Last week, the Bank of England announced inflation is set to soar to more than 13 per cent and that we’ll enter a recession later this year.
On the day this was announced, both the Prime Minister and Chancellor were on holiday and nowhere to be seen. For millions of people struggling to make ends meet across the UK, including here in Scotland, things look bleak.
Make no mistake, this is a national emergency. Millions of people are already struggling and it’s going to get worse as summer turns to winter.
By the end of the year the price of your energy bill could have gone up by almost 200 per cent.
We need a response that matches the scale of this crisis. Both our governments – at Holyrood and at Westminster – have a moral duty to rise to that challenge.
But while millions of Scots are bracing for a recession and the economic havoc it could create, both our governments are instead playing the same game and obsessing over their own priorities – not those of the people.
This is the greatest decline in living standards since the war – but we are being failed by the Tories and the SNP.
They are more interested in throwing red meat to their supporters online – the usual trivialisation of our politics, the usual abuse and the usual faux outage.
All while millions of people across the country are being forced to skip meals to feed their children. Neither Liz Truss nor Rishi Sunak is making a serious attempt to confront this crisis of their own making.
Instead they are indulging in fantasy economics in order to appeal to the Tory Party membership – promising tax cuts for the wealthy and pay cuts for the rest.
It has been simply shocking to hear Truss use the economic crisis to attack public sector pay – and Sunak’s boasting about moving funds from poorer inner-city areas to affluent towns is sickening.
What the Margaret Thatcher tribute act that is this Tory leadership election shows is just how out of touch with reality this Tory party is.
Truss and Sunak don’t represent change. It’s just Boris Johnson with a neater hair style. The same failed ideology of Johnson’s Tories, but without the jokes.
What we need is for our governments to get their heads out of the sand and take urgent action to stop people starving. And like the Tories, the SNP has shown itself unable to meet the economic challenge before us.
Rather than act to put money in people’s pockets, it has returned to the politics of grievance and division.
At a time when we face economic turmoil, it’s time for Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP to keep their promise to focus on a recovery for Scotland and confronting the cost-of-living crisis.
Both our failing governments must stop focusing on their own obsession and instead do everything it takes to make sure that no one is going hungry or cold this winter.
The reality they want to avoid is that whether you voted Yes or No, or whether you voted Leave or Remain, your bills are going up.
I know whose side I am on – yours. Energy bills, food prices and petrol costs continue to rise. That will mean rising poverty, unemployment and lost lives. This is a national emergency, we need urgent action now.
Our plan to clean up Holyrood
This week, Scottish Labour published the second in a series of papers demonstrating how we will strengthen Scotland within a changing and modernising UK.
It focused on how we clean up Holyrood and make sure that we have a Scottish Government that works for the people of our country.
We must challenge the Scottish exceptionalism that suggests that we only need change at Westminster. Every layer of our democracy needs reform, that includes Holyrood and our local councils.
We must end the culture of sleaze, secrecy and cover-up that has become the norm under this SNP Government. We must also get better value for money.
Since the SNP has come to power the number of Cabinet Secretaries has doubled. The cost of running ministerial offices has doubled.
The number of ministers has increased from 10 to 17. And this week we’ve learned the number of taxpayer funded spin doctors has gone up again. It would be one thing if our economy was thriving and waiting lists were coming down.
But with 1 in 8 Scots waiting for treatment it’s a cruel joke.
The day-to-day role of Holyrood should be focused on improving the lives of the people of Scotland – not political game playing. Our plans will end the gravy train for those at the top, increase transparency and confront SNP sleaze.
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