After the UK Budget, the spendthrift SNP must prove they can deliver for Scotland

While there remains much speculation about the Budget, I can tell you two things right now that will happen after Rachel Reeves stands up in the House of Commons. First, we will witness history in action – the first UK female Chancellor ever delivering the Budget.

Secondly, as soon the Chancellor sits down again, the SNP will immediately blame Labour for all Scotland’s financial woes. If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the whispers in the SNP’s back rooms: how can we use the Budget to cover up our mess?

Anyone who knows a spendthrift knows that it doesn’t matter how many times you bail them out, they’ll always come back asking for more. They’re the kind of person who makes a show of getting the rounds in for their new colleagues but never pays their family back on time.

£1m on two psychiatrists

The kind of person who puts off making hard choices and chucks cash at problems rather than sorting them out. These flaws might be forgivable in a friend when it’s a few quid here or there, but less in the SNP government when it’s costing millions of taxpayers’ money.

For example, rather than getting a grip of NHS recruitment, the SNP is spending millions hiring locum psychiatrists ‘off-framework’, with one NHS board spending more than £1 million on two psychiatrists in a single year.

Meanwhile, the SNP has lost control of NHS waiting lists to the point that NHS staff who spend years waiting for a hip replacement end up quitting instead. And more than £1.3 billion has been lost due to delayed discharge since the SNP promised to eradicate the practice in February 2015.

Rachel Reeves will make history as the first UK female Chancellor to deliver the Budget (Picture: Leon Neal) | Getty Images

SNP incompetence

Health is my brief but you see the same pattern in everything that the SNP touches. Remember the ScotWind fund that was supposed to provide for future generations before the SNP raided it? Or the £4.2 million the SNP government spent on press officers in just one year?

If the SNP were better at spending the money in the first place, they wouldn’t need so many spin doctors because the results would speak for themselves.

The fact is that, while the UK Labour government has been in power for three months, the SNP has been in power for 17 years. The UK Labour Budget will invest in growth and public services. The SNP's own Budget increasingly looks like a shambles and demonstrates their continuing financial incompetence.

At the weekend, the Greens walked away from the SNP’s controversial National Care Service, a Bill that has already cost millions without hiring a single extra carer. Now they are threatening to pull the plug on the Budget itself.

In the coming months, the SNP will need to win over their former pals or do what they’ve been avoiding for 17 years and listen to their critics. That’s harder than shouting from the opposition benches in Westminster, but it’s the only way to deliver for the people of Scotland.

This is the time for the SNP to put country before party – and our NHS can’t wait.

Jackie Baillie is MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader and her party’s spokesperson for health