Devastating question that silenced the braggers and the hecklers
NOT with pomp nor with pageant but with a solemn hush did First Minister’s Questions return to the Holyrood calendar. The first FMQs of the new parliament is typically a raucous affair in which winners brag, losers heckle and scores left over from the election campaign are settled.
If you were hoping for a good rammy along these lines, blame Anas Sarwar. The Scottish Labour leader brought an awkward calm to the chamber with one of those questions at which he is so adept.
He reminded Nicola Sturgeon of the contaminated water scandal at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital which claimed the lives of two children and infected 30 more. He reminded her, too, of the promise she made that the families would be told promptly.
‘This morning,’ he turned the screw, ‘it has been confirmed one family has not been informed, and it is feared they are the family of the second child who died.’
When did the Government first try to contact the family? How many times did it try? How could the poor parents still not know the truth about their child’s death?
The Labour leader’s tone was even, his voice grave but not confrontational.
The death of a child is perhaps the only matter that can drain Holyrood of its fondness for tribal oneupmanship.
The First Minister repeated her ‘deepest sympathies’ to the families. She did not know the answer to his questions but had been assured of ‘rigorous attempts’ to locate the parents. Miss Sturgeon said: ‘Any family who wishes to get in touch with the Independent Case Note Review team can email the team.’
Well intended, no doubt, but asking the parents of a child killed because your superhospital was faultily designed can only ever sound cold.
Sarwar thought so: ‘Handing out an email address is not good enough.’
The line landed smartly and without risk to Sarwar because he had forgone partisan rhetoric. He has background with what he termed ‘the biggest scandal of the devolution era’. He was the
MSP who raised the children’s deaths in November 2019, clinicians having alerted the health board that summer.
He cited Scotland’s ‘duty of candour’ law that required families to be told as soon as the health board found out.
Locking his eyes on the First Minister, he told her: ‘That means that the family should have been informed at least 18 months ago, rather than being contacted for the first time just a few weeks ago. You have broken that law.’
This style of questioning doesn’t fire up the hardliners or the scribblers in the peanut gallery but its power is quietly devastating.
‘To characterise matters as me simply handing out an email address is unfair,’ Sturgeon protested.
Her interrogator accused her of ‘missing the fundamental point’. The point being that, a child having died in 2017, the review having taken place in 2019, why had it taken until 2021 to try to trace this family?
His opponent pivoted to the public inquiry she established. ‘It is a real omission to say the things Anas Sarwar has rightly said but leave out the fact of the full independent public inquiry that is already under way,’ she objected.
A reading of the room would have told her this wasn’t the time to be begging for credit.
Least of all for a belated inquiry into the deaths of children.