THE SNP should be "screaming, yelling, hollering and shouting" at Westminster to demand more borrowing powers and stop the use of "fraudulent" Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs), a top political economist has said.
Speaking to The National for a special one-off podcast episode as part of our week investigating Labour's PFI scandal, National columnist Richard Murphy and Common Weal's director of strategy Robin McAlpine condemned the finance schemes and called on the Scottish Government to "fight the UK" over the devolution settlement.
The pair shared in their disdain for the prospect of PFIs returning under Rachel Reeves's chancellorship of the Labour Party, with Murphy describing the scheme's costs as "ridiculous"
READ MORE: How Labour's PFI caused chaos in Scotland's schools
Murphy said: "I have recently heard about a charge in a PFI contract of £300 for changing a lightbulb. I can change a lightbulb for less than £300. This is absurd."
He continued: "This idea was first put into use actually by the Tories, John Major's government really first used this, but Labour bought into the idea big time."
This has led to increasing fears that Labour will return to use of PFIs to hide borrowing costs from the balance sheet as the party is increasingly dominated by its Blairite wing.
Murphy said the people in charge of the party seem to be "utterly in awe of the private sector" and think that "they are the clever people".
He added: "That's just codswallop. Local authorities and government are perfectly capable of running building contracts."
Asked about the SNP's role in the finance practice, Murphy said: "My argument about the SNP always is that they don't scream, yell, holler and shout as they should about the problems that are posed upon them by Westminster.
"They don't make it clear how much more expensive things are going to be than they should be because Westminster has forced them to buy in inappropriate ways."
READ MORE: Labour won't return PFI to Scotland – it never left
McAlpine further warned that despite an end to UK PFI schemes between 2015 and 2024, "in Scotland, PFI never went away".
He said: "The problem is that when you say PFI might be back, in Scotland it never went away. We have never ever left PFI behind. The UK did; Scotland kept going. We've been using PFI for the last 30 years.
"We were the pioneers of PFI in the sense that the Skye Bridge was the first big PFI experiment and we're the last standing."
Listen to Season 4: Episode 2 above on Spotify.
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