Mr James Craigen: asked the Secretary of State for Scotland what follow-up discussions he has had with Guinness plc since the statement by the hon. Member for Eastwood (Mr. Stewart) to the Scottish Grand Committee on 17 July 1986.
Mr James Craigen: Why did the Secretary of State for Scotland not answer the question? Is it because he realises that it was unfair of the hon. Member for Eastwood (Mr. Stewart) to upstage the leader of the Liberal party last July during the Scottish Grand Committee debate on industry when he gave an assurance that the Secretary of State was on his charger as far as the Guinness company was concerned? We know...
Mr James Craigen: Does not the nature of the sub-committee for Scotland give us the worst of both worlds? Is there not a danger that the Secretary of State for Scotland may end up playing second fiddle to the Secretary of State for Education and Science, who will now be involved in the Scottish universities? What guarantees can the Secretary of State offer that the Universities Funding Council, which will...
Mr James Craigen: Before the hon. Member for Staffordshire, Moorlands (Mr. Knox) reached his peroration I was about to say that I agreed with many of the concerns that he expressed about unemployment and the need to remedy the decline in manufacturing capacity. In this Budget the unemployed have been forgotten and one of the few references that the Chancellor made to them was that there would be a threefold...
Mr James Craigen: Ministers have always said that this is a personal tax and not an in-house tax. They do not accept that there are likely to be more administrative difficulties under the new system than there are under the existing system. Therefore, why is he so resistant to a discretionary arrangement in this instance?
Mr James Craigen: My hon. Friend must not look for consistency in the Government's position. Has he managed to elicit from the Minister any indication of the extra cost that will fall on local authorities, the Scottish Special Housing Association and other housing bodies because of administration?
Mr James Craigen: I do not know why the hon. Member for Stirling (Mr. Forsyth) is so truculent about the proposition for an experiment in one local authority area in Scotland. His party wants to hold an experiment in 65 local authority areas. Therefore, why is he so excited about the prospect of one area which may want to volunteer for this new tax? I am sorry to hear that the last book shop in Stirling has...
Mr James Craigen: As the hon. Gentleman reminds us, the Hong Kong decision was a political one. In the light of what he has said, it is as well that he was not the Minister responsible for taking it. Is not the hon. Gentleman reading too much into the amendment? We are not trying to establish a ring fence. We are simply seeking to take out an insurance policy that may or may not be used.
Mr James Craigen: The Minister talked about expectations for the Albion plant and mentioned the options available to him. Can he be more specific about the assurances that he exacted about the future of the Glasgow plant and about the make-up of the 560 job losses?
Mr James Craigen: This is not a generous rate support grant settlement, but we have seen worse in previous years. The Minister seemed to suggest that he is adopting a more relaxed view which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cunninghame, South (Mr. Lambie) observed, is understandable in the run-up to a general election. How realistic, I wondered, was his reply that he expects a standstill in rate poundage plus...
Mr James Craigen: rose—
Mr James Craigen: Given the rate support order that the Minister is introducing tonight, what level of increase in rate poundage does the Scottish Office estimate?
Mr James Craigen: My constituency will not benefit from the Bill. The figures show that all six wards within the Glasgow district will be worse off. In my written evidence in response to the Green Paper, I reckoned that between £8 million and £12 million would be taken out of my area's purchasing power. We should be blunt about it. The Bill was born out of the panic which set into Scottish Toryism after the...
Mr James Craigen: Will the right lion. Gentleman explain why there is such unwarranted haste in cutting the parliamentary time available to debate the poll tax legislation in Scotland, which will not do away with revaluation for the non-domestic sector? If the poll tax is such a good idea, why was not a Bill introduced in the current session to institute such a tax in England and Wales?
Mr James Craigen: The right hon. and learned Gentleman seemed surprised—his words—that skill shortages were emerging. Why, after seven years, have the Government's training policies got it wrong? How many of the unfilled vacancies will be filled as a result of the training policies he has announced today?
Mr James Craigen: The Treasury Bench must always find comfort in the contributions from the hon. Member for Croydon, South (Sir W. Clark). If the north-south divide is the subject of today's debate, the Chancellor of the Exchequer certainly gave it a by-pass operation in his remarks. Economic policy is now geared more to the election than to the longer term considerations of the country's economy. Frankly, I...
Mr James Craigen: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the steep rise in part-time employment considerably masks the failure of the Government's employment policies?
Mr James Craigen: What does the Secretary for State have to say to the 2,500 employees of Barr and Stroud in the Glasgow area whose jobs are geared to research and development and defence contracts? Does he believe that BTR's management philosophy recognises the long-term potential of high-tech as against the short-term advantage of profit?
Mr James Craigen: Does my hon. Friend think that it is even more significant that as early as January 1984 the former Secretary of State for the Environment, the right hon. Member for Wanstead and Woodford (Mr. Jenkin), told the House that the poll tax suffered from fatal defects?
Mr James Craigen: The Bill will not redress that disparity. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the Secretary of State made it clear that the Government have not begun to think about the implications of the uniform business rate in sorting out these disparities?
