In recent weeks, my colleagues and I have received countless complaints from constituents about the switch to a three-weekly bin collection for front-and-back-door properties. Our inboxes have started to overflow almost as much as the bins themselves.

The SNP administration will try to tell you that this is an essential step in fighting the climate emergency. That collecting bins less often is, somehow, the silver bullet.

This is pure sophistry on their part. This is a decision driven not by recycling, but by SNP cuts. And it is our communities who are being forced to live with its unacceptable consequences.

In 2019, when the SNP first proposed the switch to three weekly, Labour opposed this policy. Some now try to disown their vote in that budget; others try to paint it as all things to all people. But the truth is: of your local councillors, only your Labour councillors opposed this wrong-headed policy.

This decision is the direct consequence of over a decade of cuts to your local government budgets from the SNP in power in Edinburgh. As funding is cut back, and demand for vital services grows, the end result is this.

The climate emergency has been hijacked to cover up for cuts. A cynical attempt to distract from the plainly obvious reality that services are almost creaking under enormous pressure.

In a few weeks, Glasgow City Council will set its budget, a budget in which £15 million worth of cuts is heralded by the SNP as a positive outcome for our city.

But consider this: in three months, Scots will be asked to go to the polls and render their verdict on 14 years of the SNP.

We are nearly a year into the pandemic and nearly a year of local government and community organisations working flat out to protect so many people. Councils like Glasgow have the SNP in the driving seat. And cuts to funding means cuts to your services.

If this is the SNP’s pre-election giveaway, I worry whether our communities would be able to withstand the continued onslaught, as core services are cut back in the SNP’s vain pursuit of the next headline. Glasgow deserves better than this.

Collecting the bins on time might not be a breaking news story. Cleaning up the streets and the pavements might not make an exciting headline. Properly maintained parks might not get the biggest social media following.

But they are all essential to building a cleaner, greener Glasgow.