KEZIA Dugdale wound up in hospital at FMQs. She was lucky it wasn’t the mortuary.
The Scottish Labour leader reckoned it would be a good idea to talk health.
With two Royal Colleges warning the NHS was at “breaking point”, could the FM say how many days were lost through staff stress last year, she asked.
Nicola Sturgeon, subtle as a sawbones, ignored the question and read a list of pleasing stats about investment and jobs instead, plus some delightful flattery from a different Royal College.
“I asked the FM about the stress that NHS staff are under and she just clapped herself on the back,” fumed Ms Dugdale, disgusted at such chiropractic shenanigans.
She then raised the under-review children’s ward at St John’s Hospital in Livingston.
Would Ms Sturgeon promise not to downgrade or close it? But the FM was waiting for her.
She would “take absolutely no lectures from Scottish Labour” about St John’s, because when she took over as health secretary in 2007, Labour had run it down and threatened to close it.
Since then, the SNP had protected its A&E, extended consultant cover, bought a £3m MRI scanner, put another £7m into bricks and mortar, improved the respiratory ward….
The list went on longer than an operation without anaesthetic.
… Refurbished the labour ward, opened a training school, opened an eating disorder unit...
Labour MSPs began looking decidedly peaky.
… and to cap it all, one of five new elective treatment centres to be built around Scotland in the next parliament would be at St John’s, Ms Sturgeon concluded.
“If the FM is so good at protecting services at St John’s why can’t she protect the children’s ward?” Ms Dugdale offered in reply, but it was too late. She’d been steamrollered a treat.
“Try a bit harder!” shouted John Swinney without any detectable sympathy.
Ms Sturgeon reeled off more hospitals Labour had threatened to shut which she had then heroically saved, before waving a copy of the draft budget and daring Ms Dugdale to jot down what she’d cut to find extra money for health.
“We don’t get any ideas from Kezia Dugdale and Labour, we just get whinging from the sidelines. That shower is not fit for opposition, let alone government.”
Ms Dugdale has just a week to recuperate. She probably needs a lifetime.
Ruth Davidson then bigged up Westminster for putting £125m into an Aberdeen city deal.
Didn’t this prove the wonder and beneficence of the Union? swooned the Tory leader.
If the FM had got her way, we’d all be “preparing for life outside the UK, with oil at $30 a barrel and Scotland’s finances about to be blown to pieces,” she winced.
Ms Sturgeon said that, despite the financial outlook, she regretted Yes lost the referendum.
With chutzpah worthy of her old boss, she even mocked the No side for bragging about oil.
“In February 2014, David Cameron promised a ‘£200bn oil boom’ if Scotland voted no. Maybe when he is in Aberdeen this afternoon he can tell us what happened to that money.”
Uproar naturally ensued, as MSPs recalled Alex Salmond used to value the oil at £1.5trillion, “or £300,000 for every man, woman and child in Scotland”, and whatever happened to that?
Finally, there was an obligatory mention of the labyrinthine fiscal framework needed to enact the Scotland Bill, which is vexing the pointiest heads in St Andrews House and the Treasury.
Whisper it, but it’s almost as if both sides rushed into giving Holyrood new powers without knowing how it would work in practice. Is there a doctor of economics in the house?
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