Salmond ‘crushing criticism’
ALEX Salmond is ‘manipulating’ the Scottish parliament by using his government majority to crush any dissent or criticism, MSPs have claimed.
Three opposition parties have launched a blistering attack on ‘slavish’ Nationalist politicians who parrot t he government l i ne without question.
They say this has led to an ‘enfeebled’ Scottish parliament where the government is not held to account and the public is failed.
The row was triggered by a disagreement in the public audit committee over its final report on police reform.
Nationalist members not only ‘sanitised’ the report to remove all criticism but
even blocked a statement being issued, saying not everyone agreed with it, the opposition parties said.
Labour’s Hugh Henry, committee convener, and Ken Macintosh, Tory Mary Scanlon, and Tavish Scott, of the Liberal Democrats, took the unprecedented step of holding a joint press conference yesterday to criticise their Nationalist committee colleagues.
They said the problem was not limited to their committee. Mr Henry said: ‘Murdo Fraser (convener of the economy, energy and tourism committee) has experienced something similar. There’s also a battle behind the scenes in the European committee for the final report to be more flattering to the Scottish Government.’
The European and external affairs committee is currently considering an independent Scotland’s EU membership – Nationalists claim it would be a formality but several experts, including European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, believe it will be difficult if not impossible.
The public audit committee had been looking into police reform – the merger of eight regional forces into a national one in April last year.
It initially warned that the savings delivered so far were unsustainable and future cuts in policing could be even higher than currently anticipated.
That followed a warning from Audit Scotland, in November, that police would struggle to hit savings targets of £139million over the next two years and £1.1billion by 2026. But the committee’s reservations were wiped from the final report.
Ken Macintosh said: ‘To not just water down criticism but to take any reference of this criticism out of it does no favours to government at all. It makes them look manipulative, which I think they were.’
He added that frustration had been building ‘for two to three years’ and he believes the Orwellian tactics are being directed from the top of gov- ernment and Mr Salmond. ‘It’s a top- down style of government. It gets repeated without question and you get your head chopped off if you don’t agree,’ Mr Macintosh said.
Mr Henry added: ‘We don’t have a means of holding the government to account.’
Nationalist public audit committee member James Dornan said: ‘This is nothing more than sheer political opportunism from Labour.’