EARTH CALLING MR ANDY KERR...

Mr Andy Kerr, who is apparently the Finance Spokesman for the Labour group in parliament has accused the SNP of implementing Tory cuts following the announcement that the salaries of public sector workers earning over £21,000 a year will be frozen for a year.

Now, I have no idea what the London government has done about public sector workers in England who earn more than £21,000, but surely Mr Andy Kerr realises that the grant that Scotland receives from London has been reduced by something in the region of £1.2 billion. (The Treasury says that it is only £900 million, but who would trust the Treasury?)

Surely Mr Kerr doesn’t believe that this reduction can simply be ignored. John Swinney has calculated that by adhering to a pay freeze for a year for those on over £21,000, £300 million, or around 10,000 jobs can be saved. Mr Kerr can’t be thinking that it would be better to lose the jobs so that the better off public servants can have a pay rise, can he?

Mr Kerr accepted that tough decisions had to be made and in particular (and this is the bit you have to love), there would have to be pay restraint in the public sector...... OK, Mr Andy Kerr, would you not say that accepting that better off public sector workers agreeing to forego a pay rise at the moment would be the restraint which you appear to call for?

Apparently not. Because he continued that it was not the Scottish Government’s job to implement Tory cuts for them. Actually, strictly speaking it probably is. They set the amount of money Scotland gets, and if it is less than before, the Scottish Government has to implement cuts. It’s a system set up by Mr Andy Kerr’s party when in government; he should be able to understand it, at least a little bit.

Mr Kerr said that a Labour Government (ah, they are calling it a government now) in Scotland would use this budget to provide low-paid workers with a living wage.

Wait a minute Mr Kerr. Is that not what John Swinney is proposing? He’s going to be allowing pay rises for the lower paid...at the expense of the better off.

Mr Kerr further added that the SNP needed to decide whose side they were on.

Oh they know which side they are on. They are on the side of Scotland, which is a lot more than “Scottish” Labour can ever say.

Mr Kerr ended his disjointed and somewhat lacklustre rant with: “John Swinney’s talk of a ‘social contract’ is nothing more than a smokescreen for cuts that will hit children and pensioners hardest.”

Erm what? Council tax will be frozen for another year. If Labour hadn’t stood in the way of local income tax, most pensioners wouldn’t be paying any local tax at all, making many of them around £1,000 a year better off! And yes, children, like everyone except the very rich, will suffer. Mr Kerr would do well to reflect that the catastrophic financial situation in which we now find ourselves was overseen by his dear friend Gordon Bloody Brown.

I’m afraid that Mr Andy Kerr appears to live in La La Land, where Labour are in power and money pours out of the permanently blue sky full of chirping birds, and life is like a great big box of chocolates.