Dundee Liberal Democrats - www.dundeelibdems.scot

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP has today (January 18th) urged the Health Secretary to take "immediate measures" as Public Health Scotland's newly published statistics showed that only 67.4% of A&E attendances were seen within four hours. This is the lowest percentage ever recorded since this publication began in February 2015.

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton has today filed a motion in the Scottish Parliament calling on the Prime Minister to resign.

At the time the motion was filed, the Conservative party were facing 17 separate allegations of parties at a time when the rest of the country was facing heavy restrictions but this will probably have risen by the time you read this.

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton has today set out his party's expectations for the forthcoming Covid public inquiry, including calling for initial findings to be reported within a year.

The Iraq Inquiry took seven years from when hearings first began to the publication of the Chilcot Report. The Penrose Inquiry into the contaminated blood disaster was set up by Nicola Sturgeon in 2008 and didn't report until 2015. The Edinburgh Tram Inquiry was announced by Alex Salmond in 2014 and is still to report.

You may remember, last November, taking part in a survey on members' views on Brexit and the party's campaigning on the future of UK-EU relations. Thanks to everyone who participated - 6,500 members, more than any previous survey of this type - and thanks to Greg Foster and Dan Schmeising at party HQ who organised it on behalf of the Federal Policy Committee. This article gives you the results.

After the disappointment and failure of the 2019 general election, an independent post-mortem was carried out into what went wrong. The findings of the Thornhill Review set a broad and challenging reform agenda for the party, which we've made good progress on implementing so far.

On the role of the Federal Board itself, the Thornhill Review found that:

FPC members started the year bright and early with our first meeting last week. We cancelled our December meeting so we could all focus on North Shropshire, so this was our first meeting since November.

Big areas of focus for FPC this year will be further work on our messages and key policies to support them, leading up eventually to the Manifesto for the next General Election; and our substantial programme of working groups developing policies in politically useful areas, to bring to autumn conference.

Willie Rennie MSP has expressed anger at the prospect of a more than £100 million cut to the core school budget and disbelief that the Cabinet Secretary for Education has dismissed the concerns.

While questioning the Cabinet Secretary for Education during a meeting of the Scottish Parliament education committee, Willie Rennie explained that figures showed there would be a real-terms cut of £268 million to local authority budgets. Local authorities spend approximately half of their budget on education, leading to fears of a significant impact on schools.

Speaking after Prime Minister's Questions, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton said:

"Boris Johnson's so-called apology was the worst acting I have ever seen.

"The Prime Minister doesn't believe it was a work party and he isn't sorry for attending. He's just frustrated he got caught.

"He's been lying to us for months because he thinks the public are stupid and rules are beneath him.