SINCE BT Group announced their plans to close their Greenock call centre site, Labour have had daily column inches attempting to lay the blame for all of Inverclyde’s woes at the Scottish Government’s feet.

This is despite many of the acute problems affecting local people being decades in the making, and without any consideration for how decisions taken by the SNP government are often undermined by contrasting policies at Westminster.

For example, according to Official National Records of Scotland, Inverclyde has experienced continual population decline, as per the following figures: 101,182 (1981), 91,390 (1991), 84,150 (2001), 81,220 (2011) and 76,700 (2021). This matters because it affects the funding allocated to Inverclyde.

It therefore simply cannot be the case that issues dating back to the 1970s are solely the result or responsibility of an SNP government that first came to power in 2007.

When will Labour admit that this so-called Union of equals has failed Scotland and Inverclyde, and when will they accept that they’ve been the leading party at the council for all but seven years since 1975?

The SNP introduced the game-changing Scottish Child Payment to help address child poverty – but the Tories’ so-called welfare reforms have pushed more people into poverty during a cost-of-living crisis.

Fourteen long years of painful Westminster austerity has left the UK with lower living standards, stagnant wages and public services at breaking point – all made worse by a Brexit Inverclyde and Scotland did not vote for. Labour have also indicated they will not reverse this folly despite their own London Mayor publishing a report saying Brexit has already shrunk the UK economy by almost £140 billion.

People often judge the Scottish Government on devolved areas as if we were already an independent nation, despite budget decisions in London impacting here – for example, due to the complexities of the Barnett Formula, cuts to health spending in Westminster impact the funding available here in Scotland.

I make this point following the news that NHS building projects in Scotland have been put on hold, which I raised with the new Health Secretary in the chamber on Tuesday. In his response, he stressed how this is a consequence of the UK Government’s disastrous autumn statement and the Truss / Kwarteng budget experiment ensured Scotland’s capital budget was slashed.

Labour will argue that these are all reasons why Sir Keir Starmer needs to move into No. 10 despite following the Westminster consensus. For example, Starmer has vowed to retain the two-child benefit cap – despite top academics estimating that scrapping the cap would lift about 270,000 households with children out of poverty.

To go back to the raft of challenges facing Inverclyde; I believe the Scottish Government are part of the solution – but to let Westminster parties off scot-free for decades of underinvestment, both in Inverclyde and Scotland as a whole, is just ignorance.