Scottish Budget: Why John Swinney is about to reveal his true priorities in this critical hour for Scotland

It is, after all, the Scottish Government setting out their £60 billion spending plan for the year ahead, deciding what taxes we all pay, with an impact that will reverberate for many years to come. But the landscape of this Budget has a particular importance because it comes at something of a critical hour for Scotland.

Across the country, our public services are on their knees. For years, those services have been the direct casualties of the SNP’s mismanagement, brutal cuts and abject failure to grow the economy.

SNP’s botched schemes

The cost is staggering. You can see it in the people ringing their GP surgeries hundreds of times a day to get an appointment. You can see it in the alarming withdrawal of NHS dentists and the endless mental health waits.

You can see it in the parents concerned for their children, the soaring incidents of classroom violence and schools left without the in-class support they need. They have watched Scotland’s education system tumble down the international rankings, and they worry about what that means for their children’s futures.

And you can see it in the bottom line of the businesses struggling to make ends meet, held back by crumbling transport links and their staff forced off work by NHS waiting lists. They’ve been scunnered by botched initiatives like the deposit return scheme and are now trying to work out how to pay for Labour’s National Insurance hike.

With the SNP at the helm, the Scottish Government has chosen to pursue a specific policy path for more than 17 years: independence first, everything else after. When a government has been in power for so long, there can be no excuses, it is a path that has actively harmed the people of Scotland.

Tories propped up SNP for years

But all of this is also why the coming Budget is so significant. It is one that we must all take very seriously for it presents an opportunity to make a difference after nearly two decades of SNP failure.

Since the collapse of Humza Yousaf's power-sharing deal with the Greens, the Scottish Government no longer has the majority it needs to get legislation, including the Budget, through parliament.

A parliament of minorities means that the government must try harder with opposition parties, which, in turn, affords those parties a greater degree of influence. There is plenty of precedent for opposition parties doing just that. Let’s not forget that the Scottish Conservatives spent years backing Alex Salmond’s Budgets, offering his government a straight sweep of support between 2008 and 2011.

Until recently, the SNP relied on the Greens to support their budgets. That arrangement, however, was instrumental in worsening the crises facing so many aspects of public life. The Greens signed off on the government cutting the housing budget in the middle of a housing crisis. They unashamedly backed cuts to mental health support in the middle of a mental health crisis. And time and again, they wilfully harmed the prospects for Scottish business.

When the Greens wrote their unflinching support for the government into the Bute House Agreement, it was a contract that propped up a series of poor government choices. One of those was spending on preparations for independence – an insular, fruitless obsession that continues to frustrate a majority of people in this country.

Positive, practical, fair-minded

Next week, the government will have a choice to make: do they yet again opt for a Green-backed Budget that navel-gazes on the constitution, or do they reach across the divide and commit to investing in the people and prosperity of this country?

When our party has supported Budgets in the past, it has been a decision taken with careful regard to the context and impact of doing so. Take 2021, for instance. In the middle of the pandemic, people expected parties across parliament to work together.

We always believed in putting recovery first. As a result of our negotiations, Liberal Democrats secured an extra £120 million for mental health services, an extra £60m to help education bounce back from the disruption of Covid, additional support for businesses, and the release of money for local authorities.

At the core of our asks has and will always be a positive, practical and fair-minded vision for our country. We want the SNP to stop throwing good money after bad on doomed projects like the ministerial takeover of social care.

People are tired of seeing their taxes rise to higher and higher levels but with precious little to show for it. They are tired of bailing out the SNP’s inability to build a ferry within budget and on time. In reality, tax has been ramped up to cover wasteful spending and the failure to grow the economy.

Building consensus

And so, in a context where our public services face severe pressures, when for so many people it feels like nothing works any more, it would be irresponsible for my party to ignore the possible routes through which we might ease matters. In everything we do, we want to build consensus wherever we can and deliver for the people we serve.

At the same time, those good faith negotiations must be balanced against the scale of the reform that is needed. The dire straits we face today largely exist because the SNP have, for so long, neglected public services in favour of agitating over independence. It’s a frustration I heard time and again on the doorstep during the general election.

The government will need to decide where it now stands. They still have a long road to travel before they can persuade my party that their next Budget can make the difference we need it to. We know how badly broken things are, and we know the only thing that will truly bring about the change that Scotland needs is a change of government.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats