Public finances ‘so pared to the bone we can see the marrow’, says SNP of Budget
SNP economy spokesman Drew Hendry described Mr Hunt as an austerity Chancellor who is taking an ‘even bigger axe’ to investment than his predecessor.
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Your support makes all the difference.Public finances are “so pared to the bone that we can see the marrow”, the SNP said in reaction to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s spring Budget.
SNP economy spokesman Drew Hendry described Mr Hunt as an “austerity Chancellor” who is taking an “even bigger axe” to investment than his predecessors.
The Budget confirmed, among other measures, a 2p cut in national insurance, help with child benefits for parents earning more than £50,000, and a cut in the top rate of capital gains tax on property sales.
The Chancellor said he will maintain his plan to increase public spending by 1% a year over the course of the next parliament, but the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said the plans “imply no real growth in public spending per person over the next five years”.
Speaking during the Budget debate, Mr Hendry said: “The Chancellor is in his Budget today promoting a further £20 billion cut, according to the IFS. Public services have already been left struggling after 14 years of underfunding, 14 years of economic chaos and blunder from mini-budgets to Brexit, colossal wastes of hundreds of billions of pounds in fraud and cronyism.
“Public finances are now so pared to the bone that we can see the marrow. Is it any wonder that a growing number of English councils, one by one, whether Tory, Labour or Lib Dem-run are now effectively bankrupt?
“People in Scotland needed a Budget that delivered funding that would have allowed investment for our public services, real investment in the NHS, a Budget that supports families with the cost of living taken into account, and properly invest in green energy.
“Not another austerity Chancellor taking an even bigger axe to investment than his predecessors.”
Mr Hendry also questioned whether the Budget would help the worst off.
He said: “This is a last-ditch, tone-deaf approach to desperately try to recover in the polls, it’s the embodiment of the Tory Party before the people. Where are the real measures that have real impact on the cost of living? The one thing that people need the most direct help with.”
He added: “(Mr Hunt’s) national insurance cuts today are already being measured by the economists who are looking at this to point out that the gains will be cancelled, as was last time, by the freeze on thresholds.
“There’s very, very little for people on low incomes, zero for 17.8 million people on less than £12,750. There is not a lot of sense in the measure that he’s taken.”
The MP for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey further criticised the Chancellor’s reliance on productivity to “solve everything” and his proposals to fill job vacancies with immigration.
He stated: “The Chancellor has put a lot of store on productivity in his speech today, he’s going to solve everything with productivity.
“Yet if we look back over the past 14 years, and indeed before that, one of the things that the UK has been exceptionally poor at is productivity. It hasn’t budged at all.”
Criticising the Government’s proposal to fill job vacancies, Mr Hendry said: “(Mr Hunt) said earlier that vacancies would be easy to fill with immigration.
“This is the party who imposed Brexit, joined by the Labour Party, and now the Lib Dems, and stopped free movement.
“Of course it would be easy to fill vacancies with people, skilled people who want to do the jobs that we have, who want to fill those vital jobs in tourism, hospitality, the National Health Service, the care service, and across many other sectors, but of course that’s been taken away by this place.”