Scots finance expert hits out over SNP claims

Published on Saturday 4 February 2012 02:38

ONE of Scotland’s leading experts in public finance has hit back at claims by the SNP that he had made unsubstantiated attacks against civil servants.

Professor Arthur Midwinter has come under fire from the SNP for claiming in The Scotsman that official Scottish Government documents could not be trusted because they were interfered with by spin doctors.

In a letter to The Scotsman today, finance secretary John Swinney described the claims of “manipulation” as “baseless”.

And yesterday SNP MSP Linda Fabiani, a former minister who now chairs the Scotland Bill committee, insisted that Prof Midwinter is partisan because he briefly worked as an advisor to former Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander.

She said: “He should be thoroughly ashamed of himself for making unsubstantiated allegations against professional civil servants that have no basis in fact, and have been shown to be false. He should apologise, and the Labour Party should disassociate themselves from his ill-judged remarks.

“It is precisely this sort of negative nonsense that people are sick of reading about, and helps explain why Labour are at a record low of 23 per cent in Scotland in the polls.”

Prof Midwinter last night accused the SNP of deliberately misrepresenting what he said and being hypercritical.

He pointed out that one of the documents he said had been affected by spin was the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS), which the SNP itself attacked when it was published under a Labour/Lib Dem Scottish Executive.

“At the time, SNP members said that one of the author’s names was appropriate because he was called Dr Rigg,” said Prof Midwinter.

“So the SNP have not been shy of attacking the integrity of civil servants.”

He added: I was not attacking civil servants but the spin doctors’ influence on documents.”