Pity Stewart Hosie, the SNP’s deputy leader. He appeared on the Daily Politics today to defend the party’s North Sea oil revenue projections and its record in government on health spending. He seemed rather unprepared. When questioned by Andrew Neil on the SNP’s comically inaccurate projections for oil revenue (it expected over £8 billion by now; only £500 million emerged), he was asked how on earth he would have filled that gap. Would he have cut spending by 14 per cent, raised taxes by 16 per cent — or a combination of the two? ‘We didn’t win the referendum, Andrew,’ he said — as if that were an answer. He then went on:
‘Every time I’m on this programme, you seem to want to fight last year’s referendum…The gap that requires to be filled at the moment is at a UK level because every penny of oil and gas revenue ever has gone and still goes to UK exchequer… I think more important that the hypothetical of what if we’d won is where are we now’.
But there is nothing hypothetical about the simple fact that the SNP based its prospectus for independence on oil price projections that were 16 times higher than the outcome. So did he campaign on a false prospectus? He then falsely claimed that the SNP’s forecasts were more modest that than of the UK government: the OBR was working on a £4 billion forecast, as opposed to the SNP’s £8 billion. As soon as Hosie started to wade into facts, he started to drown.
On health spending, Hosie was curiously unable to say by how much NHS spending had increased in Scotland since the SNP took power eight years ago. (“I don’t have that figure” he stuttered). When he was informed there had been a 8pc increase, ‘peanuts’ compared to the 12 per cent increase in England, Hosie bizarrely argued that Scotland’s lower increase was somehow a ‘remarkable achievement’ because of George Osborne’s ‘downward pressure on Scotland’s budget’.
In fact, public spending has been squeezed far less in Scotland than in England. And health spending, as a share of total spending, is falling in Scotland but rising in England. The interview was becoming painful to watch. When confronted with the disastrous waiting times at Glasgow’s brand new Queen Elizabeth University Hospital – meeting waiting times for only 77 per cent of patients against a target of 98 per cent – Hosie spluttered that its was an unfair question:
‘It’s completely wrong Andrew to choose a single hospital and pretend it’s instructive of the whole NHS across Scotland… I’m not sure why you’re doing this, Andrew.’
Even by Hosie’s standards, this was remarkable: he’s ‘not sure’ why he is being asked tough questions? He went on to claim that the SNP had set ‘tough targets’ in order to ‘drive up quality’. Hosie had no answer as to why the spending increase was so much lower than that of the supposedly parsimonious Tories in Westminster, and would not even acknowledge that the SNP has shrunk the health budget, as a proportion of total spending. He reverted to the old nationalist trick of attacking the interviewer:
‘I think when we take the budget, we increase it each year, we end up spending £12 billion for the first time on the NHS in Scotland when people are incredibly satisfied with the service they get. To have it talked down in such an abstract way is a bizarre approach to be taken.’
Questioning the SNP is bizarre? In Nicola Sturgeon’s Scotland whoever questions the SNP’s record is, of course, ‘talking down’ their motherland. Hosie’s interview is instructive in how the nationalists use rhetoric when they are unable to defend their record. They pulled off this trick in the referendum campaign, but as evidence of their failures mount it’s becoming ever-harder to run away from what is, as this week’s Spectator cover story shows, a pretty appalling record.
Comments