WITH less than a fortnight until the voters of Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse go to the polls in a Scottish parliamentary by-election, Labour has gone on the attack on health, while the Scottish Socialist Party has called for the council tax to be scrapped.

After a week which saw Labour’s South Lanarkshire campaign rocked by accusations that candidate Davy Russell was compromised by a conflict of interest after it was revealed he had worked for a firm accused of falsifying maintenance records in its contract with neighbouring North Lanarkshire Council, Labour has shifted focus to the Scottish NHS.

It accused the SNP of having presided over a collapse in GP practices, after BMA figures revealed numbers had fallen by 11 per cent since 2013 despite patient numbers growing by 8 per cent. Over that time, practice lists surged by an average of 21 per cent — but in South Lanarkshire by 25 per cent, equivalent to 1,500 new patients.

Scottish Labour’s Jackie Baillie said: “The hundreds of GP practices that vanished in a decade should be a wake-up call: primary care is at breaking point on the SNP’s watch. 

“The SNP must listen to GPs and deliver on its broken promises before it’s too late.”

Scottish Socialist Party candidate Collette Bradley, meanwhile, pledged to table a Bill to scrap the council tax if elected on June 5, arguing: “The SNP promised to abolish [it] during the 2007 Scottish elections, which helped them win. But 18 years later, they’ve done absolutely nothing to carry out that promise, including during their coalition with the Scottish Greens.

“It’s time for change, socialist change. One important step in that direction would be immediate abolition of the council tax and its replacement by the SSP’s progressive income-based alternative, the Scottish service tax.”