Stewart Hosie

Automatic stabilisers have an important role to play. Obviously the UK Government are not required to balance their books annually, whereas the Scottish Government have to because they operate within a fixed budget. The real answer is to grant the Scottish Government borrowing powers, while working within a framework that says that over the cycle—and I mean properly over the cycle—the books are balanced so that we do not end up going into a recession with half a trillion pounds-worth of debt.

The Finance Bill contains several important issues to do with fuel and alcohol and some small matters do with bingo that are important to local communities. All the retrospective measures will have to be probed. I hope that the Minister will pick up on some of these points, not least the Government's attitude to alcohol duty. Will he give us an indication that they are prepared to look again at whether alcohol can be taxed fairly rather than by unfairly attacking the Scotch whisky industry?

— from debate entitled “Finance Bill”

The three speeches/headings immediately before

  1. 1 earlier: Andrew Tyrie

    Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the examples that he cited are from federal countries, which have an injunction on their relevant states to balance the budget over any calendar year, and therefore a very high proportion of the fiscal stimulus has to come from the centre? It is perfectly sensible and reasonable for America, for example, to run a larger fiscal stimulus, whereas in a country such as ours, where that injunction does not exist because we are centralised, the automatic stabilisers can do all the work.

  2. 2 earlier: Stewart Hosie

    I am not sure that taking more money out of people's pockets would be particularly sensible at this point.

    The point about the cuts is that the Government rightly backed the fiscal stimulus. Our view is that the recession was so deep that monetary policy was not enough.

    We back the fiscal stimulus, in principle, although there are issues about the VAT cut. We have seen the Prime Minister strut the world stage talking about fiscal stimulus, not least with President Obama at the ExCel centre. However, the state of Maryland, population 5 million, will have £2 billion extra in fiscal stimulus to spend in 2010, while in Australia the state of Victoria will have 8 billion Australian dollars over the same period. It seems extraordinary that even following their own rhetoric, this Government are prepared to cut public expenditure, in the teeth of a recession, when all the serious commentators say that we will still be in negative growth next year.

  3. 3 earlier: Rob Marris

    I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his generosity. To try to preserve at least some of those 9,000 jobs, will his party propose using its tax-raising powers? I am thinking of the 3p on income tax.

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