Wiping the crumbs away, she blamed Tories for eating all the custard creams
WHEN it comes to taking responsibility for her actions, Nicola Sturgeon is similar to a child wiping away crumbs as she denies a raid on the biscuit tin. Regardless of any inconvenient evidence to the contrary, the fault is always – exhaustingly – with somebody else.
And so it was yesterday during First Minister’s question time, the weekly Holyrood session during which Miss Sturgeon apportions blame to others.
Doubtless, the First Minister would have wished for her opponents to raise the Supreme Court ruling that she cannot hold an independence referendum next year, allowing her to rage about democratic deficits.
Instead, Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross had the audacity to ask the First Minister about a widely reported meeting of senior Scottish NHS figures during which there was a discussion about whether to introduce charges for some patients.
Miss Sturgeon had, earlier in the week, denied she had any plans to privatise part of the NHS. Was she, Mr Ross wondered, also denying this discussion had taken place?
The First Minister gave a characteristically straight answer, by which I mean it wasn’t straight at all.
It was ‘bold’ for Mr Ross, a Tory, to come to the Scottish parliament and talk about privatisation. There had, she conceded, been discussions rather than plans. NHS leaders do not make government policy. The founding principles of the NHS would not be, for as long as she was First Minister, up for discussion.
MR Ross is an impudent sort and replied that it was ‘bold’ of the First Minister to adopt the position she had when use of private health treatment had risen by 84 per cent since the start of the pandemic, twice the rate across the rest of the UK.
‘None of these plans (and they’re not plans),’ said Miss Sturgeon, were being discussed or considered by her government and anyway, the Tories at Westminster were the real baddies when it came to privatisation of the NHS.
The First Minister hadn’t eaten all the custard creams – the Tories had.
You can generally judge the shakiness of the SNP leader’s ground by the volume of her backbenchers. Yesterday, they were thunderous as she tried to position herself as saviour of the NHS. Labour’s Anas Sarwar wanted to know how many private health procedures had been carried out in Scotland in the past year.
Surely you will be shocked to the point of requiring a wee lie down to learn Miss Sturgeon didn’t have those figures. Anyway, she wasn’t going to take lessons from Labour on the founding principles of the NHS.
Again, ‘bold’ appeared. After all, when Labour was founding the NHS in the aftermath of the Second World War, many leading SNP figures of the time were still mourning Germany’s defeat.
Yesterday, it took half an hour for the matter of the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Scottish Government has no authority to stage a second independence referendum next year to be raised. SNP backbencher Stephanie Callaghan ensured Scottish people heard Miss Sturgeon twist the situation’s truth.
The First Minister respected the decision, she said, but the denial of democracy by Westminster parties demonstrated beyond doubt that the UK was not a partnership of nations.
If Unionists were so confident they would win a referendum, they’d want one, said the First Minister. In the inward looking, self-obsessed world of the nationalist, it’s simply impossible to conceive that opponents might think other matters more important than time-consuming constitutional battles.
Nicola Sturgeon concluded with a jibe about Unionist politicians with the ‘power of independent thinking’ and SNP backbenchers nodded in unison.
Grasping irony must, I suppose, be another odious Unionist characteristic.