Meeting of the Parliament 01 May 2024
Politics can be ugly, and never more so than last week. However, I must pay great tribute to the First Minister: in a moment of great stress, he made a speech of great dignity and grace. It was a resignation speech that all of us, had we been in such a situation, would have wanted to make. That is a great tribute to him. Personally, I have always found him a very warm and generous individual, with a great smile and a sense of humour. I congratulate him and Nadia, who are soon to be parents again—if he thought that he was going to escape the sleepless nights, I think that they are about to come back with a vengeance.
It says something that the leadership of the Conservative Party is more stable than that of the SNP. I am old enough to remember when Nicola Sturgeon was First Minister. It is good to see her back in her place this afternoon. I do not know whether she wants to make an intervention in relation to a contribution that she made before, when she said:
“The governance of any country cannot simply be a revolving door that one party gets to pick time and time again who occupies the highest office in the land.”
I do not know whether she resiles from those remarks, but I am sure that the chamber would welcome her updated commentary on whether there should be an election now. I think that it is worth considering, which is why we will support the motion of no confidence. I note that Nicola Sturgeon is not rising to her feet. I suspect that she is, quite smartly, ducking that one.
My second reason for supporting the motion is that this Government is fond of saying that it is the best—the best in the UK. However, I do not think that “the best” is how you could judge the view of the single mother in my constituency who went without food in order to pay for her private dental bills because she could not get an NHS dentist; or that of the elderly man I met who was wincing with pain because his hip operation had been delayed once again; or that of the classroom assistant who was right in front of me with a broken wrist because she had had a violent incident with a pupil in a class; or that of the islanders who are desperately waiting for a reliable ferry service. They are not saying that it is the best, but this Government is riddled with complacency. It believes that, because we are marginally better on some occasions than the Conservative Government, we should somehow be grateful for the performance of this Government. That is the second reason why we need a renewed mandate for this Parliament and why we should have an election.
I am a big fan of Jamie Hepburn—many people have heard me talk about him before. He toils away on his own in private with his civil servants, crafting document after document that absolutely nobody reads; nevertheless, we have to give him credit for that. I want to release Jamie Hepburn from the endless torture of that responsibility. For that reason alone, I am sure that everybody would agree that we should have an election.
I never thought that I would ever say the words, “I agree with Ash Regan,” but her comment earlier that, “We chucked the Greens out the front door to sneak them in the back door,” is the fundamental problem with this Government. Either it heals the rift with the Green Party or it heals the rift with the public, and it cannot do both. That was Humza Yousaf’s view last week: that the Bute house agreement could not continue and was dragging down the SNP, and that that break was therefore needed. However, the SNP needs the majority, and that is why it needs the Greens. It is therefore not possible for the SNP to have a mandate in this Parliament, and so that needs to be renewed.
For all those reasons—for the revolving door, for the belief that it is the best, for the case of Jamie Hepburn, if nothing else—but also to heal the rift, we need to have an election.
15:23