Her cyclone of indignation and outrage drowned out everything
HINDSIGHT is a fine thing and Douglas Ross came armed to the teeth with it. Omicron having failed to be the biblical plague Nicola Sturgeon predicted, her decision to launch into fresh restrictions after Christmas was now looking like an over-reaction.
The Tory leader contended: ‘The First Minister imposed restrictions that had a massive impact on jobs, businesses and people’s mental and physical health, but we can now see they were not needed.’
According to Ross, ‘it was the Scottish public’s actions, not the SNP Government’s restrictions, that got this right’. You could see what he was getting at. You could also see what he had just set himself up for. ‘The public did comply,’ she replied icily. ‘They complied with what the Government asked them to do.’
Her cool demeanour got fierier when it was Anas Sarwar’s turn. He went with a topic that is terribly important, a grave matter of moral conscience and doesn’t have a hope in hell of making it onto the average voter’s radar.
He raised the award of offshore wind farm contracts worth £699million, which Sturgeon had called ‘one of the most significant days’ for Scotland ‘in a very long time’. The problem? According to the Labour leader the Government
had ‘sold, on the cheap, the right to profit from Scotland’s energy transition to multinational companies that have questionable human rights records’.
The ‘new owners of Scotland’s sea bed,’ he noted, included a firm ‘fined $54millon for bribing Nigerian officials and $88million for bribing Indonesian officials’.
ANOTHER had ‘committed human rights abuses at one of its construction sites… relied on forced labour and used slavery to build pipelines’. These weren’t the sorts of people Scotland should be cutting deals with, he suggested. Noting the decisions were made by Crown Estate Scotland, Sturgeon sighed: ‘The sale is one of the most exciting things for Scotland in a long, long time, which is probably why Scottish Labour is being so negative.’
I, too, hate how negative Labour is about slave labour. Sarwar recalled: ‘Just last week, the SNP was right to accuse the Tory Government of tolerating human rights abuses as a “price worth paying” to secure deals for the UK. This week, the SNP has done the same. Nicola Sturgeon is saying it is bad when the Tories do it but OK when the SNP does it.’
Sarwar added that, since one company was the Swedish stateowned energy firm, it could use its part-ownership of the Scottish sea bed to keep Swedish energy bills down. ‘The SNP is not “Stronger for Scotland” but stronger for Sweden,’ he quipped. That went down about as well as you might expect.
‘Sweden is an independent country that has full control over energy, which of course this Government and this parliament do not have. Anas Sarwar might want to reflect a little more on that,’ Sturgeon jabbed.
‘Perhaps, just for once,’ she snipped, ‘Anas Sarwar could find it within himself to be positive about the potential of Scotland.’
She impugns opponents’ patriotism with a frequency that would’ve made Joe McCarthy blanch. So when Sarwar tried to argue it was possible to be all for inward investment while having concerns about corruption and human rights, Sturgeon riposted: ‘Anas Sarwar and his many predecessors as Scottish Labour leader have been trotting out those negative talk-down-Scotland tropes for years.’
Cruelly, she added: ‘I have to say I have forgotten how many predecessors he has had.’ She does tend to be forgetful when it comes to predecessors.
There was no way Sarwar could win. She was a cyclone of indignation and her gusting outrage drowned everything else.