NICOLA STURGEON was accused of a “shameful” betrayal today, after it emerged that student debt in Scotland had soared by a whopping 167 per cent in spite of an SNP pledge to scrap it.

New figures show that the student loanbook balance north of the border at the end of the 2017-18 financial year was £4.98 billion.

At the start of the 2007-08 financial year, around the time the SNP replaced Labour as Scotland’s leading party, it was £1.85bn.

And speaking in Parliament in March 2007, Ms Sturgeon promised her party would “restore grants, abolish tuition fees and meet the debt repayments of Scottish graduates living in Scotland.”

At First Minister’s Questions today Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard blasted: “The average debt for a Scottish graduate now stands at £13,200.

“Nicola Sturgeon did not dump the debt, she dumped the promise.”

He warned that it was “the poorest students who end up racking up the highest debts by taking out the biggest loans” and called on Ms Sturgeon to issue an “unreserved apology” for breaking the pledge.

“Even by the standards of this government, promising to scrap student debt and then increasing it by 169 per cent is nothing short of shameful,” Mr Leonard added.

Ms Sturgeon said levels of student debt in Scotland compared favourably with those in Labour-governed Wales. “[This is] yet another example of Labour telling us to do as they say, not as they do,” she told the chamber.

And she claimed the SNP’s record on supporting students was “one to be proud of.”

Ms Sturgeon also faced calls from interim Scottish Tory leader Jackson Carlaw to match Westminster’s proposal to raise the threshold for the higher rate of income tax — which Chancellor Philip Hammond said would go up to £50,000 from next year in his budget this week.

The First Minister declined to make such a pledge, but argued that the Scottish budget would be “balanced, progressive and fair ... in stark contrast to the one we saw on Monday”.

• Labour MSP Neil Findlay called on Ms Sturgeon to suspend SNP councillors who retweeted a vicious article which cited Hitler’s Mein Kampf in an attack on a Jewish trade union official. A nationalist blogger described Rhea Wolfson as deploying “fascist demagoguery” in her stewardship of Glasgow’s equal pay strike last week. The First Minister criticised the article and said she stood in solidarity with the Jewish community against anti-semitism. She added: “The councillor in question has written to the young woman today with an apology.”