Meeting of the Parliament 06 February 2014
The leader of the Opposition has been using the term “real world” quite a lot of late, but I think that, sometimes, the Opposition sees the real world as some kind of fantasy land.
We heard Sarah Boyack talking about the SNP’s financial straitjacket. The reality is that we work with a fixed budget that is set by Westminster. Her Labour colleagues created the economic shambles that we all must deal with, and the Tory and Liberal coalition is adding to the woes by continuing with austerity. We must recognise what has happened and why there is a financial straitjacket, which is of not this Government’s making but the making of Governments past and present at Westminster.
Let us look at how the fixed amount of money that we get is being divvied out. Between 2007-08 and 2012-13 the Scottish budget increased by 6.4 per cent, but local government’s budget increased by 8.9 per cent—higher than the increase in the budget as a whole. Surely no one can deny that fact.
We have heard again today an attack on the council tax freeze yet, as my colleague Mark McDonald rightly pointed out, when it comes to elections the Labour Party is all too keen to support the council tax freeze. It is about time it told the people of Scotland the truth about what it would do with council tax if it was in power.