Why Salmond Isn't too Worried About FMQs

Iain Gray would be on much firmer ground when asking questions of Alex Salmond, if he had some policies of his own.

So when he had a go yesterday over the LIT, and took great pleasure in outlining who evidently opposed it, he really didn’t touch on the facts that:

Iain doesn’t like the Council Tax either and has promised to ‘amend’ it.

He hasn’t yet come up with what he’s going to do to make it fairer and more equitable.

He, by his own admission, ‘tore up’ the Labour manifesto when he was elected leader a couple of months ago, and as yet has come up with ….. well, virtually nothing, really.

So, it’s bellyaching and grandstanding from Iain, aligned with an inability to listen to answers to his occasionally coherent questions.

For example, last week Nicola Sturgeon indicated that she was not opposed to a public enquiry over the C difficile outbreak at Vale of Leven Hospital.

And Iain then promptly demanded her resignation for opposing a public enquiry (at about the same time as his local CLP was suspended by Labour’s NEC), which she had specifically not said.

Remarkable.

Iain’s already demonstrated a remarkable ability to interpret facts to suit his own agenda, and I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised by this level of malleability in his thought processes.

But maybe he’d not be in the process of being subsumed by Skeletor (Mr Murphy) in the public eye, if he actually got up and demonstrated some ability to think independently.

As it is, he’s definitely not the guy or gal that most people think of when the phrase ‘leader of Scottish Labour’ comes to mind.

It’s a pity (no, this isn’t schadenfreude), because Iain is an affable and reasonable bloke (pretty much like myself of course), but why can’t he start taking the ‘positive’ pills?