42: Long Haul

Posted on March 24, 2011 by davidsberry

East Lothian prides itself on its rolling, rural countryside, dotted with farms and villages. But, hidden away there are also some sizable businesses, like Andrew Black, the hauliers based at the old Drem airfield. This is a family business, based entirely in the tiny village of Drem. In fifty years, Andrew, together with his wife Janet and twin sons, has built the operation up to include thirty 44-tonne tractors and over fifty trailers of various sorts.

Together with their rivals David Burns over in Bonnyrigg they have expanded with the growth in business but now face fuel bills of £400 for a round trip to Swindon and difficulty knowing how best to position themselves for the long term. North Midlothian SNP candidate Colin Beattie and I have both contacted our respective hauliers to say not just that we appreciate their difficulties and value the local work they bring but that we’ll fight on to bring tax relief on road fuel. The 5p/litre effective price drop announced in the budget is still not enough in the present economic climate when diesel has soared from 111p to 136p in barely a year. That’s a 22% hike or almost ten times inflation.

That the oil-richest country in Europe need tolerate the highest fuel prices in Europe is inexcusable. In the long haul, the fuel tax regulator championed by the SNP is essential.

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An unexpected discovery amidst last Sunday’s blizzard of inserts in the papers was riches indeed: a reprint of Stanley Baxter’s classic Parliamo Glasgow with such essential phrases as ‘zarra‘ as in ‘zarra besyekindae?‘ or ‘goannae’ as in ‘goannaenodaethat?’. Which made me realise, after standing on countless doorsteps and trying the patience of locals (who’d rather have been watching Corrie instead of standing letting the heat out) that they are just as colourful in their expressions—but are rather more polite than those in Easterhouse.

For example, you soon learn that ‘nahyera’ritepawl‘ although a polite expression, translates directly into ‘I’d rather not speak with you’ or more accurately into ‘feck off’, as does the more pointed ‘whitsapointyouzzurawrasame‘. And you need to stay alert for phrases such as ‘ahvnoevenascoobie‘ or ‘ahuvnygieditonythochtyet‘ which are the hallmarks of the floating voter and—far from signaling hostility—indicate the need for follow-up.

Posted on March 24, 2011 by davidsberry | Leave a comment

43: Purdah, She Wrote

Posted on March 23, 2011 by davidsberry

Well that’s the official start gun for the so-called ‘short’ campaign, launched with the dissolution of wur Pairlimunt when our MSPs clean out their think pods and Eck desists from virtuoso demos on how FMQs should be done. He even managed to mention East Lothian’s new home equity assistance in his very last answer, using it to club Andy Kerr into what has become his habitual sullen look. Why students bothered marching when the SNP have promised no more (back- or front-door) fees was not made clear.

Student march down Canongate against tuition fees, March 2011

I met up with most of our 47-mere-mortals-again at a candidate briefing across the road at Dynamic Earth for as upbeat a launch as you could want. People in as tough a challenge as Bob Doris in inner-city Maryhill & Springburn or Aileen McLeod in the rural sprawl of Galloway have already done a pile of work and are raring to crank it up a notch for the final sprint. And if our opposition’s out there, they’re creeping around ve-e-e-ry quietly.

Newly demobbed and aspiring MSPs at Dynamic Earth

Alex Salmond in full cry motivating the troops

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44: This Is Leadership?

Posted on March 22, 2011 by davidsberry

In the course of their one-day conference, my opponent (who happens to be Labour’s Leader) stood up before those assembled. As his boss Ed Milliband had rather ignored Scotland in his own speech, someone needed to bring the focus back there. The result was something only a diehard Labour supporter could love. Perhaps after weekly drubbings at the hands of the First Minster he was punch drunk but his grasp of facts was even ropier than usual.

“I am proud too of Labour’s MSPs in Holyrood and their fight over the past four years to oppose the SNP there. In and out of that chamber they have stood alongside teachers and parents fighting cuts in their schools, the victims of crime fighting for justice, redundant apprentices fighting for a chance, kinship carers fighting for recognition, and workers fighting for protection at work. Labour, your MSPs have done you proud.”

Whatever planet he and his MSP troops have been on, that galaxy can’t include East Lothian. How can he not know his own patch? ELC has not only raised school budgets but sustained teacher numbers and provided extra teachers for certain P1-P3s. He knows there are extra police (not to mention wardens) in Tranent and Prestonpans and local crime’s down by 26% as a result. He should know kinship carers have had support for the last two years, that a massive capital build programme secured jobs in construction and that no forced redundancy faces ELC workers.

If anyone threatened apprentices, by leading his dismal naysayers to vote against 25,000 new apprenticeships in the Holyrood budget, it was he. Leave aside minimum pricing on alcohol or taxing the supermarkets. After four years practice, he and his 45 MSPs learned saying ‘no’ in unison. But their dearth of ideas is tragic. To paraphrase Star Trek: It’s opposition, Jim, but not as we know it.

As for leadership, read the whole speech. I defy you to find any.

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45: None So Blind

Posted on March 21, 2011 by davidsberry

Not content with vampire tapping into Scotland’s oil revenues since the mid 1970’s, a little-known grab by the UK government of 6,ooo square miles of Scotland’s North Sea in 1999 added insult to injury and ensured that several key oilfields would always stay within English jurisdiction and pump money into the UK treasury (see map).

To revisit this is not just picking at old sores. The area in question hems in an active Scottish & Southern’s plan to build a huge offshore wind farm that would stretch from off St Abbs to off Arbroath and range between 20 and 40km offshore. Invisible from land, over a hundred massive turbines out there could generate the equivalent of Torness. But wind rarely develops it rated output: it’s unpredictable and sometimes fails entirely.

But with the first serious (1 Mwatt) test turbines for tidal soon to be laid in the Sound of Islay and followed by full-scale (100 Mwatt) in the Pentland, we should be looking even closer to home to provide us with clean power. Tidal runs four times each day, is therefore predictable and suitable for providing the base load that nuclear currently does. And before someone lodges a comment about slack at high and low water, high tide at Leith is 8 hours behind Oban; tide is always running somewhere on our 6,000km coast.

Which brings us to our very doorstep. What if we looked at the tides that churn in and out of the Forth twice daily? With an average 5m rise per tide and 3kt current on a good day, that means the 11 billion tons of water passing between Fidra and Elie Ness could, potentially, provide 40 gigawatts of energy if it were all tapped. Clearly it’s not possible but just harnessing 3% would again be equivalent to replacing Torness.

Why, with its insistence on nuclear, is each UK government so eternally greedy for our oil yet so blind to our renewables? Could it be their interests are not the same as ours?

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46: Full Moon Equinox

Posted on March 20, 2011 by davidsberry

Funny how things do seem to come together naturally—like the Labour conference and Magners Comedy Festival being together in Glasgow this weekend. It was a fabulous full moon tonight, right on the gateway to Spring. Clear sky, still sea and the moon bigger and brighter than ever, it’s not hard to feel that we’re on the cusp of something new.

As Labour activists wend their way home from Glasgow (or perhaps stay for the Comedy Festival to cheer themselves up) what is ringing in their ears is the standard carp from their leader that famine and pestilence will engulf Scotland if it rejects their dismal cant. But, as Newsnet Scotland said “one key problem for Labour is the bulk of their time has been spent undermining the SNP Government’s credibility. In so doing, the party has not associated key positive issues with their leader in the minds of the electorate.”

East Lothian is such a varied mix of people that you might take it as a microcosm of Scotland, a 5% corner that represents the whole. On balance, it is aspirational. In its thousands of new homes, people may be tightening belts to deal with runaway banks but they hope tomorrow will bring a better story so their children will grow up in better times, just as they did themselves.

The keynote speech in Glasgow may have moved the faithful in the hall. But its bitter, accusatory tone finds little resonance out in Appin Drive or Aberlady, Windygoul or Whitekirk. Just as the faithful blue rinses who sustained the Tories passed on in the nineties, so too the grizzled miners of Ormiston and Elphinston and their half-century-old memories of working pits have passed on. Their sons and daughters, rather than following their blind loyalty, now choose something better: it is all coming together.

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47: Getting It Together

Posted on March 19, 2011 by davidsberry

Dealing with rubbish was the most popular blog for the last month (see below) so this week I visited ELC’s Kinwegar waste facility. Primarily this was to say ‘thanks’ to the eighty-odd members of the lorry crews for a winter we survived with distinction. When the snow was at its worst, these crews were out there, handling bins under conditions to give H&S inspectors heart attacks.

The much improved facilities the crews now enjoy have been open for a year now. After being cramped in draughty portakabins at Macmerry, they now have their own lockers, showers and heated drying areas so they no longer need go out into February dark in boots still clammy and damp from the day before.

But most impressive were the waste handling facilities themselves. Apart from a modern public recycling centre, the massive sheds allow both waste and recycling to be stored and sorted before almost half goes off to be used again while the rest is shipped in bulk to landfill at Dunbar. The managers were especially proud of the detailed separation they did and the top dollar income negotiable for quality bulk recyclate to off-set costs.

Even the design of the site is green, making good use of what would otherwise be waste land between a busy railway and road, sloping to allow rainwater runoff from both roofs and concrete aprons. This is then stored and used for the heavy amount of vehicle washing involved running the fleet. The two dozen bin lorries in the fleet enjoy semi-covered parking, protecting bin loading mechanisms from weather.

Bottom line is that the crews feel valued and motivated to continue dealing with the almost 100,000 tons a year that we discard. And with 40,000 tons no longer going to landfill, that’s a saving of £2.4m in landfill tax that itself gets recycled into better service.

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The blog articles receiving the greatest number of hits since mid-February were:


Posted on March 19, 2011 by davidsberry | Leave a comment

48: Cause or Effect?

Posted on March 17, 2011 by davidsberry

An interesting set of statistics surfaced yesterday. Amidst a great deal of BBC and UK-level handwringing over worsening employment statistics, (England’s rising to 2.53m people out of work) Scotland bucked the trend, dropping 16,000 to 218,000 or 8.1%. And that was achieved while shedding 18,000 public sector workers and helped by 14.3% growth in construction employment.

This could be transient, or luck…or it could be the result of a savvy SNP government working with responsive SNP councils to slim Scotland’s bureaucracy while pumping investment into infrastructure and housing. Why else should Scotland buck a UK trend?

Looking more closely at statistics for the economic regions—as the Scotsman did—highlights a more subtle pattern. Labour rushed in to rubbish any positive reading of the favourable Scottish statistics but they would be better occupied considering why it is that, after over half a century of their dominance across much of the UK, poverty and economic blight should, from Dagenham to Dennistoun, remain the embarrassing hallmark of their dismal dominance. The table ranks UK ‘regions’ by unemployment.

What is striking from the table is that Labour is inextricably linked with areas of high unemployment or low economic activity. To hear the Labour party, this is because it is the champion of the poor, the oppressed and the vulnerable. It is this loyalty to their champion that makes these areas such heartlands. However true this might have been back in Edwardian times, a century on is this still valid?

Or is it that those areas are condemned to economic hardship by Labour ‘leadership’ that is institutionalised nepotism that holds entire communities in social dependency and ‘jobs-for-the-boys’ paternalism? If Labour showed any ability to—let alone interest in—really helping those people on whose votes its existence depends they might grow out of dependency and actually gain the better life to which we all aspire.

Unemployment/Activity by UK region (from The Scotsman, Mar 17th 2011)

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A Happy St Patrick's Day to All Our Readers

Posted on March 17, 2011 by davidsberry | 1 Comment