Meeting of the Parliament 30 October 2024
It is a case of second time lucky, Deputy Presiding Officer.
Today’s budget was the moment to discover whether leopards have the capacity to change their spots. We have known for a decade and more that the Scottish National Party is reckless on the economy—reckless on tax, reckless on spending and reckless on business, all of which adds up to being reckless on growth. Today, Scotland has discovered that Labour is just as bad, with a reckless budget of broken promises.
The budget included a massive increase in tax—the biggest ever increase in a single budget; a massive increase in borrowing; a £25 billion jobs tax on employers; a financial ram-raid on Scotland’s vital oil and gas sector; higher tax on Scotch whisky; a tax assault on farmers and their families; and a cash grab on Scotland’s pensioners, who now face the prospect of freezing this winter.
In votes in this chamber, Labour and the SNP are frequently on the same page on matters such as gender reform, hate crime legislation and rent controls, but we now find that they are on the same page in the budget playbook. However, it is the wrong page and the wrong playbook because it contains more tax and more borrowing and, at the same time, cuts to key public services. All those measures are intended to fund misplaced priorities, including above-inflation pay deals, which were demanded by their friends and donors in the trade union movement.
Today, Scotland is suffering a double whammy at the hands of a cosy left-wing consensus between Labour and the SNP and their friends in the Greens. They are socialists doing what socialists do—clobbering hard-pressed taxpayers, beleaguered businesses and vulnerable pensioners.
Our motion today makes it clear that the Scottish Government has failed to deliver sustained levels of economic growth in Scotland. If it had succeeded, the finance secretary would have had an additional £624 million to spend on public services in this year alone. The Scottish economy would have been £11 billion better off in recent times if only Scottish growth had kept pace with growth in the rest of the United Kingdom.
However, rather than boosting business, this SNP Government has repeatedly put barriers in its way. For too long, Scotland has been a high-tax, low-growth economy with public services that are simply not fit for purpose. The SNP’s misplaced priorities have led to billions in waste. Public sector pay has soared while unreformed public services have suffered. For example, the two lifeline ferries, which are costing nearly half a billion pounds, have yet to take a single passenger to our forgotten islands. Hundreds of millions of pounds are wasted on pet projects, and millions more are wasted on abandoned or ill-fated legal challenges.
Ministers insist that their approach to tax is progressive, but what on earth is progressive about slapping more tax on someone who earns £29,000 a year? That is a tax on nurses, teachers and police officers—not a tax on the rich.
The Scottish ministers have increased income tax on hard-working Scots by more than £1.4 billion since 2016, but the vast majority of that tax revenue has not been generated by their newfangled rates of tax. It has come from freezing thresholds—a sleekit fiscal sleight of hand.
That is why the Scottish Conservatives are now asking the Scottish Government to examine the benefits of lowering tax in Scotland and to explore how we can apply common sense to tax in order to generate jobs and drive economic growth.
The tax gap between Scotland and the rest of the UK has stifled growth. It has prevented us from attracting and retaining key workers, such as national health service doctors and dentists, and it is undermining the financial services sector. Scottish Financial Enterprise warns that its members are finding it more difficult to attract and retain senior workers, and recruitment firms say that candidates are now asking for a Scottish weighting on their salaries to make up for the tax difference.
Fiscal drag has pulled more and more Scots into higher tax, but it is an escalator that, under the SNP, goes only one way—always up, never down—forcing more and more Scots to pay more in tax to fuel the SNP’s insatiable appetite to spend other people’s money and, frequently, to do so unwisely.