Former Scottish Labour Cabinet minister lands top Westminster job
A former Scottish cabinet minister has landed a top Westminster job.
Glasgow West MP Patricia Ferguson has been elected as the chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee. She beat Livingston MP Gregor Poynton by two votes.
Ferguson used to be a Labour MSP and held the post of Culture Minister.
The Scottish Affairs Committee had been chaired by the SNP's Pete Wishart since 2015, but the Nationalists lost their right to chair the committee after only returning nine MPs at the general election.
Select committee chairs receive £18,309 on top of their £91,346 yearly salary. This means they earn £109,655 a year.
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The job of the committee is to look at how the Scotland Office is run and to scrutinise relations with the Scottish Parliament.
The chair of the committee was chosen by all MPs. Ferguson won by 237 votes to 235.
There were 577 votes cast but 105 of these were invalid.
Ferguson said: said: “I’m delighted to be elected chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee. This Committee is pivotal in the relationship between Westminster and Holyrood, and I will ensure that it gives a voice to people across Scotland.
“This Parliament will see the new Government make decisions that will affect all of Scotland. I look forward to working with colleagues from across the House of Commons to properly scrutinise and inform these important decisions.
She had vowed to be "critical when needed" in an interview with the Record before the election took place.
The MP also said her experience as a minister would help in the new job.
She said: "I know what it's like to be scrutinized by a committee and also to be on the other side and be a member of the committee scrutinizing the government."
She continued: "When I was a minister, the attitude we took to the committees was that actually you wanted the committees to be asking you searching questions, because often you learned something that maybe hadn't become clear through all the policy briefings and all the discussions that you'd had.
"There were new ideas coming up, there were new things ccoming forward. There were new problems highlighted as well. And it was always useful, I felt, to reflect on that.
"I think that's the attitude government should have to the committee system. I'm not sure they always got that right in previous times. I think the relationship is now going to be reset."
She also hit out at SNP MPs who were previously on the committee for protecting the SNP Government.
She said: "There clearly was this issue of... it wouldn't ever be the Scottish Government's problem. It would be someone else's problem, and I suspect that this UK Government will certainly not give the Scottish Government the opportunity to be able to say that very often.
"We were all critical of the Tory government, rightly, for what it was doing in terms of finance and public services and the like. But I think it needs to be that needs to be reset. We must be fair about it. We must be critical where criticism is needed."
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