Christine Jardine
Main Page: Christine Jardine (Liberal Democrat - Edinburgh West)Department Debates - View all Christine Jardine's debates with the Scotland Office
(2 days, 1 hour ago)
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Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
It is an honour to serve with you in the chair, Sir John. I congratulate the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing this debate. I apologise to you, Sir John, because I appreciate that it is frustrating that every debate about Scotland, and about this or the previous Government’s spending in Scotland, comes back to the Scottish Government. The debate is rarely about the Scottish people—about my constituents in Edinburgh West, or our constituents across Scotland. It always comes back to the Scottish Government. That is not necessarily the fault of the Labour party, the Conservative party or the SNP, but it does not seem to matter how much money the UK Government invest in Scotland, what projects they undertake, what the spending review promises or how much money there is in Barnett consequentials—it gets squandered. As my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) said, it never seems to reach the people of Scotland. It never seems to do anything about our crumbling NHS, our schools, which are in trouble, and the housing crisis that we face.
Although the specific subject under discussion is the spending review announced by the Labour Government, for us in Scotland the debate is about the frustration that we may not get the benefit that any UK Government intend for Scotland, with any policy, because it gets blocked in Holyrood. I hate to mention that again, but £9.1 billion, however one might contest it—it might not be quite £9.1 billion—is a lot of money for the SNP Government to squander, because squander it they will. We have only to look at the evidence of the infamous and now even later ferries, which seem to fail at every turn. The money wasted by the SNP on that fiasco could have paid for around 11,000 nurses or 3,000 GPs in our NHS. That is why we are so frustrated, and why we turn again and again to the Scottish Government, and their failure to use the resources given them by Westminster.
The hon. Member for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry (Stephen Gethins) says that this place continues to have a huge impact—so it should, but that impact is undermined at every turn by the Scottish Government.
Stephen Gethins
Given that we sit in the UK Parliament, does the hon. Member concede that the numbers she mentions are absolutely dwarfed by the billions on Brexit, the hundreds of millions on Rwanda, and the billions blown by the Truss Budget, all of which will have had a material impact on the amount of money that the UK Government have to give up to Scotland? Furthermore, does she agree that the Scottish Government offsetting welfare cuts, the bedroom tax, and child poverty, as they have done—and I believe the Liberal Democrats backed that—was a good use of money?
Christine Jardine
No, I do not, actually. I agree fundamentally that the UK Government, whether Conservative or Labour, have not got everything right. But the Scottish Government have done nothing to mitigate any of the, if you like, failings of Westminster. They have done nothing to mitigate them, and have exacerbated every problem in Scotland. There is not a single area of the Scottish economy, or of Scottish education, health, or public services that one can look at, over the past two decades, and say, “Wow, didn’t the Scottish Government make a good job of that? Didn’t they spend the money well?” Just ask the constituents who I spoke to on Sunday night in Edinburgh West, who told me that they are sick to the back teeth of the SNP wasting their money—two decades they have had of it.
Christine Jardine
No, sorry. I am running out of time.
It would be churlish of me not to recognise that there have been benefits from the spending review for my constituents. I welcome the £750 million investment in the exascale supercomputer, because a lot of my constituents work at the University of Edinburgh. The investment in defence spending will help my constituents who work in the defence industries in Edinburgh. I hope that the £9.1 billion—or however much—that will be invested in Scotland over the next few years helps by investing in the projects that the Liberal Democrats in Scotland have managed to get into the budget for the coming years. The investment in the Princess Alexandra eye pavilion in Edinburgh is one that is particularly close to my heart, because my constituents have suffered from the SNP’s lack of investment there.
In brief, we welcome a lot of the aspects of the spending review in Scotland. We welcome the extra funding, but we view with frustration and some trepidation how the Scottish Government might waste it.