Stand-up Lamont takes wise crack at stand-in Sturgeon

Columnist

Friday 22 June 2012

With the First Minister off in California watching cartoons, it fell to Nicola Sturgeon to hold the Holyrood fort.

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SKETCH Ian Bell

Whether she could also hold her own was another matter.

Johann Lamont had been working on her jokes. This is a lot more fun than working on policies, but where Labour is concerned the distinction isn't always clear. Courtesy of the SNP, Lamont had plenty of material to work with.

Rumour has it that the party of independence has been forbidden to use the word independence, for fear of putting people off. If the spin engineers have anything to do with it, they'll presumably be known as the Scottish Near-enough Party. Lamont thought this was hilarious.It was almost as funny, in fact, as someone asking what the Labour in Labour Party stands for these days.Still, Lamont had seen an opinion poll suggesting support for a Yes vote has dipped. Before you knew it, this became "the fact that independence is becoming more and more unpopular because of airy and meaning-less assertions from the likes of the Deputy First Minister".One airy idea to which Lamont returns, week after week, is the SNP claim that Scotland would have a seat on the monetary policy committee of the Bank of England. The fact that we don't have such a thing, and have never had such a thing, did not detain the Labour leader. What about the EU, the pound, the monarchy, financial regulation, the Union flag? According to this line of attack, the SNP are either asserting or compromising. That much is true: the Nationalist message is becoming distinctly fuzzy.Sturgeon dealt with it well enough, nevertheless. The benefits of independence overlooked by Labour – the avoidance of illegal wars, the expulsion of nuclear submarines, protection against Labour's "new friends", the Tories – were given an airing. The Labour leader had a nearly-funny routine, meanwhile, about Wallace, Stirling Bridge and the victors keeping Edward as king and sending him "homeward with a seat on the monetary policy committee". Only a pedant would remember that Wallace won his battle.

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Stand-up Lamont takes wise crack at stand-in Sturgeon

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