This is on us.
No matter the well-crafted spin from the Scottish Govt, it's Scotland's spending plans which have landed the country with a £1.5 billion black hole.
IF the Scottish Government was as good at financial planning as they are at spin, Scotland would not be staring into a fiscal black hole this week. Unfortunately they’re not. This week it seems likely we’ll learn that Scotland is, in short, broke.
You have to hand it to the SNP though. Tomorrow’s Budget statement has been preceded with some epic pitch rolling (to use David Cameron’s phrase) as the Scottish government seeks to shift the blame for the bad news to come. A wave of social media graphics have been published by the Scottish Government’s PR wing to tell us that the cuts and tax rises expected this week are all London’s fault. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s decision to opt for tax cuts not spending increases in his autumn statement are apparently all to blame (plus Brexit, obvs). Thus Finance Secretary Shona Robison will tell MSPs tomorrow that it is the Westminster straight-jacket not abuse of the Holyrood credit card that’s the cause of Scotland’s hard rain.
The spin may work: many Scots will prefer to believe well-meaning Edinburgh over cruel-hearted London. But the truth is rather different. Whatever the difficulties caused by Mr Hunt’s spending restraint, they are as nothing compared to the impact of spending decisions made by the Scottish Government. You may agree with those decisions or you may disagree with them. What is harder to argue is that these decisions aren’t the primary reason why Scotland now stands on a fiscal precipice. If tomorrow really is as bad as many fear, with cuts to services and personal and business tax rises on the agenda, then we can only say that’s it’s been coming. And warned about. Repeatedly. And long before Mr Hunt got onto his feet in the House of Commons last month.
As I’ve been writing recently in my Scottish Daily Mail column, warnings about Scottish public spending running out of control go back more than a decade. In 2010, the Scottish Government “Independent Budget Review”, led by businessman Crawford Beveridge, made clear that the Scotland’s public sector was “unsustainable”. He argued that the public sector pay roll needed to be trimmed; that universal services, such as free tuition and prescription should be reviewed; and that the SNP’s Council tax freeze needed to end. Around the same time, the Christie Commission on Public Sector Reform set out a road map on how to change the way services were delivered. There was a very clear reform plan on how to set things on a more sustainable course.
We then had a referendum campaign. Very few of the hard decisions proposed by Beveridge were adopted (indeed, it seems rather apt that Beveridge’s Review has now been entirely expunged from the Scottish Government’s website). Christie has not been fully implemented. The freebie culture has rolled on. The warnings kept coming from independent bodies such Audit Scotland (“significant reform of the public sector is needed to protect services”), and the Institute of Fiscal Studies (“difficult choices on Scottish tax and spending over the next few years will eventually have to be faced”). But the pace of reform has been glacial. Eighteen months ago, the former Finance Secretary Kate Forbes declared that a public sector “reset” would be needed. “We need to focus on how the public sector can reform to become more efficient”, she told parliament. But a few weeks ago, MSPs on the parliament’s finance committee concluded that Scottish Government efforts to trim the size of the State had essentially run into the sand. Only now - with a £1.5bn black hole in their accounts - is Ms Robison preparing to set out some cuts.
It is, putting it mildly, rather late in the day. But then, as the Scottish Parliament Finance Committee also noted: “Affordability does not appear to be a key factor in Scottish Government decision-making”. What a devastating sentence that is.
Throughout this entire period, it should be noted, the same Barnett consequentials now held up by the Scottish Government’s PR machine as a ball and chain around Scotland’s feet delivered extra spending per head to Scotland every single year. Here’s the table, recently published by Our Scottish Future.
So while it is right to say that the UK Government is now handing Holyrood a tighter fiscal envelope compared to the loads-a-money days of the 2000s, and while it’s also right to say inflation is now eating into the government’s spending just as it has everywhere else, so it should also be said that Scotland is hardly the worst affected part of the UK when it has come to austerity these last few years. Indeed, the reverse is true: it isn’t that Scotland has been starved of cash, it’s that it’s spent money for fun and failed to consider if, and when, it might all run out.
To take one of the biggest examples: look at Scotland’s new benefits regime, which began to take shape when powers were devolved to Holyrood following the 2014 referendum. As the Fraser of Allander Institute noted last week, the Scottish Government’s “friendlier” system is leading to a higher take up from Scots. In addition, new benefits such as the Scottish Child Payment must be paid for. The Institute notes, therefore, that there is “a growing wedge between the money transferred from the UK Government through the block grant….and the amount actually spent in Scotland, resulting in a negative social security net position.” Here’s the table showing how wide that gap is.
So, £1.2 billion in three years time, then. To repeat, you might support Scotland’s new social security regime; indeed, the new Child Payment has received plaudits from many. The point is that the cost of these measures has to come directly from something else in Scotland. And precisely from whom does not seem to have been factored in; as the Finance Committee put it, that question of affordability doesn’t seem to have been much of an issue. Instead, a government that can’t borrow money has put it on plastic.
In recent months, First Minister Humza Yousaf has added to the black hole by spending tens of millions extra on more generous public sector pay deals and also promising to fund a council tax freeze next year. Without a growing tax base which might add to his coffers, he instead is being forced to demand money from a shrinking pie. That’s if, as reported, he decides to whack up tax on high earners tomorrow. It won’t be enough. And next year, and the year after, the spending pressures will only get more intense.
Ms Robison’s proposals tomorrow for government to share services and trim back the public sector pay roll will therefore be utterly essential. But more will need to be done; we will need, as Mr Beveridge said 13 years ago, “to do more with less”. I think it’s also time for Scotland to decide not just want it wants to do but what it doesn’t. What services and support will it opt no longer to provide? (I’d end free university tuition). Meanwhile, as the think-tank I help to run, Our Scottish Future, set out two weeks ago, Scotland desperately needs a plan for growth. For if it wants to afford the benefits of a wrap around state with free prescription, free tuition and “friendlier” benefits, the country really needs to start thinking about where the money is coming to pay for it all.
This is all still possible. It could and should have been confronted years ago. But instead we decided to breed a political culture in Scotland which has let these matters slip past us - which declared the hard business of trade-offs as a reserved matter. Let’s hope that over the next decade, we fare a little better.
ENDS
“Israel first, Britain second!” — Tory Party Treasurer Sir Ehud Sheleg
Despite the importance of his role as Conservative Party Treasurer, the Jewish millionaire Ehud Sheleg is almost unknown to the general public. Few people would even recognize his name. Even fewer know that he is an Israeli citizen, born in Tel Aviv, and has openly stated that Britain takes second place in his affections: “I was brought up, albeit in Israel, with the sentiment of very strong ties to Britain. In the family of nations, this has to be my favourite one. Second to my homeland, of course.” But why should anyone be interested in such biographical trivia? Only a vile anti-Semite would suggest that Sheleg might seek to influence government policy for the benefit of Jews and Israel, rather than for the benefit of Whites and Britain.
Keir Starmer certainly isn’t going to raise any uncomfortable questions about Sheleg’s role in the Conservative government. He would be denounced as an anti-Semite if he did, of course, but that doesn’t explain Starmer’s silence. He’s silent because he doesn’t see anything wrong in Israel-firsters like Sheleg and Chinn being in control of British politics. Starmer has a Jewish wife and is funded by Jewish millionaires. Like Boris Johnson and Tony Blair, he’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Zionism Inc. I don’t think he will ever become British prime minister, but if he does, we will hear a familiar refrain: “Meet the new boss — same as the old boss!” Britain’s anti-White and pro-Jewish politics will proceed as before. Gold guides goyim and Jewish money controls British politics. See above.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2021/10/04/funding-both-sides-how-jewish-money-controls-british-politics/