Meeting of the Parliament 13 June 2018
I thank the Liberal Democrats seriously for giving us at Holyrood the opportunity that was denied to SNP members at their conference at the weekend to debate the SNP’s growth commission. Is it not remarkable? They have all turned up. The SNP benches are full for this debate. How quickly they have forgotten the First Minister’s message at the weekend to stop obsessing about independence—it is the only thing that they care about and the only thing they want to come to the chamber to talk about.
There is no time this afternoon to debate the entirety of the growth commission report and I am sorry that that is the case. We cannot do justice to the whole 350 pages of what Alex Salmond’s former adviser Alex Bell described as a “political suicide note”.
There has been a lot of praise for our former colleague Andrew Wilson’s authorship of the report. Mr Wilson is indeed a credible figure and he put a lot of work into the publication. It is therefore rather unfortunate that it contains a number of schoolboy errors. One whole section has been lifted straight from a New Zealand treasury paper without any referencing. Despite the plaudits that the report has received in some quarters, it is nevertheless riddled with errors that make it a less than credible prospectus for an independent Scotland.
It is hard to know whether to be outraged or simply disappointed by the growth commission report. We should welcome the fact that the paper now represents a total repudiation of the 2014 prospectus for independence. The white paper on which that referendum was fought is now exposed as a compendium of inventions with its ludicrous overstatement of future oil revenues and the optimistic gloss that it put on public finances. It would be good to hear an apology from the SNP for its attempt to hoodwink the Scottish people just four years ago.
Let me give a few examples from the growth commission report and some quotes from better-qualified people on some of the proposals. On currency, the report proposes indefinite sterlingisation with a move towards a separate Scottish currency at some undetermined future point. The experts are clear that that is simply not workable.
Jeremy Peat, the former chief economist at RBS, said in 2014 that using sterling outwith a currency union would be
“wholly implausible, dangerous and highly unlikely to be optimal”.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, called sterlingisation very dangerous. There has even been criticism from within the SNP’s ranks, with the former MP George Kerevan, who fancies himself as a bit of an economics expert, stating that sterlingisation would lead to an independence campaign
“covering the same sterile ground as the last time”
and slamming Andrew Wilson as “dangerously naive”.
Further, the SNP’s favourite economist, Richard Murphy, said that the growth commission’s currency plan was “devastating” and gave five reasons why it would fail.
It is not only on currency that the report falls short. The proposals for public finances involve accepting “Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland” figures as the starting point for an independent Scotland, which would create austerity max—austerity on a scale that this country has never seen. It would mean £27 billion-worth of austerity over 10 years, meaning massive tax rises and spending cuts.