In response to the First Minister’s Statement on “Moving Scotland Forward”, Nicol Stephen, Leader of the Liberal Democrats in Scotland said:

“The thing that people remember most about the first year of this SNP government is the broken promises. Students, housing, class sizes, school buildings. The list goes on.

“And today it gets bigger. The promise of 2 hours of P.E. broken and contradicted. They used to say it was guaranteed, with specialist teachers. Now they say that walking to school will count. Isn’t that the sort of policy gymnastics we have come to expect from him?

“But not everyone is as generous in their assessment of the SNP government as me. The Financial Times yesterday described the first year as, ‘doing nothing very much at all’”. It also talked of ‘smugly self-confident politics’ conducted ‘without a hint of modesty’. Does the First Minister expect to keep those elements in the same balance for the forthcoming year? His statement suggests that he will.

“The F.T. also reported that the price of oil was $120 a barrel. With that back-drop, can I ask why there has been such an incredible delay on his Energy Strategy? They said it was important last May. In September we were promised a ‘statement’ ‘by the end of the year’. By February in was down-graded to ‘an over-view’ that would be placed on the website. Will we ever really see it?

“The First Minister spoke about ‘heightened ambition’. He also told a Sunday newspaper this weekend that quite a lot of the time he feels quite a lot like King James V. In that interview he wobbled on independence and said that he didn’t favour separation at all. He said he preferred a ‘social union’ under a single monarch. Can he tell us what on earth that means? And does he see a role for himself in that position as sole monarch?”