HearFromYourMP

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My Week

Posted by Sammy Wilson, MP for East Antrim, at 11:46, Tue 8 March 2011:

Debates in the N.I. Assembly can often be quite pedestrian, predictable and even boring. This is partly to do with the fact that many of them are time limited and each speaker might have only five minutes to say his or her bit. As a result they will not let people interrupt them, question what they have said or get them to explain their point. This can result in debates becoming more like reading sessions with prepared scripts read often without much passion, punch or conviction.

Over the last two weeks I have sat through over twenty hours of debate on the Budget Bill. Because these debates were not time limited, members could speak for as long as they liked (unfortunate in some cases) but the upside was that there was real debate with interventions, questioning, catching each other out, dissecting arguments and wit.

One of the funniest parts for me was when the Sinn Fein Chairman of the Culture Arts and Leisure Committee Barry McIlduff was complaining about the cut in the budget for the arts. He accused me of making the biggest cut to the Arts experienced anywhere in the UK. This was not true and I pointed out to him that in England the cut was 25% nearly twice the cut experienced in N.I. and in fact we had shielded the Arts from the full impact of the cuts imposed from Westminster. Most other people would have blustered, tried to quickly get off the point or just ignored the intervention. Being one of the less conventional members he gave a cheeky grin like a wee boy caught out by the teacher and replied “ I knew that but it didn’t suit my argument so I ignored it.” His honesty got him off the hook.

Unfortunately a lot of members know the facts but have decided to ignore them and even deny them. They go further, they then pedal economic nonsense in an attempt to avoid having to make hard decisions. I am of course referring to the UUP and SDLP.

In the case of the UUP they know that spending cuts are required. Indeed they campaigned jointly with the Conservative Party in the last election, made the same arguments about cutting the deficit by reducing public spending and said they would vote with the Conservatives for that policy in Westminster. Yet in the Assembly they refuse to vote for spending cuts and have demanded more spending on the two departments they control, Health and Employment and Learning, even though they are two of only three departments with actual increases in the money allocated to them. They are relying on the other parties to vote the budget through allowing them to sit on their hands and distance themselves from their responsibilities as part of the Stormont Coalition and the cheerleader for the Conservatives who have taken more than £5,000bn out of public spending in N.I. over the next four years.

The SDLP have also distanced themselves from the hard financial decisions in the budget. They have come with a shopping list of things they want money spent on. In fact there is not one area of government they did not ask for more money to go to during the three debates. The Party Leader Margaret Ritchie gave us a fifteen minute shopping list. Unlike the UUP however the SDLP realised that it was unrealistic simply to ask for more money they should at least try to show where it might come from. They claimed it was easy to raise thousands of millions and of course in doing so pointed the finger of blame at me for not having their insight, wisdom and financial prowess. Unfortunately their 60-page document illustrated clearly why we cannot rely on SDLP economics.

We could borrow £690m they claimed. Unfortunately if they had done their homework they would have discovered that this money would have been taken off our grant from Westminster and we would have been worse off because we would have had to pay interest on it. We could sell off £250 m of government properties they said but forgot that they had criticised my budget for putting in £100m of properties for sale, on the basis that the money would not be realised because of the depressed market. We could save £250m by cancelling purchases of capital goods like trains from overseas they stated. The unfortunate thing is that we have no orders in for any more new trains. They argued that developers could make £150m contributions to infrastructure in return for planning permissions over the next four years, but the same paper which contained these figures stated that the SDLP recognised that given the state of the market this money could not be acquired at present. They even put in £37m from the sale of the airport at Londonderry even though it only survives because the Council subsidises it so who is going to buy it? What raised an even greater laugh from the Assembly was when I pointed out it wasn’t even ours to sell!!

Debates are good because they examine the weakness in arguments, expose the inconsistencies in policies, enable ideas to be tested and establish whether a speaker has a clue what he or she is talking about.

The one thing that the three days of debate on the Budget Bill established is that with an election looming both the UUP and the SDLP are going to cynically use the fact that they can have the best of both worlds demanding that a budget is passed because they know that public services would fall apart without one. At the same time they refuse to give it their support even though they have no better ideas as to how they would address the consequences of the cuts imposed by Westminster which supplies 90% of the money available to us. They know that the two big parties do not have this luxury because if the DUP and Sinn Fein took the same stance there would be financial chaos. As I pointed out during the debate the Alliance Party could have taken the same cynical approach. To their credit they didn’t, they acted in the same way as the DUP and Sinn Fein, they argued their case, played their part, accepted that like everyone else they would not get everything they wanted and have defended their decision. That is what differentiates serious political parties from a bunch of political chancers.