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“Members cannot come to this chamber and rattle off a list of demands… without in any way identifying how they would be funded. That is reckless.”

So said Graeme Dey MSP, Minister for Higher and Further Education, on the 30th of April, 2024. He was speaking in response to Labour education spokesperson Pam Duncan-Glancy, who had asked when he would step in to “sort out the mess that he has left colleges in”.

A few minutes earlier, Mr Dey had said that MSPs are “perfectly entitled to advance the argument that we should spend more money on colleges” but that they have to “tell us where that money will come from”.

He had previously said that providing more funding for colleges would mean cutting funding for schools or hospitals. “That,” he said, “is the stark choice that everyone has to face.”

Mr Dey’s position is pretty clear: asking the government to........

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