LAST week the Scottish Parliament passed its first budget since last May’s Holyrood elections. 

Having been denied a majority in Holyrood last year Nicola Sturgeon and Derek Mackay were left with no option but to do a deal. In this case a deal with the Greens on taxation.

As a result, Scotland is now the highest taxed part of the UK.

My Conservative colleagues and I could not support this budget; neither did I think it worked for Scotland nor Inverclyde.

Despite the overall Scottish budget increasing the SNP have decided to cut back on local authority funding.

Under this budget Inverclyde’s overall revenue spending will be slashed by £4.6 million in the next financial year. 

It is only a matter of time before we start to see where these cuts will lie at a local level.

My vision is different. I want to spur businesses to create jobs, I want to attract investors to our shores and ensure that working families are able to take home more of the money that they earn. 

The rhetoric about ‘tax cuts for the rich’ doesn’t wash any more. At a time when there is a shortage of teachers, GPs, hospital consultants, software developers, engineers and a host of other professionals in Scotland, we shouldn’t be creating tax differentials with the rest of the UK.

This week was another week wasted not debating legislation. We were elected nearly a year ago and have yet to debate a Bill in the Scottish Parliament.

Let’s never forget that at the heart of SNP policy is the end game of Scottish independence. 

At any cost. Inverclyde, and Scotland as a whole, voted to stay in the UK in 2014 and the Scottish Government might be mindful to remember that.