By ANAS SARWAR, Scottish Labour leader
In the short time Humza Yousaf has been First Minister, the record of this Parliament has had to be corrected three times because of wrong information he has told this chamber.
Once was in response to the serious issue of the Covid inquiry and deleted WhatsApp messages.
Another was in response to me in this chamber when the First Minister gave an inaccurate answer about Scotland’s renewables.
But instead of immediately correcting the record, he took up hours of civil service time to try and spare his blushes.
We know this because Labour now has the full un-redacted emails between the First Minister’s office and officials.
They show that when civil servants pointed out he was wrong he rejected their advice.
Instead his advisors had civil servants spend a month coming up with a new line – including manufacturing statistics to fit his answer.
This is a gross breach of the relationship between Ministers and officials.
But for the First Minister and his Government, this behaviour has become the norm.
It is also a gross breach between ministers and the public where a minister can knowingly mislead them.
Scottish Labour has long called for a ‘Clean Up Holyrood Act’ to sweep away the culture of secrecy and cover-up the SNP have allowed to thrive.
The Salmond inquiry, the Ferry Scandal, the failures at the Queen Elizabeth in Glasgow and the Sick Kids in Edinburgh, deleting Covid WhatsApps and the Deputy First Minister now saying they only ‘aim’ to tell the truth.
Under the SNP trust and faith in Scotland’s institutions has been lost.
This is a Government that is running out of road, desperate to save their jobs and willing to say anything to cling on to power.
The NuSNP may most certainly have lost their way a tad. But there have been dark interference by the hidden hands of the establishment to help that along.
Put simply 2014 scared the establishment rigid. The Vote for independence was greater than we dare imagine and for that reason it was deemed that action be taken to stop the independence movement.
And that is exactly what the dark state has done. Salmond was first to be done down. Others were to follow. And further south, Jeremy Corbyn got the same treatment. A thoroughly honourable man with decent policies destroyed with instead another war mongering Tony Blair type in Sir Keir Starmer utterly under the control of the corporate elite. And so, the private school educated Anas Sarwar may catcall the probate school educated Humza Yousaf, but the reality is they are both the same. But their failures are no justification of nuLabour before them.