JOHN Swinney hit out at the current “hostility towards migration” after Keir Starmer’s recent pledge to cut net migration.
Speaking at the SNP’s Westminster campaign launch in front of activists and party candidates in Glasgow, the First Minister listed why he believes Scotland needs migration.
“One of the things that crops up in all my conversations with business is that they are short of people,” he said.
“Unemployment in Scotland today is very low, and has been for a number of years. And we are in a situation where businesses are struggling to find employees to fill vacancies."
Swinney added that migration is also crucial when it comes to decreasing NHS waiting times.
“You need enough people providing social care packages in the community,” he added as he rallied against the impact of Brexit.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s migration plan will include passing laws to ban law-breaking employers from hiring foreign workers and to train more Britons.
Last year’s net migration figure of 685,000 has “got to come down”, he told The Sun on Sunday, as he vowed to “control our borders and make sure British businesses are helped to hire Brits first”.
Pledges to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands have been repeatedly made by Conservative politicians over recent years, including by Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron during his time as party leader.
In his speech, Swinney accused the Labour Party of giving “an awfully good impression” of the Tories.
“I’m not saying Labour are exactly the same as the Tories – they’re not. But they are giving an awfully good impersonation of them,” he said.
“The only substantive change Labour seem to be offering is to change their own core principles.
“Let me give you one really telling – and worrying – example.
“Their health spokesman – Wes Streeting – the man who in a few weeks’ time will be the UK Government’s health secretary – last week set out his plans for the NHS.”
He said that Streeting “criticised the Tories on the issue of the NHS and the private sector”.
Swinney added: “Fair enough, you might say? Bad news. He was not criticising the Tories for using the private sector too much.
“He was criticising the Tories for not using the private sector enough. He went on to say he wanted to go further than Tony Blair’s New Labour.
“And he wrote: ‘I want the NHS to form partnerships with the private sector that goes beyond just hospitals’.
“That sounds an awful lot like creeping privatisation of the NHS to me. The SNP rejects privatisation of the NHS whether that is Tory privatisation or Labour privatisation.”
Also speaking at the launch, SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said Scotland “deserves so much more” than the status quo.
Flynn said his party had provided the baby box, lifted 100,000 children out of poverty, provided young people with free public transport and a nationalised rail service.
He added: “What we have in Westminster is a status quo. It’s a desire, as Keir Starmer says, for stability.
“I’ll tell you what stability means. It means £18 billion worth of cuts to our public services, it means no access to the European market for more than five million people”.
He decried privatisation of the NHS and said the people of Scotland should have the democratic right to choose their own future.
He said: “We deserve so much more. Scotland deserves so much more and that is all why all of us on this stage and all of you in this room are for Scotland – it’s why we always put Scotland’s interests first.
“We believe in better, we believe in a nation where we can invest in our future.”
