Harvie's last hurrah? Even Frank Sinatra's farewell didn't drag on this long
Thursday was Patrick Harvie's final First Minister's Questions as Scottish Green co-leader. He's standing down to spend more time with anyone but Ross Greer.
A sneer in search of a personality, Harvie has never contributed much in the way of wit but he makes up for it with pique. I'm an aficionado of parliamentary spite and Harvie has always had it in plentiful supply.
Perhaps he kept some in reserve for his final showstopper, for he used his allotted two questions to spit venom at John Swinney. Harvie reckoned Swinney's anti far-Right summit was little more than a talking shop and only confirmed 'a real sense of drift from the first minister'.
Moreover, Swinney lacked 'ambition and leadership', and Harvie 'genuinely struggled to think of a single signature policy that he has delivered in his year in the job'. There speaks a man who clearly missed the Short Life Working Group on Economic and Social Opportunities for Gaelic.
He began rhyming off Swinney's sins, such as watering down rental controls, U-turning on a new national park, and failing to make progress on human rights. By now the little cabbage was getting so steamed he was at risk of wilting.
He was banging on so much that Presiding Officer Alison Johnson finally stepped in and told him to clamp it. Even Sinatra's farewell tour didn't last this long.
Aware that he no longer needed to humour the prickliest cactus this side of the Mississippi, Swinney let him have it: 'I appreciate that this is his last First Minister's question time as co-convener of the Green Party, so saying all that to me might have been his last hurrah.'
The First Minister didn't fare as well up against Russell Findlay. The Scottish Tory leader gets a gold star for a splendid piece of work on thuggery in schools and the SNP's 49-page guidelines on excluding violent pupils, which he branded 'tedious, hand-wringing nonsense'.
Swinney protested that he was 'listening to the teaching profession', just as he had 'throughout my time as education secretary'. We can only hope for his sake that he wasn't listening too closely. As I recall, the consensus among teachers at the time was made up mostly of words you couldn't repeat in a classroom.
This allowed Findlay to have some fun, by reading aloud some highlights. When pupils become violent, the document said, teachers should give them 'a laminated paper with a set of bullet points that tell them to think about their behaviour'.
When a wee toerag is engaging in 'unsafe behaviour', educators are advised to start 'a conversation to jointly problem solve with the child'. Disruptive pupils, meanwhile, 'should be allowed to leave class two minutes early'.
Personally, I think classroom chairs should be replaced with ejector seats and teachers handed a remote control.
The First Minister accused Findlay of 'a failure to address the mechanisms and interventions that are required to solve a difficult issue'.
Another reason to consider my idea. We'd hire engineers to make sure the ejector seats had really good mechanisms.
The fresh guidance, Swinney said, was intended to 'de-escalate situations' and 'address the underlying causes'. And he was against too many exclusions because those pupils would be 'out on the streets and, potentially, able to become involved in criminal activity'. That's how Ronnie Biggs got started, you know. Teacher put him out of class for talking once and next thing you know he was robbing trains.
Later in the afternoon, minister Ivan McKee was sent out to announce plans to save £1billion a year in waste, in what is being nicknamed 'McDoge' after Elon Musk's venture during the early months of the second Trump administration.
Given that the task of reining in government misspending proved too much for a man who puts rockets in space, I'm not holding out hope that Ivan McKee will do much better.
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