THE VOTE to pass Scotland’s annual Budget is soon approaching. My party, Scottish Labour, has indicted it intends to abstain. This means the Budget is all but guaranteed to pass in February.

I would love to say this spells good news for councils, the NHS and workers across Scotland but the hard reality is that cuts are on the way, many of which were avoidable. There are many external factors contributing to that but government decisions from both London and Edinburgh are not helping. 

Based on the conversations I have when out speaking to communities and the organisations that sustain them, we need the Budget to pass in order to avoid instability during fraught economic times, yet we must work more constructively to avoid this situation arising every year. This Budget has to be seen as a missed opportunity by the Scottish government to push forward with investment in public services and to give many of our poorest areas much-needed funding. 

The UK Labour Budget delivered the largest settlement for the Scottish government in the history of devolution, that is not in question. I certainly do not agree with every aspect of that Budget and have been clear in my opposition to the changes to the winter fuel payment and failure to properly compensate the Waspi women among other things, but that does not excuse lacking ambition for Scotland. 

I will continue to push for reform in these areas as I view past manifestos I have stood on as promises to the public which I want to deliver where possible, but this system we have developed in which the Scottish government says it cannot get anything done due to the decisions of the UK government is just not true and furthermore it puts limitations on Scottish democracy.

This routine has been going on now for every year that I have been in Parliament since 2021 and it went on long before that as well. You simply cannot make serious progress if your first response to every proposal is that it is only possible with independence. 

The SNP benefits directly from this political tension and it knows that to be the case. There is no incentive to be bold because it believes (wrongly in my opinion) that voters will simply credit whomever is in government at Westminster with that progress. This diminishes the power of the Scottish Parliament and stops us considering serious reforms to taxation and spending because it is never quite the right time to take bold steps. 

There are more simple reforms too which are continuously passed over at Holyrood. I speak to young people every month who are doing well at school, college, or university and are desperate to get an apprenticeship at an engineering firm or a trainee position in the NHS etc and they simply cannot make it work because there is no funding to help them get to training and all the positions are nowhere near to where they live. 

Even if they can make it the actual number of apprenticeships to fill the vast number of vital jobs in renewables and tech sector simply do not exist. I am even meeting roofers and plumbers now who simply cannot find apprentices — that was a situation that was unheard of in the past and it is not due to a lack of interest.

The current First Minister has had just about every ministerial portfolio available at one point or another. How can it be that after almost 15 years of his party running Scotland this skills gap and access to meaningful secure work is only getting wider? The SNP could have used record levels of funding to deliver better outcomes right now for people like this. The costs are not gargantuan. Yet they have barely given any attention to it at all. 

These are the sorts of reforms we can do alongside the usual political positioning of a Budget. They are the kind of decisions any country looking towards the future has to make, yet for some reason Holyrood simply does not concern itself with them. 

We must do better, we cannot just fall back on thinking the private sector will do these things for us. Another decade of that kind of thinking and issues that currently seem troubling will turn into a full-blown economic crisis. 

Carol Mochan is Scottish Labour MSP for South Scotland Region.