Saving the NHS is Labour’s duty, for the SNP it’s just a game - Jackie Baillie

I know the country’s focus will move to football in the next few weeks but the SNP is already treating the future of the country as if it is just a game.

SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn’s facile attempt at covering the SNP’s track record on the NHS is to promise to introduce legislation to ensure the health service stays in public ownership.

Governing a country is a serious business and Stephen Flynn’s simplistic gimmick shows no serious engagement with the real world challenges the NHS faces, many of them created by his own government.

It is rank hypocrisy for the SNP to try and position themselves as the defenders of our NHS when they are responsible for the chaos engulfing services in Scotland.

Under the SNP, more and more people are being forced to pay for private healthcare in order to escape massive waiting lists. Private operations in Scotland are rising four times faster than they are in England.

After 17 years of SNP failure and 14 years of Tory failure our NHS is on life support and its founding principles are under threat.

While the SNP deflects responsibility and peddles gimmicks, Labour has a real plan to rescue our NHS.

Labour founded the NHS and we will always fight for it, starting by delivering an extra 160,000 appointments for Scotland every year funded by taxing non-doms who live in the UK but don’t pay their share right now.

Stephen Flynn is simply doing the Tories’ dirty work for them as he fabricates outright lies about privatisation to attack Labour.

He’s doing it because the SNP has finally woken up to the fact that a large flank of their MPs face being wiped out by Labour in next month’s election.

These are SNP MPs who will have to defend and explain why under their government almost one in six Scots are stuck on an NHS waiting list..

Incredible NHS staff, who work so hard to care for us, are exhausted and demoralised. Lives are being put at risk every single day because services cannot cope.But this can’t be as good as it gets. Our NHS needs change, and Labour is ready to deliver it.

Right across the UK, Labour will boost funding for public services. Our first step will be to deliver an extra £134million for the NHS in Scotland every single year. My message to the SNP is that they need to spend every single penny of that on the NHS. No ifs, no buts.

This would deliver the extra 160,000 appointments a year to cut waiting lists, clear the backlog and get people the care they need.

We will restore the founding promise of our NHS – healthcare free at the point of need - which the SNP has done so much to undermine.

Labour will fix the fundamentals and give our NHS a fighting chance but we need change in Holyrood too.

We need to end SNP incompetence, mismanagement and waste. We need a real workforce plan, to give our NHS and social care the staff they need. We need to end delayed discharge, which pours millions down the drain every single year.

In 1948 we created our NHS. In 1997 we rescued our NHS. The morning after the general election, 5th of July, will mark the 76th birthday of our NHS. That is the day Labour will begin the process of rescuing it again from SNP and Tory neglect.

It will be a serious job, not just a game of politics, and it needs a serious government.

This is the change Scotland needs. This is the change a Labour government will deliver.