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Finance Bill

Automatic stabilisers have an important role to play. Obviously the UK Government are not required to balance their books annually, whereas the Scottish Government have to because they operate within a fixed budget. The real answer is to grant the Scottish Government borrowing powers, while working within a framework that says that over the cycle—and I mean properly over the cycle—the books are balanced so that we do not end up going into a recession with half a trillion pounds-worth of debt. The Finance Bill contains several important issues to do with fuel and alcohol and some small matters do with bingo that are important to local communities. All the retrospective measures will have to be probed. I hope that the Minister will pick up on some of these points, not least the Government's attitude to alcohol duty. Will he give us an indication that they are prepared to look again at whether alcohol can be taxed fairly rather than by unfairly attacking the Scotch whisky industry?