POLITICS is about choices, and it’s about priorities.

As Joe Biden likes to say: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

This week the Scottish Budget, first presented by Deputy First Minister and Finance Secretary Shona Robison back in December, has been back before the Scottish Parliament.

And it does not hold up at all well to the president’s test.

It is a chaotic budget – found by the Scottish Parliament’s Finance Committee to be littered with errors, inconsistencies and missing key data – that will see working people paying more and getting less.

It is unfair – the Scottish Government claims to want those with the broadest shoulders to pay more, but under their plans everyone earning over £28,500 will pay more in tax than elsewhere in the UK.

It is also duplicitous: the health and local government budgets are shown to be increasing on paper, but the IFS think tank has revealed that they are in fact falling – at a time when local government and the vital services it provides are already at breaking point, and almost one in six Scots are stuck on NHS waiting lists.

It is years of savage budget cuts from this Scottish Government that have wrought so much damage upon Inverclyde’s public services and infrastructure, including the latest threat to Greenock’s police station about which the Tele is rightly campaigning.

Inverclyde Council under Stephen McCabe has worked exceptionally hard to deliver on the people’s priorities and preserve their services, but there is only so much local councils can do in the face of unprecedented cuts to their budgets year after year after year.

Inverclyde Council is currently consulting on £3m of potential upcoming budget cuts across 2024-26.

And what, meanwhile, ARE the Scottish Government’s priorities to spend money on? Almost £2 MILLION pounds of taxpayers’ money on an ongoing series of papers on Scottish independence for a referendum that won’t happen and the majority of Scots don’t want.

The list goes on.

It’s time this government got its priorities right.