JOHN Swinney last night survived a vote of no confidence brought against by the Scottish Tories.
They originally tabled the motion against the Deputy First Minister after he failed to release legal advice given to the Scottish Government during the legal action brought by Alex Salmond, in the wake of the botched handling of complaints against the former First Minister.
Swinney agreed to release the “key” advice but opponents were not satisfied with that. However, the motion against him fell by 57 votes to 65, with the Greens voting with SNP MSPs in supporting him.
Speaking for the no-confidence motion earlier in the day, the Tories’ leader at Holyrood, Ruth Davidson, said the committee had been hampered at every turn from receiving even the basic information required to do its job.
She said the chamber had called on the Scottish Government on November 4 to publish “all the legal advice it had received” in relation to the judicial review into the investigation of allegations against Salmond. However, she said Swinney had done nothing and missed the November 13 deadline to do so.
He also did nothing after another motion on November 25, she said, claiming that it took the threat of a no-confidence vote for Swinney to finally publish the advice.
Davidson said: “The first part of that advice is incontrovertible evidence of incompetency on the part of the Scottish Government.
“It included an urgent note from senior counsel saying the judicial review had a very real problem indeed. The issue that had alarmed counsel so greatly was that they had just learned that the investigating officer had prior contact with the complainers.”
She said the issue was so serious that counsel had advised this be disclosed and the petition conceded.
Davidson added: “While Mr Swinney’s outliners will I’m sure do a lap of honour in the press, the real losers are Scottish Government employees who have been lumbered with a protection at work policy that everybody knows is damaged goods and that staff are afraid to use.”
Swinney told MSPs the decisions that were under scrutiny in the debate were his and it was right that he was accountable to Parliament for them. He said that on each occasion he had been asked to release the legal advice he had set out why Ministers were asserting legal privilege.
“It is an important tenet of Scots law that protects organisations and individuals alike, allowing them the benefit of frank, confidential advice from lawyers … a principle that has been upheld by successive Scottish and United Kingdom governments of different political parties,” he said.
“Ministers’ view, my view, was that we could give the committee the information they needed to understand what happened in the judicial review, while avoiding the precedent for future governments of waiving privilege.”
Swinney said that was why he took the “unprecedented” decision in December to share with the committee, “a detailed submission that explained the content of legal advice issued in the judicial review”.
Swinney added: “It is worth reflecting for a moment on the significance of what the Government has done in this case. We’ve taken the extraordinary and unprecedented state of publishing formal legal advice of the kind, which no previous government in Scotland has done.
“And we have done so in response to the request of the committee and motions passed by parliament on any field interpretation of what the government has done the tourist pursuit of this motion today is entirely baseless with an election only weeks away.
“The reality, I suspect, is they were always intent on pushing this motion, regardless of what action the Government had taken.”
Swinney said the Tories’ pursuit of the motion was “baseless, with an election only weeks away”.
Labour’s Jackie Baillie said the committee had been given partial and delayed information and, in some cases “no information at all”.
She said: “The Government has treated the committee of this Parliament with contempt. And it’s treated the Parliament with contempt too.
“Let’s not forget the two votes in this chamber asking for the legal advice to be provided to the committee, simply ignored.
“The Lord Advocate wasn’t even asked for permission to do so, to release that legal advice because the SNP government had no intention of handing it over.”
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