Ian Murray: Tough choices ahead – people deserve honesty

First Minister John Swinney and Chancellor Rachel Reeves during a visit to Glasgow yesterday. Picture: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire

Within days of the General Election the Chancellor Rachel Reeves ordered an audit of public spending. What she found was a £22 billion in year black hole.

The Tories had spent all the reserves for the financial year by July. As a former small business owner in Edinburgh the idea of spending your reserves three times over in the first three months of the financial year is utterly astonishing to me.

This is the worst economic inheritance of any incoming government since the Second World War and it will require tough decisions.

After the chaos of the Liz Truss budget which saw people’s mortgages in Edinburgh soar, the Tories made a series of unfunded commitments they had no intention of keeping.

It’s a huge risk to our economy and to taxpayers. This is your money, the Tories were gambling with it and then hid it. It’s disrespectful and dangerous – and they did it deliberately.

During the election, Labour’s first pledge was to deliver economic stability after 14 years of chaos. This was the first step because, without it, we can’t deliver any of the change our country so badly needs. We need to fix the foundations to deliver a better country.

Meanwhile the SNP government has announced emergency spending controls. The difference between the two governments is that while the £22 billion black hole in the UK finances is a new government cleaning up the mess made by the Tories, the challenges in Scotland are of the SNP’s making.

Expert groups have warned for years that a failure to properly financially plan in the Scottish budget would lead to problems down the road.

In 2023 Audit Scotland said “The Scottish Government’s projections suggest that it cannot afford to pay for public services in their current form” meanwhile this week the Scottish Fiscal Commission said that much of the pressures in the Scottish budget is based on the Scottish Government’s own spending decisions.

Whether people in Edinburgh or across Scotland are getting value for money out of that spending is another question. We know that public spending in Scotland is £2,417 per head higher than the rest of the UK, but despite that the attainment gap between the richest and poorest pupils is the widest on record and 864,366 Scots are stuck on an NHS waiting list – also a record high.

None of this is the fault of doctors or teachers, but patients and pupils are being let down by record failures in public services.

While the Prime Minister and Chancellor are being honest about the tough decisions we face as a country, the SNP government has kicked multiple tough decisions into the long grass and now these problems are coming home to bite.

People in Edinburgh and across Scotland deserve better than that, and that starts with governments being honest about the scale of the challenges they face.

A government acting in the interests of working people is honest about the challenges we face and the choices they are making, not making promises they can’t keep. That’s treating the public and their money with respect and that’s how we’ll fix the foundations of our economy for the long term.

Ian Murray, MP for Edinburgh South, Secretary of State for Scotland​