Budget Resolutions
Debate between Philip Boswell and Stewart Hosie
Stewart Hosie
Not at the moment.
There is no guarantee that a deal will be done. If the Chancellor expects that the plans outlined today can cope with the consequence of a cliff-edge Brexit, which the Prime Minister plans, then the whole Government are in for a very rude awakening.
Let us look at some facts. The economic value of EU citizens working in the UK is enormous. PricewaterhouseCoopers told us last year that the impact of migration restrictions alone due to Brexit could lead to a loss of over 1% of GDP. That 1% fall would more than halve the Government’s GDP growth forecasts for every single year of this forecast period, rendering them meaningless.
Just to put some colour into that, my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee West (Chris Law) today met representatives of the computer games industry, who said that 98.4% of the companies that responded to them had said that the Government should immediately guarantee the status of EU nationals working in the UK. That would have been, if not a fiscal measure, an active and positive economic one for the Chancellor to have announced today. It would have been an active and positive economic measure to guarantee that the UK would fully replace lost EU funding post-2020, specifically the less favoured area support scheme, particularly if the UK leaves the EU before the closure window in 2019. It would have been a positive economic measure today to confirm the UK’s intention to negotiate substantial and long transitional arrangements for the financial sector, to avoid the loss of jobs, income, headquarters and tax.
Philip Boswell (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)
Was my hon. Friend as concerned as I was at the announcement just six days ago in the Irish press that since the Brexit vote over 100,000 UK companies have registered, or taken steps to register, offices in Ireland?
Stewart Hosie
I am not shocked or surprised by that. What we need to do is ensure, certainly in Scotland, and in the UK if the Government can find the will to do it, that we make this country as attractive as possible as a place to continue to invest in and run businesses in, and for us that means staying in the single market and, frankly, staying in the EU.
Finally, I want to refer to announcements made in relation to the Budget over the past week. There was the decision to have extra departmental spending cuts, and the decision on personal independence payments and other welfare measures. The latter, we believe, demonstrates the real impact of the welfare cap in punishing the most vulnerable and balancing the books on the backs of the poor, confirming many predictions that the UK is set to become more unequal than it has been since the days of Margaret Thatcher, and further confirming that this Government have learnt nothing. They are tweaking the numbers to fit the ideology, driven by an austerity agenda and failing to realise that they cannot cut their way to growth. At its heart, the real tragedy of this Budget, only a week or so before article 50 is invoked, is that Brexit was the word that dared not speak its name, and this country is completely unprepared for the economic tsunami that this Government will unleash.