Same old script offers little in entertainment or enlightenment

The cast may change in Scottish politics but nothing else at first minister’s questions ever does. This was Douglas Ross’s penultimate session as leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party and it is too late for the Tory leader to learn any new tunes. So, with a view to the coming election and his party’s three northeastern constituencies, Ross asked a question about North Sea oil exploration that he has asked on many previous occasions.

And since the questions came in the same old style, John Swinney answered them in the same old style. New licences for drilling must be subject to “climate compatibility” tests and the Conservative Party are “climate deniers” and so on and so on ad infinitum. The highlight — if it may be termed such — of these exchanges was the rebuke Ross earned from the presiding officer for heckling Swinney. The first minister does not like being called “Honest John” which is why the Tory leader delights in lampooning him like that.

If there was nothing new there, there was nothing new anywhere else either. Anas Sarwar asked about the NHS for what felt like the hundredth consecutive week and, once again, he received the same old answers.

It was left to Patrick Harvie to inject a modicum of entertainment to proceedings. The Scottish government increased income taxes, he said, because the Green Party showed them how to do it. When would Swinney and his colleagues be brave enough to do so again? Or will the Greens have to light the way for them again? Why, Harvie said, won’t the Scottish government introduce a “wealth tax” that, the Green leader claimed, could raise “£70 billion”? As so often, you were reminded that the problems of government may always be quickly addressed by solutions which are simple, expensive, and wrong.

Here too, though, the sense persisted that Holyrood is merely going through the motions. The Tories accuse the SNP of sacrificing the oil industry, Labour accuses it of abandoning the NHS and the SNP retorts that there can be no “return” to “austerity” and everyone agrees that nothing has been learnt, no progress made, but we shall all agree to reconvene in the same place at the same time, next week.