Andrew Neil has Angus Robertson for Breakfast and Stu Campbell for Lunch.

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Just as the SNP conference in Aberdeen was packing up yesterday morning the party’s Angus Robertson MP was interviewed by Andrew Neil on the BBC’s Sunday Politics show. In this interview Mr Robertson tried to blame the SNP’s underfunding of the NHS on the Tory government’s “austerity” agenda and the resultant cuts to the block grant. Andrew Neil rejected this, noting that “in real terms there has been no cut”:

This is interesting as we are used to the SNP claiming that Scotland’s block grant is being cut year-on-year that, for many people, it has become a fact. Indeed, the SNP’s chief cheerleader, Stu Campbell, immediately claimed that Andrew Neil was “telling an outright lie“, and went as far as to challenge him on Twitter an hour or two later. This is where the Bath based cybernat came undone as Mr Neil took the time to reply:

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Bizarrely, Mr Campbell is still claiming on his website that “We’ve asked the BBC man for clarification. We’re not holding our breath.”. Mr Neil answered and he was very clear.

The reality is that Mr Campbell had no need to ask the “BBC man” to begin with, he could have just checked the SNP Government’s own data:

Scot Gov Budget

Despite this hard evidence, Mr Campbell repeats his lie on his website “since the Tories came to power the Holyrood budget HAS been cut in real terms every single year, and has now dropped in total by a very substantial 10%, giving the Scottish Government over £3 billion a year less to spend now than it had in 2010-11.”.

*Image via Mr Brian Spanpong

8 thoughts on “Andrew Neil has Angus Robertson for Breakfast and Stu Campbell for Lunch.”

  2. Stuart Winton says:
    Reply

    Great stuff, Scott, and indeed I think Andrew Neil let both Angus Robertson and Wings off lightly. The years he quoted – 2008/09 and ‘this year/next’ aren’t in fact static in real terms at £35bn budget in each year.

    I downloaded the spreadsheet from the Scottish Parliament page and summed the figures. They in fact show the Scottish Government budget increasing from £35.727 billion in 2008/09 to £36.858 in 2015/16. When Andrew Neil was comparing the £35bn now to the £35bn back then he was presumably in fact comparing the previous fiscal year (2014/15) rather than this/next year, ie 2015/16.

    In fact the figures show that marginally 2015/16 is a real terms budget record, ie up marginally from the previous highest of £36.819 billion in 2009/10. Indeed that can more or less be discerned from the graphic you’ve published here – the final bar on the graph looks very marginally the highest.

    (For what it’s worth the a graphic of the spreadsheet is available on my Twitter feed @Stuart_Winton)

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