You can get The National's Real Scottish Politics newsletter free and direct to your inbox every weekday. To sign up, click HERE and click the + button.
LAST month, Labour MP Natalie Fleet had to step down as safeguarding minister after finding the role “overwhelmingly triggering” because she became pregnant at 15 after she was groomed and raped by an older man.
She had been appointed following the resignation of Jess Philips saying it was the “honour of a lifetime” but she had eventually found the job was making her “ill”.
Yet Anas Sarwar proclaimed at the weekend that the hardest job in British politics – and “for many reasons the hardest job in the world" – is being the leader of Scottish Labour.
Cue the world’s smallest violin, please.
Could you imagine Nicola Sturgeon saying this after hosting daily Covid press conferences for months? Or Kenny MacAskill after making the decision as Justice Secretary to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi – the only person convicted of the Lockerbie bombing – on compassionate grounds? Or any prime minister or cabinet minister in fact, when they have to make decisions with major consequences daily?
Outside of politics, earlier this year it was reported almost two-thirds of people are having to cut back on essentials such as groceries and utilities as a result of the cost of living crisis with 40% of people having £100 or less left at the end of each month after paying for bills and essentials.
Scores of people out there are basically working their fingers to the bone for absolutely nothing.
Yet Sarwar, who has just led Scottish Labour to their worst ever Holyrood result and has been rewarded with a seat in an unelected chamber – that oversees every law passed in the UK – and a free pass into Andy Burnham’s government had the gall to stand there and say he had spent the past five years in the hardest job in the world “for many reasons”.
Do enlighten us. What are those reasons? Is it because of all the pivotal decisions you had to make rather than sniping from the sidelines every Thursday? Is it because of the rightful scrutiny you received after false promises of no more austerity and saving jobs at Grangemouth?
Is it because UK Labour and Keir Starmer brought you down because you didn’t have the bravery to stand up to him and for Scotland? Is it because your party constantly suggested Scotland was too wee, too poor, too stupid to be independent, only for it to emerge it had to get its London bosses to pledge “financial assistance” to remain a “going concern”?
I wonder what Fleet, who said she had to hear the “worst of humanity” in her role, would’ve thought of it?
The SNP said Sarwar should be in line for the funniest joke of the Fringe, and we’d fully agree if it wasn’t such an outrageous thing to say.
You can get The National's Real Scottish Politics newsletter free and direct to your inbox every weekday. To sign up, click HERE and click the + button.
