The Scottish Labour leader, Jim Murphy, has accused Nicola Sturgeon of making up the SNP’s economic policy as she goes along, as the third of Scotland’s political leaders’ debates in a week descended into shambles.
During a chaotic discussion on the BBC’s Sunday Politics Scotland programme, Murphy and the Scottish Conservative party leader, Ruth Davidson, at times shouted over Sturgeon while the Liberal Democrats’ Willie Rennie struggled to get a hearing.
As the host Gordon Brewer battled to control the increasingly fractured discussion, Murphy accused Sturgeon of being unable to provide the figures to back up her party’s flagship policy of full fiscal autonomy – allowing Scotland complete control of its own taxation and spending - which the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said on Friday would have devastating consequences for Scotland.
Sturgeon, the SNP leader and Scotland’s first minister, argued that Murphy was failing to answer her own question about the degree of cuts a Labour administration would impose on the country.
She confirmed at the last leaders’ debate, broadcast from Aberdeen on Thursday, that SNP MPs would vote for full fiscal autonomy in the next Westminster parliament should they be given the opportunity. On Sunday she described Labour attacks on the proposal as amounting to a “re-run of the ‘project fear’ campaign that dominated the referendum”.
She said that figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies projecting a £7.6bn shortfall in Scotland’s economy under full fiscal autonomy were irrelevant to the argument because it was a “snapshot one-year figure” and the proposal was highly unlikely to be accepted, not least by the Labour party, for several years.
“I don’t accept the point that a deficit means that you can’t be in control of your own economy,” she said.
On Friday, the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, said that a funding gap of that size – 12% of total government spending in Scotland – would mean “full fiscal austerity”, requiring spending cuts far more severe than those planned by the Tories, or hefty tax rises.
Murphy accused Sturgeon of “making it up as she goes along”, repeatedly demanding that she explain the “magic policy that you have that the rest of the world doesn’t” to grow Scotland’s economy by double the rest of the developed world - the amount that Labour projects would be required to make up the shortfall.
Murphy went on to accuse Sturgeon of siding with the Tories, referring to Boris Johnson’s desire to get rid of the Barnett formula, the system by which public expenditure is allocated to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Murphy said Scotland could be “caught in a pincer movement between the leader of the SNP and new leader of the Tory party”.
Challenged by Brewer to provide figures setting out her party’s alternative to the IFS projections that she dismisses, Sturgeon said that the SNP’s forthcoming manifesto would contain such information.
She once again refused to rule out including another referendum on independence in her party’s 2016 Holyrood manifesto, repeating her contention that “something significant would have to change” before that happened.
Writing in the Sunday Herald, Sturgeon defended the policy of full fiscal autonomy as a “grown-up, responsible” arrangement, adding that her opponents had chosen the “wrong battleground”.
“People across Scotland know and understand that this is not a rerun of the referendum campaign. So they don’t want to hear the phantoms of 2014’s scaremongering. They do want to hear about an alternative approach to the economy and a better, different vision to the
