THERESA May and SNP leader Ian Blackford clashed over the state of Scotland’s economy yesterday, with the Prime Minister floundering when asked about wage growth.
The Tory leader laughed off the charge from the Skye MP, accusing the SNP of “failing the people of Scotland”.
Blackford told the Prime Minister that real wages in Britain have fallen by 2.6 per cent since 2007, and said the Government could find the money for quantitative easing but not for fiscal measures to grow the economy.
May said: “He should look at what is happening to the economy in Scotland under an SNP government, because it is an SNP government that is failing the people of Scotland.
“And the only thing I will say to him is that the people of Scotland now have a strong voice in this House through our 13 Conservative Members of Parliament.”
Blackford went on to ask: “The UK’s record on earnings has been significantly worse than almost every other developed country. In fact, real wages in the UK have fallen by 2.6 per cent since 2007.
“Wages aren’t growing, the cost of living is rising, household budgets are stretched.
“The Government can find the money for quantitative easing — £435 billion since 2009 — but can’t find the money for fiscal measures to grow the economy.”
As he urged May to take “responsibility for the Government’s gross mismanagement of the UK economy”, he said: “This is a Government that does not understand how to use economic levers and it’s our people that are paying the price.”
Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, the latest comparable figures for Q1 GDP growth had Scotland 0.6 per cent and the UK on 0.2 per cent.
Speaking afterwards, Blackford said that under the SNP Scottish Government, Scotland has “higher growth than the UK, higher employment, faster productivity growth, has more people on a real Living Wage, and less people on zero hour contracts.”
“Theresa May’s inability to answer a basic question on the decline on wages is bad enough, but her blunder over the Scottish Government’s economic performance was diabolical,” he added.
Jeremy Corbyn used his time at Prime Minister’s Question to accuse the Prime Minister of pretending to hike police pay when in fact she was cutting it.
Earlier this week Downing Street said the seven-year public sector pay cap is to be scrapped, unveiling a 1.7 per cent hike for prison officers and improvements totalling two per cent in police pay for 2017/18.
But Corbyn said that with inflation running at 2.9 per cent, even these pay rises amounted to a pay cut in real terms.
He added: “Anything less means that dedicated public servants are worse off again and they’ve been made worse off every year for the past seven years.”
May said public sector review bodies were independent, and that Mr Corbyn had failed to take account of automatic pay increases for many in the public sector.
She added that public sector pay had to be fair for taxpayers as well as the workers.
Meanwhile, Aberdeen North MP Kirsty Blackman, pressed May on the “threats to the Igbo people in northern Nigeria” asking her what the “Government are doing to encourage the communities there to live in peace?”
Some 3000 Nigerians live and work in Aberdeen.
The Prime Minister said the government was making “efforts across a number of fronts and we are providing support to Nigeria in a variety of ways.”
Tory Ross Thomson, the MP for Aberdeen South, asked and received assurance “that support for the oil and gas industry will be at the heart of the industrial strategy”.
He also asked if May agreed that the “biggest threat to the industry would be the instability of a second, divisive independence referendum”.
May, unsurprisingly, agreed.
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