Meeting of the Parliament 19 December 2023
This is a chaotic budget from an incompetent Government that will leave ordinary Scots paying much more and getting much less in return. The SNP’s mismanagement of our public finances has left us with a massive gap to be filled between what it promised and the tax revenues that ordinary Scots pay. That is an SNP waste gap, an SNP incompetence gap and a huge SNP growth gap. If Scotland’s economy had kept pace with the economy in other parts of the UK, it would now be £8.5 billion larger. The failure of this Government over 16 years to focus on the priorities of country rather than party means that it now needs taxpayers to bail it out as a result.
It is chaos—there is no other word for it. The SNP was going to raise council tax by 22 per cent and suddenly, unbeknownst to the civil service or even to the Cabinet, it was freezing it. The SNP had a plan to cut thousands of jobs in the public sector, but then the Deputy First Minister came to Parliament and said that the plan was cancelled. Now the plan for thousands of job cuts is back with a vengeance.
The Deputy First Minister invited all Opposition parties to suggest their cuts, and then Humza Yousaf announced £1 billion of conference spending commitments as he panic-spent public money following the Rutherglen by-election. Now we are told that the black hole is the biggest that it has ever been.
The SNP has neglected the day job of growing the economy and delivering public services for Scotland. Tax cannot and should not be used as a substitute for economic growth. NHS waiting times are soaring—we heard even today that cancer waits are up again. General practitioner services and NHS dentistry are a fiction for many across our country, but it does not need to be like that. Scotland cannot accept more managed decline from the SNP, with two incompetent Governments in the UK. Scotland needs change, and it is coming.
Does the Deputy First Minister accept that her Government’s failure to grow Scotland’s economy means that we are lagging behind England and Wales? What will this horrendous budget mean for the one in seven Scots who is currently on an NHS waiting list? How many more Scots will be on NHS waiting lists by next year? How many public sector workers will be made redundant as a result of the budget? Why does she think that the hard-pressed people of Scotland should bear the brunt of her Government’s failures in higher taxes and cuts to services?