'FAKE NEWS. That is one of Donald Trump’s catchphrases – and yet he is guilty of it himself with the most recent example being the videos he retweeted from Britain First.

Meanwhile, here at home, we have seen some glaring examples of what I can only assume to be Fake News – maybe not as disgusting as the Trump tweets but still fake - either that or just an astonishing lack of knowledge on the part of people who really should know better.

We started off with the new Labour leader Richard Leonard making a speech in which he called for Scottish Water to be nationalised, despite the company already being 100 per cent owned by the state.

Meanwhile, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, who happens to be the MP for this area, promised that Labour would make St Andrew's Day a bank holiday. The problem is she didn’t seem to realise that it already is – following legislation brought in back in 2007 when her own party were still in Government in Holyrood!

But the big purveyors of porkie pies have been the Tories with two crackers in recent days.

First came their false claims on broadband - that Scotland was not only lagging behind on the roll out of superfast broadband but that this was in some way the Scottish Government’s fault . As the First Minister said, the UK Government are 'talking so much nonsense it borders on dishonesty.'

The facts are clear on this. This week saw the release of data which shows the benefit for local authority areas from the investment of over £400m made through the Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband programme.

Indeed, here in Fife, without Scottish Government leadership, only 69% of premises would be connected to fibre broadband - instead, it's 96%. That massive difference.

A recent report from Ofcom stated that our Digital Scotland programme had increased coverage by 14% over the previous 12 months – the largest increase out of any of the UK nations.

As a direct result of our investment, we are on track to deliver 95% fibre broadband coverage by the end of this year, with procurement launching imminently to deliver 100% superfast broadband coverage by 2021.

Scotland is the only part of the UK to have such an ambitious target .

Then we had the Tories’ misleading scare story about the Queensferry Crossing.

There is snagging work needing done - of course there is, that is normal in the aftermath of any major, or indeed reltively minor, engineering project. There will be lane closures but there will not be and has not been the chaos predicted by the gloom and doom merchants amongst the Scottish Tories'.