Programme for Government | Scottish Parliament debates

So many broken promises, so many wasted years and so many Scots let down—that is the legacy of this SNP Government and it is a legacy that is wholly owned by John Swinney. The First Minister has been at the heart of this SNP Government for almost 18 years. As finance secretary, he cut budgets for GPs and clawed back money from health and social care partnerships, which face a deficit of £560 million. As education secretary, he downgraded the results of 125,000 working-class kids and failed to increase teacher numbers by 3,500—instead, teacher numbers are down.

The SNP thinks that it can cut a budget, partially restore it and then ask us to applaud it for doing so, but the public are not fooled. We now have a recycled, rebadged programme for government with nothing new, no vision and absolutely no guarantee of delivery. The point about delivery is key, because the SNP has had 18 years to deliver, and it has singularly failed to do so.

At the right hand of two First Ministers, Alex Salmond and then Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney was trusted to run Government and to be the keeper of its secrets—oh, how he protected those secrets, whatever the cost. However, I think that John Swinney has demonstrated over this year that he is simply not up to the job and that he has run out of ideas—so much so, that the SNP has now taken to plagiarising Scottish Labour’s plans to end 8 am waits for GP appointments and to scrap peak-time fares. I am delighted, too, with the news about the joint education and NHS facility in Barra. Of course, that news follows my visit there with Donald MacKinnon, Scottish Labour’s candidate—[

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I have to say that he is already—[

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