Hansard

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this afternoon’s debate.

At the United Kingdom general election in July, the people sent a message. They rendered a judgment on the UK Conservative Government and the Scottish National Party Government at Holyrood. The message was clear and unequivocal: people want things to be done differently. They are tired of the old politics, but the early days of this UK Labour Administration will not have given them comfort, as yet. I hope that that changes. We need the narrative to shift. We need some hope in our politics and in our country.

While the Conservatives fight among themselves, the Liberal Democrats will act as a constructive Opposition, both in this place and on the green benches at Westminster, working in the national interest to hold the new UK Government to account. We will support it when we agree with it. We will look to improve Labour’s plans when we feel that they lack ambition and we will oppose them when we think that they are wrong. That is our responsibility and it is our job.

A responsible Opposition has an essential role in any democracy, and there are now a record 72 Liberal Democrat members of the UK Parliament to do that. They are the largest third party in a century, and they are ready to champion our policies and to hold the Government to account. Those strong Liberal Opposition voices will be louder and more important than ever before.

There is no time to waste in repairing the damage that has been done by years of chaos at the heart of number 10. It is perhaps surprising that the Scottish Government’s motion does not address that chaos and its inheritance. It does not refer to the context of the disastrous state in which the Conservative Party left the nation’s finances. I understand why, but it is important that we contextualise the debate and frame it in that way.

Nor would we know that from Murdo Fraser’s amendment. It does not offer any hint of contrition. It makes no mention of Liz Truss—the Prime Minister who, with an agenda that he and Russell Findlay championed in this place, crashed the economy, sent mortgages through the roof, sent gilts into apoplexy and cost our country untold billions.

Looking ahead to the UK budget, what would Liberal Democrats do differently? The top priority of the new Labour Administration’s first UK budget must be to fix the NHS across these islands. Although policy for that vital area of public service is devolved to the Scottish Parliament, the UK Government has at its disposal much that it can do to improve the context. The Prime Minister recently promised a 10-year plan for the NHS, but without the pledge of any additional funding. Our health service needs reform—of course it does—but reform alone will not be enough to replace ageing equipment, to fix crumbling hospitals and to relieve pressure on our health service so that it will allow people to see a general practitioner at the first time of asking.

We need proper investment, as well as reform, or the crisis will get worse. In particular, we need reinstatement of capital funding. We have heard the Government repeat time and again that the cuts to the capital budget that it received from Westminster are the reason for the hard stop on so many aspects of our health service, such as the reprovisioning of the Princess Alexandra eye pavilion, the national treatment service and the Belford hospital in Fort William. I could go on. However, with latitude and extra extension of funding, those projects can continue.

I do not, however, excuse the Scottish Government for its role in our Scottish health crisis, but there are certainly keys to its resolution and salvation that are available to the UK Labour Government, and we need that: it is so necessary. The Royal College of Nursing Scotland’s intervention today was clear that patient care is being compromised daily. I agree with it on another point, which is that good care costs, but missed care costs more.

Our ministers can invest to save by investing in public health and in early access to GPs, pharmacists and dentists, so that fewer people need to go to hospital in the first place. There are steps that the UK Government can also take.

We need to fix the crisis in social care. If we do that, we can prevent people from being stuck in hospital beds. On any given night in Scotland, there are 2,000 patients who are well enough to go home, but too frail to do so without a care package to receive them there. We need to make social care a profession of choice again. Liberal Democrats across the United Kingdom have urged the UK Government to create in the budget a new national minimum wage that is £2 higher than the national average for our nation’s carers in order to make social care a profession of choice. By helping people to stay healthy for longer, we can bring down waiting lists, get people back to work and give the economy the boost that it needs.

Liberal Democrats are clear on what the people’s priorities are, because we have asked them and listened to them, door by door and street by street. Those people are telling us now that the Labour Party has got it wrong, particularly on its decision to retain the two-child benefit cap—originally, in 2016, our MPs walked through the lobbies of Westminster with Labour MPs to oppose it—which plunges thousands of children into poverty.

Labour has got it wrong on scrapping the winter fuel payment for pensioners just as bills are set to rise again in the teeth of winter. Hundreds of thousands of people should be on pension credit but are not, so that is the wrong way to means test it. I remember, as many members will, the days of the cold weather payment, which was brought in to stop the annual body count of pensioners who died because they felt too uncomfortable, or were unable, to switch the household heating on.

We would raise billions of pounds in tax revenues in a fair way by reversing the Conservative Administration’s tax cuts for the big banks; by closing loopholes on capital gains that are exploited by the very wealthiest people—the top 0.1 per cent; and by taxing the social media giants. We must make sure that the latter pay their fair share, and we should hypothecate that revenue to pump prime our investment in mental health services, because it is the social media giants that do so much of the harm to our young people. That would, in turn, lead to consequentials that we would spend in Scotland.

The Liberal Democrats will be a responsible Opposition in this Parliament and we will urge the UK Labour Government to be bolder. We will tell it when it is wrong, and we will support it when we think that it has got it right. That is what constructive opposition looks like.

I move amendment S6M-14614.4, to leave out from “importance of” to end and insert:

“terrible state of the public finances caused by the mismanagement of the previous UK Conservative administration; believes that the top priority of the new Labour administration’s first UK Budget must be fixing the NHS and social care crisis so that people across the UK can get the care that they need; considers that it would not be right to further squeeze households that have seen their living standards fall, and believes that a fair deal would see the removal of the two-child limit on benefits, the reversal of the cut to the Winter Fuel Payment, and tax revenues raised in a fair way, including by reversing the previous Conservative administration’s tax cuts for the big banks, closing loopholes in capital gains tax exploited by the top 0.1% wealthiest people, and taxing the social media giants so that they pay their fair share.”