Photo credit: Sandy Young

Anger over political response to Taser plea

The Scottish Police Federation wants to see every officer in Scotland equipped with Tasers

By Gemma Fraser
Head of content

Anger over political response to Taser plea

The Scottish Police Federation wants to see every officer in Scotland equipped with Tasers

Photo credit: Sandy Young

By Gemma Fraser
Head of content

It will take someone being killed before politicians accept the need to equip all police officers with Tasers, it has been warned.

David Kennedy, general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation (SPF), said he was disappointed but not surprised by the “lukewarm response” to calls for a wider rollout of the safety equipment.

Politicians were asked whether they supported the call to equip every officer with a Taser during a hustings in Edinburgh (pictured above) to launch the SPF’s manifesto.

Speaking afterwards, Kennedy told 1919: “It’s been the same lukewarm response we’ve had for ages, and the concern I’ve got is it’s going to take somebody to be killed before they actually stand up and take notice.

“It beggars belief. It’s as if people have forgotten what happened at Glasgow Airport. I know that’s a terrorist example, but we have to be ready and we’re not.

“The problem is that people see Taser as a gun and it’s not. It’s far safer than a baton.”

During the hustings, Justice Secretary Angela Constance said she is supportive of the fact that Police Scotland “remains an unarmed service”.

“Until we take communities with us, until the Chief Constable pitches up at my door with a proposition, I would be wanting to seek assurances that it’s the right measure at the right time,” she added.

Scottish Labour’s Pauline McNeill said her party is “not for the rolling out of Tasers at the moment”, while Liam McArthur said his party, the Scottish Liberal Democrats, were “somewhat sceptical about the extended rollout of Tasers” but had been “pleasantly surprised” by the way the previous expansion had been handled.

Scottish Conservative Sharon Dowey said the rollout of body-worn video across the country might reduce the need for a Taser expansion, but added: “Where the Chief Constable thinks that it’s operationally justified to have Tasers, then I think it’s something we really do need to consider and need to put out there.”

“The problem is that people see Taser as a gun and it’s not. It’s far safer than a baton”

SPF general secretary David Kennedy

Lorna Slater from the Scottish Greens said evidence showed that using Tasers instead of other weapons reduces the incidences of injury to officers and the public.

She added: “It seems to me that the rollout of Tasers is substantially therefore a funding question.”

The SPF also wants to increase the availability of firearms by adopting models used in Norway and New Zealand, where police are not routinely armed but do have access to weapons stored in locked cabinets within police vehicles.

Kennedy pointed to the Skye shootings in 2022, when police officers followed the gunman in their vehicle, but were ordered not to stop him because they were unarmed, and had to wait for an armed response unit to arrive from Inverness.

The SPF’s David Threadgold, Lorna Robertson and David Kennedy at the manifesto launch

“You don’t send a Taser to a firearm call – you send a firearm,” said Kennedy.

“I would have thought the murder in Skye would have been enough to convince people. If that’s not enough, what more do you need?

“How many deaths do they want before that convinces them that we need to do something about this?

“We just want to give officers the safety equipment if it’s needed. Proportionality is always there. They’re not going to use it unless they really need to use it.

“We’re not asking police to be armed either. That’s not what we’ve asked for. But that’s what some people have picked up on, which is totally wrong.”

The politicians taking part in the hustings refused to endorse adopting the Norwegian and New Zealand firearms model.

Relief after the chaos

By Magnus Gardham 
Former Scotland Office special adviser

Got there in the end. That, at least, was the snap verdict of the Chancellor’s backbench colleagues, who waved their order papers wildly at the end of her 65-minute budget speech.

They have endured a miserable few weeks as downbeat briefings, followed by clumsy un-briefings, sparked fears of a political disaster for Labour and dented confidence in the government.

And the drama didn’t end on budget day, with claims that Rachel Reeves misled the public followed by this month’s resignation of the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

“The most chaotic lead up to a budget in living memory,” taunted Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch in the Commons as she highlighted the pre-budget blunder that led to this resignation – the early publication of the OBR assessment.

When the spending plans were finally announced – as we knew to expect – Reeves avoided the poisonous step of increasing the basic rate of income tax in clear breach of Labour’s manifesto.

Instead, she revealed a plethora of smaller taxes that Labour can argue will hit those who can afford to pay more. And, of course, a freezing of thresholds until 2031 which will bring more people into tax and into higher rates.

Those rates do not apply in Scotland where income tax thresholds are devolved to Holyrood.

“The Chancellor handed Scottish Labour another get-out-of-jail card”

But the Chancellor’s move goes a long way to explaining the genuinely positive reaction from Labour MSPs. They had faced the unhappy prospect of explaining complex intergovernmental fiscal rules – and why they would cost the Scottish Government £1 billion – had Reeves raised the basic rate by 2p.

With the Holyrood election looming ever larger, the Chancellor handed Scottish Labour another get-out-of-jail card.

The two-child benefit cap was popular with the public, but appalled Labour.

By axeing it, in what was easily the most heartfelt section of her speech, Reeves delighted her own side but also removed a potentially devastating dividing line between Labour and the SNP.

SNP ministers were committed to mitigating the impact of the cap, starting just weeks before the election, and were preparing to hammer Labour – sorry, make that “callous Labour” – for the £155 million it would have cost them next year.

The Scottish Government will now save that cash and have an extra £820 million to spend, to the end of the spending review period in 2028, through the Barnett formula.

Reeves tried to credit Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar with the windfall. “Because he asked us to,” she told the Commons.

That is not really how the Barnett formula works and the sum, reflecting UK spending, was a lot less than last year’s bumper £3.4 billion transfer.

It will not stop SNP claims of austerity in the run up to next May but then, nothing would.

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