Cole-Hamilton presses Swinney to clean up Scottish politics

At First Minister’s Questions, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton has today called for an inquiry into the actions of former SNP Chief Executive Peter Murrell and urged John Swinney to adopt key measures to clean up Scottish politics.

Mr Cole-Hamilton said:

The most regrettable aspect of this whole sorry saga around the SNP’s finances is the erosion of public trust and faith in politics it creates. There are still big unanswered questions around all of this. This is why we need a parliamentary inquiry but the government are blocking it.

Just like they’ve blocked other mechanisms to challenge bad behaviour.

For 10 years, Westminster has given people the right to sack criminal or corrupt MPs. It removed the likes of Margaret Ferrier, when she endangered lives during Covid.

We could have had that here in Holyrood, but the SNP blocked it just three months ago.

Why doesn’t John Swinney think that people should be able to have the right to sack their MSPs when there is proven misconduct?

Mr Cole-Hamilton went on to say:

When there was a live bill in front of the chamber that would deliver affect to these proposals, he had the votes to deliver it across the line but he instructed his party to vote against it.

Recall provides a solution for when things go wrong, but we can do more to ensure the right people are in politics to begin with.

As a former youth worker, I’ve twice tried to change the law so that elected representatives are subject to the basic safeguarding checks around working with children and vulnerable adults.

But again, the SNP Government has blocked progress on this.

It is time to remove bad actors from public life. I can’t believe the First Minister ever wants to go through any of this again. So will he stop standing in the way of efforts to clean up our politics?