Wendy Alexander has resigned as Labour’s leader in Scotland following a ruling that she broke the Scottish Parliament’s rules over declaring donations.
More on the BBC and PoliticsHome (which has her full statement).
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10 Comments
Hugh O’Donnell, the Lib Dem member of the Standards Committee, thinks that if an MSP get written advice from the Standards Commissioner which turns out to be wrong, and then acts on it in good faith, it’s still reasonable to suspend the MSP from Parliament for breaching the rule.
Anyone with a sense of fairness thinks Hugh O’Donnell MSP is useless.
You are forgetting that she never asked for any advice until she had already breached the rules which says she has to make any declarations within 30 days. She only started to think about declaring anything AFTER she had been caught accepting an ILLEGAL donation from abroad.
Jersey isn’t abroad.
I see the Labour fans can still not bring themselves to accept that she was in clear breach and should have just taken the punishment and moved on. Ordinary people are expected to do that so why not anyone in the Labour party?
She recieved no advice from the Standards Commissioner David. So that’s lie number 1 dealt with.
She sought advice from the Standards Committee clerks. The Standards Committee is nothing to do with the Commissioner. No one knows what she asked as the report has not been made public so we don’t know if the advice she was given was in clear relation to what Labour are claiming.
Besides the Code of Conduct clearly states that the advice of the Clerks is not to be taken alone and it is the duty of the member to seek advice and make the decision themselves.
By the time she had even approached the Clerks she was already in breach of the 30 day rule. Therefore she was bang to rights.
Jersey is abroad for the purposes of political donations as it is not part of the UK. So that’s the other lie dealt with.
She has been put in this position by a shabby use of parliamentary tactics. If the Scottish Parliament finds something wrong in the actions of Alex Salmond over the Trump Golf Course do you think he will resign? I doubt it.
No. She was put in this position because she breached the standards code and for some apparent reasons of false pride has decided to take the hump rather than the slap on the wrist.
To repeat. Even when she approached the Standards Committee Clerks and asked them something (that is still not in the public domain) she had already breached the 30 day cut off period.
Given that I know that I have boken/mis-interpreted/ignored rules and laws means I am prepared to accepted at face value she didnt intend to do anything wrong. I am not sure about Alex and his golf course.
She was a very inneffective leader though.
As I’ve said on my blog, the reason Wendy went was not just because of the donations row (although that was obviously the final straw). Had it been the donations row and nothing else, she would easily have ridden out the storm. What really did for her was her utterly shambolic leadership of the Scottish Labour party, in particular over the issue of a referendum on independence.
Bernard
No arguments – as I said “She was a very inneffective leader though.”
Interestingly, the original leak must have come from inside the Labour Party.
This issue was a convenient excuse for her to step down. As a leader she was useless and a great asset to us, the Tories and the SNP.