Former Standard Life chief damns Westminster

A former Standard Life chief has claimed Scots are poorer as a result of Westminster’s botched handling of the UK financial crisis.

David Simpson will appear before MSPs on Holyroods finance committee today. Picture: Neil Hanna

Professor David Simpson, a former chief economic adviser with the Edinburgh-based financial giant, has hit out at the debts run up under Labour at Westminster and lays blame for the 2008 crash at the door of the Westminster establishment.

He will appear before MSPs on Holyrood’s finance committee today and sets out his criticism in a written submission. “Bank of England officials, Treasury civil servants and their political masters all share responsibility for having led the British economy into the financial crisis of 2007-8 and then allowing it to languish in recession for four more years,” he states. “No politician or civil servant in the Treasury or the Bank of England has accepted responsibility for these mistakes. Instead, it is ordinary people who have been punished.”

The economist adds that as part of the UK in the last five years, average living standards in Scotland have fallen.

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