Meeting of the Parliament 09 October 2024
I am grateful for that intervention. There is a range of explanations for those outcomes. First and foremost, although we have greater spending per head, we are not in charge of all the levers that affect the day-to-day lives of people in Scotland. Most obviously, we are not in charge of the vast majority of the social security system. If Mr Fraser’s party had not done such immense damage to that system over the previous 14 years, there would be far fewer people in Scotland living in poverty with worse public health outcomes.
Greens want more public spending, but we will be honest about where we think that the money for that can come from and how it can be raised. Unsurprisingly, we would take funding from the road-building and motorway expansion budgets and put it into housing and climate action, and we would raise more from those who can afford it, such as the supermarkets and people who travel by private jet.
The current balance of tax, spend and the block grant is not sustainable. We might all have different reasons for believing that that is the case, but I think that we all agree that the current balance is not sustainable. Addressing that is a shared responsibility—it is not just the Scottish Government’s or the Scottish National Party’s responsibility.