Marxist murmurings abouteu‘advice’ mystery miss the target
JOHANN Lamont has taken to quoting Groucho Marx. For her scriptwriting team, this is several comedy notches above quoting the Daily Record. But as a stand-up the Labour leader remains, let’s say, a work in progress.
Lamont wanted to say there is a difference between legal advice the First Minister might, or might not, have received on independence vis a vis the EU and that humble commodity, the truth. Enter Groucho: “Are you going to believe me, or the evidence of your own eyes?”
Alex Salmond is dishonest, in other words. He is “straight as a corkscrew”. An honest debate is impossible when “we can’t trust a word Alex Salmond says”.
What Lamont meant was that the First Minister had leaned on the supposed advice of law officers concerning possible future relations with the EU while obscuring the fact that, allegedly, no such advice exists. Salmond then wrapped himself in the ministerial code. This is never a fetching look. He had referred himself, for the sixth time, to an august panel of advisers. Apparently, he is bound not only to withhold the advice, but even the existence of advice. On a serious day, someone would have said that Scotland’s freedom of information regime is a shambles. The First Minister means us to believe he has to go to court to prevent us from finding out that something may or may not have happened. This either makes him a liar or a prisoner to probity. It also prevents Lamont from demonstrating “the seriousness of the charges that have been laid before him”. Labour in its time took five suppression cases to the Court of Session. Its current leader believes this counts as the moral high ground. Ruth Davidson then played Harpo in the farce. She remembered to be silly and forgot to be silent. The important line in Duck Soup is “Help is on the way”. Not for the Tories, it’s not.
If Lamont is interested in Marxist wisdom, the following is commended. Groucho said: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”