Questions must be asked but not by Baroness Ruth
IF YOU ever wanted a living, breathing example of hypocrisy, look no further than First Minister’s Questions yesterday.
There you’d find stand-in Tory leader Ruth Davidson portraying herself as leading the fight for answers on behalf of the two female Alex Salmond complainers who were failed by the Scottish Government’s disastrous internal investigation.
Anyone new to Scottish politics would think she was fighting a stunning moral crusade for women.
But let’s just remind ourselves of the real Ruth Davidson who stood up in Holyrood yesterday.
As Scottish Tory leader she shamelessly defended the disgusting Tory rape clause.
It meant women were limited to child tax credits for up to two children – but an exception could be made for a third child if the mother could prove it was the result of “non-consensual conception”.
It was a needlessly harsh policy that summed up years of Tory cutbacks which impacted the most vulnerable.
In 2017, she said of the policy that all rape victims would have to do on a form is “tick a box and put their name on it”.
And when she finishes in the Scottish Parliament in May, Davidson will later take a seat in the unelected House of Lords.
It’s no doubt a reward for defending years of brutal Tory policies in Scotland.
And when it comes to breaking the ministerial code, the Conservatives also have form.
Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, was found to have broken the rules last year – but Boris Johnson decided she could stay on anyway.
Tory MSPs have every right to question Sturgeon on what she knew and when. However they must understand their calls for the First Minister to quit for allegedly breaching the ministerial code are severely undermined by Patel’s behaviour.
There are questions still to be answered by Nicola Sturgeon despite her near eight-hour session answering questions from MSPs on the Alex Salmond Inquiry.
Let’s not forget, the two women who originally raised complaints did not see them resolved as the internal system was judged to be unfair.
The whole sorry mess cost the taxpayer at least £600,000 and damaged the reputation of our democratic institutions in the process.
We still don’t know if the First Minister broke the ministerial code.
Two separate investigations need to give Scotland an answer as soon as possible.
But what the country doesn’t need is ‘Baroness’ rape clause defender Ruth to fight its corner.
THE United Kingdom “is over” and a new union should be crafted to reflect a “voluntary association of four nations”, the Labour First Minister of Wales has said.
Mark Drakeford warned the break-up of the UK was possible if politicians only offered a “tweaking of the status quo” as he accused Boris Johnson of undermining the Union through his lack of engagement with the devolved nations.
In powerful evidence to the Commons Welsh affairs committee yesterday, Drakeford told MPs a new devolution settlement was needed after the pandemic had caused a rise in polarised opinions about Wales’s future.
He spoke as a new poll showed a rise in support for Welsh independence to nearly 40 per cent.
Drakeford added: “There is no institutional architecture to make the United Kingdom work.
“It is all ad-hoc, random, and made up as we go along. And I’m afraid that really is not a satisfactory basis to sustain the future of the UK.”
YOUNGSTERS are being recruited to terrorist organisations during lockdown in “worrying” numbers, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has said.
In December 2020, the UK Counter Terrorism Referral Unit saw a seven per cent rise in the volume of terrorist content online.
Speaking in the Commons, Raab said: “We can see a worrying rise in the proportion of children and teenagers that are now being arrested for terrorism offences.”
Updating MPs on the threat of Isis, he said the United Kingdom is tackling the propaganda “head on”.
But the Foreign Secretary warned that the terror group “still remains the country’s “most significant terrorist threat” both at home and abroad.