Meeting of the Parliament 30 October 2024
No, I need to make progress.
Free university tuition, free prescriptions, free eye tests, free period products and free bus travel for young people are a bargain for the £111 in additional tax per year that someone on a £40,000 salary pays in Scotland. That article does not even mention the Scottish child payment, social care support, free school meals or higher pay for nurses.
The challenges of the past 14 years, with a Conservative Government in Westminster that has cut investment to the bone and run public services into the ground, highlight how unsatisfactory Scotland’s fiscal framework is. As a devolved nation, we have only limited tax and borrowing powers and end up having to use them to try to mitigate the worst of the vicious cuts and hardships that are being imposed from London.
The Scottish Fiscal Commission, among others, advocates for fiscal reconfiguration to avoid perpetually missing our climate and nature restoration goals; and what about eliminating child poverty for good? We need more investment and money for those things, not less. Lowering taxes while continuing to subsidise polluting industries and large landowners will not achieve the outcomes that we desperately need.
The Scottish Greens want more public investment in Scotland, and we will be honest about where the money for it can come from and how it can be raised. In the Scottish budget, we would take funding from the road building and motorway expansion budgets and put it into housing and climate action. We would raise more from those who can afford it, such as those who travel by private jet.
I suggest to the Parliament that the focus should be on economic development, sustainability and prosperity for all.