Meeting of the Parliament 18 June 2014
We know how desperately the SNP back benchers are praying for a Conservative victory in 2015. They always put their own interests ahead of those of the people of Scotland.
Rather than having to find all those cuts, just think what £4.7 billion extra to spend could do for Scotland. That sum is the equivalent of 150,000 nurses, 125,000 teachers, more than 500 primary schools, 184 secondary schools or 74 hospitals, which is more than we could ever need.
People musk ask themselves why anyone would want to do that to their country, but the proposal that the SNP Government has put to the people of Scotland is unsustainable borrowing, swingeing tax increases or deep cuts to public services—or perhaps a mixture of all three. All the experts agree that one of those three options, or a mixture of them all, is inevitable in the first budget of the Government of an independent Scottish state.
The Scottish Government’s answer to all its financial problems lies at the bottom of the North Sea, a revenue that it can uniquely predict. Ignore the experts: John Swinney’s magic calculator can make the numbers add up. However, even that illustrates the precarious footing in which the SNP Government would place the public services that we cherish.
This year’s “Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland” figures show that oil revenues dropped by £4.5 billion in the past year. That is more than our whole education budget. Only a Government as reckless as this one—whose one and only goal is to achieve independence for its people—would risk the education of our children and the care of our sick and elderly on a commodity as volatile as oil.
We already live in a country where you cannot go to accident and emergency in Aberdeen and you would be best advised not to give birth to a child in Wishaw, but the Government would have to cut health spending dramatically on top of that.