Alex Salmond wants credit for not breaking the law

Today Alex Salmond was boasting about the SNP’s record of having zero borrowing, telling ‘Good Morning Scotland’:

“Well the fiscal record of Scotland is of course that John Swinney as Finance Secretary has had zero borrowing over the last five years, which he must be the only Finance Minister in the world, I think with the exception of Norway in Western Europe at least, to have achieved that enviable record. That seems to me a pretty strong track record of success and compared to the UK Chancellors – George Osborne or Alistair Darling, it is an incomparably better record.”

That would be all well and good, except the Scottish government are legally bound to put forward a balanced budget every year. Yet Salmond is boasting about having “zero borrowing”. As Labour’s finance spokesperson Ken Macintosh notes:

“Every year since Swinney and Salmond took office they have spent hundreds of millions of pounds of the Scottish share of UK borrowing, just because it does not show up on the Scottish Government’s books, it is still borrowing; and it still reveals that the Scottish Government spends more than it raises in income.”

But still, Alex Salmond wants credit for not breaking the law…