The Scotsman Bulletin Monday October 30 2023 #Alba

The Scotsman

Transcript

00:00 Hello and welcome to the Scotsman's Daily Bulletin for Monday. I'm Alan Young, I'm Deputy

00:12 Editor of the Scotsman and I'm joined today by our political correspondent Rachel Emery

00:16 to take a look at some of the headlines. Hi Rachel.

00:20 Morning.

00:21 Let's have a look as ever at the front page first. And we're leading today on, well, it's

00:28 more problems for Humza Yousaf really and it's a continuing row over the Scottish Government's

00:34 WhatsApp messages during the pandemic. It emerged yesterday reports in the Sunday Mail

00:41 that messages sent by Nicola Sturgeon may have been manually deleted. We picture on

00:47 the front page there Matthew Perry who very sadly died over the weekend and we also have

00:53 new news of oil licences for the North Sea being issued. That's causing a bit of a stooge.

01:02 All that in today's paper and much more. But Rachel, it's already looking like it's going

01:08 to be a busy week for Humza Yousaf again and not perhaps in a good way. I want to pick

01:16 up on another big political story over the weekend and that was the defection of Ash

01:21 Reagan, one time SNP leadership candidate, one time SNP minister to ALBA. And speculation

01:31 already this morning that more may be about to follow.

01:35 Yes, as we said over the weekend we got this announcement that Ash Reagan was leaving the

01:40 SNP, going to Alex Salmond's ALBA party instead. And as we said, she is a fairly big personality

01:48 within the SNP because she was a government minister up until last year and she then stood

01:52 against Humza Yousaf to be the first minister. Now six months ago she said, "I'm not going

01:57 to ALBA, I'm sticking by the SNP" and yet here we are today. She is now the ALBA party's

02:04 only MSP in Holyrood. There are now speculations as to will there be more. Neil Hanvey, he

02:11 is one of the ALBA MPs for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, he was on the radio this morning and said

02:16 that he expects to see more defections within the next few hours. So not even sooner, shortly,

02:22 he's expecting them to come today, perhaps even before we get any further into this debate

02:26 over Ash Reagan even. So there's a lot of speculation as to who that could be. We know

02:31 that Angus MacNeill, the Western Isles MP, he is currently sitting as an independent

02:36 MP in the House of Commons after being thrown out of the SNP temporarily. He has said that

02:41 he's going to work with ALBA, even though he's going to remain as an independent. So

02:45 it'll be interesting to see if his name pops up at all. Douglas Chapman, another Fife MP,

02:50 he has previously criticised the leadership of the SNP, particularly around independence

02:55 strategies. So again, another name to keep an eye out for. And of course you've got Joanna

02:59 Cherry who, perhaps since the beginning of the ALBA party, there's been speculations

03:04 as to would she go there or not. So if it's a parliamentarian, there's probably some names

03:08 to keep an eye out for, but we don't know if it is a parliamentarian. It could be councillors,

03:12 it could be prominent members in the party. We just don't know at this point in time.

03:16 It was an interesting response, wasn't it, from Hamza Yousaf at the weekend to the news

03:23 where he suggested that Ash Regan was no great loss to the SNP. This is someone who was a

03:30 former minister and a minister not so long ago.

03:33 Yes, it was just before the gender reform debate in December last year that she resigned

03:39 from government. I can understand both sides of what he's trying to say there. She has

03:44 been a thorn in the side of the SNP since she left government to the backbenches. She

03:49 has been a bit problematic there. So perhaps getting rid of a problem is seen as a good

03:53 thing, even if it does mean losing a seat over it. But there's other things to think

03:58 about as well. I mean, it's a whole person, it's the first time the ALBA are going to

04:02 be in Holyrood. It's going to be interesting to see how much of an issue that's going to

04:05 cause, how much trouble Ash Regan can cause once she is now in the party itself there.

04:10 He certainly doesn't have his troubles to seek at the moment, because in the background,

04:18 obviously, we have the Covid WhatsApp rambling on as well. And we do expect to hear more

04:24 on that this week.

04:25 Yes, this is what was revealed last week, that the UK Covid-19 inquiry, which is currently

04:31 ongoing down in London, had asked for WhatsApp messages from the Scottish government and

04:37 Scottish ministers, things to see how decisions were made, what was considered when things

04:42 were being made during the pandemic. And it sounds like they don't exist anymore and they've

04:47 been deleted. And as you said, over the weekend, there were stories emerging that perhaps they

04:52 were manually deleted as opposed to automatically deleted, which is often a function on people's

04:56 WhatsApp accounts. So again, that's going to be a sticky thorn in the side, because

05:01 even if those messages were to show no wrongdoing whatsoever, the problem is that we're now

05:06 never going to know. And that's always going to be a sticking point for people, particularly

05:11 those who lost someone they loved during the pandemic.

05:13 Indeed. Thanks very much for that, Rachel. We'll be keeping a very close eye on both

05:19 those stories today and throughout the week. We'll have all the very latest at scotsman.com.

05:24 As ever, please do subscribe if you can, and then you will not miss a thing. And if you're

05:28 out and about today, please do also pick up a copy of the paper from me and from Rachel.

05:33 It's bye for now. Bye.

05:36 (Music)

05:41 [MUSIC]

Category

Transcript

Recommended