Alistair Grant gives a round up of Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay latest keynote speech today at the Royal Scots Club in Edinburgh.
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00:00I'm Alistair Grant, the Political Editor of The Scotsman, and I'm here outside the Royal Scots
00:03Club in the new town of Edinburgh just after a speech given by Russell Findlay, the Scottish
00:07Conservative leader. He was very much taking aim at the size of Scotland's state. He was saying the
00:13big state circus really does need to end. He called it a steroid state, talking about the sheer
00:18number of public servants. He said there's 300 working groups advising the Scottish Government
00:23and really setting out the Scottish Conservatives' platform to take an axe to the size of the state.
00:28He's saying that this wouldn't affect frontline services, but he had a number of policies he
00:33announced today, probably the most eye-catching of which is a Scottish version of Elon Musk's
00:38Department of Government Efficiency in America. So Russell Findlay is saying this would be a
00:42time-limited government agency, perhaps operated by an outsider. He was mentioning names like
00:48Tom Hunter, Willie Hockey, these kind of business figures that would be able to kind of
00:53look at government spending, look at where efficiencies could be made, cut down on what
00:56Russell Findlay says is government waste. He was also saying that he would axe at least a third of
01:02the current number of working groups. He was saying that the number of what he said were
01:06jobs with kind of silly titles, jobs that are kind of backroom jobs that aren't strictly necessary
01:12would be cut down. But he was also saying there'd be a frontline first guarantee, so a kind of
01:16protection of frontline services, putting jobs and money into frontline services instead of what he
01:21views as waste. So this has been a real theme of Russell Findlay's leadership of the Scottish
01:26Conservative Party, taking aim at the size of Scotland's state, the size of Scotland's
01:31public sector in a sense, but very much trying to emphasise that he's not talking about frontline
01:37services. So today we got a bit more detail of that and as I say probably the most eye-catching
01:42thing is that replication of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. To read more about
01:47Scottish politics from the Scottish Conservatives to the SNP to Scottish Labour and all the other
01:52parties in Scotland, please stay tuned to the Scotsman's website for all the latest news,
01:56comment, analysis and videos.