IT’S not saying much, but Kezia Dugdale had one of her best FMQs today.
Passionate, direct, tingling with emotion, the Scottish Labour leader silenced Holyrood when she accused Nicola Sturgeon of breaking her word to a dying man.
Gordon Aikman is a champion of sufferers of motor neurone disease and their families.
Diagnosed as an athletic 29-year-old, “he is now in a wheelchair and relies on visits from care workers three times a day,” Ms Dugdale said. “He is dying.”
She reminded the First Minister of her promise to double specialist MND nurses in the NHS by October. It didn’t happen.
An awkward Ms Sturgeon admitted there were “delays”, but the right people were hard to find and health boards were filling places “as swiftly as possible”.
Ms Dugdale then blamed her for exacerbating a “social care crisis” with council cuts.
Would the FM introduce a living wage for struggling care workers?
Respectfully subdued till now, Ms Sturgeon could bite her tongue no longer.
Westminster cuts meant “challenging times”, she said, and demanded to know where Ms Dugdale would find the money for her policy.
Ms Dugdale's attack was wobbling but she still had the upper hand. Ah, but what would Scottish Labour be without a last-minute screw-up? Unrecognisable, that’s what.
Her finger on the finishing line, Ms Dugdale raised the SNP’s plan to axe air passenger duty, a “£250m tax break for big airline companies”. Cue uproar.
Ms Sturgeon was exultant, and gave her opponent the hairdryer treatment.
“There we have it!,” she roared. “The last vestiges of credibility that Kezia Dugdale and Scottish Labour party had have just disappeared.
“We are back to the mythical air passenger duty money and the fourth thing it’s to be spent on.
“Education, tax credits, first-time buyer grants, and today the living wage. It is absolutely dire: that lot are not fit to be an Opposition, let alone an alternative government.”
Ruth Davidson (“arrant nonsense”) and Willie Rennie (“his hypocrisy knows no bounds”) were then pawed aside on education and council tax, before Ms Sturgeon sank her teeth into an unwisely gung-ho Ken McIntosh, who wanted more affordable housing.
She snarled thanks for his “back of a fag packet” idea, and looked forward to hearing how he’d pay for it, especially given Labour’s “shining record” of six council houses when last in power.
Mr McIntosh detumesced back into his seat. Ms Sturgeon swept out, unstoppable.
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