[SCOT goes POP!] Stephen Daisley owes the Scottish Parliament an apology tonight

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Stephen Daisley owes the Scottish Parliament an apology tonight

The vote on assisted dying went the way I hoped it would, although even three hours ago I was still very pessimistic.  I think one thing all of us can agree on is that the standard of debate was exceptionally high, and indeed today was perhaps the Scottish Parliament's finest hour in the twenty-seven years of its existence.  And for that reason, Stephen Daisley owes MSPs a grovelling apology after his crassest ever article (admittedly the competition is tough) in which he suggested that the vote could mark the final "failure" of devolution, summing it up as: "Sorry, we can't teach your child to read, but we can hurry along her granny's death.' Nearly 30 years and this is what devolution looks like."

Where do you even begin with hypocrisy like that, when Daisley's beloved UK House of Commons passed an assisted dying bill that was significantly worse and more dangerous than Liam McArthur's?  Perhaps he would argue that Westminster is a two-chamber parliament and all that matters is that the Lords are there to correct the mistake that MPs made, but I would much rather an elected chamber reached the correct decision by a democratic process after a high-quality debate, as happened tonight, rather than depending on the utter randomness of whether appointed legislators-for-life who are only there because they used to be good at cricket or swimming (or whatever) feel motivated enough to lay down hundreds of wrecking amendments on any given issue.  Holyrood 1, Westminster 0, Stephen bloody Daisley -5984.

Incidentally, his article also contained an appallingly cynical rewriting of history - 

"Holyrood has not distinguished itself as a great legislative body. The Gender Recognition Bill had to be blocked by Westminster for straying into UK-wide equalities law. (When the SNP government challenged this decision in court, it got sent away with a flea in its ear.)"

I strongly disagreed with the Gender Recognition Bill, but it was legitimately passed by our national parliament and for democratic reasons it should have stood.  Westminster did not "have" to block it, it chose to block it for nakedly political reasons.  And the courts did not "send the SNP government away with a flea in its ear", they simply concluded they had to uphold a provision of the Scotland Act 1998 passed by Westminster granting itself essentially unlimited power to veto any Scottish law on a whim.  If you rig the rules of the game to ensure you can't lose and then extravagantly celebrate the sweetness of victory, as Daisley has done on Westminster's behalf, then you're making yourself look a bit bloody ridiculous - but as the man who called the Israeli conquest and annexation of the Arab-populated East Jerusalem in 1967 "the liberation of East Jerusalem", perhaps Daisley is simply past the point of embarrassment by now.

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