Alistair Grant gives a round up of Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay latest keynote speech

Alistair Grant gives a round up of Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay latest keynote speech today at the Royal Scots Club in Edinburgh.

Transcript

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.