AS well as getting on the front foot on independence, the SNP need to be more proactive in countering disinformation, not least in the areas of local government funding and education. As a non-member it is pretty impossible to find rebuttals on their website, while tweets are quickly forgotten.
Labour’s repeated claims on council cuts since 2010 do not compare like with like, as taking Edinburgh as an example, prior to the formation of Police Scotland Edinburgh City Council contributed almost £46 million a year towards local policing but last year this was only £2.4m.
READ MORE: How can the SNP-run council defend cuts in Dundee?
Also, the official Scottish Government publication on the draft budget for 2019-20 clearly shows that the total financial allocation for local councils is increasing by £210m, or 2% in real terms, next year when you include council tax and ring-financed grants to protect core council services like health and education.
When asked recently in the Scottish Parliament, Labour’s finance spokesperson couldn’t name any council in Scotland that was getting less money next year under the SNP budget proposals.
By comparison, the Local Government Association revealed that funding for local services in England will be cut by a further £1.3 billion, or 6%, in 2019-20. And in Wales the Labour government is cutting local authority funding next year even before allowing for inflation and 28,000 local authority jobs have been lost since 2010, which is almost twice as many as in Scotland.
READ MORE: Citizens all have the same need of basic services
Unionists continually state that Scotland’s health service, education standards, policing and council services are going down the tubes under the SNP when the reality is that, despite Tory austerity, they are in a better shape than elsewhere in UK. Let’s have more comparisons with England and Wales and make detailed rebuttals easily available to those who want to counter such disinformation whether on the doorsteps, talking to friends or through the media.
Fraser Grant
Edinburgh
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