Nicola Sturgeon has insisted the SNP’s election manifesto is designed to “unite Scotland” as the country looks to recover from coronavirus. The SNP leader insisted the manifesto, put forward in the run-up to the Scottish Parliament election on May 6, is the “most bold and ambitious” the SNP has produced. But she snapped at STV News political editor Colin Mackay when he questioned if the party could do without “extra funding”.
She said: “Devolved tax revenues are estimated to grow by about 20 percent.”
Mr Mackay interjected: “You could do without the extra funding.”
Ms Sturgeon continued: “Let me finish.”
“The overall budget is estimated to grow by only 14 percent and the reason for that is the Barnett formula part of our funding is growing more slowly.
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“That’s what is holding budget growth back.
“To nail this point, the money we get through the Barnett formula is not money that is given to Scotland, it comes either from the taxes we pay in Scotland and send to the Treasury in London only to get back or it is Scotland’s share of the massive borrowing that the UK Government is undertaking to help us through the Covid pandemic.”
Ms Sturgeon unveiled her party’s “transformational” manifesto but said she could go further if Scotland was independent last week.
But critics have repeatedly warned against holding another vote on independence while Scotland is still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, for fear of distracting the Government and the public from the task at hand.
Ms Sturgeon also said there would be no basis for rejecting another referendum on the part of the UK Government if a “simple majority” of independence-supporting MSPs are elected next month.
“After this election, if there is a simple, democratic majority in the Scottish Parliament for an independence referendum, there will be no democratic, electoral or moral justification whatsoever for Boris Johnson or anyone else to block the right of people in Scotland to decide their own future,” she said.
Scottish Conservative Holyrood leader Ruth Davidson hit out at the “giveaways that the SNP have been springing out of hats” during the election campaign.
She told Radio Forth: “People aren’t daft, they wonder ‘you’ve been in government for 14 years, why are you telling us now you’ve not given enough to the NHS’.
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“How cynical is this to wheel it out three weeks before an election, but not to have done the hard yards when you have been in government for 14 years.”
Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie said: “We are still waiting on the SNP delivering promises they made in 2007. They have a one-track mind for independence that prevents them getting anything else done.”
He said that on issues such as “class sizes, council tax, superfast broadband, delayed discharge” it had been “promise after promise broken” by the SNP, adding: “It will be even worse if the SNP get a majority.”
Meanwhile, Ms Sturgeon said she did not accept an SNP government would increase spending by less in an independent Scotland than has been delivered under Conservative UK governments.
