Meeting of the Parliament 07 May 2014
The figure is £100 billion. Mr Harvie must have misheard me. It is more than 50 per cent of the original £200 billion that I mentioned in my initial answer, so it is substantially more than the cost of one mile of motorway. Even the Green Party, which denounces motorways, will realise that the sum is substantially more than that.
We are disappointed with the Scottish Government’s position, because it is suggesting that it would do things completely differently were we to be independent, but from what we have seen on paper we know that that is not true. The Scottish Government has no plans at all to change income tax. Mr Swinney has been at pains to reiterate that point, so the Scottish Government is making no changes to the tax system other than its pledge on corporation tax.
As we found out last week, most of welfare would remain the same. The largest changes that are being made to welfare programmes would remain. Not a single Scottish National Party member was able to contradict that last week. Where the SNP has had a choice and has had the levers and the powers, it has gone for universal benefits almost all the time. If changing inequality was the most important thing to the Scottish Government, it would not have gone for universal benefits on just about every policy measure that it has brought in. There was a large list of them from the minister, and all of them were universal—helping everybody as opposed to helping those whom the SNP claims to want to help.
I want to put on the record some of the conclusions of a report on inequality in Scotland by David Bell and David Eiser of the University of Stirling management school. It is worth noting some of comments that are made in their paper. They accept and point out that gross income inequality is relatively high in the UK, although wealth inequality is less so, but they also point out that most of the growth happened between 1975 and 1990, and that since the mid-90s there has been virtually no increase in net income inequality. At the same time, the Nordic countries that many people on the left want to replicate have seen their inequality increase at a far faster rate than that of the United Kingdom.
It is worth putting those points on the record. We accept that there are issues, but the facts are often not put on the table for the other side.
I move amendment S4M-09926.4, to leave out from “is deeply concerned” to end and insert:
“believes that wealth and income inequality is best tackled by making work pay; understands that such a commitment runs through the ambitions of the UK Government and recognises that, since it came to power, increases to the income tax personal allowance have lifted over three million people on the lowest wages out of income tax; commends the plans for a rise in the minimum wage and welcomes the Chancellor’s commitment to fight for full employment; acknowledges the vital steps that the UK Government has taken to put the nation’s finances in order, and notes that the UK is currently projected to be the fastest growing of the G7 economies”.
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