JUST before Christmas, I set out the Scottish Government’s budget for the year ahead.

The budget will deliver almost £730million extra investment for health and care services, including increased investment in mental health, bringing overall funding for mental health to £1.1billion.

A total of £180m will be allocated to raising attainment in schools, including £120m going directly to headteachers to spend on closing the attainment gap. This will help ensure all our young people can fulfil their potential and have the best opportunities available to them. The amount of money being given directly to Renfrewshire’s headteachers will be announced later this year.

An extra investment of almost £500m has been allocated to expand early learning and childcare through staff recruitment and training, as well as new, expanded or refurbished nurseries.

More than £825m has been invested to help reach our target of building 50,000 more affordable homes before 2021. My constituency has already benefited from this policy, with new modern social housing in Renfrew, Erskine and Gallowhill.

The Scottish Government has increased the money given to carers via the Carer’s Allowance Supplement, and £37m has been provided in this budget towards that. More than 2,000 of Renfrewshire’s carers have benefited from this supplement.

We are working to build a fairer Scotland and using almost £100m to mitigate the worst of Tory welfare cuts.

Local government has been provided with a real terms increase, with Renfrewshire set to receive a total funding increase of more than £10.8m.

However, as I have said before, we are a Parliament of minorities and, later this year, I will take forward discussions with other parties on the budget announced but it is important that any party or politicians proposing additional spending ahead of the final vote are able to say how they would pay for the changes.

I believe the budget I announced delivers the public services and economic investment required and that the public expect. I hope my colleagues in Parliament will support the multi-million pound investment being proposed.

While the Scottish Government gets on with the day job of delivering a budget for the people of Scotland and our Scottish Parliament gets on with the job of rightly scrutinising those budget proposals, Westminster descends into the type of chaos unseen in any of our lifetimes. If the last few months was part of a fictional TV political drama, people would rightly complain it was too unrealistic.

This is a UK Government in total chaos and a Tory party completely divided. On the other side, Jeremy Corbyn’s position is unclear, with no obvious plan which would unite Labour MPs if he was to become Prime Minister. It is gridlock.

Regardless of what side of the Brexit debate you are on, I am sure we would all agree the current situation in Westminster is shambolic and the fact nobody, including the Prime Minister, has a clue what is happening is not good enough.