I sat through the entirety of the Scottish Government’s budget announcement last month. Every word. Every figure. Every carefully rehearsed pause for emphasis. And when it was over, I felt something I have felt too many times in recent years: a deep, grinding disappointment.
Not anger. Not outrage. Those emotions require surprise, and there was nothing surprising about what was laid before the Scottish Parliament on that cold December afternoon. Just the same tired language, the same reshuffled priorities, the same fundamental unwillingness to confront what is actually happening in this country.
Let me be specific. The NHS in Scotland is not merely struggling. It is buckling. I have a neighbour in Leith who waited fourteen months for a hip replacement. Fourteen months of pain, of reduced mobility, of watching her garden grow wild because she could not bend to tend it. She is seventy three. She has paid taxes her entire working life. And the budget’s answer to her situation is a modest increase in health spending that will be swallowed whole by inflation and staff costs before it reaches a single waiting list.
Then there is education. I grew up in Fife, in a household where education was treated as something close to sacred. My father left school at fifteen but he made certain his children understood that learning was the one ladder nobody could pull away from you. He would not recognise what is happening in Scottish schools today. Teacher shortages in rural areas. Crumbling buildings in our cities. A widening attainment gap that every education secretary promises to close and none ever does.
The budget allocates money, yes. But allocating money and solving problems are two very different things. You can pour water into a bucket with holes in the bottom and technically say you filled it. That does not mean anyone gets a drink.
What frustrates me most is the performance of it all. The Finance Secretary stood at the despatch box and spoke about “transformational investment” and “building a fairer Scotland” as though these phrases still carried weight. They do not. They have been worn smooth by overuse, like pebbles on the shore at Portobello. Nobody believes them anymore. Not the nurses working double shifts at the Royal Infirmary. Not the teachers buying classroom supplies out of their own pockets. Not the council workers in Dundee who have not had a meaningful pay rise in years.
I am not a man who demands perfection from government. I understand constrained budgets. I understand the limitations of devolved power. I understand that Holyrood cannot simply conjure money from thin air. But I do demand honesty. Tell us what you cannot do. Tell us where the choices are painful. Stop pretending that a three percent increase here and a new fund there amounts to a vision for Scotland’s future.
The opposition, I should note, was no better. The Conservatives offered their usual prescription of tax cuts, which in the current climate is about as useful as offering a plaster to someone with a broken leg. Labour talked about growth without explaining where it would come from. The Greens proposed ideas that were admirable in theory and impossible in practice. The whole thing felt like a play where everyone knows their lines but nobody believes in the story anymore.
Here is what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear someone say that Scotland’s public services are in genuine crisis and that fixing them will require difficult decisions that will make people uncomfortable. I wanted to hear a plan for the Highlands and Islands that goes beyond broadband promises. I wanted to hear an honest conversation about local government funding, because our councils are starving and everyone in Scottish public life knows it but nobody wants to be the one who says so plainly.
Scotland deserves better than a budget that manages expectations downward while pretending to aim high. We are a nation of five million people with extraordinary universities, a thriving cultural sector, and communities that still know their neighbours’ names. We have the talent and the will. What we lack, increasingly, is political leadership willing to match our ambitions with honest action.
I will be watching Holyrood closely in the months ahead. I suspect I will be disappointed again. But I refuse to stop expecting better. That is the least Scotland deserves.
