Dave Doogan MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  Does the shadow Chancellor bristle like I do and like my constituents in Angus and Perthshire Glens who are engaged in farm businesses and agribusiness more generally when they hear Ministers make a false equivalence in talking about the generous rates of agricultural property relief compared with the wider economy and how long people will get to pay? They are making a false equivalence between someone inheriting their mother’s house after her death and transferring the family farm from one generation to the next. They are completely different propositions, are they not?

• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  I absolutely do agree. I am in full accord with those Members’ bravery on the APR, but I am not sure how that links directly to 3p a mile for electric vehicles. The point is made, though. The preamble to the Budget was hugely challenging and had a direct consequence on the markets. It caused people to freeze employment and investment in their businesses, and it caused pensioners to cash in their pensions. I am pleased that the SNP was the first to call on the Financial Conduct Authority to investigate the Chancellor’s behaviour, and I hope that the FCA’s position changes. Despite all that, Scotland’s economy remains one of the best performing parts of the United Kingdom. Since 2007, per-person growth under the SNP has been 10.2%. That compares to 6.8% in the UK. We lead the whole of the UK, with the exception of London, for foreign direct investment, and a NatWest report recently confirmed that Scotland had one of the highest start-up rates in the UK in the first two quarters of this year. Employment across the UK is 75%, but as I mentioned in my intervention on the Minister, unemployment in the UK has risen from 4.1% to 5.1% since this Labour Government grasped power last year. Thankfully for the people of Scotland, unemployment is 25% lower in Scotland, at 3.8%. I am sure that fact will not be lost on the good people of Glasgow East. Next month, the Scottish Government will deliver their Budget and continue to build on our success, but the SNP will not be voting for this Bill’s Second Reading. We will not be party to the injudicious and unjust damage that will be inflicted on businesses and households by the grabbing hand of Labour through this Bill. The people will have their verdict on this risible Chancellor and her bilging outflow of fiscal calamity in May 2026, specifically in Scotland and Wales, and in English councils. I, for one, look forward to the Government getting their just desserts.

• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  On that point, will the Minister give way?

• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  Is the right hon. Gentleman as concerned as I am that this is a spreadsheet Budget concerned with little more than the number in the bottom right-hand corner? That is why everything is unravelling so catastrophically. On his BPR point, I have nothing against PLCs, but does he agree further that businesses that are owned by families and rooted in communities spend their investments locally, support local organisations and charities, employ locally and have their profits going back in locally, and that this is devastating jeopardy for those businesses?

• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. Will she concede that approximately three quarters of the last three hours of debate on this Bill has been devoted to the egregious family farm tax, including two noble and articulate contributions from Labour Beck Benchers, which took some bravery? Will she take that message back to the Chancellor, and get her to finally scrap the family farm tax?

• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  I can only guess that Reform UK is polling quite high in Glasgow East. On his substantive point about child poverty, is the hon. Member relieved that his constituents in Glasgow East are benefiting from the fact that under the SNP, Scotland is the only part of the United Kingdom where child poverty rates are falling?

• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman was obviously not listening. The increase to the block grant is spread over the entire spending review period—five years—and it does not cover more than half of the cost faced by the Scottish Government as a result of the increase in employers national insurance imposed by the same Chancellor. I am glad that I got the opportunity to say that twice. Energy bills have gone up by £340 under this Government, despite the fact that they were supposed to fall by £300. That is what people voted for—that is the prospectus that Labour gave them—and the Government are not taking it seriously. They are coming back with a £150 reduction to energy bills, which is coming out of general taxation. As sleight of hand goes, that is not very slick. The money comes out of people’s standing charge, but goes directly on their general taxation. In the interests of time, I will not dwell on agricultural property relief; I have said a fair bit during interventions, and I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) will contribute on that issue.

• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  The right hon. Gentleman anticipates my next paragraph. The energy profits levy should be coming to an end, but it has been extended by this Labour Government until 2030. That has caused 100 job losses from Harbour Energy, and it is causing 1,000 job losses every month, according to Offshore Energies UK. We are in this situation because the Prime Minister lacks the mettle to get rid of the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. That is one job getting protected in Whitehall, but it is costing 1,000 jobs a month in Scotland. That is the Labour way, and it always will be. On electric vehicles, this thruppence a mile probably does not sound that much to those who live in Chelsea or Kensington, but it will cost an awful lot more to those who live in Angus and Perthshire Glens. I get the politics of it: half of the entire Labour membership lives within Greater London, and the other half lives in other English cities, and in Glasgow and Cardiff. They probably think it is a tremendous wheeze to make people in my constituency subsidise the tax on the Labour membership’s electric vehicles, but people are smarter than that. People who live in the countryside can add up, and they know that this Government’s attack on their electric vehicle taxes does not add up. They are being swindled by a Labour Government.

• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  The SNP will not support a Second Reading. This Bill derives from a Budget that failed to deliver for Scotland and does nothing to move the dial for the households hammered by the cost of living crisis. Scotland was relying on a step change from this Labour Government—on investment in public services, jobs and industry, and real action on energy bills—but none of that has come to pass. Instead, we have a dog’s dinner Budget that results in an increase in funding for Scotland that does not even cover half of the Scottish Government’s exposure to the national insurance increase across the public sector, and a resource block grant that increases only 0.5% per annum on average across the spending review period. Thankfully, the clauses on income tax largely do not concern Scottish taxpayers, who benefit from the SNP’s judicious and progressive income tax rates in Scotland. Those in Scotland earning less than around £30,300 are expected to pay slightly less income tax than they would elsewhere in the UK, with the freezes to higher, advanced and top-rate thresholds estimated to affect only the highest 26% of earners. Someone earning more than £35,000 in Scotland will pay just 90p more in income tax per week than someone in the rest of the United Kingdom, while benefiting from Scotland’s unique social contract, whereby, under the SNP, we collectively fund prescription charges, bridge tolls, the Scottish child payment, tuition fees, under-22 bus travel, the baby box, personal care, publicly owned railways and publicly owned Scottish Water, which is the best-performing water company in the United Kingdom. Not bad value for 90p a week.

• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  The Minister will know that for the vast majority of employees in Scotland, the increase in the national living wage is redundant, because it is less than the Scottish living wage. He talks about the things that the Government increased in the Budget; was it their intention to increase unemployment by 25% as a result of their jobs tax?

• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister give way?

• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

• 16 Dec 2025 · Finance (No. 2) Bill · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does he agree with me—and, I think I am right in saying, with the hon. Member for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe (David Chadwick)—that agriculture in Wales and Scotland forms a very much larger part of our economies than it does in England, and it is therefore particularly objectionable that the Government did not consult the devolved Governments on this legislation? Does my hon. Friend further agree that farmers do not own wealth; they own value?

• 15 Dec 2025 · Sudan: Humanitarian Situation · Hansard source

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  For the UK Government to decline to take part in the atrocity prevention programme in Sudan is regrettable, and for the UK Government to fail in their due diligence on arms export diversions via the UAE to the RSF is disgraceful, but for the UK Government to have done both looks alarmingly like ambivalence or even complicity. The Minister wants to take us around the houses in saying that the evidential basis for UK arms being in Sudan is not there—let us not do that again—but can he tell us what discussions he has had with the UAE on the sound, robust basis for saying that without the UAE, these atrocities would not be happening?

• 15 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Defence innovation is harmed by a default America-first posture. Ironically, that is especially apparent in the so-called independent nuclear deterrent, which relies on US tech for fusing, firing, arming, neutron initiators, the gas transfer system and the mark 4 aeroshell. We can add to that the purchase of further F-35s for US-manufactured gravity-delivered nuclear weapons. President Trump will put America first, but it is difficult to understand why this Labour Government seem keen to do the same, while spurning the innovation opportunity of the £130 billion SAFE programme in the EU.

• 11 Dec 2025 · St Andrew’s Day and Scottish Affairs · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member is very concerned about St Andrew. We should focus on St Andrew today, but in parallel I am concerned for St David, and what he and his family might be enduring under the catastrophe of Labour-run Wales. I wish things were better in Scotland, and I know that my colleagues in the Scottish Government are working extremely hard to make things better under the egregious constraints of this Union, but the Labour Government in Wales are not so motivated. Can the hon. Member explain why it is only St Andrew’s bairns in Scotland who are getting elevated out of poverty on these islands, while child poverty is rising in Labour England and Labour Wales?

• 11 Dec 2025 · St Andrew’s Day and Scottish Affairs · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

• 11 Dec 2025 · St Andrew’s Day and Scottish Affairs · Hansard source

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  It is especially generous of the right hon. Gentleman to give way again. He touched on general practice. I am not suggesting for one minute that everything is perfect in Scotland, but our constituents enjoy 83 general practitioners per 100,000 population, compared with 67 GPs in Wales and 64 in England. How much worse must it be for constituents in England and Wales?

• 11 Dec 2025 · St Andrew’s Day and Scottish Affairs · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the right hon. Member for giving way, but I am struggling a little bit to reconcile his rhetoric with the facts. The fact is that waiting lists have been falling in Scotland for five months in a row up until now. He then moved on to emergency healthcare. Scotland’s core A&E functions outperform England’s and Wales’s consistently, year after year. How does he reconcile that dichotomy?

• 11 Dec 2025 · St Andrew’s Day and Scottish Affairs · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Member give way on that point?

• 11 Dec 2025 · St Andrew’s Day and Scottish Affairs · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the hon. Lady, my colleague and Chair of our Select Committee, for giving way. She is making a powerful point about Scotland’s identity and our values. She is a Unionist and I am a nationalist, but I do not think for one second that I am any more proud of my flag than she is proud of her flag. Does she agree with me that we must do everything that we can to prevent our St Andrew’s flag from being hijacked by those who would seek to use it against the very values that make Scotland the welcoming place that it has always been?

• 10 Dec 2025 · Conduct of the Chancellor of the Exchequer · Hansard source

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  Is the hon. Lady as frustrated as I am to hear the normally temperate Chief Secretary to the Treasury chuntering, “Do you agree with our taxes?”, as though there is only one way to raise fiscal revenues, and as though if we do not agree with Labour, we have got it wrong? That would be ironic, because there are many ways to raise taxes. Is she, like businesses across Scotland, concerned that this Government have taken £66 billion out of the real economy, with no care for what that will do to growth?

• 10 Dec 2025 · Conduct of the Chancellor of the Exchequer · Hansard source

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  I did not expect the Minister to give way. He says that energy bill payers in the UK are now £150 better off, forgetting that energy bills are currently almost £600 higher than Labour promised they would be at the election. Ofgem has come in with an additional £108 for infrastructure charges. Energy bills will go up again in January and again in April. Does he want to reflect on what he has said? Is that really the record on which he is standing?

• 10 Dec 2025 · Conduct of the Chancellor of the Exchequer · Hansard source

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  Indeed. In terms of that conduct and those decisions that have been made, that is most evident in the egregious family farm tax—a betrayal of the producers of our food, no less—and the, let us call it, management of market-sensitive information before the Budget, which had a material effect on the economy of these islands.