Eck v Nic

Control and Command

What a palaver! The past and present first ministers of Scotland, Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon are playing a game of poker with their reputations for chips. Holyrood is the stage and the first ministers are merely players, they have their exits and their entrances.

I watched live on BBC a fair chunk of the eight-hour interrogation of Nicola Sturgeon by the Scottish Parliament Committee on the Scottish Government Handling of Harassment Complaints. The first minister's ability to present detailed arguments and recall events is both impressive and legendary, although she uses far too many conditional clauses for my liking. She also has a tendency to apologise when things have not gone well and claims that she empathises with whoever is suffering as a result of the issue under discussion. It plays well when compared to the unwillingness of the UK government ministers to acknowledge any of their mistakes, but she overplays her hand on this.

She did not miss the opportunity to play her apologies and raise Alex Salmond on his dubious claims of being found not guilty for any abuse or his failure to offer any apology to the women who had raised the complaints. 

The purpose of the Committee was to establish how the Scottish Government had failed to conduct the inquiry into Alex Salmond's alleged harassment of women with due propriety. It has always been acknowledged that the senior civil servant originally asked to carry out the inquiry knew the complainants and was therefore unsuitable for the task. The focus of the interrogation was when the first minister first knew about the complaints and what actions had she taken. The crux of the issue became whether she had lied about first hearing about Alec Salmond's indiscretions with 9 women on Maundy Thursday or Easter Monday. 

According to the mendacious acting leader of the Tories, Ruth Davidson, this was a resigning offence and the first minister should resign for forgetting that she had heard this on Maundy Thursday. As an act of political grandstanding, it truly takes the Easter egg but then Ruth Davidson and Nicola Sturgeon have always been doughty street fighters, both incapable of not having the last word.. 

Not since the Scottish play has Scotland witnessed such bloodletting as the feud between Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon. These two formidable politicians have exercised Command (Salmond) and Control (Sturgeon) leadership for the past 14 years. They have stooped at nothing when it comes to ridding their governments of those who do not follow their direction of travel. Unlike Boris Johnson, the SNP leaders have no hesitation in sacking ministers, MPs or MSPs as Joanna Cherry, Neale Harvey, Margaret Ferrier or Derek McKay could testify over the past year. And woe betides any of the Scottish agencies, Health Boards or Councils who gainsay their authority.

With the Scottish Parliament election looming in May, my guess is that the Inquiry will dribble on and then fade away. Holyrood has a tendency to despatch incomprehensible subjects into the ether. Already the result of the election has been assumed to be a shoo-in for the SNP and therefore the start of another saga of calling for a second independence referendum. The result is becoming less certain as the two most recognised faces of the SNP slug it out. This is likely to be exacerbated by the loss of many of the more experienced and competent SNP MSPs like Mike Russell, Bruce Crawford, Roseanne Cunningham and Stewart Stevenson who are standing down. So are several able younger women MSPs such as Aileen Campbell and Gail Ross. This will deplete the SNP of political nous and make them even more dependent on the first minister. There are not many of the current MSPs who have shown any great capacity to govern. The consolation, for the SNP, if not Scotland, is that the same comment could be made of the other parties. 

What most concerns me about this is the loss of the proper scrutiny of Scotland's real issues: the lack of an industrial strategy, the decline and prevarication about the future life of the oil industry, the lacklustre performance of schools, the appalling failure of care homes and the centralisation of public services. Localism has been exorcised by the monoculture of the Scottish Government, all subsidiarity stops with the Scottish Government. Holyrood has allowed its internal squabbles and regular fights with Westminster to dominate politics in Scotland for too long. It is time for politicians to focus on the real issues that will determine whether or not Scotland emerges from Covid with a realistic vision for the future.