United Kingdom General Election

Speech by Ross Finnie on Thu 11th Jun 2009

United Kingdom General Election

The Presiding Officer (Alex Fergusson): Our next item of business is a debate on motion S3M-4344, in the name of Annabel Goldie, on Scotland needs a general election

Ross Finnie (West of Scotland) (LD): For a raft of reasons, Liberal Democrats think that Scotland would be better off if we had a general election. Apart from the self-evident fact that the Prime Minister and his Government are well past their sell-by date, Liberal Democrats highlight two reasons for that.

The first is the need for a completely new and more honest approach to economic management that will be more sustainable and which will produce a fairer society. What Margo MacDonald said in her interventions is right. It does not matter which way we look at the situation. We all welcomed the bailing out of the Royal Bank of Scotland, but that money did not grow on trees and it will have to be accounted for. On "Good Morning Scotland" today, we heard a debate in which the Labour and Tory finance spokesmen pretended that the whole issue would somehow disappear and evaporate. Such a debate is not honest and is certainly not the approach that will get us out of our present difficulties.

The second issue for Liberal Democrats is the urgent need to end the attack on civil liberties that the Labour Government is perpetrating.

The economic crisis is global. However, it stretches credulity for the Prime Minister to argue that because it is global, that exonerates his Government from any culpability.

The Labour Government changed the law on banking regulation and introduced the so-called light-touch regime. It was content to see personal debt reach record levels and for house price inflation totally to outstrip headline inflation. Indeed, it was content to give tax breaks to the rich but not the poor and to delude itself into believing that it had ended economic cycles. There were two severe outcomes of that flawed approach. First, as we have heard, Britain was particularly badly placed to cope with the collapse of the banking sector and the concomitant collapse in the availability of credit. Secondly, in Britain-more than anywhere else in the world-if someone is born poor, they will die poor.

We need an election to ensure that the financial structures are rebuilt on sustainable lines-we cannot simply have a repumping of the existing failed model. As our Treasury spokesman at Westminster, Vince Cable, has argued cogently, we need a new financial regulatory regime. We need to redefine and separate short-term and long-term financial and investment banking institutions, and we need to make the Bank of England responsible for all aspects of inflation.

We also need to redress the imbalance between innovation, production and the service sector; return property to its traditional role as a long-term investment that yields lower but sustainable returns; close tax loopholes; and shift the burden of tax to achieve a greener outcome and lift out of tax millions of people who should not have been in that tax trap in the first place.

The Labour Government's erosion of our civil liberties has been steady and progressive. That is evidenced by its efforts to reduce the use of trial by jury; its support for the retrial of those who are acquitted, thereby threatening the double jeopardy principle; and its move to place previous convictions before juries. It has also attacked the independence of the judiciary. The terrorism legislation has reversed the presumption of innocence in respect of articles held by suspects and imposed restrictions on liberty on the basis of reasonable suspicion, evidence that is unavailable to the suspect and charges that are not disclosed. The terrorism legislation has also extended the period of detention without trial for suspected terrorists to 28 days, which gives the United Kingdom a period that is more than double the length of that in any other stable democratic state.

Finally, we have Labour's surveillance society, in which we have seen a massive expansion in the number of bodies that are authorised under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to use surveillance information. Labour and the Tories talk of not curtailing but increasing those powers. We need an election to curtail significantly the use of those powers, which should be restricted to the investigation of serious crime. This country does not need identity cards or to retain innocent people's DNA. What it needs is regulation of the use of closed-circuit television.

We indeed need a general election to allow the public to return to Parliament members who are committed to sustainable economic policies that are designed to create a fairer society and who will defend our civil liberties. Indeed, we need to return to Parliament members who are committed to the principles of liberal democracy.