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On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I do not think that my app connected. I would have voted yes.

On a point of order, Deputy Presiding Officer. My app did not connect; I would have voted yes.

Today is the day when years of gross mismanagement of the public finances by SNP ministers caught up with them, and the price is being paid by ordinary Scots. Let us be crystal clear: by no definition—other than the SNP’s—can the budget that it receives be described as representing austerity. Scotland’s budget will increase in real terms each and every year of this forecast. There is an additional £9.1 billion for Scottish public services and, by 2029-30, the block grant will be £52 billion. This SNP Government is making cuts because it has spectacularly mismanaged Scotland’s budget. SNP ministers have created a structural deficit of a staggering £2.6 billion as a result of the choices that they have made. The SNP’s cuts plans set out huge reductions in front-line workers and a 12 per cent funding cut to Scotland’s NHS boards.

This comes at a time when, only yesterday, we learned of soaring accident and emergency waiting times and the worst cancer waiting times on record, with SNP ministers admitting that people are dying as a result of the incompetence. Domestic abuse statistics are at record highs and house building rates are plummeting down, down, down. These are cuts to mitigate their incompetence. It has never been clearer that Scotland needs a new direction. This SNP Government has the powers and the money. Is it not right that it is out of ideas, out of excuses and out of time?

I thank Professor Gillies for her report, which lays bare the financial vandalism of three individuals in particular. There is real relief in Dundee that there is now a greater understanding and acknowledgement of the conduct of management and the collapse of effective governance at the university. We all have to focus on building a sustainable future for the city’s most important institution.

The university submitted a request for a further £100 million to the Scottish Government on 30 May, which was 25 days ago. Almost one month on from that, will the cabinet secretary set out to us what additional scrutiny of that request is required?

The cabinet secretary acknowledged that income growth from international recruitment is not a realistic option for Scottish universities. Where will Dundee university find the money to repay up to £60 million of loans, whether that is from the Government or from a commercial source? The Scottish Government has already given the green light for 300 jobs to be cut but, without income growth, will further cost cutting not be inevitable? How does the cabinet secretary think that that circle can be squared?

I thank the minister for advance sight of his statement. I must say that I find it increasingly worrying that, over recent weeks, the SNP has opposed above-average increases in spending on defence, given the headlines that we have seen in recent days.

It is thanks to the Labour Government’s record investment that the signs are good and that we will perhaps not have a chaotic in-year emergency budget this year. However, given the SNP’s financial record, who knows? The question is now about delivery. Statistics that came out today—the First Minister is nodding, so he must know what is coming—show that we have atrocious accident and emergency waiting times, the worst cancer waiting times on record, domestic abuse near a 50-year high, and plummeting house-building rates. It is obvious that, under the SNP, Scotland is going in the wrong direction. What is the SNP going to do to turn Labour’s record investment into delivery?

In what is a feat of surprisingly accurate economic analysis that you would not expect from the acolytes of Liz Truss, the Scottish Tories have pinpointed one of the deep problems at the heart of Scotland’s finances. That problem is, of course, the Scottish National Party Government. It has an abysmal record of 18 years of waste, incompetence and, increasingly, chaos—£6.7 billion of taxpayers’ money wasted on ferries that do not sail, prisons that do not get built, a deposit return scheme that did not recycle a single bottle and a national care service that did not employ a single carer. Hard-working Scots are literally paying the price of SNP failure, with over £1.6 billion spent on the scandal of delayed discharge because the SNP cannot get Scotland’s NHS working.

Normally, whenever I lay out that litany of waste, it is met with complaint and howls of derision from SNP members, but it is good to have supporters on the front bench today, with the belated admission that, by their own estimates, they waste £1 billion a year. That is, of course, on top of the tally that I have just laid out.

Scotland has also suffered from the chaos and financial mismanagement of finance secretaries, who, with one exception, still sit around the Cabinet table. There has been failure to supply crucial information to the independent forecaster, refusal to publish core documents, including a pay policy, capital spending plans and the medium-term financial strategy, and chaotic, knee-jerk in-year announcements such as the council tax freeze that nobody knew about. Party politics is always put first.

Budget after budget does not even last six months, and there have now been three consecutive years of emergency in-year cuts slashing funding across the board to balance the books. There really is no other word for it—it is complete and utter chaos.

The Labour Party believes strongly in progressive taxation, but to ensure public support for progressive taxation, we have to show people what they get in return, and the SNP has utterly failed to do that. Every year, Scots are paying more and getting less in return. One in six Scots is on an NHS waiting list, schools are sliding down the international league tables, there is a housing emergency and councils are cutting key services. Better public services, more investment and a better standard of living is what people should be getting from paying their fair share in tax, but, under the SNP, that could not be further from the truth.

Meanwhile, the Tories have failed to acknowledge the economic and fiscal realities in which the UK operates. British public finances were left in a truly terrible state by the previous Tory Government. Over 14 years, it presided over a low-wage, no-growth economy. It inflicted austerity on public services, doing lasting damage to them all. It crashed the economy, sending interest rates spiralling. It presided over a cost of living crisis with sky-high inflation not seen since the 1970s. It closed the last Parliament with living standards lower than they were at the opening of that Parliament for the first time since the Napoleonic wars. It spent the last year of that Parliament promising money that it did not have in a desperate attempt to buy votes, leaving a gaping black hole in Britain’s public finances. It spent the annual national reserve three times over in the first three months of that year, Mr Hoy. All of that left the incoming UK Labour Government with a major clean-up operation to undertake. There was no apology, no humility and no shame from the Conservatives.

Frankly, the Conservatives’ plans today are not worthy of the back of a fag packet. This afternoon, they have brought half-baked, reheated tax cuts to the Parliament, and we should not believe a word of it. Cutting down on quangos would not deliver the savings that are needed for such drastic tax cuts; they would surely mean deep cuts to core public services such as our NHS. The Scottish Fiscal Commission has projected that the NHS will account for an increasingly large share of the Scottish budget: up to almost 55 per cent in the next 50 years. With an ageing population, that investment is absolutely essential. Are the Conservatives really proposing that we defund our NHS to fund tax cuts?

The UK Labour Government is facing up to the mess that both parties here in the chamber have made of our country. Last week’s game-changing spending review saw record investment for Scotland, with a £9.1 billion boost to Scotland’s budget—the highest settlement in the history of devolution.

To give you the words of the Daily Record, the Chancellor’s spending review

“means the SNP Government can no longer blame Westminster for Scotland’s ills. Successive SNP First Ministers have cited UK Government austerity as the reason for struggling services. Rachel Reeves, who has handed Holyrood an extra £9.1bn, has called time on that excuse.”

Enough of the excuses from the SNP. Enough of the half-baked ideas from the Tories. Let us get our economy moving.

I move amendment S6M-17980.1, to leave out from “believes” to end and insert:

“understands that the Scottish National Party administration has wasted in excess of £6.7 billion of taxpayers’ money since 2007; believes that the Scottish Government’s reckless spending and failure to grow Scotland’s economy has led to an overreliance on tax increases to plug annual budget gaps; welcomes the UK Government’s decision to decisively end austerity, deliver a record budget settlement for Scotland, and pledge an extra £9.1 billion over the next three years, and believes that the Scottish Labour Party’s plan to establish a Scottish treasury with strategic oversight for spending in all Scottish Government departments is essential in order to put an end to waste and ensure that people in Scotland get value for money.”

I welcome the new consensus in Scottish politics, which has been signed up to by all sides—and perhaps even by artificial intelligence—that the Scottish Government is wasting a massive amount of money. Clearly, we will hear more about that tomorrow in a well-advertised statement: Willie Rennie expects it to be very boring but, hopefully, very detailed. The minister is well aware that the Parliament’s Finance and Public Administration Committee has been calling for a proper programme of public service reform for years now, and many independent bodies have bemoaned the fact that there has been no evidence of it as such.

This is a Tory debate, and we have heard the Tories’ proposition based on their recently published policy document. I gave it its second download just this afternoon, and a thriller it is. There are plenty of pictures of Russell Findlay looking moody. Does he ever look anything but? It sets a savings target of some £642 million. It identifies a £1.5 million saving by closing Architecture and Design Scotland. Unfortunately, however, £500 million of the heavy lifting is to be saved by drawing a target around that figure on one of the pages of the document. That is how the money is to be saved. It is a project to save half a billion pounds with no detail whatsoever about how to do it.

The rest of the money is to be saved by

“STOPPING THE WASTED TIME ON WOKE”.

That is a risible attempt at an intervention in the public spending debate, which is not worth the publication at all. It is right-wing populism by numbers. It is fantastical nonsense.

That brings me, in part, to Kenny Gibson’s speech and his rejection of the tax changes that the UK Labour Government has put in place. He is of course right to point out some of the challenges that arise from those tax changes. Unfortunately, the SNP Government has rejected the entirety of the tax adjustments of some £45 billion, which have had to be used to try to rescue the public finances from the mess left by the Tory Government.

It does not stop there. Prior to the UK budget that was set out last autumn, there were demands from the SNP Government for £70 billion of additional spending—and the Scottish Government did not stop there. In the run-up to the spending review, just in the past few weeks, there was another £20 billion-worth of demands for public spending.

In total, there were £90 billion-worth of demands, with a complete rejection of £45 billion for raising the money. That is not credible and not sensible. Frankly, for a Scottish Government that wants to engage with the UK Government on a proactive basis and on a proper level, as we regularly hear from the cabinet secretary, it is not fit for purpose—far from it.

Last week, we had the unedifying spectacle of the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government agreeing with Alba and Reform that the Barnett formula should be scrapped in Scotland. It is utter nonsense to give up voluntarily an additional 20 per cent for spending on public services in Scotland.

Lorna Slater asked about the funding of public services across the rest of the UK. She might have missed the massive expansion of free school meals south of the border, but she will know that £9.1 billion of additional spending is coming to Scotland.

I pay tribute to Daniel Johnson’s very relevant observation that the date of 2016 is incredibly important to the fiscal framework in this country. I advise the cabinet secretary to revise her speaking notes on that basis. The fact that UK GDP per head grew by 4.4 per cent, compared with the 2.6 per cent figure for Scotland, is critical to the economic performance gaps: it flows through the fiscal framework, to which the cabinet secretary is a signatory.

No, thank you, madam.

Members on these benches have been concerned from the outset about the scope of the bill. We do not believe that it is commensurate with the scale of the challenge that the Gaelic language faces. Experts have warned that, without very significant intervention, Gaelic could cease to exist as a living language in as little as a decade. Where possible, my colleague Pam Duncan-Glancy and I have sought to strengthen the bill. That is what my amendment in this group seeks to do.

I am glad that the Scottish Government now agrees with Scottish Labour that targets definitely need to be written into the bill, and I echo the Deputy First Minister’s words about our engagement and the pragmatic and open discussions that we have had to that end. I therefore welcome amendments 24 to 28, in the name of Kate Forbes. However, in order for targets to be effective, they must be meaningful, and I welcome the Deputy First Minister’s decision to not move amendment 29, in her name. Amendment 29 is a broader amendment. It uses the words

“numbers of persons with Gaelic language skills”,

which could include people who have spent a few hours on Duolingo. That would do nothing to arrest the decline of Gaelic as a living language in traditional Gaelic-speaking areas. If anything, I believe that it risks masking a precipitous and potentially terminal decline of Scotland’s ancient language.

Concerns were raised at stage 2 about the Scottish Government’s capacity to collect the relevant data for reporting on Gaelic, including targets. When I met the Deputy First Minister in February, her officials supplied a list of data that was already available to the Scottish Government and that would not require legislative change. We believe that there is also common ground in relation to not wishing to impose a great burden on public bodies in that regard, while trying to meet our shared ends and ensure that we have a robust set of rules. The categories that my amendment 30 proposes are covered by that pre-existing data.

Having suitable questions in the Scottish social attitudes survey and the Scottish household survey would help to capture the number of people, including the number of children, in our households who use the Gaelic language. School figures, the survey of school subject availability and the data on achievement of curriculum for excellence—ACEL—would all help to establish how much education and training are taking place in, or through the medium of, the Gaelic language.

The Scottish Government could conduct an analysis of economic and social data linked with Gaelic from bodies such as MG Alba and Highlands and Islands Enterprise, which would contribute to an understanding of the number of businesses and other bodies that use Gaelic as their main language.

The Scottish Government could also do more to compile data on the economic and social impact of Gaelic. MG Alba and others already collect and publish data that would paint a picture of activity relating to Gaelic culture.

As we know, the Government’s targets across a wide range of policy areas have done nothing to guarantee progress. However, I believe that having targets in this context will strengthen the bill somewhat and keep the focus on the survival of our ancient language. We cannot wait a decade for another census to happen. There is every chance that that would be too late.

I ask all members to support amendment 30.