With the cost of training a new doctor in the UK standing at a staggering and perhaps bemusing £250,000 for a five year course it is understandable that the Scottish government wants to retain as many of its expensive medical graduates in the sceptred isle’s better half as possible.

Around half of Scotland’s 4,652 medical students hail from the sheltered climbs that exist between Bognor Regis and Newcastle and so it is perhaps unsurprising that 35 per cent of all medicine graduates run back to the old country as soon as Hippocrates has been paid his due.

Back in 2006, the imminent introduction of top-up fees in England got the Lab-Lib Scottish government imagining a locust storm of undergraduate medics from the south invading their northern neighbour to feed on cheap Scottish degrees before turning their backs on a host now bereft of junior doctors and financially shafted. The move then to impose tuition fees of English proportions on these parasites seemed sensible to safeguard the NHS in Scotland from potential ruin.

The SNP at the time saw the folly of the argument, however. With five medical schools in Scotland together churning out 900 medical graduates a year—far more than Scotland could ever know what to do with—the only sensible way to save any money on training would be to chop out a couple of gangrenous hangers on. St Andrews perhaps, or maybe Edinburgh. Not politically very appetising.

In the event, Labour’s fears have been left unsubstantiated; the number of degree places accepted by English students to Scottish institutions actually fell from a pre-fees figure of 4,256 in 2005 to 3,796 in 2007.

So we needn’t have worried after all and the SNP can feel confident in fulfilling their pledge of scrapping this unfair tax on some of the UK’s most debt ridden students.

The only problem is, they can’t afford it. You see, the SNP promised the world in the run up to the 2007 Scottish election but delivery on such promises has been hard to come by.

An old SNP tactic this paper has observed and criticised before was wheeled out again this week when a Scottish government spokeswoman told the Scotsman newspaper: “With Westminster imposing the tightest financial settlement since devolution, the Scottish government has had to make hard choices and identify areas of priority.” And thus the buck was passed.

As EUSA president Adam Ramsey is quoted as saying on the front page of this issue, it is a “pretty messed up” government that prioritises a toll-less Forth Road Bridge over free education for the nation’s future doctors. Already, 60 per cent of UK medical applicants come from managerial and professional backgrounds and members of this group are more than twice as likely to be successful in their application as those whose parents are categorised as unskilled. No one doubts that hard questions must be asked as the costs of undergraduate medical education spiral, but top-up fees cannot be the answer.

The SNP’s 2007 manifesto dug the party into a fairly deep hole and they are right to admit that only prioritisation of promises will get them anywhere nearer the surface. The government should be warned, however, that students will not remain so placid if they are continually considered as an afterthought.