Indeed, but I was simply going to make the comment that, in that instance, we had a candidate visiting Barra alongside me and, before he has even been elected, we appear to have delivered. Next, I am going to Caithness to talk to maternity campaigners—perhaps the Government would like to intervene there, too, and restore maternity services in the area.
As a former education secretary, John Swinney should know better than to steal someone else’s homework, but that is what it has come to, because this Government has run out of ideas; nowhere is that clearer than in Scotland’s NHS. What is the SNP’s record? NHS waiting times are up, with 800,000 Scots on an NHS waiting list; thousands are stuck in hospital beds as they wait for social care packages. Patients are struggling to get appointments with their GPs, while the GPs are threatening to go on strike. Last month, the SNP published yet another NHS recovery plan—we have now had five plans in just four years. The SNP does not know what it is doing and we have the WhatsApp messages to prove it. Only last weekend, we learned that, days before its publication, former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon had described one of the many NHS recovery plans as “awful”. For once, I agree with her.
After 18 years in charge of our NHS, there is no one else left to blame—it is entirely the responsibility of the SNP. The SNP promised to recruit 800 more GPs by 2027. That is not going to be delivered—in fact, the number of GPs has actually fallen. Today, the Royal College of Nursing Scotland published its report on “The Nursing Workforce in Scotland 2025”, in which it says that there are not enough nurses to provide safe staffing levels.
The SNP promised to reduce waiting times, yet the peak of its ambition appears to be that, by March 2026, patients will be waiting only a year for treatment. Far be it from me to point out that the treatment time guarantee is supposed to be 12 weeks. In 2021, the SNP promised to create an NHS app; I looked forward to it. Four years on, that has been downgraded to a pilot in NHS Lanarkshire.
The First Minister says that we will have a renewed focus on cancer. Well, that is not before time, as his SNP Government has failed to meet the 31-day and 62-day treatment targets, in the latter case for 13 years. He has reannounced £5 million for hospices. That is great, but they have yet to see a single penny. There is no timeline, and yet again the SNP has not delivered. He boasts about child and adolescent mental health services targets being met, but that is because the figures have been fiddled, and children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or autism have been removed.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists points out that the SNP promised to invest 10 per cent of the front-line NHS budget in mental health, but it has invested only 8 per cent. Meanwhile, GP funding has fallen from 11 per cent of the health budget to 6.5 per cent. The SNP is showing us what it actually values, and it is not the NHS, nor is it social care.
