Jackie Baillie is a cash register. The most bankable star of Scottish Labor, we are guaranteed a good turn when it is central.
Yesterday her role was a familiar – Heaper or contempt on the SNPs dealing with health – but she delivered the same old lines with sufficient Panache to make her performance shine.
Health secretary Neil Gray was 'distracted by Limogate and offside by his boss'.
The prime minister was 'frankly delusions' in suggesting that things were improved and his refusal to be the various crises caused 'moral injury' to NHS employees.
Baillie rhymed with a series of statistics to support her point, but none were as powerful as the stories of ordinary doctors who wanted to work desperately in the NHS but unable to find a job.
With a flourishing indignation, she told us about doctors in the Lothian region who 'were unemployed – let me repeat that – unemployed'. Somehow we ended up with the grotesque chaos of a SNP government – a SNP government – that doctors sent throughout the country that hand out applications.
She had even heard of doctors who were forced to earn a living as drivers. At least they will meet the health secretary.
Who was the fault of this sorry state of affairs?
Jackie Baillie from Scottish Labor has had enough of health secretary Neil Gray
Neil Gray was helpless against Jackie Baillie's attack in Holyrood
No clinicians. “It is not NHS employees or staff employees of social care who are unable,” Baillie thundered. “It's this SNP government.”
In perhaps her strongest explanation, Labor's Health spokeswoman summarized 18 years of SNP control over the health service: 'They have the money. They have the power. They just chose not to use it. '
Neil Gray was helpless against this attack. He misses Baillie's star power. It is as if you have shared a community theater understudy with Meryl Streep.
Gray speaks with X1.5 speed, as if it is making apologies faster, makes them more credible.
He is a ruthless spouter of talk points, pre -programmed with robot -like Verbiage such as 'lived experience', 'in the future' and 'in the medium -term approach'.
There was no trace in his comments about the human dimension, of a single independent thinking or feeling about the state of health care or the obstacles with which he is confronted to get it out of the crisis.
“I am the first to acknowledge that the system is not without challenges,” he claimed. I think the honor goes to patients who are getting rid of trollies in hospital corridors.
The Tories tried to change Baillie's motion to call Gray, a matter of their doctor spokesperson Dr. Sandesh Gulhane.
Their effort failed, as it would always go, and to be honest it is difficult to distinguish the point. So what if Gray would go? He would be replaced by another jargon-blinger manager of decline.
Maree Todd's apologies for your delayed cancer treatment will not be reassuring than that of Neil Gray.
There is no manual for former party leaders who stay in parliament. They have to decide for themselves what kind of back bencher they want to be. Some become more critical about their own party, others choose to prevent controversy. Some even come to Holyrood every now and then.
Douglas Ross has returned to the conservative rear seat with little hassle. The truth is told, he probably prefers it there, with his back to the wall. More difficult for certain colleagues to plant a knife in it.
His strongest interventions have been to justice so far, but his comments yesterday afternoon gave the compelling testimony of the experience of his voters with waiting lists of NHS.
One woman: said she had to wait two years and seven months to see a gynecologist. Another one, who had been waiting for 18 months for the treatment of sleep apnea: said she has five years to go.
It was, said Ross, “indefensible.”
While the clock tapped at his assigned time, he tried to determine exactly when Neil Gray knew he had misled the parliament about Limogate.
“Would he like to establish the record today at that point?” Asked Ross.
Gray stared straight ahead and did not speak a word.
We take that as no.
