This is my sketch of the latest First Minister’s Questions.
This week’s First Minister’s Questions was set to be a skoosh for Nicola Sturgeon.
She had teed up her Pretendy Ref. Unveiled her Supreme Court gambit. Even managed to clean up a constitutional spillage in aisle Swinney.
Now to sit back and let the Tories and Labour charge headfirst into her trap. They’d have a go at her referendum. She’d have a go back. It would appear to her grassroots as though the Unionists were running scared. Her Potemkin plebiscite was a real thing after all. They wouldn’t be kicking up a fuss about it otherwise.
The best-laid plans of mice, men and even First Ministers gang a-gley sometimes. When he got to his feet, Douglas Ross said not a peep about independence or referendums. He was more interested in planned industrial action by Police Scotland. Officers are about to begin their biggest work-to-rule in over a century. Ross grasps the significance only too well: his wife is a police officer.
Sturgeon swerved a quote from top cop Sir Iain Livingstone that policing was ‘not among the stated priorities’ for Scottish Government spending then pivoted to the police funding situation in England.
Finally, she suggested that, ‘if Douglas Ross wants more money for the Scottish Government to allocate’, he shouldn’t just be asking her questions but directing a few to ‘his boss at Westminster’.
Uh-oh. She pulled out the big, bad W-word. Would he rise to the bait after all?
He would not. ‘It is not the questions that I am worried about,’ the Scottish Tory leader shot back, ‘it is the answers.’
He did not let up: ‘The First Minister has just ignored a dire warning from the chief constable of Police Scotland. She deflected by saying we should look elsewhere and look at the issues in the rest of the United Kingdom. Look at the issues here in Scotland right now.’
Sturgeon objected that there were more officers per head in Scotland than England and they were paid better. Yes, First Minister. It’s almost as if Scotland has a pretty sweet deal under the Union and giving it up would be financially devastating.
Ross accused her of inhabiting ‘the First Minister’s bubble in Bute House’ and said her spinners were ‘working on overdrive’. At least they know how frontline police feel.
Sturgeon returned to her disquisition on police funding in England, prompting Ross to tell her she was ‘on a different planet’. A spot of Scottish space exploration we could all get behind.
He pointed to a spike in violent crime as ‘a consequence of a distracted government, a government that does not focus on what really matters’.
There are other consequences, too. Anas Sarwar asked her how many cancer patients in the past year had not begun treatment within the 62-day target window.
She provided no specifics.
'The answer the First Minister was looking for is 3,057,' Sarwar replied.
How many patients waiting for test results had been doing so for longer than the supposedly maximum six weeks?
'Many people are waiting for longer than the six-week standard,' she responded. 'I am happy to provide that figure later.'
No need. Sarwar explained: 'The answer the First Minister was looking for is 78,310 people.'
He continued, consulting a scrap of paper. 'I asked the First Minister the exact same question a year ago. The answer then was 44,516.' Back then, Sturgeon had assured him it was 'my focus and the focus of the government literally seven days a week, sometimes what has felt like almost 24 hours a day'.
'That was Pandemic Nicola,' he added, with a cruel curl of his lips.
Now we were back to 'Divisive Nicola', he said, and she was 'spending seven days a week, sometimes what feels like 24 hours a day, focusing on what she cares about, which is breaking up our country'.
It was a tour de force, save for Sarwar's explicit reference to independence. No platform, no credence, no oxygen for Divisive Nicola's dodgy referendum.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on Friday, July 1, 2022.
Ross and Sarwar need to keep up the tag-team tactics and focus on her appalling domestic record. Ignore the pretendyref rhetoric, it’s not going to happen. And Sarwar needs to realise it’s the Nats who are Scotland’s enemies not Westminster and the Tories.
At Last,The opposition start to ask the serious Questions, which should have been asked years ago.
Sturgeon is all Sham, a mouthpiece only.
This practice of giving written questions 24 hours in advance needs to stop.
Spin doctors then answer for her to deride the question and try to humiliate the party who asked a serious question.
Utterly Useless failed lawyer,
Failing Badly in her present position.