Meeting of the Parliament 08 September 2015
I welcome the scheduling of the debate and the recognition in the Scottish Government’s motion that we are seeing steady and sustained economic growth. Over the past year, the UK economy grew faster than any other advanced economy in the world, and Scotland is very much part of that. So too for employment, where we have seen unprecedented increases. This has been an employment-heavy economic recovery, and that has been central to the Conservative Party’s ambition.
I welcome the cabinet secretary’s narrative of all the economic successes. Of course, he failed to attribute them to their real architect—the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne. It is as a result of the chancellor’s difficult decisions, which were taken in the teeth of opposition from other parties that are represented in this chamber, that we have delivered the economic success.
Let us remind ourselves what we heard from those other parties. We were told that economic growth would not come. When employment levels were growing, we were told that those increases were illusory. Instead, the facts speak for themselves. In the past five years, more than 2 million new jobs have been created across the UK, three quarters of which have been in full-time positions. For those in work, wages have risen. In the past year, wages have increased by an average of 2.8 per cent, while inflation has been flat. UK Government policy now exceeds the pre-election pledges of the SNP and the Labour Party, in that we are working towards an enforceable £9 per hour national living wage by 2020.