Cost of Living

Neale Hanvey Excerpts

Tuesday 16th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Neale Hanvey (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Alba)]

I congratulate the SNP on introducing this debate. It is an important issue, and I am inclined to support the motion, but it is far too polite and lacks real challenge and ambition. We want to begin to tackle the scourge of poverty and the Alba party’s plan would include an annual £500 payment to 500,000 low earning households in Scotland; increasing the Scottish child payment to £40 a week for 400,000 children in 250,000 households; extending free school meals to all primary and secondary pupils in Scotland; and, most importantly, writing off the almost £1.4 million of debt to local authorities from parents who cannot afford to pay. We would also double the education maintenance allowance from £30 to £60 a week for 16 to 19-year-olds in school or college, and introduce universal access to sports facilities for all children and young people under 18.

On a personal note, even all that is not quite enough, but it would be a start. The current crisis that we are experiencing is not an accident: it is the result of unfettered capitalism and an absence of social conscience in politics. Disaster capitalists have a playbook, and what has been happening in the UK over recent years follows it perfectly: create or harness a problem, privatise and profit, dismantle public services and hand over the resources of the people to the private corporations. Governments are responsible for that, and in Scotland we have rightly complained about that for many years with North sea oil and gas. The people have never benefited, although they got a few jobs out of it. Now, with the Energy Prices Bill, Scotland will get no supply chains or service jobs—nothing. The Scottish Government have replicated the mistakes of Westminster, selling off £350 billion licences for ScotWind for £700 million. Scotland will never benefit from that. The mistakes of Westminster should not be repeated by the Scottish Government.

We know all this is because of rapacious greed. People who accumulate money need to answer the question of how much is enough. As with all addictions, the need to feed the addiction is endless, and the impact on others is manifest. The UK Government put out the red carpet for the super-rich, the high earners, the non-doms, based on the fallacy that trickle-down will reach the poorest. Trickle-down is a neo-conservative lie: it does not happen. The rich accumulate and the poor suffer. As the indulged rich hoarded more through the pandemic, doctors, nurses, teachers, train drivers and many others were denied a liveable wage or a meaningful pay increase. That is made worse in Scotland because we have the political and economic dominion of a Parliament in which Scotland can never win a vote.

The robbery of our vast energy resources from fuel-poor Scots is an outrage. The Treasury gets £80 billion in tax profits from the current boom, and 124 billion kWh of energy will be supplied to England by 2030 for free. Scotland will never see anything in return from the UK Government. Just that energy alone has a value of £11 billion per annum, and Scotland gets nothing. The food banks in my constituency have gone from a monthly expenditure of £3,000 to more than £20,000, and they can hardly afford to keep going. The energy costs of the Fife Ice Arena in Kirkcaldy have gone from £3,000 a month to more than £35,000. I wrote to every energy giant in my constituency and all those who operate off the Clyde coast to ask for help: none of them offered a penny. They have eye-watering profits but would not offer a penny of help to the communities from which they profit.

UK Labour offers nothing better. It talks of pooling and sharing, but it is really taking and driving away. It wants to use Scotland’s vast energy wealth to cut the costs of English council tax. Scotland still gets nothing.

There is a real scandal brewing on energy. The costs being endured by people and businesses are front-loaded, with up to 70% commission going to the brokers who sign them up to suppliers. It is an absolute scandal, and none of it is declared to businesses and individuals when they sign up.

At the beginning of covid, the last Prime Minister but one promised there would be no profiteering, but the Government used the vehicle of VIP lanes to pass on billions to well-connected Tories. At the same time, the Government laid waste to the domestic diagnostic sector, doing dodgy deals through shell companies that suddenly appeared and then melted away just as quickly. Let us not pretend that we are all in this together. Stop the spin and tell the truth. Facilitating and celebrating greed is an affront to human decency.