The Flag in the Wind
A weekly online newspaper bringing you information on the political scene in Scotland: part of the monthly Scots Independent.

Home | About Us | Subscriptions | Archives | SNP | Ad Rates | Features | Adverts | Events | Links

CAMPAIGNING FOR SCOTLAND
(Owned, Edited and Printed in Scotland since November 1926)
Compiled by Jim Lynch
[Issue 38 - 23 February 2001]

BETWEEN A STONEHOUSE AND A HARD PLACE

On the opening day of the Labour Conference in Glasgow the Scottish National Party celebrated a stunning victory in the Stonehouse by-election on Thursday 15 February 2001, winning nearly 73% of the vote with a swing of 27% from Labour to the SNP.

The result was :

It is worth noting that if everyone who had voted in May 1999 had voted in February 2001, the votes would have increased by 482; with a majority of 746 this would not have been enough to save Labour’s bacon.

Our successful candidate, John Young, fought a good local campaign, and he and his team canvassed every house in the town, demonstrating that hard work and persistence pays. When it comes to opinion polls, nothing beats the ballot box.

LABOUR (SCOTTISH) CONFERENCE

Well the headline is accurate; Mr Blair did not mention Scotland once in his address to the Conference in the SECC in Glasgow last weekend. John Swinney, SNP leader, said that Mr Blair claimed that 1 million children had been taken out of poverty since New Labour came to power, whereas in Scotland child poverty has remained at 30% since 1997/98. Among the other claims by Mr Blair rebutted by John Swinney were the following:

• People were benefitting from NHS Direct, the 24 hour telephone health advice service; they have not delivered on this in Scotland.

• New Labour is building a new industrial base, encouraging investment and creating jobs; Scotland has lost 30000 manufacturing jobs since 1997, and Ireland now has more manufacturing jobs than Scotland. 

• New Labour claims that Gordon Brown has produced an end to Tory boom and bust; latest economic growth figures show that growth in Scotland at 1.6% compared with 3.4% for the UK as a whole; the Scottish manufacturing sector is in recession.

There are a host of other rebuttals and they can be seen on the SNP Website, and the more you read the more you understand why Mr Blair did not mention Scotland.

He was aided and abetted by Henry McLeish, First Minister, putting the knife into his erstwhile allies, the Lib Dems, and calling them Mr Hague’s little helpers, (when Jim Wallace gets around to writing his memoirs we expect them to be called "In Bed With a Snake") and of course by Mrs Helen Liddell, sometime Secretary of State for Scotland, who managed to harp back to 1979 (Well she is a harpie). Mrs Liddell is going to be responsible for combatting the Tories and the Liberals in Scotland, leaving her deputy, the reasonably affable George Foulkes, to tackle the SNP; as there are no Tory seats in Scotland (Watch Eastwood) and the Liberals are not winning any friends from their alliance with Labour, what does that tell us? Well, Mrs Liddell will be able to claim success and all SNP gains will be pinned on the hapless Mr Foulkes.

Regarding Mrs Liddell harping back to 1979 and the vote of confidence; Labour lost that because they were incompetent, and they spent 18 years in the wilderness because they remained incompetent. When they replaced Callaghan, they opted for Michael Foot, a good principled man, whom they spoiled, when they should have opted for Dennis Healey, a good political thug. The SNP suffered after 1979 more than they did.

THE MAXWELL PRINCIPLE

Now there’s an oxymoron for you. Within the next few weeks the report on the Maxwell theft will be made public, and there are a few people who will be sweating. Robert Maxwell, one time Labour MP, and friend and confidant of Labour leaders, stole £400 million from the pension fund of Mirror Group Newspapers. The story only started to come out after Maxwell’s death in November 1991, and employees knew he was stealing but no one would listen to them. One of them, Fergie Millar, who was assistant editor of the Daily Record said "We were betrayed by those who should have stopped him, and politicians, especially Labour politicians, who should have condemned him. However they had an agenda; it did not include our rights."

The report has taken four years to complete and it has cost the taxpayer (us) about £8 million; it is not expected to criticise politicians, but Maxwell had been subject to three DTI investigations, all of which had concluded he was a crook, so his Labour friends who included Gordon Brown and the late John Smith, could not have been ignorant of that fact. Maxwell’s auditors, Coopers and Lybrand, now merged into Pricewaterhouse Coopers, are expected to receive some heavy criticism, as are bankers Goldman Sachs.

And what of his employees? Well, Mrs Helen Liddell was his Personal Assistant; and might be expected to have noticed something; we do not expect her to be sweating, but then women glow, don’t they?

H - - - Y HENRY

The First Minister, Henry McLeish, was disconcerted again last week, as he sought to turn the tables on Bruce Crawford over the privatisation of road maintenance contracts; the SNP had put down a motion of no confidence in Sarah Boyack, the Transport Minister, over her handling of the issue. Ms Boyack had been severely criticised by fellow members in the Labour Party, both councillors and MSPs, as she presided over the biggest privatisation ever in Scotland. Mr McLeish sought to draw attention to the fact that Perth and Kinross Council had privatised some jobs, blithely ignoring the fact that under the Tories compulsory competitive tendering they had no option, and he said there is a word beginning with H and ending in Y which they dare not use in the House of Commons, and as he paused for dramatic effect........ Margaret Ewing called ------- "HENRY!". The Parliament erupted with laughter, even the keeper of order, Lord Steel, teeheeing into his microphone.

Of course, as anticipated, the Labour members all fell into line and Ms Boyack comfortably survived the vote of confidence; the picture of her on TV on her bike was not connected, nor we are sure is the fact that her top adviser in the civil service is taking early retirement. In all the guffawing Mr McLeish completely forgot to express full confidence in his Minister.

The word which Mr McLeish was intending to use is one with which he and his Labour colleagues are familiar; it was hypocrisy. If you look at Foot in the Mouth Notes, you will understand why for Henry it should also be HAPPY.

WE STAND FOR SCOTLAND

As the New Labour dignatories arrived for the Labour Conference in Glasgow, the Scottish National Party unveiled a poster which said "Oh look, the leaders of the Scottish Labour Party are up from London" The poster was unveiled by Nicola Sturgeon who said "Labour is run from London which has meant four years of broken promises for our health service, and four years of disappointment for our pensioners. The SNP stands for Scotland. Part of that commitment means standing up for Scotland’s interest at Westminster. No one else does."

The ad trailer circled the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre as the Labour delegates arrived.

H - - - - - Y HOLIDAY

The Scottish Parliament is taking a short recess, and while it is customary for the Daily Record interpretation that life is a long holiday for MSPs, it is not like that at all.

SNP leader, John Swinney, will this week visit Dundee, Aberdeen, Ochil, Inverness, Moray, Angus, Banff and Buchan and Galloway. Other SNP leadership figures will be visiting Kilmarnock, Caithness, Argyll, Govan and other constituencies. By the start of the General Election campaign, John will have visited the majority of Scotland’s parliamentary constituencies.

His final visit this week will be to Ochil on Saturday evening where he will be speaking at the Adoption Meeting of Keith Brown; the meeting is in the Cochrane Hall Alva at 8pm.

Aye, some holiday, and this February tae.

AND SPEAKING OF HOLIDAYS...

Kenny MacAskill MSP, Shadow Enterprise Minister, is demanding action on holiday charter flight surcharges from Scottish Airports. He rightly points out that the flight supplements are there to increase the profits of the holiday industry, and usually bear no relation to the extra distance involved. As a case in point, Newcastle will not be much nearer to Minorca than either Edinburgh or Glasgow, which are much larger airports, but flights from the latter attract flight supplements. This applies during the months of July and August, when there are Trades Holidays and school holidays when most families have to go, and can be seen as a grossly unfair rip off for those whose options are limited.


The Office of Fair Trading says that it has had a number of complaints similar to that raised by Kenny MacAskill, and they are assessing whether the charges made from Scottish and English regional airports can be justified on cost or other grounds. Kenny has also called on the Trade and Industry Secretary to investigate whether tourist companies are breaching European regulations by the surcharges.

I can identify with this problem, as my son and his family are going to Minorca in July from Newcastle; there was a flight from Edinburgh, where they live, but it would have been an additional £690 for flight supplements.

PLUCK FIRST THE BEAM...

We are sure that Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer and the son of a Church of Scotland minister, is familiar with the quotation "Pluck first the beam from thine own eye that thou may see more clearly to pluck the mote from thy brother’s". Mr Brown has been warning the European Commission not to meddle with Britain’s economic affairs; he maintains that public spending and investment was his prerogative and not theirs. Quite right, too, and he got support from Ireland, which has also been rapped over the knuckles for doing its own thing.

The Labour dominated treasury select committee in the House of Commons has accused Mr Brown of exerting too much influence on other departments. It said "We are concerned that the treasury as an institution has recently begun to exert too much influence over policy areas which are properly the business of other departments". Among the moves he has made are taking charge of Labour’s welfare programme and relegating Alastair Darling, taking Third World debt away from Clare Short, usurping dealing with the euro from Robin Cook, Foreign Secretary and hijacking a goodly proportion of the Education and Employment Secretary’s remit. We also remember that last year , during Donald Dewar’s illness there was a report that Gordon Brown was going to take charge of the Scottish Government as well; that one seemed to die the death.

And while all this meddling in other departments is going on, the key objective of the treasury, tax reform, is being neglected. Mr Brown was also boasting at the Glasgow Conference that we had the lowest inflation for 25 years; that is true as far as it goes, since 25 years ago, 1976, we had an incompetent Labour Government and inflation at 16.6%, not a difficult target to pass! Inflation was at its lowest in modern times in the Fifties, 0.6% in 1959, and 1% in 1960, but as the Tories were in power, that is anathema.

THE DERRY AIR

No, we are not continuing the Frank Roy saga, but looking at another noble scion of the Labour Party. We have known many Alexanders in our time, and they have been known as Alex, Eck, Sandy, but we never came across an Alexander called Derry; however we did not move in the pretentious circles of New Labour. Lord Derry Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, is in the news again. This time he held a fund raising dinner for lawyers for Labour, with a minimum donation of £200 a skull, and while it is probably perfectly permissible to solicit political donations from friends and acquaintances, it takes on a rather different meaning when the solicitor is in a position to create judges and QCs from the donors. How many raffle tickets are required for a seat on the Bench?

We are sure that Lord Irvine is not in the least embarassed by the furore; after all, he has survived the wallpaper scandal, the jobs for the boys scandal, even the snow plough at his front door scandal, to say nothing of the old masters hanging on the walls of his official residence, and he has an air of puzzlement as to how anyone could be critical of his noble predilections. At one stage he likened himself to Cardinal Wolsey, who was the power behind the throne of Henry the Eighth; perhaps he has conveniently forgotten that Wolsey was arrested for treason, but died before he could be brought to trial.

POTS AND KETTLES

While John Swinney, SNP leader, has been severely critical of Lord Irvine and the whole system of patronage, the most vociferous of his critics have been the Tories; how dare he compromise their rights to power and privilege, the upstart. They perhaps should be looking closer to home, ideologically speaking, and casting a critical eye at their colleague, the Duke of Buccleuch. Last week we commented that the Duke was selling a lump of land in Edinburgh to a private developer, but that it was going through Edinburgh Council first, to save the Duke tax; as the largest private landowner in Scotland he needs the money. It has been said that you could walk from Edinburgh to the Border and never be off the Duke’s land.

Well, that was last week, so what has the Duke been up to now? He has signed over land in Midlothian to a trust set up by his wife in the Cayman Islands, so a little bit of Scotland is now in an offshore tax haven, and when the development is all set up the Duke stands to gain about £12.5 million on the bit under the trust, a tax saving to the Duke of about £3.6 million. It is all clever stuff, with title only able to be sold to a named nominee, and the whole purpose of this is to avoid tax on legitimate profit, and by using legitimate, if not particularly moral methods. As to where the Tories come into the equation, well the Duke was better known as the Earl of Dalkeith, Tory MP for Edinburgh North until 1973, when his father died, and he became a Member of the House of Lords, a natural Tory.

While the Duke has done nothing illegal, Grand Cayman is a tiny island with hundreds of banks, its own stock exchange and multi billion pound assets, and is a haven for billions of pounds of illegally obtained cash; there is nothing intrinsically strange in one of our noble families rubbing shoulders with the people concerned, since our noble families are only thus because their forefathers were bigger thieves and cutthroats than ours were.

However, the Tories should spare us the pontificating and all that holier than thou rubbish.

FOOT IN THE MOUTH NOTES

After the petrol crisis, in September last year, the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, cut 1p a litre of the duty on Ultra Low Sulphur Petrol, to encourage drivers to use it; the name of the game was to keep drivers driving and paying the highest petrol prices in the world, but give a sop to environmentalism. The petrol companies responded by supplying the fuel, but not making it any cheaper; they kept the 1p to themselves, claiming that the stuff was more expensive to produce.

The petrol companies say they do not make any money from filling stations; this year Shell announced profits of £13.1 billion, an increase of 85%, and BP Amoco announced profits of £10 billion. Strange economics!

Alex Salmond has accepted an invitation to become honorary president of the Students Association at St Andrews University; Alex is a graduate of the University, and is delighted with the honour, awarded for being the first leader of the Opposition in the Scottish Parliament.

We do not know if his delight is shared by the lord rector, Andrew Neill, editor in chief of the Scotsman, and no lover of the Scottish Parliament, or of the Scottish National Party.

The average wage of a call centre worker in Scotland is £13100 per year, which is £7000 per year below the average wage; call centre wages in England at £11100 per year are £9000 below the national average.

On 1 April this year, the First Minister, Henry McLeish’s pay will rise to £132141 per year.

Centrica, which owns British Gas, and masquerades as Scottish Gas, has announced gas price increases of 4.7% from 1 April, for all Scottish customers. This is double the rate of inflation.

The same company is reducing electricity prices in England and Wales by 3.7% also from 1 April; this reduction will not apply to Scotland. No, no connection.

Jim Murphy, Mrs Helen Liddell’s new Parliamentary Private Secretary, is the Labour MP for Eastwood; we understand Mr Murphy was being groomed to take over Cathcart from John Maxton when he retired, and he was given a trial run in Eastwood to see how he got on. In the general clearout of the Tories he got elected in what was seen as a safe Tory seat.

Mr Murphy succeeds Frank Roy, who had to resign as a result of the insult to Scotland and Ireland over the Carfin affair, and had probably one of the shortest spells of office ever; since Eastwood is still a marginal we wonder if Mr Murphy’s tenure will outlast Mr Roy’s?

While on the subject of Carfin, and the general benefits of being a part of the wonderful United Kingdom, at the time of the Great Famine in Ireland more than two million emigrated and one million died from starvation; the country exported more than three million quarters of grain in a year, and the value of food produced in Ireland was estimated to be sufficient to feed more than twice the country.

There is a the tale, told by Brendan Behan, we believe, that when Queen Victoria gave £5 to the Irish Famine Relief , her advisers were so shocked that she gave £5 to the Battersea Dogs Home to placate them; no doubt this is apocryphal.

As we trailed a week or two back, the SNP will be contesting Glasgow Springburn at the General Election, and the Scottish Socialist Party will also be running; the Westminster Parliamentary convention, unwritten, of course, is that the Speaker’s Parliamentary seat is not contested. The SNP does not feel bound by a tradition that belonged in the Dark Ages, but believes democracy demands that every seat should be contested.

And south of the Border, Peter Mandelson will face a challenge from another tradition from the Dark Ages, Arthur Scargill, the man who did what no Tory Government could do, broke the NUM.

DATES IN HISTORY

23 February 664
Death of St Boisel, Prior of Melrose, Confessor.

23 February 1310
Declaration of the Clergy and People in favour of King Robert I, The Bruce, from the Church of the Friary Minor in Dundee.

29 February 1528
Patrick Hamilton, student of Parid, Louvain, St Andrews, Marburg, Abbot of Fearn, burned at St Andrew for heresy, the first Reformation martyr in Scotland.

THE REBELS CEILIDH SONG BOOK

FREEDOM COME ALL YE

Rauch the wind in the clear day's dawnin',
Blaws the cloods heelster gowdie o'er the bay,
But there's mair than a rauch wind blawin'
Through the great glen o' the warl' today,
It's a thocht that wad gar oor rottens,
A' they rogues that gang gallus fresh and gay,
Tak the road and seek ither loanins,
For their ill ploys tae sport and play.

Nae mair will oor bonnie gallants
Gang tae war when the braggarts croosely craw.
Nor wee weans frae pitheid or clachan,
Mourn the ships sailin' frae the Broomielaw.
Broken families in lands we've harried,
Will curse Scotland the Brave nae mair, nae mair.
Black and white each till ither married,
Mak the vile barracks o' their masters bare.

Sae come all ye at hame wi' freedom.
Never heed whit the hoodies croak for doom.
In yer hoose a' the balms o' Adam
Can find breed, barley bree and painted room
When McLean meets wi' his freen's in Springburn
A'  the roses and geans will turn tae bloom,
And the black boys beyont Nyanga
Ding the fell gallows of the burghers doon.
(Repeat the first four lines of the first verse)

See the Songbook in our features section

A KIST O FERLIES
A Keek at the Guid Scots Tung
By Peter D Wright
(Note: All words underlined in this section are RealAudio links)

See Scots Language in our Features Section
for other poems, stories, sayings and words in the Scots language

THE MONTHLY PRIZE CROSSWORD

Each month the Scots Independent Newspaper offers a prize crossword and we're now offering this online in the Flag in the Wind as well.   Should you complete the crossword by the deadline you can fax it over to the SI and the first correct one opened on the closing date will win a £10.00 book token.

SI Prize Crossword No. 14
[Clicking on the picture will bring up a life size version which you can copy to your desktop or print out]