It’s another week of rancour and recrimination in the SNP’s unhappy family. Today it’s the turn of rebel backbencher Fergus Ewing. Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland this morning, the born-and-bred nationalist hit out at his own party’s ’somewhat cack-handed’ handling of their proposed council tax freeze, bemoaning how there ‘was no proper consultation with our colleagues in local government.’ Talk about cracks in the once-impregnable SNP front…
It comes three weeks before the Scottish government is due to unveil its winter budget. With money tight and the polls plummeting, Humza Yousaf’s bungling band of bureaucrats has stumbled on the answer: blame the Tories.
Yousaf’s deputy Shona Robison was out on the airwaves this weekend, desperately flogging the horse for all she was worth. ‘This will be one of the most difficult budgets under devolution,’ she complained on BBC Scotland’s Sunday Show. ‘This UK Tory budget and the Chancellor’s decisions have made my job even harder. This is the worst-case scenario for the Scottish budget.’ If that wasn’t miserable enough, Robison then went on to bemoan the £545 million the Scottish Government will receive through Barnett consequentials. ‘It wasn’t as much as we expected, but it’s still welcome,’ she said, somewhat begrudgingly.
With Christmas fast approaching, it sounds like Holyrood will be a Bleak House for Humza Yousaf. Not so much Great Expectations as Hard Times…
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