It was a depressing day in Holyrood yesterday as the SNP/Green budget passed. An unfunded Council Tax freeze crippling Scottish Councils, affordable housing cut by a third in the middle of a massive housing emergency, mental health support cut, education cut.

There was never a cat in hell’s chance that Lib Dems would vote for such an ill thought through budget. Alex Cole-Hamilton explained why:

In this budget, the Scottish Government is reaching for more tax rises. It is punishing low and middle-income families through fiscal drag, it is taking a hammer to the green renewables piggy bank and it is cutting public services for young and old alike. Why? It is doing so because Scottish National Party and Green ministers are completely out of ideas about how to spark growth, drive innovation or enlarge the tax base sustainably. They have a habit of making costly blunders—for example, the two ferries that are rusting in dry dock, the botched deposit return scheme, the independence papers and the selling of Scotland’s prized sea bed on the cheap. Next in their sights is the clueless and bureaucratic billion-pound ministerial takeover of social care that we are set to debate this week. In every case, taxpayers and public services are expected to pay the price.

The Government is out of touch and is taking people for granted. One thing that it must realise is that it needs the talents of everyone in order to grow the economy and make our country fairer. There is an intrinsic link between the health of our people and the health of our economy. People are waiting in pain for long-overdue operations. Their conditions are worsening by the day. It can take years for people to get the mental health treatment that they desperately need, which means that they cannot get on in life. There are now around 200,000 people in Scotland who are out of work because of mental ill health, long Covid and long-term conditions. According to the Our Scottish Future think tank, that costs our economy £870 million a year.

The longer people are out of work, the worse their prospects become. The longer they wait to be treated, the greater the cost to the NHS. That is why making yet another cut to overwhelmed mental health services makes no sense whatsoever.

The SNP’s choice to freeze all NHS building plans—to put a hard stop on those construction projects—for two years is damaging. That includes the national treatment centres, which were once heralded as the cure for our waiting lists. That halts the much-needed replacement of the Belford hospital in Fort William and the upgrading and refurbishment of Caithness general hospital alongside the Princess Alexandra eye pavilion, which Sarah Boyack rightly mentioned. We need to see joined-up thinking and an understanding that there is an element of spending to save—a preventative agenda.

The same can be said about the 33 per cent cut to the more homes budget, which is totally disproportionate to the challenges that exist within the Scottish Government’s own capital budget. This morning, we learned that homelessness applications are at their highest level since records began, in 2002, with an 8 per cent increase in children in temporary accommodation.

Members should look at some of the things that are being said by the housing and poverty organisations that, together, wrote an excoriating letter to the Government. They said that the Government is “perpetuating housing inequality” and risking the transition to net zero, and that its cut to the affordable housing budget is

“baffling in the face of spiralling homelessness”.

Those are not my words—they are their words.

The priority that is being placed elsewhere in the budget on social security risks being undermined entirely by that myopic approach to housing. In the cost of living crisis, housing accounts for a huge proportion of household budgets, and cutting housing will push more people into homelessness and precarious situations.

At the most recent election, there was an SNP manifesto commitment to hire 3,500 additional teachers—we heard something about that from Mr Marra—and classroom assistants alongside them. However, teacher numbers have fallen in the two years since then. Members should look at SNP-run Glasgow, where 172 teaching posts are now on the chopping block. The Times Educational Supplement Scotland has uncovered that that is part of a plan to cut 450 posts over three years.

Across the country, we will see bigger class sizes and more pupils becoming disengaged or excluded from school. That is particularly devastating for newly qualified teachers who were attracted to the profession by the Government’s promise of work.

Where is the plan to lift up Scottish education? We do not have in-class support for pupils, who are disappearing. Teachers are dipping into their own pockets to pay for basic equipment. Workloads are out of control. The Government is complacent about school violence and it refuses to put any money into fixing the dangerous concrete that exists in the roofs above the heads of our pupils.

Scotland has just recorded its worst-ever scores in the international education rankings, and the SNP-Green budget will make it significantly harder for that to be turned around. There is also a real danger that the Government is on the verge of taking colleges, universities and apprenticeships for granted. We cannot allow our excellent institutions to be downgraded in the way that they are being. In the words of the National Union of Students Scotland, the £100 million cut

“will mean fewer courses, fewer staff and fewer opportunities”.

It will damage key industries that are experiencing skills shortages, especially in renewable technology.

Therefore, I cannot fathom why the SNP and Green members are backing that cut. Why is there an indifference to what is going on? The budget as a whole will starve Scotland of the climate-friendly initiatives, jobs and skills that are needed to kick-start growth and to enable us to compete in the race for the industries of the future.

Cutting drugs funding will also mean that more people will end up requiring emergency healthcare or will be lost to us entirely in our spiralling drug deaths emergency.

More education cuts will punish pupils, students and anyone who is looking to upskill and retrain for a better life for themselves and their families. If SNP and Green ministers want to take credit for the extra funding that is being invested in pay deals and in social security, so, too, must they take responsibility where painful cuts are being made.

We will not vote for the budget, because people need a liberal budget that invests in local services, mental health and growing the economy; that enables businesses and entrepreneurs to prosper; and that generates the tax revenue that we need to lift up Scottish education, rescue the NHS and build more warm homes.