Tommy Sheridan is the Solidarity candidate in the 2016 Scottish Parliamentary Election in Glasgow
Today the party is launching its manifesto there to music.
Solidarity have gone for a musical intro, which is nice. This song is dedicated to “freedom fighters” pic.twitter.com/4iBRmZm8u6
— Philip Sim (@BBCPhilipSim) April 28, 2016
Although we can’t be at the launch it seems that Mr Sheridan is including reference to PFI in his speech this morning from the tweets being posted by attendees.
In one of his party political videos in the earlier part of his campaign to be elected to the Scottish Parliament in Glasgow Tommy Sheridan explains the concept of PFI in some detail and also why he thinks it should come to an end. Bearing in mind that this is a video which forms part of a political campaign it is nonetheless interesting as the subject is very much in the news in Edinburgh.
Sheridan claimed: “PFI known as paying for infinity. It was one of the worst General George type of deals you could sign up to. The type of deal where they offered you a telly for a fiver and by the time you paid it you would have paid £1500 for something worth £300.
“It is the same deal the Tories and the new Labour Party signed us up to in the mid 1990s when they introduced PFI to get rid of traditional public financing of schools, of hospitals, of roads – the things that we need. Instead of publicly borrowing the money and paying for it via our taxes what they decided to do was this wonderful Wizard of Oz type of trick.
“They would put it off their balance sheet and they would get a private consortium of businesses and they would lend the money to the local authorities and the government and they would then build the schools and hospitals and lo and behold it would not appear on the balance sheet. So it would not look as though you had borrowed any money. The problem is it does not work like that.
“We did borrow money. We borrowed money to pay for hospitals and schools and then we agreed to pay back five, six seven times more money than it actually cost to build the schools and hospitals.
“PFI was a criminal scheme in all but name.”
Mr Sheridan then refers to the 17 schools in Edinburgh built under the PFI policy which have been closed by the council as a result of faults being discovered in the buildings.
In Glasgow he says he has figures to prove that there is an outstanding balance of around £700 million to pay for their PFI buildings.
Watch the whole election campaign video here:
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Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
