The challenges in the way of tackling child poverty in Scotland

Another challenge for the Scottish government as it weighs up where to allocate resources – perhaps the greatest challenge of all – is the state of the National Health Service.

SNP politicians have often claimed that Scotland has the best-performing accident and emergency departments in the UK, a point repeated many times by Mr Swinney during the general election campaign.

It is far from the full picture.

When Mr Swinney took over from Humza Yousaf in May, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) pointed out that the number of people waiting 12 hours or more in Scottish A&Es had grown by 6260% since 2017.

In February, a report by the public spending watchdog, Audit Scotland, said that soaring costs, long waits for treatment, and staff shortages were having “a direct impact on patient safety”.

The RCEM says that means patients are dying who, with better and more prompt care, would live. Others leave hospital sicker than they might have been. Entrenched ill health is also a drag on meeting targets for reducing poverty.

The battle over who is to blame for the state of the public finances and public services is likely to run all the way through to the Scottish parliamentary elections in 2026.

Labour hopes to follow its success in July’s general election – when it jumped from one Scottish MP to 37, while the SNP slumped from 48 to nine – and win control of the devolved Scottish government.

Its campaign is likely to focus on the notion that only Labour can deliver change after what it describes as years of failure by the SNP, echoing its successful attack on the Conservatives at a UK level.

Mr Swinney has already made it plain that the SNP’s counter-attack will revolve around the idea that, far from delivering meaningful change at the UK-level, Labour is actually continuing with damaging austerity.