Scots must decide our country’s future
The Scottish political bubble went into overdrive this week as reports were published following investigations into complaints about Alex Salmond’s conduct.
Both reports, from James Hamilton QC and the Scottish Parliament’s own committee, have clearly thrown up serious questions about how complaints of harassment are dealt with.
People at work have the right to expect a safe and respectful working environment.
It’s clear that the procedures used to investigate these complaints weren’t up to scratch.
I hope we will see that addressed quickly and properly, regardless of who is in government after May’s election – that was, after all, supposed to be a large part of the enquiry’s remit.
Unfortunately, that aim was too often ignored by those eager to undermine the First Minister, and who were content to ignore the very people at the heart of this affair – the complainants themselves – in their increasingly desperate attempts to smear the First Minister and the Scottish Parliament itself.
The sight of Tory leaders trying to make political capital out of this process was not only an abuse of that process, but was also an astonishing display of naked hypocrisy.
To choose just one example out of too many, the current Home Secretary was found to have breached the ministerial code after bullying allegations in the Government departments she ran.
She remains in post, fully supported by a Prime Minister who, himself, sees the truth as a quaint idea, but not something he should trouble himself with.
But those elections are too important to be used by the Tories as part of their campaign to undermine Scotland’s parliament at the behest of Boris Johnson.
We have real choices to make as a country about our future and how we can tackle the challenges faced by our society as we rebuild and recover out of the pandemic.
That debate and our recovery is being deliberately and systematically undermined by a Conservative party who would rather go back to the bad old days when Westminster and Whitehall dominated our lives.
Hand in hand with right-wing rags like The Spectator, they have spent recent months comparing Scotland to North Korea, something which becomes more offensive the more you think about it.
The likes of Andrew Neil are free to write and print whatever conspiracy theory nonsense he likes – in Pyongyang his career would likely be shortened rather quickly.
Candidates and parties at May’s election will have genuine disagreements about where our country should be headed.
That is exactly how a democracy should function and, as a country, we should have those disagreements in the open and let the people judge who should be elected and whose vision should be in government.
But they are our decisions to make – not the subject of attacks by those who never wanted Scotland to have a parliament in the first place, and who would likely rather see our country incorporated as a county of England, rather than a nation of its own.
Today marks the deadline for Centrica/ British Gas engineers to accept new contracts from their bosses, with those refusing to sign being sacked by the company.
This sort of bullying behaviour would be unacceptable at any time, but, in the middle of a pandemic when these workers have helped make sure our homes are heated and we are able to feed ourselves, it is a particularly nasty and ignorant way to treat staff.
Most other countries in Europe have laws to prevent this kind of Victorian throwback, but in the UK fire and rehire is perfectly legal, no matter how often ministers at Westminster wring their hands about it.
Workers at British Gas, and the other companies employing these tactics, such as British Airways, Menzies Aviation, Tesco and Douwe Egberts, deserve the protection of the law against these despicable tactics
It’s time the UK Government got behind my Bill and banned these playground bullies as quickly as possible.