Meeting of the Parliament 18 June 2025
In what is a feat of surprisingly accurate economic analysis that you would not expect from the acolytes of Liz Truss, the Scottish Tories have pinpointed one of the deep problems at the heart of Scotland’s finances. That problem is, of course, the Scottish National Party Government. It has an abysmal record of 18 years of waste, incompetence and, increasingly, chaos—£6.7 billion of taxpayers’ money wasted on ferries that do not sail, prisons that do not get built, a deposit return scheme that did not recycle a single bottle and a national care service that did not employ a single carer. Hard-working Scots are literally paying the price of SNP failure, with over £1.6 billion spent on the scandal of delayed discharge because the SNP cannot get Scotland’s NHS working.
Normally, whenever I lay out that litany of waste, it is met with complaint and howls of derision from SNP members, but it is good to have supporters on the front bench today, with the belated admission that, by their own estimates, they waste £1 billion a year. That is, of course, on top of the tally that I have just laid out.
Scotland has also suffered from the chaos and financial mismanagement of finance secretaries, who, with one exception, still sit around the Cabinet table. There has been failure to supply crucial information to the independent forecaster, refusal to publish core documents, including a pay policy, capital spending plans and the medium-term financial strategy, and chaotic, knee-jerk in-year announcements such as the council tax freeze that nobody knew about. Party politics is always put first.
Budget after budget does not even last six months, and there have now been three consecutive years of emergency in-year cuts slashing funding across the board to balance the books. There really is no other word for it—it is complete and utter chaos.
The Labour Party believes strongly in progressive taxation, but to ensure public support for progressive taxation, we have to show people what they get in return, and the SNP has utterly failed to do that. Every year, Scots are paying more and getting less in return. One in six Scots is on an NHS waiting list, schools are sliding down the international league tables, there is a housing emergency and councils are cutting key services. Better public services, more investment and a better standard of living is what people should be getting from paying their fair share in tax, but, under the SNP, that could not be further from the truth.
Meanwhile, the Tories have failed to acknowledge the economic and fiscal realities in which the UK operates. British public finances were left in a truly terrible state by the previous Tory Government. Over 14 years, it presided over a low-wage, no-growth economy. It inflicted austerity on public services, doing lasting damage to them all. It crashed the economy, sending interest rates spiralling. It presided over a cost of living crisis with sky-high inflation not seen since the 1970s. It closed the last Parliament with living standards lower than they were at the opening of that Parliament for the first time since the Napoleonic wars. It spent the last year of that Parliament promising money that it did not have in a desperate attempt to buy votes, leaving a gaping black hole in Britain’s public finances. It spent the annual national reserve three times over in the first three months of that year, Mr Hoy. All of that left the incoming UK Labour Government with a major clean-up operation to undertake. There was no apology, no humility and no shame from the Conservatives.
Frankly, the Conservatives’ plans today are not worthy of the back of a fag packet. This afternoon, they have brought half-baked, reheated tax cuts to the Parliament, and we should not believe a word of it. Cutting down on quangos would not deliver the savings that are needed for such drastic tax cuts; they would surely mean deep cuts to core public services such as our NHS. The Scottish Fiscal Commission has projected that the NHS will account for an increasingly large share of the Scottish budget: up to almost 55 per cent in the next 50 years. With an ageing population, that investment is absolutely essential. Are the Conservatives really proposing that we defund our NHS to fund tax cuts?
The UK Labour Government is facing up to the mess that both parties here in the chamber have made of our country. Last week’s game-changing spending review saw record investment for Scotland, with a £9.1 billion boost to Scotland’s budget—the highest settlement in the history of devolution.