In full - the self-induced humiliation of a First Minister

I knew when I read the Official Report of yesterday's proceedings in the Scottish Parliament that I'd enjoy it probably more than I should.

I will admit to a bit of schadenfreude at the uber-smug Alex Salmond coming a fairly major cropper but, actually, the appropriate emotion is pure fury and indignation. Fury because the leader of our Country, the person who represents us, whose larger than life figure has become almost synonymous with Scotland in some people's eyes, has been shown to be so brazen in his manipulation of the facts. That a special adviser should attempt to put words into the mouth of an eminent expert is, in the first place, outrageous. For the First Minister to present these words to Parliament as if they were a done deal just makes it all so much worse.

In their 4 years of minority administration, the SNP had a reputation for being reasonably competent. In the last few months, over the Supreme Court, human rights, Cornton Vale and now this, they have shown themselves to be pretty incompetent. Most of the errors have come from either Alex Salmond or Kenny MacAskill. That's quite telling, I think. I wonder what someone like Angela Constance, much as I'm loathe to see her move from her current position as Children's Minister, could do at Justice. She'd have more credibility and understanding of the issues, I reckon.

Anyway, I digress. I thought it would be useful to tell the full story of yesterday's shocking events in Parliament, from Murdo Fraser's initial question, right through to the FM's statement of apology.

Things to note are:

How utterly smug Salmond was to Murdo, suggesting that if the Tories had taken more advice from constitutional experts, they might have done better these last few decades - just after he's completely misquoted one.

What a good week Willie Rennie has had. He started with the two question referendum issue on Monday and it's been in the headlines for most of the week. On Reporting Scotland last night it was Willie's point of order that was shown, not Iain Gray's. Not bad for a party with five MSPs.

It's also worth pointing out that Willie has made Labour leadership contender Tom Harris look like a total and complete amateur. Tom spent the week before accusing the SNP of trying to rig the referendum by allowing 16 and 17 year olds to vote. Unfortunately, the discussion centred around Tom's rather antiquated prejudices against allowing young people, many of whom pay taxes, to vote.

Anyway, here are the events as they unfolded. It all kicks off at the end of First Minister's Questions, after the live  tv coverage has ended.

Murdo Fraser (Mid Scotland and  Fife)(Con): To ask the First Minister when the Scottish Government will set a date for the referendum on independence.
 The First Minister (Alex Salmond):  In good time to meet our election commitment. Murdo Fraser:  The First Minister will not give us a date for his referendum and now he wants to muddle things further with talk of a third option.  Surely it cannot be the case that the First Minister lacks the courage to put his big idea of  independence to a straight yes or no vote of the Scottish people, or is he feart? The First Minister:  I now find out that Murdo Fraser has been feeding lines to the Prime Minister. I congratulate Murdo Fraser, who has, alone among the Tory candidates, questioned me for the fourth time. That is marvellous practice. It would be such a shame if all that practice came to naught. I have been handed a statement by Matt Qvortrup, a professor and the world‟s foremost
expert on constitutional referenda, from a letter that he is sending to  The Times newspaper. He closes the letter by saying: “While it is a matter for the Scottish people and Parliament to determine the form of their own referendum and while asking about a single question would be much more common, such a two-question proposition would be fair, reasonable and clear.” Our position is that, whatever else Murdo Fraser can count on—and I suspect that this is more certain than the result of the Conservative leadership campaign—there shall be a yes-or-no question on Scottish independence on the ballot paper, and the  independence referendum will be held in the second half of this parliamentary session. That is the proposition that we put to the people of Scotland, on which we received an overwhelming and resounding majority. 

Murdo Fraser:  I am not interested in the opinions of constitutional lawyers, however eminent they are; I am interested in the opinions of the First Minister. If the First Minister is so confident that he can win support for independence, why not put the matter to a votenow and let the people decide? The First Minister: There are a couple of reasons. The people of Scotland showed faith in
the Scottish National Party in the election  campaign, and I thought that the SNP would show faith in the people of Scotland. That is an original concept for the Conservative Party. I am fascinated. We heard from Annabel Goldie that she did not really care about some of the world‟s most renowned economists; now, of course, we are not to care about the views of the leading constitutional professors and experts. The problem for the Conservative Party and the reason why it has been reduced to its present pitiful  condition is not that it has not paid attention to the views of economists or constitutional experts, although doing so would have been good; the reason for the state of the Conservative Party is  that it has never paid attention to the views of the people of Scotland. 

So, a classic put down from a smug First Minister.

But pride comes before a fall – I was going to write smugness, but  I’m not going to rewrite a well known saying for my own ends.

Fast forward a couple of hours, and just before 3, Murdo Fraser, having realised Salmond’s mistake – maybe he’d been reading the Scottish Lib Dem website, because Willie Rennie had put out a press release giving the correct version of the Qvortrup quote before FMQs – raised this point of order:

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. At First Minister‟s questions today, the First Minister, in response to a question from me on the referendum on independence, stated the following, and I quote from the Official Report: “I have been handed a statement by Matt Qvortrup,  a professor and the world‟s foremost expert on constitutional referenda, from a letter that he is sending to  The Times newspaper. He closes the letter by saying: „While it is a matter for the Scottish people and Parliament to determine the form of their own referendum and while asking about a single question would be much more common, such a two-question proposition would be fair, reasonable and clear.‟

End of quote. I have now been informed that the words quoted by the First Minister purporting to be from Professor Qvortrup are not those of the professor but were written by the First Minister‟s official spokesman, who advised the press of that at lunch time‟s media briefing. I am sure that you will agree, Presiding Officer, that if that is correct it appears that the First Minister has misled Parliament, which should be a matter of great concern to all members. Will you ask the First Minister to come to the chamber and make a statement so that the record can be put straight? 

With less than half an hour to go before the end of proceedings, Iain Gray got in on the party too:

It is evident that either the First Minister knowingly misled Parliament or that his official spokesperson knowingly misled him. Whichever explanation is true, one of those people must face the consequences and the Parliament must hear an explanation from the First Minister for his conduct earlier today. I therefore ask the Presiding Officer to reconsider the issue and to provide additional time this afternoon for the First Minister to clarify the position. 

Fifteen minutes later, with still no word from the First Minister, Willie Rennie ramped the pressure up a notch, calling for a full Parliamentary debate: 

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I seek clarification, further to the points of order that were raised earlier. Professor Qvortrup was clear that the SNP‟s two-question referendum is untenable, but today the First Minister delivered a fabricated endorsement to the chamber. He quoted a letter that turns out to have been written not by the professor, but by the First Minister’s special adviser in his own office this morning. This is a blatant attempt to nobble an academic, to doctor the evidence and to pull the wool over the eyes of the people of Scotland. An apology is not enough.

Presiding Officer, will you make time for an early meeting of the Parliamentary Bureau so that a full debate can be held on the Government’s conduct on this matter. 

And, so, as the session closed, a wearied Alex Salmond  rose with his tail, rightly, between his legs.  

Presiding Officer, I gave a response to Parliament at First Minister’s question time today that I would now like to correct. I believed that the words that I used in response to Murdo Fraser were going to be included in a letter from Professor Matt Qvortrup to  The Times newspaper. I now know that that was not the case and, therefore, apologise to the chamber for my mistake. It was never my intention to mislead Parliament, so I wished to correct the record at the earliest opportunity. I was given a message shortly before I entered the chamber that was wrong, and therefore my response was incorrect. The responsibility for that is mine, and mine alone, which is why I apologise to the chamber for the misinformation.
 The good news is that I have now spoken to Professor Qvortrup this afternoon—something that I should perhaps have done before First Minister’s question time. I now fully understand his position, which is that, if we wish it, it is entirely feasible to hold a two-question referendum on Scotland’s constitutional future in a fair, reasonable and clear manner, provided that certain conditions are met.
 Furthermore, as one of the world’s foremost experts on referendums, Professor Qvortrup has agreed to put his services at the disposal of the Government and the Parliament—if it wishes—to bring about a two-question referendum, should that be the will of the Parliament, when the time comes.

 One thing is absolutely clear above all else: in the second half of this parliamentary term, there will be a clear question in the referendum that consults the people on whether they support Scotland becoming an independent nation.

A slight bit of smuggery at the end, but by no stretch of the imagination has this been an edifying week for the First Minister. He would have wanted to come out of his Conference with a bit of a boost after launching the independence campaign - but instead, it's all looking a bit ragged after this week.

The thing is, the SNP would be quite happy with a straight yes/no question. They clearly don't understand the implications of a third option and how to correctly determine the will of the people. They could have responded to Willie Rennie's initial investigation with something like " We need to make sure that the outcome is clear and that the process is fair. We'll give details of how that'll be achieved in due course." What they did instead was to engage in a debate they don't understand. Once they'd said that independence would win even if it effectively came second, they were sunk. It was an unforced error, as they say on the tennis court.

A final word, though. I'd hate to be the poor staffer who had to tell Salmond that he'd just lied to Parliament. That can't have been pleasant. Although what they were doing was absolutely wrong, I do have just a little bit of sympathy with that person. Having to admit you have made an almighty balls up to your boss is never easy.

Rennie tells Salmond: you should be bothering about Cornton Vale, not slating judges

I was more than a little bit perturbed to see First Minister's Questions today completely dominated by Alex Salmond's thrawn refusal to apologise to Lord Hope. Yes, it's an important issue, but ultimately, Lord Hope can look after himself. A vulnerable female prisoner with mental health problems in Cornton Vale can't, and, as yesterday's inspection report shows, she's unlikely to get the care in the women's prison that she needs.

Only one person raised the Government's consistent failings at Cornton Vale. Unsurprisingly, it was the Liberal Democrat leader, Willie Rennie. He feels really strongly that prison should be about rehabilitation, and giving people the support they need to turn away from crime and contribute positively to the community and I know he's as angry as I am about the situation at Cornton Vale.

I find it really worrying to have a First Minister who repeatedly describes prisoners as the vilest people in society. Sure, there are some pretty nasty pieces of work in our jails, but they still deserve to be treated like human beings, given somewhere comfortable to sleep (like a bed, not a mattress on the floor), access to basic sanitation and health care.  When Salmond attacks lawyers for fighting for human rights for prisoners, it makes it sound like he doesn't value a fair justice and penal system that treats everyone equally.  You also have to remember that addiction and poverty is at least partly responsible for some particularly vulnerable people ending up on the wrong side of the law.

You might think you could never end up in such a place - but what if you were charged with an offence and put on remand? You would experience the appalling conditions described by the inspector and you might realise that the stuff in the likes of the Daily Fail, saying prisoners have a life of luxury, is a bit wide of the mark.

I can't imagine Willie is going to be giving up on Cornton Vale any time soon. After First Minister's Questions, he said:

“Instead of foolishly attacking Scottish judges and lawyers, the First Minister should focus his anger on the unacceptable conditions at Cornton Vale prison.
 “This week’s damning inspection report heavily criticised Cornton Vale for failing its women prisoners. Some prisoners have not even been provided with a bed and are sleeping on mattresses on the floor.
 “The First Minister did not tell me what he will do to address his Government’s appalling failure towards the women in the prison system.
 “He must take responsibility and make immediate improvement to conditions and rehabilitation opportunities at the prison. This is the only way that the cycle of reoffending will be broken.”

Just as an aside, it was quite amusing to see Annabel Goldie describe Salmond's blustering, bellicose manner in his Holyrood Magazine article as if this was some new phenomenon. Does she not know him at all?

And Iain Gray has suddenly discovered he cares about justice. All that stuff with Richard Baker must just have been a bad dream, then.

Labour's knife crime policy looking stupider by the hour #sp11

I've often said that the worst thing that could happen in this election was for Richard Baker, whose preferred policy making procedure appears to be by jerking his knee in response to tabloid headlines, to end up as Cabinet Secretary for Justice, implementing draconian yet ineffective measures. 

The thought of Labour's policy on knife crime, of sending anyone caught with a knife to prison for six months is ill thought through.  Let's make no bones about it, folk shouldn't be wandering around carrying knives, but the way to deal with it isn't to send people to prison when the almost certainty is that they'll come out and do the same thing all over again. 

There might be a case for drastic action if knife crime was going up - but it's fallen by more than a third due to initiatives like No Knives, Better Lives. There are still too many stabbings and deaths, and that has to be stopped. However, I'd rather see money being put into making sure these kids never get into the situation in the first place, on positive measures, rather than locking up thousands of young people every year.

Labour themselves don't seem to have much of a clue about how many extra prisoners their plans would create. There were 3194 convictions in 2009-10 for carrying a knife. Yet Iain Gray said on The Politics Show on Sunday that they'd only need 500 extra prison places. How does that compute?  Do they really think that they are so persuasive that 84% of knife wielding thugs are just going to stop like that? Of course, Andy Kerr said around the same time that the figure was 1000, so they haven't a clue themselves.  In any event, our prisons are packed to capacity anyway. Where exactly are we going to put all these people?

If we have proven, evidence based methods of reducing knife crime, are we not better using them than another Labour attempt at a quick fix? Remember these are the people who came up with ID cards which were vastly expensive and wouldn't have prevented any of the terrorist atrocities claimed.

And what do people in the know think about Labour's policy. Well, the assistant secretary of the Prison Officers' Association thinks it could compromise safety for both officers and prisoners and that it's just "not credible."

And then the Police Federation don't seem terribly impressed. General Secretary Calum Steele said:

"As a manifesto proposal it is understandable why the pledge is considered as attractive. Although unconvinced by the reality, only politicians will know if it's truly affordable and deliverable in practice."

It seemed strange to see Iain Gray so clearly on the ropes on one of his flagship policies the other day. If he can't even research the implications properly of his own stuff, how can he be expected to competently take decisions on a daily basis that affect us all?


This is all about Labour being seen to be tough on crime and nothing to do with actual, practical reality.

That Politics Show Leaders' Scrap #sp11

Oh dear. Take 4 party leaders, put them side by side without any structure to their interactions and you're going to get a rammy. And if you had 5, with the addition of Patrick Harvie, I reckon it would just have got angrier sooner.

That's what happened on the Politics Show Scotland yesterday. All of them were guilty of talking over each other. It didn't look great, but if they'd all been polite and waited for each other, some would never have got a word in. They were damned whatever they did under those circumstances. I think if you are going to have all the leaders on, you need to give them their own space and provide a format that encourages proper debate. I think the Scotland on Sunday debates were quite good at that. In them, there were 2 minute opening and 1 minute closing statements, the chance for each participant to ask a question of all the others and then taking questions from the floor and online. If Claudia Winkleman or Jake Humphrey can take questions on their live shows on Twitter, then so can Isabel Fraser. It's not rocket science.

There were some good points. I have been critical of Tavish Scott's apparel in the past, but I loved his cool green tie. It was his exposure of the SNP's utter hypocrisy on Freedom of Information which I thought was really good. The Government has cost the country a small fortune fighting with the Information Commissioner about releasing figures on the cost of a Local Income Tax. Tavish pointed out that when the FOI legislation was brought in, the SNP in opposition argued for it to go much further - and now in Government are reluctant to release information.

He was also constructive on alcohol, accepting the link between price and alcohol consumption, but also saying that current laws aren't being used enough, with only a handful of prosecutions. I might disagree with Tavish and our previous group of MSPs on minimum pricing, but he is spot on that there's a wide range of things which need to be done to tackle our tortured relationship with alcohol.

However, I felt that Tavish missed an opportunity, when Labour and the SNP were talking about a living wage for public sector workers, to mention that our raising of the tax threshold was comparable to that and covered everybody, including pensioners.

Iain Gray was less awful than he was on the STV debate, but I still find the prospect of him as First Minister profoundly depressing.  He might have appeared to have had a pulse yesterday, but you would think he would have been able to answer questions easily about his flagship policy to send anyone convicted of carrying a knife to jail for 6 months.  There were nearly 4000 convictions for knife crime last year. Where exactly are we going to put these people and how much is it going to cost? We actually don't have the physical prison space, and if we have less bobbies on the beat as a result of decentralisation, this policy is going to be completely unworkable.  Tavish Scott was really good by saying that experts on the ground, who understand the issues, say that it won't cut crime and will increase re-offending. When knife crime is actually falling because of the implementation of policies like funding the violence reduction and the No Knives Better Lives campaign, why take us backwards?

Gray also had the brazen brass neck to talk about how Labour had backed the SNP on prescription charges. Oh yeah? Only for the final reduction a few weeks before Parliament was dissolved. That was the only time they'd supported the SNP. It was just stunning hypocrisy.

Annabel Goldie still hasn't provided any sort of answer as to why she wants to make us all pay £5 for prescriptions and students pay for their degrees at the same time as giving rich pensioners a tax cut. Tavish did well to point out that inconsistency. I found her manner quite objectionable yesterday. I've liked her a lot in the past, but she treated the other leaders with absolute contempt, telling them off in a way that you can imagine Margaret Thatcher speaking to her Cabinet. Saying "Hang on a minute, you" to a political equal is never going to look good.

Alex Salmond was completely and utterly stunned by a question about why women didn't like him. He really didn't know what to say. He thought it was unfair to ask him that because he was ahead of the other leaders in that poll.  Total arrogance.  I mean, I actually do quite like Alex Salmond and I respect his political abilities, but sometimes I just want to pull him back down to earth and make him realise that it's not actually all about him.

They were all, and I include Tavish in this, awful on the final question about what good qualities the others had. It looked mean spirited that none of them could find a good word to say about the others. It wouldn't have killed them to say that, maybe, Alex Salmond was kind to kittens, or Annabel told some cracking jokes behind the scenes, or Iain Gray was excellent at Tiddliwinks or Tavish had an excellent taste in ties or something. I only know that one of these things is definitely true, and I'd bet the two creme eggs sitting next to the laptop that one other is.  They need to realise, though, that generosity looks good. Isabel Fraser set them a trap and they all walked straight into it. I had hoped that the personal rapport between them behind the scenes was better than it appeared to be on the basis of that question. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case.

All in all, I'd say Tavish did well, and was practical and sensible and made a few original points, but I'd have liked him push more of our issues, like early intervention, and Iain Gray did badly. Salmond loses a hell of a lot of points for not caring about women, but I'd say he and Goldie were in the middle somewhere. My marks? Gray 3/10, Salmond 6/10, Goldie 5/10, Tavish 7/10. I've taken a mark off each of them specifically for the way they answered the last question.

Cameron to make statement on Megrahi - a reminder of what Scottish Labour said at the time

I don't know what David Cameron is going to say when he makes his statement about the release of Megrahi later, but the BBC reports that it will be very embarrassing for Scottish Labour, who could not have been more condemnatory of Kenny MacAskill at the time.


Update: more than speculation, if the Herald is to be believed - they say the report by Gus O'Donnell says Labour did all it could to help Libya secure the release of Megrahi. You have to ask yourself what Iain Gray would have done if he had been the First Minister who had to make that decision.


For the record, I totally supported Megrahi's release on compassionate grounds at the time and wrote extensively about it. As far as I am concerned it was the right thing to do then and I can't imagine anything changing my mind on that.


I don't think I'll like much of what David Cameron has to say as he's been very critical of Megrahi's release in the past, but that's not really what today's about.


I've reproduced in full the speech made by Labour's leader in the Scottish Parliament (who, emphatically, is not Labour's leader in Scotland. That's Ed Miliband) on the day Parliament was recalled to discuss Megrahi's release. I also wrote about the bigger debate a week or so later here where I described Labour's contribution as an "erratic delivery of a poisonous argument".


I always thought Holyrood Labour's position was less to do with principle and more to do with trashing the SNP. Today may well turn out to be exruciatingly embarrassing for them.


So, from the Official Report, here's Gray's speech in full.


Iain Gray (East Lothian) (Lab): I thank the Cabinet Secretary for Justice for his statement and for making it available in advance.

Last week, the Scottish Government made a wrong decision, in the wrong way, with the wrong consequences. The Scottish judicial process has compassion running through it. That is why we have no death penalty, that is why we have the right of appeal and parole, and that is why prisoners can apply for compassionate release. However, that compassion is at every point tempered by justice and by the rights of victims and wider society. That is why the final judgment in this case was rightly the minister's. He had a requirement to consider an application, but not a duty to grant it.

I acknowledge that the decision was a difficult one, but does the cabinet secretary understand how much it has angered the silent majority in Scotland? Does he understand how ashamed we were to see our flag flying to welcome home a convicted bomber? Does he understand how astonished we were when he visited a convicted murderer in prison? He quoted Jack Straw to justify that, but what Jack Straw told the Joint Committee on Human Rights was that

"A prisoner … would be invited to make written representations."

I have the letter here. Will the cabinet secretary now admit that it was his decision and his alone to visit al-Megrahi? He had no obligation to do so.

After that visit, al-Megrahi dropped his appeal. Will the cabinet secretary tell us whether there was any discussion of that in his meeting and—for the avoidance of doubt—will he publish his note of that meeting? How does the justice secretary explain the fact that the media told us a full week before the formal decision exactly how and when al-Megrahi would be released?

Surely the prisoner transfer application could have been ruled out because of the two on-going appeals that applied to the case. Instead, however, Mr MacAskill dragged that decision out over the 90-day recommended period and then rejected the application for prisoner transfer because the American families believed that the sentence would be served in Scotland. How does he think those families felt when he acknowledged in one breath that their views that the sentence would be completed in Scotland meant that al-Megrahi could not be released to a Libyan prison, but in the next breath he sent al-Megrahi home to freedom in Tripoli on licence, his sentence not commuted?

The cabinet secretary has mishandled the whole affair from start to finish. Between the scenes of triumph in Tripoli and the pain and anger at home and abroad, is there nothing that Mr MacAskill now regrets about 

Nurses and Police dominate FMQs

Nurses and Policemen probably feature in election literature more than people in any other occupation. That's a bit unfair in a way, but these two groups of people tend to be seen as representative of hard pressed public sector workers.  They do enhance the quality of our lives - but then so do the bin men, the road gritters and the people who work in the morgue, the librarians, housing officers and school janitors.

Anyway, it was nurses and policemen who had star billing at FMQs today.  There are flaws in the way that the SNP Government deal with the NHS - not least the move to free prescriptions which is effectively a tax cut for the better off and a total waste of money in my opinion - but generally this is not one of their weaker areas. That didn't stop Iain Gray trying to land one on Alex Salmond, though.

The issue he chose was the rather bizarre request by NHS Grampian that  nurses should work 14 shifts per month rather than 13 for no extra pay, but they will be compensated by, get this, a 15 minute break in each shift to make up the 7.5 hours extra they are being asked to work. Alex Salmond argued that this was fine because they were being asked to work the same number of hours. He is talking nonsense. Has he not realised that most of these nurses will be women? That many of them will have childcare costs? An extra shift for everyone means extra cost in getting to work, but for nurses with children, they may well incur an extra day's childcare and that doesn't come cheap. Unless they walk to work, these nurses are being asked to effectively take a pay cut in order to ease organisational shift planning. That's on top of a pay freeze. Alex Salmond's indifference to his made me really, really angry.

Tavish Scott raised the issue of policing, asking whether the Government's got its act together and drawn up a blueprint for the future of Scottish policing. What he was trying to get out of Salmond was whether he planned to reduce the number of police forces, perhaps even to one single Scottish force, something that the Liberal Democrats have long been against for very good reason. You can't say that the Policing priorities in Achiltibuie and Aberdeen are going to be anything like the same. It's sometimes difficult to pin down what Salmond actually says amid all the bluster, but he was pretty non committal as to future plans, hinting that there may be a reduction in the number of police forces and that the public really didn't care as long as there were bobbies on the beat.

Annabel Goldie asked about whether the use of methadone should be curtailed in treatment of drug addicts and called for an independent enquiry. Salmond was at his most sensible and asked that the issue of help for drug users should not become a political football and was quite conciliatory, if non specific, about it.

And now for the really annoying bit. Sometimes, if my husband and I are trying to get a particular point over to Anna, we'll have a kind of stage whispered conversation that we know she'll hear and hopefully make the desired modifications in her behaviour. Yes, I know, it would probably be more efficient to just ask her outright, but parents need to have a variety of strings for their bow.

Anyway, that sort of scenario is what came to mind when Ian McKee asked Alex Salmond about Children First's views on supporting children of alcoholic parents. So Daddy Ian and Daddy Alex (no, don't be silly, not our Daddy Alex) had this conversation about how nice it would be if the silly Labour, Labour and Liberal Democrat children would do the right thing and back minimum alcohol pricing. Now, I'm pretty much in favour of accepting the minimum price for alcohol, but proper, earnest, informed discussions are the way to go, not that kind of posturing.

That was the start of a round of questioning on alcohol issues in general for Alcohol Awareness Week culminating in Ross Finnie asking the simple question about how to make the 85% of people who don't know how many units are in your average bottle of wine. I'd have said 9 - 3 in a 250ml glass which I think is quite accurate. It's actually 9.75 for a 13% bottle.

I'd say Tavish and Annabel come out top of the leaders today, then Gray who loses out for following up a good question with one example of a waiting time not being met. I don't think that'll resonate too much. Then there was Salmond at the bottom. His total lack of understanding on nurses' shift patterns has earned him quite a long spell on the naughty step as far as I am concerned.

Who were these strange actors at FMQs today?

Noon today saw the inital First Minister's Questions of the 2010-11 Holyrood session.  And it was really, really weird.

For the first while it looked as if Alex Salmond and Iain Gray had been kidnapped and replaced by actors - or robots, in fact. Actually actors is better, because robots would have done a better job. It's not so much that the tone was remarkably civilised for FMQs, but that it looked more as if they'd rehearsed it to death beforehand. There was no enthusiasm for what they were saying. It all seemed so contrived.

Iain Gray's topic was the aircraft carriers. There's a certain irony that it was the Labour Government who dithered and delayed on these ships, vital to both Govan and Rosyth, and it was Willie Rennie as MP who was continually on their case chivvying them along. And, this was the same Labour Government which considered turning the Fife port into a dump for nuclear submarines. Anyway, here was Iain, asking Alex, who has no responsibility for these ships, a series of long, rambling questions with which Alex could only agree, giving his affirmation in equally long, rambling answers. Weird. I think I preferred it when they were at each other's throats.

The clearly fake consensus between the two of them was not replicated by their MSPs. There was a moment when Christine Grahame was seen on camera giving dirty looks and gesticulating at a Labour MSP.

There then followed a bit of a weird exchange between Annabel Goldie and Alex Salmond in which she slagged him off for the cost of his National Monologue and he slagged her off for the cost of the AV referendum which he said nobody wanted. Much like the independence referendum he wants to inflict on us that most of us aren't bothered about.

Then came Tavish. I have one major criticism. That suit! Pin striped double breasted - it looked way way too sharp. It needs to be consigned to the back of the wardrobe now. His question, of course, was much better. He raised the issue of the 4 year wind technician course at Carnegie College in Dunfermline. It's been saved this year by Fife Council, but its long term future is mired in red tape between various quangos. If we want Scotland to be the renewables powerhouse of Europe, then we need to ensure there are enough skilled workers to do the job.  Salmond needs to up his game a bit more than just to slag the Westminster Government for the spending cuts. He needs to look at the future for the Scottish economy and ensure that these courses are funded.

We then had a couple of obviously planted questions from SNP MSPs, firstly about UK Border Agency cuts at the ports in the south west of Scotland, and on minimum alcohol pricing. I hate planted questions with a vengeance and it added to the Stepford qualities of today.

And after Richard Simpson asked more about the alcohol pricing plans, the BBC coverage cut off. Must watch on the web in the future.

It was a very strange FMQs, and not the pugnacious affair I expected. I wonder if the rest of the session, in the build up to the election, will be similarly phoney and weird.

Tavish catches Salmond fiddling while education burns

FMQs is usually a display of brimstone, bluff and bluster from our imitiable showman of a First Minister. Occasionally he surprises and behaves like a grown up, just to remind us (or maybe himself) that he still can. Increasingly, though, he's been all over the place in recent months. He knows that the SNP's star is most definitely waning. Their election was pretty much a disaster - they didn't increase their seats at all despite boasts of a target of 20 seats. Maybe if nothing else the experience has taught them about expectation management. Next May looms closer and the Government normally has to fight on its record - but it's hard to see exactly what the SNP has actually been doing since May 2007.

Today when he was replying to Iain Gray's questions about business rates, he seemed distracted and subdued. Mind you, it's an issue his Government has been found well and truly wanting on. Basically, there's been a business rates revaluation which has resulted in some businesses see their rates bills go up by 200%. There's a particular issue with pre-school nurseries in Fife which have seen huge rises. The revaluation is carried out by an independent assessor so Salmond tried to do what he always does - find someone else to blame. Not so fast, though. In England the rises have been brought in gradually, whereas here it's come as a huge shock. Mr S might want to think about that when he delivers two years' cuts for the price of one next year, by the way.

Anyway, it's good to see that our Leader of the Opposition has finally caught up with an issue that Tavish Scott and the Scottish Liberal Democrats have been campaigning on for months. Maybe he wanted to make a good impression on one David Miliband who was watching from the public gallery.


The best question came from Tavish Scott, though. Listing, at some length, the various crises in education at the moment - the debacle of the curriculum for excellence in secondary schools, teacher numbers falling, class sizes rising, manifesto pledges broken (although of course that's the Councils' fault, not the SNP Government's according to, er, Mr Salmond), he asked the First Minister to say what he'd written to Education Conveners about recently.

For a fraction of a second, I thought Salmond looked a trifle shamefaced as he realised that he looked like Nero fiddling as Rome burned before he admitted that his letter was encouraging the Councils to make St Andrew's Day a school holiday. Now, I have no problem with that in principle, but when my Council is thinking of cutting £198 from the amount of money they spend on my daughter, I would hope that my local education convener, SNP member or not, would have more important things to think about.

Salmond, though, did try to pin the blame on Denis Canavan who had apparently been encouraging him to ensure that the holiday was adopted. Why can he never just take responsibility for things? Honestly. Tavish's follow up question was brilliant, though. He basically pointed out that the Government had had precious few responses from Councils, even SNP ones, to its efforts on this issue. This seemed to spark Salmond into life and he launched into a bizarre tirade accusing Tavish of being unpatriotic for not supporting the idea of a holiday on our national day. I have to say that really annoyed me. To me it's an abuse of the word patriotism to bandy it about in political debate like that - utterly poisonous. I said so when Jim Murphy used it on the SNP and I do so again now.

Tavish was on very, very good form, though and he certainly landed a significant blow today, showing up the First Minister's lack of sense of priorities. I doubt the electorate of Scotland will be very impresseed next year if his key achievement is a new bank holiday as they're coping with job losses and spending cuts.

Tavish Scott highlights Lib Dem Coalition success at FMQs

It was probably a little bit naughty of Tavish Scott to use today's FMQs at Holyrood to highlight a key part of the Coalition Agreement secured by the Liberal Democrats - the ending of detention of children at Dungavel and other immigration detention centres around the country. A bit naughty, but entirely understandable, and a good way to highlight things that Labour failed to do in 13 years.

I am so pleased that we argued and won a concession on this point. I said all the way through that I found the idea of talking to the Tories painful, but the more I read the Coalition Agreement, the more I like it.

It's early days yet, but I'm more and more convinced that we've done the right thing for the country. The party might take a hammering in the first term but at least we stepped up, unlike some. Yes, Labour Party, that would be you, I'm talking about.

You have to feel a wee bit sorry for Iain Gray. For once he managed to put across an attacking question very well, asking Salmond if he was "shameless or clueless" over NHS job cuts in Glasgow. Salmond was on great form. He's been edgy in recent weeks but today he was at his best, punchy without being nasty and despite Gray's good start, Salmond trounced him. He didn't at any point even attempt to answer the question put to him about the specific job losses but went to town on Labour for its failure to negotiate to progressive alliance to keep the Tories out of power. It's gratifying to see that that's as obvious to people in other parties as it is to me. Every time Labour carp and criticise, they should be well and truly told that they were the ones who put themselves in opposition when they could have been in Government.

Salmond also took a pop at Annabel Goldie for her comments during the election about Nick Clegg:

"I know a Clegg bite swells up and is immensely irritating for a few days and then it goes back down and leaves a nasty little blemish as a perpetual reminder of how tiresome it once was."

She came back to say that a bit of Tory Antihistamine would sort him out. Hmm, dream on Annabel.

The appalling, brutal murder of teenager Jack Frew was brought up by his MSP Andy Kerr. When Andrew wrote about Jack the other day he mentioned that the attack might have been homophobically motivated. I've blogged often about how even in Anna's primary school playground homophobic words and attitudes are commonplace. We really need to ensure that kids grow up knowing that being gay, or lesbian or bisexual is perfectly fine. There are no words of comfort anyone can offer Jack Frew's family that will help, but my heart really does go out to them.

Holyrood: The Budget Battleground

Last year the SNP Government was only able to get its budget through after a highly dramatic Holyrood showdown. Will the various groups in the Scottish Parliament be able to conduct themselves in a constructive manner this year, working together to pass a budget that meets the needs of the people of Scotland? After reading the articles in today's Sunday Herald where the Party Leaders set out their positions, I'm not convinced.

We need more from John Swinney than what amounts to a plaintive wail that the big boys in London ran away with our money. If I in my own household budget have to deal with the impact of Labour's recession, then why shouldn't John Swinney with the Scottish budget. It's not pleasant, but you just have to get on with it, work out what's important, and stop whinging that it's all someone else's fault.

Let's look closer at Swinney's boasts that the Scottish Government has delivered a surplus of £2.6 billion over 3 years. I don't usually have much good to say about how Labour have managed the country's finances but you can't really compare the Holyrood and Westminster budgets in terms of responsibility. I mean, how many banks did John Swinney save? To say that the current economic crisis strengthens the arguments for independence is patently ridiculous. Look at the real pain that the Irish people go through as their Government made huge cuts make monstrous cuts in public spending in 2 emergency budgets last year.

As for Iain Gray, he concentrated most of his space on slating the SNP over the cancellation of GARL and blinding us with figures which supposedly show that the SNP has had plenty money but it just hasn't used it wisely. His words just seem to be an extension of Labour's inability to talk honestly about the financial mess we're in on a UK level. He also fails to recognise that one of the factors making things worse for Scottish businesses is London Labour's abject failure to properly regulate the banks, to use our ownership of them to keep them lending to sustainable businesses. Labour wants to see an extension of the concessionary travel scheme to those on the minimum level of DLA and more investment in housing as well as the reinstatement of GARL.

And still the Salmond-Goldie love-in continues as, get this, all the Tories want, their big idea, when Scotland's businesses and households are struggling, is that the Government should publish online any expenditure over £25,000. That's it. How is that going to help? The Tories are very keen on this kind of pledge. I remember Boris Johnson saying during his election campaign that he would publish every pennny he spent on his website. I'm not sure he's delivered on that in any meaninfgul form.

Patrick Harvie says some good things about investment in renewables and insulation but he'd be more than happy to ruin the economy of Fife by cancelling the vital new Forth crossing.

In contrast to all of the above, Tavish Scott's piece is mainly full of positive, practical stuff. That F word - fairness, highlighted by Nick Clegg this week, a principle of virtually every Liberal Democrat election campaign I've ever been involved in, is at the fore of what Tavish is saying.

First, he wants an end to the top earners in the public sector being able to award themselves big bonuses while those at the bottom end of the pay scale get nothing. He wants action on paying six figure salaries to doctors who also work in the private sector. I agree with him that if we're paying that sort of salary, we deserve to have them full time. If they want to work part time in the private sector, then their salaries should be reduced accordingly.

He says that urgent investment is needed to get young people into work, highlighting a 45% increase in claims for Job Seekers Allowance among young people.

He also highlights practical examples of how businesses are suffering, being turned own for credit even when their proposals are sound, being dealt with remotely by people who don't know their history and their business.

It's notable that Tavish is the only leader to report on constructive discussions with John Swinney which seem to be going somewhere. I like the fact that he's chosen to emphasise that dialogue.

Labour and the SNP don't escape focused criticism, but Tavish is much more positive in his presentation than the others. Labour gets it for its myriad economic failures, the SNP for the failure of its Scottish Futures Trust which "continues to consume millions of pound but still builds absolutely nothing."

If I have to say one thing about the Liberal Democrat proposals, is that they don't mention at all one of the biggest issues to me - housing. When you have some local authorities and housing associations able to house barely a fifth of the people who need housing, when large families are crammed into 2 bedroomed houses, often in hellishly poor conditions, damp, with inadequate heating with no hope of a move to something bigger, when you have families in bed and breakfast accommodation because there's nowhere else to house them, something has to be done. Tavish understands this. When I and other bloggers interviewed him just after he became leader, he wanted to see more invevstment in social housing to save the construction jobs haemorrhaging during the recession. I don't think that this can wait for action - we need to do more to help these people now. Only then will we have a budget for all of Scotland.

The first act of the budget drama plays out this week. Let's hope that the process is more serious production and less pantomime farce.

Nadine Dorries thinks Trident isn't a weapon of mass destruction

Yes, you did read that right. Tory MP Nadine Dorries actually said on Question Time (and I replayed it several times to make sure, because I thought my dodgy ears couldn't possibly be right) that Trident, which her Party has vowed to replace in the unfortunate event of them ever returning to office, is not a weapon of mass destruction.

It's a pity she couldn't have looked up her leader's plans for a more important item of defence spending - the aircraft carriers which are due to be built at Rosyth dockyard if this Government ever stops delaying the project. She was asked the direct question and she said she didn't know. I think we should be told the Tory plans for a project which is so vital for the Fife economy, where unemployment is up a jaw dropping 70% on last year. You would think that when she was appearing on a tv programme being filmed a hop, skip and a jump from Rosyth that somebody in the Tory party would have had the sense to brief her. Of course, there's always the possibility that they don't want to make their plans public.... Why could that be?

Anyway, I think the clear star performer last night was Nicola Sturgeon. She is usually very good in these combative settings and she did shine last night, despite not having particularly great opposition.

What on earth are the Labour Party going to do about Iain Gray, though? He's a nice enough man with his heart in the right place, but he was clearly otherwise engaged when charisma was being handed out. His delivery is wooden and he can barely string an argument together.

Nadine was, well, Nadine and totally out of her comfort zone. The bizarre SNP/Tory love in lives on as she praised a lot of what was happening in Scotland and had to be reminded by David Steel that the Tories had completely and obstinately opposed devolution in any form.

I wasn't too enamoured with David Steel saying he saw the point of the people in the audience who were calling for everyone's DNA to be taken at birth and put on a database and not advancing any of the arguments why this would be a really bad idea.

Nadine's Trident comment has to be the quote of the week, though - the audience gasped with sheer incredulity.

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