They say there’s only two things in life which are inevitable: death and taxes. Well, add a third to the list. When there’s a problem which they’re both to blame for, it’s a racing cert that the SNP and Tories will blame each other.

So, sure as sunrise, here they go - passing the buck over who’s responsible for the catastrophe that’s engulfing the Scottish NHS and killing people. The only assured outcome of their mutual blame game is that the crisis will deepen. The two parties will be so immersed in pointing fingers at each other that solutions will come second. So who suffers? Well, we suffer. The voters, the patients, the taxpayers.

The electorate isn’t stupid. We can see that both Edinburgh and London carry blame. The Tory government in London clearly holds the purse strings. It crashed the economy. It’s the ‘daddy’, right. So it has to shoulder the largest share of blame. But Edinburgh can’t just abnegate responsibility. The SNP government runs the health service up here. It’s not good enough to just blame England. The SNP government has financial powers around taxation which it could, but doesn’t, use. Nicola Sturgeon’s government is pretty disastrous when it comes to financial decisions which might benefit Scotland. As witness for the prosecution: step forward the ScotWind deal which sold off the nation’s seabed for a mess of potage.

But neither government will act like an adult and accept its own share of the blame, because to do so would hand a weapon to their opponents. It’s clear that as we enter a winter of strikes and financial horror, that the SNP is banking on blaming London as its get out of jail free card. Humza Yousaf, the Scottish health secretary, was straight out of the gates blaming the UK government for the the state of the NHS as nurses voted to strike. In response, the Scottish Tories covered London’s behind, pointing the finger at the SNP, blaming Yousaf and his government for the nurses' strike.

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