Since you pay for the Scottish parliament, you have a right to know how it works. This is how.
Holyrood is back from the October recess and top of the agenda for the opposition was Westminster’s approval of drilling for gas at Jackdaw, and calls for the Rosebank oil field to get the green light too.
The First Minister was less keen to discuss the matter. Labour’s Michael Marra opened with a short, straightforward question – ‘I support Rosebank. Does he?’ – and invited John Swinney to respond with similar brevity.
What he got was a thumping avalanche of jargon – it’s a ‘quasi-judicial process’, dontcha know? – designed to bury the questioner, and the question, under a blanket of civil servant weasel words.
Marra dug himself out from beneath the verbiage and chose to move on. Russell Findlay was determined to get an answer.
When his turn came, the Tory leader followed Marra’s pithy approach. ‘Should Rosebank get the green light? Yes or no?’
John Swinney has a great many opinions on a great many things, but still ducks the question when it comes to North Sea oil
Arose Swinney, with a glint in his eye: ‘I answered that question to Michael Marra.’
Then sat back down.
‘Oh no he didn’t,’ trilled Findlay, getting into pantomime season rather too early. ‘Rosebank: Yes or No?’
Again Swinney stood, again he sighed, ‘I answered that question to Michael Marra,’ and again he resumed his seat.
A third time Findlay asked and a third time the First Minister put on the same performance. He looked mightily pleased with himself.
He was enjoying this, perhaps modelling his snide attitude on that of Cabinet colleague Stephen Flynn, who is adept at riling up the opposition and inept at everything else.
Swinney, might I remind you, is on £136,000 a year. I don’t mind the First Minister being a wide boy. I mind having to pay him six figures for the privilege.
‘This is torture,’ Findlay yelped. ‘He’s got opinions on Gaza, Israel, Russia, Iran, Europe — but not on the North Sea.’
This time Swinney offered a little more, but not much, essentially reciting the by now famous answer to Marra, which wasn’t even an answer in the first place.
Findlay reminded him there were one thousand jobs being lost every month in the North Sea, as though the First Minister cares about any job other than his own.
The SNP leader remembered the last Tory government’s energy profits levy and hurled it back in Findlay’s face. Finally, though inadvertently, the First Minister had alighted on a reasonable point.
When the Nationalists and Labour were clambering upon the Net Zero bandwagon, the Tories were flinging themselves on the same cart. The First Minister was, Findlay charged, ‘terrified of the Green Party and Nicola Sturgeon’.
Has he seen how Ross Greer’s empty doll’s eyes swivel madly to life at the mention of fossil fuels? How his tangerine locks burst into flames at the thought of an unrecycled carrier bag? I too am terrified of Climate Chucky.
Speaking of, Greer blamed the recent storms on ‘climate breakdown’. We never had strong winds until climate change. Dorothy was blown to the Land of Oz by a blast of far-Right hate speech.
His solution to our ecological woes, you’ll be shocked to learn was another tax, this one on ‘frequent fliers’ such as bankers and other wealthy types over-reliant on air travel.
This, he claimed, would raise £50million. Alternatively, we could slap a tax on attention-seeking flights to the West Bank and rake in twice as much from Green politicians alone.
Swinney alleged that the Chancellor’s new spending plans would cut the Scottish Government’s coffers by 1.3 per cent in real terms. Hey, I guess there was some good news in the Budget after all.
Michael Marra urged him to ‘put the betrayal myths away and work together to build growth’.
Why should he? Betrayal myths win elections, co-operation doesn’t.
Well-meaning characters like Marra have a Sunday schoolteacher’s outlook on politics: all morality, no strategy. They’re after the keys to the kingdom while the SNP settles for the keys to Bute House.
