STEPHEN DAISLEY: Ross sauntered out, sulkier than a teenager sent to his bedroom

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

Russell Findlay has a way of putting questions. It's the incredulous tone, the dagger-sharp diction, the arctic stare, the shoulders that recoil like a feline catching its reflection.
No matter the topic, no matter how outwardly reasonable the government's position, Findlay treats it like a monstrous crime.
He could be querying climate mitigation policy and still he sounds like a desk sergeant reading a list of charges to a toerag who'd just been caught after his 17 mugging in as many days.
In fact, climate mitigation policy was the very topic under discussion yesterday, and Findlay was in the highest of dudgeon. The Climate Change Committee had put out a report recommending steps to be taken so Scotland can meet Net Zero.
It's the kind of report almost written for Findlay to steam about at FMQs, containing as it did proposals to turn Scotland into a high-tax, high-price, electric-motored, heat-pumped, semi-vegan dystopia. Imagine Planet of the Apes only at the end Charlton Heston finds a giant statue of Lorna Slater.
Findlay fumed that, under the report's recommendations, 'the number of cattle and sheep in Scotland would need to fall by two million' in the next ten years. Culling two million sheep. There goes the SNP 's core vote.
This was the point where Swinney should have said: Are you mad, man? I'm the MSP for Perthshire North. I'm hardly about to put thousands of farmers on the dole.
Alas, he couldn't say that because, having signed up to the Net Zero religion, open deviation would make him a heretic.
The doctrine would have to be finessed without any admission that the dogma was wrong.
Or, as the First Minister put it: 'The government will consider specific proposals and bring them forward, and the parliament will have the opportunity to decide whether those proposals should be approved or not.'
Ah, of course. When there's credit to be taken for climate targets, it belongs to the government. When there's a problem, it's parliament's mess to clear up.
Next Findlay railed against the report's call for heat pump installations to be ramped up. He said 70 per cent of homes would need one to meet the Nationalists' eco goals, and only one per cent of houses boasted one today.
And they don't come cheap: somewhere between £8,000 and £15,000. SNP ministers could cover that with their recent £20,000 bonus, but what about ordinary punters?
Swinney blamed Brexit. I'm still not sure how, but he slipped it in there, as if it was a perfectly logical response, as if he didn't blame it in every answer to every question.
One MSP not terribly impressed by this answer was Douglas Ross who began heckling from the cheap seats up the back of the Tory benches.
Swinney began to stumble over his words, when Alison Johnstone's patience snapped like an overstretched bungee rope.
The Presiding Officer gave Ross a right telling off, scolding him for having 'persistently refused to abide by our standing orders', then ordered him out of the chamber and told him not to come back for the rest of the day.
He didn't move a muscle.
Throats cleared awkwardly across the room.
'Mr Ross, I have asked you to leave the chamber,' Johnstone said.
Still no movement. For a fleeting second or two, it looked as though things might get hairy, but after a pronounced pause, the former Tory leader picked up his parliament pass and sauntered out, sulkier than a teenager sent to his room.
Johnstone seemed to think booting him out of FMQs was a sanction. If she really wanted to punish him, she should have made him sit through all 45 soul-sapping minutes.
Ross was deprived of watching Nat backbencher Clare Adamson's halting attempt at reading out a question so planted it should have come with its own watering instructions.
That's what they consider orderly at Holyrood, but speaking your mind, they chuck you out for that.