Budget Resolutions

Debate between Peter Grant and David Linden

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

The sad thing is that no matter how much anyone in this House presses the Scottish Government on their decisions, a record amount of that money coming back to Scotland has already been decided not by the elected Members of the Scottish Parliament, but by Members of the UK Parliament who could not get elected in Scotland. Record amounts of that money come with strings attached and conditions attached that tell the Scottish Government how they have to spend our money.

In response to the hon. Gentleman’s specific question about the amount, if he looks carefully, he will see that, yes, there are welcome increases for capital spend, but the day-to-day service provision budgets of the Scottish Government will continue to be under intense pressure. While we welcome the increase in capital spend, the Departments of the Scottish Government—just like the Departments of this Government and the departments of local authorities the length and breadth of England and Wales—will find that the resources to meet the ever-growing demand on their day-to-day services will be as tightly pressed as ever.

While the Government will try to pull the wool over our eyes and say, “It is all covid’s fault”, we cannot and will not let them forget that the British Government’s management of the economy during covid has been among the worst of the world’s major economies. The International Monetary Fund has predicted that the long-term economic damage from covid in the UK will be worse than in the other G7 economies. Even that does not tell the whole story, because while the Secretary of State rejoiced in the fact that we hope the long-term economic damage of covid will be restricted to 2%, he forgot to tell us that Brexit is twice as bad as that. I wonder why he forgot to mention that the long-term, self-inflicted damage of Brexit is likely to be twice as bad as the long-term damage of covid.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

In talking about the self-inflicted damage from this British Government, whom people in Scotland have not voted for by majority since 1955, does my hon. Friend accept that when Government Members talk about how kind the UK Government have been in giving money to the Scottish Parliament, more often than not the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government are having to use their resources to mitigate bad decisions that come from this place, such as the cut to the universal credit, which renders the Scottish child payment, described by charities as a “game-changing” child payment, as utterly useless?

[Peter Grant]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Giving spending powers and in some cases tax-raising powers to the devolved Parliaments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland was never supposed to be a way of making up for the cuts to those same budgets coming through from Westminster, but all too often that has been happening.

To return to the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, his response to the Budget was:

“This is actually awful. Yet more years of real incomes barely growing. High inflation, rising taxes, poor growth.”

How can anyone think that is something to celebrate? The IFS also said that someone on median earnings might see their pre-tax pay just about keep ahead of inflation, but after paying the higher income tax that the Government are imposing, plus the higher national insurance tax, that median earner will be worse off in real terms. An analysis published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that many of the worst off—people on universal credit who do not have a job—will be poorer as a result of this Budget. Even the reduction in the universal credit taper, welcome as it is, does not make as much difference as the Tories are claiming. For 40% of universal credit claimants in Scotland it will make no difference at all, because they have not got a job. [Interruption.]

The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North thinks it is funny that many people will not benefit from the Budget. I do not see what he finds funny at all. While 40% of universal credit claimants in Scotland will get no benefit at all from the changes to the taper, 100% of his constituents on universal credit will be £1,000 a year worse off. I look forward to him defending that to his constituents—I would not try to defend it to mine.

All of that prompts a question: if people on average earnings will be worse off, and if the worst off—the lowest earners in our society—will be worse off, who really benefits from the Budget? The Chancellor’s banker buddies will benefit, thank you very much. Many of them will be raising a glass to toast a 5% cut in the corporation tax they pay, while the customers who pay their wages—individuals and small businesses alike—will struggle to cope with increased taxes. As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) alluded to last week, the Manchester Uniteds of this world who think it clever to take a 10-minute flight to go to a football match will gain, and the champagne quaffers in the members’ enclosure at Ascot will have something to cheer, but very few of my constituents will have anything to cheer at all.

I welcome the news that alcohol excise duties are to be reviewed at last, but let us see the result of the review before we welcome it unconditionally. As I said in a Westminster Hall debate, it cannot be right that the duty on a glass of whisky is 16% higher than the duty on a glass of wine that contains exactly the same amount of alcohol. I make no apology for reminding the House that, over the summer, all those people in the enclosures at Ascot, Henley or wherever almost certainly enjoyed the product of the skilled workforce of the Cameronbridge distillery in my constituency. It is the biggest grain distillery in the whole of Europe, and it swells the Treasury’s coffers to the tune of about £3.6 billion a year in excise duties alone. That is £3.6 billion a year from one manufacturing establishment in my constituency. The fact that for decades many people in the towns of Methil, Buckhaven, Methilhill and others have been living on or below the breadline close to a distillery that generates such massive wealth for the coffers down here in Westminster is testimony to the failure of successive British Governments to put the wellbeing of the people front and centre of their taxation and spending plans.

If the Chancellor is genuinely concerned about improving living standards for people on low incomes, he should start by reversing some of the savage cuts that he has made and reinstating the election manifesto promises that he has broken. He should reinstate the pensions triple lock, reverse the £20-a-week cut to universal credit, reverse the hike in national insurance that penalises small businesses for each and every new job they create, and scrap the two-child limit and vile rape clause. If he really believes in a guaranteed living wage for all, let us hear him—or, at least, the Minister in summing up—commit to increasing the legal minimum wage later this month and every November to match the real living wage, measured not by how much the Government are willing to ask employers to pay but by how much independent analysis shows human beings in these islands need to live on.

The Secretary of State asked what we might do as alternatives. If the Chancellor is looking for ways to save money, he could look at the gross inefficiency in the Government’s own Departments. Recent National Audit Office reports show that eye-watering sums of money have been wasted in delays and inefficiency. In the Ministry of Defence, nuclear infrastructure, Crossrail, High Speed 2 and the national criminal intelligence database, hundreds of millions of pounds—billions of pounds—are being thrown away through waste and inefficiency. He should get a grip on that; then we could improve services without necessarily having to increase taxes.

If we want to see where we could stop spending money, we could start by scrapping the programme of new nuclear power stations that are designed to rig the system in favour of nuclear energy that, when it finally comes on stream, will cost more than twice as much as offshore wind power. Sooner or later, our constituents will be forced to pay that price increase. We should scrap the monstrous white elephant that is the nuclear weapons programme: a programme whose only purpose is to commit the worst crime in the history of the planet. The Government should ditch plans to spend a quarter of a billion pounds on a new royal yacht Britannia, although, given whose ego it is clearly designed to satisfy, perhaps we should rename it the good ship Borisannia.

This is a Budget that has been imposed on Scotland by a Government we did not elect and who will never have the consent of our people to rule over us. It is partly the result of a covid pandemic, which could perhaps have been predicted, but was not. We all have to live with the consequences of that. It is largely the result of a Brexit that our people did not vote for.

The Budget seeks to level down Scotland’s status to something approaching that of a forgotten English county. I want Scotland to be levelled up. I want Scotland’s status to be levelled up to that of an equal partner of our friends in Europe and elsewhere.

The Chancellor claimed that his Budget would strengthen the Union, but what he has done is increase the pace of Scotland’s journey to a true levelling up, and bring forward the day when the sovereign people of Scotland reassert our inalienable right of self-determination, the day when our place in the world is levelled up to match that of the other prosperous, outward-looking, inclusive, democratic and independent nations. If Conservative Members think that it is not coming, why have the Government given a 20% budget increase to the Secretary of State for Scotland, whose only purpose is to peddle the myths—[Interruption.] Why do they need to spend 17.5% to 20% more on a Department, the only purpose of which is to campaign for a no vote in a referendum that they say is not coming, but that we say is coming very soon?