John Swinney: ‘The idea that we've lived beyond our means is baloney’

First Minister John Swinney has said the idea that the Scottish Government has lived beyond its means is "baloney" when pressed on the financial pressures it faces.

The comments come after a Scottish Fiscal Commission report last week concluded the government is "facing a challenge in balancing its budget" partly due to SNP’s spending decisions.

Speaking to the press at the SNP conference in Edinburgh, Swinney was asked about the state of Scotland’s economy ahead of finance secretary Shona Robison’s statement on Tuesday which is expected to include significant spending cuts.

He said: “I let me remind you parliament that the Scottish Government has balanced its budget every year since 2007 a lot of them under my stewardship. So, the idea that we've lived beyond our means is baloney.

“We've done it all and lived within our means. But there's been an inflationary shock. You've got different challenges you've got to face. The point is that we've had sky-high inflation and no budgetary inflation to deal with it. And that analysis is not just my analysis – that’s the chancellor's.”

He added: “So we've lived within our means every single year, and we'll live within our means in this financial year. But there's going to have to be some tough choices made on this journey to do that.”

The first minister then went on to say the £22bn black hole the UK Government claims to have found in its budget due to decisions of the previous government was not “a surprise” and accused Labour of deceiving the public by claiming it was unaware of it.

“I think Scotland is about to suffer enormously because of our continued participation in the United Kingdom and the fact that a government that proposed change is continuing the same fiscal approach as the Conservative government, which I think is frankly, the last thing that Scotland requires,” he said.

He continued: “None of this was a surprise. I warned about all of this during the election campaign because I had knowledge of what the public finances were like. All the Labour stuff that this is all a terrible surprise and nobody knew is complete baloney. It was absolutely mapped out for them during the election campaign.”

However, he said Prime Minister Keir Starmer is “a big improvement” and that there is “good engagement” between both governments.

He said: “Our intergovernmental relations with the Brown government, the Cameron-Clegg government, the Cameron-on-his-own government, and most of the Theresa May government were quite respectful. After Johnson, awful, just awful. Totally disrespectful, and totally unproductive.

“The Keir Starmer government's a big improvement, a much, much bigger improvement, on that. There are real conversations on some really tricky, difficult issues that we're all faced with. And I've had good engagement with the prime minister, the deputy prime minister, the chancellor, and my other ministers are engaging with ministers, on genuinely tricky problems. And it's a lot better than it was under the trio of despair.”

When asked about the SNP's poor result in the general election, where it lost 37 MPs, Swinney said “the party's not had its troubles to seek”.

 “I think the main thing the party felt was that we weren't at our best at the election campaign.

“The party’s not had its troubles to seek, and that was pretty obvious to voters. I've got to rebuild that relationship with trust between the public. It has been really, really strong for our party. It's been perhaps one of the greatest foundations of who we are, and what we've been about, and I've got to rebuild that.”