SCOTTISH Secretary Ian Murray’s election claim that there would be no return to austerity under Labour has “been absolutely proved wrong,” the SNP charges.
Scottish Public Finance Minister Ivan McKee was responding to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s statement to Parliament on Monday.
Ms Reeves warned her October budget “will involve taking difficult decisions to meet our fiscal rules across spending, welfare and tax” as she announced the cancellation of infrastructure projects and the scrapping of the winter fuel payment to pensioners not in receipt of benefits in an effort to close a £22 billion budget shortfall she claimed to have been unaware of until taking office.
Her Tory predecessor Jeremy Hunt refuted claims overspends had been hidden, stating the overspend was rooted in Labour’s decision to accept pay review bodies’ recommendations for real-terms boosts in public sector pay.
As Ms Reeves and Mr Hunt traded blows the SNP returned to its general election campaign theme of citing an Institute for Fiscal Studies report pointing to a “conspiracy of silence” between the Labour and Tory parties on £18bn in budget shortfalls over the parliament.
Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland on Tuesday, Mr McKee said: “Labour should have known about this.
“They’ve either been incompetent in not checking the numbers, which were readily available during the election campaign, or they’ve been very misleading about the process that’s happened here.”
He said the Chancellor had “been very clear that there will be more cuts coming on top of what’s already happened with the winter fuel payments — so it’s absolutely austerity and there’s no doubt about that.”
Responding to Mr McKee, Mr Murray told listeners: “He is completely and utterly wrong.
“This is a £22bn in-year overspend by the previous government that they hid from the Office for Budget Responsibility.
“Ivan McKee has got this completely wrong. It has got nothing to do with the arguments we had during the election campaign.”
Pressed on promise of no austerity given by himself and Scottish leader Anas Sarwar, he said: “There’s no wholesale cuts here.”
