Meeting of the Parliament 30 October 2024
For the Conservative Party in 2024 to bring to the chamber a motion to criticise financial policy is, in civil service speak, a bold move. We would almost think from Mr Hoy’s remarks that a change in leadership and in the front bench means that this is somehow year zero for the Conservative Party, as if we had not gone through the misery of the past five years of a UK Conservative Government, given what that did to people’s mortgages, the cost of living and everything else that went with it. Almost two centuries of perceived Tory fiscal competence were utterly destroyed when, in less than an hour, Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss wiped £30 billion from the UK economy. I would have thought that the Tories would have preferred to avoid talking about their disastrous financial record in government, which even now has left us with a black hole of tens of billions of pounds. As I say, it is a bold move for the Tories to bring a debate on fiscal policy to the chamber.
However, let us not forget that another Government has also torpedoed any notion of financial credibility. The SNP has been in government for 17 years, but its incompetence, waste and apathy have hugely damaged Scotland’s economy. What do we have to show for that SNP economy? We have £5 billion of waste. Local authority budgets have been cut by more than £6 billion. Nurses and teachers have been taxed more than they would have been if they were doing the same job in the rest of the UK, but the essential services that those taxes pay for are on their knees.