Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 08 June 2022
I am sorry, but that is a very weak area for the cabinet secretary to try to defend. Anybody who has ever been on eBay knows that, when they are selling something, they put on a reserve price, which is the lowest possible price at which they will sell the item. No one puts a cap on it. No one says, “Please don’t give us any more money than we are providing in these circumstances”, but that is exactly where we find ourselves.
The truth is that Scotland’s prized sea bed was sold at a pittance. That matters, because that income goes straight—or could have gone straight—to the Scottish Government to be spent on schools, hospitals and better pay for social care workers. However, once again, we are seeing that potential squandered.
It is well past time to remove the drag of SNP economic mismanagement. The Government has its priorities all wrong. When it comes to allocating finances, as I highlighted at First Minister’s question time last week, we have recently learned that the number of people suffering from Covid has risen to more than 150,000—that is one in 30 Scots—but the First Minister is devoting twice as much money to a divisive second independence referendum as she is to that awful condition.
The SNP-Green Government is devoting its focus, top civil servants and tens of millions of pounds to an unwanted independence referendum. We need look only at the statistics that were published in the past 24 hours to see why that is indefensible: more than 300,000 operations have been lost to Covid; delayed discharges are up 64 per cent in a year; there are dangerous levels of nursing vacancies; and thousands of children and adults are waiting more than a year for the mental health support that they desperately need.
Everyone needs SNP and Green ministers to be focused on what really matters right now. Instead—