SNP obsesses over border when it should be saving lives and jobs – Ian Murray MP

As lockdown measures are eased, many Scots are enjoying their returning freedoms and our economy is slowly starting to restart.

But some sectors of the Scottish economy will take much longer than others to return to some sort of normality – particularly tourism, hospitality and the creative industries.

And few places need those sectors to thrive more than here in Edinburgh – the beating heart of Scotland’s economy.

There have been countless dire warnings about the devastating scale of the recession we are facing. And it will almost certainly be worse in Scotland than the rest of the UK. This week it emerged that confidence in business in Scotland is the lowest of all the UK nations.

In the short term, it is vital that the UK Government changes direction and continues to protect jobs and supports businesses by extending the current furlough scheme to those hard-hit sectors that can’t get back to “normal” quickly.

Even now there are too many who are falling through the cracks of government schemes. As an example, many freelancers work through PAYE contracts so are not eligible for any support, with many going from full income to no income despite paying full tax. Yesterday I challenged the Scottish Secretary to address the need for government support to those taxpayers who have received nothing and for an extended sectorial furlough scheme.

But what of our other government in Holyrood? What is the SNP government doing for the hundreds of thousands of Scots whose jobs are at risk?

Typically, the Nationalists are playing reckless constitutional games.

We’ve seen the SNP Finance Secretary, Kate Forbes, reignite the demand for ‘full fiscal autonomy’, which would create a multi-billion-pound black hole in Scotland’s public finances. It was a policy dropped by the SNP after the 2015 general election when they realised how devastating it would be for Scotland.

It would be devastating for our economy at any time, but the impact amid the looming Covid recession doesn’t bear thinking about.

And then there’s the obsession with the border between England and Scotland. Nationalists have decided the response to a public health crisis may be to pull up the drawbridge.

This would devastate our tourism industry just as it hopes to start the slow path to recovery. And it’s taking a mallet to crack a nut, based on a localised outbreak in Leicester.

The SNP’s “close the border” idea ignores the fact that many regions of England have far lower cases of coronavirus than Scotland, which is perhaps unsurprising given the catastrophic handling of this crisis by the SNP government – the PPE shortages; the testing failures; the cover-ups and the care homes debacle.

But I don’t hear the people of Yorkshire or Devon demanding that Scots be banned from travelling there.

It also wrongly suggests there is a uniform pattern across Scotland, when we know that’s not the case. There is a clear possibility of hotspots emerging here, just as has happened in Leicester.

The First Minister is also guilty of an astonishing irony bypass. Yesterday on Twitter she attacked her opponents for what she described as turning this crisis into a “political/constitutional argument”. Yet that is precisely what she and her followers have been doing.

The SNP is picking fights about borders when the only fight that matters is beating the virus and saving people’s jobs.

Unemployment has climbed to its highest level in a generation, and our country is suffering the worst economic hit of all industrialised nations.

The priority for both governments must be economic recovery. They must stop the paralysing bickering over borders and the constitution and come up with a flexible plan, developed in a spirit of co-operation and mutual respect. That is what they are paid for. For the sake of everyone in this city and across the entire UK, let’s focus on what really matters: jobs, jobs, jobs.

Ian Murray is the Labour MP for Edinburgh South

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