Coalition cracks widen as Forbes fears for NHS funds under ‘anti-growth’ Greens
THE ‘anti-growth’ Scottish Green party would underfund Scotland’s NHS if its economic plans were adopted by the Government, Kate Forbes last night suggested.
In a fresh swipe at the SNP/ Green coalition, the former leadership hopeful spelled out the importance of growing the economy so ministers can reinvest in the health service – a tactic that the Greens have previously condemned.
Pointing to recent research which suggested that the NHS in Scotland would need a 63 per cent spending boost in the next 50 years, Ms Forbes said: ‘If you believe in a health service free at the point of need, you have to have the revenue to reinvest.
‘Bear in mind that economic growth is literally an excluded element of the Bute House Agreement. So there’s clearly a difference of opinion on it.’
Her thinly-veiled admonishment of the Scottish Greens follows stinging remarks from former SNP Minister Fergus Ewing in yesterday’s Scottish Daily Mail in which he said the Greens were ‘extremists’ who should not be in government at Holyrood.
Co-leader Lorna Slater last year claimed economic growth was a bad thing that resulted in people buying ‘c**p you don’t need to impress people you don’t like’.
She said at the time: ‘The rich get richer and everyone else gets poor so loads of people aren’t benefiting from growth.
The word isn’t helpful – it neither means economic success, quality of life nor that people are necessarily wealthier.’
But yesterday Ms Forbes told the Holyrood Sources podcast: ‘I mean, you look at the latest Scottish Fiscal Commission report on financial sustainability and you’ll see quite vividly that the fact is that health is going to increase.
‘I think health accounts for about 63 per cent of spending growth over the period that they’re looking at.’
Yesterday, in an explosive attack on the Greens, Mr Ewing warned that the ‘fringe’ party wanted to dismantle Scotland’s economy and ‘put hundreds of thousands on the dole’.