Meeting of the Parliament 26 March 2014
Thank you, Presiding Officer.
In recent months, we have had a number of debates on independence and I am quite sure that we will have many more in the coming months. Today, however, we want a focused debate. We want an analytical examination of what the public finances would be were Scotland to become independent. That is the thrust of this debate. We want that for two reasons: first, because we think that insufficient attention has been focused on it so far; and, secondly, because more and more analysts are challenging the assumptions made by the Scottish Government in its white paper and in a number of other papers that it has produced.
The official Scottish Government line today is that Scotland’s national accounts are healthier than the United Kingdom’s. We intend to examine the truth of that position. Rather than trying to update its papers or official projections, the Scottish Government says in its amendment that it
“welcomes the detailed proposals for Scotland’s public finances”
in the white paper. A single page in the entire white paper is described by the Government as “detailed proposals”.
We have primary concerns about several areas, the first of which is that the white paper features figures for only the single year 2016-17 and has nothing for the year after that, nothing for the year after that and nothing for any subsequent year, were we to be independent.