SNP is to blame for health service’s ills

THE SNP threatened to shatter its House of Commons moratorium on voting on English-only matters to protect the health service south of the Border from the depredations of the evil Tories.

They were, the Nats pompously declared, ‘the guardians of the NHS’. How hollow those words ring now after a searing indictment of the party’s stewardship of health in Scotland from Audit Scotland.

In a thoroughgoing review, the independent body looked at all aspects of the NHS here – the funding challenges, the missed targets, the burgeoning drug costs and spiralling numbers of ruinously expensive agency staff.

Damningly, there are urgent concerns in every significant area. Patient safety is, daily, at risk. The report has horrible echoes of previous audits in which clear signals that fundamental change to the way the service is being run were needed.

After almost a decade in sole charge of the NHS, the failure to react lies entirely with the SNP. Hard-pressed frontline staff know better than anyone the depth of the crisis in our hospitals, health centres and GP surgeries.

Writing elsewhere on this page Theresa Fyffe, director of the Royal College of Nursing Scotland, delivers a devastating verdict: ‘The Scottish Government has set a direction of travel but has not said how we are going to get there.’

It is a story Scots who have lived under the SNP regime are all too familiar with.

The party is long on empty rhetoric, wedded to the fiction that Westminster austerity is to blame for every ill in Scotland. It can paint majestic pictures in the air – but crucial detail and the hard graft of delivery are beyond it.