John Swinney blamed Margaret Thatcher for Scotland's health failures. (Image: Getty)
John Swinney has been slammed for suggesting that Margaret Thatcher is to blame for Scotland's healthcare failures over the last 17 years under the SNP.
The First Minister attempted to blame NHS failures such as drug deaths and delayed discharges on Thatcher's policies from the 1980s.
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His back-bench MSPs also came under fire as they were branded "clapping seals" while discussing Scotland's record number of drugs and alcohol-related deaths during FMQs
Swinney then took criticism for focussing too much on Scottish independence and not enough on prevalent healthcare failures.
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Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross called the SNP "bad for Scotland's health" and listed the party's failures from delayed discharge to thousands-long waiting lists.
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Swinney was accused of prioritising Scottish independence over improving healthcare. (Image: Getty)
Swinney said: "One of the things Douglas Ross put to me was about alcohol-related deaths and I want to share a quote with parliament because it's the type of evidence that the parliament has to chew over and consider when we're dealing with the kind of rhetoric that we hear from Douglas Ross.
"Professor Jamie McCartney, the professor of wellbeing and economy at Glasgow University, said this, and I quote, 'You see lag defects from decades ago of urban planning, policy decisions, and the 1980s economic changes, and how that translated into people's alcohol deaths a decade or two decades later.'
"So it is not unprecedented, I simply put that evidence to Parliament because we have to understand the consequences of the devastation wreaked on our country by the policies of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government."
Swinney was quick to receive fierce criticism for this as the SNP has been in power since 2007 and healthcare is devolved.
Ross hit back: "We know that apart from separating Scotland from the rest of the UK, nothing else matters to John Swinney. Independence will always come first before our NHS, before jobs, before schools, before the economy, before everything.
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"People up and down Scotland want the focus to be on these issues, the things that really matter today, but we all know what John Swinney wants.
"If it's not page one, line one, it's not the priority for the SNP. Right now in 2024, the SNP leader from 2004 is trying to take us back to the division of 2014.
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"We've had 17 years of decline and broken promises. Isn't it time to finally move on from the division of this SNP Government and focus on the issues that really matter in Scotland?"
He said Swinney was "blaming the failures here in Scotland now to a period before I was born, and apparently, it has nothing to do with the 17 years the SNP have been in charge".
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