THE First Minister met with Rishi Sunak on his first visit to Scotland since he was anointed as Prime Minister by Conservative MPs at the end of October last year.

Although Sunak is as intransigent and undemocratic as his predecessors, it is a small sign of some progress that he is meeting with the head of the Scottish Government.

His immediate predecessor, the equally mandate-free Liz Truss, did not even deign to make a phone call to the leaders of any of the devolved governments during her short time in office. Although, to be fair, she was far too busy crashing the economy and costing the public purse an estimated £30 billion – according to the Resolution Foundation think tank – to bother with trivialities like acknowledging that the United Kingdom is, in theory at least, a union of nations.

Sunak, to no-one's surprise, repeatedly refused to set out the democratic route to another independence referendum in this UK which he still insists is a voluntary union. That's because we all know, even if Sunak or Starmer dare not say so, there isn't one. For generations the British state has been founded on a lie.

READ MORE: Rishi Sunak REFUSES to set out Scottish independence referendum route

Aside from the constitutional issue, one of the most pressing topics of conversation during what was described as “perfectly cordial and constructive” talks was the crisis facing the NHS across the UK as a whole. While Sunak's Conservative subordinates in Holyrood love to pretend that this crisis is entirely the fault of Scottish Health Secretary Humza Yousaf, the problems are also occurring in England and Wales.

In England, ambulance response times and A&E delays are far worse than they are in Scotland. Funnily enough, Douglas Ross appears strangely reluctant to describe what's going on in the Conservative-controlled NHS in England as a “crisis”, thus illustrating his party's hypocrisy and naked opportunism.

In England, it is currently taking ambulance crews an average of an hour and a half to reach patients calling in with a category-two emergency such as a stroke, instead of the normal target time of 18 minutes. Early intervention is vital in stroke treatment, as I know from personal experience. It took the ambulance almost an hour to reach me when I suffered a stroke during the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020. This meant that by the time I reached hospital, medical staff had missed the time window to inject me with clot-busting drugs which could prevent brain damage and, as a consequence, I have been left with lifelong disabilities. 

This same fate is currently befalling stroke patients in England as a direct result of Conservative underfunding.

This is not merely a crisis, it is criminally negligent. These patients will require longer hospital stays, greater therapeutic intervention and more rehabilitation resources than they otherwise would have needed. They will go on to depend on a higher level of community care and support and will be entitled to higher levels of disability benefits, all of which entails a greater long-term cost to the public purse than should have been necessary, not to mention the emotional and psychological costs incurred in terms of personal loss and tragedy. Not properly funding front-line NHS services is a false economy.

As previously explained in this newsletter, the NHS across the UK as a whole is suffering systemic problems which are the cumulative result of decades of UK Government under-funding. The bottom line is that in order to alleviate the worst of the problems which are currently assailing the NHS and bringing the service to its knees, more money is needed. The £30 billion that Liz Truss squandered on her ideologically driven package of unfunded tax cuts for the rich which so spooked the markets and tanked the pound would have gone a very long way to resolving many of the problems that the NHS is facing.

So it was deeply disappointing, although not surprising, that Rishi Sunak, whose great wealth ensures that he is personally insulated from the health crisis because he can and does afford private health care, has refused to release more funds to the Scottish Government in order to avert strikes in the NHS.

Unlike the Westminster Government, the Scottish Government is constrained by the devolution settlement and lacks the power to raise the necessary funding through borrowing or tax measures other than an increase in income tax. All that the Scottish Government is able to do is to divert funding from other areas in order to prop up the health service, which naturally leads to the likes of Douglas Ross bleating about how the Scottish Government is betraying the public and calling for some other minister to resign.

This is the infantile game in which Scotland is trapped as long as we remain a part of this not-so-voluntary so-called Union.

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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