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00:00 Hello, Ralph Blackburn, National World's Politics Editor, here today for another episode of
00:14 Politics Unpacked. I'm here in Edinburgh today, actually, where it's been another bad time
00:21 for the governing party, the Scottish National Party, currently the biggest party in Holyrood
00:27 and also in Westminster in Scottish seats. And you know, after a terrible 2023, where
00:36 former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon got arrested, 2024 hasn't started so well either.
00:42 The COVID inquiry that was up here last week, uncovered that Sturgeon had actually lied
00:50 to reporters when she said that all of the WhatsApp messages sent between ministers during
00:57 the pandemic would be sent over to the COVID inquiry. Instead, she has now revealed that
01:02 those messages were in fact deleted. And critics have said that, you know, this inhibits the
01:08 COVID inquiry of being able to actually establish how the government responded to the pandemic,
01:15 especially when, as we're now seeing, so much of the governance was carried out actually
01:19 on WhatsApp, as opposed to the kind of official ministerial channels. Now, at the next general
01:26 election, which is almost certainly going to be held later this year, Scotland is going
01:31 to be one of the big battlegrounds, which will likely determine whether Labour will
01:36 get an overall majority to give Keir Starmer the keys to number 10 Downing Street. A year
01:42 or so ago, it looked like Scotland was completely out of play for Labour. But now they are expected
01:47 to win maybe upwards of 20 seats north of the border. And that takes a lot of pressure
01:53 off them in some of the more rural constituencies in England that otherwise they might have
01:57 had to win. So depending on how this year goes for Humza Yousaf and the SNP, it could
02:02 lead to Labour getting a very comfortable majority in the general election. Guess who
02:06 is coming back to headline politics, I would say this week, and that is the former Prime
02:12 Minister Liz Truss. She's launching this week, and this is no joke at all, the popular conservatism
02:19 movement. Remember that when Truss resigned as Prime Minister, that left Labour at their
02:24 highest level in the polls for decades on 56%. And the Tories were left on 19%. Yep,
02:32 she's naming her new movement, the popular conservatism movement. This is just another
02:37 kind of right wing offshoot of the Tory party to go along with the you know, the many acronyms,
02:43 the ERG, the NRG, the CGG, I could go on. And really, it's not likely to worry Labour,
02:51 but it's actually just going to cause the Prime Minister Rishi Sumac even more headaches
02:55 as he tries to pass bills such as his proposal to ban smoking for younger people. This is
03:01 something that Liz Truss has said she will oppose. And you know, Rishi Sumac's message
03:08 when he tries to compete against Keir Starmer is that I'm getting on with the job. I'm,
03:14 you know, delivering on stability and all these sort of things. And the more and more
03:19 Tory infighting that happens, the harder that sell makes it. And so yeah, Liz Truss is only
03:25 going to cause Rishi Sumac even more headaches in this regard. A very interesting Opposition
03:32 Day debate is set to be voted on on Tuesday. This is brought forward by Labour and it's
03:37 going to put in significant restrictions on ministerial severance pay. Now, ministerial
03:43 severance pay is the payout that, you know, cabinet ministers, really any member of the
03:47 government gets when they, you know, resign or even are sacked. And it's paid out to anyone
03:54 who leaves government. And the only restrictions are that if you join government within three
03:58 weeks, you have to pay it back. Now, with the successive governments in the last financial
04:04 year of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sumac, there was a very high amount of churn between
04:11 ministers. You know, I think there were three education, Asian ministers in a day, for example.
04:16 And so the payouts given to ministers reached almost a million pounds that year. You know,
04:21 for example, Michael Gove was out of government for three months. He would pay, he was paid
04:26 £16,000 for taking another cabinet job. Brandon Lewis got two payments within four months
04:33 for joining government and then quitting. So he paid around £33,000. And even if, you
04:41 know, government ministers or frontbenchers resign in disgrace, as we saw happen with
04:46 Chris Pincher and Peter Bone, who both then lost the whip, they still got ministerial
04:51 payouts. So there's no limit around that. And Labour basically wants to, you know, limit
04:56 it to people who have been accused of misconduct. And if they get found guilty of that, they
05:01 would not get the payment. It wants to cap it. So if you're still benefiting from the
05:07 payment, so if you go back into government within three months, you'd then have to pay
05:11 it back. And it also wants to limit it to not pay three months of a year. So at the
05:18 moment, even if you weren't in post for a whole year, you effectively get paid a quarter
05:23 of your annual salary. It wants to limit it to a quarter of how much you've earned in
05:27 that year. And it says that this will cut the ministerial severance pay overall, or
05:33 would have cut it in the last financial year by 40%. So this would be quite a difficult
05:37 one for the government because normally they would never vote with a Labour opposition
05:43 day motion. You know, they don't want to give it the airtime. They want Labour to look like
05:47 they're running the government. This will be a tricky one because they'll be obviously
05:51 voting this down.
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