Chamber and committees

I am sorry, but I have only one minute left.

The egregious law breaking of Boris Johnson really matters, because it not only displays a disregard for our society but almost permeates into the economy. As long as Boris Johnson and, indeed, most of the Tories care not about money laundering and other forms of financial crime—the cost of which is counted in the hundreds of billions of pounds annually, according to the UK’s National Crime Agency—and as long as they care not about the distortions created in markets and the wider economy or about the people they are supposed to serve, the state capture that has taken place in the UK will continue in both our society and our economic system.

However, the most objectionable aspect of the Tory motion is the undercurrent of trying to force a feeling of helplessness and dependency in Scotland. The Tories seek to damage the Scottish people’s belief in themselves and to feed the myth that it is better to allow people such as Boris Johnson to be in charge than for us to be accountable for creating our own future. Of course, that explains the Tories’ fear of allowing the Scottish people to decide their future, but they will fail to prevent us from doing that. Scotland will be the wealthiest country ever to achieve political independence, and that will put the people of Scotland in charge of our future.

I will take one if the member is going to directly counter my figures and give figures that show that I am wrong.

Let us take the previous 20 years and run an international comparison of GDP growth rates.

Sorry, but I missed the member. I will come back to him.

From that comparison, we find that the UK’s growth was 68 per cent in nominal terms, while the average large advanced economy grew by 93 per cent and the average small advanced economy grew by 138 per cent, which is double the cumulative growth of the UK economy. Scotland is having to pay a heavy price for that UK failure and for being tied to the UK’s economic mismanagement, particularly in comparison with other medium-sized advanced economies, many of which have a weaker asset base than Scotland has.

I can absolutely explain it. I can refer directly back to the cabinet secretary’s comment that members on the Tory benches seem incapable of understanding the difference between micro and macro economics. I encourage them to look at exactly which powers reside in Westminster, as that is absolutely the crux of the debate.

If the Tories had a genuine concern about growth or any understanding of economics, the motion would be shouting from the rooftops for Scotland to have full economic powers. I notice, too, that the motion says nothing about the straitjacket that is imposed on Scotland by our lack of borrowing powers, which the cabinet secretary referenced. The Tories complain about highly uncertain forecasts, but they have not mentioned that UK public sector net borrowing was £151.8 billion in the financial year ending March 2022. If it is good that the Government of Boris Johnson can borrow so freely, why is the Scottish Government denied those powers?

The pseudo economics of the Tories also turns a blind eye to corruption and large-scale financial crime, which distorts markets and punishes consumers and businesses that play by the rules.

Craig Hoy rose—

I continue to wonder. When I was growing up, Scottish Conservatives would often talk about accountability and taking responsibility for creating our own future. Why is it uniquely now that the best that Scotland can hope for is to go cap in hand to Boris Johnson and ask for more money, rather than to create a better future? What on earth has happened to the Tories?

It is there. Okay.

Okay. I will collect £500 from all four of you at the end of the session.

I am not clear about how and where you baked the impact of Brexit into all your forecasts. I assume that you have reflected all the way through your forecasts the hangover from the pandemic and the supply issues that we have talked about, which have reverberated around the world, but I was slightly surprised that there was no mention of Brexit in your report, given that we now know that the impacts are only starting to be felt. I appreciate that it is complex to pin Brexit on one thing, because it is a very fragmented picture, but I was surprised that there was no mention of it. How and where have you baked it into all the numbers?

Is that similar to what you have done with the pandemic? Have you taken the same approach?

Good morning. I am sure that, for people who are watching the committee—I always say that, and everyone laughs and says, “No one ever watches this committee”—the discussion about whether or not there is a black hole is an important, pivotal point, because it is actually predicated on debt. You make the important point that whether or not there is a black hole comes down to actuals, not forecasts. Perhaps the media have tended to use that in a very florid way.

Dr Verne Atrill discovered that

“there is a precise point, a mathematical singularity, which we can measure as the Ratio of GDP/Total Debt, at which an economy stops expanding and begins to contract instead.”

On that point, I simply note that the UK Government is hugely in debt.

That leads me to the fiscal framework, and I want to get some reflections from you. We know that any Government, including the UK Government, will have frequent errors across a wide range of forecasts. The UK Government—unlike the Scottish Government—does not suffer any penalty as such for the forecast that, for example, it will have to repay £817 million in 2024-25. Of course, the UK Government does not then have to repay that in a single year’s cycle; it can repay it over several years and—to go back to my earlier point—it can borrow.

I, too, applaud the fact that the resource spending review has been done; it is a worthwhile exercise. However, it really brings into sharp focus the issues with the fiscal framework, utterly and fundamentally, with regard to what you are being expected to do within limitations that other normal Governments would not have. Therefore, perhaps the discussion is really about that. I would like some further reflections from you on that issue before I move on.

I was going to raise similar questions and ask how confident you are—accepting what Professor Breedon said about everyone else making the same prediction—that inflation will peak at 8.7 per cent in the last quarter of this year. When you read more detail about some of the uncertainties that you point out on the supply side—which we have much less understanding about—realistically, how confident are you? We know that the prediction will probably be wrong, which I fully accept because all these things can be wrong, and Andrew Bailey recently conceded that the fiscal levers that he has to exert control over CPI inflation are fairly limited. It is always uncertain, but how uncertain is it? If I asked you to place a wager of, say, £500 of your own money, how much of that money would you risk? Perhaps that is a better way of putting it.