Stand By Your Posts
Regular readers will have noticed a lack of articles lately. The fault is partly mine: the editor and I have been busy with other things for a fortnight, and Holyrood has been left to its own devices.
Having spent a few moments this evening reading up on what he missed, I can report that very little has changed.
The big story, naturally, is a tweet. At 11am on Remembrance Sunday the official Scottish Government X account posted warm wishes for the Sikh festival of Bandi Chhor Divas, at the very moment the nation was observing the two-minute silence. It didn’t post anything of its own about Remembrance, though it did repost the First Minister’s message showing him laying a wreath in Edinburgh. Its only other post that day, according to the Scottish Daily Express, was about a minister attending COP31.
Cue the Conservatives. Shadow Scottish Secretary Harriet Cross wrote to Swinney demanding an explanation, her colleague Andrew Bowie suggested the SNP had steered clear of Remembrance because of the Union flag on the fallen’s shoulders, Kemi Badenoch weighed in, and Reform called it an “unmistakable show of contempt”.
Swinney replied that the claim the government hadn’t acknowledged Remembrance was “categorically false” and asked Cross to withdraw it. The SNP’s head of digital added that the UK Government hadn’t posted about Remembrance on Facebook either, which may well be true and is not much of a defence.
Everyone involved could have drawn a line under this with a one-sentence “Bad timing, apologies”. The Express reports the government instead has “no regrets” and that a spokesman wouldn’t rule out a repeat. That’s a bold approach to the news cycle, and the news cycle has responded by staying exactly where it was.
Over at the Criminal Justice Committee, MSPs have written to Justice Secretary Neil Gray and Scottish Prison Service chief Linda Pollock. They say they learned the full extent of September’s disorder at HMP & YOI Polmont, which the committee describes as the worst in a decade, from media reports some six weeks later.
Convener David Linden says the committee remains deeply dissatisfied with how information was handled. Pollock has put the incident down to tension caused by overcrowding. Gray told the committee he would reflect on how operational information is shared, and he’s due to make a statement to Parliament today.
Riot, silence, newspapers, strongly worded letter, reflection, statement. You could set your watch by it. What happens about the overcrowding is the question nobody has yet been asked to reflect on.
On Wednesday Reform UK used an opposition debate to force MSPs to vote on face coverings in public places, specifically the burqa and niqab. This followed a members’ business debate last month that their deputy leader Thomas Kerr said ended prematurely. Opponents called it racist; Kerr said he didn’t mind making Holyrood uncomfortable.
The motion was amended to note that police already have powers to require the removal of face coverings where there are reasonable grounds to believe they’re being used to conceal identity in connection with crime or disorder. It passed as amended by 92 votes to 15, with 8 abstentions. So Reform got its vote, and Parliament used it to say the law is fine as it stands.
And today, Tory MSP Stephen Kerr has called for a “national conversation” about how Holyrood elects its members, complaining that the Scottish Greens have “gamed” the list system to win a disproportionate number of seats. The Greens won 15 MSPs, 13 of them from the regional lists, having stood in only six constituencies. The Tories contested every constituency and returned 12.
The Greens’ reply is that Kerr is himself a list MSP and would lose under First-Past-The-Post. There’s a certain comedy in a party discovering that a voting system is unfair on the same day it’s reminded how many of its own members it depends on. It’s a venerable tradition that nobody finds a flaw in the electoral system until the result goes against them.
What next? The SNP’s “Choose Scotland” campaign, launched at its Aberdeen conference in mid-October, runs until Christmas, with a national day of action planned for St Andrew’s Day on 30 November. The Prime Minister, for his part, has so far shown no sign of moving on the Section 30 question. Expect a leaflet or two.
