Meeting of the Parliament 09 October 2024
I have only four minutes, and I have a lot more to say. I am sorry.
Scotland is forecast to have the fifth-lowest gross domestic product growth of any UK region. We lag behind the rest of the UK in growth and have done so for the past decade. The SNP’s failure to grow our economy has cost the Scottish budget, to date, £624 million, according to a calculation that was done not by the Scottish Conservatives but by the Scottish Fiscal Commission. Underpinning all that, in Scotland, we pay more tax than the rest of the UK. Those decisions are having a negative impact on our ability to grow the economy. I have, many times in this Parliament, referred to the attitude of Scottish businesses towards the tax differential. In order to attract staff, many of them now have to offer a wage premium to take account of our higher taxes.
In addition, the Greens’ destructive approach to housing has damaged investment confidence and driven away hundreds of millions of pounds of investment, which has gone elsewhere. Thanks to the Greens’ policies on that sector, it is no wonder that we have a housing crisis.
Instead of introducing new taxes and widening the tax gap with the rest of the UK, the Scottish Government should go in the opposite direction. It should ignore the economic and fiscal illiteracy that the Scottish Greens propose and instead use its extensive and generous fiscal powers to deliver a budget later this year that will prioritise economic growth and reduce the tax gap with the rest of the UK. The Greens will not like that budget, but the rest of Scotland will be thankful for it.
I am pleased to move amendment S6M-14825.2, to leave out from “notes” to end and insert:
“agrees that the fiscal levers currently available to the Scottish Government are more than adequate to deliver the economic growth that is vital to sustain public services; recognises that the current fiscal settlement, provided by the former UK Conservative administration, is the most generous on record, and that the Scottish Government has failed to properly utilise the monies allocated to it, by instead choosing to prioritise wasteful projects, such as the National Care Service; notes that the Scottish Government’s financial incompetence, which was exacerbated by the former Bute House Agreement with the Scottish Green Party, has resulted in Scotland becoming a high-tax, low-growth economy that has lost the confidence of the business sector and has resulted in severe public sector spending cuts to fix the Scottish Government’s financial black hole, and urges the Scottish Government to show some common sense and ignore the economic and financial illiteracy proposed by the Scottish Green Party, which proposes yet more burdensome taxation and anti-growth regulations, and to use the generous fiscal powers that it already has to deliver a Budget that prioritises economic growth and provides for all of Scotland.”
15:10Motions, questions or amendments mentioned by their reference code.