Channel 4 News is the Green Party with a weather forecast tacked on the end, so naturally the headline issue of its Scottish election debate was the pronouncements of Donald Trump.
‘Let’s kick off with, who else, Donald Trump,’ sighed Krishnan Guru-Murthy.
Oh, I don’t know.
How about missed cancer waiting times, the yawning attainment gap, the worst drugs deaths record in Europe, or ferries that keep going back to dock and up in price?
For very specific strata of British society — city-dwelling arts graduates, retired geography teachers, people with names like ‘Flick’ and ‘Jonty’ – Trump serves the same function once fulfilled by Freddy Krueger.
He is the man of their nightmares, a boogeyman so compulsively loathsome to them that hating him has taken over their lives.
Channel 4 News knows its audience and sticking Trump at the top of the programme might have stopped them switching over from an all-Scotland show.
They wouldn’t have missed much anyway. The tenor of the evening was established early on when Guru-Murthy breathlessly declared: ‘The Scottish parliament could end up with a majority for independence.’
The Scottish parliament has had a majority for independence every single day since 5 May 2011.
Anas Sarwar, John Swinney and Malcolm Offord debate immigration on Channel 4 News
It’s nice to see the London media take an interest in matters north of the Tweed but they really aren’t sending their best.
The Trump ballyhoo was over a social media post the US President had sent urging the UK to ‘drill, baby, drill’ in the North Sea.
The party leaders were asked for their take, which ranged from John Swinney trying to distance himself from Trump without being seen to do so, to the Greens’ Gillian Mackay opposing any and all oil and gas exploration.
Mackay was the only woman on the panel, unless you count Alex Cole-Hamilton.
Malcolm Offord, whom some crazy person keeps allowing on TV, proposed that we ‘drill, Milly, drill’. Huh?
W ho was Milly? I don’t think we can take any more scandals in this election cycle. Then it dawned on me; he was saying ‘Mili’, as in Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a Malcolm Offord joke that doesn’t require an apology and a donation to charity, but at least give us a clue.
Much of the running time was taken up by Anas Sarwar and Swinney hissing at one another, like a set-piece cat-fight from an Eighties American soap opera.
The Labour leader branded the First Minister a ‘crank’ for refusing to accept national security concerns as the reason for Westminster knocking back a massive Chinese investment in Scotland. Swinney branded his opponent ‘desperate’.
Somewhere in Scottish Lib Dem HQ, they hit the button marked ‘Scotland deserves better than this’, and the Cole-Hamilton droid dutifully spouted out the line.
The Scottish parliament has been up and running for almost 30 years and these six represent the dizzying heights of Holyrood politics. Maybe Scotland deserves better than this, or maybe we just have a national humiliation fetish.
My favourite line of the night came from Mackay when asked if the Greens would put up taxes.
‘We need to get away from thinking of tax as a bad thing,’ she replied, with the earnestness and idealism of youth.
Things I would like to apply this logic to: overdrafts, weight gain and wine spillages on new carpets.
The only time the debate threatened to turn into a debate was near the end when immigration came up.
Offord, a well-meaning fellow but a pretty hopeless public speaker, nevertheless stood his ground under hostile questioning over economic migrants’ access to Glasgow’s housing stock.
Sarwar turned brutal when he claimed one of Reform’s candidates wanted to ‘deport my children’ and demanded that Offord say where they ought to go.
The dam has been well and truly breached. For years, the political and media classes have kept immigration off the agenda.
Offord’s determination to say the impact on housing was unfair on Scots and Sarwar’s emotive and personal broadside spoke for themselves. Scotland is not exceptional. Immigration matters here too.
