Nicola Sturgeon wants to be friends
SKETCH: SNP leader disavows 'partisan politics' to dodge responsibility during First Minister's Questions.
'I will try to stay away from partisan politics,' the First Minister intoned.
It doesn't matter what cut-throat opponent-demoniser Nicola Sturgeon does, partisan politics just seems to follow her around. Like a bad smell, or John Swinney.
This statement came early on in First Minister's Questions and telegraphed how seriously the Scottish Government was taking the prospect of another exams crisis. Sturgeon can forgo partisan politics for as long as an SUV can forgo diesel, and for the same reason.
She was under questioning from Douglas Ross about 2021's exams scandal, which is different from 2020's exams scandal because they're now called 'assessments' instead. Pupils and teachers are unhappy with the new approach and so the Scottish Government has unveiled a direct right of appeal, but warned pupils who ask to be regraded that they could be marked down rather than up. It's like a soft-spoken mafia don assuring a witness he's free to testify in court while Marco the Mangler stands off to the side mixing cement.
Sturgeon noted that 'many of the arrangements that we are putting in place are very similar to those that are being put in place in England and in Wales under governments of different parties'. That, she added, 'reflects the fact that this is a difficult situation'.
Sometimes you've got to admire the First Minister's chutzpah. The woman who says we need independence because the UK Government makes bad decisions for Scotland was not only taking the same bad decisions but making a virtue of it. People claim Westminster is too inflexible but it's able to spring from oppressor to deflector shield and back in sprightly fashion.
Ross, who is self-isolating and was joining the session via Zoom, read out the words of a pupil who accused the Scottish Government and the SQA of 'saying that everything is okay, when it is not' and being 'clearly in denial', and questioned whether Sturgeon agreed with the student's assessment.
'I do not agree with that,' she responded, adding that it was her duty to 'persuade young people and their parents' that, while ministers couldn't make all of the problems caused by Covid-19 disappear, the government was 'doing everything that we can'. The kids are all wrong.
Instead of listening to young people and acting accordingly, Ross objected, the First Minister intended to 'persuade them that they are wrong'. Sturgeon accused the Tory leader of 'mischaracterising' her, thundering: 'I did not say that the government’s job was to persuade young people that they were wrong. I said that it is the government’s job to engage with young people and... yes... to seek to persuade them that the arrangements that are in place are the right ones.'
These pupils are a real headache for Sturgeon. They've asked her more difficult questions in seven days than her backbenchers have in seven years.
Anas Sarwar told Sturgeon she had been 'rightly critical of the chaos that Dominic Cummings described' in his evidence to MPs, but asked if she accepted that she made 'many of the same decisions' as Boris Johnson. The Labour leader castigated a mindset of 'Scottish exceptionalism' that prevented ministers from seeing that.
Sturgeon appended air quotes to 'exceptionalism' when she repeated it back, but maintained she had been 'candid' that 'we have not got everything right'. (Factcheck rating: extremely true.)
The Greens’ Lorna Slater got in a couple of questions about investing in ‘the green recovery’. If the Greens had their way, the only things we’d recover would be cave-dwelling and dancing round the crops at Lughnasadh.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on June 4, 2021.