COMMENT By Anas Sarwar and Keir Starmer

This time next week the election campaign will be under way in Scotland.

It won’t be a business-as-usual election, with Covid restrictions still in place and the ongoing pandemic overshadowing the political debate.

Today, we will be thanking frontline NHS workers for their incredible work over the past year.

They have battled Covid heroically, and now they are helping defeat it by rolling out the vaccine. But our thanks alone is not enough. We need to protect our NHS by giving it the resources it needs and reward our health and social care workers with the pay rise they deserve.

Across the UK, these elections offer a very clear choice.

The Tories are cutting nurses’ pay and cutting spending on the NHS, while the SNP has short-changed social care staff in Scotland.

In the weeks ahead, political parties will be setting out their priorities to the public.

We know what the Scottish Tories want to prioritise: a return to the past.

Boris Johnson and Douglas Ross want to go back to business as usual and the same old insecure society that’s been so cruelly exposed by the pandemic.

And we can’t rely on the SNP to prioritise recovery because it has already made clear it will prioritise a referendum this year.

As we come out of this pandemic, Labour’s priorities will be the priorities of the Scottish people: securing our economy, protecting our NHS and rebuilding our country.

Under our leadership, the Labour Party is changing. We are listening and working hard to restore trust.

During the pandemic, at both Westminster and Holyrood, we have acted in the national interest: supporting the governments when they have taken the right decisions and holding them to account when they could have done better.

Now our entire focus must be on recovery. At this time of national crisis, we believe that it is a moral responsibility for politicians to unite to deliver it.

So wherever you are in Britain, a vote for Labour is a vote for a pay-rise for our nurses and care workers; a vote to back business to create the next generation of high skilled jobs; and a vote for a comeback plan for our children.

A generation of young people have had their learning disrupted by Covid, which is why Scottish Labour has published an education comeback plan.

It is a plan that delivers hope for our young people, restores Scottish education, supports teachers, and makes sure that every child has the right to a decent start in life.

This is just part of a National Recovery Plan which can unite our politics and rebuild our country so it becomes a fairer and more resilient society than we were when we went into this pandemic.

The only way to get this plan delivered over the next five years is if a strong Scottish Labour Party is elected to the Scottish Parliament.