Rishi Sunak boasts about a post-Covid ‘jobs miracle’ but when it comes to performing wonders in the labour market, they’ve got nothing on the SNP. Jeane Freeman, former health secretary in Nicola Sturgeon’s devolved government, has been unveiled as the new Ambassador for Community Engagement, Public Health and Innovation at Glasgow University’s medical school. The university calls Freeman’s recruitment ‘a very welcome addition’ and says she will help with projects to ‘improve the health and lives of the people in Glasgow, Scotland and beyond’. It’s nice to see people trying something new at this stage in their working life.
One wonders on what basis Glasgow Uni deemed Freeman the woman for this particular job. Her three years in charge of health in Scotland were not exactly resume-boosting material. During her tenure, NHS Scotland consistently failed to meet the Scottish government’s accident and emergency waiting times targets — until the pandemic hit and saw ‘significant drops’ in A&E attendance. Freeman oversaw Scotland’s response to Covid-19, in which she failed to deliver her pledge of one million vaccine doses by the end of January 2021, missing the target by a mere 424,103 doses.
It was also on her watch that both untested and Covid-positive patients were transferred from hospital wards to care homes. In all, almost 200 Scottish care homes received untested patients while hundreds of infected patients were placed in age care facilities. When she understated the number of patients involved in the transfers, Nicola Sturgeon explained that her health secretary was ‘a bit tired’. Freeman later conceded: ‘[W]e didn’t take the right precautions to make sure that older people leaving hospital going into care homes were as safe as they could be and that was a mistake.’ Her record in office earned her the sobriquet ‘Calamity Jeane’.
Even so, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that she has landed her latest role. After working as a Holyrood special adviser during Labour’s iron grip on Scottish politics, she later switched sides to support independence and eventually became an SNP MSP. There a panoply of consultancy gigs ih the interim that saw her dubbed the ‘Quango Queen’. Infamously, a Sunday Post investigation found that she spent more days in 2013 working for quangos than there were in the year itself.
The paper reported that, in the financial year 2013–14, Freeman did 190 days on the Scottish Police Authority at £300 a day, three days a week on an NHS board (up to £25,000 in total), and between 20 and 30 days on the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland (£295 a day). Totting it all up, the Post placed her working year at an impressive 376 days, and this was on top of managing her public affairs firm, holding down a top role in Women for Independence and serving on a Scottish government task force at the troubled NHS Lanarkshire. Her critics may scoff but Freeman is a testament to the Scottish work ethic. Keep creating the jobs, Rishi; Jeane will have all of them.
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