Scottish Parliament: FMQs with First Minister Humza Yousaf - The Scotsman Roundup
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00:00 Hello, welcome to the Scotsman's Politics Show. We're here to debate what happened at
00:13 First Minister's Questions. I'm joined by our political correspondent, Alistair Grant.
00:18 Alistair, it's been the story of the week, really. What's apps and no surprise that it
00:23 came out again today.
00:24 Yes, this was raised by both the Scottish Conservative leader, Douglas Ross, and the
00:29 Scottish Labour leader, Anna Sarwar. And just to give a bit of background to this, it's
00:33 obviously, like you say, it's been a big story that's been running for a number of days now,
00:38 in the headlines of a lot of Scottish newspapers, featuring in the front pages. And essentially,
00:43 it exploded into the headlines because the Scottish government was criticised for failing
00:48 to hand over WhatsApp messages at a hearing of the UK COVID inquiry last week. So the
00:55 Scottish government said that it was requesting a legal order, essentially, the inquiry would
01:00 make a legal order that would compel it to hand over WhatsApp messages. It argued, essentially,
01:06 that this was needed so that it didn't have to worry about data protection issues, people's
01:10 private data. And that order has now been issued. So the Scottish government now says
01:14 it's handing over those WhatsApp messages. However, there's been reports, particularly
01:19 at the weekend, that Nicola Sturgeon is among senior figures who may have deleted WhatsApp
01:24 messages, some of her messages from that, from the time of the COVID pandemic may no
01:28 longer be held. Nicola Sturgeon was doorstepped by journalists in the Scottish Parliament
01:33 about this in recent days, and essentially refused to address it, refused to confirm
01:39 or deny that she had deleted COVID WhatsApp messages, even though others have since come
01:44 out and confirmed they still hold them, for example, the former finance secretary Kate
01:48 Forres. So it's not quite clear why Nicola Sturgeon can't address that point. But this
01:53 got raised at First Minister's questions today, some quite strong language from Douglas Ross,
01:58 who essentially said that if WhatsApp messages had been deleted, it was equivalent of building
02:02 a bonfire to torch the evidence. He's going quite strongly on it, accusing the Scottish
02:08 government of potentially holding the inquiry in contempt of letting down grieving families.
02:13 Humza Yousaf, for his part, making the point that the Scottish government is now handing
02:17 over 14,000 WhatsApp messages. He was very, very keen as well to knock it back to a focus
02:25 on some of the evidence we've been hearing relating to the UK government, some of those
02:29 kind of embarrassing WhatsApp messages that have come out, the extraordinary evidence,
02:33 obviously, in recent days from people like Dominic Cummings. He's very keen to highlight
02:36 that. He was also bringing up Nicola Sturgeon's regular media briefings during the pandemic.
02:43 At one stage, they were almost daily, and saying that she was never shying away from
02:48 scrutiny. And again, Douglas Ross focusing in on the Scottish government's actual policy
02:54 at the time. So he was saying that the Scottish government's policy to delete WhatsApp messages
02:59 after a certain period of time was announced after the inquiry was put in place, sorry,
03:05 after the Covid inquiries were announced. So he was raising concerns about that. I think
03:10 that policy essentially says that messages relating to government business should be
03:14 kept, but WhatsApp messages as a whole can be deleted. There's some kind of ambiguity
03:19 around how that was put in place, how it was adhered to, particularly now you've got figures
03:23 like Humza Yousaf saying he kept his WhatsApp messages, so it doesn't seem to have been
03:27 adhered to by everyone. And importantly as well, Humza Yousaf very much saying that,
03:32 I think his quote was, "We certainly don't have anything to fear from the truth." And
03:37 Douglas Ross retorting to that, that we don't know the truth at the moment because obviously
03:42 the inquiry is still trying to get access to information. So I think this is a story
03:46 that will run and run. There's still a lot of questions to be answered, a lot of concerns
03:50 over WhatsApp messages, other informal messaging systems and what information might have been
03:56 kept. And just to kind of state the obvious, it's obviously extremely important if you're
04:01 holding public inquiries into the Covid pandemic to have access to messages that were said
04:07 by ministers, officials, to get a glimpse of why decisions were made. The Scottish government
04:13 is always keen to say that it didn't routinely make decisions over WhatsApp, but we're not
04:19 talking about the decisions that were made. We know what decisions were made. We lived
04:22 through the Covid pandemic. I think what the inquiry is trying to get a handle on is how
04:27 decisions were made, what the conversations were around them, what the decision making
04:30 process was. And obviously things like WhatsApp messages are crucial to that.
04:35 Alistair, as a title, the Scotsman's covered a lot of issues around transparency related
04:41 to the Scottish government, effectively asking and trying to answer the question about whether
04:45 it's been transparent enough across a range of issues like the ferries to things like
04:50 the WhatsApp messages. How do you, even if the argument is legitimate that HUMS is making
04:57 about the need for a section 21 notice to release this information under data protection,
05:01 what do you think the optics of this whole discussion? Do you think it makes the Scottish
05:06 government look good or does it make it look bad?
05:09 Well, I think you can see from spokespeople for the Scottish Covid Bereaved, for example,
05:13 that group that represents some of the families that were impacted, that lost loved ones during
05:18 the pandemic. They are not happy about it at all. You've got lawyers like Amir Anwar
05:23 who represents them, that have been quite outspoken about it. I think from the government's
05:27 point of view, to be criticised by a senior lawyer for the UK Covid inquiry for not handing
05:33 over messages or not going about it in the right way, I think it's not a good look. I
05:38 mean, they are obviously quite keen to point to some of the mess we're seeing down south
05:42 in terms of the evidence around the UK government's handling of it, Boris Johnson's administration,
05:48 some of the chaos that was happening behind the scenes. That's obviously true. Lots of
05:52 concerns about that. Some of it's frankly astonishing. But when you're facing questions
05:57 in Holyrood, you're talking about the Scottish government and the Scottish government can't
06:01 just say, well, look at them. There are serious questions to be asked up here as well. I think
06:06 transparency in general is obviously something that governments sometimes struggle with.
06:11 And this is just another example of that.
06:14 You can also read our story from Connor Matchett, a deputy political editor today on Microsoft
06:19 Teams on the fact that it has an auto-delete function activated as well as part of Scottish
06:26 government practice. That's at scotsman.com. Please follow all the latest. We'll be bringing
06:32 you what happened from FMQs either via our live blog or coverage on the site. Just select
06:38 the politics tab for all the latest. Thanks very much for joining us, Alistair, and thanks
06:43 to everyone else.
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