MICHAEL Gove has denied that a UK Government announcement to create 1000 new civil service jobs in Scotland was a “pre-election bribe”.
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was in Glasgow yesterday after unveiling that the Cabinet Office is moving 500 jobs to a secondary HQ in the city and another 500 jobs would be based at the Department for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development in East Kilbride as part of a plan to spread the civil service jobs across the UK.
He said the jobs would be a mix of new jobs and posts where staff would re-locate but he said that people would be able to retrain to take up opportunities in the civil service.
Asked if the announcement – coming eight weeks before the Holyrood elections – was a “pre-election bribe” he said he would not describe it in that way.
He said: “I don’t think that’s fair. These will be new jobs some of which will be from elsewhere in the United Kingdom but many of which will be recruited locally. And the purpose of it is part of a broader campaign of levelling up and united across the UK.”
Gove also used the occasion to campaign for the Conservatives in the upcoming Scottish Parliament election – saying he hoped Douglas Ross would become First Minister in May.
The Cabinet Office minister said every vote for the Scottish Tories would “cut the SNP and cut Nicola Sturgeon down to size”, and it was for the people to choose the next First Minister.
“I hope it will be Douglas Ross,” he said.
Ross, who was briefly an MSP before swapping Holyrood for Westminster in 2017, plans to return to the Scottish Parliament via the North East regional list in May.
The 38-year-old Moray MP has only been Scottish Tory leader since last August.
Gove also attacked the SNP’s plans for a second independence referendum in the next parliament as a “momentous distraction” to the national recovery from the Covid pandemic, but was ambiguous about whether one could take place.
Despite Boris Johnson promising in his 2019 manifesto to “reject any request from the SNP government to hold an independence referendum”, Gove suggested the matter could turn on the result in May.
He said: “We’ll see what happens in the Scottish election.”
The SNP are ahead in the polls, on course for an overall majority, with the Tories set to remain in second place.
Gove said: “It’s up to the Scottish people to decide who the next First Minister is. I hope it will be Douglas Ross. The Scottish Conservatives are the only party fighting an unapologetically pro-UK campaign focused on jobs and economic recovery.
“We know that every vote for the Scottish Conservatives is a vote to cut the SNP and cut Nicola Sturgeon down to size and that seems to me to be the wisest thing to do.”
Asked if Downing Street would agree to indyref2 if the SNP win in May, Gove ducked the question. He said: “We’ve been clear the most important thing at the moment is to concentrate on our health recovery and our economic recovery. It seems to me that talk of an independence referendum at the moment is just a momentous distraction from that.”
Pressed on whether if Scots voted for a referendum it was right that they should get one, Gove said: “We’ll see what happens in the Scottish election. But at the moment, I can certainly tell you that, and I think everyone can see this, that the principal focus of people in Scotland, as in the rest of the United Kingdom, across this family of nations, every family is focusing on making sure we can build back better. “
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