Thin excuses for incompetence and chaos are running out for ruling parties - Jackie Baillie

Thin excuses for incompetence and chaos are running out for governments in both Edinburgh and London

Circular economy minister Lorna Slater confirming the delay to the planned deposit return

Believe it or not distraction isn’t the word of the political week, it is chaos. In Westminster and at Holyrood the ruling parties are falling apart at the seams, incompetent and incapable of governing.

Boris Johnson has jumped ship and Nicola Sturgeon has been arrested - both unthinkable two years ago but suddenly inevitable this year.

Both the SNP at Holyrood and the Conservatives at Westminster are descending into open civil war over the poisoned legacy left by Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson.

The former leaders loom over their parties like the rapidly expanding shadow of a jumbo jet coming in for a hard landing on runway 2024.

At present I count four Westminster by-elections caused either by toys out of the pram resignations from Boris Johnson and his die-hards or in Rutherglen and Hamilton West by a dragged out by the fingernails former SNP MP.

Downing Street might be a comfortable place to live, but Rishi Sunak has a responsibility to the country as well as the soft furnishings. He should just get on with it and call a general election.

Similarily, there was a terrible irony in Humza Yousaf appearing on Sunday morning television to assure us that Nicola Sturgeon was “in a good place and doing well” just hours before she was arrested.

Mr Yousaf always does a fair impression of drowning not waving in these interviews. He went through such constitutional contortions that his spin doctor must wish he had chosen a bad appendix over the new job.

The SNP leader said that he would make “life very difficult” for a Labour government if demands for a referendum on independence, which he admits his party is in no position to offer, are not met.

He could not have been clearer. After the election SNP MPs will be tasked to back the rump of Boris Johnson’s Tories over the progress and change offered by Keir Starmer and Labour.

Such a staggering political mis-step was, luckily for him, rapidly overtaken by the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon, the second former SNP First Minister to be arrested after leaving office.

How that plays out remains to be seen and there has to be, as the former First Minister insists, a presumption of innocence until the law has run its course.

Meanwhile there is the job of governing which is impossible in the case of Rishi Sunak who is heading for possibly his third relaunch since taking over the Conservative Party.

For Humza Yousaf trying to progress any policy, or even find a good news day, must be like walking over broken glass, or crushed glass, or whatever it is Ministers do with it after Lorna Slater has finished grinding up their government’s reputation in the press.

According to Ms Slater the now junked deposit return scheme was ready to go until sabotaged at the last minute by the wicked Westminster government. But Ministers and officials in Edinburgh knew from the very beginning that an Internal Market exemption was needed for the deposit return scheme to go ahead in Scotland.

Why, logically, did the government proceed with the scheme, and impose costs on businesses which now threaten to sue Ministers, without securing the exemption first?

The scheme has been, as one brewing company director described it, “a bonfire of chaos from the outset.”

It has cost £300 million so far, and may cost more in compensation claims. Yet a scheme could still go ahead without glass along the same lines as the Welsh government, but SNP and Green Ministers reckon they can cut their losses by blaming Westminster.

These thin excuses for incompetence and chaos are running out for both governments.