Meeting of the Parliament 04 June 2026 [Draft]
No, thank you. I am just getting started.
We might all wish that the process would involve addressing the drug deaths crisis, which is the worst in the developed world and is more than three times worse than it is in other parts of the UK, where the same drug laws apply. We might wish to deal with social care, national health service reform, online crime and much more. Those are the many issues that hang off the back of the fiscal choices that we make as a Parliament.
Instead, we must deal with the overarching fiscal malaise that was forewarned, in response to which the Government has yet to present a coherent answer. The assessment that the Institute for Fiscal Studies provided of the SNP’s spending plans during the election was absolutely brutal. The £1.4 billion increase in spending commitments, for which no credible funding has been identified, could increase the fiscal gap to some £6.1 billion.
Unfortunately, the big answers will not be found in the scope of the measures that the Government has identified in its motion. It has failed to quantify how much those measures would raise. By my calculations, the proposed mansion and jet taxes would account for up to about 0.33 per cent of the gap. I have rounded that figure up and, frankly, I have been rather generous in my assessment. I do not believe that the Government believes that those measures are commensurate with the scale of the challenge.