Gordon Brown today kicked off Scottish Labour's general election campaign with a commitment to end Tory austerity in Scotland.

He said:

"Today in Scotland, 71,000 depend on food banks, compared with 7,500 four years ago; 80,000 are on zero hour contracts; 180,000 are on council waiting lists; 200,000 children have gone to school today ill-equipped because their families are on the breadline; and, in total, 820,000 Scots are in poverty.

And so while others want to talk about coalitions, deals, pacts, hung parliaments, confidence and supply motions – insider Westminster talk – we will spend all our time discussing with the people what really matters – poverty, unemployment, deprivation, bad housing, inequality and the neglect of the NHS."

Labour, Scotland's party of social justice and fairness, in 2015 and 2016 will add an additional £800 million to the Scottish spending total.

• Bank bonus tax; allocated to Scotland: £150m
• Mansion tax and tax avoidance measures; allocated to Scotland: £200m
• Reforms of corporation tax, action on false self-employment & investment funds changes; allocated to Scotland: £150m
• Bank levy; allocated to Scotland: £100m
• Tuition fee package made up mostly of pension tax relief; allocated to Scotland: £200m

And where will the money go? 

• A guarantee of a job and training for every young person out of work for a year;
  
• Action targeted to support the NHS;
  
• Action for ending the bedroom tax and to create an Anti-Poverty Fund to reduce the need for food banks;
  
• And action to help restore college cuts and colleges places, help with grants for students and help for the out-of-education teenagers who need a better chance.
  

Despite all their public demands to end Tory austerity, the extract below reveals that the SNP have publicly committed themselves in exchanges between the Scottish Government and the Treasury to a ZERO spending rise in 2015-16.

Why? They want to go into the Scottish election campaign of 2016 blaming Westminster for a failure to provide additional spending to Scotland. So it suits their purposes to be able to claim additional new spending has been ruled out in the months leading up to that result. Except that they are the co-authors of the yearlong austerity and the zero additional spending is their own policy.

Martin Freeman sets out very clearly in tonight's election broadcast the choice facing Scotland. The SNP is only interested in exploiting austerity. Scottish Labour will end Tory austerity.

George Osborne's final budget was long on spin, but short on substance. And it comes with a big sting in the tail for Scotland's public services.

Listening to the Chancellor you wouldn't have thought we have had the worst fall in real earnings in recorded history a total fall of 7.9%. No other real earnings decline comes close. The IFS says his tax and benefit changes since 2010, including the big VAT rise, have cost families on average £1,127 a year. Nearer £2000 if you are a public service worker suffering from the UK and Scottish government pay policy.

For public services, the OBR confirmed that the spending squeeze becomes much more severe than anything we have seen to date in 2016-17 and 2017-18. While the Barnett consequentials are difficult to calculate precisely, it looks like a another £2bn of cuts and a further 30,000 public service job cuts.

The SNP's attack on the budget is less than credible when you consider their Full Fiscal Autonomy plan would impose even greater austerity on Scotland. On Brian Ashcroft's very measured assumptions; "If we assume that under FFA Scotland could have been able to borrow to fund a deficit the equivalent of the UK’s 5.6 per cent – which would have been a tall order for a sub-state government, or an independent Scotland, at the same borrowing rate as the UK – then a further £3.8 billion would have had to be funded by higher taxes and lower public spending."

£3.8 billion amounts to half the education & training budget and one third of the health budget - between 50,000 and 60,000 public sector job losses.

And this isn't just about recent oil revenues, it goes much deeper as this chart shows.

The SNP response to this is economically illiterate. They claim that FFA will grow the economy, including a 50% increase in exports. At the risk of 'talking Scotland down' there isn't any indication as to how this amazing, record shattering growth is going to be achieved.

We know the Tories want to slash spending, not because they have to, but because they want to. As Ed Miliband said in Clydebank this week; "These Tories have their own vision. They believe that wealth comes just from a few at the top. Because he believes in a smaller state. The market left to run riot. Working people left to fend for themselves."

True, but the SNP plans could be even worse. Only Scottish labour can credibly claim to be Scotland's anti-austerity party.

Scottish Labour has established a commission to report later this year on how the party's vision of eradicating low wages could be achieved. It will by led by MSPs Jackie Baillie and Neil Findlay and include representatives from business, unions and the voluntary sector.

At a launch event in Glasgow today, Scottish Labour Leader Jim Murphy said: 

"I'm making it my mission to abolish low pay in Scotland. Too many Scots families are just a rainy day away from real financial trouble. More than one in four Scots get paid less than the living wage. This isn't right, and we need to fix it fast. Scotland can only succeed when working people succeed. We need to come together to make this happen. The days of people going out to work all the hours they can and still not being able to make ends meet must come to an end. So we will make sure that any firms getting public sector contracts are living wage employers."

The Leader of Labour led Renfrewshire Council, Councillor Mark McMillan, explained how his council promoted the living wage in procurement and adopted UNISON's Ethical Care Charter. Speakers from the Poverty Alliance and RBS set out the case for the Living Wage - good for workers, business and the economy.

Neil Findlay MSP summed up the round table discussions that covered the need to raise the National Minimum Wage and ensure it was properly enforced. Others referred to wider employment concerns including the shift from wages to profits and the damage low pay is doing to the faltering economic recovery. Rebuilding collective bargaining was an important part of the solution. 

Ending low pay is just one element of raising employment standards. Labour's commitment to improve childcare and ending exploitative zero-hour contracts were also important in delivering an economy that works for everyone.

Last month we highlighted the impact the SNP's Devo-Max policy would have on Scotland's public services. In effect it would be Tory austerity all over again.

We were accused of scaremongering, of talking Scotland down.

Well, yesterday the Scottish Government published the Gers report on Scotland's public finances. This shows that in 2013/14, people in Scotland paid £400 more in tax than the UK as a whole but they also received £1,200 more in spending. While the figures include oil and gas revenues, the time lag means they don’t include the most recent fall in production and tax yield.

The IFS has projected the impact of falling oil revenues on Scotland’s budget if the SNP's Devo-Max plan was in place. They calculate:

“that if Scotland were fiscally autonomous in 2015–16, its budget deficit would be around 4.0% of GDP higher than that of the UK as a whole. In cash terms, this is equivalent to a difference of around £6.6 billion.”

So, we apologise, we underestimated the impact, it's actually worse than Tory austerity - It's Devo Austerity Plus.

The STUC yesterday reminded us why all the trade union submissions to the Smith Commission opposed Devo-Max.

“Today’s report is a sobering reminder of some of the risks of full fiscal autonomy for Scotland."

Replacing the Barnett formula with Devo-Max would result in big cuts to the budgets for our NHS and schools, as well an end to the UK-wide pensions system. Even on yesterday's numbers it would have cost £4 billion to Scotland in 2013/14, or more than £800 per person.

Here's what the experts say.

Last Saturday at the Scottish Labour Party conference, Ed Miliband and Jim Murphy made Labour's position on ending Tory austerity crystal clear. We welcome this clarity because Labour hasn't spoken up loudly enough about the differences on spending, as we highlighted in this blog last January. 

Gers exposes the reality of the SNP's devo-austerity plus. Labour's spending plans provide a sharp contrast to Tory austerity. So we agree....

Scottish Labour recognises that too many people feel insecure and powerless at work. The Tory-led Government’s race to the bottom has seen record numbers of people working fewer hours than they would like, and an increasing reliance on zero-hours contracts.

Last week Scottish Labour published data researched by the House of Commons library that showed 82 per cent of jobs created in Scotland since 2010 are low-paid. They also revealed that 28 per cent of the 27,000 new jobs created north of the Border since 2010 are zero hours contracts. Shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran said:
“This Government stands up for the wrong people: they help out their friends who have been avoiding their taxes, yet they do not help those who work hard and play by the rules, but do not even get a decent wage in return.

Last year the Labour led Scottish Affairs Committee published a report on the use of Zero-Hours contracts in Scotland. That report said “too often, the relationship is unbalanced, leaving the employer with all of the flexibility and few costs and the worker in fear of dismissal, denied access to due rights of employment and, in some cases, earning less than the minimum wage.”

Shortly after that report Ed Miliband was in Scotland launching the findings of the Pickavance Review into how to help employers compete on higher wages, skills and productivity – rather than on exploitative zero hours contracts. He said:
“most employers don’t use them and for good reasons: the widespread use of zero-hours contracts is incompatible with building a loyal, skilled and productive workforce. And we also know a minority of employers are misusing zero hours contracts as a crude way of cutting costs or managing staff. “It has left too many people not knowing how they will make ends meet from one week to the next, and unable to plan for the future.”

Exploitative zero-hours contacts are leaving thousands of people worried about whether they will have enough work or be able to put food on the table from one week to the next. This sort of job insecurity, which the Tories have done nothing to tackle, is putting an unnecessary strain on family life. It’s not the way Scotland should be competing in the 21st Century.

Labour is committed to ensuring that everyone is properly protected in the workplace.

1) We will abolish exploitative zero-hours contracts, with rules introduced to give new rights to employees on zero-hours contracts. This will include the right for employees who have consistently worked regular hours to receive a fixed-hours contract automatically.

2) We will ban employers from requiring zero-hours workers to be available on the off-chance that they’ll be needed.

3) We will stop employees from being required to work exclusively for one firm if they are on a zero-hours contract.

4) We will also ensure that zero-hours workers who have their shifts cancelled at short notice will receive compensation from their employer.

Only Labour can make the changes we need to end exploitative zero-hours contracts.