SWINNEY SURVIVES A NO CONFIDENCE VOTE
Greens give red card to Tory and Labour’s ‘cheap political stunt’
JOHN Swinney has survived a motion of no confidence at Holyrood despite his party being branded “secretive and outrageous” in its behaviour towards the Alex Salmond Inquiry.
MSPs rejected the motion by 65 to 57.
Labour, the Tories, and Lib Dems all said the Deputy First Minister should be held accountable for delays in evidence being passed to a parliamentary investigation
But the Greens sided with SNP MSPs when a vote was held at 8 o’clock last night.
Swinney twice refused last year to publish legal advice requested by a committee of MSPs investigating the Scottish Government’s botched handling of complaints made against the former SNP leader.
Salmond denied all allegations against him and won a judicial review of the government’s complaints process in 2019, which judges found to be biased. Swinney finally published the legal advice last week after opposition parties united in a threat to hold a motion of no confidence if he did not.
Following the release of the documents, the Tories decided to table a motion of no confidence anyway.
But the unity between the parties cracked after the Greens dubbed it a “cheap political stunt”.
Salmond inquiry member and Labour MSP Jackie Baillie said today motions of no confidence were mechanisms to hold the government to account
She reminded MSPs of Nicola Sturgeon’s promise in 2019 to ensure the inquiry had all the documentation it wanted.
“What the committee has had is partial information, delayed information, and in some cases, no information at all,” she said. And they have withheld documents from the committee. Swinney told MSPs he had already explained why the legal advice was not published in November last year despite two votes in favour of doing so.
“Ministers’ view, my view, was we could give the committee the information they needed to understand what happened in the judicial review while avoiding the precedent for future governments of waiving privilege,” he said.
“That is why I took the unprecedented decision to share with the committee in confidence in December a detailed submission that explained the context of legal advice during the judicial review.
“I believed then that such an approach could fulfil our obligation to parliament and the committee without waiving legal privilege and therefore protecting the interests of future governments.”