Don’t speak for England
Nicola Sturgeon erupts in indignation over Tory MSP’s jibe at First Minister’s Questions.
If the Lib Dems need anything, it’s guts.
A bit of pluck, a smidgeon of gumption, a hint of fire in their bellies. After another gloomy showing in May, happy warrior Willie Rennie was replaced by slick smoothie Alex Cole-Hamilton, a Gen X Centrist Dad still trying to pass for a millennial older brother. He could do with a good scrap to toughen up his image and remind punters that, once upon a time, his party had principles.
Vaccine passports are that fight, or at least the opening salvo, and Cole-Hamilton came out swinging against them at First Minister’s Questions: ‘I will state this clearly where other members have not: I and my party are fundamentally opposed to vaccine passports as a matter of principle.‘ This despite them not applying to indoor events with fewer than 500 attendees and therefore leaving Lib Dem conferences blissfully unaffected.
Cole-Hamilton warned of a ‘rush to introduce the policy’ which would ‘throw up practical problems’, such as cross-border vaccinations and booster shots. When exactly would the measures apply, he wondered? ‘Will I need a vaccine passport to join a mass protest against vaccine passports?’
Which raises the question of whether police officers will need a vaccine passport to police people protesting vaccine passports without a vaccine passport, though by this point my head was starting to hurt. Inception was a confusing enough movie without remaking it as a Lib Dem philosophical riddle. Besides, Cole-Hamilton could get Tasered by the riot squad and it would still pale to that time a ram attempted GBH on Willie Rennie.
The point was, nonetheless, a serious one. For the first time, Cole-Hamilton said, Scots would ‘have to provide private medical data to strangers in order to access freedoms in our society’. He was troubled, too, by the absence of a time limit and the possibility of such a regime being expanded. ‘Where does this stop?’ he wondered.
This is how Lib Dem leaders should talk: unabashedly for liberalism, however awkward or unpopular it might be in the moment. Sturgeon defended her policy as necessary but admitted she respected Cole-Hamilton’s ‘principled position’. His position might prove more than principled — it might turn out to be prescient.
Anas Sarwar, who has been adrift since his disappointing election result, was back on form yesterday with a bravura broadside against the SNP’s NHS failings. He cited the 600,000 patients on waiting lists and asked Sturgeon if she agreed it was ‘a humiliation for the SNP and a tragedy for the tens of thousands of patients who languish on ever-lengthening lists’?
She dodged the question, luckily for her because Sarwar had pulled one of those switcheroos that never get old in which he was actually quoting her own words from back when she was an opposition health spokesperson and lashing the Labour executive for its performance. The difference is, her dudgeon was over just 84,000 on waiting lists.
Sarwar predicted she would blame Covid — and she swiftly obliged — but he had come prepared with statistics about how bad things were before the pandemic. Sturgeon sniffed that it was ‘easy to come up with slogans’ in opposition, prompting a 120mph return serve from the Labour leader: ‘The First Minister relied on slogans in opposition and has kept on relying on slogans in government.’
Sturgeon said SNP-era spending on the NHS ‘would not have happened had Labour stayed in government’. It’s bad enough when she cosplays as Jacinda Ardern; now she thinks she’s Nye Bevan.
The session ended on a particularly low note as Sturgeon answered a question on racism against people of Irish descent. Anyone was welcome to come and make their life in Scotland, she said, whereupon Tory MSP Tess White crowed: ‘Except if you’re English’. Sturgeon took umbrage with the imputation — I have never seen her so incandescent — and demanded to see the Presiding Officer.
Alison Johnstone was obviously appalled by White’s behaviour and when the MSP offered an apology after lunch, the PO was still PO’d. Yet, she dispensed with the matter and moved on.
There is a tendency to downplay Anglophobia in Scotland and, rather than grab for the mantle of victimhood, Nicola Sturgeon might reflect on some of her rhetoric about England and Covid last year and the ugly scenes at the border that followed it.
But White’s cross-chamber braying was crass and called attention to Anglophobia in the worst way possible — by turning it into a cheap heckle that could easily be decried across the Scottish political establishment. The talk in today’s papers will be all about White, not anti-Englishness.
The Presiding Officer urged MSPs to ‘remember that we are privileged to represent the people of Scotland and that at all times in the chamber we treat one another with great dignity and respect’. The only person who came out of the affair with any dignity or respect was Johnstone, who, though evident in her displeasure, handled matters swiftly and calmly.
The Presiding Officer’s chair is the loneliest seat in parliament, the occupant’s decisions guaranteed to displease some of the people all of the time, but Johnstone did what was seemingly beyond others yesterday: she got the tone right.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on September 3, 2021.