Meeting of the Parliament 04 June 2019
The Scottish Labour Party is always happy to take any opportunity to make our case for real and radical economic change, for more investment and less austerity, for more planning and less market, and for more democracy, because too much economic power rests in too few hands.
I am bound to begin by making a couple of points to the Conservatives, who called for this afternoon’s debate. First, they are of course right to remind us that, in the last quarter, Scottish gross domestic product growth once again lagged behind total UK GDP growth. However, they should not be supercilious. Last year, output from the manufacturing base in Scotland rose by 2.6 per cent, but output from the UK as a whole contracted by 1.3 per cent. It was only through a growth in services that the UK rate of output moved marginally above the Scottish rate of output.
Secondly, although it is of course good to see a Conservative representative move a motion in this Parliament in favour of a “high-wage economy”, it is a pity that, where they are in Government, the Conservatives will not support a real living wage. They have presided over the biggest fall in real wages for 200 years; not since the great slump of 1798 to 1822 have we seen a wage squeeze quite like it. More than a decade on from the financial crash, the wages of working people are still stuck below the levels that they were at before the crash. The shameful result is that one in four children in Scotland lives in poverty, and two out of three of them are brought up in poverty in households in which at least one adult is in work.