Nation for Sale

Posted on June 27, 2012 by davidsberry

THE assertion by Scottish Labour that Scots willingly chose to join the UK is wrong on every level.

Again, like yesterday, not technically a reblog, this informative article from Paul Scott was printed in today’s Hootsmon. It gives a scholarly backdrop to how this Union we are now in made its start in rather unsavoury circumstances.

On 1 June The Scotsman quoted verbatim a passage from a speech in the Scottish Parliament by the Scottish Labour leader, Johann Lamont. She said: “We, as a nation, were never conquered. The United Kingdom has not been imposed upon us. It is the choice of Scots”. She made the same point again in the BBC Question Time programme on a week later.

This distorts the facts so drastically that Johann Lamont is either completely ignorant of the history of the Union or she is trying to deceive us. It is an event which I have studied for years and which is the subject of two of my books, Andrew Fletcher and the Treaty of Union (1992 and 1994) and The Union of 1707, Why and How (2006). There is in fact no mystery about the way in which England achieved the Union against the clear wishes of the great majority of Scots. It is clearly recorded in the documents of the period.

The English opportunity arose over the failure of the Scottish attempt to establish a trading post at Darien on the Isthmus of Panama. The Act of the Scottish Parliament which established the Company offered 50 per cent of the shares to English investors. There were over subscribed within few days but they were withdrawn when King William made know his disapproval. The necessary funds were raised in Scotland alone in a surge of patriotic fervour. They amounted to half of the total money in circulation. The venture failed for many reasons including the English encouraging a Spanish attack.

In consequence of this, the Scottish Parliament passed an Act in 1703 which called for the appointment of a different successor to the Scottish throne on the death of Queen Anne. Royal approval of the Act was withheld and the Scottish Parliament passed it again in 1704. The English Government reacted by first threatening invasion and then proposing negotiations in London.

Because it was put to the vote after most members had left for the night the Scottish Parliament passed an Act to leave the appointment of the Scottish delegation to the Queen. When they arrived in London the English Government declined to discuss any Scottish proposal their own was eventually adopted.

This provided for the abolition of the Scottish Parliament but the continuation of both Houses of the English Parliament with the addition of a few Scottish members to both Houses, 45 in the Commons (one more than Cornwall) and 16 in the Lords (fewer than the English bishops). The Treaty provided for the payment of a sum of money to be paid to Scotland which among other purposes was intended to compensate the shareholder in the Darien scheme. On the other hand it imposed on Scotland a share of the English National Debt and the payment of English rates of import duties on alcohol.

To secure the passage of this proposed Treaty the English began a programme of bribery of the members of the Scottish Parliament. The debate there lasted from 30 October 1706 to 16 January 1707 when it was approved. At that time the Parliament was not representative of the people. It consisted of three types of members sitting together, the Lords, the Burghs (which were then unrepresentative of the people) and the Counties. It was only this last element which was elected, but only the Lairds had votes. The population of Scotland at large made its outraged opposition to the Union very clear. Letters against it flooded into the Parliament and not one in favour.

The great economist Adam Smith in a letter of 14th April 1760 said of the Union: “The immediate effect of it was to hurt the interest of every single order of men in the country. Even the merchants seemed to suffer at first. The trade to the Plantations was, indeed, opened to them. But that was a trade which they knew nothing about; the trade they were acquainted with, that to France, Holland and the Baltic, was laid under new embarrassments which almost totally annihilated the first two and most important branches of it. No wonder if at that time all orders of men conspired in cursing a measure so hurtful to their immediate interest”.

For some years after 1707 the English Parliament intervened in Scottish affairs, including the Patronage Act of 1712 which enabled lairds to intervene in the appointment of Church ministers in Scotland. This led in 1843 to the Disruption, a major split in the Church of Scotland. But, as Walter Scott remarked in his Letters of Malachi Malagrowther of 1826: “Scotland was left from the year 1750 under the guardianship of her own institutions, to win her silent way to national wealth. Scotland increased her prosperity in a ratio more than five times greater than that of her more fortunate sister”.

These Letters (which have been called the first manifesto of modern Scottish nationalism) were a passionate protest against the way in which Westminster again started to interfere in Scottish affairs when France ceased to be a threat after their defeat at Waterloo. In fact (although Walter Scott died too soon to see it) Scottish opinion began to approve of the Union in the 19th Century. This was because of the effects of the British Empire, while it lasted. It provided a good source of raw materials and a market for Scottish exports and provided valuable jobs for many Scots in its administration.

That is now the distant past. The modern world is the age of independent, and contented small nations. They have increased the membership of the United Nations from 51 member states in 1945 to 193 today. The rapid surge in their prosperity and sheer happiness as independent countries has been unmistakable and impressive. Scotland should follow their example.

Posted in Commerce, Politics | Leave a comment

SOS Puffin—2012 Report

Posted on June 26, 2012 by davidsberry

Technically this can’t be a reblog since the original wasn’t a blog at all. But as a great example of a dedicated wildlife fan who has put major amounts of effort over five years into a project to secure the habitat for Scotland’s most popular seabird, it deserves wide coverage. For all that time, the driving force has been John Hunt, a genial, craggy and dedicated ‘twitcher’. Thanks to John, a huge conservation programme for threatened puffin habitats of the Forth is now almost complete. John’s report follows below.

Typically Sociable Group of Puffins—Known also as ‘Tammy Norrie’ or ‘Clowns of the Sea’

Introduction: SOS Puffin is a volunteer project sponsored by the Scottish Seabird Centre which started in 2007.  It aims to bring under control the invasive plant tree mallow which has taken over the islands of Craigleith and Fidra near North Berwick and threatens the important populations of nesting puffins and other seabirds.

Islands Visits and Volunteers:  To avoid disturbing breeding birds, no visits to cut tree mallow were made to the islands from mid-April 2011 until August 2011 when work parties recommenced.  From August until October, attempts were made to organise work parties on most weekends and once during the week whenever the limitations of boats and tides permitted.  Last winter our usual boatman was reluctant to take us out so few work parties took place.  In March 2012 the Seabird Seafari inflatable returned and work parties resumed until April when we stopped once again for the breeding season.

Craigleith:  The weather was distinctly unhelpful last autumn and we managed only nine trips to Craigleith before the large inflatable came out of the water for the winter.  However thanks to the winter weather and the impact of rabbits only four more trips were needed in the Spring to thoroughly clear the island of tree mallow.  The number of work parties to Craigleith each month (with the number of volunteers shown in brackets) since the project started is shown in the table:

Trips (and volunteers) to Craigleith

The drop in the number of work parties over the last three years is largely a reflection of  steadily getting on top of the problem.

‘Mallow-basher’ Squad at the Pond on Craigleith—John Hunt Second from Right (‘Nests’ on Ground are Cut Mallow)

Last summer the tree mallow was slow to make an appearance and we were lulled into a fall sense of security.  However from July onwards it made its usual impressive comeback so that by the autumn large areas were once again covered by seedlings from 1 to 2 metres in height.  However there were areas where the density of seedlings was less than the year before.  Only limited progress was made with cutting this before we lost our boat transport in late autumn but the rabbits helped during the winter, attacking most plants and killing small seedlings.

This meant that by this Spring our task was significantly less and four more work parties were all that was needed to clear the island completely apart from small areas at the east end which we had to avoid because of the nesting cormorants.

Rene van der Wal (Aberdeen University) continued his programme of ecological monitoring based on a number of plots across the island. He is looking at the response of tree mallow and other vegetation to the control work including the recovery of native plants.  His findings confirm a gradual recovery of perennial plants with the island vegetation mostly in good condition during the puffin breeding season.  The effect of rabbits is mixed in that, while they are hitting the mallow hard during the winter, they are also creating ideal conditions for tree mallow to germinate during the summer when the rabbits eat other vegetation.

Due to bad weather we were not able to land on the date planned for the puffin burrow count so unfortunately this count will have to wait until next year. However a count of other nesting seabirds was carried out on 26th May, organised by Bill Bruce, and the totals for the main species counted are given in the table below.

 Seabird Census (Other than Common Gulls) on Craigleith

Fidra:  Only three SOS Puffin work parties have been out to Fidra during the last year.  The number of visits each month to Fidra since 2007 (with number of volunteers) was:

Trips (and volunteers) to Fidra

In addition to the above, Allison Leonard of the RSPB (Fidra’s owners) organised three work parties to the island during February.  We were able to supplement their volunteers with some of ours so that an additional  22 volunteers were on these three visits.  By April the island was largely cleared of tree mallow. RSPB even managed to organise some climbers to cut tree mallow growing in inaccessible places on the cliffs.

As with Craigleith, fewer visits to Fidra have been necessary in the last two years to keep the mallow under control even though here there are no rabbits to help.  This is again a reflection that the mallow is returning less vigorously with each year.

Strimmer Squad at the Railway Path below Fidra Lighthouse

Tree mallow also recovered strongly on Fidra last summer and autumn, returning to most of the former areas but generally at a lower density than previously.  With the help of the RSPB visits, most of the island was cleared by the end of March though the weather prevented us from completing the task as thoroughly as we would have liked.  The RSPB involvement made all the difference and it was particularly good to have the tree mallow cut on the cliffs.

A puffin burrow count was carried out on 3rd May by the Forth Seabird Group and came up with a corrected count of 750 apparently occupied burrows (aob).  This is similar to the count of 799 in 2009 but disappointingly less than the 1,149 in 2010.  It is not known what the breeding numbers are like on the Isle of May this year but at present there is no obvious explanation for this drop in numbers.

The Lamb: No visits were possible to the Lamb during the last year.  There is only a small amount of tree mallow on this island but it still needs to be cut each year to stop it spreading further or retirning to the other islands.

Overall Effort:  during last year, 21 planned work parties had to be cancelled—mainly because of the weather or weather forecast.  The number of volunteers coming on each visit has varied from 5 to 13 with a mean of nearly 11.  It was very frustrating to have to cancel so many trips but we are grateful for the good nature and patience shown by the volunteers.

Since the project began in 2007, nearly 900 people have been out helping on the island visits, with many coming more than once.  The number on the volunteer data base continues to grow and is now at almost 600—of whom well over 400 have been out at least once.

But work parties continue to be heavily dependent on a small group of enthusiasts who come regularly, a number of whom have now helped on the remarkable tally of work parties notched up to date by:

  • David Ross 92
  • Margaret Wight 83
  • James Leyden 81
  • Howard Andrew 65
  • Bill Bruce 48
  • EJ Shields 48

Organised groups that have been out during the last year include Scouts and corporate groups from John Lewis, Royal Bank of Scotland and the George Hotel, Edinburgh.

Looking Ahead:  As a result of all this hard work, we have been able to bring tree mallow sufficiently under control so that, since 2009, puffins and other birds have been able to nest on Craigleith and Fidra without being impeded in any way.  The extent and density of tree mallow is slowly reducing and the effort required each year is also declining. However, it is not yet clear how long it is going to take before the tree mallow is reduced to the extent that it only requires occasional visits to keep it at bay.  Until then we shall continue to organise regular work parties. Work parties will start again in August and details of proposed dates/times will be sent out to volunteers in July.

Our ecologist Rene van der Wal will continue his ecological monitoring on Craigleith and a masters student from Aberdeen University, Tiana Rakotondratrimo, will be looking at what is happening with the tree mallow seed in the soil.  We hope her project will give us valuable information about the all-important seed bank which has so far proved remarkably resilient.

What It’s All About—A Puffin (20cm high) Next to Flowering Tree Mallow (Grows over 2m)

A huge thank you to all those who have helped as volunteers and in other ways.   From all the feedback we receive, the work parties are still much enjoyed by those who take part and more volunteers keep coming forward. Our thanks also go to Viridor Credits, Scottish Natural Heritage and others for their generous funding of the project.

  • John Hunt
  • Craigleith Management Group
  • June 2012
  • info@seabird.org


Posted in Community, Environment | 1 Comment

Day of the Naysayers

Posted on June 25, 2012 by davidsberry

So, today is the launch of “Better Together” aka “The ‘NO’ Campaign”. Can’t say that I wish them well. That’s not because they oppose my personal belief that the Scots would do better running their own country in their own interests. It’s because unionists have yet to explain what advantage Scots would gain by remaining in their union. Their utterings to date are dire warnings but all vulnerable to question, if not disproof.

What really undercuts their statements’ credibility is their uncanny echoes of flat-earth prophets who went before—supposed giants of their day whose lofty status in the firmament of the time rendered them blind to seeing the real world, let alone a better future. Some classic examples:

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” —Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1895

“I  think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” —Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out” —Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their  home.” —Ken Olson, president and founder of DEC, 1977

Apparently no era has been free from such hilarious humbug: there’s no reason why the early 21st century should be any different. Indeed, today may become their finest hour as unionists from near and far pontificate how no sane, rational person could want Scotland to become a normal country.

First up to the plate: the egregiously negative D. Alexander MP, aka Maestro of the Mint who has rather jumped the gun by flinging his supposed thunderbolt the day before. He asks: “What would be the arrangements for borrowing and finance under an independent Scotland? If interest rates went up by 1% that would cost families in Scotland about £1bn in extra mortgage costs.”

Well, yes, if you do the sums. But what basis does he have for postulating this as a likely outcome? Or are we here among habitual naysayers whose hefty salary is on the line if the UK ceases to be? Let’s take a look at some global and fiscal mechanisms that indicate what might drive or prevent Scotland getting a poor fiscal rating.

The UK currently enjoys a healthy AAA rating on its government debt. That means some gnomes at Moody’s, Standard & Poor, Fitch’s, etc credit rating agencies agree the UK is able to repay anything they borrow. Many Northern European countries enjoy the same high rating, as does the US. But Italy, Spain and Portugal have ratings of A, BBB and BB+, all of which imply increased risk (and therefore interest rates) while eye-of-the-storm Greece is down at CCC and paying well over the odds to borrow.

The implication of Maestro Alexander’s questions is that Scotland would not have the same high credit rating as the UK currently enjoys. It’s a fair question to ask if there is any basis for this.

First of all, the “better together” slogan and many other unionist litanies forever harp on about how Scotland gets to punch above its weight by being part of a BIG country of 60m, rather than ‘go it alone’ with 5m. Is there a basis to this? Well India, Russia and Brazil are all huge countries with economies that would dwarf Scotland’s; yet they’re all rated BBB—in other words on the world’s fiscal shit list, with ratings exactly the same as wobbly Spain. Meantime Denmark, Norway and Finland—all smaller than Scotland—rate AAA. Hell, so do Luxembourg, Singapore and Liechtenstein and the SUM of their populations is less than Scotland’s. So it ain’t size.

Second, let’s look at economic health. Both UK and Scotland specialise in financial services and, as a result of Irn Broon’s ‘prudence’ being a joke, those services are in intensive care and we now owe something close to 100% of GDP in either case. The UK’s budget deficit has cratered over the last four years, rising to £97.8bn or 6.6% of GDP. At first glance the GERS figures for Scotland show a comparable deficit of £14.3bn or 12% of GDP. But when North Sea oil revenues, based on a 90% share of the fields, is added in, this shrinks to £6.4bn or 4.4% of Scottish GDP. In other words, anyone arguing that the UK can sustain an AAA rating when it is doing 50% WORSE on the world stage has to argue the same for Scotland.

But thirdly, and most conclusively, we really should be talking about comparing the future UK with a future Scotland. With Osbo’s economic strategy in tatters, continued massive borrowing and quantitative easing  are inevitable, so UK debt is set to grow, not shrink. And what economic miracle or business breakthrough lies just over the horizon to snatch Britain’s fiscal chestnuts from the fire? None that springs to mind.

On the other hand, consider Scotland. Already energy-rich, oil exploration proceeds apace as oil prices bob along above £90 and the 5-year average, onshore wind approaches half our existing capacity. Meanwhile, offshore, tidal and wave in development will fully exploit our position as inheritors of half of Europe’s renewable energy. Add in that, per capita, we export more engineering, that the whisky export market is going through the roof (up 22% last year to over £4bn) and that tourism is up 16%, now spending over £4.4bn, then you have the basis for as robust an economy as any other country.

In the dismantling of shared institutions, there will be some premium to pay for Scots running their own DWP, Pensions and other government departments currently housed in and around Whitehall. But that will be more than offset by most of those jobs landing in Scotland, with dispensing with the scale of things like embassies that a self-styled ‘world power’ requires, a cut of at least 50% in our defence costs and the possibility of a solid lease sum for England to continue to use Faslane until it works out where to stick its nuclear deterrent.

Put all this together and, no longer burdened by global delusions,  a pretty vibrant economy would result, one that would pay back Scotland’s £65bn-or-so debt this union has recently cost us far faster than England will be able to manage. Don’t tell Danny, but once his moth-eaten union ballast is detached from the more dynamic, less service-burdened, more future-oriented Scottish economy, the threat of losing AAA rating and mortgage rate chickens are more likely to be coming home to roost in our English cousins’ homes. A resulting rate rise of 1% would sting unhappy English punters for well over £10bn.

Posted in Commerce, Politics | Leave a comment

Public Disservice

Posted on June 23, 2012 by davidsberry

Lothian Buses has a history stretching back to the formation of Edinburgh Corporation Tramways in 1919 and a slew of recent commendations, including Best UK Bus Company (2002), Bus Operator of the Year (2007) and Top City Operator of the Year (2011). It runs the youngest bus fleet in the UK and they are generally held to be modern, clean and reliable to those who use them. And, since their main competitor, FirstBus, has thrown in the towel on many of its more rural routes a decade after it had given up competing head-to-head with Lothian on principal city routes, it could fairly be said that Lothian now rules the roost in the Capital.

So why am I about to excoriate them? Especially when, as that rare beast—a successful public company—they return a tidy profit to their ‘owners’? (Edinburgh City owns 91% and the three Lothian councils own 3% each).

Well, first of all, in their original incarnation during the fifties, they dismantled the once comprehensive tram system that ran from Granton to Braids and Musselburgh to Corstorphine. Leave aside what San Francisco has done to transform its Embarcadero waterfront by running vintage trams along it, if Edinburgh had simply preserved and maintained half the routes it once had at, say, £2m each year, that would still not have cost 10% of what we are spending today to resurrect their ghost.

In the same era, ECT was bullish about what its new Atlantean streamlined double-deckers could do: they were instrumental in persuading British Rail to abandon: Inner/Outer circle services through Newington and Morningside; a Corstorphine branch serving the zoo at Pinkie; Craigleith and Granton service; loop through Easter Road to Leith; all the little stations like Abbeyhill & Piershill on the way to Musselburgh. The wholesale butchering  of local stations left Edinburgh as the biggest city in the UK with no suburban rail service.

But, for ‘efficiency’ the new streamlined Atlantean buses were driver-only; without clippies, they spent inordinate amounts of time loading at each stop as grannies fished for change. Nonetheless, ECT forged ahead with more such buses until the back-platform Routemaster that you could hop on or off at the lights became a thing of the past. Increased traffic in the city brought even more sluggish routes until, in the nineties, the City Council’s transport maestro David Begg (now an academic) got his big paint set out and turned half the city streets into garish bus lanes.

It was just a few years prior that Maggie Thatcher had decreed a market free-for-all in buses and had abolished the regulation that had restricted ECT buses to services within the city and all others to services in and out of the city. For ten years, there was chaos as newly formed bus companies like Stagecoach and First cut each others’ throats for dominance in a given city market. FirstBus and the repackaged Lothian Regional Transport duked it out with flooding certain routes, scheduling their own buses to run a few minutes ahead of the competition. It was a mess. The only advantage the punter saw was a £1 flat fare all across the city where the two competed.

In 2000, LRT became Lothian Buses and, as the whole furore died down, they scooped a number of awards, as related above. But these were essentially for running ever more modern and environmentally friendly buses. The fleet had grown to over 600 vehicles and side businesses like the Airport Link and City Tours had been added. But there were still only 50-ish bus routes and it took at least as long on any of them in 2010 as it had in 1960. Passengers were riding cheaply in clean, comfortable buses. But speed was poor.

Even before the tram works and after a ‘no-change’ policy on fares, convoys of LRT buses would jam Princes Street or Nicholson Street as five tried to get to one stop at one time. The counter-move of creating more stops and spreading bus routes among them helped move things along for natives but still confuses the hell out of visitors. Anyone not knowing the City who arrives at Waverley by train has no chance of finding an onward bus anywhere (let alone the bus station): the stop for the 10/11/16 services to Bruntsfield is 1/2 mile away at the Mound.

And then there’s the profit Lothian makes—quite apart from what gets syphoned off for perfectly legal reasons—over £38m in 2010, despite recession and tram works. And that was after an relentless regime of bus replacements, of paying their MD a £208k salary (which includes a £48,100 bonus) and three other directors pulling in a nifty £145k each with a £49k sweetener on top (see today’s Evening News). They alone account for 1p on every one of the 107,000,000 fares Lothian collects in a year.

In less than ten years, fares have increased by 40% and while red diesel might have increased by that in the same time, other costs, wages and inflation haven’t. Paying the big cheeses a cool £200k each might be justified if this company had broken fresh ground, revolutionised public transport or otherwise transformed Edinburgh into a Mecca for pilgrims to good bus practice. But it isn’t.

Given that Edinburgh has; no rail services; mobile, affluent bus-riders; a booming tourism industry; a decrepit competitor in FirstBus and a parking regime that makes Devil’s Island look like a holiday camp, Lothian ought to be profitable. But what does it do with that profitability? New buses and environmental conscience are both laudable but hardly inspired: real competition would expose their major flaws:

  • their service, while reliable, has not improved in half a century
  • average speed of service along a route one of the worst in the UK
  • a given bus is hard to find if you don’t know both stop and city geography
  • no literature or timetables to be had other than at a stop
  • no single-ticket to use train or other buses on one fare
  • no free transfers from one Lothian route to another
  • day tickets that have risen 75% in the decade
  • almost all routes radial—you can’t easily get to ERI from Muselburgh
  • almost all routes double deckers & empty for most of the way
  • no small ‘nippy’ buses and no ‘feeder’ local routes

They raked in a £38.6m profit in 2010. That means 35p of every fare taken (or 25%) was profit. That didn’t go to pay the high heid yins their £1m—that was already part of the costs. But 91% of profit (about £35.1m) went to Edinburgh City Council. That’s equivalent to each household in the city paying another £140 for that year in council tax. Nice trick! And this is how to ‘encourage’ public transport?

Where is the investment in Oyster-style cards where people slip on and off the bus like they do in London? Where are the clippies on routes to Leith who can help out baffled tourists trying to find Britannia? Where are the short, fast linking services using cheap, small buses through the sprawling suburbs that every European city has?

Lothian has taken a 1960’s model for a city bus service and done no more than spruce it up with new buses. A five-year-old with a stout abacus could make such an unambitious company profitable in such a cosseted environment. But 21st © integrated transport, such as you find in any European city, is a mystery to them—and will remain so as long as a suspicious cosiness between the City and its ‘arms-length bus company remains as thick as it is.

What They Threw Away 60 years ago—Edinburgh’s Tram Map, 1950 (source: see below)

Map copyright © David King and originally used without his permission, for which I apologise. Originally drawn by cartographer J.C. Gillham and published by Edinburgh Corporation. Permission has now been graciously given—see:

http://www.grantonhistory.org/transport/edinburgh_tram_maps.htm

Posted in Transport | 4 Comments

Ehhhh: What’s Up, Doc?

Posted on June 22, 2012 by davidsberry

Yesterday saw the first UK-wide doctors’ strike in decades. It was over proposed changes to their pensions and, although the government tried to play it down and a fair number of doctors showed up for work anyway, there were still thousands of appointments broken and hundreds of non-urgent operations cancelled. Anyone having waited for either to come round knows that can be a matter of month, if not years.

The doctors had thought they had a deal but the UK Department of Work & Pensions has made no exception for doctors in its brutal re-evaluation of what the country can afford to pay its public servants. Generally speaking, the public has been supportive, such is the high esteem in which doctors (and nurses) are generally held. A discussion on FaceBook received this (edited) response:

“They contribute more to the pension pot and, in the main, work long hours and have a job with great responsibility. I dont think it is too much of a reward at retirement. In comparison to bankers and what Westminster government wastes on Trident, etc. it is a mere drop in the ocean.

“All the while, Westminster’s squandering of money could be used to increase wages for the lower paid. Because doctors got generous pay rises under Blair does not make them responsible for Blair pushing others into doomed private pensions. Otherwise you could lose them to other countries.”

All fair comment. But a little rummaging comes up with a pay structure that has changed appreciably over the last few years. This is shown in the following table of NHS salaries:

Salary Averages in £ sterling of NHS Medical Posts 1972 -2009 (Source: Pay in the NHS)

As well as showing the doctors’ huge boost around 2003, it shows the relative pittance for doctors under training and the modest salaries of even senior nurses. Compounding public envy of the scale of that boost has been a simultaneous decrease in GP willingness to work anti-social hours, resulting in fewer out-of-hours surgeries, home visits, etc. But is thee evidence that we are losing doctors abroad because the pay is so much better there? The chart below makes comparisons of salaries elsewhere:

International Comparison of Doctors’ Salaries with Average Wage (Source: fullfact.org)

The results show things as at least comparable, with the self-employed (i.e. private practice) GPs doinf particularly well by comparison. Those interested in details of UK GP salaries can find them in the NHS publication GP Earnings and Expenses those for hospital doctors are given in Hospital Doctor Pay Scales. Bottom line is that most GPs will earn over £50k before tax, most hospital doctors double that and specialists or Trust CEOs serious six-figure sums.

But the dispute was about retirement arrangements. Instead of a lump sum of £162,000 and an annual pension of £68,000 upon retirement, the DWP wants doctors to contribute more, retire later and receive less. While unfair, this is no more than thousands of council workers, teachers, firemen and other public servants are being asked to do. All have complained, some have taken strike action.

Many of them (including doctors’ supporters) will agree with the assertion above, that “Westminster’s squandering of money” could provide the necessary finance. Trouble is, one man’s squander is another man’s defence system and, given the failure to date of either copious borrowing or quantitative easing to halt our fiscal slide, Osbo has no real room to maneuver—even if he wanted to.

So, solid though the doctors’ case may be that they had a deal, so did everyone else. And, since they pull down at least twice average earnings and would not get any better pay elsewhere, why they should not take some of the pain too seems a reasonable question.

Posted in Commerce, Community | Leave a comment

Lost in Translation

Posted on June 21, 2012 by davidsberry

Recently, SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson, a fluent German speaker, was interviewed in Wiener Zeitung (The Vienna Newspaper). In it, he urges caution in allowing himself to be described as a ‘nationalist’ because of continuing strong right-wing overtones in that word from Nazi history in the German-speaking world, even 2/3rds of a century later. The SNP have always been proud of its peacefully different ‘civic’ nationalism.

The response from Patricia Ferguson and Ruth Davidson (aided by a partial Herald newspaper), mocking the SNP for denying they were nationalists, seems to stem from either rank ignorance of history or deliberate cynical opportunism. In either case, it so appalled the editor of the paper in question he felt obliged to pen an explanation:

“May I clarify remarks attributed to Westminster SNP leader Angus Robertson, in an interview published in the Austrian quality newspaper Wiener Zeitung (“Robertson defends interview”, The Herald, June 19).

In an edited German language interview with Mr Robertson the newspaper reported that the SNP was not “nationalist” in the sense that German speakers would commonly understand it. The distinction seems an obvious one for anybody who speaks German, knows the history of Germany and Austria or reads the interview.

In the unabridged interview Mr Robertson said: “We are cosmopolitan citizens of the world. I prefer not to translate that ‘I am a Nationalist’ into German because in German it sounds far-right, which I am not.”

“I hope this puts the record straight.

  • Dr Walter Hämmerle,
  • Deputy Editor,
  • Wiener Zeitung,
  • Wiedner Gürtel 10, 1040 Vienna, Austria“
Posted in Politics | Leave a comment

Looking a Sea Horse in the Mouth

Posted on June 20, 2012 by davidsberry

Yesterday, Marine Scotland published a controversial report on fish stocks in the Firth of Clyde as the Clyde Ecosystem Review. Whereas two years ago, a similar report had predicted that the estuary was “about to become a marine desert” this report is far more optimistic and talks about “a functioning ecosystem” and “more white fish biomass than in the 1940s“.

Scottish Fisheries Secretary Richard Lochhead said:

“The Firth of Clyde has been a rich and productive fishing ground for Scottish fishermen for hundreds of years, however intensive fishing in the twentieth century has made an impact. Therefore it’s very encouraging that this new report reveals a remarkably resilient ecosystem, which has shown recent signs recovery and continues to support fish populations.

“What this report indicates is that with careful, collective management it may be possible to improve biodiversity and nurture the Firth back to a more diverse fishery, able to support mature fish stocks that can be sustainably harvested.”

All of which is good stuff. By surveying the fish actually in the sea, including the minnows and not just taking statistics from those that are caught, it is believed that this survey is much more accurate. A large number of young whiting is thought to be because their predators are being caught. The more informed and/or cynical among you out there reading this might be caught with a sotto voce “aye, right” on your lips right now.

Because whitefish increase or no, landings are not what they once were and a whole variety of fishing methods (quite apart from the insanity of CFP-induced discards) are literally tearing the place up. Most at fault are the prawners and scallop dredgers. To catch prawns, you need fine mesh nets and just about everything else gets hoovered up as by-catch. The scallop boats drag what is effectively a marine bulldozer along the bottom. Not only does this bring up a different sort of by-catch as well as prawns but it’s like harvesting apples using low-level bombers: it gets the job done but leaves a wasteland.

The Community of Arran Seabed Trust now has several years of a total take ban on a couple of square kilometers in Lamlash Bay and are pleased with the biodiversity gained but this is literally a drop in the ocean of the whole Clyde ecosystem. While water quality improvement and regulated fish and shellfish farming have certainly helped boost the productivity of Scotland’s inshore waters, increased seal and seabird populations, though welcomed, are often at odds with producers, much as sheep farmers oppose reintroduction of eagles or wolves because of what they may eat.

Although there has been no equivalent study, the situation in the Forth appears similar to the Clyde. The exception here is the lack of fish farming—although if someone were to reintroduce the local oysters, once so plentiful they were the staple of Auld Reekie’s poor, there is a fortune to be made (they’re smaller but sweeter than the pacific variety in current use). But we have the same scallop and prawn boats, as well as a scattering of one -man inshore crab and lobster smacks all round the Forth’s many small harbours.

Every time I go out on it, the Forth seems healthy too. Not only have cetaceans been spotted around its mouth (always a sign of good water quality) but the gannets of the Bass continue to thrive. Gannets aren’t too fussy about which fish they take, as long as they swim within 5m or so of the surface. These big birds can take fish a half kilo or more in weight. Last time we counted, 150,000 of them were living on the Bass. Even if they took just one fish per week each, that’s ten tonnes of fish a DAY going down gannet gullets alone.

Nesting Gannets above the Lighthouse on Bass Rock

On the other hand, Bass gannets have been detected fishing as far away as Norway so it may be they are being forced to extend their range. For short-ranged seabirds like puffins and guillemots who ‘fly’ deep underwater to catch their prey and don’t have that option, the story is not so good. Puffins locally had been losing numbers while the Danes were sucking up thousands of tonnes of their staple sand eels off the Wee Bankie for use as fertiliser. Then they were hit by invasive Bass Mallow blanketing Craigleith and Fidra so they couldn’t even land, let alone get to their burrows. Numbers do seem to be rising again.

But, while the puffins may be recovering, guillemots (in French “little penguins” because that’s what they look like) seem to be in decline. The massed colonies on Craigleith’s east cliff and the steep side of The Lamb have thinned. Just what that means is unclear but such birds feed on just those small fish most likely to get wheechled up in a prawn net and not seem big enough to bother throwing back. It is a similar story with the dainty kittiwakes who take smaller surface fish.

We should learn lessons from elsewhere. Once people could pick the delicious California abalone along any rocky seashore. And, although that great state has 1,500km of seashore (15% of Scotland’s) the abalone is now fished out and endangered. Wildlife tourism is one of our growth industries. And while one of the glories of the Forth is its wildlife and its accessibility from the Capital, we should not be smug. I would not take Marine Scotland’s report as more than a reprieve that we have not messed up our inshore marine environment quite as badly as we thought. Business as usual is no sensible option.

Posted in Commerce, Environment | Leave a comment

Who You Calling ‘Foreign’?

Posted on June 19, 2012 by davidsberry

I often wonder at the genuineness of unionist ‘confusion’ at what Scotland being a normal country would involve. Every other day another academic is dragged out from some ivory tower to furrow his distinguished brow over whether the sun could still rise over Britain if it contained two countries or a businessman frets that ‘separation’ would damage bulk-buying of stamps and could hurt profits.

Let’s leave aside that 100+ countries have become independent since 1945, half of them smaller than Scotland and that not one is clamouring to lose its independence. More specifically, Eire, despite a worse depression than the UK has suffered and a property market that has lost 50% of value did not come begging to reverse the 1922 treaty that set up the Irish Free State. Why?

Congenital naysayers like Jim Murphy had their fun coining the phrase ‘Arc of Insolvency’ when places like Eire and Iceland, both riding the credit wave of the mid-noughties for all they were worth, were hammered worse than the UK when the recession hit. Icelandic banks tumbled, along with Irish property magnates and the austerity imposed dug deeper there than here. So, that’s the lesson then—poor wee places like that can’t make it? Tosh!

Having hugely overstretched itself in the banking sector (the three government-owned banks that failed once owned assets 10 times Iceland’s GDP) the Financial Times says Iceland is “emerging from the shadow of 2008“. Meantime, in contrast to both Britain and the EU’s shrinking economy of 0.1% and 0.3% respectively, the Irish managed 0.9% growth last year and is on-track for the same in 2012. Not only are they not insolvent but both made a better fist of dealing with the crisis and with much less fuss and long-term damage than the £200bn ‘quantitative easing’ fest at the heart of Osbonomics.

So, smirk Mr Murphy but your boss of the time, Mr ‘Prudence’ Brown pillaged pension funds, invested squat in the future, spent beyond our means on social programmes, threw the FSA to the wolves of Canary Wharf and muffed the Northern Rock warning signal before running into the HBOS/RBS fiscal brick wall that made Iceland look like a playground lunch money heist. Allow me, for the first time, to quote yesterday’s blog because it is relevant here:

“The most recent expenditure and revenue figures for 2010/11 show that Scotland accounted for 9.3 per cent of UK public spending, but 9.6 per cent of UK tax revenue, and that our 9.6 per cent of UK tax was generated with just 8.4 per cent of the population.”

In other words, Scotland’s starting to look more like our recovering neighbours than the floundering economy that we are currently yoked to. The arc of prosperity is returning and we are prevented from being a part of it. Ah, but we’ve only touched on two of the countries that made up the original arc: what about our three Scandinavian northern neighbours? The contrast with the UK becomes embarrassing:

  1. No Scandinavian bank came close to failing (they had strict regulation: FSA take note)
  2. No Scandinavian country fell into recession
  3. Sweden and Denmark rank 3rd and 4th on the scale world economic competitiveness
  4. Norway’s oil fund (now passing £200bn) is the world’s biggest single financial reserve

All this has been done with the most generous welfare state on the planet and with standards of living and qualities of life that are surpassed only in dot-on-the-map financial havens like Liechtenstein, Monaco and the Caymans. It’s not that the Arc of Prosperity is back: it actually never went away. It just suits unionists to bubble on about the Euro crisis and Greek instability because it makes the British fiscal failure look good by comparison.

But, even if Scotland’s doing better than its southern cousins and looks like it might fit in the arc, how could we afford to dismantle the UK state, shoulder all the burdens that are currently carried by it and not drown in debt? Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that we want a world presence comparable to Eire. How would that work?

There are around 500,000 civil servants in Britain. Assuming we’d need 8.6% of them to run our 8.6% of the UK population, that’s a chunk of change—probably around £1.2bn. But we’re already paying for them with the 9.6% of tax revenue we send south (see above). Two issues to resolve is whether equivalent economies of scale are possible at our reduced size and just how the Department of Work & Pensions or the MoD or whatever could be sensibly partitioned. Given that avoiding that being disruptive would take time, there is no reason why Scotland could not contract with England to run parts of its civil service in the interim while the trickier ones (e.g. HM Revenue) are sorted out.

Let’s face it, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all made peaceable and almost unnoticed transitions to full independence. Australia, independent in 1900, kept the pound until post-WW2 with no ill effects to anyone. Much gnashing of teeth has met the idea of Scots keeping the pound because “we’d have no control over the currency“. Given the fact that Sterling interest rates are controlled by the Bank of England and set mainly in the interests of the London area, you have to ask what difference this would make. Having the same currency as our main trading partner simply makes sense.

Our place in the world, if modeled on Ireland, would involve about 170 embassies and consulates but, since we already own a 8.6% stake in the 200+ UK ones, its should be relatively straighforward to negotiate for a presence in those where we wished to be and invest in new premises where it made sense to do so. Embassies would only be part of the negotiations to apportion assets. Clearly the English would be getting the bulk of the deal and might therefore wind up buying us out of areas of Whitehall, Salisbury Plain, Chatham, Portsmouth, GHQ, etc.

Whether we’d want to make a stink about far more than 91.4% of motorway being in England would depend how hard-nosed they were about 90% of North Sea oil coming to us and how much they were prepared to pay to keep Faslane, as well as the Cape Wrath and Benbecula ranges. The point is that it’s in both our interests to make it as painless as possible. Trains will cross the border carrying grannies to see their grandchildren, just as before; the BBC will broadcast Eastenders as well as River City; there need be no more antagonism than we witness before a Calcutta Cup match.

Let’s face it, the transition of three-quarters of your day-to-day services like education or NHS to Scottish Parliament control in 1999 went largely unnoticed at the chalk-face, The distant bureaucracy of benefits, taxes, pensions, defence, foreign service, etc will be noticed even less. All of it need not happen overnight and there are over 100 recent examples to study how it can best be done.

From then on in the great and civilised land that is Englandshire, the Jocks will join the Paddys as visiting cousins rather than foreigners (whether the Taffys wish to make such a move will be up to them). You will notice that there IS no shorthand word for the English: given their dominance in Britain—and the continued cultural oblivion that has always gone with that—we on the Celtic fringe will simply have to shrug, smile and accept that even full political autonomy will be no proof against the ongoing family tyranny exerted by your big brother even after you leave home.

Posted in Commerce, Community, Politics | Leave a comment

Stranger Scotland; Untied Kingdom: It SSUKs

Posted on June 18, 2012 by davidsberry

I am encouraged by rumours of an imminent ‘No’ campaign launch. It is high time that those who claim the present Union is the best of all possible worlds for the Scottish people extended their campaign beyond procedural quibbles and throwing mud at those, like myself, who argue for independence.

Given the putative lineup of SSUK leaders, we’ll have our work cut out. Alasdair Darling, Charles Kennedy and Annabelle Goldie are no lightweights and, while independistas have differed with them on many points, they construct cogent arguments from their interpretation of the facts and fairly represent the thinking person’s (i.e. not the Daily Mail) wing of unionism.

And it’s not before time. This blog has been running a series of items on advantages to be had from Scottish Independence. To date counter-arguments on the advantages of Union have been thin on the ground and largely devoted to unsubstantiated scaremongering (“can’t keep the pound”…”can’t stay in Europe”…”shunned if not in NATO”…”oil running out”… etc, etc).

Typical of the ham-fisted staging of the Union argument to date has been the utterly hilarious Luff & Harvey Show before Westminster’s indelicately titled “Separation Committee” chaired by Iain Davidson MP, a man whose mind has been compared to a black hole. Nick Harvey MP (Minister of State for the Armed Forces) and henchperson Peter Luff (Parliamentary Secretary of State for Defence) appeared before the committee this week. Ably aided by Lindsay Roy and David Mowat (and noticeably less ably by Jim McGovern and Pamela Nash), Iain performed what could only be described as a stylised but intimate tango with the MoD reps. It was like the Glasgow Warriors’ pack discussing ‘women’s problems’ after a night on the batter.

Seldom can Sir Humphrey have been as comfortable in front of a parliamentary committee as here. Knowing they were among friends, Luff and Harvey waxed lyrical on how inseparable British forces were, how lacking in detail the MoD was regarding Scottish Government intentions, how impossible it would be to build as much as a portable sentry hut in Scotland, were this debilitating plague of independence befall Scotland. Imagine a football match while one team was still in its bus on the way to the game and you get the picture.

To date, whether it’s Brian Wilson sounding off again in the Hootsmon or the latest naysayer comment in SoS, the drum-roll of dismissive pooh-poohing of what Scotland can achieve can be seen as no more than the logical continuation of assertions in the ’90s that there was no debate to be had about Scottish independence, that “we couldnae dae it wursels”. Looking back those twenty years, it is impressive how far this debate has come, despite surly Unionist foot-dragging at conceding each step.

Leave aside the entire argument about process—we have a Scottish Government both capable and clear about the major question to be asked about our future; that question will be posed in two years’ time, once we’ve had a chance to discuss it; a free choice of all people registered to vote here will decide and, unlike most other countries, we got here democratically, without anyone getting hurt—let alone killed—in the process. That alone is something of which we can be proud.

But let’s examine this new ‘stronger together’ slogan. Leave aside our joint history; do the Scots feel that a permanent UK right-wing government is what they want? Are we prepared to send our soldiers on dubious wars while the UK deludes itself it’s still a world power “punching above its weight”? Are we happy having another budget-busting generation of cold-war-era, global-macho nukes we’ll never use based on our soil? Do Scots feel the same jingoistic hostility towards Europe as most English seem to? Are Scots as mercenary predatory as London City traders whose 1988 ‘Big Bang’ deregulation fueled the greed that created the present recession (for which punters are paying)?

I was struck while watching the BBC’s obsequious Trooping the Colour ceremony not just how spectacular but how foreign it looked. Apart from tunic buttons, all the Guards look identical. While, from a military awe perspective, this makes sense, that particular visual homogenisation looks so English; when the Queen opened the Scottish Parliament in 1999, the Household Cavalry looked magnificent but totally out of place in Edinburgh. When the BBC4 re-broadcast Tumbledown for the 30th anniversary of the Falklands conflict, it was as part of their “Very British Institution” series. But apart from Colin Firth’s excellent performance as a wounded Scots Guards officer and a couple of token Jock accents, this was as English a production as Radio 4 at its plummy best.

A recent debate about whether Scots can be British misses the point entirely. The Scots ARE British—whether they like it or not. But most are pretty clear about the differences. But that is exactly where our English cousins get muddled because, for 300 years, they have used the terms interchangeably. Most English—especially those in the Home Counties—would have seen either BBC programme as magnificently British; most Scots would see them as quintessentially English. TheEnglish get hurt, insulted or even angry that the Scots would want to leave the Union because they are English and after three centuries of its glory, to them, the Union is simply England writ large. Unless they belong to the 5% who have spent appreciable time in Scotland, they just can’t get their heads around what we’re on about.

What we’re on about is our ability to do better than be the adjunct of a fading world power with delusions of grandeur. The most recent expenditure and revenue figures for 2010/11 show that Scotland accounted for 9.3 per cent of UK public spending, but 9.6 per cent of UK tax revenue, and that our 9.6 per cent of UK tax was generated with just 8.4 per cent of the population—the equivalent of £1,300 extra for every man, woman and child in Scotland.

Though we will shoulder our share of the UK debt, the resources available to Scotland (90% of UK’s oil, similar amount of renewables, strong export market in whisky and engineering, major tourist destination, world reputation already) mean we are well placed to prosper and to pay that debt down much faster. It will be England, burdened by acres of social problems in its cities, unaffordable ‘prestige’ expenditures like Trident, by bases in Gibraltar and Cyprus to support its carrier-less and therefore delusional ‘global reach’ that in two decades will still be struggling to repay the present debt while Scotland has moved on to start accumulating its Norwegian-style oil fund.

Scotland now has its vision—not to hark back to some Victorian heyday, glorious as yet another BBC costume drama and relevant as your great grandad’s campaign medals—to look to a 21st century future for our children: to build a stronger, sustainable, prosperous economy; to create a fairer, more equal society; to shape a Scotland of which we can all be proud and from which our presently benighted English cousins might learn.

Posted in Community, Politics | Leave a comment

Can’t Get There from Here

Posted on June 15, 2012 by davidsberry

Readers of a gentle disposition in no mood for a rant—much less an anorak rant—are advised to point their browsers elsewhere. Yesterday I spent the day trying to pull together a coherent picture of public transport in the North Berwick area with the idea of publishing a short, lucid timetable for use by our many tourists. I failed. Miserably.

The logical among you will ask “how hard can it be?” Indeed, in such a rural idyll with one train and four buses in the entire North Neuk of East Lothian, it should be a doddle. But there’s a history. Roll back to the eighties when the government of the time believed in market competition in all things and deregulated buses. There did indeed follow a free-for-all in most cities that left a couple of companies glaring at each other and trying to get by on minimal £1 fares they dare not raise.

But out here in the rolling mangelwurzel fields of Bucolitopia, commercial routes became an endangered species, the rest sustained only by council money paid to bus companies to run evening/Sunday/any services. The ploughman’s wife on Norglaur Farm needed to get her shopping in town, so these minimal rural runs were supported for social reasons. Trouble is, Norglaur and its ilk is now tenanted out and its steading become £450,000 homes whose Chelsea Tractors see far more use than the slow and infrequent rural bus.

For the last 20 years, rural passengers have suffered badly from deregulation. Commercial routes charge exhorbitant fares because there is no competition and supported routes (if two buses a day can be called a route) run so infrequently people avoid using them. Best of all, rapacious operators like First would undercut local bids for routes and then balloon their price for the next bid because they knew the smaller operator could not risk bidding and failing. Supported bus costs rocketed while service was cut back.

Seven years ago, I campaigned for a summer free shuttle bus—nothing major, but an hourly service that met the train, whipped round the main local attractions, then back to the station. Given that parking in NB is a summer nightmare, especially on weekends, it is a sensible way of squeezing more visitors in. The Seabird Centre arranged a joint ticket with First ScotRail but First Bus refused to honour it on the shuttle so a Swedish family would struggle to find 80p each in ‘foreign’ money to ride the mile to the SSC. First also used a clunky full-size bus without special decoration when a 15-seater plastered with Summer Shuttle logos could have advertised its own services.

The annoying points weren’t just that companies took a blinkered view, it was that the council were unable to see this as more than a school bus contract. They put neither posters nor timetables at the stops, printed no leaflets, did nothing to link with the train and, probably worst of all, never allocated the contract until it was too late to advertise it in all the literature being printed for that tourist season. This went on for five years.

For two of those years, it actually did work. The difference was a semi-retired bundle of energy from Wallyford called Tom Armstrong who saw the potential. He had racks made for the bus, put posters in its windows, boned up on local geography and history and was off along the platform meeting each train to invite arriving tourists to use his services. It was a revelation while Tom was there but his retirement put an end to all that. He was replaced by another glum driver from Musselburgh whose response to any tourist question was an incomprehensible grunt.

This year saw the great First Bus Scramble when First suddenly announced they were pulling out of half the routes they ran in East Lothian. Locally they kept the X24 service to Edinburgh and—annoyingly (because anyone could do it better than them)—the 111 Summer Shuttle. The 121 Haddington went to Prentice and Eve’s kept the 120 Dunbar service.

This leaves a real pig’s breakfast: none of the four routes are co-ordinated either with each other, nor with the train, except for shuttle and train. No ticket issued on one bus is valid on another and the concept of a single travel ticket valid on all—bog standard on the Continent for the last half-century—is still a mystery here. Visitors must go away thinking Scotland is a nice but difficult to visit because its public transport is appalling.

So, yesterday was the day I tried to boil this mess down into something palatable. I tried to think like a tourist as to what could make a visit as easy as possible and came up with the formulation below. Whether anyone who gets to the Museum of Flight could also visit Tantallon Castle in one day, let alone see all four attractions, is questionable. This timetable is still deeply flawed and I welcome suggestions for improvement.

But perhaps you can’t get there from here as long as each bus and train operates as if it were on its own isolated planet and information totally ignores any passenger who may never have been there in their puff before. It may be yet another argument why Chelsea Tractors and petrol still make sense at £1.35 per litre.

Posted in Commerce, Transport | Tagged | 2 Comments