RETREAD HUMZA JUST LIKE AN OLD BANGER...
FMQS was an ill-tempered affair. Douglas Ross, who was trying to talk about Low Emission Zones, struggled to be heard over Nat heckles. So he started shopping the culprits to the Presiding Officer. Clype.
‘Joe FitzPatrick, a government minister, wants to shout me down!’ he cried, whipping his head around theatrically to indicate the disruptive influence. The local government minister was caught but recovered quickly by clamping his face with a vice-like smile.
The interjections continued, and with them Ross’s complaints, as he championed the humble motorist against LEZs.
Victims of this car-banishing edict include a Glasgow charity that feeds the homeless but can’t get an LEZ exemption for its refrigeration van (it was later handed a stay of execution).
Humza Yousaf was more assured than usual. He projected little confidence but looked like this session was less excruciating for him than its predecessors.
The shoulders were lower, the voice more modulated. The peanut gallery behind him still doesn’t thunder for him like it did Nicola Sturgeon but it managed a few more spurts of applause this week.
The First Minister called on Ross to be ‘unequivocal in his support for LEZs’ to show the public that ‘we don’t just talk the talk but are prepared to walk the walk’.
He seems to want every driver in the land walking the walk – or face a massive fine.
Then the Tory leader embarked on a spot of heckling himself, prompting Yousaf to quip: ‘It’s fine for Douglas Ross to dish it out but he can’t take it.’
The FM wasn’t all that keen on taking it himself when Anas Sarwar asked him how many Scots had died on NHS waiting lists in 2022. Yousaf hadn’t a Scooby and offered some emoting instead.
THE figure, the Labour leader told him, was 18,390. The FM pivoted to the impact of Covid on waiting times, adding: ‘I cannot escape — and will not escape — that matter of fact.’
It’s a curious turn of phrase, like an excuse got in early in his premiership. He is less forgiving of Westminster, mind, and its ‘shameful hypocrisy’ in trying to exclude glass bottles from the DRS.
He brought forth a boastful bout of verbiage on the SNP’s environmental record.
This fever of self-congratulation roiled on until Liam Kerr poured some cold water over it, listing all the environmental budgets cut by the Government. ‘Isn’t this his own shameful hypocrisy?’ Kerr jabbed. Later, he pulled Yousaf up on a blunder in an earlier answer. Kerr knows how to think on his feet, an admirable skill for scrutinising a government that has trouble thinking in any position.
For those who keep track of such things, a list, by no means comprehensive, of things Humza Yousaf blamed on Westminster this week...
Homelessness in Glasgow. The ‘plundering’ of the Northeast. ‘Sabotage’ of the Deposit Return Scheme. Reductions in pharmacy services in Scotland. The cost of living crisis. Staff shortages in the social care sector (Brexit). A rise in mental ill-health (ditto).
He seems content to retread old Sturgeon steps rather than take the country forward.
Like a banger in an LEZ, he’s going nowhere.