The Flag in the Wind
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We did get more first past the post seats, 3, Ochil - George Reid from Labour, Dundee East - Shona Robison from Labour, and Aberdeen North - Brian Adam from Labour. Labour lost 3 seats to us, 1 seat to the Tories, 1 seat to an independent, and 1 seat to the Liberals. We lost Galloway to the Tories - by 99 votes; we lost the same Westminster seat to the Tories in 2001 by 72 votes! However as we took Dundee East from Labour by 90 votes.......

I attended John Swinney’s Press Conference today ( see below) and was astounded at the savage attacks on him by the press; mind you when it was the Scotsman and the Record, why should I have been astounded. Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph was also a bit nasty, but probably because he was stuck in Scotland while his colleague was looking for the Galloway papers - George Galloway, that is, not "and Upper Nithsdale". What these guys don’t see is that they have spent the last 4 years denigrating the Scottish Parliament and the MSPs, and they now lament the apathy they have created in the electorate, and blame it on the SNP!

The seats lost by the SNP were mostly under the list system,(apart from Galloway) as there were so many ways for people to cast their second vote; the Green Party picked up 7 seats and the Scottish Socialist Party (formerly Militant, if you believe Labour Minister Brian Wilson) picked up 6. The Scottish Pensioners’ Party also had a list seat, as had Mrs Sillars. The actual ballot paper for the second vote was about 18 inches long at all the Lothians Polling Stations anyway; other regions might have had more or less, so confusion reigned.

The first past the post seats were as follows:

Other seats which were near misses:

It should be noted that at the 1999 election, the Liberal majority in Tweeddale was 4,478, and that this has been reduced to 538! Over the last year the Liberals had complained to the Parliamentary Standards Committee that SNP list MSP, Christine Grahame was working too hard, and doing what they should have been doing; the Liberals were also putting it about that as Christine was top of the list the people didn’t need to vote for her as she would be elected anyway. What nice people they are.

As noted above, Galloway went to the Tories, helped by 4299 Labour votes, and as they Unionist Parties say "It’s nae loss whit a freend gets."; apart from Tweeddale all the other marginals are Labour.

List MSPs are as follows:

At the Press Conference, John Swinney said that there were lessons to be learned from the results; he said that in future the SNP will concentrate on first past the post seats and thus minimise the vagaries of the list which cost the SNP 7 seats, and that he intends to put in a new party constitution with more emphasis on the members , and to reconnect the party to its local communities. In response to questions from the press about the failure of the SNP campaign, John gently pointed out that they themselves had complimented the SNP on a brilliant campaign! Fuller briefing below.

My own view is that this has been the best and most professional campaign the SNP has ever run, and John Swinney has gone from strength to strength and performed superbly on TV. It is so disappointing that all the effort, dedication and ingenuity did not pay off - the last programme "Meet the Leaders" only attracted about 200,000 viewers. It’s a bit like the Scottish football team; there the crowd turns up and the team let them down, and in the elections the team played brilliantly but the crowd didn’t turn up.

SNP leader John Swinney today came out fighting insisting he would not resign despite the election result which saw his party lose a quarter of its seats. Mr Swinney was in an aggressive mood at the post-election media briefing, warning his party that it "must change" before the next election in 2007. He insisted a "root and branch rejuvenation of the party" would be carried through with urgency but the independence message would stay central to his ambitions. The SNP leader said: "The challenge of the next four years and the challenge of what I intend to do, devoting the next four years of my life to winning the 2007 election, is to guarantee that the SNP is perceived in 2007 as a credible alternative government." Mr Swinney said he would deliver a major blueprint for reform of the party's internal structure by July. He said: "It is time for a root and branch rejuvenation of the party as we face up to the challenges of the modern political era." He said he wanted a new party constitution with a one-member-one-vote voting system and a smaller national executive. The parliamentary ranking system which saw the exit of SNP leading lights Mike Russell and Andrew Wilson should be binned, he said. And in a warning to local activists, reform will allow the leadership to "remove failing branches". The shadow cabinet is to be cut in size and in a hint of greater discipline the SNP's MSPs will be told "never to forget why they are privileged" in their jobs. More participation by women, the disabled and ethnic minorities and a stronger presence for the party in local communities are also on the cards. He said: "That is the party reform agenda I will drive forward and drive forward with urgency." Mr Swinney stuck firmly to his guns on the independence policy despite suggestions that it had cost his party votes. He said: "Excuse me for believing in Scottish independence, excuse me for believing that is the right way forward for Scotland. But I say to you honestly and clearly and with the strongest political conviction can possibly muster that independence is the right answer for Scotland. It's a view I hold very deeply and it's one I will put to the people of Scotland and I will persuade them the merits of those arguments in the years to come." Mr Swinney argued that his party needed to put more effort into winning first-past-the-post seats if it wanted to move from a protest party to a party of Government. He said: "What we have demonstrated in Ochil, in Dundee East, in Aberdeen North, tough contests with the Labour Party, is the SNP's ability to deliver first-past-the-post successes. The problem is that we are not able to do that in sufficient areas across the country and that is what the agenda I have set out today is all about." Mr Swinney also rejected suggestions that his campaign had been a failure, insisting he was "very proud" of it. He added: "What we have to recognise however is that we have got to get across to the people of Scotland simple and clear choices in the years ahead."

Anyway, belated St George’s Day wishes to our English readers, and I actually did refer to it in Foot in the Mouth Notes when I commented that Charles Clarke, English Education Minister, was visiting Scotland, this constituency no less, where he had no mandate, on St George’s Day. Forbye, I quoted from Julius Caesar, but that must have been serendipity, and not planned!

I seem to recall that last year I did some investigation into St George and his place in the Calendar of Saints, and in my quest for knowledge even went so far as to contact the Vatican Library. My recollection, without looking up my own words, is that he was demoted, but not given the Kirkcaldy heist, which is what I believed; strangely, looking up St George on the Web, I kept coming across the Red Hand of Ulster!

As Mr Ramage put it, there are no Shakespeare suppers, which does seem a bit peculiar when you consider the impact he has had on the world; I am sure that virtually every friend or acquaintance of mine could come up with a Shakespearean quote at the drop of a hat, so why are the English so shy of celebrating their bard?

I also received another message from a Steafan Risnidh, which may have been praise or rebuke, but as it was in the Gaelic I’ll never know. Thanks anyway.

Robert Mundell, professor of economics at Columbia University in New York, not only backed fiscal autonomy for Scotland, but said that there was no reason why the country could not be successful under Independence. Professor Mundell was awarded the Nobel prize in 1999 for his work on international monetary and fiscal policy, and has been described as a major influence on the formation of the European single currency; he has served as an adviser to the UN, the World Bank, the US Federal Reserve Board, the European Commission and several governments in Latin America and Europe.

He argued that Scotland’s political union with England had made sense when Britain was in the ascendancy and leading the Empire. "The enduring legacy of the empire was to make the English language the most important in the world. But that era is now over. The modern counterpart to the British Empire is the EU which provides for 25 countries in Europe the political and economic umbrella that the British Empire provided earlier for countries like Scotland. I do not know whether Scotland needs a government in between its own parliament and what will one day probably become the federal capital of Europe in Brussels."

His comments were widely reported in the Herald, making the front page, but the Scotsman relegated to a footnote on Page 8, as "Economist backs fiscal autonomy"; I do not know if the Daily Record was aware of it, as their billboard for that day said "Exclusive - SNP will cost Scotland 30,000 jobs." At the same time as Professor Mundell was giving an independent view, the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, was telling the Scots how well off they were and would be under the Westminster system, and projecting growth of 3%-3.5%; the Bank of England was saying 2%-2.5%, OECD - 2.6% and NIESR - 2.8%. All of these institutions are forecasting that there will be a massive shortfall in the Budget figures, meaning that taxes will have to be raised by as much as £30 billion over the next 2 years; as growth in Scotland is very much below the UK average we will be hit harder.

Another little con trick when the Chancellor was up here a week or two ago; he told us that whereas in 1985 the number of 18-24 year olds out of work for over a year was 40,000, this year it was only 282. He neglected to mention the 27,200 in the same age group who had been receiving jobseeker’s allowance for up to a year, and that only 67% of that age group were in employment compared with 79% of 25-34 year olds and 82% of 35-49 year olds. What you don’t know won’t harm you!

So we have an internationally respected independent Nobel prize winning economist with no axe to grind saying Scotland could do well as an independent country, and a New Labour Chancellor, who dissembles and has got his sums wrong, telling us it would be a disaster; I rest my case.

It is the last approach we should be looking at more closely; New Labour claim that the police spend an awful lot of time in court, waiting to give evidence, and that this is the biggest waste of police time. A concerted effort to change things would release more policemen to walk the streets. This is undeniably true, but so is the fact that since coming into power, New Labour have taken no steps to change this; this is probably acceptable in their eyes as a benefit delivered cannot then be promised at the next election. That apart, just how do they aim to free up policemen this way, as this would require fundamental changes to the law, and so far, the new Criminal Justice Bill has not addressed these.

What the new Bill has done is pay a sort of lip service to the principle, by removing court police officers and replacing them with security guards! This clever ploy has raised hackles among Scotland’s judges; as it is, when criminals are brought before the court, the benches are full of other criminals, criminals’ families, criminals’ victims and criminals’ enemies, and witnesses. Removing police officers from these courts is tantamount to encouraging mayhem and to severely limiting impartial justice; a policeman at least merits respect, if not fear, but security guards are generally treated with disdain, but this would put more police on the streets! Sheriffs and magistrates around Glasgow have already indicated that they would not be willing to sit in court under these circumstances.

While we are at it, another proposed piece of legislation on education has also incensed the judiciary; Lord McCluskey, Scotland’s most senior Law Lord has expressed deep reservations about the draft Education (Scotland) Bill. According to this, when parents of special needs children challenge their local councils, they will not be entitled to legal aid; this means that parents would have to pit their wits against teams of well-paid and well-qualified opposition lawyers. According to Lord McCluskey this would deny them their right to a fair hearing under the European Convention of Human Rights.

So the first example is one of hocus-pocus, as New Labour seek to swop police officers for security guards, and the other looks like an oversight somewhere; I just hope that no SNP members were complicit.

FOOT IN THE MOUTH NOTES

As you read the article, you discover that it is 60% for the UK; in Scotland 60% of GPs were opposed to home visit charges. (OK, it was only 59%, but 60% chimes!)

Parking charges at the flagship Edinburgh Royal Infirmary range from £1.20 for up to 1 hour, to £10.00 for 6 hours and over; a proportion of nursing staff can get permits for £250.00 per year, but there are not enough to go round.

Nightshift nurses face the same charges; overnight the car park is empty.

Scotsman columnist Katie Grant is wondering this week if her duty is not to walk to the ballot box, but to get down on her knees and pray.

As she is a well known member of the Tory Party, she might be right.

Since 1997, stock values on the World market have fallen 5%; from the same date, stock values in the UK have fallen by 12%. This has had a dramatic effect on company pension schemes, heralding an uncertain future for older people.

The Chancellor helped turn a drama into a crisis by removing £5 billion a year in tax credits from pension schemes.

A million and a quarter parents are still waiting for money from the new working tax credit system which came into force with such a fanfare at the beginning of April; 450,000 have not yet applied for the credit, due to the application therefor being too complicated, and 800,000 have applied and so far have received hee-haw.

As one disgruntled non-recipient put it "If my Tax Return is late, the Inland Revenue fine me. When they’re late, it’s "Tough!" "

The company was bought last year by two residents of the tax haven island of Sark, the Barclay twins, coincidentally owners of the Scotsman newspaper.

In a radio interview, Andy Kerr, the "outgoing" finance minister, described the £400 million cost as a "drop in the ocean." See New Labour - see public money.

From casual observation (as I try never to watch these programmes) it seems that most popular soaps, Emmerdale, Coronation Street and East Enders, have as a focal point the local pub.

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