scotland's hard-working families.

In doing so, he has managed to unite Scotland's business community and some unions against him, bring Labour and the Tories into a loose alliance opposing him, and has generated such a backlash of negative publicity that the Scottish Government has been rocked for the first real time since taking office.

So what's going on?

Margo MacDonald, the independent MSP who has been in and around Nationalist politics for three decades, said Mr Swinney's low-key performance on local income tax was due to one fact: his heart was not in it.

She said: "He is trying to see through an SNP manifesto commitment. What carried him through his performances in the past was in part the adrenalin of having won the election and partly because he did well in the Budget and spending review.

"He is now trying to do what, I think, he has become convinced is probably impossible."

Ms MacDonald said the SNP government had become obsessed with its manifesto commitments, believing that the voters actually remembered what had been in the manifesto, when the simplest and best thing to do, on occasions, was to drop commitments which could not be delivered.

Peter Lynch, a senior lecturer in politics at Stirling University, said Mr Swinney should never have attempted to change local government finance.

He said: "This is the most difficult policy they have tried to implement.

"I wouldn't have picked it. You should never change local government finance because every time you do it, you get mired in such difficulties and problems that it becomes all but impossible to do.

"Given the way he coped with the Budget, this is probably a bit of a turnaround for him. (The SNP] made such an issue of the council tax in the election they have felt compelled to go ahead with this, but they really should have dumped it."

However, Mr Lynch said the Scottish Government's decision to roll out such an unpopular policy now might be more astute than it first appeared.

"They are doing this now. Why? Remember where we are in the electoral cycle. They take the hit on this now, attract the negative publicity and move on in time for the election – that's the reason for doing this early rather than taking it into the next election campaign."

Since last year's election victory, Mr Swinney has had to endure a tougher ride and probably more ups and downs than the rest of his Cabinet colleagues put together.

The Budget process was difficult, getting it through the parliament even harder, but he managed that with style and competence.

Now he is suffering from the condemnation of groups and parties inside and outside the parliament and it has obviously affected him.

He has been through this sort of political rollercoaster before, as party leader, but what his colleagues will want to know is whether he has the fight to bounce back once again.