One of the most famous scenes from the film ‘The Deerhunter’ involves three US soldiers being forced to play Russian roulette by their Vietnamese captors. Russian roulette is the practice of loading a gun with one bullet spinning the chamber and then pulling the trigger. It is a game which can obviously be fatal if the chamber spin stops at the one with the bullet in it.

This might seem obscure but it relates to recent matters in our great city. Last week the SNP opposition group on the city council played a form of Russian roulette with the city’s budget. If the council had voted in favour it would indeed have been fatal. Here’s the story.

Every local authority has to keep money in the bank for a rainy day. Officially those sums are known as reserves. According to the Accounts Commission, Glasgow should have about £30m in its reserves after a budget is set. The SNP budget options opted to use reserves to mitigate against the cuts to the extent that would have left only £5m in the council’s bank account.

This reckless use of reserves was roundly condemned on our side of the chamber. Councillor Liz Cameron called it a General Custer budget, because it was the budget equivalent of waiting for the cavalry to arrive. “We all know what happened to General Custer” she said to howls of laughter on the Labour side. We’ve also taken chances with the reserves to make the budget cuts less painful. But our deal still leaves £22m in the bank.

The other SNP scam was a straight forward cover up. They set a budget for only one year - forgetting to tell the citizens of Glasgow that if the council had voted for the SNP kamikaze option it would face budget cuts of an extraordinary £90m in 2017/18. Call me old fashioned but this is downright duplicity on their part.

Mount Florida Primary school is in an old red sandstone building which is 120 years old. It’s on Carmunock Road on Glasgow’s south side, in the shadow of Scotland’s famous Hampden Park. It’s been modernised in the city council’s multi-million pound 4Rs programme.

In the last three years £1.5m has been spent on the school. Every classroom’s been modernised with new windows, walls, and fancy flooring. There’s a new gym hall and a new dining room. And an entirely new nursery school created out of what was the former janitor’s derelict house.

The headteacher, Carol Neill, took over when the refurbishment was started three years ago. “When the children came back to the new school for the first time all you could hear were exclamations of ‘Wow’ echoing round the buildings”. She says the refurbishment has transformed the buildings of the school but has also boosted the morale of the teachers, pupils and parents. “Pride in the school is at a level probably never seen before” Carol said.

“Good Morning Mr McAveety” intoned the pupils of primary three when I met them. And they pronounced my surname perfectly much to my delight! One of the class told me the new windows were great. “You used to be able to sit in class and hear the wind whistling through them,” he said.

The primary sevens had a big lesson for the city council when I knocked on their classroom door. They’d just had a mock election in the class. The aims of Noah Tufley’s Litter Pollution Vandalism Prevention Party speaks for itself. Sophie Moreau’s election ticket for her party was “to fill potholes, deliver more dog poo bins and end fly tipping.” Point taken boys and girls!

Carol the head teacher kept the best to last - the spanking new basement nursery school where once the jannie’s dilapidated house stood. There’s seventeen three and four-year-olds attend in the morning and the same number in the afternoon. Mrs Crilley was reading the morning story when I arrived. “The Dinosaur that pooped a Planet” held all in rapt attention.

To date £150m of the total £250m modernisation project to transform Glasgow’s primary schools has been spent. If they all tell the same story as Mount Florida this will prove to be among the best investments ever made in the annals of the city council.