Socialist Party Scotland
The Scottish government draft budget for 2025/26 was unveiled this week. SNP finance secretary Shona Robison described the backdrop: “The UK Budget resulted in an increase in funding through the Barnett formula….After inflation, it represents growth in day-to-day spending to pay for services of only around 1% year on year.”
As we said after Rachel Reeves’ Westminster budget: “underfunded public services will continue to be underfunded, austerity will remain and working-class people will continue to be asked to pay the price for the crisis of British capitalism.” No surprise then that the Scottish budget will do exactly the same.
Typically for the SNP-led government, Robison went on: “This Government has had to take difficult decisions to manage financial pressures.” ‘Difficult decisions’ are SNP and Labour speak for continued cuts and underfunding to local government, housing and the NHS.
Headlines like “record funding” for the NHS and local government are meaningless in the context of more than a decade of cuts and austerity. With inflation eating into budgets and increased demands for health and social care services – the reality is waiting lists will grow and budgets will fail to cover demand.
two-child cap
Much was made of the intention to mitigate the hated two-child benefit cap, but not until April 2026. In truth, this will do little to alleviate child poverty which currently affects 240,000 children who are living in relative poverty in Scotland. And that figure is increasing. While welcome, if it happens, it will benefit 15,000 children. The key issues of benefit cuts and low pay – working families make up the majority of those where children grow up in poverty – are decisive.
As it is, the SNP pledge is clearly designed to be timed for the next Scottish parliament election in 2026 and an attempt to outflank Labour with Starmer keeping the Tory policy in place.
This follows on from the SNP’s announcement that it will introduce a universal winter fuel payment, but not until next year. By refusing to use their powers to mitigate Starmer’s cut this year they are letting down up to 800,000 pensioners in Scotland. As important would be fighting for the nationalisation of the energy companies under workers’ control to slash bills to help end fuel poverty.
housing
The SNP were rightly hammered last year for cutting the funding for affordable housing at the same time as declaring a housing emergency. This budget promises a £768 million investment in affordable homes – yet that only reverses the cuts from last year.
So far behind are the Scottish government on their housing targets that an estimated investment of £9 billion is needed by 2032 to build the promised 110,000 affordable and social housing units, 70% for social rent.
The 8,000 homes to be built/started this year will see them fall even further behind the modest target they set. Meanwhile homelessness and housing waiting lists are at record levels.
Local government is going to see further cuts to council budgets in February/March 2025. Even the Scottish Greens described the budget as representing: a “huge cut” to core council services like schools and social care. The Scottish Greens record of voting for cuts budgets in no sense means they will vote against this budget of course.
NHS
Bizarrely, Robison crowed that by March 2026 no one will wait longer than 12 months for a new outpatient appointment, inpatient treatment or day case treatment. That’s one year! No one believes these targets, not least after every single previous government target has failed to be delivered on. The headline £2 billion “uplift” in NHS spending for next year was undermined when the IFS report said her own figures in the budget showed it would only be half of that figure.
The huge underfunding crisis in Scottish colleges and universities will likewise not be relieved by the paltry amounts on offer in.
What is ever clearer following the draft budget is that working-class communities and trade unionists need their own political alternative. A mass workers’ party based on the trade unions and fighting on socialist policies would stand for public ownership and an end to all cuts.
Socialist Party Scotland will be championing the need for a major trade union and socialist election challenge for the Scottish elections in 2026. The urgency for this has been underlined a hundred times by the Starmer government’s betrayal, the SNP playing pass-the-parcel with Westminster cuts and, as a result, the inroads being made by Reform UK in working-class areas in Scotland.
