Meeting of the Parliament 04 June 2019
I am pleased to take part in this Conservative debate on the economy. I will first focus on the part of the motion that talks about
“the need to address the skills gap in the economy”.
As others have said, it is true that there are skill shortages, but that is not because we have loads of unemployed people—unemployment is at a record low of 3.2 per cent—or people with the wrong skills. Rather, the biggest problem is that there is a lack of people. When we went into the union, in 1707, we had something like one fifth of the population of England; now it is more like one tenth. It is very hard to grow an economy if the population is not growing. It is a failure of the British project since 1707 that England’s population has grown much more than Scotland’s. Scotland has been let down.
Agriculture, construction and tourism are all sectors that are dependent on EU and other workers coming to Scotland. Tourism specifically is worth some £9.7 billion to the economy, and EU citizens are reckoned to make up 13 per cent of the local tourism workforce, 15 per cent of the workforce in the accommodation sector and 19 per cent of the workforce in hotels and restaurants. If boosting Scotland’s economy is linked to growing Scotland’s population, how can we boost the population? Well, how about being part of the European Union, which would allow the free movement of workers? How about relaxing our immigration policy so that more people can come here and work?
Of course, the UK is going in exactly the opposite direction. The UK wants to leave the EU, stop free movement and tighten immigration policies. Therefore, it seems that the UK is deliberately following policies that will damage the Scottish economy. Is the UK Government consciously following a policy to damage Scotland? Even I do not think that it is quite as bad as that, but, at the very least, the UK is pursuing policies without considering their negative impact on Scotland.