Scotland’s Finance Secretary, Shona Robison said her budget was about hope and delivery. Kevin McKenna begs to differ.

When scrutinising SNP budget promises, experience tells you that investing your savings at the local bookies carries a better chance of long-term reward.

After two decades in power, the SNP have made many bold statements. The attainment gap in education would be cut, Nicola Sturgeon once told us. Yet, by 2023, the PISA attainment scores for Scottish 15-year-olds in the previous decade lagged eight months in reading; 16 months in maths and 18 months in science. The SNP had failed a whole generation of disadvantaged pupils for the entirety of their schooling

Her successor, John Swinney consistently promises to lower the levels of child poverty. Hospital waiting times are always about to be cut and ambitious programmes of affordable house-building are always set to be delivered, thus addressing a root cause of multi-deprivation. It never happens.

Scotland’s chronic rates of addiction deaths remain a national SNP disgrace that betray a callous attitude to some of our most vulnerable people. During the SNP’s ruinous reign hundreds of schools have been shut amidst an education strategy that has seen Scotland plummet in basic rates of numeracy and literacy. Pupils in working-class neighbourhoods are disproportionately affected by these failures.

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And so, year after year, you wait for a budget........

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