The National (Scotland) - Seven Days
UK media can’t take any SNP support – even Tory
THIS week, Sky News presenter Kay Burley interviewed Tory minister Tom Pursglove mainly about that awful bar-room boor, Lee Anderson’s racist and Islamophobic comments about the London mayor Sadiq Khan. Suella Braverman, Liz Truss and Paul Scully were quite rightly in the dock too!
Later in the interview, Tom mentioned the common refrain that the UK Parliament was the envy of the world. Kay then asked: “I’m not sure we were the envy of the world last week when it descended into absolute chaos when you were discussing what was going to happen with the Gaza motion by the SNP. Do you still have confidence in Lindsay Hoyle?”
Tom responded, “I think what happened last week was really disappointing and undoubtedly the decision that was taken around the alteration of the procedure cannibalised the legitimate SNP Opposition Day because simply put ... (at that point
Kay interjected with “That’s not my question minister, come on minister”) ...what happens is, no, no, it goes directly to your question (Kay, “It doesn’t”) because it meant they couldn’t have the opportunity to vote on the motion they wanted that they had tabled.”
(Kay, “That wasn’t my question.”) Tom then goes on to answer the question of whether or not he had confidence in Lindsay Hoyle.
I know we are totally used to UK (and “Scottish”) broadcasters clearly only being allowed to comment on anything negative about the SNP. Nevertheless, this unforgivable attempt to shut down a Tory minister (a Tory no less!) telling the facts of the matter to give context and to explain the SNP were innocent victims on this issue and why there was therefore a loss of confidence in the Speaker, was truly shocking!
Anybody who has watched Kay will be in no doubt she is a very sharp cookie, as they say, so she knew exactly what she was doing, no doubt toeing the line of Sky News high heid yins. A very similar example happened on the same morning on Good Morning Britain when Susanna Reid, another sharp cookie, quickly interjected when a Tory MP she was interviewing made the same point (I can’t recall if it was Tom or another MP).
This is what we are up against and it really depresses me! Political anoraks like myself suss out all this stuff and see what’s happening. What chance though do Joe and Jeannie Public in Scotland have? They probably aren’t really interested in politics (and I don’t blame them!) but still watch the news now and again and crucially vote!
What messages are they getting?
That the SNP government has spent millions on ferries that dinnae work – omitting that by abandoning the
HS2 north of Birmingham, the UK Government has squandered squillions of dosh! Oh, and of course, there must be deid bodies in Nicola Sturgeon’s gairden, as why else aw thae polis tents?
Let’s face it, we all know the script, but many folk, understandably, are taken in with this Russian-style propaganda! Where is a Scottish Navalny when ye need yin!
Ivor Telfer Dalgety Bay, Fife
THERE has been a great deal of focus on a perceived rise in antisemitism and much reference to the Holocaust in the
months since October 7. As a child, I saw The Sound Of Music and spent the next several decades learning everything I could about German history and the Nazi rise to power, including a special project on the Nuremberg Trials.
It’s one of the reasons I opposed nuclear weapons after coming face to face with them whilst working at Holy Loch in 1982.
As fate would have it, I met Walter Jakob Wolfgang, a refugee from the Holocaust in 1983 when I got my first job at CND. Walter was one of the organisers of the first Aldermaston March and a lifelong member of both CND and the Labour Party. He became famous after being dragged out of a Labour
Party conference aged 82 for shouting “nonsense” during Jack Straw’s speech about the Iraq War. He was then arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act – a fact missing from his Wikipedia entry.
Walter’s father died shortly after arriving in Britain from an illness caught in what was then a “work” camp prior to their transformation into death camps. Aged 14, Walter had been briefly held in such a camp on a visit home from school in England but was released.
I often think of Walter, who died in May 2019. He never once weaponised the annihilation of his extended family as a justification for his beliefs – something I have often found with Holocaust survivors. It tends to be those whose families have fled from Poland or Russia from pogroms who utilise it in debates as David Aaronovitch did once at the Cambridge Union, ironically in a debate with Walter.
In later years when he couldn’t drive, a rota of his friends would take him to synagogue which he attended without fail all the way up until his death. It was Walter who told me that Judaism is a religion, thousands of years old, and Zionism is an ideology – just 150 years old. He was very clear on this and on Jewish values.
Walter would have been horrified at the genocide now being conducted by the state of Israel. He would have been shocked and angered beyond belief at the vilification of Jeremy
Corbyn whom he admired greatly and who – along with me – was the last person other than hospital staff, to see him alive. Jeremy visited him in Kingston Hospital three times in the two weeks he was there travelling on public transport without aides or fanfare.
There has not just been a rise in
antisemitism in recent months, there has also been a rise in Islamophobia.
Finally, my enduring image of this conflict – the one happening now in real-time, not the one invoked to justify the unbridled overkill of Netanyahu and the IDF – is of a tiny hand, a toddler less than two years old, clutching his father’s shirt as he lies dead in his arms. Marjorie Ellis Thompson
Edinburgh
ABBI Garton-Crosbie’s article in The National on Thursday, February 29, reveals that the lack of leadership and policies in the Labour Party extends down to local authority level and raises questions on Inverclyde Council’s understanding of devolution.
Under the UK Local Government Finance Act 1992, local authorities are responsible for their financial affairs, must appoint a responsible officer to manage their financial affairs and their budget calculations have to be made before March 11.
According to the research briefing on local authority financial resilience placed in the House of Commons Library on
February 7, local authorities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have not been subject to the level of funding reductions that those in England have faced since 2010.
So how does Inverclyde Council think that it will get a better deal from a Tory minister in London than MSPs producing a balanced budget in Holyrood over a matter that has been devolved from Westminster to local authorities for more than 30 years?
We have already seen that the
Scottish Parliament cannot impose a council tax freeze on local authorities so they are free to set their budgets and make appropriate increases or decreases in council tax.
With the local authority elections, some years away this is a golden opportunity for councils – especially the multi-party coalitions – to show the public how local authorities can use devolution to produce a better quality of life for local residents by bringing government closer to the people.
John Jamieson
South Queensferry
OPINION polls are predicting that Labour are showing signs of improvement here in Scotland – but perhaps we should reflect on the last week in politics.
First we had Labour organising a car crash of shenanigans at Westminster through the back door, resulting in the SNP Opposition Day being shelved – effectively silencing the majority representation from
Scotland at Westminster.
Now we learn that Labour-run councils in Scotland are bypassing the Scottish Government and our local authority body Cosla and are going directly to the Conservative government at Westminster calling for financial assistance directly to Scotland’s local authorities.
Please let me point out that in the week when the Scottish Budget was approved by the Holyrood Parliament, the Scottish Government has been demanding no more cuts to the Scottish Budget, no more austerity cuts to the vulnerable and no tax cuts for the better off from Westminster.
The Labour Party’s actions in Westminster and now bypassing the Scottish Government on something as important as local government finance sets off warning lights – warnings of just how a future Labour
government would view and try to diminish the authority of our Holyrood parliament and our voice in Westminster.
Catriona C Clark
Falkirk
FURTHER to my letter published in your pages on Thursday, February 29, I received a second electioneering drop from my LibDem candidate yesterday.
Much like three-quarters of the election material that arrives in the lead-up to any election it was headlined “Only (insert name of relevant party) can beat the SNP”.
Nothing else in the pamphlet held any relevance for a Westminster election. From “Build a new Belford Hospital in Fort William” to “Increase access to mental health services”, all of the issues listed are devolved.
There were no suggestions as to how their resolution was likely to be facilitated by electing a LibDem
MP to Westminster for the simple reason that there is pretty much no connection between the two things. Specifically, there was no attempt to make a logical connection between how eliminating SNP representation in the UK Parliament and delivering any change in the state of the NHS.
The bullet points in the pamphlet were described as a “plan” without addressing the key problem surrounding most of our NHS woes – how the aspirations in the “plan” are to be funded.
If there had been some discussion in the text about how, as an MP, he can persuade the incoming government to allocate more resources to tackling the problems of the NHS in Scotland and beyond, together with the underlying issues of poverty, poor housing and declining social services, the communication would have had at least some credibility.
As it stands, the document is simply an attempt to confuse voters into believing that electing another LibDem MP will, by some magic known only to the candidate himself, “fix our broken NHS” Scotland.
While the comments above relate to this specific set of un-costed thought bubbles, only because it has arrived before all the others, it is representative of the majority of the fatuous claims and counter claims that arrive on our doorsteps before elections.
Labour’s actions against Scotland are setting off warning lights