Dear All
There is an old saying, in every cloud there is a silver
lining, basically what that means out of a bad thing happening there must be
some good.
Nicola Sturgeon appointed her pal, Shona Robison to be the
Scottish Health Secretary, and she had made a complete pig’s ear of running the
service. The state of Scotland ’s
health service is a national disgrace. There is a GP crisis, an A&E crisis,
a cancer waiting time crisis, a nursing crisis, the list goes on and on.
While Ms. Robison was doing such an exceptionally poor job
running the Health Service, it came to light her husband SNP MP Stewart
Hosie was allegedly having an affair with a younger woman called Serena Cowdy.
Ms. Cowdy was everything that Shona Robison wasn’t, she was
young and dynamic and she openly declared that:
“I just can't keep my knickers on”.
A refreshing breath of honesty about knickers which must
have gutted Stewart Hosie because one thing you need in a relationship is trust
and he has experience of breaking trust.
Quick question; could you trust a partner who said, “I just
can't keep my knickers on”.
As well as the affair with Hosie, Ms. Cowdy was also said to
be involved previously in a relationship with 3 in a bed Angus.
That would be SNP MP Angus MacNeil, it was said he ratted
out his wife as well to allegedly ‘plough’ into Ms. Cowdy, previously he had a
history cheating and betraying his wife.
As I remarked in the past, the SNP cult have no loyalty.
I am a big believer in letting people do what they want to
do and then live with the consequences, the consequences for Hosie was him
having to step down as SNP Deputy leader.
What value he placed in his marriage is anyone’s guess!
Stewart Hosie and Shona Robison have a daughter; happy
families went straight out the window as Hosie disgraced himself. You have to
wonder what ran through his mind, did he look at his wife and think she had
become an old crony or did he think that Cowdy was a step up and he had the
urge to fire in there in ye olde London
town.
At one time, the Hosie couple were dubbed the ‘Golden Couple’
of the SNP, more popular than Nicola Sturgeon at Party Conferences, they seem
to have it all, both had high profile jobs, a family, and were well connected
to Dundee SNP, said to be the Nationalist powerhouse.
I have to say that I am surprised at Shona Robison, having
failed at delivering a health service, failed at managing to keep her husband
from straying, that she considers her marriage break-up as "character
building".
What is character building about your husband ‘pumping the
guts’ out of a woman who is younger, more dynamic and better looking?
Anyway, I find Ms. Robison’s angst to be rather boring and uninteresting which is why I think this article needs a song.
I think it is also worth noting, that Shona Robison wasn’t
exactly left destitute after the sordid details of her husband’s affair came to
light, she was a Government Minister who was earning just under a £100,000 plus
allowances for a number of years and previously before that a junior Minister
since 2007.
One of the things which politicians do especially when they
aren’t up to the task that they have been given is to ‘open up’ to the media to
give their ‘human’ side, this is usually done as we have seen in the past with
others when really bad PR is about to break or has broken. At that point,
people flock round the person to give ‘comfort’ and if anyone dares to criticise
them during this period, they stand a fairly good chance of a ‘mob’ or in the
case of the SNP, a cult condemning them.
As part of the pitch by Ms. Robison, we get insights into
her break-up of her 20-year-old marriage, we get death of her mother and her
father’s slide into dementia and we get the news that she has also began a new
relationship with Yes campaigner Mike Strachan. Her husband gets outed in May
2016 and in a rather short space of time, Ms. Robison has moved on to someone
else. This is worthy of a plot in a soap opera don’t you think, I have to say
her getting a new relationship didn’t take long.
How long between getting dumped in May 2016 when the story
broke did it take her to get fixed up?
Was there a period of grief, reflection and solitude, if so
how long?
One of the things which I find extraordinary is the crass
way that Shona Robison has dragged her dead mother into her outward expression
of angst.
She said:
“I lost my mum back in September. She got hugely positive
care at the Royal Victoria, just down the road from Ninewells. She was 91 and
in there for a long time and we had to come to the realisation that she wasn’t
going to come out as her body was basically shutting down. That is hard for a
family because she was a real anchor for us and you have expectations that even
though she was 91, you still think they are going to go on forever. The care at
the Royal Victoria was so fantastic and the way the staff worked with us as a
family to help us come to the realisation that she was very ill and to face
what the prospects were going to be was just amazing. Having gone through that,
I appreciate how difficult it is for mums and dads when you are juggling caring
for ageing parents and childcare responsibilities.
She added:
“I was also trying to see my dad who is in a dementia unit
and trying to find the time to visit him. It is never as much time as you want
and you carry that guilt around. I know I am not unique in this because others
will rack themselves over the same things. It is just trying to juggle life.”
My main issue with her diatribe here is that she has given
the health service a slap on the back which by default she gives herself by
saying:
“The care at the Royal Victoria was so fantastic”.
It has to be mentioned that other people haven’t been given
such a fantastic service by the Scottish NHS which is struggling and in crisis.
The Scottish government pledged that 95% of patients would
be treated within four hours in accident and emergency. They’ve been missing
that target every week for the last six years.
In a movie, play or TV soap, the same formula is generally
followed, start, middle and end, the start of the Robison saga is the ‘affair’,
the middle is Robison citing her mother and father’, the end part is the big
finish, the emergence of hope. In this case, the knight in shining armour, Mike
Strachan.
This standardised formula is to leave an audience with a
feelgood factor that everything in the end turned out for the better with the
added benefit of Ms. Robison doing a ‘plug’ for a fantastic NHS which by
default makes her fantastic.
Finally: in every story, there is someone who is supposed to
emerge to be the ‘hero’, you get a choice, is it Stewart Hosie ploughing Serena
Cowdy or is it Scottish incompetent Health Minister Shona Robison, I don’t
think either qualify for hero status.
Yours sincerely
George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University
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