Budget (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at 4:28 pm on 26 January 2000.

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Photo of Adam Ingram Adam Ingram Scottish National Party 4:28, 26 January 2000

I would like to commend the minister and his officials for producing the comprehensive documentation and the mass of facts and figures that accompany the bill. As a member of the Finance Committee, I look forward to the detailed scrutiny of the bill; I believe that Mr McConnell is appearing before us next Tuesday.

The stark fact that stares out at me from the mass of information is that this budget cannot be regarded as worthy of a national Parliament. It is more akin, and more directly comparable, to the annual budgets produced by our local councils. Just like them, we have to accept what funds we are given by a central authority—in our case a block grant from Westminster that, over time, will bear little relation to what we actually need to spend on our nation's public services to maintain, never mind improve, their quality.

Even more significant, the block grant that we are given to allocate and distribute bears little or no relation to the revenues that Westminster ingathers from Scotland. Under the current devolution settlement, we have been invested with even less responsibility than a local council has in that regard. The bill displays publicly the impotence of this Parliament to put Scotland's wealth to work for our people, to create the conditions for economic prosperity and to redistribute resources to bring about social justice.

We should view the bill as the Executive's best shot at shielding the Scottish people from budget cuts imposed by our remote and uncaring Treasury in London—the real master in this chamber. Make no mistake, Gordon Brown has inflicted serious damage. With £1.1 billion in cuts to services in Scotland over the first three years of a Labour Government compared with the last three years of the wicked Tories, Scotland's shield is heavily dented.

Many members of this Parliament will be aware that their former local authority colleagues are struggling—struggling to balance budgets and struggling to explain to their electorates why increased taxes are accompanying cuts in services. When they were in local government, members such as Mr McAveety, who is sitting next to Mr McConnell, were quick to point out where the blame for their predicament lay. The blame for the funding shortfall, both in councils and in this Parliament, lies at the door of the London Treasury.

The situation has become worse and more restrictive under Gordon Brown's stewardship of the United Kingdom economy. We now have less than we did during the darkest Tory years. If Brown's Treasury in London had allowed Scotland to spend even the same proportion of the national wealth that we spent five years ago, this Parliament would have an additional £4.5 billion in its budget over the next three years.