Chickens come home to roost for the SNP - Alex Cole-Hamilton

Finance Secretary Shona Robison gives a Scottish Government Pre-Budget Fiscal Update at Holyrood on Tuesday, September 3. Picture: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire.

Who have only ever known the rancour and division of the independence debate. Who have been taught in schools which have had to put up with ministers who care more about breaking up the UK than improving learning. And who have seen their standard of living diminish along with their access to timely healthcare.

These young people have had to listen to nationalist ministers lay the blame for all of these failings in public service at someone else’s door, despite Scotland having had its own devolved parliament and government for a quarter of a century. This week the chickens have come home to roost for the SNP.

Finance Secretary Shona Robison has outlined the grim reality of Scotland’s public coffers. An eye watering black hole in their spending plans (which they should have seen coming) means devastating in-year spending cuts. That will cause real pain to households across Scotland.

Of course, there was a vain attempt once again to cast this as entirely the fault of the UK government, but unluckily for Shona Robison, the Scottish Fiscal Commission had already blown the whistle on that. The commission produces Scotland’s official, independent economic and fiscal forecasts to accompany the Scottish Government budget cycle and acts as the government’s financial watchdog in a similar manner to the Office of Budgetary Responsibility in London.

In a devastating report they revealed: “If a budget is set based on pay assumptions which are lower than those that materialise, this creates challenges with in-year management of the budget, requiring the government to reduce its planned spending on services. The recent emergency spending controls the Scottish government has put in place for 2024-25 are the result of those challenges.”

Other independent experts agree that the government has tied itself in knots and failed to grow the economy. To be clear, I don’t have a problem with giving our public sector workforce the pay they deserve, but the SNP have done that against a backdrop of nearly two decades of economic incoherence and blunders.

I said this is about chickens coming home to roost because we can’t forget the hundreds of millions of pounds ploughed into two ferries that have yet to carry passengers. Civil servants worked on vacuous papers about the supposed case for independence. Up to £2 billion has been earmarked for a vast and unnecessary ministerial power grab over social care services, rather than putting the money towards care workers’ pay and conditions. And if Scotland’s prize seabed hadn’t been sold on the cheap then the windfall from the windfarms that will be built upon it would have been so much bigger. The list goes on and on.

All the while, people are working harder, but they feel like they are falling further behind. They’ll be thinking about that when they are next asked to cast their vote. That can’t come soon enough. We need rid of this tired government and across Scotland, as we demonstrated at the general election, the Scottish Liberal Democrats are ready to play our part in what comes next.

There was a time when the SNP were able to pull off the remarkable trick of appearing anti-establishment whilst being in government. Something tells me that those first-time voters, born the year the SNP came to power won’t be falling for that trick anytime soon.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is MSP for Edinburgh West and leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats