Scotland’s budget slanging match
20 September, 2009
I’ve been pondering the political slanging match that erupted on Thursday with a certain level of bewilderment and disappointment. That the SNP’s most important budget announcements has been reduced to a …
SNP is anti-glasgow
and
Glasgow gets crumbs from the table
… type row based on the cancelling of the Glasgow Airport Rail Link by no less than a councillor, and let’s face it even being lead councillor of Glasgow City Council, Scotland’s largest city, doesn’t make you anything more than a councillor at the end of the day.
Stephen Purcell though may have intended to drive a wedge between Glasgow and he SNP, yet it is arguably this sort of negative campaigning that saw Labour lose the 2007 election. It may even be worth pointing out that Purcell has been touted as a future Scottish Labour leader in the past and if this is part of his training then it certainly seems he is to be made in the mold of his recent predecessors.
Iain Gray though must be furious that his own pathetic attacks on Swinney, comparing him to Sweeney Todd, have been so readily ignored by the media in favour of Purcell’s nonsense anti-glasgow slurs. Let’s not forget that Glasgow gets more per head than virtually any other council area in Scotland, or that Glasgow already has a major infrastructure project underway in the form of the M74 extension, something that Labour managed to put off doing for, well it must be about 40 years.
Purcell has called Swinney’s honesty into question over the figures used to make the decision to scrap the GARL project, yet his own party continues to writhe around at the lowest level in their approach to politics. Politics to Labour is about winning at any cost, and clearly not about serving the people.
Meanwhile the Conservatives continue to portray themselves in a good light, even if you disagree with their politics you can’t help agree with their co-operative and mature approach to politics and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them secure more of their own interests from this budget as they did in the previous one. On the other hand the highly combative approach to politics as espoused by Labour would seem unlikely to secure much more than ridicule, indeed it’d be well deserved.
Of course the budget isn’t really about slanging and arguing, it’s about figures and the spending that these imply, so courtesy of the Herald here are some of those figures:
OVERALL NUMBERS
John Swinney has £29.712bn to spend next year. Adjusted for inflation, at this year’s prices, that is £29.535bn – down 268.3m and the first real terms fall in government income of the devolution era. It is actually some £500m less than initially projected (down 2.3%) and also suffers through having to pay back capital expenditure previously brought forward as a measure to combat the recession.
ECONOMY & TRANSPORT
The finance and sustainable growth budget is reduced by £43.5m. The most controversial aspect of the budget is the plan to scrap the Glasgow Airport Rail Link (GARL). Work improving the Glasgow-Paisley line will go ahead, but scrapping GARL will save £170m, more than £6m of that in the coming year. There will still be spending of more than £1bn in road and rail improvements, and an extension of free bus travel.
HEALTH & WELLBEING
The overall departmental budget rises by 2.4% to £11.35bn, with each health board receiving 2.7% more. But within this the housing and regeneration budget falls from £701m this year to £441m next year as a direct result of having to pay back previously accelerated spending. If the [Westminster] treasurey allowed fresh acceleration of future spending this would change, but this is unlikely.
EDUCATION
The education budget rises by £53m, a real terms increase of 0.7%. Universities get 2.1% more in real terms, and colleges 5.3% more. But the big controversy here is the decision to cut spending on teacher training – not as a saving but as a mechanism to ensure that newly qualified teachers get jobs [or perhaps to simply reduce the glut of teachers we already have]. This is described as a “temporary slowdown”. There is also a £10m increase in the sum available for school building.
JUSTICE
Within this standstill budget of £1.215bn, administrative savings of 1.5% will free up resources so that a further 1000 police officers will be in post by 2011 in addition to the 1000 already recruited. They will also secure police and fire pensions and continue with prison and court building programme, as well as measures to reduce reoffending.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT
Total support for authorities will approach £12bn and includes funding to freeze council tax for another year and continue implementing the Small Business Bonus Scheme. The concordat between central and local government will look to deliver individual outcome agreements with each authority, but thus will come under even more strain as councils are asked to match the 3% administrative savings demanded of civil servants.
CARBON BUDGET
Scotland’s first national Carbon Budget was given a mixed reception by environment groups. The analysis of emissions from publicly-funded projects is believed to be the first of its kind, but lobbyists said it risked being merely “an interesting analytical tool” if it is not allowed to impact on public spending. The new study, released alongside the budget outlines the environmental impact of government spending in the year ahead.
