Prime minister Boris Johnson has criticised the Scottish government’s record on education and other policy areas, and said he would introduce measures to “compensate for the grave inadequacies” of the SNP.
In an interview with BBC Scotland, Mr Johnson said: “They [the SNP government] have the highest taxes anywhere in the UK. They are not doing a good job on health, they are not doing a good job on education.
“I hope the money that we are now investing is properly spent on those services.”
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But SNP depute leader Keith Brown said: “The last thing Scotland needs or wants is an ill-informed lecture like this from Boris Johnson.
“The reality is that the SNP Scottish government is delivering for people and communities, while under the Tories’ zombie administration Westminster has completely stopped governing.
“People across Scotland are looking on in horror at the chaos engulfing Westminster and the Brexit disaster being imposed on Scotland by Boris Johnson and his extremist cabal in Downing Street.”
This is not the first time a leading Tory Brexiteer has attacked Scottish education. In 2017, former Westminster education secretary Michael Gove - who attended a private school in Aberdeen and started his journalism career in the city - wrote: “The SNP’s adoption of a dumbed-down curriculum, its opposition to rigorous tests and open data on school performance and its hostility to more open data for headteachers has proved disastrous for Scots students.”
At the time, a Scottish government source denounced Mr Gove’s “ill-advised attempts to trash Scottish education [which] betray the astonishing arrogance of Westminster Tories fired up on Brexiteer rhetoric, who now think they can do anything to Scotland and get away with it”.
And in July this year, education consultant and former local authority children’s services director David Cameron - no relation to the former prime minister - penned a riposte for Tes Scotland after a former advisor to Michael Gove tweeted that Scottish education was a “disaster”.
