I always endeavour to do so, Presiding Officer, and I learned everything that I know from John Swinney, so I am grateful to him for the reminder of behaviour.

I am genuinely long enough in the tooth to remember that, for the last two years of a UK Labour Government, when the SNP was in government here, the money that was passed on to Scotland for the NHS was diverted away from it by the SNP to be spent on other things. Had the SNP not done that, the NHS would be at least £1 billion better off in the budget now.

Let us roll forward to 2021, when the SNP’s NHS recovery plan promised more than £1 billion of investment to increase NHS capacity, reform the delivery of care and quickly get everyone the treatment that they needed. Humza Yousaf presented a flagship network of national treatment centres, with at least 40,000 additional elective surgeries and 40,000 procedures per year by 2026, increasing to 50,000 in the years after. By 2026, an additional 1,500 staff would be recruited to work in those national treatment centres.

Those plans were apparently costed and worked out. Audit Scotland, in a scathing report in September 2023, warned about delays. Now, many of those national treatment centres have been cancelled or postponed for years. The result of that incompetence is that planned operations continue to lag well behind pre-pandemic levels: 60,000 fewer operations were carried in 2023 out than were performed in 2019.

Those cancellations and delays are already impeding the recovery of our NHS, and waiting times are getting even longer for people who are waiting for in-patient treatment. That is nothing less than an insult to the almost one in six Scots who are on an NHS waiting list and the hard-working NHS staff who are simply trying to do their jobs in a broken system.

Audit Scotland has described Scotland’s NHS as directionless, risking patient safety and on the brink of breakdown. Health is fully devolved, and responsibility lies with the SNP Government. The Deputy First Minister, like the rest of the Government, is at pains to blame everybody else, but there comes a point when a little self-reflection is required. After 17 years in power, the SNP has left the health service at breaking point, with extreme overcrowding and long waiting times threatening patient safety.

Let me focus on capital. There has been a 10 per cent cut to the capital budget for the Scottish Government over the next five years, but there has been a 100 per cent cut to the capital for new health projects. National treatment centres that are critical to tackling waiting times have been delayed for years in Ayrshire and Arran, Lanarkshire, Lothian, Grampian, and Tayside. They are all gone and there is no answer about what will happen now to tackle waiting lists.

People in the Highlands are waiting for the redesign of Caithness general hospital and the revamp of Raigmore’s maternity services, which are now parked on the shelf. Lochgelly and Kincardine in Fife, the Liberton GP practice, the Gilmerton GP practice, East Calder in Lothian and Greenferns in Aberdeen have all been denied desperately needed health centres. Funding has been pulled from the Edinburgh eye pavilion, despite promises to the contrary, and a new cancer centre in Lothian has been delayed. A promise to publish the revised capital investment plan alongside the budget has been broken. There is no transparency from the SNP—there is just more secrecy.

Where has the capital gone? What is it being spent on? Overpriced replacement ferries are costing almost four times the original, at almost £400 million, and they are seven years late. What other capital projects will be cancelled or delayed? Will it be the A9 or the A83 at the Rest and Be Thankful? The reality is that we simply do not know.

The crisis in social care deepens. Care packages are cut, contracts are handed back, staff morale is low and the number of vacancies is growing.

The SNP can spin out of this in any way it wants to, but this is a Government that has lost control and is financially incapable of running the country. The real-terms decline in funding to the NHS is an insult, as is the real-terms cut to the social care budget, and the impact of those cuts will impede the recovery of our health and social care services for decades to come. SNP ministers have, for years, promised patients and staff that they would deliver state-of-the-art national treatment centres, but despite almost 830,000 Scots being on waiting lists for tests and treatment, those promises have been broken.

The people of Scotland should not have to pay the price of SNP incompetence. That is why Scottish Labour cannot vote for the budget today and why only Scottish Labour can be trusted to support our NHS and social care services and their dedicated staff, so that they can deliver for the people of Scotland.