RHETORIC DOESN’T MATCH REALITY

APPROACHING 100 days of this newly elected SNP Government, it looks identical to the SNP Government that has failed Scotland for the past 14 years. It’s already apparent that they are only offering more of the same old inaction, delays and grievances. They can’t even stick to targets that they set themselves.

During the Scottish parliament election campaign, they announced a plan for their ‘first 100 days’ as a government. We’ll reach that point, 100 days since the election, very soon. You would expect that the SNP would be closing in on every target. After all, they wrote this document themselves.

But the SNP can’t even live up to their own expectations. They set the bar low and still they can’t reach it. They’re on course to break roughly a dozen promises across health, education, the environment and several other crucial areas.

We’re barely three months into a new term of the Scottish parliament and already it’s the same old SNP, letting down Scotland with their abject failure to match rhetoric with reality.

The promises they made were on some of the biggest issues facing the country and still they’ve flopped. They pledged to vaccinate all adults, so we can move on from Covid faster.

Despite the huge success of the

UK vaccine scheme overall, the SNP won’t even come close to meeting that target on current trends.

It’s likely they will miss it by hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses, unless they make massive improvements.

They pledged to publish an NHS Recovery Plan, to cut down on treatment times and remobilise our health services quickly.

They might well manage to cobble together a plan at the last minute in the coming weeks, but there’s no sign of it right now.

That should have been one of their first priorities. But already, Humza Yousaf is proving to be just as poor a health secretary as he was a justice minister.

And they pledged to launch a Scottish-specific Covid inquiry, so we can learn the lessons from all the huge mistakes the SNP Government made, of which we know there are many.

Even though it’s in everyone’s interests to know how and why things went wrong, especially in the early days of the pandemic when so many people were sent to care homes carrying Covid, they show no signs of delivering this promise either.

Instead, all we’re getting is typical SNP deflection.

Deflecting is all they can do to hide their missed targets and they know that themselves.

The SNP spin machine is already going to work. We’ve already heard that they’re going to try and claim – wait for it – that the 100 days shouldn’t start from the day of the election result. No, in SNP fantasyland, the 100 days should start weeks later.

Have you ever heard something so plainly absurd?

They treat the Scottish public like fools, expecting to get away with it. Of course, their biggest deception has been over the constitution.

They promised Scottish voters that, for at least 100 days, they wouldn’t push for another divisive independence referendum.

Before the results were even in, hours before we knew the Scottish Conservatives had retained 31 seats and won more than 100,000 extra votes, Nicola Sturgeon was already setting up yet another constitutional showdown.

And ever since, they’ve been looking for any opportunity to create a fight with the UK Government. It doesn’t matter the topic – vaccine passports, freeports, drug deaths – they have no interest in working constructively.

For the SNP, every issue is just another excuse to agitate for independence. Last week, we learned that behind the scenes they’ve been readying to ramp up their push for indyref2 at their annual conference next month.

When we should all be fully focused on Scotland’s recovery, the SNP’s eyes are off the ball again.

For Nicola Sturgeon, there is only ever one priority.

For all her claims of communicating at a ‘higher level of intelligence’ than the rest of us, she’s got no chance of convincing people across Scotland that breaking up the country is the right thing to do, especially now, when we’re facing the ongoing threat of a health and economic crisis.

Their promise to people across Scotland to focus on rebuilding the country over independence was always bogus.

Now it is in tatters for everyone to see. Once again, all they can do is try to spin their way out of it.

You’ll hear Nicola Sturgeon claim that independence is ‘essential’ to Scotland’s recovery and that without it, we won’t be able to get back on our feet.

It’s a desperate throw of the dice from a faltering Nationalist campaign. Their obsession with another referendum is exactly why they’re failing to tackle the deep problems they’ve created over the past 14 years. Distraction gets in the way of delivery.

Scotland suffers again, all because the SNP don’t fixate on improving schools, hospitals or our economy. They fixate on breaking up the United Kingdom, whatever the cost to the country.

Another government, a Scottish Conservative government, would have put ideology aside and done everything in our power to meet these first 100 days pledges.

That’s the way it should be – it’s what people expect and deserve.

We wouldn’t be keeping Scotland stuck with Covid rules like face masks in schools.

We would be moving on, cautiously but confidently, and taking Scotland forward at a faster pace.

Instead, the SNP have lurched from one Covid guidance shambles to another since Tuesday’s announcement.

If we were in the SNP’s place as Scotland’s government, we would be rolling out the vaccine faster.

For weeks, we have been calling for the SNP to make vaccines more accessible and expand their marketing schemes so we reached more young people.

Only recently have the SNP even started to listen and make some of the right moves.

And, if we had the privilege to serve the people of Scotland, we

Every issue is just another excuse to agitate for independence

They treat the Scottish public like fools, expecting to get away with it

would not be working behind the scenes on how to divide the country. Another referendum would be off the table.

Instead, we would be working day and night on our legislative programme to improve Scotland.

We’ve set out plans for 15 bills over the next Scottish parliament and, as the government, we would have already used the vast resources at their disposal to immediately enact emergency legislation to tackle the scourge of drug deaths and spread economic growth across the country with an Enterprise Bill.

We’re serious about becoming Scotland’s real alternative to the Nationalists at Holyrood because, in their first 100 days, the SNP will not come close to meeting the promises they made.

They’re already breaking the trust of Scottish voters.

As time goes on, it’s going to become even clearer that this is a government out of ideas and cut off from the needs of real people.

It has lost whatever direction it had. There is no vision for improving Scotland. Not a shred of determination to restore our schools to their historic strengths.

No clue of what’s happening on the frontline of our NHS.

In 100 days, it looks like this SNP Government will have already broken its key election promises.

For the next five years, the Scottish people deserve better than the same dreary pattern of wildly overpromising and woefully underdelivering.