A Place to Stand

Dear Mr Swinney,
                              I note you described your budget yesterday as a "relentless pursuit of economic growth". In the same way First Minister Salmond previously said that the Scottish cabinet are spending every hour trying to grow the economy. If true this would inded be admirable. If half true - half admirable. And so on.

    However, looking at what you have brought forth I can find no trace of truth in it whatsoever. Perhaps you could help firstly by saying what  it actually does to promote growth - the nearest I can see is some increased housing subsidy which may, very slightly, offset the fact that 75% of housebuilding costs are government regulations. It should be obvious that if you actually wished housebuilding could be massively stimulated and truly affordable housing created simply by getting government out of the way, without the expense and waste your action involves.

   The world economy, outside the EU, is growing at 6% annually. You know perfectly well that we could achieve at least the average any time your party wished it simply by not getting in the way and letting the market work. So your remarks about "relentless pursuit of growth", which, together with Mr Salmond's, we must accept as representing the level of honesty to which the SNP aspire, are not only, provably, wholly untrue but the complete and absolute opposite of the truth.

    We both know, and John Mason MSP has recently publicly admitted that the SNP are relentlessly idealogically committed to opposing any policy that would tend to make Scotland less like North Korea than South Korea. You are also intelligent enough to know that this is incompatible with any slightest attempt to end the recession.

    You also know that "In modern times the main driver of economic growth has been, and continues to be, energy" because neither you nor anybody else disputed it when Jim Mather, who for some unknown reason was in your totalitarian party, showed it. You thus know, with absolute certainty, that your policy of making electricity from the most expensive, unreliable and restricted source is a driver for recession.
   Indeed the only policy slightly towards growth that the SNP support is unrestricted immigration and resettlement of the Highlands with 3rd world immigrants. A limited amount of immigration by the technically qualified or wealthy certainly assists growth. However evidence that unlimited immigration, which obviously self selects the unqualified, provides growth is lacking and it clearly cannot provide per capita growth. Thus the sole policy of yours conceivably aimed at growth would deliberately reduce Scots average living standards.

   We both know perfectly well that we could be out of recession within weeks if you followed the economic policies of UKIP. Indeed even faster if you followed the economic programme I previously sent you and with which you found not one single thing you could dispute.

    You are perfectly entitled to your "socialist" idealogical hatred of the various ways out of recession. You are entitled, like the Greens, to be opposed to growth, but they, at least sometimes, honestly admit it.

      You are not entitled to lie, continuously and deliberately to the Scottish people. I must ask you either to point out where I have been factually inaccurate in this assessment or to confirm that no SNP representative will ever, in any circumstances, make the claim to be, "relentlessly" or even on balance, committed to growth. And to confirm which other statements by the SNP, if any, can ever be treated as in any way truthful.

   I await your early reply.

Neil Craig
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    In researching this I found the Holyrood record to recently have been redesigned to hide what our masters have been saying in Parliament rather than making it visible.

   Salmond's remark about the cabinet spending every hour seeking growth was in last week's broadcast First Minister's questions but is not, at least not easily, available to the public. To rest whether this is deliberate I put Jim Mather's remark quoted into the Parliament's search system which assured me no such remark had been made. As I linked that remark from They Work For You that is clearly a lie.

    You will see that the TWFY site explains

"Due to changes made to the official Scottish Parliament website at the start of 2011, our parser that used to fetch their web pages and convert them into more structured information has stopped working. We’re afraid we cannot give a timescale as to when we will be able to cover the Scottish Parliament again. Sorry for any inconvenience caused."

   I have to assume this is entirely deliberate and a sign that our "totalitarian" SNP rulers are making sure that they do not work for us at all.