 | 'We have seen our Parliament devalued by a government, which doesn't understand the very concept of public service. Which dulls the expectations of our nation and which seeks to bore the electorate into submission. ' SNP leader, Alex Salmond MP, 25 th September 2004. |  |
THE SNP leader at Holyrood, Nicola Sturgeon, yesterday raised the stakes on the NHS by challenging Jack McConnell to deliver on the Scottish Executive's waiting-times pledge or quit as First Minister.
Sturgeon told the Nationalists' pre-election conference in Dundee that McConnell should 'hang his head in shame' because Scotland's health service was getting worse under the Labour-led coalition government.
She insisted that he take personal responsibility for enforcing the Executive's promise that by the end of the year no patient would wait more than six months to see a consultant.
'If that promise is broken, as many before have been broken, if patients are let down again, sacking another health minister won't be good enough,' she told party activists. 'I issue this challenge to Jack McConnell: make it a personal pledge, put your job on the line.
'Tell Scottish patients that if you fail to deliver, again, if you are not up to the job, then you'll hand over to someone who is up to the job of sorting out Scotland's National Health Service.'
Although health is devolved to MSPs and will not focus heavily at the forthcoming Westminster election, NHS waiting lists were a major theme of Sturgeon's address.
Her challenge to McConnell follows her best ever performance at First Minister's Questions last week, at which she ambushed him on his Executive's record of improving the NHS since 1999.
She revealed official statistics showing that the number of outpatients waiting for more than a year to see a consultant had soared nearly tenfold over the past six years.
McConnell was left struggling to counter the charge because he was unaware of the figures she used.
Sturgeon returned to the subject yesterday, saying McConnell should make a public apology to all those he has let down on the health service.
'Any decent national leader would have used live television to apologise to each and every one of these long suffering patients,' she said.
But a Scottish Labour spokesman dismissed Sturgeon's attacks by saying that her party was irrelevant at the forthcoming general election.
'Anything she or Alex Salmond says is meaningless, because the next Prime Minister will either be Tony Blair or Michael Howard. All the SNP is doing is helping put Howard into government,' he said.
Sturgeon's Labour-bashing will be picked up today by the SNP leader, Alex Salmond, who will use his conference speech to attack Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown, the MP for Dunfermline East.
Salmond is used to denouncing Prime Minister Tony Blair over the war in Iraq, but he will direct his fire on Brown, who he will argue presides over a country stricken by poverty.
'Some people say when they see the iniquities of this Labour government Ð oh it's not Gordon's fault. It's not Brown, it's Blair. Well, let me tell you Blair could not exist without Brown no more than Gordon could survive without his economics guru, Ed Balls.
'The Chancellor, the Scottish hero, has covered himself in glory at the Treasury while people in Scotland have been covered in poverty,' Salmond will say.
Despite the war of words, a new System Three opinion poll published today shows that Scottish Labour is on course to retain their huge lead over every other political party north of the Border Commissioned by the SNP, the February snapshot reveals that 46% of voters in Scotland would opt for Tony Blair's party in the event of general election being held tomorrow.
The Nationalists are in second place, on 23%, which is up on their 2001 performance and would probably be enough to return their five MPs to Westminster. David McLetchie's Conservatives polled 16%, with the LibDems trailing in fourth with 13%. The Scottish Socialist Party only attracted 1% of all respondents.
The SNP's potential stand-still at the general election has prompted senior party member and former MSP Michael Russell to suggest that in future SNP candidates do not stand at Westminster elections and instead focus their efforts on Holyrood. Writing in a commentary piece in today's Sunday Herald, Russell argues that three factors prevent the SNP making inroads at general elections: a London-centric media, the party's tiny campaign budget compared with the UK parties and the fact that they are fighting only one 10th of all seats.
'Why go on leading with our chin, argue some SNP figures, when these odds will always be stacked so heavily against us?' he wrote. 'Why not put everything into the Holyrood elections, where we actually have a chance of winning government and moving on to independence?'
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