Independent candidate Bonnie Prince Bob tore into SNP Culture Secretary Angus Robertson at the Grassmarket Residents Association hustings last Friday and the clip went viral within hours, leaving Robertson visibly rattled and scrambling to limit the damage.
Standing in Edinburgh Central against the SNP heavyweight, Bob opened by quoting Robertson's own 2021 victory speech back at him, his promise to address housing inequalities, the scourge of homelessness and the toll of drug-related deaths, before systematically dismantling his five-year record.
On housing: temporary homelessness in Edinburgh is up 219%. The Scottish Housing Regulator found the council in systemic failure. The council has suspended advertising social homes until March 2027 and 55,804 people are on the waiting list.
On drug deaths: 425 people have died from drug-related causes in Edinburgh since Robertson won this seat.
But Bob's most brutal assault was on Robertson's role as Scotland's Culture Secretary.
Bob told the assembled residents that Robertson had presided over the eviction of fifty Edinburgh artists from a publicly owned workspace in his own constituency. The building was sold for £1 and is now being converted into student flats. He was caught using a literary festival funded by his own quango Creative Scotland to promote his personal book. The same quango spent £110,000 of public money on a pornographic film and lied to parliament about it. And while all of this was happening, the Category A listed Basil Spence building on Dalkeith Road, described by Historic Environment Scotland, Robertson's own heritage body, as a building where any harmful development would normally lead to their objection, is to be handed to a student accommodation company charging £22,000 a year per bed.
Bob called it an act of cultural vandalism.
The audience reaction was immediate. Commentators described it as one of the most devastating hustings performances in recent Scottish political memory.
Within six days Robertson had rushed a guaranteed basic income for artists into the SNP manifesto, a weekly payment modelled on Ireland's Basic Income for the Arts scheme. The SNP called it standing shoulder to shoulder with Scotland's creative community. The timing tells a different story.
Bob's response was characteristically direct: a Culture Secretary who spent five years presiding over the failure of Scottish arts funding does not get to buy his way out of accountability three weeks before polling day.
The SNP is in damage control. Robertson is on the back foot. And the independent artist and filmmaker from Edinburgh who has been telling the truth about this city for a decade has, in three minutes at a hustings, done what the entire Scottish press corps failed to do in five years.
Watch the full clip below:
