Why SNP's fantasy economics won't help the poor

They are all welcome and the remittances back home will be appreciated, though no tax will be paid in the UK. It is not as if they are depriving local populations of employment, since skilled labour is being imported only because it is unavailable here.

Surely it is long past time to be asking why? Anyone who does not see a problem with the fact that, simultaneously, one in six young Scots is not in education, work or training, is avoiding a rather important question.

The energy context is particularly puzzling. We have been talking for years about “re-wiring Britain” with most activity to happen in Scotland. It has been known for a decade that offshore wind was blowing in. By 2029, the industry will require 40,000 workers.

So why is there not a well-trained young workforce ready, eager and waiting? Why has there been so little progress on linking people to skills and needs? Why is another opportunity receding before our eyes to deliver that “second industrial revolution” with lasting benefits?

Part of the answer lies in the Scottish Government’s sustained lack of respect for further education which has suffered dismal years of cuts, mergers and redundancies. With so many labour market demands to train and retrain for, the FE sector should have been at the centre of strategy rather than consistently treated as a poor relation.

But the benefits debate also impinges. Over 80 per cent of young people on benefits say they would prefer to work. The obligation of society is to help them meet that ambition. Is that not what the Scottish Government should have been enabling and incentivising for the past decade? FE and training are fully devolved.

Welfare reform is difficult for any government. I think Labour should have placed far more emphasis on the transition from benefits to work, as a positive. It appeared an afterthought even to point out that Office for Budget Responsibility projections about relative poverty (and that word ‘relative’ is itself important) did not take account of those who will be removed from any kind of poverty through employment.

If in a few years time, 250 more jobs at Rosyth are filled by people currently on benefit, that will be 250 Fife families living more prosperous, fulfilled lives. If even 10,000 young people on benefits have acquired career routes through skills for offshore wind, their life prospects will be transformed. Where is that vision?

There is plenty time to work through the evidence which will identify where real hardship and injustice will be created by the proposed reforms. One of the many problems inherent in any attempt at reform is separating what is necessary and reasonable from consequences which do not meet that test. The scalpel is now needed rather than the axe.

I saw Tory and Reform spokesmen being asked about Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement. The Tory said they would have doubled the scale of savings (which begged an obvious question). The guy from Reform said her proposals would “barely touch the walls”. The idea this is Labour’s problem alone is not consistent with facts – except in Scotland where the money pit is bottomless so long as it doesn’t have to be accounted for.

If the Scottish Government’s highest priority is to increase welfare spending then that is its entitlement. Maybe it could come out of the £5 billion of “back office savings” which the public finance minister, Ivan McKee, is looking for after years of vanity projects, waste and duplication, no matter how much money rolled in through the Barnett Formula. But the Scottish Government has no entitlement to be absolved from its own hard choices, as is its clear intention.

Meanwhile, the Finance Secretary, Shona Robison, told the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster that she wishes to replace the Barnett Formula with that hardy chestnut, ‘full fiscal autonomy’, which at the last count would cost Scotland £8 billion a year. This is the fantasy world they get away with – spend more on everything while, for constitutional objectives, scorn an arrangement which treats Scotland well.

But where does money from Barnett consequentials go? One simple reform in the interests of transparency would be a straightforward ledger. For example, we learned that of £100 million which reached the Scottish Government as a “consequential” for house cladding after the Grenfell Tower disaster, not a penny has been spent for that purpose. So where did it go? Welfare?

A little bit of history should also inform perceptions. In 2014, the SNP’s fantasy economics encountered the possibility they might collide with reality, if Scotland voted for independence. So John Swinney wrote a memo to colleagues warning that oil price volatility could put pensions and benefits at risk.

This was never meant for public consumption while the independence White Paper simply invented a fantasy “average” oil price to address the inconvenient memo. That price ($112) was never met on a single day.

The moral is that, when set against their constitutional objective, Mr Swinney and Co were more than willing to jeopardise the pensions and benefits of Scottish people, which is also what ‘full fiscal autonomy’ would deliver.

With the help of that leaked memo, the Scottish people saw through them in 2014. Eleven years on, the welfare bill has trebled – and, naturally, is higher in Scotland than anywhere else. A sensible debate about how to address that indisputable challenge would be welcome.

Maybe it could start with a shared assumption that getting young people into work would have been a lot better than abandoning them to life on benefits. So why have we failed so badly?