11:30 Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)

The hon. Lady has painted me as a schoolmarm this week, so I shall role play and give an arithmetic lesson. The Scottish Government have complained this week that they are having to make £1 billion of cuts, despite the fact that they have 26% more funding per head than England, and I just have some suggestions about how she might find that. She might cancel the £20 million on a referendum that is not happening, or the £9 million on the eight embassies they run. She could look at the £300 million they have spent so far on two ferries, which are five years late and £150 million over budget, or at the £52.4 million on the collapsed BiFab company or the £5 million on climate change reparations. She could look at the nearly £600 million they spent to bail out Sanjeev Gupta’s smelting business, or the half a million pounds wasted on a publicly owned energy company that never happened. That adds up to over £1 billion, but instead the Scottish National party is going to have to cut frontline services and capital projects to balance the Government’s books. As the Auditor General has pointed out this week, he has lifted the veil on the scale of the SNP’s financial incompetence. I think the people of Scotland deserve better than that, and that is why I will be putting this clip out later.

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