Scotland Bill

Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at on 10 March 2011.

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Photo of David McLetchie David McLetchie Conservative

This is a tale of two conversations. The first is the so-called national conversation, which the First Minister launched with great fanfare in August 2007 and described as

“the start of the next, and most dynamic phase, of Scottish constitutional reform.”

However, the national conversation is no more. It is reduced to a mere whimper of irrelevance.

Thankfully, there was a second conversation, between the parties in the Parliament that represent the overwhelming majority of our fellow Scots, are committed to sustaining Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom and are equally keen to ensure that our constitutional settlement is right for Scotland, is fit for purpose and promotes accountable and good government on the matters for which we are responsible. Our conversation led to the establishment of the Calman commission and its thorough review of devolution to date, which was taken on by the outgoing Labour Government—to its credit—and has now manifested itself in the Scotland Bill that the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Government have brought to Parliament.

Moreover, unlike the futile and wasteful national conversation that is no more, the process has had the endorsement of this Parliament at every stage.

Some say that there is no democratic mandate from the people for the Scotland Bill, but I can assure members that there is. Careful research discloses that we have passed the Salmond test, which was articulated by the great man himself on 9 December 2009 in this Parliament. He asked my colleague Annabel Goldie:

“does Annabel Goldie accept the proposition that, given the unity of which the Conservatives are now part with the Liberals and Labour, if people in Scotland think that the Scotland Bill is good enough, they can vote for one of those three parties, but if they think that we can do rather better, they should vote for the Scottish National Party or the Green party? Does she accept that as a proposition for the forthcoming election and will she accept the result if that is the division of opinion?”—[Official Report, 9 December 2010; c 31364.]

Of course, Annabel Goldie said yes. What was the forthcoming election? It was the one that we had last year. What happened in the election? The Scottish National Party got 20 per cent of the vote, and the parties who supported the Scotland Bill got nearly 80 per cent of the vote. Therefore, we have passed the Salmond test with flying colours, and let us hear no more of that kind of nonsense.

I want to highlight three criticisms of the financial provisions of the bill and the refutation of them in the report, which is based on the evidence that we gathered. First, let us consider the alleged £8 billion deficit that was held up as demonstrating a so-called inherent deflationary bias in the income tax proposals. It was rightly described by the Secretary of State for Scotland as a nonsense figure based on a set of assumptions that were explicitly ruled out in the white paper.

Interestingly, when we look forward—it is the future with which we are concerned—an analysis prepared independently by the Scottish Parliament information centre’s own researchers for the committee demonstrated that if the Scottish Government model was started in 2011-12 and extended over the four-year period of the spending review, under the bill’s proposals we would be nearly £2 billion better off. That is an independent assessment using the Scottish Government’s own methodology. The claim that there is an inherent bias or flaw is complete nonsense.

Neither is there an inherent inflationary bias. The overall objective is to equate the level of grant reduction with an accurate estimate of income tax receipts in year 1, so that we have a position of neutrality and a level playing field on which to move forward. That is why we have to get the grant reduction sums right at the outset and why we set out in the report the principles on which they should be calculated.

We also had the claim that there is a direct connection between the devolution of tax powers and economic growth. At its most absurd, it was claimed by the First Minister in a speech to the SNP conference—where else?—that

“with economic powers we could grow the Scottish economy by an extra 1 per cent a year”.

One would have to make such a statement at an SNP conference, because they are the only people stupid enough to believe it.

Be that as it may, the poor professors who were cited for that absurd proposition came in for further misrepresentation in official Government publications about the linkage. Interestingly, if we carefully read the evidence submitted to the committee, we see that there has been a significant shift in the position of the SNP Government and its pin-up-boy economists. Economic growth is now referred to as economic performance, and sustained annual increases in GDP have now become one-offs. Finally, we had an acknowledgement from the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Sustainable Growth that

“a large measure of it depends on what you do and what policies you take forward”.—[Official Report, Scotland Bill Committee, 8 February 2011; c 440.]

How true—that was self-evident from the start, but it is a long way from the blustering assertions of Mr Salmond.