Being a pal of Nicola’s means you don’t fear the sack
PEOPLE complain that Health Secretary Shona Robison doesn’t have the decency to resign considering her record of failure in the NHS. That make. She is a decent person. It is just in keeping with her record in office that she actually set herself the target of resigning last January and has now set up a task force to find out why she missed it.is an unfair accusation to
Under the current SNP regime it is, of course, a moral crime to criticise anything that is going wrong in this country. You could get banged up in a tartan gulag for being ‘anti-Scottish’.
Yet what the SNP Government has done to the NHS is deeply against the national interest.
Don’t take my word for it. These are the words of the chairman of BMA Scotland, Dr Peter Bennie.
He said: ‘While there have been increases in both finances and workforce, this is simply not keeping pace with demand.
‘Doctors struggle with the implications of this on a daily basis, with services deteriorating, patients suffering as a result and more pressure being put on already overworked staff.
‘This is compounded by political pressure to meet arbitrary targets that often tell us little about quality of care or the outcomes for patients.’
THE SNP has put more cash into the NHS – just not at the rate the rest of the country has enjoyed. The Conservatives – diagnosed as the ‘evil’ Tories by the SNP – have increased NHS spending at twice the rate south of the Border than the Nats have decided to do here. They have the cash but would rather spend it elsewhere.
If they had kept up with UK spending, the Scottish NHS would have an extra £1 billion a year. That money might have gone some way to fill the vacancy crisis in the NHS. It is 3,000 nurses short. One in four GP practices has a vacancy. That is before we get to the crisis with consultants.
Despite that record, Ms Robison seems unsackable. She is a friend of Ms Sturgeon and doesn’t seem to see the need to resign. In the Bute House bunker she is bombproof.
Such is the imperious nature of the current Scottish Government, perhaps a grateful nation should wait for her to abdicate.
But they say all politics is local – and Ms Robison has rather a lot of local difficulty.
A Dundee MSP, she failed to spot the failures of NHS Tayside.
She seemed to miss that her local health authority had dipped into £2.7 million of charity donations, not to build anything new, but just to keep the hospital doors open. Yet she survives.
Our First Minister might think she is showing loyalty to a friend. But if she had more compassion – if not for those of us who need the NHS but for her pal – she would see that she is drowning.
Ms Robison is out of her depth. She simply cannot do the job. That is taking its toll on the health of the nation and, I suspect, the health of the Health Secretary. She should be put out of her misery.
The fact she has not been is not only down to the toxic loyalty of the First Minister. To be fair to Ms Sturgeon, who the heck could she replace her with?
This is a woman who was prepared to use a political defibrillator to revive Mike Russell’s career when she had a vacancy. That must have been painful.
With the talent at her disposal, a Cabinet reshuffle would be less rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic and more looking at a pack of jokers and plaintively saying twist.
Scotland waited for more than a century for its own parliament and a measure of home rule. Then we went through the ridiculously painful and expensive process of creating the building. The difficulty now is how to populate it with talent. That is looking intractable.
Nicola Sturgeon was a poor Health Secretary whose successor bears the scars of her failures. Yet, if you look down at our 129 MSPs from the public gallery, it is difficult to see many people you would entrust with the nation’s health – or indeed send for the rolls.
IF you take Ruth Davidson and Adam Tomkins out of the Tories, who are you left with? Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney out of the SNP – who are you left with? (Take Patrick Harvie out of the Greens and the world just got a whole lot less sanctimonious).
We have a poor Health Secretary because the health of our politics is poor.
When the late Sam Galbraith – the neurosurgeon – was health minister, he bluntly apologised for the failings of the NHS on his watch and said that if he couldn’t fix them then he expected to be out of a job.
Our political health has deteriorated. Now there can be no admissions of failure. Little honesty.
We have health ministers clinging on to office – no matter how difficult it is for others to cling to life.