SSP National Co-Spokesperson Colin Fox responds to the Scottish Budget, and criticises the SNP’s underwhelming record.
Finance Secretary Shona Robison’s tax and spending plans for 2026/27 promise ‘more of the same’ from an SNP administration that ran out of ideas some time ago.
Her budget offered us a rehash of ideas and promises we have seen again and again over the past 19 years.
The Scottish Government Budget statement announced that £68bn would be spent in the year ahead and yet it is likely to make not a blind bit of difference to the chronic problems we face with Scotland’s economy, public services and social conditions.
Most of the new measures she offered up represented a pittance here and a drop in the ocean there unlikely to make a blind bit of difference to the underlying chronic conditions and complaints Scotland faces today;
- Her package of measures to alleviate the ‘cost of living crisis’ in Scotland not only contained nothing new, they included measures like the abolition of tuition fees, personal care, prescription charges and bus fares that were introduced in some cases 20 years ago.
- She condemned Labour’s use of PFI in our hospitals and schools then extolled the virtues of the SNP’s equivalent privatisation scheme the Scottish Futures Trust.
- She insisted the NHS in Scotland was ‘on the road to recovery’ thereby conceding it had deteriorated dramatically under her administration.
- And her big ‘showpiece’ announcement at the very end increasing income tax thresholds for basic rate and intermediate rate taxpayers by 7.4% amounts to ‘more small beer’ for hard pressed workers.
The only other political item of note in the debate was ‘more of the same uselessness’ from Labour. Michael Marra on behalf of Scottish Labour accused the SNP of receiving a ‘£10.3bn uplift from the UK Treasury, only to turn it into £1.3bn of cuts’.
But having ‘milked the cow’ he proverbially ‘kicked over the bucket’ by announcing that Labour would abstain, rather than vote against these Budget provisions, when the time came.
I was left thinking Ross Greer of the Scottish Greens could not have been more wrong when he claimed [in the debate] ‘the devil was in the detail’.
On the contrary, the details were virtually irrelevant, the broad picture showed us both an administration and an opposition bereft of ideas to address the deep-seated failings of the Scottish economy and its governance.
The SNP has been in office since 2007 and their record is widely seen as underwhelming.
Shona Robison’s ‘steady as she goes’, Neo-liberal managerialism offered nothing new; no scrapping of the hated Council tax, no measures to adequately address the cost of living crisis or the crisis in our public services, no solution to the lack of affordable housing, prison overcrowding or the multitude of other social problems
All the more reason to elect SSP MSP’s in May.