The SNP has suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of one of its own former MSPs who rejected the party's praise of the Finance Secretary's budget, opposition parties say.
Jean Urquhart vetoed an SNP bid to steer Holyrood's Finance Committee to support John Swinney's 2013/14 draft budget.
The SNP motion said Mr Swinney's budget plan "encourages sustainable growth", but Ms Urquhart voted with Tory and Labour MSPs to reject it.
Ms Urquhart resigned from the party in October alongside fellow SNP rebel John Finnie over the party's new support for Nato, reducing the SNP's parliamentary majority to one.
The resignations shifted the balance of power on three Holyrood committees, with the SNP now in a minority on the finance, justice and equal opportunities committees.
Labour Finance Committee member Michael McMahon accused the SNP members, which include convener Kenneth Gibson and vice-convener John Mason, of drafting a motion that was at odds with the evidence.
"The SNP Government tried to prevent any real scrutiny of its budget by failing to give us sufficient detail and ordering its majority of backbenchers to block any attempts to get to the bottom of this," he said.
"Despite these efforts, the Finance Committee couldn't find any real evidence to sustain the Scottish Government's assertion that this is a budget for growth.
"On the contrary, witness after witness argued the opposite and it seems only those under the SNP whip believe this set of spending priorities is about creating jobs."
Conservative member Gavin Brown said Ms Urquhart's scepticism had led to an "embarrassing defeat" for the SNP.
"The SNP's budget started to unravel the day after it was delivered. That unravelling shows no sign of stopping," he said.
An SNP spokesman said: "This is a positive report for the Scottish Government. What the Tories failed to mention is that their own amendment – which said that this wasn't a budget for economic growth – was also rejected by the committee."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article