Compilers hail and farewell.

This is a belated “Thank You” to Donald Bain, who is having what I hope is just a sabbatical from the Flag; Donald has been a Compiler for about two years.  The late Alex Ewing put me back in touch with him when I inherited the editorship of the SI, and between contributions to the Flag and to the SI, it has been a fruitful relationship. I will still be asking him for contributions to the SI!

I am pleased to welcome another two Compilers, which brings the strength back up to five; Jennifer Dunn, who writes every month in the SI has agreed to be a Compiler.  Jennifer is now a Councillor in Glasgow.  The other new Compiler is Mark Hirst; Mark is the Parliamentary Researcher for Christine Grahame MSP.  Both Compilers definitely have one quality I lack, and will never now attain; it is known as Youth.

 

Brown’s Black and Blue Thursday.

  As the New Labour project spectacularly unravelled last week, with an ashen faced Gordon Brown accepting it was his responsibility, I managed not to have any sneaking sympathetic thoughts about his plight.

It is doubly ironic that the bale of straw that broke this camel’s back was one that Brown had bound up himself, in one of his last acts as Chancellor of the Exchequer (I mistyped the word Chancellor, and it came out as “Chancellot” – a Freudian slip if there ever was one.)  His tinkering with the 10% tax rate at the beginning of last year, as he sought to cosy up to Middle England, was only another symptom of how far he has strayed from socialist ideals in pursuit of personal glory.  What I find bizarre is that people – normally Labour supporters – will say “He was a brilliant Chancellor…….”

  Let us consider that in the light of the recent strike at Grangemouth;  it transpires that at that port, all the oil and gas from the Forties Field came ashore.  This  was the equivalent of one third of the take from the North Sea;  it was stated that there would be a loss to the Exchequer of £25 million per day.  Now £25 million a day equates to over £9 billion a year – Yes - BILLION!  Multiply that by three, and we are looking at £27 billion of revenue from oil every year.(The Scottish Parliament annual budget is £30 billion).

  So over and above all the other taxation revenue, the United Kingdom has almost £30 billion a year buckshee – found money – which is there by luck, not skill or enterprise, but luck, and it has been flowing from the North Sea for over 30 years.

  I wait for someone to explain how this wonderful competent Chancellor has managed to get the UK into a cumulative deficit of £581 billion, remembering also that (unlike Norway)  no oil money has been salted away for a rainy day.

 

IS NO NEWS GOOD NEWS?

A recent report by the BBC Trust (is that an oxymoron?) has discovered that there is very little coverage by the BBC of events outside England, and contrary to their beliefs, Scotland is outside England.

We have been accustomed to this attitude for so long that we have become institutionalised in a broadcasting sense, and it does not infuriate us, as it should. Two things in this past week have focused my attention;  every week I play snooker with a group of friends, all fellow septuagenarians, and conversation in the car ranges over sport and sketchily over politics.  I say sketchily, as I am the only SNP member;  last week, one of them was bemoaning how house prices were falling with dire predictions of negative equity.  He was quite surprised when I pointed out that all of us, and most of our families, lived in Scotland, and that house prices in Scotland were actually rising.  I do not know which programmes he watched on TV, but he was convinced that things were bad on the property front, as they are in England.

Then on Sunday evening, my wife and I  were watching Scottish Television, the one where various people hold up an STV sign at the start of programmes, when along comes the News;  it was ITN, and as usual there was no Scottish news.  My wife said “There’s no Scottish news on Sundays”, and I agreed.  But there is – our broadcasters just do not cover it – and it is time we asserted ourselves.  Put it another way, the result of Hibs against Rangers was of greater interest North of the Border than Chelsea or whoever against whoever, but that is what we got.

                              

THE BIG ISSUE

I have to say that the Politics Show on BBC on Sundays is normally quite interesting, and this past week was quite stimulating;  we had First Minister Alex Salmond reacting to the English and Welsh election results, and the London Mayoral election, John MacCormick as an apologist for the Electoral Commission, and Wendy Alexander finding the wrong Road to Damascus.

Alex Salmond was very constructive; he talked of the strong possibility of a hung parliament after the next Westminster election, and his hopes of a strong SNP presence to extract the best deal for Scotland.  He was also sad about Ken Livingstone’s defeat, as he is an old friend, but stated he would be happy enough to work with Boris Johnston;  Alex used the phrase “happy to work with anyone who was democratically elected”.

I was surprised to see John MacCormick from the Electoral Commission;  he was supposed to chair a Fringe Meeting at the SNP Conference in Edinburgh last month, but was unable to be there. (It was rumoured that he was at the wedding of Jack MacConnell’s daughter that day, but that might have been a canard.)  He was quizzed as to why the Electoral Commission had not referred  the case of Wendy Alexander to the Procurator Fiscal;  he said that the chief punishment for an illegal donation was that it had to be returned, and it had been (after they were found out),  that Ms Alexander had taken all reasonable steps, and that there was no intention to deceive.  Quite how this judgment was arrived at when all of Ms Alexander’s donations were kept under the £1,000 limit to keep them from being declared is not clear.

Interviewer Glenn Campbell was fairly incisive, but he was not as incisive as Alex Neil MSP was at the SNP Fringe Meeting, which Mr MacCormick unfortunately missed.

Harking back to the SNP Conference, Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon made a comment that struck a chord with me, and with others;  she said “The SNP wants power for a purpose, compared to New Labour whose purpose was to get power.”  When Ms Alexander was on the BBC Politics Show she used her time to criticise the SNP, exclusively, without coming up with much constructive comment.  Glenn Campbell asked her if the subject of a Referendum on Independence had been discussed with her colleagues; she replied that there had been “tactical discussions”, to which Glenn Campbell said “Tactical discussions – this is our country’s future we are talking about!”

As the interview was drawing to a close Ms Alexander was asked what were the big issues she had to put before the electorate, “We have to reorganise the Labour Party in Scotland” she asserted!  Now what did Nicola Sturgeon say about purpose and power?

 

The Wrong Road to Damascus

If general observers of the Scottish political scene are mystified by the antics of Ms Alexander, the leader of the Labour MSPs, think how her own cohorts must be feeling?  She has been steadfast in her defence of the Union, even going so far as to get into bed with the Tories and the Liberals with a “Commission” to review the Scotland Act, which categorically excludes Independence, and now she pops up with a call for a Referendum on Independence!

Her colleagues – I hesitate to call them friends- are no doubt aghast at how quickly she has conceded the pass;   she was bitterly anti - Referendum, then comes the crushing defeats for Labour in the local government elections in England and Wales, and the loss of London to the Tories, and she is off on another road.  Her Unionist allies, Tory and Liberal, have had the Commissionary rug pulled from beneath their feet as well, without as much as a by your leave.  I am reminded of a comment I made at the time of Clause 2a, which prompted a Referendum sponsored by Brian Souter (Maybe that’s why she hates him);  I said then that Ms Alexander had been a management consultant, and having proved that she was unable to manage, she then proved that she was unable to consult either.  Plus ca change.

She has become the victim of the law of unintended consequences, because she has now conceded  a Referendum on Independence.   The timing of this is not the issue, except in her own eyes.  Having been implacably opposed to a Referendum, she has now accepted that there should be one, so now we have both Government and the main opposition party agreed on a Referendum;  of course, the devil is in the detail, and in the timing.  Ms Alexander has been shouting about the SNP’s manifesto commitments; the SNP had a manifesto commitment to hold the referendum in 2010, and sees no reason to alter the timetable.

So let’s be very clear, a favourite saying in politics these days – Wendy Alexander has been implacably opposed, as a matter of principle, to an Independence Referendum.  We understand that view, we understand principles;  what we fail to understand is why she has done a complete U turn and is now calling for an Independence Referendum now.  Could it be that matters of principle are always subject to Labour’s ambitions for itself, and thus do not count?

I have just watched Wendy Alexander on Newsnight Scotland, and I am not clear what she is proposing;  I understand very clearly that she wants to damage the SNP, and thinks that this is a jolly good wheeze.  Fiddling about with the future of your country for short term political gain is totally despicable.

 

FIRST MINISTER’S QUESTIONS

Last week I was in the Parliament for First Minister’s Questions, which I try to attend as often as possible;  one of our MSPs told me that Alex Salmond was ill, and that Nicola Sturgeon would be taking the Questions.  I said “Perhaps there will not be the same antagonism between Nicola and Wendy Alexander”, to which I got the response, with a raised eyebrow “You think so?”

In the event, as the world and his brother – and sister- now know, it was a decidedly one sided contest, and in the unkind words of Ian Bell, writing in the Herald, “Nicola wiped the floor with Wendy”.   There are a few thoughts flowing from this episode; in the first place Ms Alexander’s questions were batted aside because the SNP Government team had done their homework, so she was hit with facts.  Secondly, our Deputy far outclasses their head honcho, and thirdly if Alex Salmond falls under a bus then the succession is safe.  The SNP has quality.

 

 

Clamjamfray
 

 

Donnie MacNeill

 

Whose oil is it anyway?

 

Panic from pumps to parliament! What a stooshie over a pension scheme, or was that just an excuse for a trade union to try its luck and take advantage of a government that’s flapping about like a fish on a trawler’s deck?
 

The whole Grangemouth affair has highlighted our dependency on oil and raised, again, the question of ownership of the black gold. Certainly, Alex Salmond was calmness personified in the face of the approaching armageddon, invented it has to be said, in the news rooms of the Scottish media. His Westminster counterparts, no doubt mindful of the loss of tax revenue and the upcoming local elections in Englandshire, were flapping about like….well, you know!
 

The one person who got it right was Steve Camley in his cartoon in the Herald, with the Dear Leader sporting a lapel bearing the message, “It’s our oil crisis”. The only crisis we have is in the ticking of the clock towards the day when our North Sea reserves run out. Without independence, we will have had little or no benefit from all the years of its extraction, apart that is, from the financing of the destruction of our steel, coal mining, shipbuilding and fishing industries.

How much is a barrel of Brent crude worth? At current market prices, ten supplementary benefit payments and a post office closure!

 

 

Wonder Woman

 

And at this time of national uncertainty, what was the leader of her Britannic Majesty’s Labour Opposition in the Scottish parliament anxious to ask the First Minister at FMQ? Not what he was doing to help resolve the dispute; not what difference independence (sorry, ‘separatism’) would have made to the situation; not even if the Prime Minister had called or written! Oh no, Wendy was anxious to know if some people had more privileged access to his supreme being than others.
 

Well, no one has more direct access to the FM than she, and does she know how to misuse it?!
 

Wendy was supposed to be Labour’s Wonder Woman, and quite apt the title is too. Every week her colleagues wonder what kind of mess she will make of her questions in the chamber, whilst she must wonder how long it will be before Brutus Kerr and his cohorts start sharpening the knives. She must also be wondering just what she has to do to get one over on the First Minister!

It’s a wonder she can sleep at night!

 

Floating Bets

Along with seventy three other inveterate nationalists, your intrepid scribe was out on the drink the other week. Well, I hear you say, what’s so unusual about that in the SNP? The ‘drink’ in this case was the Forth Estuary and the occasion was the third Casino Cruise organised by the ubiquitous Gordon MacDonald the treasurer of the Livingston SNP CA. As always, Gordon had organised everything, including the weather, to perfection and a great night was had by all, including Ian Hudghton who had come down from Forfar allegedly for the sail, though I did notice that he was a dab hand on the tables. Obviously he has learned some useful things during his time as an MEP in Brussels! Seriously, he is tireless in his support for the party at all levels - and all over the country. In the spirit of impartiality, I should mention that the event also had the support of Alex Orr and Grant Thoms, who would both like to have the chance to go to Belgium and learn to play the tables as skilfully as Ian!

As the evening wore on, I got to reflecting, as the chips disappeared from the baize  in front of me faster than labour voters at the polls, that this was the way to enjoy politics and to raise funds, without recourse to the dubious services of Lord Levy and his affluent associates.

My dear chum and fellow clansman, Angus Brendan, the Barra sheep-tamer, would have been hard pushed, however, to get the Met interested in anything on board. Except, perhaps, the two West Lothian Councillors, later to star at the end of the Spring Conference, who appeared on the quayside with what looked suspiciously like big violin cases! One can only assume that they were to be used to carry home the remnants of an excellent buffet, or some of the multitude of raffle prizes on offer.

 

Fire Alert

 

We have had a little local difficulty in West Lothian with the downgrading of fire cover for the fastest growing area in the Lothians. For some reason, local campaigners, who are also SNP members, were not allowed to hand out leaflets at the Spring Conference. These were only to highlight the issue, which will eventually affect the whole of Scotland, and to encourage people to sign the e-petition going in front of the Scottish Parliament.  Do your patriotic duty and log onto http://epetitions.scottish.parliament.uk/view_petition.asp?PetitionID=224
 

And do it now, before you have to call out a fire tender that isn’t there!!