For 16 years, Scotland’s economy has been held back by the SNP.
The nationalists have limited growth by introducing higher taxes and forcing more harmful regulations onto businesses.
Humza Yousaf’s party exacerbated those issues by letting the Greens, who openly admit they don’t even believe in economic growth, into government.
Now, Patrick Harvie has a seat at the Cabinet table while businesses are shut out of decision-making.
The result is the most anti-business Scottish Government administration since devolution. Every action it takes, every regulation it brings in, every statement that Humza Yousaf utters seems to cause our economy more problems.
Scotland cannot afford to go on like this, hampered by Humza Yousaf and the economic extremists in the Green Party.
That’s why I’m delighted to be part of the Scottish Conservative finance group, the strongest economic team in the Scottish Parliament, as we work with our party leader Douglas Ross to bring forward exciting new economic proposals.
No other party can match the experience that my colleagues Liz Smith and Murdo Fraser have in standing up for the business community and representing their interests.
Neither can representatives from the SNP or Labour rival the real-world experience that I have from decades of running businesses and leading senior economic teams within local government. My other colleague in the economy team, Brian Whittle, has also spent many years growing businesses.
All that experience of working in business and with the business community has gone into our new policy paper, announced on Tuesday during an address in Edinburgh by Douglas Ross.
The Scottish Conservatives new paper, Grasping the Thistle, is a blueprint for increasing economic growth.
Our plans would better fund public services, make household bills lower, and create well-paid jobs for the next generation across our whole country.
It is a vitally important paper because, as Douglas Ross said in his keynote speech on Monday, “economic growth should be put front and centre of our national political agenda.”
The SNP and Greens don’t think it is important - but economic growth is what allows us to keep increasing budgets for our schools and hospitals. It is only by building a bigger economy that we can build better public services.
It is not a choice between pursuing economic growth or improving public services, as some short-sighted socialists would have you believe. Instead, the two must go together. You need the greater economy to fund improvements to essential services.
Understanding of the relationship between economic growth and government budgets has been lost at Holyrood in recent years. It deteriorated under Nicola Sturgeon, who always kept business at the back of the queue, and it has evaporated entirely since the Greens got their feet under the Cabinet table. Humza Yousaf has followed the same path of overlooking and even ignoring the concerns of the business community.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Our policy paper sets out dozens of concrete ideas to reset the Scottish Government’s relationship with business and grow our economy.
One of our first actions would be to increase cooperation between the UK and Scottish governments with a Joint Economic Board. Too often, the SNP work against, rather than with, our UK partners.
We would also radically redraw the Scottish Government’s own economic organisations, by cutting down the vast number of economic agencies that the SNP have created. This would create clearer lines of accountability while reducing the vast waste of taxpayers’ money that has spiralled out of control under the SNP.
To improve the government’s relationship with the business community, we would introduce a new ‘regulation handbrake’ to provide stability in times of uncertainty.
But we would go even further to give businesses as much support as possible. We would immediately launch a national workforce plan to align skills programmes with the needs of employers.
We would look even further into the future with the creation and expansion of regional innovation clusters, so that we can help businesses in every single part of Scotland to thrive.
Those are the key elements of our positive plans to rejuvenate Scotland’s economy.
Every one of our proposals can be enacted now, without delay.
So, Humza Yousaf can no longer sit on a £60 billion budget and blame Westminster for everything.
He needs to stop with the excuses and start taking Scotland’s economy forward.
The SNP must listen to the Scottish Conservatives and adopt our common-sense proposals.
They have the backing of the business community. Now they need the support of the Scottish Government.
