....OPINION......OPINION......OPINION......OPINION......OPINION......OPINION..

National news
Our drugs problem
Regeneration failure
Hamish Henderson
Expensive Labour councillors
Fairness and democracy in politics
al Magrahi - the facts
Why Scots don’t support England
The SNP and independence
Three Towns regeneration
The economic situation
What politicians really believe
The World Cup
The oppressed have become the oppressors
The Scheme
No openness and accountability in North Ayrshire
What the election result means
The Election
Events
Manipulating the election result
Creating divided communities
Good and bad councillors
Scotland deserves better
Judging the actions of MPs
The chance to have our say
Fears Council is being disingenuous
We need leaders who will put first the interests of Scots
Labour’s betrayal of the working class
That Sturgeon letter
Reasons for Council budget cuts
The people should have their say on defection
Vote for what we want
The law needs changed
Elections
Bias against the SNP
Where is the justice?

....OPINION......OPINION......OPINION......OPINION......OPINION......OPINION..

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the3towns.com September 4 2010

National news

I should declare my position before we go any further. I would rather watch paint dry than a cricket match.

Given the minority status of cricket in Scotland, I suspect many Scots share my view that the game is simply Morris Dancers playing Rounders. It is just so boring.

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the point of cricket is to throw a ball relatively close to someone holding a bat, but with the intention that the batter (should that be batsman, I’m not sure) doesn’t hit the ball and it bounces or trundles safely into the hands of a guy standing behind the batter/batsman. That, apparently, is success. If nothing happens, if no-one scores, if barely anyone has to move, then that is success in cricket.

Now, our English friends have a very different view on the game: to them it seems to be a matter of life or death. How else can we explain cricket being the lead item on the UK ‘national’ news?

It’s bad enough when the lead item about cricket relates to an actual game, but over the past week we’ve had to suffer the first ten minutes of thirty-minute news programmes taken up by allegations about a betting scandal involving three members of the Pakistan cricket team, which is apparently playing England at the moment.

The allegation, as far as I can see, involves bets having been placed that correctly predicted ‘no ball’ decisions. This, apparently, is an infringement involving the guy throwing the ball (is that a bowler - isn’t that a hat?) and relates to him stepping over a line while throwing. In other words, people are betting on nothing happening, but in this case nothing happening illegally - and that has been taking up the bulk of so-called ‘national’ news programmes broadcast into Scottish homes every night.

While the BBC and ITV have devoted so much airtime to the allegations levelled against three Pakistani cricketers, and have sought-out the opinions of Pakistani Government officials regarding the matter, the same country is desperately attempting to recover from recent devastating floods that have claimed around 2,000 lives. International aid agencies have described the floods as Pakistan’s worst-ever natural disaster, with more than eight million Pakistanis, around two-thirds of whom are children, now dependent on aid. Put that in context: it’s more than one-and-a-half times the population of Scotland, now living in tented villages, starving, fearful for their lives, totally dependent on any scraps the aid agencies can provide - and British broadcasters are leading news bulletins with allegations that three men have stepped over a line during a game, and that some people might have placed bets on that happening.

The BBC and ITV news departments in London should be ashamed of themselves. If allegations of betting and rigged cricket matches merit coverage at all, then they should have featured in the sports news. Cricket really isn’t that important. Placed alongside the devastating humanitarian disaster now unfolding in Pakistan, it is little short of obscene for British broadcasters to have sought-out Pakistani Government officials, only to then ask them for a comment about a game.

Of course, this cricket story is also just one more example of English issues dominating news programmes broadcast into Scotland.

Scots, by and large, do not follow cricket. Yet our so-called ‘national’ news leads with a story about the game, virtually every night for a week. The Scottish news is labelled ‘regional’, which tells us everything we need to know about the attitude of the BBC and ITV towards Scotland. They think our nation is simply a region.

In the past week, ‘national’ news bulletins from London have also referred to stories happening in the “North-East” and the “North-West”. Of course, the stories were actually taking place, not in Aberdeen or Ullapool, but in the Newcastle area and in Cumbria. For London-based broadcasters, the ‘nation’ in ‘nation-al’ means England.

It was not by accident that broadcasting was a power retained by the UK Westminster Parliament when devolution was introduced through the Scotland Act (1998). By keeping the power of broadcasting, and ensuring Scots continued to receive their ‘national’ news from London, British unionist politicians ensured the continuance of 300 years of indoctrination.

The UK ‘national’ news - stories about England and from an English perspective - ensure that Scots know England is more important than Scotland. To reinforce this idea, the real national news - about the nation of Scotland and from a Scottish perspective - comes after the English news and is branded as just ‘regional’.

Substitute European Union for British Union, and imagine the outcry in England if it was announced that news programmes would now be broadcast from Brussels, but that English news would still be covered in regional bulletins following the main news. Rightly, the people of England would not tolerate such a move, yet predominantly English politicians and broadcasters think such a situation is acceptable for Scotland.

Think I’m going too far with this? Perhaps, then, you weren’t already aware that British Government documents, released under Freedom of Information legislation, show that when a ‘Scottish Six’ news programme was touted in the late 1990s, then prime minister Tony Blair and the then Director-General of the BBC, John Birt, actively worked together to ensure it never happened. What possible motive could a British prime minister and a British broadcaster have in preventing Scotland from having a news programme that reported Scottish national news and international stories from a Scottish perspective?

Well, if the Scots had their own ‘national’ news and were able to interpret world events in terms of how they related to Scotland, ‘the Jocks’ might actually start to believe they were a real nation: and if that happened, who knows where it could end. They might even get the daft idea that they could govern themselves, and before long England could have to face the reality of living without the Westminster Exchequer’s two biggest contributors, revenue from North Sea oil and the Scotch Whisky industry.

As Aleksandr the Meerkat might say, “It’s simples. ‘Regional’ Scottish news, ‘National’ (English) news from London, and lead stories about cricket keep the Scots in their subordinate place within the British Union.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com August 28 2010

Our drugs problem

Anyone who thinks heroin addiction is the stuff of Irvine Welsh fiction or is only a problem in major cities, should take a walk along Dockhead Street in Saltcoats most mornings of the week.

The thin, hollow-cheeked men and women, with compulsory bull terrier, are not early morning window shoppers, they are attending local chemists to receive their prescribed methadone, a heroin substitute that is used to wean users from their drug of addiction.

Another tell-tale sign of the heroin problem in North Ayrshire is the number of people on a waiting list for detox treatment. Not everyone can afford to go private for the specialist help needed in kicking what is a terrible addiction, and the services offered by the public sector are struggling to cope with demand.

Heroin ruins lives. If it doesn’t kill you, it destroys you. In addition to the health and social problems caused by heroin use, much of the crime in North Ayrshire is drug-related. Users will do just about anything to get the money they need to fund their habit. Stealing cash from relatives and shoplifting can escalate to burglary and robbery, while some women find themselves drawn into prostitution.

We’ve all seen the television documentaries about drug addicts, shooting-up in dark alleys and squalid, derelict buildings. For most of us, those programmes are a world away from our normal, everyday lives - but the reality is different, and the problems come much closer to home.

Have you noticed local public toilets now have that blue-tinged lighting? It isn’t a fashion statement or an attempt to save money by using low-wattage bulbs. It’s ultra-violet light, which makes it more difficult for heroin users to find a vein.

How about the houses in local streets, where they seem to have a lot of visitors, many arriving and leaving by taxi. No, they aren’t a naturally-popular family with lots of friends who pop in for quick chats - they’re drug dealers, dispensing misery to local people at as little as £1-a-bag. Yes, just £1. Of course, once they’ve got you hooked, you then don’t qualify for the ultra-low, introductory offer.

It costs taxpayers millions-of-pounds every year to pay for the country’s drug problem. From health services, through social work to the criminal justice system, money that could be used to build a better society is spent attempting to keep a lid on what, to some, is big business and, to others, a progressive decline into poverty, pain and, very possibly, death.

Over 90-percent of the heroin sold on UK streets, including in the Three Towns, is cultivated from poppies grown by peasant farmers in Afghanistan. That fact gives a lie to the government propaganda that tells us we are winning the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Afghani poppy production continues to flourish despite the presence of British and US forces. The heroin routes from Afghanistan through Pakistan, Turkey, Bulgaria and into Western Europe remain firmly open. British taxpayers are funding a military occupation of a country, where many of the farmers eke-out an existence producing a crop that, ultimately, kills young men and women here in the UK.

It’s a sort of macabre double-whammy on the young of this country. Soldiers in their teens and early twenties are paying with their lives to occupy a country that doesn’t want them there, while many of their contemporaries back home pay the same price from an addiction to Afghanistan’s main export - and, in both situations, the British taxpayer is footing the bill to kill our young people.

Meanwhile, politicians in the so-called mainstream political parties continue to peddle a prohibitionist line. They argue that drugs are illegal and must remain so. Even though such a strategy is plainly failing, Tory, Labour, Liberal Democrat and SNP politicians will not countenance the obvious alternative: decriminalisation.

During my time as an MSP, the Scottish Socialist Party attempted to have a serious debate about the damage drugs are doing in Scotland. The party advocated legalising cannabis and decriminalising other currently illegal drugs. Unfortunately, the mainstream parties and the British media responded in predictable fashion. The politicians buried their heads in the sand, sticking to the prohibitionist line, while the media chose to portray the SSP as ‘friends of the dealers and junkies’. In fact, the SSP’s decriminalisation policy would lead to fewer addicts, less crime and a massive reduction in public spending.

Decriminalisation would not mean drug dealers go un-prosecuted, far from it. The traffickers and dealers would still face the full force of the law, but the users, the people exploited by the gangsters and money-men, would be treated as victims and offered help instead of a jail term.

However, one of the main corollaries of decriminalising drugs such as heroin, is that the incentive for dealing - massive financial profits - would be removed. If gangsters can no longer make money from trafficking and supplying drugs, they simply won’t do it.

Also, in a post-decriminalisation world, state chemists could regulate for strength and purity the heroin supplied to registered addicts. A recent project in Amsterdam, which saw addicts prescribed either heroin on its own or a mixture of the drug and methadone, recorded a significant rise in quality of life for those on the programme, and average net-savings amounting to 12,793 euros (around £8,600) per patient, per year. The financial savings were reached by factoring-in lower policing costs and the reduced incidence of crime against property resulting from addicts not breaking the law to fund their habit.

Last week saw a prominent convert to the cause of decriminalisation, with Sir Ian Gilmore, outgoing president of the Royal College of Physicians, saying “decriminalising drug use could drastically reduce crime and improve health.” Sir Ian said the problems caused by dirty needles and contaminated drugs were not a product of the drugs themselves but of prohibition. Professor Gilmore further stated that he believed drugs should still be regulated, but the laws on misuse should be reviewed.

We simply can’t afford to continue down the head-in-the-sand, prohibitionist route that has cost so much in terms of human life, social welfare and public finance. If we are to tackle the evil that is drug abuse and addiction, we need to remove the profit motive, regulate supply and ensure adequate detox facilities are available. That will only happen when we decriminalise the drugs that currently blight our society.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com August 21 2010

Regeneration failure

Since 2006 the Irvine Bay Regeneration Company has been telling local people that it’s doing a fabulous job and, almost before our very eyes, Ardrossan, Saltcoats, Stevenston, Kilwinning and Irvine will be transformed into wonderful places to live and work. Some of us didn’t believe the propaganda.

Now, thanks to information secured under Freedom of Information legislation - reported in this week’s News Section - we see the reality of Irvine Bay’s efforts. For an outlay of £17.4 million of public money, the regeneration company has provided new infrastructure that has created just 46 jobs.

Meanwhile, Irvine Bay has been spending our money to snap-up what it describes as derelict buildings and sites which, it claims, will be brought back to life and will result in the regeneration of local town centres. The reality, however, is a bit different.

Last week the3towns.com reported how the exterior of the former Lyric Bingo in Ardrossan’s Princes Street is in a very poor condition, despite the fact it is less than a year since the completion of a refurbishment project that cost £350,000. Irvine Bay Regeneration Company funded the project. Or, at least, that is what the company would have us believe. In the regular, full-colour brochures issued by Irvine Bay, which are delivered to every home in the area, we are frequently told how they are spending money on different projects, and all to our benefit. What they don’t make clear, is that the money they are spending is ours. The Irvine Bay Regeneration Company is funded by grants from the Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise (Ayrshire) and North Ayrshire Council, all bodies that are, themselves, wholly-funded by taxpayers. Therefore, the money Irvine Bay has been spending, and which it seems to think we should be so grateful about, is taxpayers’ money. We pay for Irvine Bay, but we don’t have much say over what they do with our money.

The regeneration company, which is chaired by Labour peer Baroness Ford, is close to completing the renovation of what it describes as two ‘iconic buildings’ in Ardrossan and Saltcoats, the former Station Master’s house at Saltcoats Railway Station and the old Clyde Estuary Hotel in Princes Street, Ardrossan. Now, no-one can take anything away from the company in terms of the new buildings being a vast improvement on what was there before - but, surely regeneration should be more than doing-up old buildings?

For example, Irvine Bay Regeneration Company paid £543,000 for the former Grange Bingo in Stevenston’s Bogglemart Street. Just a few months before, the then owners had been granted planning permission to demolish the bingo and build 22 new flats. Then the economic recession kicked-in. Banks stopped lending to developers and prospective house buyers couldn’t get a mortgage for love nor money. The result was the construction industry all-but ground to a halt.

With little prospect of the 22-flat development going ahead in the current economic climate, and with a huge white elephant of a former bingo on their hands, how pleased do you think were the owners of the Grange to see the Irvine Bay Regeneration Company walk in waving a cheque for over half-a-million pounds?

Irvine Bay then demolished the old bingo and embarked on the construction of a business centre which, it claimed, would bring new jobs to Stevenston. So, in the end, it’s good news, then? Well, not quite.

Irvine Bay almost certainly paid well over the odds for the former bingo site and, in the company’s Annual Report, it states the new business centre on the site of the former Grange Bingo in Stevenston is ultimately expected to create the full-time equivalent of 29 new jobs. Not including the demolition and construction costs, which are considerable, that works out at almost £19,000 per job. Not exactly value for money. Our money, don’t forget.

The same Annual Report also uses a phrase that confirms the suspicions of many who questioned the value of Irvine Bay’s grand plan for local towns. Regular readers of the3towns.com will previously have read of my own belief that the plan was almost a direct lift from the ‘Lowell Project’ in the USA. Lowell was a mill-town, located around 30 miles outside the city of Boston, Massachusetts. When the town was devastated by wholesale job losses in the American textile industry, planners decided not even to attempt replacing the jobs in Lowell. Instead, the plan to regenerate the town centred on making Lowell an attractive place to live and improving transport links with Boston. The theory was that people who worked in Boston could live in the country and commute to their jobs in the city. Lowell was to become a dormitory town for Boston.

Sound familiar? In the Irvine Bay Regeneration Company’s Annual Report we find references to the “Glasgow city-region” and how people can live by the sea in ‘Irvine Bay’ and commute to their jobs in Glasgow.

Don’t forget, the Irvine Bay Regeneration Company has, so far, received around £17.4 million of public money, supposedly to regenerate Irvine, Kilwinning and the Three Towns, but their idea of ‘regeneration’ appears to be centred on actually improving the lives of people who work in Glasgow, by allowing them to buy property in seaside locations.

The house-building with which Irvine Bay has been associated, in terms of securing land to allow development, is exclusively within the private sector and retails at prices far beyond the financial reach of the average Three Towns’ household. Combine that with the distinctly poor performance in terms of job creation within the local area, and the Irvine Bay Regeneration Company looks like exceptionally poor value for money.

Renovating a few run-down buildings does not constitute regenerating the Three Towns. Regeneration is attracting to the area sustainable, well-paid jobs, which would see a substantial increase in funding feed into the local economy as disposable incomes rose, with shops, bars and restaurants sharing the benefit and employing more people too. Then there is the added bonus of the rise in self-esteem felt by people who, once again, know the dignity of work and of being able to provide for their families. In turn, that increased feeling of personal well-being leads to a greater feeling of community and to more people prepared to look after their home, their garden, their street, and their town.

Investing in people, creating long-term, well-paid work is what will regenerate local towns. Meanwhile, it is perhaps time for an independent enquiry into what the Irvine Bay Regeneration Company has been doing with our money, and the outcomes it has produced.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com August 14 2010

Hamish Henderson

Last Wednesday evening (August 11), I had the honour of delivering the third Annual Hamish Henderson Lecture at the Edinburgh People’s Festival.

I think Edinburgh is great at any time, but during festival season it takes on a whole new life, becoming one of the busiest and most cosmopolitan cities in the world. However, the difference between the People’s Festival and the International Festival (and it’s hugely popular Fringe), is that People’s Festival events are free or at a nominal cost, so the ordinary residents of Edinburgh can attend, and as often as they like.

The People’s Festival was first established in 1951 - one of the original founders was Hamish Henderson (more about the man later) - but it only ran for four years. It was revived in the late 1990s and has grown every year since. In addition to the Hamish Henderson Lecture, other People’s Festival events this year include: the premiere of ‘Morticia’, a movie by Edinburgh director Nabil Shaban, which was shot in locations throughout the city and stars local actors; a tour of ‘Edinburgh's Radical Past’, conducted by historian Allan Armstrong, and which takes-in the locations of the city’s lesser-known revolutionary, radical past; “Rebus’s Edinburgh”, an award-winning tour, conducted by Colin Brown, which visits the Edinburgh landmarks made famous in Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels; ‘The Bad and the Beautiful’, an exhibition by Edinburgh photographer Paul Jordan; ‘Afghanistan Aid’, a concert calling for British troops to be brought home and in aid of the democratic, secular and progressive forces in Afghanistan; ‘Comedy on Friday the 13th’, with five headline comedy acts courtesy of The Stand Comedy Club; ‘Theatre from SpartaKi’, four pieces of drama from Dalkeith playwright Cecilia Grainger. All of this is provided by the people of Edinburgh, for the people of Edinburgh, and the most expensive ticket for any event costs just £4.00.

I’m delighted to say the Hamish Henderson Lecture was a huge success, particularly as, this year, it departed from the format of the two previous lectures, which had been given by Hamish Henderson’s biographer, Timothy Neat, and his former colleague at Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, Professor Fred Forrester. Both men were friends of Hamish Henderson and spoke about the man: this year, my remit was to refer to the issues Henderson cared about and for which he fought during his life - he died in 2002 - and how those issues remain relevant today.

If you have never before heard of Hamish Henderson, don’t be surprised. He was a socialist who believed in an independent, Scottish republic and, as such, did not get much coverage in the pro-monarchy, capitalist-owned British media.

Hamish Henderson was born in Blairgowrie on November 11, 1919. He was born illegitimate and, as a young boy, moved with his single mother to England, where she had found work.

Henderson won a scholarship to the Dulwich School in London, but his mother died and he was placed in an orphanage. Despite these difficulties, Hamish Henderson was a bright student and was eventually accepted into Cambridge University. He excelled at languages and prior to the outbreak of World War II, he went to Germany where he helped smuggle Jewish people out of the country.

When the war started, Henderson enlisted in the Pioneer Corp, but his talent for languages was quickly recognised and he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corp.

Hamish Henderson served in North Africa and subsequently, with the 51st Highland Division, fought the length of Italy. It was, in fact, Hamish Henderson who accepted the surrender of Italian forces from Marshal Graziani. No-one knows how it happened, possibly the confusion of war, but the actual Italian Surrender document remained in Henderson’s possession, and he would often show it to people in his local pub in Edinburgh.

After the war, Hamish Henderson embarked on a tour of Scotland, meeting residents of communities in every part of the country, and many travelling people. He recorded their stories, songs and poetry, in their own dialects, and was later to provide this work to the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University, where he worked for many years.

Hamish Henderson was a writer and a poet. His war poems, ‘Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica’ told the stories of ordinary soldiers and reflected on the waste of so many young lives. However, as his war record showed, he was not a pacifist, recognising that when evil emerged, such as Fascism, it had to be fought.

In 1951, Hamish Henderson helped found the original Edinburgh People’s Festival, as a counter-point to the culturally-elitist, and distinctly un-Scottish, Edinburgh International Festival.

In 1955, he was a co-founder of the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University, and in the late fifties and early sixties, he was a prominent figure in the re-establishment of a Scottish folk scene.

However, the folk scene created by Henderson and others also re-awakened a feeling of Scottish national identity, which, in turn, led to the establishment of a re-invigorated national political movement.

The politically seismic event of 1967 - the SNP’s sensational by-election victory in Hamilton - would not have happened without the foundations laid some years earlier by Hamish Henderson and others in their determination to re-establish a feeling of Scottish identity and culture. It was also the internationalist outlook of people like Henderson that ensured Scottish Nationalism did not replicate the narrow-minded, inward-looking and scapegoating mentality of other Nationalist movements.

Hamish Henderson was also a committed opponent of British imperialism, of racism and of nuclear weapons. However, despite his positions on such matters being known, he was approached by the British Government in 1983 and advised that Her Majesty the Queen was minded to award him an OBE in recognition of his services to Scottish culture. As a life-long socialist - a real socialist, not the pretend type you find in the Labour Party - Henderson declined the ‘honour’.

In any country other than the politically and culturally subordinated Scotland, a man of Hamish Henderson’s talents and commitment would be looked on as an icon. He was a poet, a songwriter, a soldier, an academic and an intellectual. He was possibly the most important Scots poet since Robert Burns, and it was great to see so many people turn out last week in Edinburgh to hear about the beliefs of the man and how he had fought for the creation of a Scottish, socialist republic.

As the person delivering that lecture, my simple hope was that I could do him justice. As I made my way from the hall after delivering the lecture, one older woman stood apart from other members of the audience. As I approached where she stood, she held out her hand, which I shook. She said, “Thank you very much. That was a wonderful tribute to Hamish.”

I thanked her for coming and for her compliment. She then said, “I’m Hamish’s widow.”

Both I and Colin Fox, chairman of the Edinburgh People’s Festival and organiser of the Hamish Henderson Memorial Lecture, were taken aback that the man’s widow, now a very elderly lady, had made the effort to come along and had sat quietly at the back, not making a fuss and only revealing her identity when the room was almost empty.

The story of Hamish Henderson - and the quiet dignity of his widow - reflects a decency in Scots that it’s easy to overlook amongst the modern cut-throat, me-me-me society.

There were, and there remain, decent people in Scotland who are prepared to fight for a country that puts people before profit, and who want for this nation the normal status of independence, with the full powers to build a better life for all Scots.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com August 7 2010

Expensive Labour councillors

 Most people who choose to become involved in politics do so through a desire to help change society for the better, and not because they see it as a way of advancing themselves or improving their own earning potential.

Now, that last statement may take a bit of believing, particularly given the Westminster Allowances scandal, the fondness of Kenneth Gibson MSP for claiming public money, and the3towns.com’s recent stories about mileage claims submitted by some of North Ayrshire’s Labour councillors. However, it does remain true.

The majority of councillors, MSPs, MPs and MEPs began their political involvement as rank-and-file activists, pounding the streets delivering leaflets, canvassing support at election time and doing the routine, mundane things that are necessary components of all campaigns. Most did not join their respective parties with a view to securing for themselves a political career.

However, having said that, there are a few exceptions. The previously-mentioned Kenneth Gibson MSP has a track record that shows he is not shy when it comes to filling his pockets with public money. Another former representative of Cunninghame North , Brian Wilson, ex-MP for the constituency, jumped ship from the SNP to Labour, partly because, at the time, if someone wanted a political career in Scotland, Labour was the only party almost guaranteed to provide it.

Then there are those North Ayrshire Labour councillors. At the last Council Election, in 2007, a fair voting system was used for the first time. The Single Transferable Vote (STV) method of Proportional Representation meant that some of the Labour deadwood was cut. In the Three Towns, electors decided they could easily do without the continued presence of two Labour members, Sam Taylor and Margaret Munn. Unfortunately, though, sufficient votes were received for three others, which meant that Peter McNamara, Alan Munro and David Munn were returned to serve another term as councillors.

One would have thought the three men might have looked at the fate of their former colleagues and resolved to do a better job for local people than had previously been the case. However, it appears arrogance has won over responsibility.

Mr McNamara continues to be the Three Towns’ most expensive councillor, pocketing a total of £23,241 last year (2008/2009), rising to £24,201 this year. As the the3towns.com has previously reported, Cllr McNamara’s mileage claims for the last financial year (2009/2010) include 77 trips with no reason or explanation provided. It is a requirement that councillors provide a detailed description of the approved duty to which each journey relates, but Cllr McNamara simply wrote ‘Cunninghame House’. So, the reality is, we don’t know what Peter McNamara was doing on those 77 separate occasions he claimed public money. We just know that he cited visits to Council headquarters and pocketed a total of £596.15.

His colleague, Alan Munro, also appears to believe the public of North Ayrshire do not merit an explanation of why we forked-out £441.01 for his travel. On 79 separate occasions Cllr Munro listed ‘Members Services’ as the supposedly detailed description of approved duties. ‘Members Services’ is another version of Cllr McNamara’s ’Cunninghame House’. It does not tell us what Alan Munro was doing that required him to make those 79 journeys. However, what we do know, is that without any explanation, the two Labour councillors charged us £1,037.16.

Then there is David Munn. Claiming mainly for ‘double journeys’ - where he was driven to Council headquarters in Irvine, then the driver returned to Saltcoats, went back to Irvine to pick him up, and then back to Saltcoats again - Cllr Munn socked the North Ayrshire public for a total of £1,006.27 in mileage claims between March 2009 and February 2010.

When the full mileage claims of Cllr McNamara and Cllr Munro are calculated - that is, not just the journeys for which they provided no explanation - McNamara pocketed £1,798.15 and Munro £747.98. Added to Cllr Munn’s claims, the three Labour councillors cost us a total of £3,552.40...just for their travel costs.

When we put together the salaries and all expenses paid to McNamara, Munro and Munn in the financial year 2009/2010, the three Labour councillors cost local taxpayers a staggering £60,299.36.

As readers of the3towns.com have suggested over recent weeks, there should be an investigation into why councillors were paid hundreds-of-pounds without providing an explanation of why they required to make journeys. Ultimately, however, it is for us, the electors of North Ayrshire, to decide whether or not high-charging Labour councillors are value for money.

Unfortunately, it will be May 2012 before we next get that opportunity.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com July 31 2010

Fairness and democracy in politics

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government intends to carry out a referendum on changing the voting system used for Westminster Elections.

Now, normally I would support such a move. After all, First Past The Post (FPTP) , the system by which we currently elect UK MPs, is the most undemocratic of all the options and should have been scrapped a long time ago. However, there are two reasons why I don’t support the British government’s proposals.

Firstly, the referendum will offer only one alternative to FPTP, the Alternative Vote (AV) system. Proportional Representation is a voting method that allows Members of Parliament or councillors to be elected based on the votes cast by the people, so it is fair and democratic. The Alternative Vote system, while better than FPTP, is not Proportional Representation.

In fact, the only benefit of AV is that, eventually, by re-allocating votes through second, third and maybe even fourth preferences, the person elected will be able to claim the support of a majority of people who voted. Presently, it is usual for a Member of the Westminster Parliament to be elected on a minority of votes cast.

For example, in the local constituency of North Ayrshire & Arran at the recent UK General Election, Labour’s Katy Clark was returned to parliament on just 47.4-percent of the vote. Therefore, a majority of people who chose to vote, did not want Katy Clark to be their MP. However, the non-Labour vote was widely split, with the SNP some distance behind in second-place, on 25.9-percent.

Had AV been in place last May, the second-preferences of the bottom candidate - in this case Socialist Labour’s Louise McDaid - would have been redistributed and, if enough put Labour in second-place, then Katy Clark would have crossed the 50-percent threshold and would have been able to claim election on the basis of a majority of votes cast. That is the only change AV would bring. Because the system is not proportional, the majority of first-preference votes would still be ignored.

The best method of election is the Single Transferable Vote (STV), which is a system of Proportional Representation and which, therefore, sees candidates elected on the basis of actual votes received from the people.

Again, locally, we have evidence of how well STV works. In May 2007, for the first time, elections to North Ayrshire Council were carried out using the Single Transferable Vote. The result saw Labour lose its previous overwhelming majority - a majority their actual vote under FPTP had not merited - the SNP saw their number of councillors considerably rise, the Tories got what their vote deserved, the Liberal Democrats had councillors elected for the first time, and Independents secured victory where local people gave them their support. Overall, the composition of North Ayrshire Council now reflects the actual votes cast by local people. That is fair and it is democratic.

STV requires larger Wards or constituencies, but the end result means voters get what they want in terms of elected members. Presently, in the Three Towns, we have three Labour councillors, three Independents and two SNP. That reflects how we voted in May 2007. However, at Westminster level we have only one Labour MP. If they have a problem requiring the intervention of a UK parliamentarian, local people who voted for parties other than Labour - that is, the majority - either have to approach someone for whom they did not vote, or go without help. That is unfair and undemocratic.

The Scottish Parliament is elected by a hybrid electoral system, with First Past The Post used to elect constituency members and the Additional Member (AM) method for electing regional MSPs.

We have FPTP for Westminster and Scottish Parliament constituencies, STV for councils and AM for regional MSPs, with the UK Government floating a referendum on AV for UK Elections. Confused?

All of which brings us to the second reason I oppose the Conservative-Liberal Democrat referendum idea. They want to hold it on the same day as the next Scottish Parliament Election, May 5 2011.

If the Con-Dem coalition goes ahead with its proposal, we would be handed three ballot papers as we walk into Polling Stations. On one we would mark ‘X’ next to our preferred candidate for constituency MSP; the second would require us to rank our choice of political parties or Independent candidates for Scottish Parliament regional members by entering 1, 2, 3 and so in the boxes on the paper; then we would be asked to state ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ in relation to a voting system to be used at a completely different election.

Anyone who witnessed the confusion and numbers of spoilt ballot papers when two separate elections - the Scottish Parliament and North Ayrshire Council - were held on the same day in May 2007, knows that what is currently proposed by the UK Government is a recipe for disaster.

We also have to consider how a UK-wide referendum would impact on media coverage of the Scottish Parliament Election. Holyrood is our national legislature, and it is absolutely essential that we focus on issues for which it has responsibility, not to mention the manifestos of those parties and individuals contesting the election. However, such crucial matters would be subsumed by British (English) television news bulletins and current affairs programmes covering the referendum on an electoral system for UK parliamentary elections. The fact Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are even considering holding their referendum on the day of the Scottish Election, shows great arrogance on their part, and contempt for the Scottish people and our national parliament.

For fairness and democracy to be served, each election - UK, Scottish and Council - should be held on separate days, in separate years, with no added referendums to confuse issues. It would also be much simpler if we had the same electoral system for all elections. The Single Transferable Vote is the fairest method and produces results that most closely reflect the actual votes cast by the people.

All we need now are politicians prepared to stand-up for fairness and democracy.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com July 24 2010

al Megrahi - the facts

 I am on record as supporting the decision of Scotland’s Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, in releasing from prison Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the man convicted of killing 270 people by bombing Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988.

The decision was correct. It was contentious - after all, no-one was challenging the guilty verdict passed on al Megrahi at a special Scottish court sitting in the neutral country of the Netherlands - but, nevertheless, it was correct. More about that guilty verdict later.

Of course, there were, and there remain, many people who believe that al Megrahi, as a mass murderer, should have been left to die in jail: the fact he has terminal cancer cut no ice.

Now, almost a year since al Megrahi was driven out of Greenock Prison and to a waiting plane at Glasgow Airport, which flew him home to Libya, many of the same people who objected to his release are up-in-arms that he hasn’t yet had the decency to die.

The Scottish doctors treating al Megrahi while he was a prisoner in Scotland gave him around three months to live. That was their professional, medical opinion, and it was on that basis Kenny MacAskill exercised the power to release a dying prisoner on compassionate grounds, to allow them to spend the last days of their lives amongst their friends and family.

Clearly, the people who objected to al Megrahi’s release were right when they said that he, as the bomber of Flight 103, had shown no such compassion for the 270 people he killed. However, Kenny MacAskill was also right when he countered that Scotland is a civilised, compassionate country, where justice is balanced with mercy.

For those whose relatives died as a result of the bombing of Flight 103, either on the plane or in the town of Lockerbie, where much of the wreckage fell, the personal tragedy is still very raw. Many have voiced the opinion that al Megrahi should have died in a prison cell, but others have expressed support for the compassion shown by the Scottish Government. Since that dark night in December 1988, the relatives have carried themselves with great dignity. However, 22 years later, the memory of their loved ones is being tarnished by politicians playing to the public gallery while, behind the scenes, doing sordid deals for financial gain - not to mention carrying out foreign policy decisions that result in revenge attacks, such as the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

They had no bearing on Kenny MacAskill’s decision, but there are very strong doubts over the guilt of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi. The ‘evidence’ I have read in relation to who actually bombed Flight 103 points the finger, not at Libya and al Megrahi, but at Syria and Iran. In particular, a man named Ahmed Jibril, who was, in 1988, leader of a Damascus-based organisation called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC).

Evidence that was not allowed to be presented at the Netherlands trial of al Magrahi (and Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima, who was found not guilty) indicated the bombing was funded by Iran in retaliation for the American warship USS Vincennes blowing an Iranian passenger jet, an Airbus A300B2, out of the sky over the Persian Gulf in July 1988, killing 290 passengers and crew. At the time, America stated the action had been a mistake.

The PFLP-GC and Ahmed Jibril were, essentially, hired guns. They were paid by Iran to avenge the killing by America of innocent Iranian civilians. The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 was the result.

It was convenient for the west to divert attention away from Iran - otherwise America would have to accept its responsibility for the initial action in shooting-down the Iranian passenger jet - and, instead, blame the then pariah state of Libya and its ‘mad’ leader General Muammar Gadhafi.

Other documents I have personally seen show that a crucial element of the prosecution case in the trial of al Magrahi - a small piece of electronic circuit-board, claimed to have come from the bomb that downed Flight 103 - was flown from Scotland to the United States, where it was ‘examined’ at an FBI laboratory in Washington. However, official Scottish police and court records state that the circuit-board was never ‘signed-out’ of their control and did not, at any time, leave Scotland. FBI Special Agent Richard Marquise later said that without the piece of circuit-board, “It would be a very difficult case to prove ... I don't think we would ever have had an indictment.”

So, the reality is that very strong doubts exist over the guilt of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, but none of these were factors in his release from a Scottish prison. That decision was taken solely on the basis of his terminal medical condition and the power invested in Scottish ministers to show compassion in such cases.

It is nothing short of a disgrace, therefore, to have American Government officials condemn Kenny MacAskill for his action, when they know the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 was actually a reprisal attack for their own killing of 290 innocent Iranians; when they know that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi is almost certainly innocent; and when they know, too, that the vital piece of evidence that convicted him - the circuit-board - spent time secretly at an FBI laboratory before being presented to the Scottish court in the Netherlands.

An equal disgrace is the British prime minister, David Cameron, toadying to the Americans by also condemning the decision of the Scottish Government. In 2008, the previous New Labour Government signed a Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) with Libya. It is widely acknowledged that this agreement was put in place in order to allow Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi to be sent back to Libya. In return, Colonel Gadhafi would open-up Libyan oil fields to British companies, potentially bringing multi-million pound contracts to UK businesses. The PTA was supported in the UK Parliament by the Conservative Party, including David Cameron. Therefore, our current prime minister appears to be happy for a convicted mass murderer to be sent home, as long as there is financial gain for UK companies, but baulks at a dying man being released on compassionate grounds.

Amid the bluster and grand-standing from American and British politicians, the facts continue to shine through: Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky in a reprisal attack for the killing by America of 290 Iranian civilians; crucial evidence against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi was secretly transported to an FBI lab, where it was ‘examined’ before being presented at his trial; the real bombers of Flight 103 were a Syria-based terror group, funded by Iran; and, above all, Kenny MacAskill and the SNP Scottish Government were right to show compassion to a dying man.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com July 17 2010

Why Scots don't support England

Ask any Scottish schoolchild when was the Battle of Bannockburn, and they probably won’t know. However, ask them when the Battle of Hastings took place, and chances are they will correctly answer 1066. For the record, Bannockburn was 1314.

This situation illustrates the extent to which Scots have been subjugated and indoctrinated within the British Union. English historical events are known, but the story of our own nation is patchy, to say the least.

Let’s try another question: how many people sit on a jury hearing a court case? Of course, that’s an easy one - ‘twelve good men and true’ - so twelve people form a jury. Actually, in Scotland a jury consists of fifteen people. Twelve is the correct answer for England.

Another? What is the difference between libel and slander? Well, to defame someone in spoken terms is to slander them, while libel is the same offence but in writing. Again, though, both terms are English. In Scots law, whether spoken or written, there is only one offence, that of ‘defamation’.

One more: how do you go about changing your name? Again, that’s an easy one, isn’t it? Everyone has heard of ‘Deed Poll’. If you want to change your name, you do so by ‘Deed Poll’. English, again. In Scotland, if you want to change your name, you simply do it and notify anyone who should know, such as your bank, employer and so on. As long as the change is not made for fraudulent purposes, it is perfectly legal.

The indoctrination of Scots has been so successful that many, possibly even most of us believe English history and legal matters also pertain to Scotland.

The union of Scotland and England in 1707 (through the joining together of the countries parliaments) was supposed to be a union of equals, but it never turned out that way. At the time the aristocratic members of the Scots Parliament were signing the Treaty of Union in Edinburgh, the ordinary men and women of Scotland were rioting on the streets in opposition. Robert Burns so aptly described the treachery of the Scots ‘noblemen’ when he wrote that they had been, “bought and sold for English gold, such a parcel of rogues in a nation”.

It is a little-known fact that the Treaty of Union was not actually signed in the Scots Parliament. The rioting in Edinburgh against union with England was so severe that the unelected MPs could not reach the parliament building. The Treaty, therefore, was actually signed in a wash-house at the rear of a tenement building on the Royal Mile.

Now, the reason for bringing-up some of the differences between Scotland and England, and the extent of our indoctrination, is a conversation I recently had with a friend. It revolved around a match in the World Cup - Germany V England - and how I came to be supporting Germany, while she wanted England to win.

The woman in question is Scottish, and she posed the question to me, “Why are you not supporting England?” She reasoned, “They’re our neighbours, we all live on this wee island, and we’re all British.”

Given that we are friends, and have been for almost 30 years, she knew very well that I did not consider myself to be British, but she did genuinely have a problem with Scots wanting Germany to beat England.

So, let me explain why I did not support ‘our neighbours on this wee island’.

Firstly, there is the contemporary issue, that of Scotland receiving television broadcasts meant for people in another country, England. Not only do we have commentators and pundits describing everything through an English prism - which completely ignores the fact we are Scottish - we also have adverts telling us how great England is and how we ‘must’ get behind ‘our (English) boys’. How do you think the people of England would react if their television coverage of the World Cup was provided by their near neighbours across that small strip of water called the Channel? How would the English take to their television coverage, night-after-night, looking at the World Cup from a French perspective, with adverts urging everyone to get behind ‘our (French) boys’? It wouldn’t happen. The English wouldn’t accept it, but for the second-class citizens of Scotland, it’s deemed to be ‘good enough’.

Secondly, there is the historical and political perspective. Let’s take the ‘British’ thing first: we live on an island called Great Britain (originally Greater Britain), so, in a geographic context, we occupy part of Britain. However, Britain is not, never has been, and never will be a nation. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not a nation, it is a union of nations. For someone to say their nationality is British, is the same as saying their nationality is European, simply because we also live in Europe and are members of the European Union.

The Treaty of Union in 1707 merged two parliaments, it did not merge two countries. A British parliament was formed to replace the parliaments of England and Scotland - although, in actuality, the English body continued as before with the addition of a few Scots. However, even after this union, the two countries of England and Scotland continued as separate entities. There has never been a ‘nation’ of Britain. In Scotland we remain Scots, just as in England they remain English - those are our respective nationalities.

So, we may all live on a bit of ground that forms part of the British Isles, but our nationality is not ‘British’.

To understand why my friend was alone amongst a pub-full of Scots watching the Germany V England game, we also need to look at the post-union relationship between Scotland and England.

Since 1707 England has dominated Scotland. The idea of a partnership between two equals was not one ever bought into by the English. Throughout the building of the British (in reality English) Empire, Scots were used as cannon-fodder and to run imperial administrations on behalf of the English Government in London.

In more recent times, Scotland has been stripped of its natural resources - much as England’s other colonies were in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Revenue from North Sea oil has flown directly into the coffers of the Westminster Exchequer, while 1-in-4 Scots pensioners continue to live below the poverty line. Meanwhile, Norway, which discovered North Sea oil at the same time as Scotland, now has one of the highest standards of living in the world, with no recession and a fund to benefit future generations of Norwegians standing at around £200 billion.

England, our neighbour and partner in union, has used Scotland and the Scots. Our relationship has been one of servant and master. Within the British Union, Scotland has had 300 years of being told we are too wee, too poor and too stupid to govern ourselves. We have been told, and continue to be told, that we are dependent on Mother England. It is a marriage where the dominant partner has systematically abused the other.

After 300 years of being put-down, used and abused - not to mention television indoctrinating us into the English way - it is perfectly logical that Scots, apart from my friend, wanted Germany to beat England.

It is like the playground bully finally getting their comeuppance. It is perfect if retribution is meted out personally, but in some cases it is almost as good to enjoy the pleasure vicariously. Thank you, Germany.

Finally, as any marriage-guidance counsellor will tell you, it is much better for partners to separate and live independently than for one to endure a relationship where they are abused. Who knows, after independence, when England no longer dominates Scotland, perhaps we really will see the day when a pub-full of Scots can back our neighbours in a football match.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com July 10 2010

The SNP and independence

Hold the front page! Shock revelation - SNP leader says independence is “not the centre of gravity in Scotland”.

That story about comments made by Alex Salmond appeared recently in a number of national newspapers, and was portrayed as revealing a massive split in the SNP and an admission that the party’s reason for existing no longer formed the core of its beliefs.

Actually, this has been the SNP position since around 2000, when John Swinney beat Alex Neil to succeed Alex Salmond as party leader. There has always been a divide within the membership of the SNP - every political party has its arguments and divisions - and in the ranks of the Nationalists, the most common, and most important argument is over the way to achieve independence.

There may well be some SNP members who don’t want independence for Scotland - in the past, a few opinion polls have put the figure as high as 3-percent - but, quite frankly, they are in the wrong party. The Scottish National Party believes the nation of Scotland will not achieve its full potential until we retake all the powers that only come with independence. That’s a fact, but here is the problem - some SNP members currently holding senior and influential positions within the party are prepared to wait an awful long time to secure national sovereignty. They are the ‘gradualists’, and the party’s talk of ‘fiscal autonomy’ or, more recently, ‘fiscal responsibility’ for the Scottish Parliament is their attempt to incrementally build the powers of the devolved legislature in Edinburgh, almost without the population of Scotland noticing that we, as a nation, have begun slowly edging towards independence.

The SNP’s gradualists think independence is the right constitutional settlement for Scotland. They just don’t believe they can persuade the people of Scotland to vote for it, so they look to play a long, slow game where, bit-by-bit, additional powers are ceded from Westminster to Holyrood until one day, many years from now, they can turn to the electorate and say, “You know, we’re almost independent. There aren’t that many powers left at Westminster. We might as well just do it, eh? What do you think?”

The problem with that strategy is two-fold: firstly, we have had the devolved Scottish Parliament for 11 years now and not one substantial additional power has come our way from London. On that basis, how long is it likely to be before we ‘gradually’ got to the stage where sufficient powers had been ceded to make independence the next step? Secondly, if ‘the party of independence’ is conceding that its core belief is “not the centre of gravity” in Scotland, and appears no longer to be actually campaigning to achieve independence - instead advocating whatever ‘fiscal autonomy’ means - then why should the people of Scotland support independence at election time or in a referendum?

Actually, there is a third problem with the gradualist approach to independence - you could call it the ‘fundamental’ problem. If independence is “not the centre of gravity in Scotland”, then the SNP should not be sitting back and acknowledging such a situation. Faced with that position, the SNP should be re-doubling its efforts and fighting harder than ever before to make sure everyone in the country knows that without independence we will never be able to solve Scotland’s social and economic problems.

Independence is the normal state of affairs in most nations around the world, so if it is not the “centre of gravity in Scotland”, it should be. ‘Fundamentalists’ in the SNP have been quiet since the party secured victory at the 2007 Scottish Parliament Election and formed a minority administration - a silence that is, to an extent, understandable - but falling poll ratings and a leadership now actively peddling a position that would kick independence so deep into the long grass it would be difficult ever to retrieve, means it is now time to speak out.

Independence is not some nebulous concept: it is the catalyst that would bring to Scotland the powers we desperately need to transform our society. Without full control of our resources and the full powers of a sovereign, independent government, we cannot tackle the ‘bread and butter’ issues that affect every one of us, every day of our lives. That is how ‘fundamental’ the issue of independence is to the future of Scotland.

The current Scottish Parliament is a devolved body, answerable to the United Kingdom Parliament in London. Again, that’s a fact. In reality, the Scotland Act 1998 gives the UK Parliament the right to overrule any decision taken by the Scottish Parliament - the ‘sovereign’ parliament in London can even scrap the Scottish Parliament, if it was minded. What other country would accept such a position? The London-based UK Government is formed by the political parties that finished in third and fourth place according to the votes cast by the people of Scotland. Again, what other country would accept such a position?

The need for Scottish independence has never been greater. Therefore, the SNP should be articulating the merits and the benefits of independence at every opportunity and in relation to how it would enhance every aspect of our lives.

It should be the job of the SNP to make independence “the centre of gravity in Scotland”. It is the fundamental issue.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com July 3 2010

Three Towns regeneration

For most of last week the Three Towns were bathed in sunshine. So far this year we’ve been relatively lucky with the weather - certainly compared with the summer-that-never-was in 2009.

It’s amazing the difference a bit of sunshine makes to people. One day last week, while walking along the promenade from Saltcoats into Ardrossan, everyone I passed seemed happy. There were older men and women out for a walk; joggers, with Ipods hissing as they passed; cyclists, young and old; families with young children. There were even people in the water, some just paddling and others, the brave ones, actually swimming.

Of course, the ones in the water would be day-trippers - most locals don’t enter the Firth of Clyde anymore, not with the history of ‘stuff’ washed into the sea from nearby agricultural land. Wherever they were from, they were having a great time, and let’s hope the lack of rain this year meant that the bathing water was clean.

There is an old story, from years now long gone, about two wee Glasgow boys in for a paddle at South Beach. One looked at the other’s feet in the water and said, “Your feet are manky.” The boy replied, “I know, we wurnae here last year.”

Now, before Glaswegians get out their poison pens, it’s a joke! It didn’t really happen, but the local area did used to see families from Glasgow spend their summer holidays here, every year.

In the early 1960s, I can remember visiting a Glasgow family who spent a week in a rented flat in Ardrossan’s Arran Place. The father of the family had been in the Royal Marines with my dad, and they had remained friends. I also remember there were a lot of them in that family, four or five children, and the Arran Place property wasn’t that big, but they seemed to really enjoy their holiday at the seaside.

For those of us born and raised in the Three Towns, there is a lot we take for granted. When you see the Firth of Clyde and Arran every day, you tend to lose recognition of just how beautiful a view it can be. We forget how lucky we are to have such scenery on our doorstep.

It is because of this natural asset that the Irvine Bay Regeneration Company has focussed on our coastal location as the main thrust for its efforts to bring new life to Ardrossan, Saltcoats, Stevenston, Kilwinning and Irvine (we hadn’t before known about Kilwinning beach - they certainly kept that a secret).

The problem is, the developments Irvine Bay has introduced do very little to actually regenerate the local towns. On that sunny day last week, the Saltcoats Harbour area was busy with people eating chips and feeding seagulls. There was nothing else to do.

In the Harbour there are now huge rock formations, which were constructed as part of sea-defences to prevent flooding in Saltcoats. The photographs published last winter by the3towns.com, which showed the Braes car park severely flooded, seem to indicate the project failed. Last week, some of the visitors to the Saltcoats Harbour did comment on the work done by Irvine Bay. The comments I overheard were directly and indirectly related to the rock sea-defences. One woman enquired why one or two rocks were white - I know there is a reason, but I can’t remember what it is. Something to do with ‘jewels’? Maybe not.

The indirect reference was to ‘the smell’. Since the rock sea-defences were constructed, an increased amount of seaweed has become lodged in the many crevices, creating a stink in hot weather.

The company operating the private amusement rides next to the Apollo Cinema were doing well. Obviously, they have to rely on the weather bringing visitors, so they must have had a poor summer last year. Meanwhile, on the site next door, where there used to be free swings, climbing frames and other attractions for young children, there was nothing. The site is now empty.

Further along the seafront there is the new ’talking wall’, where Irvine Bay immortalised on stone plaques the thoughts about the area of some local residents. This feature was almost universally ignored by those enjoying the sun.

Into Ardrossan and many people enjoyed the clean, sandy beach. North Ayrshire Council gets wrong an awful lot of things, but they are to be commended for the way the sand at South Beach is maintained. The children’s play park on the front is also well tended and was particularly busy while the sun shone.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for what used to be the putting green. The Council had allowed the fencing around the seafront facility to fall into disrepair - to such an extent it was easier, and cheaper, to remove it completely. So Ardrossan no longer has a putting green. During last week’s sun, what had once been a popular facility was being used as an unofficial car park.

Then there is…well, actually, that is it. Listed above is the sum total of the ‘tourist’ facilities provided along the main seafront locations of Saltcoats and Ardrossan. We no longer have families descending on the area for a week-long holiday, but on sunny days we do still see many day-trippers looking for a good, fun day at the seaside, and what do we give them - not a lot.

The Irvine Bay Regeneration Company has, rightly, been criticised for targeting its initiatives on the creation of expensive, private housing - much of which is out of the financial reach of local people. Irvine Bay’s plan is to turn the Three Towns into dormitories for Glasgow, with people working in the city and living by the sea.

Such a strategy fails local people, who desperately need work. The Three Towns, and surrounding areas, need a regeneration that is focussed on bringing employment and creating well-paid, sustainable jobs. The Irvine Bay plan is nothing more than a rip-off of a strategy developed in America to create dormitory towns in which the workers of the city of Boston could live. It’s purpose is to serve Glasgow by developing seaside housing for the city’s workers. That does not benefit the lives of those of us who live in the Three Towns.

As for the seafront location being the centre of Irvine Bay’s regeneration strategy; if that really was the case, why is it that ‘tourists’ visiting the beach last week had virtually no facilities and very little to do?

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com June 26 2010

The economic situation

Let’s get one thing straight, we are not ‘all in this together’.

We, that is ‘us’, the ordinary, working-class people of the country, did not benefit from the obscene profits generated by bankers and financial speculators when they were having their ‘good times’ from gambling with our money, but suddenly ‘we’ are included when they can’t pay their debts and need a bail-out.

The massive debts accrued by the spivs and speculators of the City of London were cleared by the previous New Labour Government by borrowing billions-of-pounds against our names. We did not run-up the debts, but we paid them - and we could only afford to pay them by borrowing the money, which we will have to pay back, with interest.

Were you consulted at all about the action taken by the Labour Government? I know I wasn’t. No, none of ‘us’, the ordinary people, were consulted. We were just told it was necessary.

We were told by Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling that the debts of the Capitalist financial speculators had to be cleared or the banks would have collapsed. They told us that we came close to the nightmare scenario where cash-machines would have declined our cards and we would not have been able to access money in our accounts because the High Street banks would have been ‘bankrupt’.

That story is very similar to the garbage trotted out by pro-nuclear politicians. Their lie is that we need more nuclear power stations to ‘stop the lights going out like they did in California’.

Now, there are two points to be made regarding that scare story: firstly, when full life-cycle costs are taken into consideration, nuclear is the most expensive way of generating energy. It is so expensive that no company within the nuclear industry has any plans to build new stations in the UK. Of course, if the government - that is ‘us’, the ordinary people - were to pay the astronomical costs of building new nuclear stations, then private companies, like British Energy, would be happy to run them and skim-off their profit. That is, so long as the government - that’s right, ‘us’, the ordinary people - continue to pick-up the multi-million pound tab for cleaning up nuclear sites at the end of their life-spans, and dealing with the toxic waste the industry generates.

The second point about the threat of ‘the lights going out’, like they did in California, is that the cause of that particular electricity failure had nothing to do with a lack of supply, and everything to do with cost.

Like most things in the USA, electricity generation and supply is in the hands of private companies. In California the private companies that generate electricity hiked up their prices to such an extent that the private companies who supply the electricity to domestic users refused to buy ‘the product’. There was plenty of electricity, it was just that private companies were doing what they always do and were attempting to exploit a situation to maximise their profits at the expense of the ordinary people.

Despite the fact the Californian lights went out for no other reason than the greed of Capitalists running private companies, we are still sold the scare story that such an event could be repeated here if we don’t agree to pay for, and build, new nuclear power stations. Of course, if we were stupid enough to fall for that scare story, then the new power stations would be run for us by Capitalist private companies, who would look to maximise their profits at our expense.

The story about the Labour Government having to bail-out the spivs and speculators of the big financial institutions, in order to stop High Street banks closing and us not being able to withdraw a few pounds from the ‘hole in the wall’, is just as much garbage.

Banks could have been ‘saved’ by taking them into public ownership. In other words, they could have been ‘nationalised’. In doing this, the government could have made clear that what was being nationalised was the core functions of the banks - savers accounts, main-home mortgages, personal and business loans and so on. In addition, it could have been made clear that debts accrued from financial speculation on the part of the private banking companies would not be covered. Banks could have been ‘saved’ without the ordinary working class people of this country becoming responsible for the repayment of billions-of-pounds of debt amassed by a very few greedy Capitalists.

That could have happened, but it didn’t - and the reason it didn’t, is because all of the mainstream political parties in this country support the Capitalist system. We, the people, bailed them out, we paid their debts, and they have gone straight back to their old ways. The same people who caused the current economic crisis are still in place, they are still operating the Capitalist system, they are still taking home salaries that read like a Lottery winner’s cheque, and they are still paying themselves obscenely massive bonuses.

Last Tuesday, the first Budget of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition Government introduced a range of measures that will result in hundreds-of-thousands of job losses amongst the ordinary, working-class people of this country. We are in for savage cuts to public services. We will have to pay more tax, including VAT, which has been raised to 20-percent. VAT is a regressive tax, it hits the poorest hardest, so yet again it is the ordinary, working-class people who are footing the bill for Capitalist profligacy.

Capitalism caused the misery so many ordinary people are now enduring - and of which so many more will feel the force as the government’s austerity measures kick-in - and yet we are told there is no alternative. We are told Capitalism is the only game in town and we just have to brace ourselves, get on with things and wait for the next financial catastrophe - the history of Capitalism is littered with them.

However, that is not the case. There is a viable alternative, one where the interests of the ordinary people are put first, rather than those of a small ruling elite. That alternative is called Socialism.

Let’s briefly look at a few alternative measures that a Socialist government could have introduced:

Income Tax - £17.2bn could be raised by taxing all income over £100,000 per year at 50-percent, with a further £9.1bn raised by removing the caps and restrictions on NI contributions. Marginal increases in income tax would generate a total of £26.3bn per year in additional income for government. If combined with more stringent tax avoidance measures it would be possible to raise much more than this from those in society with the highest incomes.

Corporation Tax - this has been halved over the last 30 years from 56-percent to 28-percent. By taking it back to 56-percent, it would be possible to generate additional revenues of £42bn per year. An International Financial Transactions Tax to reduce currency speculation would bring in an estimated £4.2bn per year.

Tax Avoidance - Various estimates from HMRC, the Guardian, TUC and the Treasury have suggested that a concerted effort to reduce tax avoidance would secure around £20bn a year, while the Tax Justice Network has calculated that in recent years some £120bn of tax has been avoided. This is money that has effectively been fraudulently taken from the people by big business.

Reducing Public Spending - Measures could include cancelling the replacement for the Trident Nuclear Missile System, saving around £76bn, and immediately bringing home British forces serving abroad. Meanwhile, Ministry of Defence workers could be provided with alternative sources of employment that would serve the interests of the people here in Scotland, rather than supporting imperialist wars abroad. The Scottish Trades Union Congress has recently set out how such a strategy applied to the replacement of Trident would create far more jobs elsewhere in the economy. Then there is PPP/PFI spending, an issue close to our hearts here in North Ayrshire, with the local Council’s £380m project to build and maintain just four schools. Returning PPP/PFI projects to the public sector would save around £3.3bn per annum.

Welfare and Pensions - People should not have to ‘prove they are poor’ in order to receive benefits, as currently happens with means-testing. Benefits and Pensions should be part of a universal system, with progressive taxation recouping any payments made to those whose incomes from other sources mean they don’t need additional support.

Debt Repayment - A full programme of Socialist policies applied to Scotland’s current economic situation would generate a budget surplus of around £10bn, which could be used to repay debt.

It hasn’t been possible in an article like this to go into detail about how Socialism would create a fairer society, where the interests of the people are what motivates and drives government policies. However, a viable alternative to the Capitalist system that has caused the problems we now face is available. Of course, you won’t hear much about it. The Capitalists own the media and it isn’t in their interests for you to know about the alternative.

Incidentally, I have to be honest, the alternative budget proposals listed above were not my own. They form part of the reasoned policies brought forward by the Scottish Socialist Party in response to the ‘slash and burn’ Budget of the Tory-Lib Dem Government. In much of the Capitalist-owned media, if they mention the Scottish Socialist Party at all it is only to brand them as ‘the loony left’. In fact, the policies of the SSP are very reasonable and would benefit the vast majority of Scots. Meanwhile, the Capitalist lunatics are still in charge of the asylum.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com June 19 2010

What politicians really believe

In 2004 I wrote a political pamphlet called “Scotland’s Youth - Scotland’s Future”. In it I set out my vision of what an independent Scotland could look like.

No, I wasn’t getting ideas above my station. As a backbench Independent MSP at the time, I was under no illusion that I might, at some point, be part of a government that would be in a position to implement policies for an independent Scotland. In fact, I was simply doing what used to be common-place amongst politicians, I set-out my views in a pamphlet, so that everyone knew where I stood on a range of issues, not just our nation’s constitutional future.

Actually, with regard to being a backbencher, my friend Margo MacDonald and I - both former SNP MSPs - used to sit together in the very back row of the parliament’s debating chamber. We joked that if we were any further back we would be in the car park. Many of our opponents expressed the view that this would be the best place for us.

However, unlike most of the MSPs from political parties, Margo and I were prepared to express our own personal views. The best thing about being an Independent was the ability to schedule time to suit your constituents, as opposed to party Whips telling you where you had to be. The next best thing was freedom of thought and expression. MSPs from political parties are happy to comment on a range of issues, but you can never be sure they actually believe in the view they give. Often they will simply be trotting-out the party line.

To be honest, the party line will usually be pretty close to the politician’s own view - those of us who have joined political parties tend to go for the one whose views most closely reflect our own. However, there are occasions when a Member of Parliament or a councillor will find themselves defending a position with which they don’t actually agree.

For me, such a situation occurred while I was a member of the SNP and found myself on a public platform having to support an independent Scotland’s continued membership of the European Union, or keeping the Queen as Head of State after independence. I don’t agree with either of those policies, but as a party member I was expected to advance the agreed positions. That’s the way party politics works.

However, while everyone singing from the same hymn sheet is good for external PR purposes, it also allows for certain individuals to hide their true beliefs from the public. The SNP is a broad church, members hold a wide spectrum of views - from socialists on the left to rabid free-marketeers on the right - but all united in the belief that Scotland would be better as an independent nation.

Outwardly, the SNP presents itself as a moderate, left-of-centre party; a position that genuinely reflects the actual position of the majority of members, but the public mask hides some who would not be out of place sitting amongst the more right-wing elements of the Tory Party.

For an example of this, we need look no further than the local constituency of Cunninghame North. At the 2007 Scottish Parliament Election, Cunninghame North returned an MSP from the moderate centre-left SNP. However, what local people actually got was Kenneth Gibson, a former Glasgow councillor with a history of high allowances claims and bad press regarding incidents with women.

Of course, Mr Gibson’s personal life is his own affair (or affairs) - what matters to the electors of Cunninghame North is that he should reflect the moderate centre-left views of his party - and that’s where there is a problem.

While the SNP Scottish Government rightly condemned Israel’s recent attacks on innocent civilians aboard aid-ships in international waters, Kenneth Gibson is on record as having lodged a Parliamentary Motion ‘celebrating the creation of the State of Israel’. Mr Gibson’s motion ignores the fact that the State of Israel was created on Palestinian land, from which the rightful owners were forcibly removed. Even the Tory Westminster Government has distanced itself from the aggressive actions of Israel, but Cunninghame North’s Kenneth Gibson praises “Israel’s diverse, dynamic, democratic and vibrant multi-ethnic and multi-religious culture,” a statement that is little more than propaganda for a country that intentionally ‘imprisons’ 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and imposes a blockade that severely restricts the flow of essential foods and medicines.

This week, Kenneth Gibson gave an interview to a pro-Israeli web site about another Parliamentary Motion he has lodged, this one condemning an apparent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Scotland. The Cunninghame North MSPs’ Motion refers to “the number of anti-Semitic incidents including extreme violence, assaults, damage and desecration of property, threats, abusive behaviour, including verbal abuse, and the disbursement of anti-Semitic literature”. The picture of Scotland being painted by the man who claims to represent local people in parliament is clearly not a pretty one.

In his interview, Kenneth Gibson is asked, “What do you believe is the cause of the sudden rise in anti-Semitism in Scotland,” to which he replies, “There has been a significant rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Scotland with hate crimes tripling in one year. A study by Ephraim Borowski, Director of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities and former head of the Philosophy Department at Glasgow University suggests that much of the significant increase in anti-Semitic incidents is associated with events in the Middle East. The study concludes that ‘Events in the Middle East, often accompanied by a popular conflagration of Israelis and Jews, have a habit of leading to outbreaks of anti-Semitic activity’.”

The SNP MSP continues, “This is particularly depressing in Scotland, the only country in Europe never to have anti-Semitic laws.”

If anyone is attacked because of their faith, then that is very wrong. However, the terrible situation described by Kenneth Gibson is not a Scotland I recognise. One also has to wonder how the Scottish media has missed a story so major that Kenneth Gibson apparently believes we need to introduce anti-Semitic laws.

Gibson is then asked, “Have you heard reports of incidents of anti-Semitism in your own constituency?” He replies, “I have not heard reports of incidents of anti-Semitism in my own constituency which has a negligible number of Jewish residents and no discernable community.”

Next May, at the Scottish Parliament Election, people in Cunninghame North should be aware that a vote for the moderately left-of-centre SNP may actually see the re-election of Kenneth Gibson, a man whose personal political views seem to be considerably to the right of his party.

While the SNP is assuredly a moderate, social democratic party, its candidate in Cunninghame North supports a State that kills innocent aid workers in international waters, and which imprisons and bombs innocent men, women and children in Gaza.

What is the betting Kenneth Gibson does not publicise his personal views before the election?

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com June 12 2010

The World Cup

So we’re at that time again - the four-yearly festival of international football that is the World Cup - and, yes, Scotland failed to qualify, again.

During the week, I was talking to a friend’s son: he’s eighteen and potentially a top-flight footballer himself, having represented Scotland at ‘17s’-level and now playing pro-youth. We were discussing the World Cup in South Africa and the teams we thought could win the trophy. Then, he said something that made me stop: “It would be great if Scotland qualified for a World Cup Finals.”

He was 6 years-old the last time our national team competed in football’s top tournament. Understandably, therefore, his actual memory of France 1998 is, well, almost nil. He has seen highlights of the games we played, but does not recall having watched them at the time. He probably didn’t - 6 year-olds have much more important things to do than watch Scotland lose 2-1 to Brazil, draw 1-1 with Norway, and then lose 3-0 to Morocco (yes, Morocco!).

Since then, we have failed to make the finals tournaments in 2002, 2006 and now 2010. We have a generation that has grown from young children into adults without ever seeing their national football team compete against the best in the world.

That realisation made me think how lucky I had been while growing up myself. I saw Scotland become the first team to be knocked out of the World Cup without losing a game. That was in 1974 - we beat Zaire 2-0, drew 0-0 with the mighty Brazil, and 1-1 with Yugoslavia. We went out on goal difference: Brazil had beaten Zaire 3-0 and that one extra goal was enough to see us catching an early flight home from West Germany.

Four years later, we were off to Argentina to win the World Cup. Team manager Ally McLeod said we would at least bring home a medal, and I believed him.

It is now almost cool to knock Ally McLeod and the Scotland side of 1978 - we lost 3-1 to Peru, and drew 1-1 with the shop-keepers and camel-herders of Iran - but we should also remember that we then beat the Netherlands 3-2 in our final game. The Netherlands were one of the best sides in the world at that time - they went on to lose to the host nation, Argentina, in the final - and our third goal in that game, the mazy dribble and chipped finish by Archie Gemmill, is recognised as one of the best ever scored on the world stage. We were not as bad as some people would have us believe.

I’ve written before of my belief that, had the tournament been played a year earlier, Scotland could well have secured the medal that Ally McLeod promised. In the mid-1970s Scotland had a very good football side, with an exceptionally strong midfield that included players like Bruce Rioch, Don Masson and Asa Hartford.

In 1977, having won the British ‘Home’ International Championship, rounding off the tournament with a 2-1 win over England at Wembley (their goal was an 87th minute penalty), Scotland embarked on a South American tour to prepare for the following year’s World Cup in Argentina.

Our first stop was Brazil, where we went down 2-0. It was Chile next and an excellent 4-2 victory (more about that game in a moment), before moving on to play Argentina. Bearing in mind that just 12 months later Argentina were to be crowned world champions, the fact we drew 1-1 with them on their own turf shows how good Scotland were at the time.

However, the 12 months that elapsed between our South American tour and the World Cup saw some of our best players tip over the edge of playing ability. From being at the peak of their game, our midfield masters seemed to lose their magic. Of course, things weren’t helped by the banning and sending-home of winger Willie Johnston over allegations of drug-taking. Johnston claimed at the time, and maintains to this day, that he took nothing more than two Reactivan tablets, an over-the-counter medication to combat the effects of hay fever. However, he was sent home ‘in disgrace’.

Ally McLeod didn’t bring us the medal he promised, but as far as I am concerned he made only one major error during the finals in Argentina. It was not his fault that certain seasoned professionals were no longer as good as they had once been - the same players had strutted the international stage with impressive skill just months earlier. No, McLeod’s unfathomable ‘mistake’ was to play podgy striker Joe Harper ahead of that season’s most prolific goal-scorer in Scottish football, Rangers’ Derek Johnstone. That decision has never been satisfactorily explained, and as Ally is no longer with us, it might be that we are never able to fully understand why he kept Johnstone on the bench when we needed goals.

So, it wasn’t to be in Argentina 1978, but things were not as bad as they seemed at the time. Our team peaked too soon. Had their legs and ability held out for a few months more, we might just have got that medal Ally promised.

Now, back to that friendly against Chile in 1977, because it is a game worth mentioning. In 1970, the people of Chile elected a Socialist president called Salvador Allende. He embarked on creating a fairer society and began nationalising industries that had been seriously exploited by companies based in the United States of America.

As is its way in these matters, America didn’t care for the democratic choice of the Chilean people so, in September 1973, it backed a military coup that overthrew Allende and saw General Augusto Pinochet installed as president. His repressive, right-wing military rule was much more to America’s liking.

Salvador Allende died as Pinochet’s army stormed the presidential building: he apparently committed suicide.

In the four years between the military seizing power in Chile and Scotland arriving to play a friendly match against the national side, Pinochet’s thugs abducted, tortured and killed thousands of political opponents, student activists and intellectuals. Many of those grabbed off the streets were taken to the National (football) Stadium, where the actual torture and killing took place. It was in the same stadium that Scotland was to play Chile.

At the time, a number of Scotland players voiced concerns about playing in a ground where such atrocities had taken place - when the team arrived at the stadium, bullet holes were still very much in evidence. However, the faceless bureaucrats of the Scottish Football Association (SFA) made it clear that any player who refused to play in the match against Chile would face ‘disciplinary action’. With the World Cup less than 12 months away, players did not want to jeopardise their chance of pitting their skills against the best on the planet, so they played - all except one.

Only one Scotland player stuck to his principles and refused to play a football match in a stadium that had been used to kill people whose only crime was to have backed a democratically-elected Socialist president. That player was the then Clydebank winger Davie Cooper. What is all the more remarkable, is that Cooper was just 22 years-old at the time.

Davie Cooper went on to have a very successful career with Rangers - and Scotland. His talent was such that even the idiots who then ran the SFA knew they had to pick him. It was, of course, Davie Cooper who scored the penalty against Wales in 1985 that saw Scotland qualify for the following year’s World Cup Finals in Mexico.

Tragically, in 1995, Davie Cooper died from a brain haemorrhage at the age of just 39.

Scotland qualified for the World Cup Finals in 1974, 1978, 1982, 1986 and 1990. We missed out in 1994 and then qualified again in 1998. Since then, nothing. The result of which is that we now have a generation of Scotland fans who have never seen their country compete in the world’s premier football tournament. That has to be rectified by taking one of the places in the Finals of 2014, which will be held in Brazil, the first time since Argentina in 1978 that the tournament will take place in South America.

Scotland has a lot for which it should atone with regard to the 1977 South American tour and the 1978 Finals. We also need to allow young Scots to see their team play in the World Cup. Brazil would be a great place to do that.

Meanwhile, who is going to win in South Africa? I fancy Spain, but that’s probably the kiss of death for them.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com June 5 2010

The oppressed have become the oppressors

 When we try to describe what the Nazis did to the Jewish people during World War II, words are inadequate.

Atrocity, ethnic cleansing, even holocaust seem too weak when the event we are trying to describe involves the systematic and deliberate killing of 11 million innocent people.

Of course, not all of the 11 million who died as part of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ were Jewish, but no one group paid a higher price.

Other than the intellectual and moral inadequates who populate far-right organisations, like the British National Party, the National Front or the English Defence League, no-one can fail to be moved by the harrowing newsreels that show Jewish men, women and children being loaded onto cattle trucks - some German soldiers even took money from them for their fare - and transported to camps where they were either killed in mechanised extermination chambers, or worked to death by sadistic guards.

People of the Jewish faith had been persecuted throughout history, but until the rise of Hitler’s Nazis in 1930s Germany, no-one had attempted to actually wipe them from the face of the Earth. Like the Roma Gypsies, Jews were believed by the Nazis to be racially inferior and degenerate and therefore worthless. The ‘Final Solution’ was an attempt to annihilate an entire people.

It is because of the inhuman treatment of the Jewish people that I find it so difficult to understand how the State of Israel can, today, so readily resort to acts of violence and persecution against the Palestinian residents of Gaza.

Israel, the Jewish homeland, occupies Palestinian territory. The rightful owners of the land on which Israel now sits were forced-out in order that a ‘safe’ country could be created for the Jewish Diaspora. Of course, as with so many historical disasters, the British played a pivotal role in allowing Israel to be created on Palestinian territory.

It is from the very beginning of the Jewish State that today’s Israeli-Palestinian problems derive. However, over the past three years, Israel has exacerbated things by enforcing a blockade of Gaza, where 1,500,000 people are crammed onto a strip of land 25 miles long and between 3 and 7 miles wide. Of that total population, over 900,000 people are officially classified as refugees.

In January 2009 Israel launched a full-scale military invasion of Gaza, which included air-strikes directed into densely populated civilian areas. All the while, the Israeli blockade means Palestinians in Gaza are denied essential food and medicines.

The Israeli defence of its action is that Palestinians continue to launch rocket attacks into Israel from Gaza. However, Palestinians point out that such attacks are reprisals for Israeli aggression and oppression.

According to the United Nations, 80% of Palestinians living in Gaza are now reliant on humanitarian aid - the very aid that a flotilla of ships was attempting to deliver last week, and which was attacked in international waters by commandos from the Israeli Defence Force.

Obviously, there is no scale of comparison between what the Jewish people suffered at the hands of the Nazis in World War II and what is currently happening in Gaza, but I just can’t understand how a people who have known and suffered persecution over centuries can have allowed themselves to become the oppressors.

Israel has got away with its persecution of the Palestinians because it receives unflinching support from the United States of America, the country with the largest Jewish population in the world, outside of Israel itself. Any attempt by the United Nations Security Council to criticise, censure or impose sanctions on Israel over its incursions into Palestinian territory or its treatment of the Palestinian people have been vetoed by the United States.

However, if the international community, including America, allows Israel to get away with boarding ships in international waters, killing innocent people, and placing under arrest others on board who had committed no crime, then they will be condoning what is little more than state-sponsored terrorism.

Copied below is a letter written on behalf of the civic community of Gaza. It was written on May 31, the day Israeli commandos stormed the ships attempting to take aid to the Palestinian people:

We, Gaza-based Palestinian civil society organizations, call on the international community and civil society to pressure their governments and Israel to cease the abductions and killings in Israel’s attacks against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla sailing for Gaza, and begin a global response to hold Israel accountable for the murder of foreign civilians at sea and illegal piracy of civilian vessels carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza.

We salute the courage of all those who have organized this aid intervention and demand a safe passage through to Gaza for the 750 people of conscience from 40 different countries including 35 international politicians intent on breaking the Israeli-Egyptian blockade. We offer our sincerest condolences to family and friends who have lost loved ones in the attack.

By sailing directly to Gaza, outside of Israeli waters, with cargo banned illegally by Israel, such as the 10,000 tonnes of badly needed concrete, toys, workbooks, chocolate, pasta and substantial medical supplies, the flotilla is exercising international law and upholding article 33 of the Geneva Convention which clearly states that collective punishment is a crime against humanity.

The hardships of Israel’s closure of Gaza have been well documented by all human rights groups, most recently by Amnesty International in their Annual Human Rights Report, which concluded that the siege has “deepened the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Mass unemployment, extreme poverty, food insecurity and food price rises caused by shortages left four-out-of-five Gazans dependent on humanitarian aid. The scope of the blockade and statements made by Israeli officials about its purpose showed that it was being imposed as a form of collective punishment of Gazans, a flagrant violation of international law.”

The United Nations continuously states that only a fraction of the required aid is entering the Strip due to what it calls ‘the medieval siege’, with John Ging the Director of UNRWA in Gaza specifically expressing the need for the Flotilla to enter Gaza. The European Union’s new foreign affairs minister Catherine Ashton has just reiterated its call for, “an immediate, sustained and unconditional opening of crossings for the flow of humanitarian aid, commercial goods and persons to and from Gaza.”

The people of Gaza are not dependent people, but self sufficient people doing what they can to retain some dignity in life in the wake of this colossal man-made devastation that deprives so many of a basic start in life or minimal aspirations for the future.

We, from Gaza, call on you to demonstrate and support the courageous men and women who went on the Flotilla, many now murdered on a humanitarian aid mission. We insist on severance of diplomatic ties with Israel, trials for war crimes and the international protection of the civilians of Gaza.

We call on you to join the growing international boycott, divestment and sanction campaign of a country proving again to be so violent and yet so unchallenged. Join the growing critical mass around the world with a commitment to the day when Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as any other people, when the siege is lifted, the occupation is over and the 6 million Palestinian refugees are finally granted justice.

(c)the3towns.com

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the3towns.com May 29 2010

The Scheme

It’s the biggest ratings hit BBC Scotland has had for years, and it purports to tell the story of life on an Ayrshire housing estate.

‘The Scheme’ was filmed in Onthank, Kilmarnock over the past year and features six families. So far we have only met four of them - we won’t see the two remaining episodes until a court case involving one ‘member of the cast’ has been concluded. The BBC believes screening the behaviour of the individual involved could prejudice his trial.

However, the possibility of prejudicing the reputation of Onthank, Kilmarnock or even Ayrshire as a whole did not stop the BBC from broadcasting the ‘The Scheme’ in the first place.

A number of Onthank residents agreed to be filmed for the series, but those who were ‘ordinary’ did not make it to our television screens. In the first two episodes we were introduced to three largely dysfunctional households, and one where a family was struggling to persuade the local Council to provide a community centre.

Psychologists would have a field day attempting to analyse ‘The Scheme’ and its inhabitants. Then there is the question of the BBC’s motivation for screening such a ‘fly on the wall’ documentary.

Some people have been outraged at the behaviour shown in the series, some pity those who have to live in such circumstances. Others are angry that the BBC has misrepresented the community of Onthank. However, there is another strand of opinion that could be voiced in the Three Towns…there but for the Grace of God.

Residents of Ardrossan, Saltcoats and Stevenston know the towns are mostly populated by decent people, doing their best to raise families and get on with their lives - but there are parts of each town where, had the BBC chosen to point their cameras in those directions, they would have found similar examples to the ones they came across in Onthank.

Of course, the BBC could have chosen just about any large area of population in Scotland and they would have found the sort of people they wanted for ‘The Scheme’ - the unemployed, the disadvantaged, those with alcohol and drug problems, those who commit acts of anti-social behaviour and those who suffer from it. None of us has to look too far to find the results of social decay.

What ‘The Scheme’ shows is the ‘underclass’ created by the policies of Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. That so-called ‘underclass’ and the social problems that stem from the behaviour of those who inhabit it, are a direct result of government policies that saw people as expendable and believed unemployment was a price worth paying to allow a very small group to become extremely wealthy.

The behaviour shown in ‘The Scheme’ is the price we are all now paying for Thatcher’s abandonment of the concept of society. Before Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979, there was a political consensus that sought to achieve full employment. Governments believed it was their responsibility to ensure there were jobs for everyone who wanted to work, and that was the vast majority of people.

Now, the unemployed are blamed for their predicament. Right-wing newspapers brand them as scroungers and spongers, while programmes like ‘The Scheme’ show the rest of society what their taxes are being ‘wasted on’. In fact, the unemployed did not create and implement policies that smashed manufacturing industries in Britain. Children across the country did not grow up with a dream of one day scraping-by on £65 per week Jobseekers Allowance. The vast majority of people still want to work, as they always have, but politicians have created a new society, one where hope and opportunity are no longer provided.

The people depicted in ‘The Scheme’ have problems that society has, to a large degree, helped to create. Once caught in the poverty trap, with hope and opportunity removed, who is to say that we, too, might not succumb to alcohol or drugs to dull the pain of existence?

Last year I interviewed teenagers in the Dalmarnock area of Glasgow. I was there because Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill was due to visit. Mr MacAskill was meeting with a team of dedicated youth workers who were desperately trying to divert boys - actually young men - away from gangs, alcohol and drugs. They did this by providing organised football matches - the SNP Government had coughed-up the money for pitches - but I clearly remember the comment one young boy made: he said, “I enjoy the fitba, but I cannae play fitba till I’m 65. We need jobs.”

I was reminded of the young men in Dalmarnock when I watched ‘The Scheme’. Areas like Onthank - and towns like Ardrossan, Saltcoats and Stevenston - also need jobs. We can’t condemn our young people for wandering the streets and possibly resorting to alcohol or drugs, when we have created the society that has robbed them of the opportunity to work and the hope of a better life. On ‘The Scheme’, one 20 year-old man made exactly the same comment as another of the boys in Dalmarnock last year. I had asked what there was to do at night, as did the interviewer on the BBC programme. In Glasgow and Kilmarnock the answer was the same - “There’s nothing to do but get wasted.”

Of course, some parents are better role models than others - but, again, it is difficult to condemn young people who have grown up never knowing their mother and father to have long-term work. The parents didn’t ask to be unemployed - we elected the politicians who dealt them that hand.

If we are appalled at the behaviour shown in ‘The Scheme’ - and we should be appalled that anyone is forced to live without hope and opportunity - then maybe it’s time we started questioning how the politicians we elected made such a bad job of our society. Particularly here in Scotland, we should be asking how it is we are the only nation on the face of the planet to have discovered oil and got poorer.

Scots should be asking how Norway discovered oil at the same time as us, but in smaller quantities, and yet managed to create a society that now enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world.

Norway is a small, independent country that used its natural resources to build a better society for its people. At the same time, Scotland, a small region of Britain, handed over to governments in London the wealth generated from our natural resources.

What did we get back in return? Watch ‘The Scheme’ and see, or take a wee walk through our very own schemes in Ardrossan, Saltcoats and Stevenston.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com May 22 2010

No openness and accountability in North Ayrshire

The February 2008 decision by North Ayrshire Council to remove Wardens from sheltered housing complexes is becoming the defining issue of the present Labour administration.

Labour councillors argue the system that replaced Wardens results in local people receiving a better standard of care. That is debatable. Certainly, whenever elderly residents have been asked their opinion, they have indicated a preference for having Wardens. However, the issue is one where each side can make an argument in support of its position.

What is not debatable, is that when a majority of councillors decided to remove Wardens from sheltered housing, certain relevant information was not made available to them. Specifically, councillors were not told that, even if they took the decision to axe Wardens from Council-owned facilities - in order to save money - the local authority would still direct funding to housing associations so that they could continue to provide Wardens in their facilities.

That information did not come to light until much later, and only after Independent councillor John Hunter began to ask questions about Council funding being made available to housing associations in North Ayrshire, and the uses to which the money was put. In response to Cllr Hunter, NAC officials admitted the local authority was, indeed, paying money to housing associations, and that those bodies were using it to provide the Warden cover that North Ayrshire had scrapped in its own facilities.

The argument now being put forward by Labour councillors is that the Scottish Government provides money for Registered Social Landlords (housing associations) and that the Council simply administers those funds by passing them to the relevant bodies in North Ayrshire. Labour then says that, once housing associations are in possession of the money, it is up to them how they spend it.

That, of course, is true. However, the point missed by Labour councillors - almost certainly deliberately missed - is that no-one, neither councillor nor Council official, saw fit to tell elected members about the financial arrangement with housing associations, and that those bodies would continue to use the money in providing Warden cover for their vulnerable tenants. When North Ayrshire councillors took the decision to remove Wardens from local authority sheltered housing, they did not know public money was being used to provide the same service in housing association complexes. They also did not know that such money would continue to be provided, irrespective of the decision they took regarding the Council’s Warden provision.

Had councillors been made aware of this situation, it is argued they may well have reached a different decision. Had councillors known about the public money provided to housing associations, and that those bodies considered the best use of the funds was to continue employing Wardens in their sheltered housing units, then maybe it would have been felt that vulnerable, elderly residents in Council facilities should also be allowed to keep that level of service.

In all the bluster from Labour councillors at last week’s Council Meeting, where Cllr John Hunter called for an investigation into the matter, the unshakable fact that continued to emerge was that councillors did not have all relevant information available to them when they took the decision to remove Wardens from sheltered housing owned by the local authority.

Referring to the fact that councillors had not known about the public funding of Wardens in housing association facilities, Labour’s Communities spokesperson, Cllr Peter McNamara, commented, “The information that came to light latterly, while interesting, was not relevant to the decision-making of this body.” Apparently, that is what passes for reasoned argument amongst North Ayrshire’s Labour administration.

Cllr McNamara considers that, when North Ayrshire councillors were debating and voting on the provision of Wardens in Council sheltered housing, it was “not relevant” that those councillors were not told housing associations would continue to provide Warden cover, and that this would be funded by public money received from North Ayrshire Council.

The other argument put forward by Labour councillors - that it is up to housing associations how they spend the public money they receive from the Scottish Government, by way of the Council - also requires closer scrutiny, because the same principle applies to North Ayrshire Council. Approximately 80% of NAC’s total funding is provided by the Scottish Government from general taxation paid by you and me - the other 20% is raised through the Council Tax.

So, like local housing associations, it is up to North Ayrshire Council how it spends the money it receives from the Scottish Government - and it is surely relevant to any debate about the best use of funds allocated to care of the elderly that decisions are only reached after careful consideration of the full facts. In the case of Warden cover, the full facts would have to include how other similar bodies in the area use their public funding. Clearly, then, the full facts were denied to North Ayrshire councillors - a situation the Communities spokesperson believes is “interesting” but “not relevant”.

One other smaller point raised by Labour councillors during last week’s Council Meeting was an objection to John Hunter referring to housing associations as “effectively the private sector”. Cllr Hunter was, in fact, correct. While housing associations are considered to be ‘public bodies’ in terms of EU procurement regulations, they are generally accepted as being private entities, given that they are not owned or directly controlled by the state. The people of North Ayrshire have ultimate control of the Council, through the ballot box. We have the power to elect or vote-out the 30 individuals who form ‘the Council’. We have no such right or power over those who run local housing associations.

There is one other very serious matter to emerge from last week’s deliberations over the axing of Wardens in 2008. The Motion submitted to the Council by John Hunter asked that the local authority’s chief executive carry out an investigation and report back to a future meeting. It also asked that, in the meantime, councillors apologise to the people of North Ayrshire for having taken such a major decision, without being in possession of the full facts.

Labour councillors, supported by two Liberal Democrats and three others who claim to be Independents, voted down Cllr Hunter’s Motion - the SNP, Tories and Independent Ronnie McNicol backed the call for an investigation and apology.

What the vote means, is that Labour councillors, and their lapdogs, are not only prepared to leave our elderly citizens without much-needed, and much wanted Warden cover in sheltered housing units, they are also perfectly content to prevent the public knowing what has been happening at the Council. Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, our Labour masters refuse to apologise to us mere mortals.

When public bodies cease to practice openness and accountability, you can be certain they have something to hide…and when councillors think they are better than the people they are supposed to serve, it’s definitely time for them to go.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com May 15 2010

What the election result means

So, after the people spoke on May 6, we now have new political leaders in the UK.

In a hung parliament, with no party having overall control, we have the first coalition government for 65 years, since the dark days of World War II. By abandoning their claimed ‘moderate left-of-centre’ position and agreeing to prop-up a right-wing Tory administration, the Liberal Democrats proved they are not to be trusted.

Of course, Lib Dems will argue that their role in the new government is one of equal partner, but that is not the case. Yes, some Liberal Democrats will sit in Cabinet and Nick Clegg now has the title of Deputy Prime Minister, but make no mistake, we have a ‘back to the future’ situation, with the Tories once again in power and ready to take their sharpened knife to jobs and public services. Unemployment, already just short of three-million (according to official figures - it is actually considerably higher), will rise still further as Tory and Lib Dem ministers sanction austerity measures that will plunge families and communities into levels of poverty not seen since Thatcher rampaged across society in the 1980s.

Despite the relatively youthful look brought to the Tory Party by David Cameron, a leopard cannot change its spots - it’s still the same old Conservatives that now have control of our country. Tories believe in low taxation, which benefits the wealthy to a greater degree; they believe the state should be shrunk, which means fewer public services and jobs. Conservatives champion the private sector, which means more companies tendering for public contracts, with the sole motivation being the extraction of profit, which results in fewer people employed and the driving-down of wages and conditions for those who survive the sack.

That is how the Tories operate and, despite claims to the contrary, the Liberal Democrats will not stop the worst excesses of Conservative ideology.

Of course, as ever, for those of us north of the border there is the Scottish dimension to UK politics and government. Scotland did not vote for the Tories or the Liberal Democrats, but we still have their coalition government imposed on us. That’s what happens when you are a heavily-outnumbered, very junior partner in a union.

Scotland overwhelmingly voted Labour, with the party securing 41 of the 59 Scottish seats. Well, actually, that isn’t quite true. Yes, we did return a huge majority of Labour MPs, but when we look more closely at the actual vote, what we see is not a national endorsement of Labour but, rather, the massive in-built bias and unfairness of the ‘First-Past-The-Post’ electoral system.

The Labour Party took 69% of Scottish seats on just 42% of the vote. The SNP came second in terms of votes secured - almost 20% - but saw just 6 MPs elected.

Then came the two parties who now govern us. In third place, the Liberal Democrats took 19% of seats on almost 19% of the vote - achieving proportionality by chance - and taking 11 seats, five more than the SNP who actually beat them in the poll. The Tories, elected by the people of England, finished fourth in Scotland, receiving just 1 MP for its 16% of the Scottish vote.

So, in Scotland, the parties of the UK Government got just 35% of all votes cast and have only 12 Scottish seats (11 Lib Dems and 1 Tory). Of the Scots who exercised their democratic right to vote at the election, 65% did not support the two parties who form ‘our’ government.

Tory and Lib Dem ministers will now legislate for Scotland on vital issues such as the economy, defence and foreign affairs. Despite being rejected by the majority of Scottish voters, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats will also set the annual budget of the Scottish Parliament and government. So, the parties that finished third and fourth in Scotland now have control of our lives. That cannot possibly be called democracy.

Locally, in the North Ayrshire & Arran constituency, which includes the Three Towns, Labour’s Katy Clark was re-elected with an increased share of the vote, from 2005, and a majority of almost 10,000. However, of those people who trooped to Polling Stations on May 6 and put their cross on a ballot paper, a majority (53%) voted for parties other than Labour.

Both nationally and locally we have a democratic deficit caused by an unfair electoral system. Katy Clark has proved herself a hard-working MP since first being elected five years ago, and will undoubtedly continue to champion local people and causes, but the reality is that, at the General Election, a majority expressed a preference for other candidates - Ms Clark and Labour emerged as the largest minority. Without a fair voting system, the votes of the 53% that voted for parties other than Labour are totally discounted and, therefore, are wasted.

To make things fair, we need proportional representation (PR). With the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system of election, we would have larger constituencies but would see multi-member representation, just like we currently have at council level. For example, in the Ardrossan & Arran Ward of North Ayrshire Council we presently have 2 Independents, 1 SNP and 1 Labour councillor, because that is what local people voted for at the last election in 2007. Similarly, people in Saltcoats & Stevenston spread their voting preferences in a way that saw the election of 2 Labour, 1 SNP and 1 Independent councillor. People in each Ward can go to the councillor of their first preference or, indeed, to all of them, if they wish.

As for Scotland being governed by two parties rejected by the Scottish electorate and imposed on us by the voters of England, that problem is easily resolved.

All we need to do is get off our knees; stop accepting a subservient role as a region of Britain and stop tolerating a democratic deficit where the voters of another country tell us who should govern our nation.

All we have to do is vote for the status that is accepted as ‘normal’ by most nations on the face of the planet - independence.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com May 8 2010

The Election

 In the aftermath of the UK General Election, a friend of mine stated that the Tories had not won. I disagreed.

The Tories did win the election. In terms of MPs elected and votes cast, the Tories were the winners. The reality is, they did not receive sufficient support or MPs elected to form a government, which was the point my friend was making, but of the parties that contested the election, they were the most successful. They won the election.

At the time of writing this piece, the horse-trading had begun and talk of coalitions or vote-by-vote pacts was rife. Principally, the leader of the largest party, David Cameron, was looking around to see if he had enough pals to get a go at running the country.

Meanwhile, old grumpy chops, Gordon Brown, was not for moving from Number 10. Despite losing the election, Brown remains prime minister until he resigns, and that isn’t something he’s inclined to do until he really has to.

So, if Cameron finds he is ‘Davie nae mates’, we could see the ridiculous situation of the two main parties that lost the election going on to form a government. Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, from the party that finished third, could be cabinet ministers.

At least when coalition governments were formed in the Scottish Parliament by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, one of them had actually won the election by emerging as the largest party in terms vote and members elected.

Hung parliaments need not be bad for the country. They simply require politicians from different parties to co-operate in the country’s interests. Is that really too much to ask?

Of course, when a big party doesn’t have power to govern on its own, and needs the support of smaller parties, then the wee guy gets to punch above his weight - and that could apply to the SNP. With just six MPs, the SNP are small fry in the big UK sea, but if their support is needed to form a government or win parliamentary votes, they could exert great influence to Scotland’s benefit.

Having said that, such assistance could only be offered to a Labour-Liberal Democrat government. Unless things have changed since the SNP decided it could walk the road to independence without me, there is a clause in the party’s constitution that prevents them from entering into a formal coalition or agreement with the Tories. The clause was placed there by ordinary members after a previous SNP Westminster Group - there were just three of them at the time - had voted with Thatcher’s government on one issue.

For some of us - and I’m pleased to say I played my part in the issue by speaking in the debate at the party’s National Council - one vote of support for the Tories was one too many.

So SNP support for the Tories should be ruled out. If the Lib Dems have any sense - and that is a big question - they, too, should reject any plan that would see them shore up a Conservative Government that will cut spending to the bone, slashing services in the process and destroying families and communities by throwing thousands onto the dole. Let’s face it, they have previous on that one.

The best chance the Tories have of securing support is from Ulster Unionists, but that would not be enough to govern with a majority of votes.

So, what is left? Do the Lib Dems prostitute themselves, abandoning any pretence at principle and get into bed with the Tories? Or do we really have to settle for a government of the second and third-best politicians, as decided by the UK electorate?

Time, and political ambition, will tell.

There is, of course, another avenue down which the UK could travel. If no party can govern, even with a coalition, there would have to be another election. That is what happened back in 1974. Then, Harold Wilson’s Labour Government did manage to secure a majority in the second election, but of just four.

This time, what could we expect? Would people be galvanised into ensuring there was no repeat of the hung parliament we currently have? Would they decide on firm government from Cameron and the Tories, or would Labour under a new, more charismatic, leader be a different, more appealing prospect?

Again, time will tell if that is a route we eventually follow.

Meanwhile, there is the Scottish Question. We again have the prospect of a Tory Government, lording it over our nation, but with only one MP representing a Scottish seat. Now, that clearly is unfair. It’s the return of the democratic deficit.

However, having said that, what would happen if Labour and the Lib Dems did manage to cobble together a UK administration, with the support, maybe, of the SNP. Would the people of England not feel aggrieved that legislation was being imposed on them, partly due to the votes of 41 Labour, 11 Liberal Democrat and 6 SNP MPs, all elected from Scottish constituencies?

Actually, there is a very simple resolution to all the horse-trading and hypothetical scenarios. Why don’t we just go for ‘Devolution Max’ or independence as some of us still like to call it.

Let’s have the Scottish Parliament with all the powers and responsibilities of a normal nation, and let’s take decisions for ourselves, in the interests of the people of Scotland.

The current SNP Government in Edinburgh is a minority administration. For it to get its legislation through parliament, it has to persuade other parties to support the proposals. That is a sign of strong democracy. Where political opponents reach agreement in the nation’s interests.

Let England elect whatever government its people want, and let’s see Scotland once again become a full sovereign nation.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com May 1 2010

Events

 When asked by a journalist what was most likely to blow a government off course, the late Harold MacMillan, Conservative prime minister from 1957 to 1963, famously replied, “Events, dear boy, events.”

Last Wednesday morning, as 65 year-old Rochdale woman Gillian Duffy put on her coat to nip to the local shop for bread and milk, no-one had any idea that an ‘event’ was about to happen.

As Mrs Duffy walked down her street she came across a media scrum. Journalists, broadcasters and technicians swarmed around a man who was walking up the street, beaming a smile at everyone and calling, “Hello, how are you? Nice to see you.”

The man, as we all now know, was prime minister Gordon Brown, and he was walking up Mrs Duffy’s street as part of Labour’s new election strategy to have the country’s leader meet ordinary people, rather than take questions from Labour activists at stage-managed meetings.

It must have seemed like a good idea at the Labour strategy meeting. Indeed, to be fair, had Gordon Brown not been a control freak with a nasty, bullying streak, it might just have worked.

Gillian Duffy was very much ‘ordinary people’ and, given she had been a Labour voter all her days, she was an ideal person to have the prime minister speak with to show his human side.

Things actually went well during the couple’s exchange in the street. Mrs Duffy explained she was Labour but, like so many people who have voted for the party in the past, she had concerns about how the country had turned out after thirteen years of government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The questions asked by Mrs Duffy were legitimate and were put politely to the prime minister. There were no problems and they parted in a friendly manner, with Gordon Brown commenting on Mrs Duffy’s “good family” and calling back how nice it was to have met her, as he made for the back-seat of his car.

Labour’s spin-doctors and campaign organisers must have been silently congratulating themselves on a good piece of election PR - until Mr Brown started speaking to an aide in the car.

Labour had asked Sky News to provide a radio mic for the prime minister, so that his words of wisdom could be clearly heard while he met ‘ordinary people’. Sky provided the equipment but did not have time to retrieve it before Mr Brown walked off and got into his official car. The mic, therefore, was still pinned to the prime minister’s lapel and was still live.

Now, that in itself need not have been a bad thing. Sound engineers back at Sky News Centre could very well have picked up a growling Gordon Brown complaining about his new shoes nipping or asking if anyone had caught that nice lady’s name. We might have heard the prime minister suggest it would be a nice touch to send Labour-supporting Mrs Duffy a card or some flowers.

We could have heard that but, of course, we didn’t. What we actually heard from the live mic still pinned to the premier’s lapel was the real Gordon Brown. The public face had gone - that ridiculous smile and the chirpy calls of ’how are you’ and ‘nice to see you’ - and in its place was the blaming, bullying Brown.

“That was a disaster,” he scowled. “They should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? I think it was Sue.”

The prime minister had felt it was not right that an ordinary person - during his meeting with ‘ordinary people’ - had been able to question him on issues of policy, even though the questions were perfectly legitimate, and had been asked in a civilised manner by a Labour supporter. So angry was Mr Brown that his closest personal aide, Sue Nye, was to ‘get the blame’ for allowing this to happen.

Then, of course, the real Brown went further. Raging at the staff member by his side in the car, he said, “She was just a sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be Labour. I mean, its just ridiculous.”

Other than the Leaders Debates that have propelled the Liberal Democrats into a challenging position, Gordon Brown’s encounter with Gillian Duffy - more accurately his reaction to it - could very well turn out to be the ‘event’ that defined this General Election campaign.

Of course, after the ‘event’ the Labour machine went into full damage-limitation mode. The prime minister had apparently simply misunderstood what Mrs Duffy had said and, naturally, he apologised for his comments about her. No-one believed them - we had all heard Brown for ourselves and knew he meant every word - but even the best damage-limitation exercise can only work with the material at its disposal. The flaw in this particular exercise was Brown.

Back went the prime ministerial car to Mrs Brown’s street in Rochdale, and into her house went the prime minister. Apparently after apologising, Mr Brown re-emerged to face the ranks of television cameras. With that stupid, ridiculous smile back on his face, Gordon Brown said, “I’m mortified.” No, Gordon, you’re grinning like a Cheshire cat. Surely people who are mortified by their actions show some contrition and humility?

Meanwhile, in North Ayrshire & Arran, another ‘event’ had just taken place. Philip Lardner had been the Conservative candidate in the constituency since 2006, fighting the Scottish Parliament Election of 2007 and squaring up to Labour for the UK contest on May 6.

I’ve met Philip Lardner a few times. I oppose virtually every policy he advocates, but he struck me as decent guy. Now, that’s as close to a compliment as you will ever hear me give a Tory.

When Philip Lardner sat down to write an explanation of what he believed should be the position regarding the teaching of sexuality in schools, I don’t for a minute think he set out to offend anyone. That said, the view that homosexuals are not ‘normal’ is wrong and is clearly hugely offensive. To someone who is gay, being a homosexual is as perfectly normal as is being a heterosexual to me or, for that matter, to Philip Lardner.

It was also wrong for Mr Lardner to argue that Section 2a of the Local Government Act should have been retained. This was the legislation introduced by Margaret Thatcher which banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools. In fact, what the law did was prevent guidance teachers from properly counselling young people who were questioning their sexuality. The reality was that a pupil could confide in a teacher that they believed they might be gay, but the teacher was prohibited, by law, from reassuring the young person that their feelings were okay and acceptable. To have provided such reassurance would have left the teacher open to allegations of ‘promoting homosexuality’ and therefore to prosecution.

The Scottish Parliament abolished Section 2a (also known as Clause 28) when it passed the Ethical Standards in Public Life Etc (Scotland) Act in June 2000.

Philip Lardner’s ‘event’ has resulted in his suspension as the Conservative candidate and from his position as a primary school teacher.

It’s strange how normal, everyday things, like meeting ‘ordinary people’ or setting out your thoughts on a particular issue can have such serious ramifications.

We now await the ‘events’ of next Thursday (May 6), when ‘ordinary people’ have the power to shape our country for the next five years.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com April 24 2010

Manipulating the election result

 The unprecedented upsurge in Liberal Democrat support, according to polls conducted mainly in England, is a direct result of the performance of Nick Clegg in the first televised Leaders Debates.

Two things immediately spring to mind: firstly, how television now shapes our lives; and secondly, how unfair to Scotland is the UK broadcasting system.

Taking the second point first, if the leader of the Scottish National Party, Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond, had been included in the televised debate, he would have wiped the floor with the three leaders of the British Unionist parties. Salmond is a ‘big beast’ in political terms and an excellent debater. The case for Scottish independence would have been enhanced through Salmond’s participation in the debate, and the (apparent) stellar advancement of the Lib Dems would not have happened.

Nick Clegg is Tony Blair-lite. With Salmond in the debate, articulating a pro-Scottish position, Clegg would have been exposed as just one more British Unionist, committed to keeping Scotland in its place, performing a very junior role within the United Kingdom - while funding government spending through revenue generated from oil lying within the Scottish sector of the North Sea.

Television catapulted Nick Clegg into the limelight and advanced the Liberal Democrats in UK polls, mainly because he was not Gordon Brown or David Cameron, and because he could string a few sentences together.

Clegg portrays himself as a man-of-the-people, representing the mainly working class constituency of Sheffield Hallam - but what do we, the public, actually know about the new (apparent) darling of British politics?

Nick Clegg was born in 1967 and brought up in the very well-to-do town of Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire. His mother was born in Indonesia to Dutch parents, and his half-Russian father was a banker. The Russian side of his family were aristocratic landowners before the peasants took back their country.

Clegg was educated at the private Royal College of St Peter School - located in the precincts of Westminster Abbey - where fees now run at around £30,000 per year, and then Cambridge University. Following graduation, he worked for a while as a reporter on the Financial Times and then as an aide to EU Commissioner - and former Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer - Sir Leon Brittan.

The man is even more of a toff than former Bullingdon Club member David Cameron.

Then there is ‘middle class’ Gordon Brown, with his moral compass that, under his leadership of the UK Treasury and then the country itself, pointed him to policies that allowed the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer - not to mention sending hundreds of young British service personnel to kill and be killed in illegal and unwinnable wars.

If we play the British Unionist political game, it is from those three that we must select the person to run our country. What a choice?

In Scotland, we can of course choose to opt out of the British game: we can choose to get off our knees and govern ourselves, like a normal nation. In Scotland, we can vote for independence.

However, having said that, those of us in Scotland are not allowed to hear the independence argument put directly to those who would deny us the opportunity to take control of our own resources and build a country where policies were developed in the interests of the people.

The British Unionist political parties and the British media (more accurately the London-based English media) have decreed that only the two toffs and the middle class ‘son of the manse’ should be heard. That is unfair.

In 2007 Scotland elected a Scottish National Party Government, and that party should not be excluded from ‘Leaders Debates’ broadcast in our country. What has been agreed by the British Unionist parties and media is little short of manipulation of the UK Election.

Television now shapes our lives to such an extent there is all probability that more people will have cast a vote during the last series of the X Factor than will elect a government on May 6.

The power of television is immense. Through that power, Nick Clegg was allowed to present himself as a ‘regular sort of guy’ (where have we heard that before?) and to enter living rooms up and down the UK, including Scotland, with his Liberal Democrat message. The governing party of Scotland was denied that opportunity.

Through the power of television, the Lib Dems have had their election campaign boosted beyond their wildest dreams. The same happened in 2005: the then Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, was the darling of TV shows, such as Have I got News For You, and was never off our screens during the campaign. As a consequence, in North Ayrshire & Arran the Lib Dems achieved their best-ever result, despite having an almost invisible candidate, few activists, and having done very little local campaigning.

This time, the Lib Dems have just selected a candidate for the constituency that includes Ardrossan, Saltcoats and Stevenston. Just two weeks from election day, the party finally got round to naming the person for whom they want us to vote. As detailed in the News Section of the3towns.com, the candidate is Mrs Gillian Cole-Hamilton, an Edinburgh teacher.

The Lib Dems have not taken seriously the Ayrshire & Arran seat: their extremely late selection of a candidate is treating local people with contempt. Without a shadow of doubt, the Lib Dems do not deserve support from local people - yet the power of television, and the rigged Leaders Debates broadcast into our homes, mean that we are told the party is neck-and-neck with the other two British Unionist parties and could be kingmakers after polling day. Anyone who only gets their political news through the British media could be fooled into believing the Liberal Democrats are contenders in North Ayrshire & Arran. That is the power of television, and it clearly demonstrates the unfair way Scotland and individual constituencies are treated.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com April 17 2010

Creating divided communities

 If someone told you Ardrossan was in line for a makeover that would include the creation of a cinema, a number of bars, a retail centre with shops selling clothes, food, shoes, household goods, newsagents, cafes and a separate industrial centre housing all trades - you might doubt the plan was genuine, but you would surely welcome the vast improvement on the town’s current situation.

Then, what if a similar plan was unveiled for Saltcoats and Stevenston too - each town with its own commercial, retail and social facilities?

Would you think such plans were just too good to be true? How could towns like Ardrossan, Saltcoats and Stevenston sustain such facilities? It would not be viable, would it?

Certainly, those tasked with regenerating the Three Towns appear to stop short of creating the type of facilities described above. For the publicly-funded Irvine Bay Regeneration Company, ‘regeneration’ means little more than building flats and houses and hoping that people who work in Glasgow might buy into the idea of working in the city but living by the sea.

Irvine Bay wants to extend the suburbs of Glasgow to the shores of the Firth of Clyde. The company’s plans - not even original, they are copied from an American idea that centred around the city of Boston - provide little for those of us who actually live in the Three Towns but don’t work in Glasgow, they provide very little for the majority of local people, those who don’t earn enough to buy the new flats and houses that have sprung-up around Ardrossan Harbour.

Of course, Ardrossan Harbour is no longer a commercial port. It is a yachting marina, home to the play things of the rich. In its previous incarnation, men worked at the harbour, they loaded and unloaded ships from every corner of the globe.

The town of Ardrossan was built around the harbour, but gradually the commercial operations were allowed to close - the shipyard went, the numbers of Dockers dwindled as shipping was directed to other ports. Still, today, the vast majority of goods transported around the world travel by ship, but those who landed jewels like Ardrossan Harbour after Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher scrapped the National Dock Labour Scheme and privatised the ports, had other ideas for the facilities.

‘Rationalisation’ saw the bosses direct shipping to fewer ports, reducing their operating costs and maximising their profits. Meanwhile, Dockers in ports like Ardrossan were made redundant and the facilities they left behind were targeted for ‘regeneration’.

I was the councillor for Ardrossan North when plans were first discussed about creating a yachting marina at the town’s harbour. Alone amongst the 30 members of the Council at that time, I objected to such plans. I admitted my bias - being the son of a Docker - but raised questions I thought had to be answered before marina plans could be progressed.

I pointed out that, if a marina was constructed it would mean the end of Ardrossan as a commercial port - the large cargo vessels that used Ardrossan could not be accommodated if the harbour basin was turned over to small sailing craft. I asked where new jobs would be created when the Dockers jobs were lost forever. In response, I was told the marina would generate more work for local people than had been employed at the dock before it closed. I didn’t believe it then and, regrettably, my scepticism has proved well founded.

The ‘regeneration’ of Ardrossan has seen the town’s main employer destroyed, to be replaced by yachts and housing most local people can’t afford. So what about the marina-related employment? It didn’t happen.

Very few people are needed to operate the movement of yachts, and service-side jobs didn’t materialise because the boats’ owners bring with them everything they need for their short sailing trips. The Asda store has provided a number of mostly part-time, relatively low-paid jobs near to the harbour, but the profits from the supermarket wing their way across the Atlantic into the coffers of the mighty Wal-Mart organisation: very little feeds into the economy of the Three Towns.

Saltcoats and Stevenston can tell a similar tale with the demise of the ICI factory - actually factories - at Ardeer. Well-paid jobs were lost when firstly the Nylon Plant closed, to be followed by the Organics Division and then the Nobel’s Explosives Company.

Now, the talk is of ‘regenerating’ the Ardeer peninsula, with private housing, water-sports facilities and a golf course. Presumably, once again, the people at whom the idea of buying into the lifestyle of ‘living-by-the-sea’ and enjoying ‘water-sports and golf’, are those working in Glasgow.

The people overseeing the ‘regeneration’ of the Three Towns are working to a plan that designates Ardrossan, Saltcoats and Stevenston as dormitory towns. The houses being built are for those who decide to live by the sea and commute to their work in Glasgow. The facilities being created are targeted at the leisure hours of the same people. Even shopping facilities are becoming ever more remote from the majority of local housing. Car owners can choose between Asda, Sainsbury‘s, Morrison’s or Tesco, but many have to make do with the limited choice and higher prices of convenience stores.

The ‘regeneration’ of the Three Towns is creating divided communities. Very little is being done for the indigenous populations, most notably in the area of job creation.

So, what of the plan to makeover Ardrossan with the creation of a cinema, a number of bars, a retail centre with shops selling clothes, food, shoes, household goods, newsagents, cafes and a separate industrial centre housing all trades - with similar facilities in Saltcoats and Stevenston?

Actually, those are the facilities the towns had in the 1930s, during the great depression, when things were much tougher than anything we currently face.

Those were the facilities the towns had until the last ‘regeneration’ in the 1970s: those were the facilities the towns had until capitalists took decisions to maximise their profits at the expense of local people.

If we want those kind of facilities again, we must first dedicate our ‘regeneration’ efforts into job creation. We need local jobs for local people: well paid, sustainable jobs that allow families to live locally and contribute to their communities.

If current ‘regeneration’ plans continue to be pursued, we face the prospect of ‘them and us’ towns, where local people live in relatively poor-quality housing with little prospect of well-paid work in the area, while those who can afford the seafront housing in the ‘regeneration zone’ commute to their work in Glasgow and drive to Irvine to get their shopping at the 24-hour Tesco.

We need to abandon American plans for ‘regeneration’ and, instead, start to put life and work back into local towns.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com April 10 2010

Good and bad councillors

Last Wednesday’s meeting of North Ayrshire Council confirmed two things. Well, it confirmed a number of things, but the two most striking points to emerge from proceedings were the effectiveness of Independent councillors John Hunter and Ronnie McNicol, and how whenever decisions have been taken that impact negatively on local people, one Labour councillor is always there.

Investigations and questioning by John Hunter (Ardrossan & Arran) have revealed that North Ayrshire Council axed Wardens from public sheltered housing complexes but, incredibly, continued to fund such cover in ‘private’ housing association facilities.

At the time the decision was taken to remove Wardens from Council units, in February 2008, Labour councillors claimed a new system of care would be introduced that would be even better than the face-to-face assistance offered by Wardens. The reality, as is so often the case, did not live up to the rhetoric.

In sheltered housing around North Ayrshire, residents now have to go without the practical help a Warden could offer in a whole range of areas, from making sure someone was okay and had eaten that day, to assistance with filling-in forms and contacting health and social welfare professionals when needed. The remote care service introduced by the Council falls far short of what was provided by on-site Wardens.

Let’s be under no illusions, the Labour administration of North Ayrshire Council, supported by two Liberal Democrats and Independents Margie Currie and Liz McLardy, axed Wardens to save money. They claimed the action would save the local authority around £230,000 a year - but what they didn’t say at the time was that they were funding Wardens in ‘private’ facilities, and would continue to do so.

The fundamental question that must be answered is why it was considered appropriate and acceptable for residents in Council-owned sheltered housing to be denied warden-cover, when the local authority - paid for from our taxes - was forking out so that people in housing association facilities could have a better service.

Now, don’t get me wrong. No-one is attempting to deny Wardens to the housing association residents. They need them every bit as much as those in Council-owned facilities needed them. The issue is North Ayrshire Council’s removal of Wardens from public facilities - to save money - while continuing to spend money to provide Warden cover in non-Council units.

The bottom line is that Wardens should not have been removed from Council sheltered homes. Residents in the local units should have continued to enjoy the level of service and support received by their counterparts in housing association complexes.

Now we come to the crux of the matter. At last week’s Council meeting John Hunter asked the Communities portfolio holder, Cllr Peter McNamara, if he knew the local authority was funding Wardens in ‘private’ facilities when it took the decision to remove this cover from Council-owned units. Cllr McNamara indicated that he had not known.

The Labour leader of the Council, Cllr David O’Neill, said that Council Wardens had been funded from the Social Work budget, while Housing had paid, and continues to pay, for such cover in housing association complexes.

The Labour portfolio holder for Housing, Cllr Tom Barr, confirmed that he, too, had not known about the situation when the decision was taken to remove Wardens from Council units.

However, John Hunter was able to show that, while funding may have been directed into two separate budgets - Social Work and Housing - the money for both had originally come from the same Council source.

Now we have the fundamental question about who is actually running North Ayrshire Council. Here is the theory: we, the public of North Ayrshire, elect thirty people to run public services and facilities on our behalf. Those thirty people are called councillors and they are ‘the Council’.

Those councillors employ staff, on our behalf, to provide us with the public services and facilities we require.

Within local government there is a thing called the ‘member-officer dichotomy’. That essentially means the fundamental dividing line between the responsibilities of councillors and members of staff. Essentially, councillors formulate policy - they decide what services and facilities they are going to provide - and members of staff carry out those policies - they actually deliver the services and facilities.

The Labour portfolio holders for Communities and Housing, in their statements indicating they did not know what was happening within the Council departments for which they have responsibility - and for which they are paid an additional sum of money as a Special Responsibility Allowance - seems to point the finger at staff members acting to formulate policy, in addition to also carrying it out. If that is the case, then those members of staff have crossed the line (the member-officer dichotomy) and it is them who are running the Council, not the Labour administration elected by the people.

The admission made by Cllr Peter McNamara and Cllr Tom Barr at last week’s Council meeting could have very serious implications. Put bluntly, either McNamara and Barr really did not know what was happening, which means they are incompetent - or they both believe that officers of the Council had decided on a policy to fund Warden cover in ‘private’ housing association sheltered housing units and, at the time elected councillors were considering axing the same cover from Council facilities, the officers did not tell them what was happening.

The two councillors are essentially saying that staff members allowed councillors to take a decision to remove Warden-cover from public sheltered housing without having the full information available to them - very pertinent information regarding Council funding of the same service in ‘private’ complexes.

Such an allegation against professional members of staff at North Ayrshire Council is as serious as it gets - yet that is the inescapable conclusion of the denial by McNamara and Barr that they knew what was going on back in February 2008.

Meanwhile, another independent councillor, Ronnie McNicol (Saltcoats & Stevenston) also exposed an issue that happened on Cllr McNamara’s watch.

Before the last Council election in 2007, Labour councillors told the public of Saltcoats that the Town Hall in Countess Street would receive a refurbishment costing around £3m.

After the election, the Labour administration of the Council scaled-back the cost of the Town Hall refurbishment proposals to around £1m. Now, Cllr McNamara and his Labour colleagues have decide to spend nothing, and Saltcoats Town Hall has been left to rot.

John Hunter and Ronnie McNicol are doing exactly what councillors should do, they are looking after their constituents and are holding the Labour administration to account for its actions.

However, when something impacts negatively on local communities - loss of open space at Laighdykes playing field, poor quality football pitches, a poor quality school, old people having to do without Wardens, Saltcoats Town Hall refurbishments abandoned - they always seem to happen under portfolio headings for which one particular councillor has responsibility.

Cllr Peter McNamara swapped Saltcoats for Ardrossan at the last election, and moved from Labour spokesman on Education to Communities. Perhaps he thinks it is harder to hit a moving target.

Mr McNamara’s admission last week that he did not know what was happening under his watch places the spotlight firmly on him. If, as he claims, he really did not know what was going on, then he is incompetent and should resign.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com April 3 2010

Scotland deserves better

So, this Tuesday (April 6), the country’s worst-kept secret will finally be out in the open - the UK General Election will take place on Thursday, May 6.

The gloves will be off: in less than five weeks time we will go to the polls to elect a government, and we face a stark choice. It is five more years of failure under Gordon Brown and New Labour or back-to-the-future with Tory-boy David Cameron.

Make no mistake, if we play the British Unionist game, we do only have the choice of right-wing New Labour or right-wing Conservative. The Liberal Democrats have no coherent strategy, never mind policy agenda, and they will almost certainly see their vote squeezed by the two bigger UK parties.

In Scotland, we could opt to get off our knees and take control of our own affairs through voting for political parties that favour independence. However, one of the big lies being used mercilessly by both main British parties is that the SNP are an irrelevance at the Westminster Election because they won’t ever be in a position to form a UK Government.

Like all big lies, there is a grain of truth behind it. Of course it is true that the SNP will never form a government in London - but that is not why the party stands candidates at a UK Election. The SNP hopes to secure a mandate for independence by persuading sufficient numbers of Scots to support the party. So, if a majority of Scots voted SNP on May 6 - or if the party secured a majority of Scottish seats - then it would have the right to either hold a referendum on Scottish independence or to directly enter into negotiations with Westminster on the issue of an independence settlement, which would then be put to the electorate in a referendum.

Whatever route the SNP chose, majority support for the party at the election on May 6 would legitimise the next move towards retaking our political independence.

All of which means that, here in Scotland, a vote for the SNP - or other pro-independence parties - is as relevant as a vote for either of the two main British Unionist parties, albeit for different reasons.

Having said that, the pro-British Union propaganda with which we will be bombarded over the next few weeks - not least UK-wide ‘leaders debates’ that feature only the leaders of political parties that support Scotland remaining within the British Union - will mean that the general public is left with the distinct impression that this is a contest between just two parties.

Newspapers, most of which are English titles with a few Scottish stories thrown in to ‘tartanise’ the edition sold north of the border, will report the election from an English perspective. The fascist British National Party (BNP) will get as much coverage as the Scottish National Party (SNP), despite the fact that here, in Scotland, the SNP forms the government and the BNP has no relevance whatsoever.

As far as the London-centric print and broadcast media is concerned, the choice we face is between Brown and Cameron. The bias of omission - not reporting the SNP or other pro-independence parties - is as bad as actively carrying anti-SNP or anti-independence stories.

Of course, there are distinct Scottish newspapers, and these will major on issues affecting Scotland, but they, too, will edit overall coverage in terms of Labour or the Tories forming the next government of the UK.

Only the Herald and Sunday Herald give fair coverage to the idea of Scottish independence. Neither newspaper actually supports an independent Scotland, but at least they are open to persuasion.

The Scotsman and its sister paper Scotland on Sunday have seen their readership figures plummet over recent years, partly because their owners have continued to support the Tory cause in a country that returned just one Conservative MP at the last General Election. In Scotland, there is little appetite for the Tory editorials carried by the Scotsman, but still one of only two ‘serious’ Scottish newspapers - the other being the Herald - will punt the Conservative line throughout the forthcoming election campaign.

In terms of tabloid newspapers, Scotland’s big two are on opposite sides of the British political argument, with both firmly set against the SNP and independence.

Scotland’s biggest-selling tabloid is now the Sun, which has switched its support from New Labour to the Tories. Close behind is the Labour-supporting Daily Record. When seen in the context of having no national newspaper that supports its cause, the rise and electoral success of the SNP is all the more remarkable.

At this election, the Sun will trot out the Tory line, and the Record will regurgitate Labour press releases. Yet again, both titles will print British Unionist propaganda and will tell us the contest is between Labour and Tory, with the SNP an irrelevance.

However, the biggest lies will come from the British Unionist political parties themselves. We only have to look to last weekend’s Labour Conference in Glasgow to see how the British parties will attempt to con the people of Scotland.

The conference of the Scottish Sub-Section of the British (English) Labour Party saw Gordon Brown give the keynote speech. Actually, there is a question to try on your mates: Who is the leader of the Labour Party in Scotland? The answer is Gordon Brown. Iain Gray is only allowed to call himself the leader of the Labour Party in the Scottish Parliament.

In his speech, Brown said the SNP’s plans for independence had been exposed by “the failure of Scottish banks,” which, he claimed, “had been successfully bailed out only because Scotland was in the Union”. Unfortunately, this is the standard of misrepresentation we are going to get in the weeks leading up to May 6.

The reality is that the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland are not national ‘Scottish’ banks. The are privately-run, multi-national corporations who retained headquarters functions in Scotland.

These banks collapsed not in an independent Scotland, but in a Scotland within the Union, with economic and financial policies and regulations set by the Labour Government in London.

An independent Scotland would not have found itself in the position the UK did when the capitalist system imploded. Norway, the closest thing we have to how an independent Scotland would look - given population size and ownership of North Sea oil - did not even go into recession. Norway did not have to act to bail-out its banks because its economy was in a much healthier state than that of the UK.

The British Unionist political parties will lie their way through the coming election campaign, and compliant pro-Union newspapers will report their lies and distortions.

Scotland deserves better.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com March 27 2010

Judging the actions of MPs

Just when you thought politicians couldn’t sink any lower, up pop former Labour Ministers Stephen Byers, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon.

Caught on camera by Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, the three MPs touted themselves to a fictitious lobbying company, with Byers describing himself as a ‘cab for hire’ at between £3,000 and £5,000 per day.

The former Cabinet Ministers told a woman, whom they believed to be working for an American head-quartered lobbying company, that they could help her clients gain access to people in positions of power within the government, and could even help change legislation.

It was bad enough when MPs were charging us for decorating their homes and cleaning their moats, but this latest development takes Westminster sleaze into a whole new dimension. If former Government Ministers are prepared to help change the laws of this country to suit corporate clients – even those from outwith the UK – then the principles of an elected democracy are torn to shreds.

Who is to say that corporate money did not buy the Thatcher Government’s policy on trade unions? Big business would surely consider it money well spent to fund a change to laws that resulted in it being much more difficult for workers and their union representatives to safeguard jobs, wages and conditions.

Is it possible that British and American arms manufacturers could have secured parliamentary votes in support of illegal wars, from which their companies made massive financial profits? Who knows? The bottom line is that Byers, Hewitt and Hoon were caught, but how many of their predecessors have secured similar ‘cab for hire’ deals when Channel 4 cameras were not there?

The Tories have spent the best part of the last week claiming that Labour was still in hock to trades unions. Specifically, we were told that one of Labour’s biggest funders was the union Unite, whose members are currently involved in industrial action with intransigent bosses at British Airways (BA).

The problem for the Tories is that, while Unite certainly does pay millions of pounds into Labour coffers, the leaders of New Labour are quite prepared to bite the hand that feeds it. From Gordon Brown down, Labour Ministers have not been slow to condemn striking cabin crew and to side with the bosses of British Airways.

Cabin crew have a legitimate grievance: bosses are trying to rip-up long-standing agreements and impose new terms and conditions that would see workers much worse off. That, however, cuts no ice with New Labour.

The Labour Party used to be the party of the millions, but is now the party of the millionaires. People like Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson are much more comfortable breaking ciabatta with company directors, than sharing beer and sandwiches with trade union leaders.

There is an election only weeks away, and right-wing English newspapers would crucify New Labour if the party actually sided with the workers in the current BA dispute. Irrespective of how just is the case of striking cabin crew, New Labour will not support them.

Far from New Labour being in the pockets of trades unions, the movement that once prided itself on being “the people’s party” is now firmly on the centre-right of the political spectrum and is ever-eager to show the inhabitants of boardrooms up and down the country (and beyond our shores) that their interests will take precedence while New Labour remains in office.

Prior to the party’s landslide victory in 1997, senior MPs were dispatched to woo city financiers and corporate directors. In what became known as “the prawn cocktail offensive”, New Labour persuaded the big beasts of the business world – that is, the bosses – that things had changed. No longer was Labour on the side of the workers. It was made clear that, under a New Labour Government, the spivs and speculators could continue to make “loads-a-money”, as they had done under the Tories. Peter Mandelson, one of the architects of New Labour, summed up the transformation of the party when he said, “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.”

Perhaps it was such a mentality, and Labour’s cosying-up to millionaires, which instilled a belief in some MPs that wee jobs working for lobbyists, paying between £3,000 and £5,000 a day, were acceptable.

It should also be borne in mind that the actions of Byers, Hewitt and Hoon did not break any laws. So long as they had not held Ministerial office for twelve months, they were perfectly at liberty to take positions with any company, even those who may have directly benefited from decisions the former Ministers took while in government.

Is it any wonder that the general public is so disillusioned with politicians?

However, having said that, it is the case that the vast majority of MPs, MSPs and councillors work very hard for their constituents. They do not get paid six-figure salaries, do not fiddle their expenses and do not seek highly-paid extra jobs working for companies that hope to unduly influence the democratic process.

In North Ayrshire, while we have recently seen examples of politicians with a liking for claiming public money – such as Labour councillors Peter McNamara and David Munn, and SNP MSP Kenneth Gibson – the majority of our representatives get on with their jobs and keep allowances claims to reasonable levels for the jobs they do, working in our interests.

We should not tar all politicians with the same brush. Obviously, with the UK Westminster Election only a matter of weeks away, it is natural that we will look at the activities of MPs who claimed thousands of pounds in allowances for things such as paying mortgages and furnishing second homes – not to mention those involved in the latest ‘lobbygate’ scandal – but it would be unfair to link other hard-working parliamentarians with the bad apples.

Quite simply, each MP should be judged on their own merits.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com March 20 2010

The chance to have our say

 We are only around seven weeks from the UK General Election. Are you getting excited?

What do you mean, ‘no’?

Latest figures show that, across the UK, 3.5 million people have not registered to vote. Within that figure, of those aged between 18 and 24, a staggering 56% are not on electoral registers, meaning they will have no say on who forms the next government.

For some, omission from the register will be down to something as simple as recently having moved house, and not advising the Electoral Registration Office. However, for the vast majority of ‘the disappeared’, the decision not to have their names on the Electoral Roll is deliberate.

Many people say they have no interest in politics: they believe it has nothing to do with them. There is also a very strong belief among the general public that politicians are all the same, that they are all in it for themselves, and that recent revelations about MPs allowances show none of them can be trusted. Consequently, around 3.5 million people have taken the conscious decision to ‘opt out’ of politics and elections.

However, those people are wrong. They may be disinterested in party politics, but the life of every citizen in this country is intrinsically linked to decisions taken by politicians. To argue that politics has ‘nothing to do with me’, is to fundamentally misunderstand what politicians do.

From a local level - how often our bins are emptied, how and where our children are educated - through national government - how criminals are dealt with, the level of health care we receive - to UK government - how much tax we pay, whether or not young people are sent to war - decisions taken by politicians affect every one of us, every day of our lives.

We are currently in the biggest economic recession since the 1930s, and that didn’t happen because bad pixies cast an evil spell. The spivs and speculators of banks and financial institutions were able to gamble, and lose, with our money because of the economic system adopted by UK, and most western, politicians. The so-called ‘mainstream’ political parties in the UK - Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems - all favour capitalism, which is based on a small group of people exploiting the majority and getting very rich in the process. The theory is that a proportion of the wealth made by the elite will ‘trickle down’ to the rest of us, but capitalism doesn’t work.

Over the past year, capitalism has been exposed as a massive con trick. The capitalists got rich at our expense - and when they seriously messed-up, it was left to us to bail them out.

Not only did UK politicians take the decision to embrace free-market capitalism, they also adopted a ‘light-touch’ regulatory system, which meant that the capitalists were free to do what they wanted, no-one was watching. Then, when capitalism failed, UK politicians took another decision, this time to use more of our money - and borrow billions in our name - to save the necks of the capitalists.

We are in the depths of economic recession, with unemployment going through the roof, because of decisions taken by politicians. The New Labour Government, and the Tories before them, did not have to embrace capitalism, but they did. It was their decision.

North Ayrshire Council is skint. Local people are facing serious cuts to services, while as many as 1,000 local authority staff members could lose their jobs in the near future, which will further impact on the provision of services and on the local economy. This is another consequence of the decisions politicians took to support the capitalist con-trick, and then bail-out the failed capitalists after their house of cards came tumbling down.

We are presently living with the consequences of decisions taken by politicians - decisions and consequences that are having a hugely negative impact on our lives, yet 3.5 million people have ruled themselves out of passing judgement on the politicians who have created this situation.

If we don’t have our names on the Electoral Register, and if we don’t actually vote, then the politicians will get away with it. They have taken decisions that have affected our lives and, in a democracy, the only way we can answer them is through the ballot box. If we want to tell the politicians what we think of their decisions, we have to vote.

However, that brings me to the question I am most often asked at the moment: who do we vote for this time? The question is asked by people who value their vote, but who do not see any political party that deserves their support.

New Labour has been disastrous in government, but the Tories will be even worse. The Conservatives are the original party of capitalism, and once back in power they will squeeze us, through taxation, and the public sector, through reduced funding, in order to direct our cash back into the pockets of the capitalist elite.

The Liberal Democrats are fence-sitters, always hoping to appear as the only sane ones in the political asylum, but all the while offering little of consequence. In North Ayrshire, the Lib Dem’s most recent contribution was to ask the Council to consider a scheme that, effectively, would have privatised local schools.

Of course, in Scotland, we have an alternative not available elsewhere in the UK. The SNP forms the government of Scotland and is currently recording polling levels for the Westminster Election that are almost double what it achieved the last time we chose a UK government, in 2005.

However, in the North Ayrshire & Arran constituency, the SNP candidate isn’t even the party’s first choice. In the selection process, Mrs Patricia Gibson was passed-over in favour of Mr Robert Crawford, who subsequently resigned to take a job in England. So, the question can legitimately be asked, if SNP activists didn’t consider Mrs Gibson to be the best candidate, why should the rest of us vote for her?

So, this election, probably more than any in recent times, presents a difficult choice. To which party or candidate should we give our support?

We’ve got seven weeks till the election, during which time we will be bombarded with leaflets and party political broadcasts. Who knows, we might even get a visit from activists or the candidate themselves, that’s if the parties still believe in actually canvassing for votes.

In the run-up to the election, we should remember what parties have done in the past and scrutinise what they promise for the future. If we get the chance, we should ask individual candidates to explain their party’s actions and why they continue to support the failed capitalist system.

Then, on May 6, we should vote. It’s the only chance we get to have our say, and we should take it.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com March 13 2010

Fears Council is being disingenuous

 In this week’s News Section of the3towns.com, an Ardrossan woman raises her concerns over the future of the Whitlees Community Centre, stating, “I’m not saying the Council is being dishonest, but they are certainly not being upfront about their plans. They aren’t admitting what lies behind their thinking.”

North Ayrshire Council has said it has no plans to close the Whitlees Centre, but many people believe the local authority would like to offload such facilities. Instead, it’s floated that Council bosses have in mind a plan that would see management committees transformed into ‘trusts’, which would take on responsibility for operating and maintaining community centres.

Such a plan would completely alter the role performed by the volunteers who sit on management committees. Presently, they oversee bookings and liaise with Council officials to ensure that facilities are run in the best interests of community groups and individual users. However, were the Council to pursue their ‘trusts’ idea, members of management committees could be expected to assume responsibility for actually operating community centres, with everything that entails, including hiring staff, negotiating contracts for facility management and maintaining the fabric of the building. It would be an entirely different ball game.

The reason North Ayrshire Council is considering such a move relates to finance. Because of the UK Labour Government’s ‘light touch’ regulation of financial markets, spivs and speculators were free to gamble with our money. They lost, and brought the country to its knees. Then, the same Labour Government used more of our money - and borrowed billions of pounds in our name - to bail-out the failed banks. As a result, Labour cannot fund the social services so many people desperately need.

Savage cuts are being imposed across every government department, including the block grant to the Scottish Parliament, which means that, in turn, local authorities are receiving much less money than they had expected. Consequently, Labour-run North Ayrshire Council is to cut around £40 million from budgets funding services to local people.

Savings have to be found and community centres are, apparently, an easy option. If North Ayrshire was to persuade management committees to turn themselves into trusts and take responsibility for running facilities like the Whitlees Centre, then spending could be considerably trimmed. The Council could be expected to hand over community centres, free-of-charge. No doubt they would claim to be ‘giving’ them to local people - but the reality is that local people already own them, through the Council we elect every four years. Not only that, local people already fund community centres through the Council Tax we pay every year. So, the only changes would be that expenditure would be off the Council’s balance sheet, and members of management committees would find themselves as trustees of community facilities.

Actually, there is one other significant change that would arise from a move to trusts: if sufficient income could not be generated to meet outgoings, facilities would have to close, and it would not be the Council who had to take that action, it would be the community-spirited members of management committees, the same people who had been persuaded to become trustees and take on the running of community centres.

That is why many local people believe North Ayrshire Council is being disingenuous when they say they have no plans to close the Whitlees Centre. Having no plans to close the facility is not the same thing as being committed to keeping it open.

Of course, if the Labour administration of our local Council had not ‘invested’ £15 million of our money in Icelandic banks that subsequently collapsed, then money might not be quite so tight.

the3towns.com also reports speculation that the Council has commissioned external auditors to look at the future of community centres and libraries. Setting aside, for the moment, the not inconsiderable cost of hiring external auditors, past experience shows that very few of these reports come to conclusions other than cutting costs and services. The ultimate cost saving would be to ‘privatise’ the facilities, but community centres and libraries are not exactly money-spinners. They are much-needed community facilities, but no entrepreneur is going to bite the Council’s hand off to get control of them.

Therefore, there could be a compromise position, one which would be just as unacceptable to local people - possibly one community centre for Ardrossan, one for Saltcoats and one for Stevenston? We could all probably guess which of the current facilities would be retained and which would close.

Then there is the issue of libraries. One for each Council area, maybe? One library covering the Three Towns?

In the early 1990s I had the honour to be the councillor for Ardrossan North. Back then we were in the teeth of Conservative rule. At every Council meeting the Labour administration would condemn the Tory Government for cuts to local government funding and bemoan how difficult it was to maintain service provision.

Of course, they were right - the Tories did cut local government funding, which meant reduced services - but things were not as bad as they are now. The Tory cuts were nothing compared to New Labour’s cuts, and not even Margaret Thatcher went as far as closing community centres and libraries.

We all know that New Labour is not real Labour, but to have out-Toried the Tories in attacking local government and cutting social services is something of which they should be thoroughly ashamed.

If, at some point in the near future, the Labour administration of North Ayrshire Council brings forward proposals to either close community facilities or dispose of them by passing ownership to trusts, the opposition majority - SNP, Tory, Lib Dems and Independents - should tell them where to stick their plan.

We elect councils to provide us with services and facilities. If Labour cannot do that any longer, then perhaps it is time they stepped aside and allowed others to try.

Of course, that would mean councillors like David O’Neill and Peter McNamara having to give up their enhanced payments. Watch them put their own interests before those of the people of North Ayrshire.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com March 6 2010

We need leaders who will put first the interests of Scots

 There is something wrong with Scottish league football, and the national side’s promising result against the Czech Republic last Wednesday night gives a major clue to what is the problem.

The Scotland side that took the field in Craig Levein’s first match as national coach put down a marker that augers well for the future. With endeavour and skill, Scotland saw-off a strong Czech side, beginning the Levein era with a 1-0 win.

However, just three days earlier, Scotland’s two top club-sides played out a poor match, with members of both teams exhibiting a lack of basic skills and producing only one goal, which came from a goalmouth scramble in the fourth minute of time added-on for stoppages.

The match was, of course, the Old Firm game, and the 1-0 win for Rangers all-but guarantees a second league title in two years will be heading to Ibrox. Over the 90 minutes (94 with time added-on), Rangers were the better team, but only just, and that isn’t saying much, because Celtic were very poor.

The Scotland team against the Czech Republic consisted of, hardly surprising, eleven Scotsmen, and they tried their heart out for ‘their’ team. In the Old Firm fixture, of the twenty-two players on the field at kick-off, only eight were Scots.

Possibly Celtic’s worst player was the on-loan Landry N’Guemo: throughout the game he seemed to have great difficulty finding a team-mate with a pass. N’Guemo grew up in a village called Dschang, which you’ll find in the African republic of Cameroon. I could be wrong, but it is probably safe to say that the young N’Guemo did not grow up with a burning desire to one day play football for Glasgow Celtic. Instead, the African’s commitment to the club is based solely on the considerable pay cheque that slips into his bank account every month.

I singled out N’Guemo only because he was particularly poor in last Sunday’s game, but I could have picked any of the ten Celtic players who started last Sunday’s Old Firm game, and who were not born in Scotland. Actually, of the starting eleven, two were born in Scotland, but one, Aiden McGeady, has chosen to play for Ireland. Scott Brown was the only Celtic player eligible to play for Scotland.

In 1967, Celtic became the first Scottish side to win the European Cup, with eleven players born within 30 miles of Glasgow - Bobby Lennox, from Saltcoats, was the player who lived farthest from Celtic Park. Last Sunday, a very poor Celtic team lined up as follows:

Artur Boric (Poland), Andreas Hinkel (Germany), Josh Thompson (England), Thomas Rogne (Norway), Edson Braafheid (Netherlands), Aiden McGeady (Ireland), Scott Brown (Scotland), Landry N’Guemo (Cameroon), Diomansy Kamara (France), Robbie Keane (Ireland), Marc-Antoine Fortune (France).

Celtic used three substitutes during the game: Darren O’Dea (Ireland), Georgios Samaras (Greece) and Ki Sung-Yueng (South Korea).

Notwithstanding the obvious communication problems that must impact on a team with players who have eleven different ‘first’ languages, it is pertinent to ask how many of the current Celtic side can genuinely claim to understand the history of the club and what it means to the fans? While so many young (and not so young) Scots would give just about anything to wear the green-and-white hoops and play for the team they love, how many of the current Celtic team could make a believable claim to being supporters of the club, beyond the next pay cheque?

By all accounts, the answer to that last question is just two - McGeady, the Scottish-Irishman and Robbie Keane, a genuine Irishman. Speculation continues to suggest that the only Scotsman in the Celtic side, Scott Brown, grew up with an allegiance to Rangers.

The current Celtic side are a team of international mercenaries, whose skills, such as they are, will be made available to the highest bidder. Such a scenario is the name of the game in the world of top-flight football. It’s a business, and a very lucrative one at that.

However, scouring the world for footballing talent only works if you can afford to pay for the best: Celtic, and for that matter Rangers, cannot afford even second-best.

While both sides of the Old Firm currently pay wages of around £20,000 per week to their mercenaries, talented young Scottish players on their books ‘don’t make the grade’. The logic seems to be, if you’ve signed a foreign player, and are paying him such huge wages, you’re going to want your money’s-worth - and so, you’re going to play him.

Since the beginning of this season, I’ve had cause to take-in a number of Under 19 Pro-Youth games, mainly involving Queen of the South, who presently have on their books two local boys, one from Ardrossan and the other Saltcoats.

In each of the Under 19 sides I’ve seen, there have been young boys with exceptional skill. Those boys, with the right training and, crucially, with the right commitment on the part of players and clubs, could certainly, in a few years time, give the likes of Landry N’Guemo or Georgios Samaras a run for their money.

As things stand, though, young Scottish talent will not be given much of a chance to play for either of Scotland’s two top sides.

For that situation to change, Celtic and Rangers need to invest as much in developing young Scottish players as they presently squander on mediocre foreign mercenaries. Just for the record, Rangers were not as bad as Celtic in last Sunday’s game - fielding seven Scots in their starting eleven - but they still had an Algerian, a Bosnian, an American, a Spaniard and two Northern Irish on the field at some point during the 94 minutes.

It might mean a few relatively lean years as the young Scottish players build their skills, but the end result would deliver better and stronger Old Firm teams, with the national side also benefiting from young men finally being allowed to reach their full potential with the best club sides in the country.

Unfortunately, the money-men who run football clubs seem to see the short-term fix as the only option. If they aren’t prepared to build a better Scottish club, using young Scottish talent and developing Scottish skills - substitute ‘country’ for ‘club’ and the same applies in politics - then Scots will continue to suffer, while our money is poured down the drain or, to put it another way, into the bank accounts of over-paid and less-than-competent foreign players - for ’foreign players’ substitute ‘Westminster politicians and bankers’ and, again, the same applies to politics.

In football and politics alike, we need leaders who will put first the interests of Scots and our country.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com February 27 2010

Labour's betrayal of the working class

 In all but name, New Labour launched its General Election campaign last weekend.

The prime minister still has not announced the date of the election - he’s going to hang on, virtually until the last minute - but the speech Gordon Brown made at a rally in Warwick University gave us New Labour‘s campaign slogan - ‘A future fair for all’.

Presumably, we are supposed to take from the phrase that a re-elected New Labour Government will create a society that is fair. However, the slogan could equally mean we are all to receive a fair in the future - I’ve no idea where we would put it, now that the Braes is a car park and Laighdykes a quagmire.

More seriously, though, the New Labour slogan is telling for two reasons. Firstly, the party used the exact same phrase at its 2003 Conference - couldn’t they even be bothered to think up a new one, or do they now simply re-hash slogans the way they have re-hashed Tory policies since being elected in 1997?

Secondly, the phrase does seem to give the game away in terms of New Labour’s failure to create a fair society over the 13 years they have been in power. If a fair society is to be created in the future, then there can be no doubt that our current society, the one created by New Labour, is unfair.

In that respect, the facts do speak for themselves, with the most damning, for New Labour, being that since 1997 the poor have got poorer and the rich have got richer. Under the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, many ordinary working-class people have been plunged into levels of poverty that even the destructive policies of the Thatcher Tory Government managed to avoid.

A year after Tony and Cherie Blair swept into Downing Street, to be met by hordes of party workers waving British Union flags, Peter Mandelson - now Lord Mandelson and the real power behind New Labour - made clear just how much the former ‘people’s party’ had changed. In a speech to California computer company executives, Mandelson stated, “we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. Unfortunately, the time from then until now has also shown that New Labour was equally relaxed about people getting very poor.

Like the Tories before them, New Labour pandered to multi-national corporations, doing everything asked of them to allow profits to be maximised, while the wages and conditions of workers were eroded. The political entity led by Blair, then Brown, went from being the party of millions, to the party of the millionaires.

The people who created the Labour Party will be spinning in their graves at what their organisation has become. Formed to give parliamentary representation to the working-class, Labour, for generations, struggled against the capitalist British establishment, with its vested interests and in-built bias in favour of the very small minority that grew fat on the labour of the workers.

The fight was hard, but the workers, the ordinary men and women of Britain, put their faith in ‘their own’ to look after their interests and legislate to create a fairer society. Labour had some successes: the creation of the welfare state, which provided a safety net for the poor; the establishment of the National Health Service; and a programme of house building that, for the first time, allowed working-class people to live in affordable homes, away from the squalid conditions created by money-grabbing, private landlords.

However, even before Blair, Brown and Mandelson got control of the party, Labour leaders tempered their aspirations for the working-class by bending to the control of the imperialist British establishment. Labour quickly travelled from socialist ideology to government compromise, and the hopes of ordinary people were continually dashed.

Then, along came New Labour, and all pretence of being a socialist party was abandoned. Blair and Mandelson told the party it was unelectable and had to change. The change they advocated was to move to the centre-right of the political spectrum, adopt Tory policies, abandon the founding principles of the Labour movement and turn their backs on the working-class in favour of the bosses and the money-men.

Party members were told that the policies of ‘old’ Labour had been soundly rejected at the polls, and that if they were ever again to form a government, those policies had to be ditched. One Labour MP - the one the people of Cunninghame North had the misfortune to be (mis)represented by for 18 years - went as far as saying the Labour Manifestos at the 1987 and 1992 General Elections had been “fantasy politics”.

That MP was Brian Wilson, and his statement was a reflection of what those in control of New Labour believed. They considered it was the stuff of fantasy to want to create a fairer society; they believed power was more important than principle. What Mr Wilson and the leaders of New Labour in London failed to mention, far less understand, was that those ‘old’ Labour policies had been supported by the people of Scotland. Brian Wilson, himself, had been elected to the UK Parliament in 1987 and 1992, standing on commitments contained in the Manifestos he later described as “fantasy politics”.

Scotland wanted the policies of ‘old’ Labour. Scotland wanted a fair society. Scotland wanted socialist solutions to our country’s problems - but, like the working-class, Scotland was abandoned by New Labour. Labour turned its back on the people it was supposed to help, and on the country that supported it through the long, destructive years of Thatcherism.

Now, as the capitalist Tory policies employed by New Labour over the past 13 years have brought the UK to its knees, we are supposed to believe the party when it tells us it will deliver “a future fair for all”.

We now know, from harsh experience, that New Labour will not deliver a fair society in Scotland or the UK. Neither will the Tories. The Lib Dems? Aye right!

If Scotland wants the fair society for which we continued to vote, while the people of England were electing Thatcher, then we must first take back the power to govern ourselves and elect a government of our choosing, rather than the one England elects and imposes on us.

That will only happen when we re-take our political independence. If we don’t take responsibility for ourselves, we’re destined to have more inequality, more right-wing policies, more people unemployed, more illegal wars, more multi-billion pound nuclear missiles we will never use; and more London-based politicians ripping us off.

When Gordon Brown finally gets round to facing the public at the polls, the choice is ours.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com February 20 2010

That Sturgeon letter

Some politicians really need to grow up.

Calls for the resignation of Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon over the letter she wrote in support of a constituent are completely over-the-top. Anyone who witnessed last week’s First Minister’s Questions at Holyrood, where Alex Salmond defended his deputy, would have seen that the opposition’s resignation calls were nothing more than empty rhetoric on the part of political pygmies who could not lace Nicola Sturgeon’s boots.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Ms Sturgeon was right in providing a letter of support for convicted fraudster Abdul Rauf: I’m simply saying that doing so is not grounds for resignation.

As the MSP for Govan, Nicola Sturgeon was approached by a constituent, who asked for her help. In writing a letter of support for Mr Rauf, Ms Sturgeon was providing that help - it’s what MSPs are supposed to do.

However, it is the content of the letter that has led to charges that Nicola Sturgeon blundered and made an error of judgement. Abdul Rauf had previously served a jail term for fraud and, the reason for his approach to Nicola Sturgeon, was now facing court over charges relating to fraudulently claiming benefit of around £80,000. In these circumstances, was it appropriate for Ms Sturgeon’s letter to enquire whether the presiding sheriff might look at a non-custodial sentence?

The answer to that question has to be ‘no’, it wasn’t appropriate. The sentence handed to a criminal has to be determined by a sheriff, and should not be influenced by a politician. It is entirely proper that the Executive and the Judiciary - those who make the law and those who dispense it - are kept apart. It is, therefore, in this area that Nicola Sturgeon certainly made an error.

Had the Govan MSP simply written a letter in support of her constituent, where she flagged up Mr Rauf’s health problems and his responsibility for a young family, then she could legitimately claim to have done as much as could be expected in the circumstances - after all, the man had essentially stolen £80,000 of public money. It was going beyond this position, asking for a non-custodial sentence to be considered, that was an error of judgement.

It may be that Nicola Sturgeon did not actually write the letter, it might have been composed by a member of her staff - but even if that is the case, Ms Sturgeon signed it, presumably after reading it, and must therefore accept responsibility for its contents. Nicola Sturgeon is a very busy person - MSP for Govan, Deputy First Minister and Health Secretary - but even a lowly back-bench MSP knows they should never sign anything without being aware to what they are appending their name.

So, that is where the fault lies. Nicola Sturgeon made an error of judgment in signing a letter that went too far in support of a constituent facing fraud charges. She made a mistake, who hasn’t?

The mistake was made in her capacity as MSP for Govan: it did not involve her other roles within the Scottish Government. However, that has not stopped political opponents, like Labour’s Iain Gray, Annabel Goldie of the Tories and Tavish Scott of the Lib Dems , from calling for her resignation as Deputy First Minister and Health Secretary.

It seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to any mistake, actual or perceived, for opposition politicians to call for a minister to resign. Nicola Sturgeon’s mistake is not a resignation matter, and the politicians who have demanded that she go have actually diminished their own, already poor, standing. Gray, Goldie and Scott have shown themselves to be little more than political chancers. Certainly, none of the three have the abilities of Nicola Sturgeon, or the respect she has earned since assuming ministerial office.

Nicola Sturgeon has been, by far, the best Health Secretary Scotland’s had since our national parliament was reconvened in 1999. Because of the many problems besetting the Health Service - most of which were caused by the Tory Government of Margaret Thatcher introducing ‘the market’ to the NHS, and New Labour’s continued underfunding of the service - the Health portfolio was seen as a poisoned chalice.

The best Health Minister under the previous Labour-Lib Dem administration was the first, Susan Deacon. However, despite her undoubted talents, even Ms Deacon could not achieve the turnaround in the NHS, and the increase in services to the public - not to mention handling the swine flu pandemic - that Nicola Sturgeon has provided since assuming office in 2007. It would be to the detriment of Scotland if she was forced out because a letter she signed went too far in support of a constituent.

Of course, Scotland’s interest is not what motivates the leaders of Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems. All they are interested in, is narrow party-political advantage and, in their own wee world of politics, they see the resignation of a Government Minister as a victory. We should all bear in mind the actions of Gray, Goldie and Scott when next we go to the polls. Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems have shown that they are prepared to damage the Scottish Health Service to score a cheap political goal.

The Scottish public has a right to expect more from its MSPs. I, for one, have more respect for a politician who attempts to do their best for constituents and country, but who makes an honest mistake, than for those who would, metaphorically speaking, take out and shoot anyone who is found to be not perfect.

It is all the more ironic that those calling for Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation lead parties whose parliamentary groups are filled, almost entirely, with political non-entities, men and women whose limited abilities mean they, themselves, cannot adequately perform the role of MSP, far less Health Secretary and Deputy First Minister.

We should accept that Nicola Sturgeon made a rare lapse in judgement, and then allow her to get on with the roles she performs on our behalf.

Meanwhile, the ‘weans’ in Scotland’s opposition parties should do us all a favour and grow up.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com February 13 2010

Reasons for Council budget cuts

  Last Thursday, North Ayrshire councillors agreed to a budget that sees millions-of-pounds cut from local services.

The area has consistently suffered from the highest unemployment in Scotland, and ‘the recession’ has compounded problems - but the Council’s budget decision is where the irresponsible actions of bankers and financial speculators really begins to impact on the most vulnerable people in our communities.

Services for the elderly will face cuts, while breakfast clubs and after-school care for young children are under threat. We all pay taxes in order that such services can be provided for members of our extended families and friends within local communities, but the UK Labour Government has used our taxes to bail-out unprincipled and unrepentant banks.

While pensioners in Ardrossan, Saltcoats and Stevenston struggle to survive, the financial speculators who caused ‘the recession’ continue to live lifestyles the like of which most of us can only dream. Our taxes were used to ‘socialise’ the multi-billion pound debts of banks and financial institutions - in other words, the debts were passed to us - which has meant these organisations are again able to make profits, which they keep. Not only that, from the new profits, they intend to once again pay obscenely-massive bonuses to senior managers - the same managers who brought the country to its knees with their irresponsible, greedy actions.

So, on this occasion, North Ayrshire Council are not entirely to blame for cuts to services - they are also down to the inherent unfairness of the capitalist system and the actions of the UK Labour Government.

Capitalism, the economic system supported by all of the so-called mainstream political parties - Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems and the SNP - is based on maximising profits for the few by exploiting the majority. The few at the top of multi-national banks and corporations maximised their profits, while the majority struggled to get by. Then, when the corrupt capitalist system collapsed, the majority - you and me - paid to cover the debts of the few. Now, the few are back to their old games, while many of the majority suffer unemployment, home repossessions and reduced or removed services.

We are paying the price of capitalist extravagance and incompetence, and will continue to pay for many years to come. Now, though, our payments are not just in terms of financial bail-outs - now, we are also paying a social cost.

The UK Labour Government has used so much of our taxes, and borrowed so much money, that it cannot now afford to fund the public services the country needs. Failure in the private sector has resulted in punishment for the public sector which, in turn, means pain for you and me. That’s the price of embracing the capitalist system.

Now, the failure of capitalism isn’t just a theory. Now, ‘the recession’ isn’t just an abstract concept discussed by politicians and economists on television programmes. Now, it’s all very real.

The UK Labour Government has imposed substantial cuts across all departments, including the devolved Scottish Parliament. This year alone, the SNP Scottish Government will receive half-a-billion pounds less than they had expected.

In turn, the SNP has had to impose cuts to Scottish public services, including local government, which brings us back to the budget passed last week by North Ayrshire Council.

The local authority talks of ‘savings’ and ‘efficiencies’, but what they mean is cuts. The Council is skint, so services will be cut and workers may lose their jobs. Again, while the capitalists look to maximise their new profits and pocket their bonuses, the majority, in this case Council workers and service users, pay the price.

There is no doubt that the biggest impact on the Council’s budgetary decisions is the reduction in public finances caused by the decision to bail-out the capitalist system, but in North Ayrshire there are other factors at play.

While North Ayrshire Council are not entirely to blame for the necessity to cut budgets, the ruling Labour Executive do bear responsibility for decisions that have contributed to the local authority’s straitened position.

For example, embarking on a Public Private Partnership (PPP) project to build and maintain four schools, which will ultimately cost local taxpayers £380 million, was a disastrous decision. Not only is the multi-million pound cost a massive drain on Council resources - the PPP bill has to be paid irrespective of any other considerations, which means the private companies involved will continue to receive their profits while the Council cuts public services - but the schools, themselves, are of poor quality and continue to require substantial repairs.

The North Ayrshire Council Schools PPP Project is notorious. Other local authorities around the country are aware of it and refer to it as a reason not to go down the PPP route when they are considering building projects in their own areas.

Then, there is the small matter of £15 million of Council funds deposited in Icelandic banks that subsequently collapsed. The money is still outstanding.

Financial regulators issued warnings about Icelandic banks long before they collapsed, while one English Council withdrew its funds from Reykjavik because it believed the return being offered was “too good to be true”. North Ayrshire took no notice and no action.

So, overall, the biggest contributory factor to North Ayrshire Council’s financial problems are the corrupt capitalist system embraced by the ‘mainstream’ political parties and the actions taken post-collapse by the UK Labour Government. However, the other, more local, issues are also significant.

When we next get the opportunity to vote, at national and local level, we must make sure we get rid of the politicians who have caused the dire situation we now experience. They failed us, and we are now paying the price.

Next time, let’s vote for candidates and parties who put people before profit.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com February 6 2010

The people should have their say on defection

 John McNamee of Blantyre made a few ripples in the political pond this week by declaring he no longer believed in independence and, therefore, he was quitting the SNP and joining Labour.

Mr McNamee is an elected councillor on South Lanarkshire Council, so his decision means the SNP Group are down one member, while Labour’s number goes up. That is the headline issue in Cllr McNamee’s actions, but there is also the matter of how someone who apparently believed in the right of the Scottish people to govern themselves, now thinks that is not a good idea.

Clearly, there will be people in Blantyre who voted for an SNP councillor and who will now be concerned that the person they elected is to take his voting instructions from Labour. Those people are right to be concerned.

Now, before any of the less intelligent members of the SNP rush to condemn me for hypocrisy, given that in a previous life I was elected as an SNP MSP, only to end up serving as an Independent, I should point out there is a crucial difference between what Cllr McNamaee has done and my own situation.

I did not leave the SNP; I did not resign from the party; my commitment to an independent Scotland was, and remains, undiminished; I had not changed my views from the day I was elected as an SNP MSP. The reason I ended up out of the SNP was because I was expelled by the party.

The SNP took the decision to kick me out, in the full knowledge that it would be reducing its number in parliament by one. It was the party’s decision, not mine. However, that did not stop some of the more intellectually challenged SNP members - leadership loyalists every one - from calling for me to resign as an MSP.

If those calling for my resignation had their way, it would have meant the party leadership could expel any MSP with whom they disagreed, and simply replace them with a more obedient member. That really would be the end of freedom of speech within political parties.

Without going into too much detail, the reason I was expelled from the SNP was because I had been a vocal critic of the leadership of John Swinney. Under Swinney, the SNP lost seats, members and votes; the party was in a downward spiral.

I publicly called for Swinney to stand down and for Alex Salmond to return as leader, so that the party could be rejuvenated and its fortunes turned around.

Most people now acknowledge I was right. However, Swinney and a very small group of people around him couldn’t take the criticism and charges were fabricated against me. The party never produced any evidence to support their charges - they couldn’t, there was no truth behind them - but that did not stop the leadership loyalists on the National Executive Committee from finding me guilty and expelling me.

All of which meant I was no longer an SNP MSP. So, should I have resigned and allowed another SNP member to take my place in parliament?

As explained above, I took the decision that I was the same person who had been elected as an SNP MSP and it was the party who decided I should no longer hold that position. In fact, John Swinney recently made a comment to me, in front of a witness, which confirmed that he had been behind moves to expel me and that his motive had been pay-back for my part in ending his leadership.

Had I resigned from the party or had I joined another party after being expelled, then there would have been a case for me standing down as an MSP - but the reality was that the SNP, by its actions, chose to reduce its number in parliament.

I decided to continue working for local people, on the same basis as I had always done. Constituents had the same person representing them, a person who held the same political views as when he was first elected, including support for an independent Scotland.

Which brings us to the crucial difference with the situation involving Cllr McNamee. The South Lanarkshire councillor was elected as an SNP member, but has now fundamentally changed his views and has joined another political party. Electors in Blantyre voted for a councillor who would, amongst other things, support the cause of an independent Scotland. They now have one who is completely opposed to that proposition.

By turning his back on the voters who elected him, McNamee has removed legitimacy from his election and he should resign. If he thinks local electors will back him, even after his complete turnaround in what he stands for, then he should put that to the test at the ballot box. He should force a by-election, stand for Labour and allow the people to have their say.

On the other issue relating to Cllr McNamee’s action - his discovery that he no longer believes in independence - this, without doubt, is a clear sign that he was never actually a Nationalist in the first place.

Once someone has read the facts, rather than British media distortions, and recognises how much more successful and prosperous an independent Scotland would be with full powers over our own affairs, they don’t change their minds and advocate that, instead, our country should just be a region, controlled by another country.

People like Cllr McNamee are chancers, motivated by their own self interest. Usually, it transpires that the SNP had cause for concern regarding them, which prompts the resignation and move to another party. In this case, it has been reported that McNamee had been under investigation by the local SNP group over his expenses and allegations of inappropriate behaviour. It sounds like Labour are welcome to him.

Meanwhile, the people of Blantyre have a Labour councillor for whom they did not vote. If McNamee believes in democracy - literally meaning ‘people power’ - he should let the people have their say.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com January 30 2010

Vote for what we want

The latest British Social Attitudes Survey, published last week by the National Centre for Social Research, appears to show we have moved to the right in political terms.

Amongst the report’s findings were that 33% of people now see themselves as Conservatives; fewer than 40% want to see a redistribution of wealth; and only a similar figure would be prepared to pay more tax to help those less well-off.

In fact, the ‘British’ Social Attitudes Survey is actually the ‘English’ Social Attitudes Survey, which means that, really, there has been little change. It transpires that slightly fewer than 360 Scots contributed to the Survey’s findings.

England has consistently voted for centre-right political parties - Conservative and New Labour - both of whom have fully embraced the unfettered free market, which operates on the basis of exploitation, forcing down wages and workers’ conditions, reducing spending on public services and maximising private profit; while ordinary, working-class tax-payers bail-out the capitalist system when it fails.

Under the Tories and then New Labour, the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer - last week’s Survey showed there are now 1.7 million British children living in “severe poverty”, yet the UK Government can find billions of pounds to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention saving the skin of millionaire bankers and financial speculators, the same people who continue to pay themselves obscene salaries and bonuses.

The British Social Attitudes Survey makes clear that such situations will continue, as England prepares to elect a right-wing Tory Government to replace the right-wing New Labour Government. Meanwhile, Scotland will again reject these policies - and the Tories - but we will still have David Cameron as prime minister. The reason, of course, is because Scotland is heavily outnumbered by England in terms of population within the United Kingdom. That is how our different opinions on taxation, redistribution of wealth and voting intentions were drowned-out in the British Social Attitudes Survey - and why we will have a Tory Government imposed on us, despite rejecting them, yet again, at the ballot box.

The only way Scotland can have the government it wants and for which it votes, is if we re-assume the status of a normal, independent nation. Until we get off our knees and decide to take responsibility for ourselves, England’s opinions will be portrayed as ours and the voters of England will decide who governs us.

Of course, British Unionist political parties - Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems - will argue that Scotland can have the best of both worlds, with a devolved parliament in Edinburgh while remaining part of the United Kingdom.

However, the reality is a bit different to the rose-tinted view of the Unionists. Scotland’s devolved parliament has very few real powers. For example, the Scottish Parliament has no power over Scotland’s economy; it has no power over international relations; we are not allowed to decide whether or not Scottish troops are sent to war. In fact, the Scottish Parliament has so few real powers, it is actually Westminster that takes all decisions relating to Holyrood elections - MSPs don’t get a say. Not only that, the Scotland Act 1998, which established the Scottish Parliament, contains a clause that allows Westminster to overrule any decision taken by the Scottish Parliament. Then, just for good measure, there is another clause that gives Westminster the power to abolish the parliament in Edinburgh, if it sees fit.

It was former Tory and Ulster Unionist MP Enoch Powell who once said, “Power devolved is power retained”, and that is certainly the case with regard to relations between Westminster and Holyrood. The reality is that the Scottish Parliament is entirely answerable to the British (English) Parliament in London. Even the current SNP Scottish Government can only legislate in areas that Westminster has said it can.

The Scottish Parliament has no power over income or corporation tax and, as a result, is extremely limited in what it can do to redistribute wealth and tackle poverty. Yet Scotland consistently expresses support for policies that would achieve both goals - the British Social Attitudes Survey shows England is moving further in the opposite direction.

It’s worth repeating: the only way Scotland can have the government it wants and for which it votes - and can have the policies we consistently say we support - is if we re-assume the status of a normal, independent nation.

Now, clearly, the most obvious way of achieving independence is to vote for the SNP - the party does, after all, already form the devolved government - but would an independent Scotland governed by the Nationalists see the implementation of policies that would achieve a redistribution of wealth and an end to poverty?

The SNP currently operates with a conflict at its core. Without doubt, the social policies it advocates are moderate left-of-centre. The SNP sits comfortably in the social-democratic tradition, but its financial policies tell another story, putting it on the centre-right of the political spectrum, geared towards the capitalist free-market, with low taxation, small government, and a Scotland open to exploitation by the very multi-national corporations that lie behind the current economic recession. It is difficult to marry the party’s social commitments with its advocacy of free-market capitalism.

There are, however, other pro-independence political parties that do advocate policies which chime with the ones Scots have repeatedly stated they support, including a progressive taxation system - where the better-off pay more and those on low incomes pay less - coupled with a redistribution of the nation’s wealth, directed to lift people out of poverty and provide hope and opportunity for everyone.

The irony is that the parties whose policies most closely meet the aspirations of Scots are considered to be outside the mainstream of politics: they have also seen steep declines in their respective vote over recent years. They are the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and Solidarity.

Of course, they used to be one party, and if they are to return to the level of support achieved at the polls in the early Noughties, they need to be united once again.

However, notwithstanding the internal split in the socialist movement, why should it be that votes for the SSP and Solidarity have declined, while Scots apparently support the society their policies would create?

The answer is simple. The media in Scotland is controlled by organisations based in England: news stories are reported from the right-wing, British Unionist perspective of London and the south-east. Just as the British Social Attitudes Survey portrays an English view as being representative of the whole of the United Kingdom, so the London-centric UK news and political coverage misrepresents the opinions of Scots.

Far from being outside the political mainstream, the SSP and Solidarity advocate policies that reflect the traditional Scottish view on the type of society we want. Actually, it is the right-wing, capitalist policies of the Tories and New Labour that sit outside the mainstream of political thinking in Scotland - but English-dominated media and research organisations will never report that reality.

To redress the balance, Scots should be prepared to vote for what they believe in, irrespective of the indoctrination of the British (English) establishment. If we want a Scotland that puts first the interests of Scots, then we need to vote for political parties that support independence - and if we want to create a society where poverty is eradicated, where all of our citizens are treated with respect and provided with the opportunity to build a better life for themselves and their families, then we should be prepared to vote for socialist parties.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com January 23 2010

The law needs changed

  In a previous life, as an MSP, I was a member of the Scottish Parliament’s Public Petitions Committee. Rightly, the Committee has won plaudits for the way it allows the public direct access to parliament and to raise issues of concern.

Unlike petitioning the Westminster Parliament, a member of the public who submits a petition to Holyrood can expect action to be taken, even if it is just to note the matter raised. At Westminster, members of the public cannot directly petition parliament. Instead, a petition is submitted by an MP on behalf of their constituents. However, as one MP told me, submitting a petition involves dropping it into a bag behind the Speakers chair and then forgetting about it.

The Scottish Parliament’s Petitions Committee has become the model for other legislatures around the world - even Westminster MPs have visited Holyrood to see how things are done. During my years on the Committee some very serious issues were raised by members of the public. Probably the most significant was when a petition was submitted on behalf of people who, as children, had suffered abuse, both physical and sexual, while in the care of the state or religious orders.

As a consequence of receiving that petition, the Committee carried out an investigation and, for the first time, requested debating time in order that Parliament could fully consider the outcomes.

The debate on the Victims of Institutional Childhood Abuse was one of the most moving ever heard in parliament. However, the most significant aspect of that day came just prior to the commencement of the debate, when the then First Minister, Jack McConnell, made a public apology on behalf of the state to all children abused while they were in care. For many of those abused children, now adults and sitting in the Parliament’s Public Gallery that day, Jack McConnell’s apology was the long-awaited beginning of the process to right a wrong.

There were other petitions that stood out: one where a woman sought changes to the way a prisoner’s release was notified to victims of crime. Actually, the issue she raised was that, in some cases, victims were not notified and, as happened to her, the first she knew about the release of her violent ex-husband was when she walked into him in her local shopping centre. After representations by the Petitions Committee, Ministers agreed to tighten-up the process of notifying victims of crime about when a perpetrator was due to be released.

Another petition was presented by the family of a young girl who was killed by a speeding driver. They requested a change to the law, so that taking a life on the road would be treated the same as killing someone with a gun or a knife - the car being the weapon used. At present, drivers who kill someone are usually charged with dangerous driving, and if they receive a custodial sentence it is normally of only a year or two. As far as I am aware, that particular petition did not make the progress the girl’s family had hoped. However, the petitions process did allow them to raise the matter at parliament, which brought national publicity for the issue.

Overall, the Committee was used well by members of the public to raise concerns, but there were a few occasions when some attempted to abuse the access it gave to parliament. One such case was a when a petition was presented, apparently by three individuals, which sought to ‘improve’ the planning system in Scotland. When the Committee heard the presentation by the petitioners, it quickly became clear that the three individuals were businessmen and their idea for improving the planning system was to privatise it.

It transpired that each of the businessmen had experienced a situation where a local planning committee had refused their applications for housing developments. The developers then had to go through the process of appealing the planning decision, and they felt the local committee should not have been allowed to delay matters.

What the businessmen wanted was for planning committees to be abolished and, instead, for decisions to be taken by private ‘planning experts’. They wanted to remove the involvement of democratically-elected councillors.

As things stand, communities, through their elected councillors, actually have very little power to prevent big businesses from imposing their will, and their developments, even when local people object to proposals. Planning committees can refuse permission, but if a developer appeals to Scottish Ministers - in fact, the appeal will normally be heard by a civil servant - and that appeal is successful, then the feelings of local people are brushed aside. The only recourse left to aggrieved communities in that situation would be to raise the matter at the Court of Session - but even if successful, the Court cannot reverse the decision of the civil servant, it can only set it aside and ask ‘Ministers’ to reconsider.

Ardrossan has recently experienced two examples of big business imposing its will on the community, against the wishes of local people and North Ayrshire Council’s Planning Committee.

A few weeks ago, Clydeport, owners of Ardrossan Harbour, won an appeal to Scottish Ministers, which overturned a Planning Committee decision to refuse permission for the demolition of the Customs House in Dock Road. The outcome is that one of Ardrossan’s few remaining buildings from the era when the town had a thriving commercial port will be knocked-down.

Then, this week, a civil servant, on behalf of Scottish Ministers, granted permission for Vodafone to erect a 3G base-station and mast on Stanley Road, close to Stanley Primary School and adjacent to the site of a proposed housing development where young families will be expected to live.

The Vodafone proposal was originally turned down by North Ayrshire’s Planning Committee. Councillors listened to local people and decided the mast should not be allowed in that location. However, Vodafone has got its way and the mast will be erected.

Quite simply, the current system is wrong. Big business should not have such power over local communities. Planning legislation should not take precedence over the wishes of local people. Simply because a proposal complies with existing planning rules should not mean that it must be allowed. Communities should have the ultimate say, and if people in a town like Ardrossan want to keep a building of historic significance or don’t want a mobile phone mast next to a primary school, then that is what should happen.

In a democracy, it is wrong that big business can force communities to accept proposals they don’t want.

Councillors on the Planning Committee answer to the people of North Ayrshire and have a duty to listen to the views of local people. Clydeport, through its parent company Peel Holdings, and Vodafone answer only to shareholders and have a duty to maximise profits. In a democracy, who should be taking decisions that affect local towns?

If the law needs to be changed, then the law should be changed. Big business should not be riding rough-shod over the wishes of communities.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com January 16 2010

Elections

 Do you have an opinion on when votes should be counted after an election? If you do, North Ayrshire Council’s relatively new chief executive, Elma Murray, would like to hear from you.

Ms Murray is also now the returning officer for elections held within North Ayrshire, which includes those for the Council, the Scottish Parliament and the Westminster Parliament. The returning officer has responsibility for ensuring everything goes smoothly on election day, from before the polls open at 7:00am until the votes have been counted and the result announced in the early hours of the next day.

In fact, it is the counting of votes in the early hours that most interests Ms Murray and other returning officers around Scotland.

Rumour has it that the officials would rather see the counting postponed until the next day - for example, this year’s UK General Election will take place on a Thursday and, if the returning officers have their way, votes would not be counted until Friday, possibly starting at mid-day, with the result announced in late afternoon or early evening.

Now, that idea has some merit. One positive aspect being that everyone would be able to get a night’s sleep before attending the count at the Magnum in Irvine. However, there are negative aspects.

As someone who has been involved in a few election counts over the years, I much prefer to know the result, sooner rather than later. I think most people from the political side of elections will feel the same. That opinion isn’t just driven by a need to know or a desire to be put out of your misery. Political activists don’t like any time when ballot boxes are out of their site.

If the idea of postponing election counts until the next day is adopted, ballot boxes will have to be stored overnight, and whoever is tasked with watching them will have to be beyond reproach.

Now, the means involved in tampering with sealed ballot boxes would be quite complicated, but it could be done. It is also the case that almost everyone has a political opinion, very few people are completely neutral, so anyone who might have access to ballot boxes containing uncounted votes would be eyed with great suspicion by political parties if a result went against them.

Why create unnecessary doubt? Once the people have voted, get the votes counted and have the result available to the public by the time they get up to go to work on the Friday morning.

There have been stories of ballot tampering for as long as there have been elections. Even in recent years there are two events that stand out. The first happened at the 2003 local government elections in Renfrewshire. In a number of seats the result was very close between Labour and the SNP, and the balance of the entire Council was decided on just one or two Wards.

Labour scraped victory on that occasion, but SNP calls to have ballots checked in a few seats were turned down, after it emerged the counted ballot papers had, apparently, been thrown-out instead of stored. Local authorities have a legal obligation to retain ballot papers.

Then there was the Westminster Glenrothes by-election, where polls predicted a close-run thing between Labour and the SNP. However, as things turned out, Labour won comfortably with a majority of over 6,000.

Such a big margin of victory did not chime with the SNP’s own polling, carried out by party activists prior to the election. Because of that, the party asked to check what are known as the ‘marked-up registers’. These are the lists on which staff at polling places mark-off the names of people who vote on the day of the election. You will have seen it being done when you have voted. You give the person your Polling Card or your name and address, and they score off your name on their list.

The SNP wanted to check the registers, as all political parties are entitled to do, so they could see how many people who had committed to voting for them, subsequently did or did not actually vote.

Unfortunately, the local council ‘lost’ the marked-up registers. That means it is not possible to check who voted, and the SNP could not verify if its ‘identified supporters’ had turned out on polling day. It is also not possible to check if people whose names appear on the Electoral Register, but who have died since the list was compiled, might actually have voted. Believe me, it has happened.

The two examples given relate to post-election issues, but serve to illustrate how security surrounding ballot papers and registers is crucial. If we changed to having election counts the day after the actual vote, then uncounted votes would be handed over to the security of a very few individuals. Who can give a 100% guarantee that none would be lost or thrown out by mistake?

Having said that, there remains another issue where ‘First-Past-The-Post’ ballot papers are counted. A quote attributed to the former Soviet leader Josef Stalin goes, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”

Votes for each candidate are counted be tellers, usually council employees prepared to work through the night to get a bit of overtime. From personal experience of watching tellers do their job, they make very few mistakes. However, once tellers have placed ballot papers into piles for each candidate, they are counted into bundles of 100 and taken to a central table where they are placed onto the main piles for each candidate. A couple of bundles of 100 placed on the wrong pile could swing an election result.

Tellers don’t take the bundles of 100 to the central table, that’s done by a deputy returning officer, usually a senior council official.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that such manipulation of an election result has ever taken place, but the opportunity is there.

The Scottish Parliament Election of 2007 produced the highest-ever number of spoilt ballot papers, and the fact this coincided with the introduction of electronic counting was cited by many as the cause.

However, in reality, ballot papers were spoiled because people were asked to use three different electoral systems on two ballot papers. For the Scottish Parliament there was the First-Past-The-Post system for electing a constituency MSP, then the numerical ranking of candidates for the Additional Member element of the poll. In addition, the North Ayrshire Council Election was conducted on the same day using the Single Transferable Vote method.

That won’t happen again. The Scottish Parliament and Council elections have now been separated and will be held a year apart - parliament in 2011 and council in 2012.

There were problems with the system, but it wasn’t electronic counting that produced spoilt ballot papers.

In Cunninghame North the result saw the SNP take the seat from Labour by just 48 votes. Had the count been done under the old system, where piles of 100 ballots were carried to a central table, one bundle ‘mistakenly’ placed on the wrong candidate’s pile could have altered the result.

Some changes are worth making, but slowing down the process by delaying the count until the next day, and having uncounted votes lying around out-of-sight, would be detrimental to the process. Meanwhile, removing the scope for human influence or error should be encouraged.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com January 9 2010

Bias against the SNP

All broadcasters in the UK are supposed to be politically impartial but, unfortunately, that is not the case. Our so-called ‘national’ broadcaster, the BBC, is biased against the SNP.

BBC Scotland has had to recognise the SNP is now the major force in Scottish politics, given that it forms the government of Scotland, but broadcasters in London still perceive the Nationalists to be a minor party on the periphery of the political spectrum, and treat them as such.

Here is what the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, had to say about the SNP’s concerns over the decision to broadcast Westminster Election debates featuring only the leaders of the main British Unionist parties - Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems:

“ ‘See you in court’. That's the message coming from the nationalists in response to the deal between the three main UK parties and the three main broadcasters.

“They complain that they are the victims of a metropolitan carve-up which ignores their status as major parties in Scotland and in Wales.

“Alex Salmond is reminding all who'll listen of the time a Scottish court injuncted a Panorama interview with Prime Minister John Major in the run-up to local elections in 1995. The court deemed that the broadcast was unfair to other parties in Scotland. I need no reminding since I was deputy editor of Panorama at the time and had to call Downing Street to tell them that the interview would not be seen in large parts of the UK - since TV transmitters do not neatly cover national borders, the courts blacked out coverage in parts of the north of England and Northern Ireland to be sure no Scot would see it.

“This time the broadcasters are offering separate debates for the main parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in addition to the UK leaders' debates.

“They will point out that the nationalists - unlike the Lib Dems - do not have even a theoretical chance of winning a UK-wide election or forming a government.

“Alex Salmond is not even running at the next Westminster election. That won't, I suspect, stop him calling in the lawyers. Even if a court proves unwilling to overturn a deal done by the three main UK parties and three main broadcasters, he will hope to persuade the jury that is Scottish public opinion.”

Robinson’s comments, posted on the BBC web site, are breathtaking in their arrogance and ignorance. Sadly, what borders on cultural imperialism is what we have come to expect from London-based broadcasters who think they are so much more important than the hicks (Jocks) in the provinces.

Let’s start with Robinson’s comment that “they”, the SNP and Plaid Cymru, “complain that they are the victims of a metropolitan carve-up which ignores their status as major parties in Scotland and in Wales.”

The argument put forward by the Scottish and Welsh nationalists is not based on a perception of having been wronged by a decision taken in London by London-based broadcasters and London-based, British Unionist political parties. There is no whimper of ‘poor me’ from the SNP or Plaid. Let’s put to the side Robinson’s patronising tone and, instead, look at the facts: the agreement over broadcasts featuring the leaders of the three main British Unionist political parties was reached without any consideration being given to the different political circumstances that apply in Scotland and Wales, compared with England. Only in England are the three main parties Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems.

In Scotland, the SNP forms the government of the country and is ahead in most opinion polls relating to the Westminster Election. Of the three main parties, in terms of England - and accepted by the BBC, ITV and Sky - only Labour can make claim to any degree of strength in Scotland, and that is in decline.

The Tories are Scotland’s third party, with only one MP elected from a constituency north of the border. The Lib Dems, whose Scottish MPs are mainly returned from small pockets of support in rural areas, hold a poor fourth-place in Scottish political rankings.

All three of England’s main parties trail the SNP in Scotland, yet the London-based broadcasters have agreed with the London-based political parties that there shall be three television broadcasts, beamed throughout Scotland, which will not feature Scotland’s party of government, but will include the leaders of the three main opposition parties north of the border, all of whom just happen to support the British Union.

So, when the SNP and Plaid Cymru “complain that they are the victims of a metropolitan carve-up which ignores their status as major parties in Scotland and in Wales”, the facts are on the side of the Scots and Welsh.

Robinson’s next patronising comment refers to Scotland’s First Minister attempting to fight for the right to be heard. The BBC editor states, “Alex Salmond is reminding all who'll listen of the time a Scottish court injuncted a Panorama interview with Prime Minister John Major in the run-up to local elections in 1995.”

It’s that phrase, “all who’ll listen”. ‘All who are daft enough to listen’ is clearly what is implied, but even the biased BBC in London surely would not have allowed their political editor to stray that far from objectivity.

Then we have Robinson displaying the ignorance that, ironically, makes the case for why London broadcasters should not be allowed to beam into Scotland their British Unionist party leaders' debates. Robinson argues, “the nationalists - unlike the Lib Dems - do not have even a theoretical chance of winning a UK-wide election or forming a government”. Only a London-based, metropolitan reporter who does not understand Scottish politics could make such a crass statement.

The SNP does not fight Westminster Elections to win UK-wide - the fact the party does not field candidates outside of Scotland makes such a feat an impossibility - and therefore does not seek to form a government anywhere other than in Scotland.

The SNP fights Westminster Elections attempting to gain sufficient support from the people of Scotland - either a majority of seats or votes - to secure a mandate to negotiate an independence settlement with Westminster: the conclusion of which would see Scotland re-establish itself as a normal, independent nation.

It is for that reason that the SNP has a right to be heard in any leaders' debate broadcast in Scotland. Alex Salmond does not seek to be prime minister of the UK or for the SNP to play any part in a Westminster government, but those two prizes are not all that can be won at the UK General Election. The SNP fights for a different prize, one that is perfectly achievable - securing independence for Scotland by the consent of the people through the ballot box.

Such a victory would be won through democracy, and it is undemocratic for London-based broadcasters and political parties to seek to deny the SNP a voice in the main television debates ahead of the Westminster Election. It is also profoundly undemocratic for the BBC, ITV and Sky to argue that only voices supporting Scotland remaining in the British Union should be heard before Scots go the polls.

The so-called ‘compromise’ of having an additional debate in Edinburgh, over-and-above the three beamed into Scotland from London, simply means the British Unionist parties would feature in four broadcasts to the SNP’s one.

In the interests of fairness and democracy, the three main parties in England - all British Unionists - must not be handed an advantage over their Scottish and Welsh opponents ahead of the Westminster Election.

Any ‘leadership’ debate broadcast in Scotland must feature the leader of the SNP, who is, after all, Scotland’s elected leader.

Less arrogance and ignorance from London-based political reporters would be an added bonus.

(c) the3towns.com

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the3towns.com January 2 2010

Where is the justice?

It’s amazing the things you find on the internet when you’re looking for something else. Now, behave, I’m not talking about those kind of things.

I had been looking for comments made by former prime minister Tony Blair prior to the unleashing of ‘shock and awe’ against the people of Iraq in 2003. Blair had appeared on the Radio 4 Today programme and had said that Saddam Hussein could stay in power in Iraq, and could even retain all of his conventional military hardware, provided he gave up his weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The reason for my search was, of course, Blair’s recent admission - to the cutting-edge political interviewer Fern Britton - that he would have sent British troops into war against Iraq even if Saddam had not had weapons of mass destruction, and that he would simply have “deployed different arguments” to justify the military action.

Clearly, Blair cannot have it both ways. In 2003 he was arguing that an Iraq free of WMD and led by Saddam Hussein was fine, but now he says it didn’t matter whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, British forces were always going to go in alongside American troops to effect ‘regime change’.

Some of us never had any doubts, but there surely is no longer anyone out there who does not now accept that Tony Blair took Britain to war on the basis of a lie. Blair lied to the Westminster Parliament. His lie secured parliamentary support for war and sent hundreds of young British men to die - not forgetting the thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children who were blown apart by British and American bombs.

Crucially, Blair’s admission that war was inevitable, irrespective of what Saddam Hussein did or did not do, and was based on removing the head-of-state of a sovereign nation, so that he could be replaced with one who was more amenable to America, means that, in terms of international law, Tony Blair and George Bush are guilty of war crimes.

To wage war against a nation that presents no threat to your own is a war crime. Iraq was no threat to Britain or America. However, that nation was home to the world’s third-largest oil reserves, and Saddam Hussein was not prepared to let America plunder Iraq’s resources. So, he had to go, and a pretext for war had to fabricated.

Britain and America knew Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. United Nations’ weapons inspectors had made clear there was no evidence of such weaponry anywhere in Iraq. UN reports stated that weapons previously held by Saddam had been decommissioned. Of course, Britain and America knew all about the weapons Iraq used to have, because it was the UK and the US who sold them to Saddam.

That said, in 2003 Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, and Tony Blair knew that. Yet the British prime minister stated publicly that all Saddam had to do to avoid war with Britain and America was to give up his weapons of mass destruction. He did not have any.

Saddam Hussein was a despicable tyrant, but America and Britain does not have the authority to overthrow, by military force, any national leader they simply do not like. Nor does the US and the UK have any right to occupy a sovereign nation and to govern it, either directly or by proxy.

Since Saddam Hussein was removed by US forces, with the support of the British military, Iraqi oil reserves are being extracted by American companies, with the oil itself being made available to America at very favourable rates.

In addition, many American companies have made billions-of-dollars through contracts awarded to rebuild the Iraqi national infrastructure that was bombed to smithereens by the American military. That work is ongoing, and companies, such as Halliburton, which has very strong links to the American government, are continuing to rake in the cash.

The actions of the Bush administration and the Blair-led UK government were, and remain, contrary to international law. Of course, both George W Bush and Tony Blair have since retired from their positions of power, but that does not mean they should no longer be held to account.

Both Blair and Bush ordered that a war be waged against Iraq. That war was illegal. Therefore, both men should be brought before the International Court of Justice in the Hague, the United Nations’ principal judicial body, where they should be afforded the right to defend their actions.

I believe the evidence is overwhelming and both men would be convicted of war crimes. Of course, that won’t happen. It won’t happen because the US and UK will not let it happen. Even if there was a will amongst other nations to bring Bush and Blair to justice, America still has sufficient economic and commercial power to buy-off any attempt to initiate legal proceedings.

There is something far wrong with the type of democracy advocated by the United States of America, when we see it desperately trying to extradite from Britain Scots-born Gary McKinnon, the 43 year-old Asperger Syndrome sufferer who is accused of attempting to hack into US government computer systems, yet it would move heaven and earth to prevent George Bush from facing trial.

Gary McKinnon’s condition is a type of autism: he maintains his attempt to look at files on US government web sites was related to his interest in UFOs. No-one was harmed by Gary McKinnon’s actions.

George Bush, on the other hand - along with his sidekick Blair - ordered the bombing of innocent civilians, killing thousands of people. If America and Britain really believed in democracy and the rule of law, who should be facing trial, Bush and Blair or Gary McKinnon?

If Gary McKinnon is extradited to the US, and if he is convicted of breaching US security by hacking into Pentagon web sites, he could face up to 60 years in a high-security prison. Meanwhile, George Bush and Tony Blair continue to make millions-of-pounds (and dollars) from speaking engagements - and receive 24-hour protection, paid for by US and UK tax-payers. Where is the justice?

Oh, I almost forgot, the thing I found on the internet while I was searching for Blair’s comment to the Today programme about Iraqi WMD, was a reference to a speech made to the Scottish Parliament on June 2 2004. It was made by a then MSP called Campbell Martin. Apparently, he had been suspended by the SNP and was speaking in support of a Motion lodged by the Scottish Socialist Party.

The comments came towards the end of his speech and were directed at Labour MSPs who supported Tony Blair and the war in Iraq. To be honest, I couldn’t have put it better myself…

“This international situation has come about because the American President and the British Prime Minister were prepared to lie to the people whom they are supposed to represent.

“The people of Britain were lied to by a Prime Minister who represented your unionist party.

“Iraq did not have chemical or biological weapons. Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. Iraq had no weapons other than those that it was sold by Britain and America when Saddam Hussein was our best pal because he was using the weapons to kill Iranians. That is the reality.

“The position that was taken by the Labour leader of the United Kingdom Government was all lies and you supported it. Bush and Blair knew that it was all lies - I have a copy of a document called ‘Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces and Resources For A New Century’, which was published by the Project for the New American Century in September 2000. That was four months before Bush stole the American presidency and a year before the atrocity at the World Trade Center.

“The document sets out the blueprint for an invasion of Iraq. A year before the attack on the World Trade Center, the Americans were already determined to invade Iraq.

“The organisation that published the document included people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush. The people who planned to invade Iraq are now in positions of power in the American Government - they lied to the American people and Blair supported their lies.

“Last month, Geoff Hoon, the UK Defence Secretary, said that it costs £4 million a day to keep British troops in Iraq. The SSP amendment today says that money should instead be used to bring about a lasting peace in the middle east.

“Let’s stop spending £4 million a day on sending people to Iraq to kill Iraqis. Let’s start using it to build peace in the middle east.”

(c) the3towns.com

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