Meeting of the Parliament 09 November 2023
That is nonsense. I do not know whether the minister has looked at what has happened to economies elsewhere in the world. The UK is performing better than many competitor countries in the G7, is performing far better than Germany and is expected to perform better than France and Italy.
Even if, as the minister says, the UK economy is not performing well, let us look at how the Scottish economy is doing in relative terms. Since 2014, under the watch of the minister and his colleagues, the Scottish economy has grown at half the rate of the UK economy. We cannot ignore that simple fact.
I return to what I was trying to say. Let us try to unpick exactly what the motion is about and what the Government is trying to achieve, beyond the weary constitutional points that it is so keen to make—unless it is all about laying a trap for the Labour Party, which I suspect is what the debate is really about.
There is no point in devolving employment law to the Scottish Parliament if the Government intends to leave it as it is, so the Government is going to make the law either more liberal or more restrictive. I think what we have heard shows that there is no intention to make our employment laws more liberal, so let us assume that they are going to be more restrictive than in other parts of the United Kingdom. That flies in the face of everything that we have heard from the business community in recent weeks and months.
There is already major concern in the business community that were a seeing tax divergence between Scotland and the rest of the UK and that that divergence is having an impact on business. That point is being made in the budget submissions that are currently being published by the likes of the Scottish Retail Consortium and the Confederation of British Industry Scotland, among others. Every time I meet businesses, one of their major asks is for the Scottish Government to tackle that tax differential, which is now an active barrier to encouraging people to move to take up jobs in Scotland. If the cabinet secretary has not heard that message loud and clear from the business community, he has not been listening.