Meeting of the Parliament 27 February 2025
I remind members of my entry in the register of members’ interests. I derive some income from a private rented property and I have received hospitality from the Scotch Whisky Association.
The Scottish Government is correct to recognise the value of investment in driving forward Scotland’s economy. Economic growth is vital to us all, both as a good in itself and as a generator of the tax revenues that we all want to see to fund our vital public services. As we know, our growth has been too low for too long. Even the relatively historically low levels of growth in recent times at a UK level have not been matched by the performance of the Scottish economy, and that has to change.
That is where the cabinet secretary is quite right to say that there is a role for investment—that said, the Scottish Government’s motion is, for us, as ever, simply too self-congratulatory. There are substantial issues in relation to the level of investment that we need to attract to deliver the faster economic growth that we all want.
I will break my remarks into two parts. First, I will talk about the investment by the public sector. Public spending has a vital role in investing in the infrastructure that our economy needs to succeed. For too long, we have been waiting for the promised delivery of the dualling of the A9. That project is of vital importance to my constituents in Mid Scotland and Fife, the Deputy First Minister’s constituents, others across the Highlands, and the vital Scotch whisky industry, which relies on both the A9 and the A96, for which dualling is on the back burner, to get their goods to market. The point that has been made regularly by representatives of the whisky industry is that those two infrastructure projects are vital.