Meeting of the Parliament 31 January 2024
As we debate the culture of secrecy and cover-up that has been laid bare in the UK Covid-19 inquiry, let us remember that at the heart of this scandal are the people who lost their lives and families who lost their loved ones. It is for them that we search for answers and call out that culture of cover-up at the very heart of the Scottish Government.
In recent weeks, it has been revealed that Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney, Jason Leitch and other officials too numerous to name have deleted all of their pandemic WhatsApp messages. Nicola Sturgeon described Boris Johnson as a “clown”. Many might agree with her, but no one thinks that of Nicola Sturgeon—she is a clever woman, so what she has done is deliberate. Some have described it as cynical and calculating, but, whether or not we agree with that, it is deliberate.
This week, Jeane Freeman admitted that the SNP Government was not prepared for the pandemic; Kate Forbes has challenged the deletion of evidence by her own colleagues; and Nicola Sturgeon today has confirmed that she misled the nation and put the boot into poor Humza Yousaf. The inquiry was able to scrutinise the WhatsApp messages of UK Government ministers and officials. It will have no such ability to scrutinise the totality of the decision-making process of Nicola Sturgeon and her advisers, thanks to the systematic destruction of evidence on a truly industrial scale. That is utterly shameful and a complete betrayal of trust.
The SNP’s arrogance and sense of impunity have robbed the public of any chance of properly understanding what happened during the pandemic. We had the discharge of untested patients to care homes, the closure of businesses and the shutting down of our schools—and, of course, more than 17,000 Scots died from Covid-19. The loss of each of those lives is a tragedy. However, one surviving WhatsApp exchange reveals that the SNP chief of staff was much more concerned with stoking a “good old-fashioned rammy” with the UK Government, so that she could
“think about something other than sick people”.
The outrage of a comment like that surpasses party politics. That attitude at the very centre of Government is utterly indefensible.
Some 17,000 lives were lost, but the SNP’s priority was constitutional bickering. When asked about that, the former First Minister simply failed to tell the truth. We have no answers to why key and often deadly decisions were made. What we do have is proof positive of the SNP’s skewed priorities.
This is not the first time that the SNP has attempted to conceal the truth from voters. Over the past 17 years, it has instilled a culture of secrecy and cover-up that now permeates Scottish politics. I have been in the Parliament for some time—since the beginning—and I have had a ringside seat for the erosion of accountability and the shroud of secrecy, which was at its worst when Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney were in charge.
The SNP has long berated the Tories at Westminster for the party’s sense of closed government, but it seems that those protests were a case of “Do as I say, not as I do.” Transparency and openness should be practised by everyone else but not the SNP, when it comes down to it, because it is one rule for them and another rule for the rest of us.
The use of private, un-FOI-able SNP email addresses for official conversations, the mass destruction of discussion chains and the on-going misleading of Parliament cannot continue. That goes beyond political scandal; it is a potential breach of the law.