Hello and as I sit down to write this column, I hope you had a safe and uneventful Guy Fawkes night.

I was delighted to be out recently campaigning with both the First Minister John Swinney and our wonderful SNP candidate for Ward 14 Ms Adekemi Giwa, who stayed around Keal Drive for years and is still heavily involved with the Fountain of Love, Christian Church on Drumry Road East. What a force of nature this young lady is. All the very best Adekemi, all your hard work will pay off.

We all heard the hype around the budget and how there will be a very welcome uplift in the returning of some of our Scottish Tax monies to us, right here in Scotland.

Have you noticed how the party in Government in Westminster’s representatives in their branch office then have loads of bright ideas on how the Scottish Government should spend it, particularly on further mitigations of the benefits they have withdrawn, or on the new imposed tax hikes they have slid in. Who pays for the employers' NI contributions for local authorities?

They withdrew the £160mil for the Winter Fuel Allowance, then say we should return it, they keep the bedroom tax and insist it's up to the Scottish Government to mitigate it here, they decide not to feed school children in England and Wales and then insist that we should extend our school meals programme from primary one to five right up to primary seven. We want to but there is no Barnett Consequential for this socially necessary step forward. If they would only copy us, then those monies would be pumped straight back into the school meals provision, immediately.

Oh! And the other one they are not trumpeting, the one they would like you to forget, is that the independent, Joseph Rowntree Foundation figures based on the expected rise in costs of everything post Budget, say that all but a few of us will be between £1000 and £1700 worse off over the life of their Parliament, as a result of their tax hikes being passed on as more and more of your hard-earned cash is taken up by paying your bills. And as a consequence, we mostly have less disposable income, pensioners get a £8 a week rise if they survive till April but lose £300 in December or the fact that yet again they have completely left the WASPI women and their six years missed pensions out of their equations.

It's as if the Westminster Labour government heard about the enormous cost to the city of Glasgow of both the Equal Pay dispute settlement, which we will be paying for decades and the PPI fiasco which again we will be paying for decades and said “Hold our champagne”.

Scotland deserves better, Glasgow deserves better and most certainly Ward 14 Drumchapel Anniesland does as well. Aye yours Bill.