G facility. I can confirm I've been involved in no discussions regarding those matters. Thank you. That ends the statement from the minister. The next item of business is a debate on motion number 12776 in the name of Jackie Baillie on support in Scotland's economy. Members wish to speak in debate are invited to press the request button now. I call on Jackie Baillie to speak to me with the motion. Ms Baillie, 14 minutes. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. It's been a mere two weeks since we last debated supporting Scotland's economy, both debates brought forward by Scottish Labour and not the SNP. In that time, we have reflected on the publication of the Government's annual accounts for 2013-14 and not one, but two papers on the benefits of improved economic performance emanating from the Scottish Government. Then, of course, last week we had the UK budget. All provide us with insights as to the choices that voters face in the upcoming general election. I want to take each of those in turn and let me start with the Conservative Lib Dem coalition's record in government. In the past five years, we have seen four out of five new jobs created in Scotland on low pay with 84,000 workers trapped in zero hours contracts. Energy bills have increased by over £300 under David Cameron, while the number of families with children who cannot afford to heat their homes has risen to an all-time high. The average Scottish worker's annual wage has fallen by almost £1,600 in real terms since 2010. The Tories, unsurprisingly, have cut taxes for millionaires and raised VAT to 20 per cent, a regressive tax that hits the hardest-pressed families the most. In a second, thanks to the Tories—oh, they are both popping up—and the Lib Dems, we have had 24 tax rises that have left families £1,127 per year worse off. I will take an intervention from one of the colleagues. I am grateful to Jackie Baillie for giving way. If the position is as dismal as she paints, why do 40 per cent of the population prefer George Osborne as Chancellor to only 21 per cent, thinking that Ed Balls would do a better job? I have to say that there is no accounting for taste, because I disagree with the number that would prefer George Osborne. Unsurprisingly, under George Osborne's watch, tax avoidance now costs us £34 billion. We also see over 22,000 children in Scotland relying on food banks last year. I do not know what the members are laughing about, but I think that that is pretty serious. In 2011, there was one trust-al-trust food bank in Scotland. Now there are 48. Taken together, I think that this is a damning indictment of five years of Tory misrule. Just yesterday, the Scottish Government published an analysis of inequality in our country, and it told us the stark reality of Scotland today. The wealthiest 10 per cent of households owning 44 per cent of all of the wealth. In contrast, the least wealthy half of households in Scotland owned just 9 per cent of total wealth. Under the Tories, there is no doubt about it. The rich are getting richer, and the poor are even worse off than they were before. Inequality is increasing, but that is not good for the economy and for the country. Those figures show that we simply cannot afford another five years of failed Tory austerity so that those at the top continue to thrive whilst working families across Scotland struggle to make ends meet. That is simply not fair, and only Labour is in a position to end Tory austerity. What about the Tories' attempts to reduce the deficit? On the basis that Mark McDonald has an injured leg, please let me give way to Mark McDonald. I am grateful to the member for her sympathy. I note the member saying that only Labour offers an alternative, but given that the shadow chancellor stated the day after the budget that he would reverse absolutely nothing from George Osborne's budget, in what way is the Labour Party offering any sort of alternative to the austerity being proposed by the Tories? There is a significant alternative. Labour has never supported Tory austerity plans. The budget coming forward from the Tories is so insignificant that it does not begin to address the problems that we have. The Tories have said that they would reduce the deficit, but even in that they have quite simply failed to do so. In 2010, the Tories said that they would balance the books by 2015. They would raise living standards for all. Living standards have fallen. Real wages are down. Prices are up. We are facing a significant cost of living crisis. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has confirmed that living standards are lower now than when the Tories came into office. As for balancing the books, the Tory Lib Dem Government is set to borrow more than £200 billion more than it planned in 2010. The Tory budget last week very quickly. Renni Llywydd, she has forgotten one very important fact. Is it her Government that left us in this mess in the first place that we had to clear up? She has also forgotten that we have created 187,000 extra jobs. Is she going to answer that? Can I simply say that it ill behoves the Liberal Democrat to talk about budgets, particularly when they promised going into an election to scrap tuition fees, and the minute they were in power, they changed their minds? The Tory budget last week did very little to redistribute wealth in this country or to improve the lot of hard-working people and families. Perhaps most significant was what they did not say. Barely a mention of public services such as our NHS or our schools. Not a word on the cuts to come. Yes, there are cuts to come—deeper and more significant in the next two years than anything that we have seen in the previous five. That is what the independent office of budget responsibility told us. Tory spending plans will mean £70 billion of cuts to public spending if the Tories win the election—more than double the amount admitted to by David Cameron and George Osborne. That would mean a real terms cut of £2.7 billion a year to spending in Scotland by the end of the next Parliament. We know that continuing Tory austerity undermines our NHS. We know that Tory austerity denies opportunities for our young people. It denies security in old age. To end Tory austerity, we need to get rid of the Tories at the election or we will have another five years of the deepest, most savage cuts to our public services, the lights of which have not been seen since the 1930s, a time before we created the NHS and when kids left school at age 14. Labour has a better plan. Our values and our vision are of an economy that works for all, a politics where everyone's voice is heard and a society based on the common good. A Labour Government will raise the minimum wage to £8 an hour. We will ban exploitative zero-hours contracts. We will freeze energy bills so that they can only fall, not rise, and we will have fairer taxes in place of the regressive taxation of the Tories. A Labour Government will increase the taxes of the wealthiest few to give working-class Scots a better shot at life. We will use the mansion tax on homes worth £2 million to fund 1,000 more nurses in Scotland's NHS. We will increase the top rate of tax to £50 to invest in the next generation. We will end tax avoidance by the hedge funds and the tax havens and an end to big companies doing sweetheart deals with HMRC. The Tories will not support that because they opposed the redistribution of wealth and Alex Salmond himself told us at the weekend that he agrees with the Tories. There we have it. The SNP will oppose tax rises even on the wealthiest few so much for progressive politics from the SNP. Let us examine what the SNP promised. It offers full fiscal autonomy, where Scotland raises all its own taxes for all its own spending. That means scrapping the Barnett formula that protects Scotland's public services such as our NHS and our schools. A fortnight ago, we knew that full fiscal autonomy would cost Scotland over £6 billion less for public spending in 2014-15. That was based on what we knew about the structural gap as well as the falling oil price. Since the UK budget and the revised OBR projections, we now know that the situation is even worse. The independent institute of fiscal studies tells us that the cost of full fiscal autonomy, the SNP's policy, now is a staggering £7.6 billion black hole at the heart of the Scottish budget each and every year. That is a bombshell of £1,400 for every single person in Scotland. We would either need to have huge cuts to services or we would need to raise taxes by this amount. It is simply staggering. Scrapping Barnett, as the SNP wants to do, would mean cutting our NHS in half, scrapping every single school in the country and cancelling the state pension in Scotland. It would have devastating consequences for all of us. Last week, we estimated that Scotland would lose at least 138,000 jobs based on a £6 billion black hole. That is a loss of one in every 16 Scottish jobs. With a £7.6 billion black hole, that number just got bigger. What the SNP promised is not just Tory austerity, but the SNP's austerity on steroids. It is a completely bizarre policy that would cost us all very dearly. With the cuts and the SNP's austerity max, those are not just a risk, Presiding Officer. They would be a certainty. No thank you. As Peter Jones put it in yesterday's Scotsman, dump fiscal autonomy is insanity. It is not just Peter Jones saying that. The SNP has strongly voiced their opposition, as have a number of leading economists and impartial experts who warned of the consequences for our public services. We were also treated to the First Minister's plan to reduce the deficit and increase spending. She promised £180 billion of investment across the UK and debt reduction in every single year. The truth is that they got that wrong and debt would increase. The Deputy First Minister read out the figures for us all to know the truth of that, but they had to revise their figures to show a decrease in investment so that debt would reduce. Even though they had been caught out, they returned to using the original figures that are simply not true. You cannot believe a word that we are told by the SNP finance minister. The SNP tells us that we can grow our way out of the problem. In its two papers on the benefits of improved economic performance, it points to increases in factor productivity, investments and exports up by 50 per cent. The economics are absolutely fascinating. The assumptions are, frankly, heroic. Two papers in a matter of six days and suddenly we have added £700 million to the bottom line. The fact is that this analysis is not rooted in reality, but even allowing for the SNP's figures, which are contested, there still remains a huge gap in the nation's finances. Using the SNP's best figures, we would see an additional £17 billion in 10 years. That sounds a lot, but with Barnett we would see an extra £76 billion over 10 years. So where would the difference come from? The truth is that it would come from all of us in tax rises or deep and catastrophic cuts to services. It also means that there is absolutely no possibility of Scottish public finances being in any fit state to ease austerity under full fiscal autonomy that could only ever be harsher and longer-lasting austerity. As I said two weeks ago, no amount of name changing will help the SNP. Full fiscal autonomy became full revenue retention, but the policy itself remains entirely wrong-headed and the modelling is suspect too. Do the assumptions include the block grant? I look forward to hearing the finance secretary about that. Do the assumptions include Barnett? John Swinney knows that you cannot have both, and there is dishonesty in the modelling.  Much of Labour's policy officer in recent weeks has come about because of the Barnett bonus. We would use the proceeds from the mansion tax to invest in our NHS and invest in 1,000 extra nurses. We would use the money from pension tax relief to deliver a better future for 18 and 19-year-olds, keep tuition fees free and improve bursaries for the least well-off students. We would back the living wage, making employment fairer and something the SNP voted against five times in this chamber. We would make sure that Scottish people succeed because we know that when Scottish people prosper, Scotland prospers too. None of that would happen with the SNP's policy of full fiscal autonomy and none of that would happen under the Tories austerity plans. Scottish Labour has a better plan, Presiding Officer. Our value and vision is for a better future, so let's go out and change Scotland because this is not a time to gamble with the SNP. Let's make sure that we end Tory austerity and kick the Tories out of government. I move the motion in my name. Desperately short of time today, I now call on John Swinney to speak to and move amendment 1, 2, 7, 7, 6.4. The Deputy First Minister, up to 10 minutes please. Presiding Officer, let me begin by moving the amendment that stands in my name. I thought when Jackie Baillie started out her speech today that on such a landmark occasion where the Labour Party had decided to have a debate about Scotland's economy that we were going to have a comprehensive explanation of the alternative strategy of the Labour Party to advance the issues about which the Labour Party is concerned. I think that we got about 90 seconds out of 14 minutes, which was about the Labour Party's plans, and the other period was just the usual bile from Jackie Baillie that dished out to absolutely everybody on the critique of the Labour Party. I'm going to try to be as helpful as I can to find common ground with Jackie Baillie in the debate, because the one thing that I can agree with Jackie Baillie about is that the United Kingdom's austerity programme has failed by any standard. It's delayed the UK's economic recovery, it's done little to achieve the chancellor's original deficit targets and it's disproportionately hit the poorest in our society. Members criticised me, I can hear muttering on this side of the chamber about that. Let me just share some of those issues. The Conservatives are aware of the fact that in June 2010 the chancellor predicted that the UK would run a surplus on the structural current budget of £5 billion in this financial year. He now expects to run a structural current deficit of over £45 billion this year. That is a clear evidence that demonstrates that the public finances have not recovered in the fashion that the chancellor predicted in June 2010, of course. Would Mr Swinney not give the chancellor some credit for having created the situation that we have in the United Kingdom, the fastest-growing economy in the western world? The thing about that analysis is that we have to look at all of the years that were involved in the chancellor's term in office. Back in 2010, the chancellor predicted that the type of economic conditions that we are experiencing today are welcome. Let me put that on the record. We should have been appreciating those conditions and experiencing them in 2012 and 2013. We were experiencing nothing of the sort. We were experiencing the implications that I set out to Parliament that would be the case of the severe cuts that were made in 2010, which interrupted the first signs of economic recovery that were taking place when the Conservatives came to office. As a consequence, the chancellor has failed to meet his economic targets at the moment that he said that the structural current budget should be at a £5 billion surplus today. Why, then, in the Deputy First Minister's view, is growth in the UK projected to be better than almost all of the eurozone countries? Why is employment predicted to be higher than almost all those countries? It is the same answer that I gave to Mr Fraser, that we had two years where the chancellor predicted that we should have been experiencing faster growth, which we experienced nothing of the sort. We are now beginning to see the emergence of that growth. If we put the pattern of economic growth that we are experiencing now against the period that the chancellor predicted, we will find that the chancellor's predictions about 2012 and 2013 were utterly flawed. Last week, the chancellor had every opportunity to change course in his economic direction. However, despite the headroom generated by the improvements in the economic outlook that I have just acknowledged, he chose to continue with the harmful austerity agenda. We were told last week that austerity would end one year earlier and that planned spending cuts had been scaled back. The reality is that, the day before the budget, George Osborne planned £30 billion worth of cuts. The day after the budget, he still planned to have £30 billion worth of cuts. Those are the damaging implications of the stewardship of the United Kingdom Public Finance's courtesy of George Osborne. Why does he think that the answer to record higher levels of debt is even more debt? I will come on to address that issue in a moment. I plan to come on to those questions in a later part of my speech. Having seen that critique of austerity, what was more remarkable for me about not so much the chancellor's inflexibility last week was that Labour's shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, explicitly approved of the chancellor's approach and said that he would not reverse any of the budget measures. Labour has embraced the chancellor's austerity agenda by signing up to the UK Government's fiscal mandate. As the chancellor confirmed in his speech last week, meeting the fiscal target would require £30 billion worth of spending cuts over 2016-17 and 2017-18. If Labour members are unsure about what their position is, let me just tell them that the Charter for Budget Responsibility for which they voted in the House of Commons on 13 January contained the implicit assumption that, in order to meet the fiscal mandate and supplementary debt targets set out in the updated charter, the Government estimates that on current forecasts, around £30 billion of discretionary consolidation is likely to be required over the following two years, 2016-17 and 2017-18. I think that the Labour Party should be... Jackie Baillie... I'll give way in just a moment. Jackie Baillie has made her clarion call, as usual, for everybody to be honest and transparent. Jackie Baillie should be honest and transparent and accept that Labour is wedded to austerity as are the Conservatives. Jackie Baillie. I thank the cabinet secretary for taking an intervention. Perhaps he disagrees with the resolution foundation that suggested that Labour's plans for the next Parliament would see an extra £43 billion invested. Perhaps he disagrees with the Institute of Fiscal Studies. It actually says that there's not a huge amount of difference between Labour and the SNP's spending plans. If you think that we support austerity, then isn't it the case that you do too? I think that all I asked Jackie Baillie to... It's lovely to hear all those quotes, but I just want Jackie Baillie to explain to Parliament why the Labour Party voted in favour of the... We didn't, she said. Jackie Baillie has just said, we didn't. Jackie Baillie doesn't obviously know what day of the week it is. No, no, I've given way... Well, okay, okay, we'll have it. Come on. Voting to balance the books is entirely different to voting for a package of cuts. We reject Tory austerity is about time you did too. Well, the Labour Party voted for the charter of budget responsibility, which requires £30 billion of discretionary consolidation, which means cuts in plain language for Jackie Baillie. Jackie Baillie has just said, in her last intervention to me, she's just said that the Labour Party doesn't support cuts. I'm able to follow her argument. Maybe she's persuaded by the line of argument that says that the approach should involve sensible reductions in public spending. Those aren't my words. Those are the words of the Labour motion that was put to the House of Commons on 4 March. The last time I looked, sensible reductions in public expenditure mean cuts, so whichever way Jackie Baillie wants to have it, the Labour Party's wedded to austerity and cuts just as much as the Conservative Party are in this whole debate. I was rather surprised in the argument that Jackie Baillie advanced in criticising the fiscal approach that was advanced by the First Minister. Her argument was that somehow to invest in the economy, which is what we want to see happening, is somehow a bad thing. That is my point to Mr Rennie. I believe that there is a moment in economic recovery when you have to invest to support, encourage and nurture growth. The proposals that we have set out are designed to do that, to invest in the economy to create the climate where we can undertake greater levels of economic activity, which will encourage and motivate greater participation in the economy, which will ensure that we have more taxpayers and, as a consequence, the public finances become stronger as a consequence. That is the thinking behind our stance. I would have thought that that was a stance that might have attracted support from the Labour Party, but who knows the result of the election might do so. I'll give it to Mr Rennie. In the last minute, Mr Swinney, you're not taking this intervention. Oh, I'm not. Oh, sorry. Well, there we are. Mr Swinney. Thank goodness that somebody is here to overrule me, Presiding Officer. Let me conclude my remarks, Presiding Officer, by saying to Parliament that the Scottish Government is committed to taking forward a programme of investment within the economy, we believe that the United Kingdom Government should change its fiscal stance to enable us to do that more effectively within Scotland by enabling us to have the resources to invest in securing economic recovery and economic development in Scotland. We want to do that. We want to be able to do that by the power and the effectiveness of a strong group of SNP MPs in the Westminster Parliament after the election. I look forward to seeing that being the result on 8 May. I now call on Gavin Brown to speak to and move amendment 12776.3. Mr Brown, up to six minutes, please. Presiding Officer, thank you. I start by moving the amendment in my name, and by saying that I commend the Labour Party for bringing the economy to debate today, to borrow the language of Sir Humphrey. I think that it was courageous of the Labour Party to wish to debate the economy in a way that they do not want to do at a UK level. However, to be fair to Scottish Labour, it is the third time they wish to debate the economy and fair play to them. They have not got much better by the third time, I have to say. I am no clearer on what the Labour alternative plan actually is, but perhaps in closing today a rabbit or two will be pulled out of the Labour Party hat and will hear what it is that it intends to do. Ultimately, the economy makes uncomfortable reading for both the Labour Party and the SNP, because they were loud in their chorus several years ago saying that the plan would not work. What we were doing was not going to be effective at all, and what we were going to say was a deeper recession. We were going to see double-dip recession—I think that it was the prediction of the Scottish Government—and actually that did not happen. We saw the headline rates for the economy last week in the budget, and they were all moving in the right direction. They were all positive, and they were all projected to get better and stronger for each year of the forecast period. To counter Mr Swinney's point, when you compare the projections for the UK to our trading partners to the rest of the EU, we feature very well. If you take growth as an example, in 2014 we had the highest growth in the G7. The growth projections for 2015 were revised upwards last week by the Office for Budget Responsibility. Projections for world growth were revised downwards by the OBR, but the UK was revised upwards. Eurozone growth will be lucky if it hits 1 per cent in 2015. I am grateful to Mr Brown, but does he not acknowledge the strength of my point by the fact that GDP per capita remains, at the end of 2014, nearly 2 per cent below pre-recession levels? The projected growth that the chancellor expected to have has not materialised as a consequence of the decisions that have been made. The projections of 2010 did not materialise in the way that the chancellor predicted, but what the chancellor and nobody else knew was that the entire continent of Europe went on the precipice a year later. Of course, growth was delayed by two years, because the chancellor had six quarters of negative growth across Europe, with whom we do almost half of our trade. If the Scottish Government's finance minister cares to read the reports of his own chief economist, that impact is acknowledged in almost every one of those reports that I have read.  The eurozone crisis would have affected this economy, regardless of the spending plans laid out. The Deputy First Minister is generous in giving me an answer, so I will give it to him again. I am grateful to Mr Brown. Does that not then make the case that we made repeatedly to the United Kingdom Government for an early change to the austerity agenda to invest in the economy? No, it does not, because we have been taking the difficult decisions as we did, and when we did, we now find ourselves in a far better position than our European neighbours. Growth is projected to be two and a half times most of our competitors. We have the highest employment rate that we have ever had in this country. Unemployment is too high still, but at just over five and a half per cent it compares very favourably to double-digit unemployment in France, Italy and many other European countries. His arguments would be fine if we were on the same page as the rest of Europe, if we were all doing well at the same time, but he has to accept and acknowledge that the UK Government action has achieved something positive if we are doing well, projected to do better when those countries with whom we compete are not projected to do the same. I have taken a number of interventions, so I hope that Mr Robinson will forgive me for not doing so. This has not happened by accident. It has happened because of the difficult decision taken early. It has happened because the UK Government stuck to the path. It has happened because UK businesses and the people of this country stood firm, stepped up to the plate and created jobs. Underpinned by the competitive policies of the UK Government, whether that is corporation tax, freezing fuel duty, raising the personal allowance or cutting national insurance. What really I have to say great in this side of the chamber is the SNP's assertion that somehow, if we had fiscal autonomy, there would not be austerity. Somehow we would be able to get rid of austerity. That is blatantly untrue. I know Mr Swinney knows this because he looks at all the figures and he does judiciously, I have to say, look at the numbers. He knows, based on the GERS figures from a couple of weeks ago, he knows, based on the figures that we are likely to see in GERS next year. He knows, based on the likely oil revenues that we will see over the next five years or so, that actually, if we went for fiscal autonomy, there would have to be far, far de-drifted authorities than we have under the UK Government, whether it is Conservative or indeed Labour. On that basis, Deputy Presiding Officer, I am content to close. Many thanks. I now call on Willie Rennie to speak to and move amendment 12776.1. Mr Rennie, up to six minutes please. Thank you Deputy Presiding Officer. I will do it exactly that. I will move the amendment in my name. I am grateful to the Labour Party for calling this debate, because I think that it gives us all in this chamber an opportunity to shine a light on the different economic plans of the various parties. For me, this debate should be about economic competence and fairness, because it cannot have one without the other. It is worth off by just reminding the chamber that this Government said that Scotland would be on the verge of a second oil boom, with blossoming oil fund, more jobs and ever-increasing tax receipts. Now we face a low oil price worth half what they confidently predicted we would have. Jobs have been slashed and tax revenues have plummeted. In fact, it has been estimated that the shortfall on their predictions is worth £155 million every day. It is worth reflecting on that, because it goes to the heart of the SNP's competence on managing the economy. The SNP said that it would be far better off if the oil boom and the reality is something different. The GERS figures show exactly that. It is worth about £800 for every single person in this country. That is the penalty that we would have paid for independence or full fiscal autonomy. The central argument on the economy for independence has been found wanting. I will take an intervention. I am interested in the point that Mr Rennie makes, that economic competence can be determined as a result of predictions on oil price. At the time that the Scottish Government was predicting $110 per barrel, the UK Government, DEC, which is led by his colleague Ed Davie, was predicting $120 billion per barrel. What does that say about the economic competence of the Liberal Democrats? What it proves is that it cannot run an economy simply on the big resource of oil. It is so volatile, it has a big impact and therefore trying to have generous predictions on oil reveals how incompetent the SNP has been on the oil and on the economy. Despite the animosity that clearly exists between Jackie Baillie and John Swinney and, in fact, the whole of the Labour Party and the SNP, there are many similarities between the two parties' plans. Members will have heard me before saying that the nationalists and Labour said that the UK economic plan would fail. Unemployment would rise, GDP would stagnate, unemployment would fall. However, now, thanks to the UK Government's plan, we now have falling unemployment, higher employment and growth is back. Despite those facts, the SNP and Labour continue to say that the plan has failed. According to the latest figures, the latest figures show that employment in Scotland is at a record high, up 187,000 since 2010. Growth is back, as Gavin Brown says, vying with the United States of America for the best in the G7 group of countries. Like Labour, the SNP said that the UK's economic plan would fail just before the economy started to grow again. Like Labour, the SNP argued for lighter regulation of the banks just before they went bust. Just like Labour, it thinks that the answer to high levels of debt is ever more debt. The SNP and Labour were wrong on the banks, wrong on the economy, wrong on jobs, and now they have the audacity to say that that is all in the past and that they are definitely right this time. They want to borrow billions of pounds more when we should be eliminating the deficit and cutting debt. Their plans will put the economy at risk and we should not put our faith in parties that have been consistently wrong on the economy. Even though we have worked quite constructively with the Conservatives over the past five years to get the economy back on track, we do part company with them on their plans for the next five years. They want to do two things. First, like us, they want to eliminate the deficit by 2017-18, but they want to do so with no tax rises, whereas we are planning £6 billion worth of tax rises on banks and mansions. Unlike the Conservatives, we do not believe that public services can bear the full impact of those cuts. Secondly, once we have eliminated the deficit, we want to invest in capital works for the good of the country. The Tories disagree. I have to say that the Conservatives seem to be hell bent on an ideological mission, not just now, to reduce the size of the state—I will take them in a second—which will damage public services and take the UK back to the 1960s. I will take an intervention. Does the member accept that his party does not want to eliminate the deficit, but that it just wants a current budget balance? We agree with the Conservatives that we should eliminate the deficit by 2017-18. That is the plan that we have and that is the £30 billion reduction that we have in place. That is where we agree with the Conservatives that we disagree with the mix of the spending that is required and the taxes that are required in order to achieve that. We reject the volatile, seesaw economics of the past, with Labour and the SNP borrowing too much risk in the economy and the Tories cutting too much threatening public services. Look at the progress that we have made. We have cut taxes by £900 for workers. We have increased pensions by £900. We have got the economy back on track. We have expanded childcare for families that need it most. That is the balance of doing the fairness in society together with getting the economy back on track, and that is why you should stick with the Lib Dems. Thank you very much. I now call on Patrick Harvie to speak to and move amendment 12776.2. Mr Harvie, up to 6 minutes to please. I suppose that I should begin by acknowledging the point of agreement that I have, both with the Government and with the Labour Party, in a rejection, basically, of the UK Government's economic agenda, the austerity agenda. That is a point of common ground between all the political parties that are not part of the UK coalition in this Parliament, a rejection of that austerity agenda. I think that, if I remember rightly, both Jackie Baillie and John Swinney described it as a failed agenda, and I think that I would just take issue to a certain extent with that, because, in my view, that agenda was not designed to serve the common good. From the conservators point of view and particularly, I believe that agenda was designed to entrench an ideology, to entrench an economic model, which that political party is ready to. Given the political situation that they have engineered, in which they see very little coherent opposition to the basic proposition of cuts coming from the main opposition party at Westminster, I think that, from their point of view, ideologically they have succeeded, even if they have not achieved the benefit to the common good, which most of us, I think, would wish for. In fact, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said very clearly that spending cuts on the scale implied by the chancellor's plans would lead to a fundamental reimagining of the role of the state. I think that that was their intention all along. I think that that was their purpose, and I think that, on those terms, they had been catastrophically successful. On the alternatives that are before us, we have a debate between the Labour Party about a slower pace of cuts, a slower pace of essentially the same broad policy or, from the SNP, the implication that an increased borrowing level from the UK Government compared to what is currently planned would allow some £180 billion extra of spending and investment over the term of the coming Parliament. Now, neither of those, I think, can be seen as the only option. The Green Amendment today is intended to at least begin some debate on an additional alternative that exists before us, because over the last few years we have seen, and in Europe we are still seeing, an approach to quantitative easing, the creation of money, the quite legitimate creation of money through the use of central banks. That has been used, particularly in the UK's case, on the scale of £375 billion. It has been used principally to rebalance the balance sheets of the financial services sector. Whether you take the view that that has created a benefit for bankers and whether we attach blame to the bankers as the great villains of the economic crash, it certainly has not invested in the real economy. It certainly has not sent £375 billion of investment into the real economy and into the priorities that I think would serve the common good. That is the alternative that the Green New Deal group, including figures such as Richard Murphy, Colin Hines and my colleague Caroline Lucas, has been advocating at UK level more recently. In exchange of letters between Caroline Lucas and Mark Carney, Caroline argues that the Green New Deal group's plan is designed fundamentally to transform a still-broken financial system and reduce the deficit while transforming the UK's ageing infrastructure to meet a range of environmental and social challenges. Those challenges, many of them, are those that we have all agreed to on paper, some of them unanimously agreed to, and yet we are not seeing the investment come to meet those challenges. Some of us might have expected the Bank of England to take a slightly conservative approach and perhaps dismiss this green QE programme as something unachievable. Mark Carney replied that it is possible that, if the NPC did vote to increase its asset purchases in future—in other words, another round of QE—it could expand the range of assets it purchased. In fact, the idea of a green QE programme is one that is very realistic indeed and one that I hope is not completely out of kilter with some other political parties' priorities. In just the last week or so, David Blanche, for example, has said that the next move in interest rates either has to be more quantitative easing or a cut in interest rates or both. If more quantitative easing is going to be even contemplated, if that is on the agenda at all, surely the opportunity is to inject that in real investment into the real economy and into the social, economic and environmental priorities that the country faces. The SNP is knocking doors around the country with enthusiastic and optimistic faces about the influence that they may have in a balanced Parliament after me. Let me just say that whichever political parties in here have some influence in a balanced Parliament after me. Let us make sure that we use that influence for the right priorities, not for those who might want, by pushing the Government to exempt coal from carbon taxes or bail out outdated, redundant polluting infrastructure. Let us invest instead in the new infrastructure, the new priorities that our country needs Scotland and the UK need for the future, far better than inviting in private equity or overseas Governments to build and own the country's infrastructure on our behalf. I move the amendment in my name and I hope that the Scottish Government is open to this argument. Many thanks. We now move to open debate. Five-minute speeches, extraordinarily tight for time. If we do not manage the time-keeping, we will be making cuts of our own up here. Mark McDonald will be followed by Alex Rowley. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer, and on the basis that I can keep my balance for five minutes, that is how long I intend to take. Two weeks ago, Presiding Officer, as has been highlighted, the Labour Party brought this very debate to the chamber. Sadly, I was not able to participate in the debate because, on the Sunday previous, I had sustained an injury and I was distraught. I am sure that the chamber was equally distraught to miss out on my contribution. Luckily, they have brought this debate back just for me, just so that I can have the opportunity to speak on the issue of Scotland's economy. Although I have sustained a broken leg, it is clear that the Labour Party is still acting like a broken record, because it continues to go on and on and on, talking down the prospects of Scotland's economy and Scotland's economic future. I am trying to perpetuate the myth that Scotland, as a nation, is uniquely incapable of sustaining, of growing and of performing well as an economy. That does the Labour Party no service whatsoever, and I suspect that it may be somewhat of a genesis of the reason why the Labour Party is performing quite so spectacularly badly in the opinion polling that we are seeing in Scotland at the moment. However, let us look at the agenda that we are talking about and that we are putting forward at the moment in terms of the economy. What we have chosen to focus on is on the opportunities that exist to have modest growth in public spending at a UK level, which would then deliver direct benefits to Scotland but also would have other benefits to the wider UK in terms of addressing the continual cut in public expenditure that is taking place. As we know from the analysis that has been undertaken by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, that would enable the projections that the Labour Party has established in terms of deficit reduction to still be achieved while operating within that financial envelope of increased public expenditure. I believe that that is a win-win scenario, because undoubtedly deficit reduction is something that needs to be tackled, but it does not need to be tackled in the manner that is given the priority ahead of everything else, which is the unfortunate position that we find from the current UK Government where the deficit is seen as the be-all and end-all and the poorest and most vulnerable in society are seen as an afterthought as a means to achieving those targets. We heard talk today, as we often hear from the Conservatives, about those difficult decisions that have to be made. The decisions are not difficult for Conservative ministers because they do not tend to impact on them. They are certainly not difficult for many of the powerful corporate interests who are supportive of the Conservative Party and are quite friendly with some of the front-benchers in the Conservative Party at Westminster because they do not directly impact on them. The people who are bearing the brunt of those difficult decisions are the poorest in society who are having to face on a regular basis an assault on their incomes and an assault on their way of life from UK Government decisions. That is simply acknowledged by any analysis that is done of the impact of budget decisions in terms of economic deciles in the UK. It is those at the lower end who are facing significant detriment where those at the top end are not facing any form of significant detriment whatsoever. We can see from that only too clearly, if we look at where the focus is directed, if we look at the focus in terms of effort, in terms of budget and in terms of rhetoric between welfare and, in particular, the concept of benefit fraud, as it is often termed, and tax avoidance. One welfare fraud that should undoubtedly be tackled—I am not suggesting for one second that it should not—accounts for less than £2 billion per annum. Less is lost to the exchequer in welfare fraud than they retain through the failure of individuals who are entitled to benefits to take up the benefits to which they are entitled. They actually make a net saving in that area. However, if we look at tax avoidance and tax evasion, which costs the exchequer on an annual basis £30 to £35 billion, we look at the fact that there is a disproportionately higher number of staff allocated to tackling welfare fraud than there is to tackling tax evasion and tax avoidance. I say that we have a UK Government that has got its priorities 100 per cent askew in relation to that. If we look at the fact that the number of people who are facing sanctions on their benefits, which are driving them into the need to call upon assistance from food banks, and we have seen in Aberdeen the instant neighbour food bank running out of supplies in recent days versus those who are being actively pursued and prosecuted for evasion of tax, again we can see that the UK Government has its priorities 100 per cent askew. There is a better way to do things, we have outlined a better way to do things, and I hope in May that we will have the opportunity to get on with doing things differently. I am afraid that there is no time available. Alex Rowley to be followed by John Mason. Presiding Officer, while Gavin Brown and Willie Rennie put each other on the back for where they are, it is worth remembering that in 2010, when they went into government, when the Tories, the support of the Liberals went into government, that we were coming out of a recession, the economy was growing from what was the first global banking crisis and a global recession, and we were coming out of it. I would put to both parties that it was as a result, a direct result of the economic policies that were then pursued and the austerity measures that were pursued, that we did not continue to grow at the rate at what we should have done, and that is why we are not in a place now. I have only got five minutes, sorry. The other key points that I think it is worth making to the Tories in particular is that, while employment is growing, we need to look at the types of jobs that are being created within the economy. The levels of unfairness, the levels of inequality in the economy are not being tackled. Low-pay, zero-wage contracts and, in effect, most workers have not had to take a five-year pay freeze, while energy prices continue to rise, while the cost to loving continues to rise. People are not at the stage in a really good place in terms of their budgets and how they move forward. The other big problem with the Tory austerity is that it is an attack on the poor. It is not about saying that we will all take our share and we will all have to suffer equally in terms of coming out of it. The type of welfare reforms that we are seeing taking place—the sanctions and the kidney targets that are being put on sanctions—is, for the first time, probably since the 40s, creating absolute poverty in communities across Scotland. That is an absolute failure in the economic policy no matter how you measure it. That cannot be right. That is not right. Mark McMillan mentioned the fact that, rather than a war on the poor, let us go after the tax dodgers, the tax cheats, the tax evaders, and start to collect the billions upon billions upon billions of pounds that can be brought in to start to address the deficit. The fact is that the Tory chancellor has not addressed the deficit. We still have major problems in terms of the levels that he has dealt with in this country. We still have a major problem in terms of our economy, in terms of what it produces in the manufacturing base that was destroyed by the 18 years that we had a Tory Government previously. However, in the short time that I have, I want to come on to speak about the policies that John Swinney and the Scottish Government are putting forward. I do not think that it is to attack, if you like, when you question the impact that full fiscal autonomy would have on the Scottish economy in the short to medium term as you go forward. All the evidence suggests that the figure that was given by the independent advice for the Scottish Parliament was that the Barnett formula would result at £6.5 billion that would have to be made up from some place with full fiscal autonomy. It is a legitimate question to put to the Deputy First Minister is where would we make up that difference and how would we make up that difference. If you have a genuine concern, as I do, that would either result in major cuts in public services or a need to increase taxes at a time where that would be damaging equally to the economy, then it is legitimate to ask the question would full fiscal autonomy not result in deeper cuts and deeper job losses than what we have experienced. The Deputy First Minister had to argue that. My final point would be that even in terms of his amendment where he talks about the economy performing and starting to tackle inequalities, I do not believe that this Government actually has a clear anti-poverty strategy. I have been looking and found that you had a framework to tackle poverty and income inequality in Scotland 2008 told us some updates. I cannot measure that to see where those outcomes have been achieved. If there is no clear anti-poverty strategy for Scotland, we are not going to start to tackle inequality. Those are legitimate points that I think are raised with the Government. I am afraid that I need to finish. John Mason, we are followed by Graham Pearson. I think that there are a number of issues in the Labour motion today that we need to look at in a bit more detail. First, they suggest that full fiscal autonomy would make Scotland £7.6 billion worse off. That is not the point and does not hold water for a number of reasons. Point 1, it only looks at one year on its own and we need to take a long term view. We need to remember the many, many years when Scotland has been subsidising the rest of the UK. Two weeks ago, we debated the economy and I spoke about the failure of the UK over the long term, so I will not mention all those points again today, but particular failures of the UK have included failure in manufacturing and failure to grow Scotland's population. Point 2, if we ask the public which party stands best for Scotland, the answer is always the SNP, even among people who do not vote for us. Some politicians want what is best for the UK as a whole, even if Scotland suffers in the process. They are entitled to do that if they are in the Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties. However, that is not a position that you will find in the SNP, so no one actually believes Labour's assertion when they talk nonsense such as they want the SNP to lose out. Point 3, as long as we stay in the UK, we want a better deal for Scotland. If there is to be a hung Parliament in London after May, we want more powers, but we also want more money, for example seeing high-speed rail brought to Scotland. Point 4, we also have the policy clearly stated by Westminster that transfer of powers should be on a no detriment principle. More powers for Scotland must not mean that Scotland of the UK is automatically better or worse off just because of the transfer of powers. For all of those reasons, Labour's suggestion that full fiscal autonomy could leave Scotland worse off are just laughable and no one believes them. Another point in Labour's motion is the mention of Labour's redistributive policy plans. Is that really the case? Would Labour really distribute wealth and income? Again, a few points on that. Why did the previous Labour Government preside over a widening gap between the rich and the poor in society? Point 2, Labour's plan is a 10 per cent to 50 per cent rates for income tax, and that on the surface sounds progressive. Not as progressive, of course, as the previous Labour Government or a previous Labour Government, which I remember, when they took income tax rates up to 98 per cent, but I think that even they would accept that that's a bit extreme nowadays, but at least 50 per cent would appear to be a step in the right direction. Of course, we need to remember that national insurance is a factor in here as well. NIC is not progressive at all, starting at 12 per cent and falling to 2 per cent, so the combined rate, according to Labour, would start at 22 per cent and the top rate would be only 52 per cent. Can that really be described as progressive? I don't think so. Will Labour increase the 2 per cent NIC for higher earners, including ourselves? You can argue for or against the higher rate of income tax in NIC, but I would just say today that a combined rate, top rate of 52 per cent, cannot be called progressive, and 22 per cent is still too high a hurdle for low earners. If we are serious about redistributing, surely we have to look at redistributing wealth and not just income. Inheritance tax is the obvious player here, although previously we have had capital transfer tax. It is very difficult for Labour to claim to be progressive or redistributive when their motion makes no mention of redistributing wealth whatsoever. Overall, it seems that there is very little more redistribution under the future Labour Government than we saw under the last one. All of that leads me to wonder how—I am not taking any envisions—how do the public view Labour? Are Labour seen as a progressive party with redistributive policies? If not, why not? I think that we can go back to last September and the referendum. Something seems to have changed then. Rightly or wrongly, many people saw the referendum about whether we wanted a fairer society or not. Clearly, many richer people voted no because they did not want a fairer and more equal society, in which they might lose out. On the other hand, many poorer people voted yes, not because they had some romantic idea about Scotland, not even because they necessarily thought Scotland as a whole would be better off, but because they thought that, even if the cake was a little smaller, it would be shared out more fairly and more equally. I would suggest that it was because Labour sided last September with the rich, with the status quo, with unfairness and with inequality. That is why Labour campaigned against fairness and inequality last September that it is now suffering in the polls. You must draw to close, please. You can wheel out fine words if you want, like progressive and redistributive, but people saw last September what Labour really meant. They were against these things and people will not support Labour. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to contribute this afternoon. I do believe that John Mason does any argument to no justice when he glosses over the facts and spends most of his presentation this afternoon dealing with politics and parties, and not as the motion suggests supporting Scotland's economy. There have been a lot of statistics exchanged across the benches this afternoon. At times, my head spins at the prospect of the way in which the parties opposite have tried to provide a view that Scotland and the UK generally are moving forward. In that context, I am loath to add any additional statistics, but although, alluded to by Jackie Baillie earlier, the full impact of the wealth and assets report yesterday was not brought to the chamber. In that asset report, it says that 10 per cent of households own 74 per cent of financial wealth in Scotland. That same 10 per cent has 55 per cent of the pension wealth. They also have 43 per cent of property wealth. Can it possibly be right in a Scotland in the 21st century that those kinds of statistics can appear on our national newspaper and we do not have a sense of social injustice—a view that we need to take steps to move forward and not mark time with good words and constant referral to statistics that are meaningless? One set of statistics that I received today adds to the fund of knowledge that has been issued by the Business Register Employment Survey, a UK survey that notes that many of the districts in Scotland have lost jobs in the period 2009-13. East Ayrshire 3,000 jobs, East Renfrewshire 700 jobs, Glasgow 24,500 jobs and so on. Those are real jobs, a real purpose in life, an opportunity to develop an economy within a family that is meaningful and gives purpose and creates a distance between daily life and poverty and a future contributing to the well-being of Scotland. Much has been said about what does Labour Party contribute in moving forward. We have indicated that we believe that energy costs should be capped. We have said that we would raise living standards by initially increasing the minimum wage to £8 an hour. We have introduced the idea that every 18- and 19-year-old young person who leaves school and goes straight into work should have £1,600 allocated in order that they can be helped with training, tools and start-up costs for business. We have indicated that we believe that we should move forward in balancing the books and introduce a mansion tax in order that we can begin to shift wealth from those who have to those who have not. We would see 24 million working people being taken out of the burden of much of the tax they face by creating a 10-pen starting rate for tax. Those are practical options that will take us forward in a productive way for the future. The SNP has indicated that it would like full fiscal autonomy. That presupposes that the Barnett formula will no longer be applied in our relationship with the United Kingdom. It was only six months ago that we were told that the wealth of Scotland's oil would see us through any future that we might face. We had enormous confidence that that wealth would continue to flow. How time has changed not because an SNP Government has made any wrong choices, but the world, unfortunately, has impacted on decisions that we take here in Scotland, and those impacts will be long-term. There is a need to take a more productive look in the way forward. We should reject George Osborne's approach, which suggests that we are all doing so well and moving forward together. Whatever the plan was, and I think that the Green Party had it right, it was not to ensure that those who have not took part in our economy in the future, but the wealthy did so much better. We must close. Thank you very much. Murdo Fraser, to be followed by Kevin Stewart. I am probably going to be rather unkind to Jackie Baillie during the course of this speech. Let's start on a point of agreement. I agree with the part of the Labour motion, referring to the SNP's disastrous plans for full fiscal autonomy. As Jackie Baillie fairly said, that would represent huge funding cuts to health, education and policing, totaling £7.6 billion, alternatively substantial tax rises, as confirmed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. I commend to members the excellent article in yesterday's Scotsman by Peter Jones. He concluded that this is an insane time to be pursuing such a policy, and he is absolutely right. The Scottish people would be those who suffer from such a move. The SNP claimed that it could grow the economy faster than even the record growth that we are predicted to see in the UK in coming years. Yet, as Peter Jones pointed out, if there was any way of managing an economy to get out of public spending austerity caused by a deficit, do you not think that the Governments of Greece, Ireland, Spain, Italy or Portugal would have discovered it by now, or maybe it is just that our SNP ministers are somehow magically blessed with a talent beyond anyone else anywhere in the world? I see that they are not leaping up to defend themselves, Deputy Presiding Officer. Sadly, it is there that Jackie Baillie and I must part company, because the rest of her motion, and I am afraid that much of her speech this afternoon, was patent nonsense. Let me give Jackie Baillie some gentle advice. It is one of the rules of politics that you should play to your strengths. When choosing topics for debate, choose the subjects where you have a strong record and where you can attack your opponents. You should avoid areas of weakness where your opponents can undermine your arguments. On that basis, Labour's choice of topic for this afternoon's debate must rank high on the courageous register. For the Labour track record in the economy is one best brushed under the carpet and quietly forgotten, not one taken to the chamber and championed in a debate, because we could all in this chamber remember the state of the economy in 2010. High unemployment, deep recession and the worst set of public finances in the developed world that was Labour's legacy. Thankfully, in 2010, the people of the United Kingdom had the good sense to elect a Conservative-led Government, a Government that took some tough decisions in the teeth of opposition from the Labour Party and others, but tough decisions now delivering real success. So, since 2010, we see... Sorry, a point of order, Dr Richard Simpson. Could I have Dr Richard Simpson's microphone, please? Presiding Officer, I wonder if you would like to afford the speaker the opportunity of correcting the fact that he said that the economy was not in growth in 2010 but was in recession. That was actually incorrect. The growth was small but it was there. He perhaps would like to correct it at this point. It's not a point of order. It's a debating point. Can I point out to the chamber that points of order are better at the end of speeches rather than interrupting them? We are now very behind time in the debate. Murdo Fraser.  Mr Fraser, I'm afraid I don't have the time. This is unfortunate, but please carry on as quickly as you can. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I must have imagined the recession that we suffered in the late early part of the previous decade. I certainly remember it. If Richard Simpson doesn't. Anyway, since then we have had an excellent track record of this. Audra, please. And despite some of the nonsense that we hear from the Labour benches, 80 per cent of the new jobs that are created are in full-time positions and 80 per cent are in skilled occupations, and three private sector jobs have been created for every lost public sector job. In 2014, there were some 34,725 more businesses in Scotland compared to 2010. The UK's inflation rate fell to zero in February, the lowest level since CPI records began in 1998. Wages are rising faster than prices, helping families to meet their bills, and we have the fastest-growing economy in the eurozone and our projectors to have the fastest-growing economy in the developed world in coming years. Here in Scotland we are benefiting from all the hard decisions taking. The Labour Party motion refers to George Osborne's economic plan as having a detrimental impact on the UK economy. What is detrimental? Is it the rising employment? Is it the falling unemployment? Is it the low-efficient? Is it the fast economic growth? If Labour wants to see detrimental decisions, we need to look back at the decisions taken by Gordon Brown and Ed Balls when they were in government. Deputy Presiding Officer, if I were Labour, I might have chosen some other topic for debate this afternoon. The simple fact is that if the people of Scotland wish to see continued economic growth, then the SNP route brings economic disaster. The Labour route drags us back to the failures of the past as only the Conservatives that can be trusted to keep us on the right path. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I would like to see Mr Fraser go to Aberdeen at this moment in time and say that it is only the Conservatives that will keep the economy on the right path. In this week, we have seen a food bank in Aberdeen run out of food. That is absolutely disgraceful in a developed nation. It shows the huge divide that we have between rich and poor. If he is proud of that conservative record, I would like him to go to Aberdeen and speak to the folks at that food bank and tell him that and see what happens. The opening line of Ms Bailey's motion today states that the Parliament rejects the UK Government's plans for further austerity and believes that George Osborne's economic plan is based on extreme spending cuts and regressive taxation, and will have a detrimental impact on the UK economy. I agree with that part of the motion, but I wonder where the Labour Party actually stands on this matter. After all, the day after the budget, the shadow Chancellor Ed Ball speaking on Radio 4's today programme, when he was asked, said that he would not reverse any of the budget that had been done the day before. An admission that if elected, an unfettered Labour Government would do absolutely nothing to change the damaging Tory liberal policies that are having a major impact on the most vulnerable in our society. That means that, by signing up to that budget, that means that the Labour Party, like the coalition parties, has signed up to an additional £12 billion of cuts, despite the Chancellor's admission that there is headroom for investment in public services. That, of course, is the same Labour Party who trooped through the lobbies with the Tories and Liberals to vote for the charter of budget responsibility just weeks previously, which was another £30 billion worth of austerity cuts over the first two years of the next Parliament. Those statements by Ed Ball and the Action by the Labour Party at Westminster quite clearly show that, although today's motion carps about Osborne's extreme spending cuts, when it comes to the crunch, Labour at Westminster have backed its austerity measures to the hilt. Jackie Baillie in her speech says that we can't afford another five years of Tory austerity. I would say to Jackie Baillie that we can't afford five years of Labour austerity either. It is quite clear. On you go. Jackie Baillie. Can he tell me how he can afford a £7.6 billion reduction in our budget as a result of the SNP's foolishness on full fiscal autonomy? I would say that full fiscal autonomy is not going to happen tomorrow. Is my colleague John Mason rightly said that we can deal with us over the peace and not just rely on one year? I will come back to that later on in my speech. The SNP has offered an alternative with modest increases in public spending to allow for £180 billion of spend across the UK. After the First Minister's speech outlining this policy, Jonathan Portis, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said, that the idea that further austerity is inevitable, desirable and necessary simply does not add up from an economic perspective. In that sense, I think that Nicola Sturgeon is quite right to put those issues on the agenda. Her good sense is maybe the reason why she is the only political leader to have a positive approval rating in England. What I would say in that final minute is that Scotland's revenues are growing. We pay more in per head than any other part of the United Kingdom, bar London. We can do even better if we break free from the Westminster anchor of austerity. That means that we can provide better for those folks, those most vulnerable people that have been affected by those austerity cuts that have hit them year on year. The only way to do that, to break that austerity anchor, is to send a phalanx of SNP MPs to London to haul up that anchor and bring some reality back to politics. Thank you very much. Can I alert the chamber that I am likely to have to reduce speeches? Audra, please. Can I alert the chamber that I am likely to have to reduce speeches to four minutes at some point over the afternoon? James Kelly to be followed by Joan McAlpine. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. This debate is very timely this afternoon, as it comes as we are on the verge of the common general election. The different approaches that have been outlined by all the parties in this Parliament are very informative to the voters throughout Scotland. There is no doubt that what is in credit was a contrast between the words of the Tory motion and the reality of what is happening on the ground. The Tories tell us about the growing economy, about the numbers that are in employment, but the reality is that, in the last five years, people in work are 1,600 pounds worse off. Families who are in benefit are 1,100 pounds worse off. Murdo Fraser tells us about 80 per cent of jobs being skilled jobs, but 80 per cent of jobs created in the last five years are low-paid jobs. All that creates a situation where we have more people on zero-hours contracts, we have more people suffering from benefit sanctions, we have more people struggling with the cost-of-living crisis, and that is why we find a situation where people very regrettably are queuing up at food banks in our constituency. That is the reality of the Tory approach, and that would be exacerbated by the re-election of a Tory Government, taking us back to a situation that we had in the 1930s. What I found astonishing about the SNP's approach to the debate is that, during the course of Mr Swinney's contribution and also Mr MacDonald, we heard nothing about full fiscal autonomy. Maybe they had forgotten it, maybe they had too much of Alex Salmond's pink champagne at lunchtime, but the reality of it, at least Mr Mason, was honest enough to talk about it. If you are going to have full fiscal autonomy, it is going to result in binning the Barnett formula. You have got £7.6 billion less than we have got currently, and that is just the first year that will grow as the years go on. What effect do you need to examine? What effect is that going to have on schools throughout the country that are already struggling with cuts that some are needing rebuilt and modernised? What effect is that going to have in the NHS? What effect is it going to have where our accident and emergency departments are in crisis? What effect is that going to have when we have 150,000 people on social housing waiting lists? What impact is it going to have in the struggle to get more of the 400,000 people in Scotland who are not on the living wage, on to that living wage? What impact is it going to have is that we have a growing elderly population if we have got £7.6 billion less in our budget? There is no point in shaking your head about it, Mr Swinney. You have never covered it in the whole of your speech, because you are clearly embarrassed of it. Mr Kelly, can you speak through the chair, please? I contrast that to Labour's plans, where we will seek not only to introduce fairness, but also to support economic growth. We will do that by introducing a tax on the bankers bonus, a mansion tax in homes greater than the value of £2 billion and also introduce a top rate tax. From the proceeds of that, we will support the creation of 1,000 more nurses in the NHS to help to avert the crisis in the NHS. We will create a jobs guarantee and also a living wage of £8. In addition to that, we will freeze energy prices, we will give support to student busseries and we will also create a £1,600 allocation to those working-class kids who are not able to get to college or university. In the next six weeks, the choice, as we have seen in the chamber, is clear. We can continue with the Tory austerity and the Tory cuts that are so damaging in our communities. We can adopt the SNP approach, which would create a £7.6 billion black hole in Scotland's budget, and we can adopt the positive redistributive policies of the Labour Party, which will create economic growth and help Scotland's communities to get back on their feet again. The motion talks about austerity, so I want to start by having a look at the first anti-austerity national leader, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man for whom the war on want was not rhetoric, but real. Roosevelt's anti-austerity programme was the New Deal, which saved many thousands of Americans from hunger and want by investing in infrastructure in the country and establishing a social security net for the first time. It cost money, of course, and it made a many ways among the establishment. He was told that it was too expensive and that the priority should be balancing the books, as Jackie Baillie has just said. Indeed, in his election address at Madison Square Garden, Roosevelt noted that, never before in all our history have those forces of conservatism been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred. I should like it to have it said that the forces of selfishness and lust or power have met their marge. Roosevelt was told that state spending was unaffordable and that a balanced budget should take priority over feeding the hungry and rebuilding the country after the Great Depression. It is a sad fact, Presiding Officer, that the arguments and forces of fiscal conservatism that were lined up against Roosevelt eight decades ago are alive and well today in the UK, ensconced for the moment at least in number 11 Downing Street, putting in place another £30 billion of cuts that will hit the poorest people in our society, and Scotland alone will see another £12 billion cumulative cut over the next four years. I know that the Labour Party would very much like to pretend to have inherited Roosevelt's mantle. The motion uses the language of anti-austerity, but he never advocated, quote, sensible cuts in public spending, which the Labour Party has supported at Westminster. No, I've only got five minutes, sorry. Anti-austerity, which means investing, nourishing the economy, encouraging economic activity, as the Deputy First Minister says, will increase the tax take if he cuts spending and reduces economic activity. He inhibits the income from tax, and he has to borrow more as a consequence. This is the lesson that Roosevelt and Maynard Keynes taught us many, many decades ago, and it's why George Osborne's austerity has failed. It's the reason why borrowing has risen substantially beyond his initial expectation and has exceeded the June 2010 forecast by over £50 billion in 2014-15. Disgracefully, the Labour Party has signed up to this failed model. It's surely disgraceful that Ed Balls says that there's nothing he would change in George Osborne's budget. George Osborne was very explicit in his budget that welfare will take the biggest hit. I hit the disproportionately huts, the disabled and families with children. In voting for the charter of budget responsibility at Westminster, Labour are voting to put those £30 billion of austerity cuts in place over the next two years. Jackie Baillie calls it balancing the books, and I suppose that it's inevitable that you'll use the language of the Tories when you mirror the policies of the Tories. Roosevelt was attacked for failing to balance the books and history celebrates him for doing so, and it's in this historical context that we should view the First Minister's real anti-austerity proposals. As with the new deal, she advocated investment to promote growth through an increase in spending of £180 billion in public services until 2019-20. She told her audience at University College London that we could use that investment to promote infrastructure, education and innovation, which will support stronger and more sustainable growth in the future. That proposal is one that Franklin D Roosevelt would have endorsed. In his 1936 campaign address, he said that his anti-austerity agenda had, as I said earlier, made him the most hated politician ever amongst the powerful and wealthy. He went on to win a landslide in 1936. The SNP's anti-austerity programme has also induced some very hysterical outbursts among the UK establishment. They fear us, they hate us and, as Roosevelt said, I welcome their hatred because we represent hope and we offer true change and a true end to austerity if we will power at Westminster after May 7. I am calling Dennis Robertson, but after Dennis Robertson, I am afraid that speeches will have to be reduced to four minutes. The people on the 7th of May will vote for more austerity from the Tories, the Labour Party and the Lib Dems or a new way from the SNP, who will be able to influence the direction of travel in the hung Parliament. Nicola Sturgeon in the polls is the person who has the highest poll rating even in England. We have another choice, Osborne, Balls or John Swinney. John Swinney to put forward his plans to take Scotland forward. The debate in the economy here this afternoon is not just a wider general debate about what is happening in the UK. It is about what is best for Scotland. From the budget, Scotland will be £12 billion worse off. Why? Because Labour has supported the Tories and the Lib Dems once again to ensure that there is £30 billion of austerity cut. They cannot run away from that fact. That is fact. It is on the record, £30 billion more austerity and the £12 billion from the budget will come to Scotland. That is fact, Presiding Officer. Let us look who has been paying the price for this remarkable, this superb term of office that the Conservatives and the Lib Dems will applaud themselves about. Who has been paying the price? The most vulnerable, the poorest in our society. Look at the welfare cuts. Look at the sanctions that have been imposed by the DWP. Who has stepped in to try and mitigate some of that? Well, this Scottish Government stepped in to try and mitigate some of the impact of the welfare imposition that the Government has imposed on Scotland. No one else has. No one else has. What we have done is mitigated a lot of the cuts that are coming to Scotland. We should not have to use the money to mitigate, we should be using the money here to have a progressive outlook for our economy. What the Scottish Government has been doing to try and ensure that our economy is prosperous and moving forward is putting money into the capital investments and the infrastructure within Scotland, actually having jobs, creating jobs. We have an infrastructure programme, we have the Imbreramsley bridge in my constituency, we have the Afford academy campus in my constituency, there is the A96 in my constituency, there are programmes that are actually taking the economy forward, it is actually assisting those in the construction industry and we are moving forward with a very progressive plan. The plan that Mr Swinney and the First Minister have in a honn parliament is the plan that the Scots will adopt on the 7th of May because, as we know from the polls, Labour, Conservatives and Lib Dems are nowhere to be seen in Scotland. We will have as many SNP MPs down there influencing the direction of travel for the benefit of Scotland because this is what this Parliament requires to ensure that we take forward a plan to benefit Scotland, not to bring it back into an austerity agenda. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Thank you. I now call Drew Smith to be followed by Mike McKenzie. He can give you about four and a half minutes, Mr Smith. I'm grateful to you, Presiding Officer. General actions are an opportunity not just to challenge those with power but, indeed, ultimately to take the power from them. Jackie Baillie has set out that Labour does have a better plan for ending Tory austerity and, indeed, for raising living standards because, under the Tories, plans to reduce the deficit have failed. They have failed because they have failed to understand that the country succeeds when working families succeed. Their legacy is one of insecure and exploitative work for ordinary people, a rising cost of living, while, at the same time, tax cuts for the very richest and an on-going failure to tackle the issues of tax avoidance, which are robbing public services of proper support. However, the SNP's central demand for this general action is full fiscal autonomy. Presiding Officer, this afternoon, the time has come for scrutiny of the idea of full fiscal autonomy because Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon have been absolutely clear that this is the SNP's stated aim for the general election, influencing the House of Commons such as to secure full fiscal autonomy for Scotland. Others have defined what that means. We all understand what full fiscal autonomy means. On one level, it is a simple solution to the conundrum of where power lies and in whose interests it is wielded. However, the outcome of full fiscal autonomy would, in fact, be very simple indeed, because it would mean the devastation of Scottish public services, job losses, cuts on a scale that dwarf the other issues that we are discussing this afternoon, full fiscal austerity, austerity max, cuts on top of cuts on top of cuts. It is quite simply, Presiding Officer, a terrible idea. That is why John Swinney did not mention it once in his 10-minute speech. The SNP's key aim for the general election and the finance secretary will not even defend it. That is why Mr McDonald would not defend it, but we have to give credit to Mr Mason for attempting to do it. Mr Swinney, if you wanted to talk about full fiscal autonomy, you had an opportunity in opening this debate, because this is an idea that no one who cared about people who actually rely on public services could ever conceivably support. I have listened carefully to the arguments from the SNP this afternoon, and the truth is that we have not heard a single cogent reason why this would be in Scotland's interests. Whatever our views on the merits or otherwise of independence or indeed our assessment of the coalition's record, we should all be able to agree that this is a very, very bad idea. I am proud to argue the case for my party's better economic plan—to balance the books by growing our economy. I am not shy of the fact. I have to say to SNP members who bandied around the word progressive this afternoon that not one of them has mentioned taxation. That is absolutely shocking, Presiding Officer, because I am prepared to say that, in order to achieve that fair balance, it means asking those with the most to pay very modestly more. Labour's proposals are for redistribution, from those with most to those with least. Pulling and sharing resources which Scotland has placed in the UK—a place that we confirmed last year that that union delivers, that means redistribution in different parts of the union. The SNP's plan for full fiscal autonomy is what it would achieve. It would wreck the redistribution across the United Kingdom and, in the process, it would wreck Scotland's public finances. There are no arguments for this, Presiding Officer, other than an ideological one. Why are they attempting, occasionally, to argue it at all? It is because it is the idea that they think looks most like independence. That is the only argument for this disastrous policy that can be made. John Mason said that others were talking Scotland down. The truth is that they are arguing for this policy whether it would make Scotland richer or poorer, and the truth is that we know that it would make Scotland poorer. Why do we know that? The Scottish Government's own figures tell us that, and IFS puts the figure at £7.6 billion. I understand, Presiding Officer, that many people have a deeply held belief in support for Scotland being separate from the rest of the UK. I understand that members are opposite. That is an unshakable belief, and they are not going to change it. I accept that the Conservatives and the Liberals will defend their record. I think that Patrick Harvie is right that the Conservative members who believe in a small estate are supportive of continuing and deepening austerity to achieve precisely that aim. However, I cannot understand, Presiding Officer, that the Scottish ministers who now choose to campaign for an arrangement predicated on staying in the UK, which would actually make us worse off within the UK. It is the worst of all worlds, and I therefore support their Labour motion in front of us today and look forward very much to this general election campaign. Many thanks. I can give Mike Mackenzie and Tic Brodie four and a half minutes each. Thank you, Presiding Officer.  Next, we will tell us that we are not genetically suited to taking these big decisions for ourselves. The disappointing thing about this afternoon's debate is that only the SNP and to a certain extent the Green Party have put forward credible proposals for an alternative economic strategy. The Labour party is desperately trying to create the illusion that there is any significant difference between their proposals and the Tories, and the reality is that those differences are marginal. Only a few weeks ago, they marched through the lobbies side by side with their Tory friends to vote for continuing austerity. The reality is that all the UK parties are wedded to austerity, with Labour claiming that their cuts are somehow nicer cuts than Tory cuts. The people have not spoken yet, but they are showing all the signs that they have greater economic wisdom than their political masters in Westminster. In a Westminster electoral system that is designed to give a clear majority to one party, it does not look as if any of the main UK parties enjoy much public confidence. Scotland is now the key battleground in this UK election, and there has been much speculation about the reasons for Labour's falling fortunes in Scotland. It is not just about the semantic shillie-sharling over what was promised in the Vow. It is not just that Labour campaigns side by side with the Tories during the referendum. It is not just about the enhanced political engagement brought about by the referendum, but it is also about an increasingly informed electorate. It is also about a large section of the population who, as a result of the referendum, have received a political and an economic education. I am sorry, I am short of time. It is also about the democratisation of information, aided and abetted, as we know, by the internet and shared by means of social media. Presiding officer, this increasingly informed electorate knows that deficit reduction is not in itself an economic plan. Mr Kelly has said no to your intervention. It would be one of the... They know that deficit reduction is not in itself an economic plan. It would be one of the happy outcomes of a good economic plan, but it should not be the sole purpose of an economic plan. To focus solely on deficit reduction is to attempt to treat one of the symptoms of the disease and not the disease itself. If we are to nurse our economy back to good health, it is necessary to deal with the underlying problems of our economy. It is necessary to move from a low-wage economy to a high-wage economy. It is necessary to move from a position of low productivity to one of high productivity. Presiding officer, I was reading last night about the financial and property crisis of the Roman Empire in AD 33. The business cycle was waxed and waned from before that time. Gordon Brown's boast that he then did boom and bust was like a suffer riding on the crest of a wave trying to claim that he created the wave. Governments can dampen down the business cycle but they cannot end it and good government economic policies can reshape our economy to deliver better outcomes. Increasing our productivity would increase competitiveness. Moving to a higher-wage economy would increase taxation revenues and tackle the deficit far more effectively than implementing harsh cuts. Tackling inequality would deliver real and sustainable economic growth. That is why economists like Paul Krugman and Brian Ashcroft—I am not always a fan of these gentlemen—are suggesting that the UK parties have a bogus economic narrative. For those reasons, it is necessary to send a large block of SNP MPs down to Westminster to shake economic policy from there. I feel that today we are in a time warp. 14 days ago, we were talking about people supporting the Scottish economy. Today, we are talking about supporting Scotland's economy with the same mood music, funerial. Last time, the lyrics were bad. Today, they are absolutely horrible. The motion calls for the rejection of the UK Government plans for austerity. It believes George Osborne's economic plan is based on the extreme spending cuts and regressive taxation. However, as Mr Osborne did not or would not spell out the extreme cuts or any menu of them, it is incumbent. In fact, it is essential for Labour to tell us today. Tell us now, when they voted for the £30 billion of austerity cuts, what was on the menu? I want to rehearse all of the Ed Ball's radio four quotes last week, where he is non-reversal of the Osborne cuts in public spending.  So tell us. What are they? What has Labour signed up to? Tell all the people what the cuts are going to be. Of course, Labour now invokes the OBR, and it is warning about yet further cuts and more savage, yet undefined cuts over the next two years. That will be the OBR that Alistair Darling, who had his inception said, and I quote, right at the start, that Tories use the OBR not just as part of the Government, but as a wing of the Conservative Party. They succeeded in strangling a good idea at birth. That will be the OBR relied upon in the motion, who, in its own fiscal outlook, just a year ago said that it was unable to forecast the effect of the new inverted commas Calman taxes on the Scottish budget because, and I quote again, its forecasting methodologies are work in progress. That will be the OBR over a period of six iterations of its forecast basis, which provided that for Osborne to produce the budget that he has just done. Let's look at another part of the motion, the 10 per cent starting rate of tax on the first £1,000 to save money for hard-working families. Of course, Labour doesn't, or can't, or won't, spell out the personal tax allowances in their taxation programme. However, if we just imagine that if we apply the £10 to the first £1,000 and retain the current tax thresholds, then year on year, someone on £15,000 a year in 2016-17 will see a reduction of £140 in their tax bill. However, someone on £50,000 a year reaps a reduction of £203 a year, so much for Labour's fairness and equality, so much for Drew Smith's crocodile tears and asking that the well-off should pay more. Further in the motion, to reject the sense of full fiscal autonomy and keep the Barnett formula—let's look at that—the late Lord Barnett, he of the formula, said in the event of Scotland getting more tax powers, retaining the formula would be, and I quote again, a terrible mistake. Another Labour luminary predicted that the formula would be a quote diminished because the funding arrangement would be irrevocably changed by new tax powers coming to Hollywood. That luminary, of course, was Jack McConnell in August last year, so the only true solution is, of course, to have full fiscal autonomy married to full political independence. Labour has sold the jerseys. It sold the first team jerseys in 2008, and they are now selling the second team jerseys on austerity, on undefined public expenditure cuts, on spending of £100 billion on nuclear weapons, on fair work, taxation and pay. Two weeks ago, I said that they had no economic strategy, no oil and gas plan, no fiscal determination, and this week they have proved it yet again. Thank you very much. We now turn to closing speeches. As ever, I expect members to have participated in this debate to be in the chamber for closing speeches. I call on Patrick Harvie—maximum six minutes, please. It is quite common in these debates that I can find myself agreeing with at least half of what various members who disagree vociferously with one another have to say, so maybe I am just in an unreasonably good mood today. I am going to focus on the stuff that I do agree with, at least at first. Jackie Baillie began with a strong rejection of the coalition's record and of its promises of austerity to come. When she said that there is a clear need to get rid of the Tories, that is something that I can very happily subscribe to. Rather than merely condemning Ed Ball's, let me hold out the hope that if he has the opportunity, he will find something in the last Tory budget that he would like to overturn. I could certainly provide a list if that would be helpful. Jackie Baillie, continuing her attempt to rebrand the Barnett formula as the Barnett bonus, launched an attack and was not the last Labour member to do so on the concept of full fiscal autonomy. Let me just try to identify one point of agreement on that. Whatever change is to be proposed in the fiscal relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK after the implementation of what the Ramshackle-Smith agreement led to, it must be subject to greater thoughtful, reflective, considered process than that Smith commission itself. We all know that it was a breakneck timetable, and those who have described it as coherent and durable find it hard to keep a straight face when they do so. Whatever comes after it must be done on a more thoughtful basis than that. Lord Smith's more agreeable namesake in this chamber was quite right to raise the question of tax and where tax fits in it. He is quite right to say that it is absurd to argue for a more equal society without talking about the greater contribution that those who are wealthiest must be expected to pay. It is something that the Greens have argued consistently. I certainly hope that we will not be alone in doing so in the run-up to next year's election, the Hollywood election, when all political parties will have to set out their stall on a more progressive tax system in Scotland. Mr Swinney, the Deputy First Minister, places familiar emphasis on the approach that the SNP takes to stimulating more growth, leading to more jobs, leading to more taxes, and that is a way of balancing the books. Notwithstanding our old debate about the limits to growth, limits to its extent and value as a metric, I welcome the fact that the SNP seemed to have abandoned under its new leadership the nonsense of starting that cycle with tax cuts for a big business. That is an important point of change in the SNP's most recent economic policy, and I hope that it follows through on that agenda further. Gavin Brown, and here I may struggle to be positive, like so many others, judges economic recovery on the basis of incredibly narrow metrics, talking about growth regardless of who benefits from how that wealth is generated or who manages to hoard it, talking about jobs regardless of quality and security and pay levels of those jobs, talking about cuts as well only in terms of necessity, as he perceives it, and regardless of the human impact of those cuts. As to the Liberal Democrat position, well, Willie Rennie is not the first Liberal Democrat I've heard recently trying to create this measure of distance from the Conservatives. It's clear that the Liberal Democrats feel ready for a spell in opposition. Well, I don't think they need to worry. I feel that that burden may be lifted from them soon. The empty hopes of their activists, the empty sound bites and the empty yellow boxes, will all soon be things of the past. The green proposition that we put out on green QE is quite consistent, and I find it astonishing that such radical words can come. It's quite consistent with a paper from the Bank of England, not the most radical economic voice in the land. In its recent paper, a one-bank research agenda, climate change and policy, technological and societal responses to it could have significant effects on financial markets and financial institutions, presumably as well as crashing the life support system that we depend on. It will be bad for the markets. They conclude by saying that central banks may have to respond to the challenges presented by those forces. We have offered a means by which the central bank can do so. Investing in renewable energy, investing in energy efficiency, investing in the high-quality housing that the country needs, investing perhaps in some of the IP generation in offshore energy, in energy storage and in alternatives to petrochemicals, some of the areas where Scotland could have a leading advantage. The use of the green investment bank or a national investment bank to enable local authorities to devolve Governments, NHS trusts and boards and other public bodies to make that investment. As with the previous QE programme, debt issued by one part of government is taken up by another part of the public sector, it ceases effectively to be debt, no interest to cruise and it opens up the possibility for that investment. Investment in the public good, investment in environmental progress, investment in high-quality jobs in every constituency of the UK, that is the kind of programme that the next UK Government should be investing in. I do hope that whoever has influence on that balanced Parliament that is likely to emerge from this year's election will press that point to the benefit of Scotland and the rest of the UK. Many thanks. Before I call our next closing speaker, I note that Alec Riley has not returned to the chamber. I do not have an explanation for that. I now call on Willie Rennie, maximum six minutes please. In response to a point, an intervention from Jackie Bailey, Kevin Stewart and asked about full fiscal autonomy said, well it's not going to happen tomorrow. Well thank goodness for that because if we had listened to him last year and he had had his way in the referendum it would be next year and if we listened to him on May 7 it might be here next year. That's the price that we would pay. I'll take an intervention from Kevin Stewart if he's got some kind of explanation. Kevin Stewart. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I think that Mr Rennie should tell the public about the deficit that is currently being run by the UK Government and the huge debt £1.5 trillion that the UK has. We could grow ourselves out of deficit, which is something that the UK Government seems incapable of doing. Other companies can do it, why not Scotland? Willie Rennie. Well, Kevin Stewart is chancellor, achieving miraculous rates of growth in just 12 months in order to deal with a massive hole in the finances that he would leave. That's what he's suggesting. He says that it's not going to be here tomorrow, but thank goodness that it's not. I'm disappointed that Alex Rowley is not in the chamber because he did criticise the coalition's deficit reduction plan, but he seems to have forgotten an important thing that Alasdair Darling said when he was Gordon Brown's chancellor. He said that there would be tougher and deeper cuts than those implemented by Margaret Thatcher. That was the case. The reason why that was the case is because of his former boss and colleague Gordon Brown and the state that he left the country in. Alex Rowley should be a little bit more careful when criticising the coalition's plans, because that's exactly what his chancellor would have done if he had been returned to office. Alex Rowley and Drew Smith failed to recognise when they talked about the impact on working people. The big tax cuts that we've had—I bet a man the other day who was paying—he had received £12,000 of an income a year. He used to pay, before the coalition came to power, £1100 in income tax. Now he will pay £200 in income tax. The biggest tax cut for working people, I think, I have ever seen and probably will ever see in the future, not just now. That is the kind of thing. That is the practical measure that we need to implement to help working people. We have many people talking about progressive politics, but I do not think that it is progressive to leave an ever-growing mountain of debt for future generations to pay. I am not going to spend today what our children should have tomorrow, nor should we be cutting beyond today what is necessary to balance the books. I think that we should invest appropriately, build that stronger economy and that fairer society, so that there is opportunity for everyone. I started off by setting out the difference between the various parties on the economy. Labour and the SNP, I believe, want to borrow far too much. The Conservatives want to cut too much. Either would return us to that deep seesaw damaging economics of the past, and we should steer clear of advice from those parties in that regard. Many people have talked also about tax dodging. I have a report here that sets out what the UK coalition has done on tax dodgers. We have closed many loopholes, in fact, 33 different tax loopholes. We have prosecuted 10 times more people for tax crimes than the Labour Party did when they were in power. We have clawed back a massive £1.4 billion extra from fraud by using better data, and £9 billion taxed back from those in Switzerland, Lichtenstein and the Channel Islands. Those are practical measures that have resulted in big tax take back to the Government to help us in difficult times. None of the members mentioned anything. It is just like none of the members mentioned the tax cuts for those who are working people. I think that if we are going to have a balanced debate, we should recognise that we have also in this country got the economy back on track and we have done it fairly by cutting tax for those on low and middle incomes, by making sure that we are helping those from disadvantaged backgrounds with things such as childcare—a massive expansion in childcare. In fact, the Scottish National Party Government needs to do an awful lot to catch up with the UK Government on childcare, but we have also made sure that the economy is going to stay the course. If we listen to the advice from the Scottish National Party and the Labour Party, we will just plunge ourselves into even higher levels of debt. We will listen to the Tories. The cuts to public services will be really deep. They will go back to the levels that we had in the 1960s. We will see massive cuts to public services to the NHS beyond what is sustainable. I think that we need to stay the course and keep that balanced approach. The balanced approach that has worked over the past five years with 187,000 extra jobs in this country—something, again, that no member in this chamber is going to recognise other than the Conservatives. I think that we have made significant progress in the country in the last five years, based on a plan that none of those people said would work. None of them said would work. So we should stay the course, get that balance between borrowing and spending right, keep the course on path for that fairer society and that stronger economy. Many thanks, and now Colin Gavin Brown, maximum six minutes, Mr Brown. Let me start by just coming back on some of the points made by the Labour Party. The first of all said that the Chancellor's plans would be detrimental and have a negative impact on the economy, but that does not square terribly well with the growth projections, which were revised upwards last week, along with the unemployment projections, which were revised downwards, and indeed the employment projections, which were revised upwards, with full employment now a distinct possibility, perhaps by the end of the next Parliament. We heard that they would do things differently, but I think that they were a little light on detail. The idea of a 50p tax rate is something that, obviously, this side of the chamber would be against, but I ask in all seriousness, particularly with income tax being devolved, how much would a 50p tax rate actually raise in Scotland? Relative to the economic damage it could do, the perception that Scotland is a difficult place to do business that it might add to, how much would a 50p tax rate actually raise? I hope that Labour can return to that in their closing. It wants to bring in a 10p tax rate, fair enough, but is there any backdoor admission that it was quite wrong of Gordon Brown in the first place to remove the 10p tax rate? It was his final act as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Why have they suddenly changed their position on that? Although they try to make out that the coalition Government is fond of austerity, but a Labour Government would not have had any change, it is simply not true to say that. I looked deep into the budget and, deep in the middle of the budget, it says that the consolidation, if you add tax changes and spending reductions, the total consolidation over the course of this Parliament until now has been approximately £106 billion, but £70 billion out of the £106 billion was inherited by this Government from the previous Government. They would have had fewer spending cuts, but they were signed up to £70 billion out of the £106 billion that actually happened. That was before the Euro crisis took shape, so they might well have ended up in a not-too dissimilar place. However, I want to turn now to the comments made by the SNP, because there are a couple of really important ones to dwell on. The first one is that the stated policy of this Government is full fiscal autonomy. It has put it down on paper many times, and it has been reiterated by almost every SNP speaker today. The Labour motion talks about there being a £7.6 billion worth of cuts required or tax rises. They do not mention borrowing, but, of course, it could be done by borrowing, but there are only really three ways in which it could be done. The Scottish Government has said that the figures do not stack up. That was John Mason. Kevin Stewart said, do not worry, it is not going to happen tomorrow anyway, which is not really a retort. However, the serious point is this—what is the Scottish Government's official position on the finances for full fiscal autonomy? What do they think it would be in 16, 17, 17, 18 or 18, 19? If that is their stated policy, if that is what they are hoping to achieve, where they get a phalanx of MPs, that is what they would be pushing. I think that the public, the people of Scotland and wider society have a right to know what the Scottish Government's projections were to be the case. It is easy to rubbish other party's projections, but what is their view? That is why, in our amendment, we have called for them to publish Scotland's balance sheet, the Outlook of Public Finances, in their own terms so that we can see what they believe the impact on the finances would be. I will give way to John Mason. I thank Gavin Brown for giving way. Would he accept that the Scottish Government, no Scottish Government, is going to ask for more powers that would leave them worse off? I am not sure where to begin to tackle that. Given that John Mason and every other SNP speaker, and every time the First Minister and Deputy First Minister speak on the subject, full fiscal autonomy, is there stated policy or aim? I have a proposal to make, Deputy Presiding Officer, that we did not put on the amendment, but I hope that Alex Neil, who I believe is closing, will address us. Given that we have an independent Scottish Fiscal Commission with economic brains in there, with the ability and capacity to do the work, why do we not get the Scottish Fiscal Commission to publish a report on full fiscal autonomy, using all the statistics that they can get their hands upon, to work out to the best of their ability what their projections would be for 2016-17, for 2017-18 and for 2018-19? I think that that would be fair, because it is not coming from the Labour Party or the Conservative Party, it is not coming from the Scottish National Party, it is coming from the Scottish Government's own fiscal commission. I hope that Mr Neil can address that, and it is something that I think would shed some light on what is a really important issue. Then we can see whose figures stack up, then we can see what the impacts would be, and it was then up to the electorate to judge to the best of their ability who is correct on this issue. I simply close by saying to Alex Neil and to John Swinney why do we not get the Scottish Fiscal Commission to look at this and publish an independent report on the matter. Many thanks. I now call on Alex Neil. Cabinet Secretary, maximum eight minutes please. Thank you very much indeed, Dave. Presiding Officer, can I begin by saying that I have listened to all the speeches very carefully indeed, not least those in the Labour benches? It is a great tragedy that Alex Rowley is not the main economic spokesman for the Labour Party instead of Jackie Baillie, because he showed much more sense in terms of his tone and the very serious issues that he raised. Quite frankly, much less illiteracy in economic matters than Jackie Baillie has displayed. The first lesson that Alex Rowley demonstrated is a fundamental issue. It is one that Harold Macmillan, when Lord Stockton made a speech about in the House of Lords in the early 80s during the factual recession then. That was the fundamental one. There are two basic strategies when you have a structural deficit. You either grow your way out of the deficit or you try to cut your way out of the deficit. We have seen in recent years that trying to cut your way out of the deficit delays the time by which you can get the deficit down and it also does it at enormous economic cost to your people. The estimate by Oxford University Professor Simon Wren Lewis is that the cost of trying to cut our way out of the deficit has been a loss of 5 per cent of GDP across the United Kingdom, equivalent to £1,500 for every person in our country. There are two very practical good examples that prove the point. If you compare what has happened in the UK with what has happened under President Obama in the States, his strategy was to grow his way out of the deficit. He now has a much lower deficit than either the UK or many other countries. Indeed, the UK's deficit as a percentage of GDP is one of, if not the highest, in the whole of Europe. The idea that you can cut your way out of the deficit is absolutely the wrong way to do it and a very costly way. However, there is another very good example closer to home. The strategy that has been followed, recommended by the World Bank, is that the two things that you can do to bring the deficit down quicker as a part of your growth strategy is, first of all, to invest in capital. Capital investment creates far more jobs than any other way of creating jobs. That means far more revenue, far more savings in social security and a much bigger reduction in the deficit. The other way is not to cut welfare, but, as the World Bank has now shown, one of the ways in which it can boost the growth of a country is by redistributive policies. If we had pursued a UK-level redistributive policy along with an investment plan over the last five years, the deficit would already be much lower. The level of employment and the quality of employment would be much higher and our overall economy would be in a far stronger position. The French followed the economics of Alec Neill. They have doubled the level of unemployment that we have and they have a fraction of the growth prospects this year and indeed last year. Why is that? They did not follow that strategy. They did not have an investment-led growth strategy and they did not pursue what the World Bank suggested about the way to do it. However, you just need to look closer to home. If you look at the strategy that John Swinney has followed in recent years, where we have put a massive emphasis on the importance of investment, shifting revenue spend to capital spend and, at the same time, as a result of the SFT that you all opposed, we have put about £300 million a year on average more capital investment than would have been the case without the Scottish Future Trust. As a result of that, if you look at the employment figures in Scotland of all the countries that make up the United Kingdom, we have the highest level of employment and we have the second lowest level of economic inactivity. That is a direct result of the policies and the strategy that is pursued by the Government and John Swinney in achieving that. I am grateful to Mr Neil for taking an intervention. Can he tell us when he talks about redistribution? Is he referring only to shifting spending from revenue to capital or is there any measure of social redistribution policy that he would support? Against the Opposition, very often the Labour Party is pursued much more progressive policies than the Labour Party. You just need to look at yesterday and today's papers. The Labour Party pays lip service to redistribution and there we have one of its biggest councils in Scotland, North Lanarkshire Council, having to be forced into position by the courts of giving equal pay to women, which they have fought for the past 10 years. We will not be taking any lessons from the Labour Party on redistribution. The millions spent on lawyer's fees to do in the chances of women getting equal pay is an utter disgrace and you will notice that none of them are getting up in their feet to defend it. Indeed, if you look at the policies of the Labour Party, earlier on we had a statement on Longannock. What is the root cause of the challenges facing Longannock? This is part of economic policy. It is the tariff structure that was introduced by Ed Milliband when he was the Secretary of State for Energy. It is that tariff structure that has done so much damage and brought forward the closure unnecessarily of Longannock. Also, if you listen to the Labour Party, they will get more faces than Big Ben when it comes to economic policy. On the one hand, they are trying to say that they are pursuing an anti-asterity policy and strategy. On the other hand, they vote for £30 billion where the cuts and then, after the Tory budget, Ed Balls tells us that there is nothing in a Tory budget that he would revere. I will give way. I am grateful to Mr Neil because, in his round of issues from Longannock to equal pay in Northlandshire Council, could he perhaps address the issue that Mr Swinney has singularly failed to, the SNP's proposal for full fiscal autonomy at this general election? Absolutely. Cabinet Secretary, you are approaching your last minute. Let me just give you one example of if we are in charge of our own money. Let me just give you one example of how, over the next few years— Order, please. We must hear the cabinet secretary's last minute. We had 10 billion pounds to redirect to good social and economic causes, but that would be by scrapping the plan to have a successor to Trident on the Clyde. That is an example of how you use your fiscal independence not just for the benefit of your economy and employment, but to achieve a much fairer society. It is grace that when the Labour Party is supporting 30 billion of new cuts, the one cut that they are not supporting is cutting the 100 billion that a new Trident would cost. The Labour Party of all parties is going to waste money on that. That is what fiscal independence gives you the chance to do. That is what we need to build up Scotland and the Scottish economy for the future. Many thanks. I now call in Lewis MacDonald to wind up the debate. Mr MacDonald, you have until 5.30 p.m. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. The next six weeks are about making choices, and this debate has made some of the choices clearer, although perhaps not all. The Conservative amendment highlighted the OBR's revised forecast for economic growth but did not refer to the sharp squeeze on real spending in the next two years, which the OBR was predicting only last week. Willy Rennie criticised his party's coalition partners for the Conservatives' ideological drive to reduce the size of the state, as if that was something that his party hadn't noticed before now, even though they've been part of such a coalition government cutting the size of the state for the last five years? Patrick Harvie talked about green investment, and I hope that his party will support Labour's plans to broaden the base of the green investment bank by encouraging green investment premium bonds to be issued. I'm grateful to Mr MacDonald for giving way. If Mr Blanchflower is right and the next UK Government is going to have to contemplate a new round of QE, will the Labour Party be open to the idea that that investment goes into the real economy, into green investment, rather than into the financial services sector as the last round did? I'm certainly confident that the next Labour Government will want to ensure that any such economic measures are taken forward in a way that does boost the real economy and does it in a way that's sustainable as well. However, what we've heard today from the SNP is that they maintain that they are opposed to further cuts and in favour of increased public investment, yet at the same time they stand for full fiscal autonomy, which would inevitably reduce the revenues available for investment and make cuts all the more certain. The Tories, which shrink the state by drastic cuts in services and by regressive taxation, the SNP would divide the country by reducing to a minimum the services and the taxes that we share across this island. As Jackie Baillie made very clear, Labour rejects both those courses of action just as we reject the ideologies that lie behind them. The best way to balance budgets and reduce the level of debt is to grow the economy and the living standards that are working people, and the best way to secure the benefits of growth for Scotland is to maintain the fiscal union and the Barnett formula. It is simply wrong to say that there is only one way to get the current budget into balance and to start to reduce the national debt. Mr Brown and Mr Fraser claim that it can be done only by drastic spending cuts, and the SNP echo that because they want to pretend that any party committing to deficit reduction is also committing to Tory cuts. None of that is true. The charter for fiscal responsibility does not say what measures need to be taken in order to balance the books. Voting for a balanced budget and voting for Tory cuts are very different things, and the SNP repeatedly says otherwise that it does not make it true. It was striking that John Macalpine criticised Jackie Baillie for using the language of balanced budgets, which is precisely the language that John Swinney likes to use on his own front bench. How quickly the deficit can begin to go down will depend on the state of the economy and on levels of productivity. The sooner that the next UK Government can achieve improved living standards and higher productivity, the sooner it can begin to cut the debt. Labour's approach is to use all the tools that are available to Government to strengthen the economy in ways that benefit both the individual citizen and the public finances. That means using the tax system so that a greater share of the cost of strengthening the economy is borne by those who can afford to pay more. Reversing the cut to the top rate of tax for those on the highest incomes, a mansion tax on the biggest homes to fund investment in the NHS, and just as the incoming Labour Government 18 years ago taxed the windfall profits of the privatised utilities to provide a new deal for the long-term unemployed, so this year's incoming Labour Government will put a tax on bankers bonuses to fund starter jobs for young people who have been out of work for a year or more. It is fundamental to Labour's view of the world, to Labour's values that social justice and economic success should go together, and that is what an incoming Labour Government will seek to achieve. As well as increasing taxes for those who can afford to pay, Labour will reduce the disadvantages of those who have lost the most in the last five years. A national minimum wage of £8 an hour using the tax system again to reward private companies would sign up to paying a living wage as the best have done already and ensuring that workers and regular hours have regular contracts by ending exploitative zero hour contracts. I thank the member for giving way. Of course, one way to reduce the amount of money that is spent on benefit expenditure is to remove people from the situation of relying on in-work benefits. Does the member share my concern that a minimum wage of £8 in the year 2020 will not move people significantly out of that position of in-work poverty in the need to rely on in-work benefits? It will, but perhaps it is not enough on its own, and that is why we want to see action on the living wage as well and using the tax system to reward that. It is only a shame that Mr MacDonald and his colleagues voted five times against some of the measures that we brought forward in that area. What is good for working people is good for the whole country. That is a fundamental truth to which Government must return. It is fundamental to the approach of Scottish Labour that we seek to promote further devolution in the context of the Smith agreement while continuing to pool and share resources across the United Kingdom. A Labour Government will bring forward a bill to implement the Smith agreement in its first 100 days. We want to see the powers of this Parliament strengthened, but we also want to see the sharing of power across all levels of government entrenched both in our political structures and our political culture. For those of us who have supported devolution within the United Kingdom, the rational response to the Smith agreement is to put it in place as soon as possible, and then for both parliaments and both Governments to do whatever they can to make it work. Of course, we understand that that will not happen in the next few weeks. Full fiscal autonomy will be the platform of the SNP at the next election, and no doubt what it will seek to pursue thereafter. It is always illuminating—I listened with interest to the Government's closing speech today, because it is always illuminating and comparing and contrasting the speaking styles of Mr Swinney and Mr Neil. Mr Swinney seeks to stay calm and measured, and he often succeeds, except perhaps when he is being criticised for what he has not said and complains from a sedentary position. Mr Neil prefers to put on a more theatrical performance, and he hardly ever fails to achieve that. Of course, when Mr Neil is asked to close a debate, there is always a suspicion that there may be some important issue that the Scottish Government does not wish to be rationally addressed. That was, I think, confirmed by Mr Neil's performance, and Mr Swinney gave the game away not by what he said but by what he failed to say. In 10 minutes, he managed to say nothing substantial at all about his own party's actual economic policy, which is full fiscal autonomy. Instead, he left that defence of full fiscal autonomy to some of those behind him. I give way to Mr Robertson. I thank the member very much for the brief intervention. Mr McDonald is criticising what we have not said. Mr McDonald has not said what his view is on Trident and what the spending would be from the Labour regarding Trident. I look forward to debating defence issues with Mr Robertson. Clearly, it is not only Alex Neil. Clearly, Alex Neil is not the only one on the SNP benches who somehow imagine that full fiscal autonomy involves decision making power over the defence of the United Kingdom. It is no wonder that Alex Neil did not want to address the issue of full fiscal autonomy when he was asked about it. The only thing that he could think of was a defence issue, namely Trident. Of course, when Mr Swinney left defence of full fiscal autonomy to those behind him, he gave us some insights into what the SNP really thinks. John Mason made a sincere but bizarre defence of full fiscal autonomy, which seemed to consist only of protesting that his party would not want to do anything that damaged the Scottish economy. Therefore, its policy must be all right after all. Chick Brody went further than anybody. He quoted Lord Barnett saying that keeping the Barnett formula alongside the Smith agreement would be a terrible mistake, and he made it clear that he agreed with that, too. Kevin Stewart's defence was that full fiscal autonomy was not really a problem, because it was not going to happen tomorrow, while the question has to be do the SNP front bench and vision happening at all. There is clearly a cost to going down the road of full fiscal autonomy, and the Scottish Government needs to tell us what that cost is if voters in Scotland are to make an informed choice in the next few weeks. The right choice is for a Labour Government that recognises that what is good for working people is good for the economy, rejecting another five years of Tory austerity and rejecting the extra austerity of full fiscal autonomy. That is the right choice for Scotland. That is the right choice for the future. Thank you. That concludes the debate on supporting Scotland's economy. The next item of business is consideration of business motion 12787. In the name of Jofix Patrick, on behalf of the parliamentary bureau sitting at business programme, any member wishes to speak against motion, should press request speak button now. I call Jofix Patrick to move motion number 12787. The next item of business is consideration of business motion 12784. In the name of Jofix Patrick, on behalf of the parliamentary bureau sitting at a stage two timetable for the mental health Scotland bill, any member wishes to speak against the motion, should press request speak button now. I call Jofix Patrick to move motion number 12784. No member has asked to speak against the motion, so I now put the question to the chamber. The question is that motion 12784, in the name of Jofix Patrick, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed to. The next item of business is consideration of business motion 12788. In the name of Jofix Patrick, on behalf of the parliamentary bureau, sitting at a stage one timetable for the carer Scotland bill, any member wishes to speak against the motion, should press request speak button now. I call Jofix Patrick to move motion number 12788. No member has asked to speak against the motion, so I now put the question to the chamber. The question is that motion 12788, in the name of Jofix Patrick, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed to. The next item of business is consideration of two parliamentary bureaus. I would ask Jofix Patrick to move motions number 12785 and 12786 on approval of SSIs. The questions on these motions will put decision time to which we now come. There are seven questions to be put as a result of today's business. The first question is that amendment number 12776.4, in the name of John Swinney, which seeks to amend motion number 12776, in the name of Jackie Baillie, on supporting Scotland's economy, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the voter amendment number 12776.4, in the name of John Swinney, is as follows. Yes, 62. No, 48. There were four abstentions. The amendment is therefore agreed to. Can I remind members that if the amendment in the name of Gavin Brown is agreed, the amendments in the name of Willie Rennie and Patrick Harvie fall. The next question, then, is amendment number 12776.3, in the name of Gavin Brown, which seeks to amend motion number 12776, in the name of Jackie Baillie, on supporting Scotland's economy, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the voter amendment number 12776.3, in the name of Gavin Brown, is as follows. Yes, 15. No, 99. There were no abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is amendment number 12776.1, in the name of Willie Rennie, which seeks to amend motion number 12776, in the name of Jackie Baillie, on supporting Scotland's economy, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 12776.1, in the name of Willie Rennie, is as follows. Yes, 4. No, 109. There were no abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is amendment number 12776.2, in the name of Patrick Harvie, which seeks to amend motion number 12776, in the name of Jackie Baillie, on supporting Scotland's economy, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 12776.2, in the name of Patrick Harvie, is as follows. Yes, 5. No, 109. There were no abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is at motion number 12776, in the name of Jackie Baillie, as amended. On supporting Scotland's economy, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result o