Financial Powers Debate

Ms Wendy Alexander (Paisley North) (Lab): As this is an SNP debate six months before an election, the SNP should, as a minimum, have clarified what Scotland’s principal Opposition party believes about the future financing of Scotland.

It is somewhat bizarre that, after touting fiscal autonomy as its flagship policy for more than five years, the SNP cannot even bring itself to mention it in the motion or to tell us how it will work. To be fair to the SNP, by definition, every single independent country raises and spends its own taxes—they all have fiscal autonomy. However, as others have said, no devolved or federal nation has adopted fiscal autonomy to finance its constituent parts. Why? It is because the very reason for being part of a larger state is to share risk, resources and revenues. When I asked Jim Mather for examples of fiscal autonomy, he cited Navarre, the Basque Country, Montenegro and the Channel Islands. Those are hardly the fastest-growing parts of their respective states, but let us leave that aside. All those jurisdictions have fiscal decentralisation and share risk, resources and revenues with the centre; none has fiscal autonomy.

Jim Mather: There is an article by somebody who is very close to home in today’s edition of The Scotsman calling for efficient government. Most people realise that efficient government can be achieved only when there is a closely linked virtuous circle between wise spending and Government revenues. How will we get efficient government in Scotland in the fiscal vacuum that Wendy Alexander wishes to create for it?

Ms Alexander: We get efficiency by good government and good politics.

Let me return to fiscal autonomy. As Brian Adam made clear, fiscal autonomy is a financing system for independence. As David McLetchie pointed out, that is why we cannot find a single paragraph on the SNP’s website about how its flagship policy will work. The debate has been important in that the only conclusion that one can draw from it is that fiscal autonomy is officially dead as an SNP flagship policy. Members heard it here first: fiscal autonomy is dead and has been consigned to the cluttered graveyard of discarded dead economic policies.

Fiscal autonomy is going the way of the oil fund, which was the SNP’s centrepiece in 2003, but which is no more and did not even rate a mention in the budget discussion this year. In 1999, we had the penny for Scotland, which is gone but perhaps not forgotten. In 1997, the SNP tried to balance the books by claiming that an independent Scotland would inherit none of the national debt. All those policies are discredited and dead and all of them have been ditched because of their lack of plausibility.

The SNP knows that the Scots do not want to hand over all their public services, including the entire health, education and police services, to the mercy of a financing system about which the SNP cannot even provide a motion, never mind a one-page guide. That is not serious politics. We speak today not in some seminar room; this is a Parliament with a responsibility to the people to sustain their livelihoods and preserve their services. The people of Scotland deserve better. Let us forget the deception and start providing some detail.