Boot this Homer Simpson parliament

Holyrood is not a functioning parliament. In its place are 129 Homer Simpsons clinging to a donut. What Scotland needs more than anything, from COVID19 to unfinished hospitals to rusting ferries to fiscal blackholes is a turnaround team.

My background is in medicine and surgery but also in health economics and management. One of the biggest challenges for health managers is turning around a failing hospital, or several hospitals, or even a whole organisation. To turn around the failure we need to identify that the Scottish Parliament, not only the Scottish Government, is failing. That failure needs audited from top to bottom and skilled professionals brought in to both run the government and strip out the waste and the harm in Holyrood’s culture. That needs experienced minds, clean hands of devolved politics, and the will and means to sack the board.

The fish rots from the head down and Sturgeon’s government is stinking. With everything I have seen, every model and piece of data I have asked myself how can we show Scotland that we are the answer? I think the answer is we are us and not the establishment. This year has convinced me of this more than ever. Career politicians, appointed for loyalty and not talent, across the West have produced a criminally narrow mix of skills and experiences. 

Like the loveable buffoon Homer Simpson, life for politicians is about coffee, donuts, fun and meltdowns. Everything but the meltdown can be covered up. Everything that has failed in Scotland has been covered up but COVID19 was our meltdown.

LIke Mr Simpson, the parliament has been promoted beyond merit. None have any professional background. The Scottish Cabinet has been promoted through loyalty, out of harms way. Our dear leader Nicola Sturgeon presided over health and should have been sacked for incompetence. Our dear former finance minister Derek Mackay failed at everything he ever did and they made him finance chief, like some reconstruction of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. His replacement is a bag carrier. To add eight new bag carriers plus a slew of refurbished last seasons won’t change anything. 

What this patient needs is a transfusion. This is where I believe All4Unity brings new blood, for that life saving transfusion. If a MP of 25 plus years were elected, a GP elected, two businesswomen elected, a senior legal expert elected and the rest of us a WhatsApp whisker away from those MSPs Scotland would have shut COVID19 down in 18 days, not 18 or so months. More than sense we bring a wealth of experience and training to that first role of devolved government: Crisis Management.  

No other list brings Scotland what it desperately needs and that is a turnaround team. Not a merrygoround team, a turnaround team. No candidate has been a MSP before, neither a failure in government or a dismal failure in opposition. We have no record to defend, only the will and means to set Holyrood’s record straight with a top down audit and sacking the board. We will never ever support a toxic SNP government. The Tories have. Labour, unwatched, would do so. 

We were invited and assembled around a single mission, to turn Holyrood around by turfing Nationalists out. That’s it. No free bikes, no free cuddly toys, no gongs to the Lords for a job half done. Holyrood is sick because its culture is sick and those charged with managing Scotland are managing us all to malice misery
This has nothing to do with bogus statistics or models or the siren calls of plastic journalists and plastic politicians on the make.

This is a national emergency. COVID19 has shown devolution has melted down and still the SNP talk about a SNP run National Care System for the elderly in care. The trouble is, they’ve just had that. The medicine dripping from Sturgeon’s spoon is making the patient worse not better. We are not the A-Team. We are the team to turn Holyrood around so Scotland can finally recover.

Let’s boot this Homer Simpson parliament out; vote for my colleagues in All4Unity.

Jon Stanley is an All for Unity candidate for Central Region, a qualified doctor, senior researcher for the Bow Group and Head of Policy for the Scottish Unionist Party. Follow him on Twitter @JonMarcStanley

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