Westminster Voting Intentions

And now for how commentators (myself in this instance) can finish up with egg all over their faces; last month I commented that the SNP was down four points on its General Election result, which had not been one of the better ones. This month as I perused the General Election figures in the Herald, the General Election figures looked a bit different; so, last month System Three gave the wrong General Election percentages, and I never noticed them, but made pompous predictions (as my mother used to say "Aye, weel, that’s the price of ye.") The figures were also wrong in November and December, and prior to that I did not show the figures for Westminster; I only noticed they were wrong when they printed the amended figures, which I checked independently - with the BBC website.

Right that’s the sackcloth and ashes over, and this just the start of Lent too, so what can we make of the poll? SNP and Labour up on last month, and on the real General Election result, Liberals up on last month and down since the Election, and the Tories down on last month and on the election; I’m never convinced by the Tories’ standing in opinion polls. Very few people like to admit that they are greedy arrogant Tories, but in the privacy of the polling booth....... We are doing better than before, but it will be four long, long years until the next Westminster election, and anything can happen; the Blessed Tony might have saved the world by then, or not, as the case may be, or perhaps Prime Minister Gordon Brown will have saved Fife. Who knows?

AND TALKING OF FIFE...

Tricia Marwick, SNP, MSP, who lives in Glenrothes, used to work for Shelter, and has been active in politics for at least 20 years, had never heard of them. According to reports, the charity received two annual grants of £20000 per year after it had been wound up; it seems to have started operating around 1996, and rented part of Henry McLeish’s constituency office for about two and a half years. The word used for the rent was "peppercorn", but it amounted to £25 per week, and it was Mr McLeish’s failure to mention this that led to his resignation.

The charity at one stage employed Lynda Struthers, who was Henry McLeish’s election agent; Ms Struthers now works for Fife Council as a debt officer. The group’s management committee consisted of six council officials, Ms Struthers, Maureen Rodger, an election agent for Henry McLeish and also a Fife social worker, Fife Labour Councillor Angela McCallum, Fife Labour Councillor Elizabeth Henderson, Brian Wilson, former head of the council’s elderly care department, and Christine Latto, a Fife social worker. The group was wound up in February 1998, but was given grants of £20089 in April 1998 and April 1999; the meeting in March 1999 was attended by Mr McLeish’s wife, Julie, who was a regional manager for elderly care.

All this may be perfectly legal, and moral, and there may well be good and cogent reasons for these actions; an investigation by Fife Council has revealed that everything was above board, but then it was investigating itself, so one would expect that result. Two things make this seem suspicious; in the first place, it seems passing strange that Mr McLeish would "forget" rent from a charity which had involved two of his election agents, and his wife, albeit in a more remote way, and secondly, although charities are required by law to retain accounts for a period of six years after cessation of their activities, somehow Fife Council had shredded all records appertaining to the charity, "due to lack of storage space". It is not clear whether the shredding took place before or after the Glasgow Herald started making enquiries. We do know from Peter MacMahon, Mr McLeish’s special adviser that when the Herald went a looking that the Chief Executive of the Council contacted the Leader of the Council, Labour Councillor, Christine May, who contacted Mr MacMahon, who said "Tell them nothing".

In the Scottish Parliament, John Swinney, SNP , asked the First Minister, Jack McConnell, if he would support an investigation into the matter by Audit Scotland; Mr McConnell replied "If he did his homework he would know that an inquiry is already under way." As the subject only came up because the Herald and the SNP had pursued it, Mr McConnell’s point score was understandable. John Swinney replied "What we have here is a Labour council, giving money to an organisation run by Labour activists, renting office space from a Labour MP. The connection is Labour, Labour , Labour, and it stinks. Will he clean up Scottish politics and start with Fife council?"

This is not the first instance of Labour organisations destroying evidence; when Mr McConnell’s own constituency secretary was asked at the time of the Lobbygate enquiry into Beattie Media and its relationship with Jack McConnell what had happened to the notebook in which she had taken notes of a call from Beattie Media, she said that she had destroyed it "as was her routine". At that time she had been in the job for almost six weeks; some routine! Other notorious political shredders were Westminster and Brent Tory Council, who shredded evidence in the "homes for votes" investigations; Dame Shirley Porter, (venerated by Baroness Thatcher) has been told to pay back the council £26 million (or about that sum) but flew back to Israel whence she has transferred her £58 million fortune. The latest example is the auditors, Arthur Andersen, who shredded evidence relating to Enron before they were subpoenaed by the US Congress.

Incidentally, Mr McConnell said in the course of the Parliamentary exchange that he did not accept the practice of shredding documents so soon; admirable, we think his constituency secretary burned them.

WHO’S DIED?

A football journalist at the Hearts - Rangers match was astonished when after a garbled announcement over the tannoy system (aren’t they all) the crowd got to its feet and just stood there. When he asked what it was all about he was told it was one minute’s silence because Princess Margaret had died, and we are reasonably sure that most of the crowd would not have had a clue about her, but they profess to be "loyal".

I would like to think that if I had been there I would have remained seated, but I don’t think I would have the moral courage! Her passing will not make the slightest difference to the scheme of things, and thankfully we will not see any of the hysterical hypocrisy that occurred when Diana died, when football matches were postponed, and the Referendum for the Scottish Parliament was endangered. One year after that episode hardly anyone turned up on the anniversary of her death, because the day of instant mourning was past.

The press is still playing the monarchic game, with headlines like "A Nation Mourns", but in practice nobody really noticed, leading one to think that the fuss about Diana was of the popstar culture, rather than the royal one. The press are trying to stir up interest, as they have papers to sell, but even they are coming round to the view that royalty has had its day; while the Blessed Tony is supposed to be abolishing the House of Lords, with all its pomp and privilege, all he is doing is creating a new batch of privileged people, by patronage, which is how it all started in the first place. A reform of the whole system is required, but we should be wary of the Australian example; they voted on whether or not to keep the Queen as Head of State, and when the Aussies sussed out that it was either the Queen or a politician, they picked the Queen as the lesser of two evils. We see Tony Blair acting like a President, and Margaret Thatcher thought she was a Queen herself, so there might be some merit in royalty - I said might.

What Mr Blair could and should be doing is to repeal the Act of Succession, which prevents the monarch from marrying a Catholic; the irony of this is not lost. The purpose originally was to prevent the Pope exerting influence on the country, so it was enshrined in law; society has moved on, and power is now exercised by the Prime Minister, not the Queen, and Mr Blair is married to a Catholic, and the world has not come to an end! It could just be that repealing the Act could at a stroke demolish the spurious "loyalty culture" which elements in Northern Ireland still cling to. The world has moved on, but the British constitution hasn’t.

LIFE - OR DEATH - IN THE FASLANE?

What set me off on this kick was an editorial in the Scotsman (usually more bad than good) deploring the fact that John Swinney attended a demonstration at Faslane; at that demonstration, Tommy Sheridan of the SSP, and Lloyd Quinan of the SNP got themselves arrested. Taking part in campaigns against nuclear weapons over the years have been such luminaries as Tony Blair, Robin Cook, Gordon Brown, Lord George Robertson, and many others in the Labour Party too numerous to mention; they have now seen the light, and wish to keep nuclear weapons because it gives Great Britain status in the world.

John Swinney said in his Conference speech in Dundee in September 2001, that the SNP had consistently opposed weapons of mass destruction since they were imposed on Scotland in the Sixties and that the party would keep that faith, so I can see no ambivalence there; if he had not gone to Faslane then he might have had to explain his absence. The Scotsman editorial somehow infers that this would keep the wild eyed left wing bolsheviks of the SNP (like masel’) happy, but would not cut much ice with the good solid peace loving citizens who want to sleep sound in their beds at night, secure in the knowledge that enough nuclear weaponry to blow up this planet and a few others was safely stored within a fifty mile radius of their houses. There seemed to be a few ministers there; ministers of religion, not government ones, but some female ones too, ensuring gender balance, but none of them looked swivel eyed to me. It must be what they put in the Scotsman tea machine, or maybe, just maybe, acting under instructions from Baroness Thatcher who is urging the American President to invade Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and North Korea, on the basis that Islamic extremism has taken the place of bolshevism and has to be rooted out. Who’s swivel eyed now?

The concept that being opposed to Trident is anti American or even anti Nato is nonsense; we could all wish that Mr Bush would listen to Colin Powell rather than Donald Rumsfeld, but that is merely the voice of commonsense, and American Presidents come and go, so nothing is forever. But as most observers are aware, the biggest danger of nuclear weapons is the accidental one, not the deliberate starting of a war, and if England wants Trident, they can have it. After all, the Tories took the refitting of nuclear submarines away from Rosyth, "only and alone for purely cost savings"; it now turns out that the cost of Devonport will be about £400 million more than originally estimated. This of course will be paid out of general taxation by we poor subsidised Scots; I wonder what Malcolm Rifkind thinks of his decision now?

THE GLASGOW KISS - 2002 STYLE

The Lord Provost of Glasgow, Alex Mossom, opened the week at an ecumenical service at the church of Blessed John Duns Scotus in the Gorbals; the church houses relics of St Valentine, yes the very man whose martyrdom is celebrated on 14th February each year.

St Valentine, who lived before Catholics and Protestants were invented, was executed on 14th February 269, because he was a priest, and he persisted in marrying Romans with a Christian ceremony. His remains were kept by a French family, who gave them to a Franciscan monastery which was founded in the Gorbals in 1868; when the monastery closed the relics were transferred to the new church.

So, who would have thought it, the remains of St Valentine, the patron saint of love and romance, in a church in the Gorbals , Glasgow; a very unlikely place, but then perhaps Rome , and Paris, and Venice all have their equivalents of the Gorbals. We would suggest that the Speaker of the House of Commons, who has been dubbed "Gorbals Mick" by a parochial London press, might wish to pay a visit to the relics, as at the moment he appears to be very much unloved . The reasons for this are not clear; some say that he is making a mess of the job, some say that he is unintelligible, and others are suggesting he moves to the House of Lords as Glasgow will lose about three MPs before the next election. We have no particular animus against him, apart from the fact that he is a Labour MP from Glasgow, and that city is a shambles not helped by Labour domination, St Valentine or no St Valentine.

It might be that he was one Scot too many; Tony Blair, psuedo Scot, Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Alastair Darling, Dr John Reid, Lord Derry Irvine - all in the Cabinet, and not dealing with Scottish affairs. Whatever, if the visit to St Valentine and love thy neighbour does not have an effect, then perhaps a judicious Glasgow kiss to the toffy nosed here and there might work wonders.

(A Glasgow kiss, for the uninitiated, is a head butt, usually leaving the recipient with a broken nose.)

FOOT IN THE MOUTH NOTES

We would suggest they put it in Fraserburgh, where they are having terrible troubles with seagulls; if it does not frighten them off, at least they can then do to her what she did to the people of Scotland during her reign.

Speed cameras are to be painted in bright colours so that motorists can see them; in England and Wales they will be coloured yellow, but in Scotland the executive want them to be red and yellow in case they are mistaken for SNP posters.

Wait for the retaliation on the red pillar boxes, as they obviously must support Labour.

Nice to see democracy in action.

So that’s where the Fifth Amendment came from then.

The Chinese New Year begins this week; this year will be the Year of the Horse.

Bookmakers are rubbing their hands.

Some of the horses I’ve backed would have been beaten by someone with a zimmer.

The Treasury has been selling off gold over the last two years despite public protests; the price of gold has now surged and we would have been £350 million better off if we had kept it.

If they were bookies they would lose money.

SYNOPSIS

BLAIR "MISLED PARLIAMENT" OVER STEEL DEAL

Plaid Cymru has accused Tony Blair of "misleading" the House of Commons over his support for an overseas steel deal. Carmarthen East MP Adam Price has exposed a letter in which the Prime Minister expressed support for a British consortium's takeover of the Romanian national steel producer. Mr Price is angry the prime minister wrote to the country's leader Adrian Nastase two days before a UK-owned firm bought Sidex for 300 million pounds - as British giant Corus was shedding over 3,000 Welsh workers. Indian-born steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal had donated 125,000 pounds to Labour before his LNM Group made the deal. Mr Price, heaping allegations of "sleaze" on Mr Blair, said the Indian businessman's company was registered in the Dutch Antilles - a Caribbean tax haven - and was, therefore, a rival to Corus. He accused Mr Blair of "intervening in the strongest possible terms in the interest of a company which is undermining British jobs". Plaid Cymru now plan to raise the matter in the Welsh Assembly chamber in questions to First Minister Rhodri Morgan. The SNP is backing Plaid's calls for the Committee on Standards in Public Life to investigate the affair. SNP Westminster group leader Alex Salmond commented: "Since Tony Blair promised to clean up Westminster, we've had Formula One and cash for policies, Peter Mandelson's unique approach to the right to buy, passports for donors, rows over the office expenses claimed by Labour MPs, financial links to the collapsed US energy giant Enron, and now letters to foreign leaders to smooth the path of Labour-supporting contractors. New Labour has not just failed to deliver its promise to clean up Westminster, it now looks every bit as bad as the old Tories."

BORDERERS IN PLEA OVER CUTS

Campaigners are planning to march on the Scottish Parliament in protest at proposed cuts to services in the Borders. Budget cuts are expected to be approved later this week when Borders councillors meet to decide on a way out of a financial crisis caused by a 3.9 million pound deficit in the education budget. But the plans have provoked anger and hundreds of people joined a protest at proposals to close Eyemouth's swimming pool and community centre on Monday evening. The Scottish National Party's Christine Grahame said the Labour and Liberal Democrat administration must intervene. The South of Scotland MSP said: "This will not stop until the coalition in Edinburgh provide this council with some borrowing so that they can work out this mess and not punish the people." A delegation from the Borders is due to present a petition to the Scottish Parliament calling on the Scottish Executive to intervene.

MSP QUERIES NEW ROLE OF TOP FISHING CIVIL SERVANT

A row is brewing over a shake-up at the Scottish Executive's fisheries department. It is believed that fisheries secretary Paul Brady has now also been given responsibility for rural development. Following the division of the ministerial portfolios in December, Richard Lochhead says the move appears to confirm that fishing is a "low priority" for the coalition. The SNP's fisheries spokesman will be tabling a Parliamentary question today in a bid to find out the reasons for the change. "If it transpires that the role of fisheries secretary has been diluted this will be another example of Labour and Liberal ministers downgrading the fisheries department," he said. "It seems that not only has the portfolio been split between two ministers, who themselves have a range of other responsibilities, but now the long-standing post of fisheries secretary has been burdened with quite a number of other rural responsibilities, such as land reform. Given the importance of the fishing industry to the Scottish economy, and in particular our coastal communities, it is only right that should be recognised by designating particular ministers and civil servants as dedicated points of contact and ambassadors for the industry." A cabinet reshuffle by First Minister Jack McConnell saw Mr Finnie taking over the sea fisheries and Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency elements of what had been junior minister Rhona Brankin's brief and Ayrshire MSP Mr Wilson being given responsibility for aquaculture and freshwater fisheries.

HOSPITAL DEATHS RATE RISE

The number of patients who die after emergency surgery in Scotland has increased, a report into hospital mortality has revealed. It said that poor post-operative care could be one of the contributing factors to the one in 700 death rate. The Scottish Audit of Surgical Mortality was asked to examine the deaths of all patients under hospital care for the year 2000. Approximately 4,500 deaths were reviewed and more than 1,100 consultants and anaesthetists were questioned. SNP shadow health minister Nicola Sturgeon said: "There is a wealth of information that people should have access to in a modern NHS and the performance of surgeons is part of that modern NHS." The kind of information on hospital performance, which is available in England, should be made public in Scotland. The MSP said: "No-one underestimates the problem of presenting the information properly but those problems are not insurmountable. We live in an information society and the fact is we need information for patient of hospital is unacceptable."

MINISTERS CHALLENGED ON DEFENCE PROCUREMENT SPENDING

Ministers have been pressed in the Commons on the level of defence procurement spending in Scotland. SNP defence spokesman Angus Robertson challenged Junior Defence Minister Lewis Moonie over figures he had recently been given in a written reply. At question time, Mr Robertson said: "Can you comment on the answer given to me on February 1 with regard to procurement expenditure, which showed the figure in Scotland was only 4.3% of UK expenditure - half our population share? Do you believe this level of expenditure is too much, too little or about right?" The junior minister claimed the government would spend more money on procurement in Scotland were there more companies producing goods the MoD could buy. Speaking outside the chamber, the Moray MP described the minister's defence as "pathetic".

SCOTS TWICE AS LIKELY TO BE SPIED ON

Scots are twice as likely to have their telephones tapped and mail intercepted as other Britons. A Sunday newspaper investigation has revealed that surveillance by the security services and police has reached record levels north of the Border. Scottish ministers are giving approval for snooping operations at a much greater rate than their counterparts in London. The number of Scots put under surveillance after being dubbed potential 'enemies of the State' has risen by 500% in the past 10 years for which figures are available. Roseanna Cunningham, the SNP shadow justice minister, described the figures as "extraordinary". She said: "For the first time in Scotland's history we have a Liberal justice minister who looks far more illiberal when it comes to surveillance than ministers south of the Border. The present establishment has to explain itself because it is difficult to see on what basis this could be justified." Ms Cunningham now intends to table questions on the matter in the Scottish parliament.

UEFA's TOP SCOT VOICES CONCERN AT JOINT BID

Former SFA secretary Ernie Walker, who is now a major figure within UEFA, has expressed his concern over Scotland's failure to submit a solo bid for Euro 2008. SNP spokesman on sport Mike Russell said: "It is increasingly clear that Jack McConnell has botched the Euro 2008 bid. Jack McConnell has badly damaged our credibility with UEFA and if he cannot convince Ernie Walker that this is a serious bid, what chance is there of convincing the rest of Europe? Obviously, the suspicion is growing that the joint bid is designed to be a good loser."

CHALLENGE TO NEW NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS

The Scottish National Party has challenged the first minister to oppose the introduction of new nuclear power stations on Scotland. Environment spokesman, Bruce Crawford, said a majority of Scots would not support Energy Minister Brian Wilson in plans for expanding the nuclear industry. He said: "Brian Wilson seems intent on putting the profits of the nuclear industry before the will of the people of Scotland. Jack McConnell must stand up and fight this undemocratic plan and protect Scotland's veto."