Bams Oot the Windae

Posted on May 24, 2012 by davidsberry

They say there’s a first time for everything. In today’s Torygraph, Alan Cochrane found common cause with SNP Defence spokesperson Angus Robertson MSP and—for the first time to my recollection—I find myself agreeing with both of them. Arch-unionist Alan is, for my money, one of the more thoughtful and articulate among them. Though he takes no prisoners and many independistas have come off worse in exchanges with him, his are exactly those arguments we must counter if the case for independence is to be conclusive.

His column regrets that the SNP has shied away from reconsidering its hostility to NATO membership by an independent Scotland at next month’s National Council and sympathises with Angus’ quite effective campaign on behalf of current and future armed forces in Scotland. Angus does talk military language almost as fluently as he does English & German and cuts a martial figure in trews and bumfreezer, as Alan observes.

Originally fueled by active member hostility to nuclear weapons and a long record of CND membership and demonstrations against Faslane, the refusal to consider NATO membership when Scotland became independent seemed a logical extension. This was underpinned by basing of the UK deterrent in Scottish water within 25 miles of Scotland’s densest conurbation around Glasgow, which put 2m Scots in the Cold War firing line.

The end of the Cold War put any urgency on the back burner but recent Westminster decisions to spend £350m investigating ‘Son of Trident’ has brought it all to the fore again. At this point, there is no practical alternative nuclear base in English waters, so the Faslane base becomes a key negotiating point in any independence discussions. But, at the same time, detailed plans for Scottish Armed Forces and their international posture—once academic, now possibly imminent—need to be laid.

Both sides of the independence argument see no need for hostility between Scotland and England, so the prime route of any hostile action towards Scotland is thereby neutralised.  Any invader would need to come through England or by sea. This latter should be taken to include terrorist acts against major items of infrastructure, like oil platforms, offshore wind farms, tidal turbines and the like. Even Torness or Hunterston nuclear power stations or the Forth/Tay Bridges could be plausible targets for seaborne attack.

If we add in the 10km length of Scotlands coast and scattered islands, the need for long-range maritime recce and rescue lies mostly within Scotland and so the net balance of appropriate armed forces for Scotland would look very different to the one the MoD is currently pursuing.

But smaller countries especially are all the stronger for having good friends among their neighbours. Quite apart from England, good relations with Eire, Iceland, Norway and Denmark would constitute an outer line past which any putative enemy would have very little chance of moving undetected, let alone undeterred. Such good relations would need to be earned by Scotland bearing its share of international duties, be it the odd infantry battalion deployed to world hotspots under UN blue berets or rescue squads flown in to help people recover and rebuild after major disasters like earthquakes.

Let’s leave aside the shape of any Scottish Defence Force. No reasonable Scottish budget could afford to build it on a scale such that it didn’t need good friends and military allies. And while some might argue that we could ‘do a Costa Rica’ and neglect to have any armed forces whatsoever, our history, our links with global communities—not to mention the exceedingly high regard in which Scottish soldiers are held throughout the world—all mitigate against anything but a small but balanced and capable military.

Looking at possible international links to develop, there is certainly a future in celebrating the Celtic connection with Eire and Cornwall, as well as Brittany and Galicia. In the opposite direction, the Nordic Council could be a booster rocket to strap on the Scottish economy. But neither have a military dimension. Indeed, with the demise of the Warsaw Pact and many of its members going over the their former ‘enemy’, the only game in town is NATO.

NATO has been called the most successful military alliance of all time and certainly none of it members has suffered non-terrorist attack in its 60+ years. It is certainly a nuclear alliance but 25 of its 28 members are non-nuclear and most have managed to negotiate a degree of non-nuclear involvement with which its people are comfortable. Given that Scotland holds a key position on NATO’s North flank and provide some of the best training facilities in Europe, the likelihood that a deal over favourable membership for an independent Scotland could be reached is high.

So why would the SNP not want it? Longstanding and principled anti-nuclear credentials need not be compromised. The drive to remove Trident from Faslane need not be sacrificed (not least because the US is far happier to run a nuclear deterrent under its own control, as France already does with its variant). NATO and UN deployments are among the few opportunities beyond joint exercises to encourage Scottish recruits with the incentive of seeing the world.

The principled pacifists in the SNP ranks who want the Cost Rica approach are few in number. The realist majority accepts that a  joint defence posture is the only one a full nation can realistically adopt. No-one in the SNP is arguing for a nuclear Scotland, nor for the horrendous moral dilemmas that it brings—quite apart from the costs.

Quite how SNP MSPs and other senior members think an independent Scotland could take its place as a normal nation and not join a defensive treaty with all its neighbours has not been explained. Idealism was something the SNP might allow itself while in the political wilderness. But on the brink of achieving its goal, the need to convince the still-doubting 2 in 3 Scots with a consistent, pragmatic suite of policies has become vital.

These policies must not only articulate the many advantages of a nation blessed with Scotland’s people and resources but also demonstrate how integrally linked it remains with neighbours and friends by accepting its obligations, even as it seizes opportunities.

Like it or not: Scotland is already a nuclear power and a NATO member—and a target for any who would challenge either. Faslane and the current union make that a fact. Independence is the way to escape such labels and set a course different from that forced on us by London. But to want independence, yet reject the vital key for close work with friends we need will be seen as retrograde, unrealistic, bampot thinking.

I’m all for independence. But we need these bams oot the windae before they hang oor collective bum oot the windae in the international isolation that would surely result.

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments

Taking the temperature: what the Eurobarometer tells us about attitudes to the economic crisis

Posted on May 23, 2012 by davidsberry

Taking the temperature: what the Eurobarometer tells us about attitudes to the economic crisis.

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

It’s the Education, Stupid

Posted on May 22, 2012 by davidsberry

Politicians of all stripes seem ferally inclined to have a go at one another. But one area on which even they all agree is on the importance of education. And, having led the world in getting its broad citizenry into schools three hundred years ago and through the Scottish Enlightenment a hundred years after that, surely Scotland should be some kind of educational superpower, no?

Er, no. While politicos knock lumps off each other on class sizes, on pupil/teacher ratios, on the merits or otherwise of Curriculum for Excellence, while teachers squabble over less pension for more work and their unions fixate on pay structures and in-service hours, kids are still being dumped at the end of our education production line like so many horse buggies in an automotive world. When employment was plentiful, this went little-noticed. Today everyone agrees youth unemployment is a scandal. We are no basket case, But we do compare poorly with other countries like Finland, Denmark, etc.

Ah, but how to fix it? In the noughties, Labour created slick youth employment schemes that did little more than slip numbers off the unemployed statistics for a year or two. The present modern apprentice schemes are more laudable but broadly equivalent to treating a brain hemorrhage with elastoplasts. Everyone wants quick fixes and education officials see the issues as theirs to solve. But, even in 1680, the world was a complicated place and no parish dominie worth his salt would have seen teaching his kids as his job and his alone.

A good education has always been a complex and elusive thing. But in this hectic world of specialists we have made of the 21st century, our streamlined thinking jams complex matters into facile categories. Just as when our car gets sick and the mechanic cures it, we expect the same from the hospital: it’s a service; we’ve paid for it; I’m entitled. The concept of responsibility for our own health is only beginning to be dimly perceived. And, until it is, our NHS will go on taking £1 in every £3 our government spends.

The same applies to education. Parents can be seen in two main types: 1) ambitious ones who want their child to succeed, seeing education essential to get there and; 2) indifferent ones who see school as kind of day care and expect it to deal with any and all their kids’ problems for them. Both approaches deserve criticism.

The ambitious parents fixate rather too much on qualifications. Vital though those are, there is seldom the kind of pro-active involvement which engages the child in activities outside of school, especially those that complement what the teacher may be doing. With both parents out working—often the case in ambitious households—the connection between the school day and the rest of life can be tenuous to the point of schizophrenia.

The indifferent parents are often not that way through choice. Again, both parents may work or it’s just a single parent at their wit’s end. Often the neighbourhood is one where academic, or any other kind of success, is a rarity. Not only the child but the parents themselves are presented with no local role models, nor support/advice that makes sense to them. ELC runs a project in Musselburgh called First Step that seeks to address this but it is one of very few drops in a bucket of daunting scale.

Why is this all so negative? Why are we not celebrating the fact that last year, exam attainment across Scotland again set a record? Because we’re lying to ourselves. From kids, through parents, teachers, schools, all the way up to the Minister, it suits everyone to have exam inflation, where exams get slightly easier; everyone can boast improvement. But it is self-delusion. Firstly, much essential education cannot be measured by exams and secondly, youth unemployment and business feedback makes it clear the system is poor at turning out employable people.

Tomorrow, a major summit by Holyrood’s Finance Committee will examine this ongoing, deteriorating issue of youth unemployment. In preparation for that, Arnold Clark has released a depressing evaluation on the employability of Scottish youth, in which 80% (1,850 out of 2,280 applicants to them) were declared unfit to work as apprentices. Now, we are not talking about calculus, nor the correct use of the Past Anterior here. As the report puts it:

““We are increasingly concerned at the state-sponsored babysitting nature of some college programmes, rather than the specifically targeted vocational training for near-guaranteed employment we believe taxpayers’ money should be being spent on.”

Students are work-shy, regarding the 18-hour week they attended college as already too onerous. Other criticism included a poor attitude to others, no concept of citizenship, poor communication skills, a poor understanding of the standards expected and an “inability to make a decision based on anything other than ‘I want’.”

Blaming educators is the obvious remedy. But what is almost always overlooked are the 150 hours each week when the students are not at college or the slightly less time pupils are not at school. Three hundred years ago, parents, neighbours, ministers, etc were part of the education process. Even in John McLean’s time on Clydeside, the principles of self-improvement were still ingrained in their thinking. Today’s easy TV diet of soap operas, fantasy contests and overpaid ‘celebrities’ are poor substitutes for such rugged support.

But where present-day socialists seem to have it wrong is that education isn’t the great leveller—it’s the great raiser-upper. But only if the child has some form of extracurricular support to round out the rote of learning in school itself, the chance to apply what they learn and see their options. There another article in today’s Hootsmon that describes how even recently, growing up on a council estate but listening to Simple Minds still opened that window out onto the world showing even a third-generation on the burroo that there were other options.

And here’s the multi-layered dilemma. If the world were less complex and hectic, there would be more peace and time to focus. If we had fewer growing up on deprived estates, there would be less distraction and more support. If parents were better able to comprehend their kids and not see them as extensions of themselves. If we had more old-school teachers who know their kids and intervene with them when required.

Modern kids are no more stupid than those in 1680. But certificates are only part of education—and not even the most important part. If we can help kids navigate the pitfalls of the paragraph above, they will achieve much—not least developing their skills, their interests, their ambition, whether as surgeon or stable-boy.

STV is currently running the 56-Up documentary that charts a dozen 7-year-olds at 7 year intervals from 1963 to the present. They were of all social backgrounds but where they wound up—from cheeky Cockney jockey to Hooray Henry—was both predictable and yet surprising. Most stumbled somewhere along the way; those that did while still in education had the hardest times and harboured most regrets; all recovered under their own steam and were the better for it.

If tomorrow’s committee is just another bunch of politicos grandstanding for the camera and trying to knock points off their opponents, we’re no further on. But if they take the Curriculum for Excellence as their starting point, encourage social work to stop acting like they operated on another planet, inspired parents to be just that and teachers to remember the dominie’s social heart under his crusty black-gown exterior, we might leave a country better populated by the personal success stories to which we all aspire.

Posted in Education | 1 Comment

Drachmatis Personae: Angela vs Bob

Posted on May 21, 2012 by davidsberry

In my second Silicon Valley job 30 years ago, I launched the engineering department of a start-up PC company years before IBM rolled out the PC or Apple the Macintosh. ACS was run by the most plausible Southern good-ole-boy salesman you could ever want to meet. Bob could talk the hind legs off a donkey. He so inspired me, it took a year for me to realise that hardware, operating system and applications could all be invented by a staff of six—but they couldn’t also be developed into reliably bombproof products.

As red figures ate through the $1m in venture capital Bob had bamboozled out of Xerox, Bob and I had a heart-to-heart. “We have a problem, Bob” I confessed. “Our actual income can’t justify keeping this scale of development.” Bob disagreed and shared a little of his genius with me. “You’re off by a country mile, Dave,” he beamed. “If I owe $5k, yes I have a problem. But, since they’re into us for over $1m, it becomes Xerox’s problem.”

These thoughts came back after the non-event G8 summit in Washington was followed by a NATO summit in ‘da Windy City’. Both produced similarly vacuous statements over withdrawal from Afghanistan and taking the air out of the fiscal panic (a.k.a. ‘Eurocrisis’) over Greece. Both issues have headlined around the globe for years to the point of boredom with most folk. But while a simple solution exists for one (just bale out), resolution of the Eurocrisis lies much more in the ‘rock-and-a-hard-place’ category.

Much though I disagree with former Chancellor Alastair Darling on policy, his refreshing frankness on Sunday’s Andrew Marr show was an overdue lesson in clarity; Europe has had four years to learn from the banking crisis that struck in 2007; they appear not to have done so. As a consequence, continued dithering means the bigger the crash is likely to be once enough people agree that the Euremperor still has no clothes.

In the course of the noughties, our banks forgot their main role of financing business and devoted much time and money in speculation—either within themselves or in a variety of questionable ‘instruments’, among which were accidents-waiting-to-happen like junk bond packages and treasury bonds from places like Greece.

Unfortunately, few leaders are showing rigour equivalent to Mr Darling’s candour. But as one of them is Angela Merkel—this may be the only reason Europe’s entire fiscal structure is not disintegrating around our collective ears. Yet. Just as Darling & Brown baled out British banks with almost £1tn in loans, so the Germans have shored up overextended European banks’ imprudent willingness to buy up government debt—not just in from Greece but in other overheated economies across the Mediterranean.

Almost everyone is pressuring Angela to budge on a little more generosity towards Greece. She’s having none of it and she’s right. Though it is hard to find politicians anywhere who agree with her, that has more to do with the toxicity of the situation than with any flaw in her fiscal thinking. M. Hollande, the new French President talks austerity but walks a softer line than Sarkozy did. Spain’s Treasury Minister, Inigo Fernandez de Mesa is similar, arguing for Greece to be accommodated and denying that Spanish banks are in imminent need of any bail-out (although the Torygraph begs to differ and shares in Bankia, Santander, etc plunged 20% at the end of last week.)

The origins of all this lie in incompatible ambitions for the EU among its members. Skeptical as Britain always was, the EU’s French/German heart of 20 years ago beat faster as a huge boost in members from communism’s collapse and German re-unification  made anything seem possible. The dream of a single trading bloc of 350m using one single currency beckoned. For public (especially German public) consumption, criteria for euro membership were portrayed as strict. But Italy only qualified because no-one could imagine any euro without them. Greece didn’t qualify but was let in anyway. The boom of the noughties raised all boats, meaning shortcomings and stresses could be papered over.

In Britain, Irn Broon steadily sold off the UK silver by raiding the pension funds, selling off the gold reserves, syphoning burgeoning tax receipts off to pay for social programmes—in short, living beyond our means. On the Continent, the same: banks bought euro-denominated lucrative Greek (and Spanish, etc) debt, which the Greeks used to fund pay rises and pensions they couldn’t afford. In both places, politicians pretended their short-term vision would suffice, secretly aware that, some time later (hopefully, much later) someone else would reap the whirlwind they had sown.

Comeuppance came earlier than any predicted. The worthlessness of many bank-created ‘instruments’ brought down both creators and customers in 2007-8. The rot was only stopped by countries printing money that had no backing to lubricate the otherwise creaking global fiscal machine as banks and business ran for cover, calling in loans and snapping shut any cash outlay in sight. As a short-term expedient, it worked. But as a long-term solution, it has flaws, not least when faced with the ‘Bob’ philosophy.

Whereas most countries pulled on sackcloth and ashes and skidded into sullen austerity, such was the omnipotence of the ‘Masters of the Universe’ of Canary Wharf and their ilk who, ever since the 1988 ‘big bang’ in the City, have been feverishly inventing a slew of financial derivatives and hedge strategies, that their personal money machines kept them ‘earning’ six- and seven-figure bonuses, even as the financial institutions they served (and the punters who invested their life savings in them) took a serious hammering.

The defiance of fiscal gravity by bank directors and traders was not lost on a public now hit by collapsed jobs, pensions, house prices and salaries. But, worse, it convinced the public in places like Greece that defiance and chutzpah could sustain their bloated salaries and pensions, despite their country alone being palpably deficient in means to sustain them. Given that they were eurozone members, they could afford wages & benefits over the odds because their neighbours could not let the euro fail.

As a international version of Bob’s scenario, it is entirely plausible. And, as long as Greece lacks the political will to change as they are being asked to do, the problem is not really theirs: it is indeed the eurozone’s. Having failed to keep the nerve prior to their April elections, their inability to form any government means that the June 11th elections will be equally inconclusive, leading to a summer of uncertainty. While others sweat, they’ll just keep getting overpaid and hoping for the best.

And, rather than being supported to hold the line on Greek (and anyone else’s) austerity, Angela is under new pressure from Hollande in France (to show something from his new presidency) from Obama in the US (to avoid frightening American horses prior to his own election in November) and even her own unions, who have just secured an austerity-busting 4.8% wage rise.

Forget that Greece should never have been let into the Euro in the first place, ejecting it now would mean an instant default on all its loans and Treasury notes. This, in turn, would mean serious deficits at banks who had made (and perversely continue to make) those loans. In other words, the banks, far from learning from the ludicrous over-stretch of four years ago, have hardly changed their ways. Since virtually none of their boards were hung by their thumbs for their earlier behaviour, this is no surprise. It seems a couple more failures are needed for them to finally relearn their banking business.

But it means that the combined pressure on Merkel of eurozone solidity and further bank runs guarantees that Greece can brazen it out indefinitely—or at least until the entire euro economy falters from pouring all its cash into the likes of inefficient Greece when it should have been tooling up to meet insatiable demands of the new Chinese consumer.

At that point, when the bulk of European business has been crippled, the Greeks will simply revert to the drachma, suffer a couple of years of austerity not much worse than they are baulking at now—and then quietly prosper as their devalued drachma brings in tourists by the million. But not as many, nor as rich tourists as if their Bob-style bluff were to fail, Angela were to prevail and Greece were unceremoniously booted out of the euro right now. It would be short-term pain for long-term gain.

But who’d dare take centre stage to force such a tragedy?

Posted in Commerce, Politics | 1 Comment

Fun Isn’t Weather-Dependent

Posted on May 20, 2012 by davidsberry

After a record cold/wet April, May is bidding fair to make this the worst Spring in decades. Farmers are staring morosely at crops that, after a good start from a mild winter, have barely grown any in seven weeks. Blossoming trees seem at sixes and sevens about what to do and several chestnuts have been shedding damaged leaves that had only just unfurled.

The weather has been driven here from the Arctic by persistent northeasterlies, which, in turn, means a livelier sea running into the Forth. This does not seem to have deterred our local yachtsmen whose racing lasers have been out capsizing regularly in the unpredictable surf of the last few days.

Perhaps more surprising has been the stream of people keen to go out on the Seafari boats from the SSC around Craigleith and Bass Rock. Yesterday, though the May trip was cancelled (hard to get in & out of Kirkhaven on a northeasterly) I was called in for guiding on three trips on the RIB.

It was, as the locals describe it, “lumpy”. A long, heavy swell from the East was being ruffled by a ragged chop out of the North East, making passage uneven and the sea state qualify as ‘rough’. And, as we were going at 20-25 knots into it, the Force 3 wind was shredding a fair bit of spray from the bow and thrashing it over the passengers and me. My kind of weather.

Luckily, everybody else loved it too (with the possible exception of skipper Brian who had to steer us safely through it). From a quintet of Italian twitchers, big enough to have been from the scrum of the Azzuris to a well spoken wedding party whose high heels looked incongruous poking out the end of the waterproofs, all treated it as a fairground ride bonus on top of seeing the wildlife.

And wildlife there was: several young harbour seals hauled out below the vale in the Craig, with a big raft of puffins offshore opposite; plenty of mini-penguin-like guillemots and razorbills clumped on the cliffs or whirring overhead; cormorants and shags; kittiwakes and fulmars; and everywhere the scavenging gulls looking for an easy meal.

Down at the Bass, the “gannet flying school” had hundreds aloft, gliding effortlessly in the updraft above the cliffs as we pitched and yawed in the unpredictable jabble below. Most impressive was when several hundred adolescent birds lifted off the helicopter landing area to fill the sky above us with these magnificent birds.

Lighthouse and Castle on Bass Rock

It’s always fun for me to ‘visit the estate’ as I do at every opportunity. But it’s twice the fun to be sharing it with people seeing it for the first time and watch them still beaming from the experience as we unload they all safe back on dry land.

Posted in Education, Environment | 1 Comment

Creative Skintland

Posted on May 18, 2012 by davidsberry

And while we, as we were yesterday, are on the topic of the arts and creativity in Scotland, today’s Herald carries a piece on how Creative Scotland is shaking up the way it disburses the £50-or-so-million of their largesse to various artists and organisations. Precipitated by a cut in government funding, to be offset in part by an increase in lottery funding (now that the endelss drain of London Olympics is being plugged), this nonetheless racks up a level of uncertainty that is unprecedented in the hand-to-mouth world of the arts.

Creative Scotland is a new quango, created in July 2010 by rolling Scottish Screen in with the Arts Council. Although a new quango, it is pretty standard-issue in terms of its structure. It has an (unremunerated) board of worthies of whom Ruth Wishart is probably the best known and chaired by the usual business heavyweight in the form of Sir Sandy Crombie who was previously Chief Exec of Standard Life Investments.

Under the board, the senior management team of six pulls down £440k between them and a group of 13 ‘portfolio holders‘ heads up the rest of the 137 staff. Through them a variety of arts projects across Scotland was being given financial support through a mechanism called ‘flexible funding’. This was not as solid as ‘foundation funding’ but did allow organisations to plan shows, pay bills, hire staff and breathe easily.

But lottery funding cannot be used for anything that looks like stable and permanent support. To be moved on to a project-by-project funding basis will be onerous to funded organisations because they will have to apply for project funds before flexible funding expires each year. In effect, it puts CS even more in the driving seat than it was because everyone from the Edinburgh Festival to Mull Little Theatre will be coming, cap in hand, on an annual basis.

Creative Scotland disburses the arts support money across Scotland, so it is reasonable to secure professional management of that money. But, with most of the arts ‘industry’ up in arms about developments (and individual artists being especially derisory about ‘nomeklatura’ and/or a ‘Glasgow Mafia’ making key grant decisions) just who is watching whether public money is being directed and used wisely. Attending a recent CS event in Dovecote Studios (I remember them as the Infirmary Street Baths) in Edinburgh, I was impressed with the canapes, glitz and flummery, but little else.

It reminded me very much of fundraisers I once attended for the San Jose Symphony at which Silicon Valley names like Intel’s Moore or AMD’s Sanders would be entertained and fleeced for fat cheques in exchange for founder’s status plaques being nailed up in their box. But—penguin suit or no—that was private money and theirs to disburse. Every penny of CS’s largesse started off in the public purse.

The whole shebang started off poorly, with Morag Hay being pulled in as a ‘bridging’ Chief Exec and getting a brisk £15k for 60 days’ work. All in all, just rolling the two quangos into one cost Joe Public £838,475 in severances last year. In all, CS received £52m of public money from Holyrood last year and disbursed £45m of it, leaving a nice little cushion of £9.5m in the bank. And, in doing that, its 137 staff pulled down £5.821m in total.

Far be it from me to question in detail which of the 40+ arts organisations got how much CS money last year. But to have 13% of funding monies drained off by the very organisation that dispenses their funding seems excessive—especially when its events would put some private sector shindigs to shame. It has moved up to the split new and prestigious Waverley Gate office complex (the old GPO) where it joins Amazon, Balfour Beatty, Microsoft and NHS Lothian (whereby hangs another tail). What was wrong with their more modest quarters in Moray Place is unclear.

Canada has a population of 34.8m (roughly seven times as many people as Scotland) Their Canada Council for the Arts disbursed CAN$205m for a total administration overhead of CAN$14m, which translates to a much more reasonable 6.8%—or about half of what the CS prestige machine skims off the top.

How do they do it? Well, for a start, they don’t have an SMT that costs £1/2m, nor 13 ‘portfolio holders’ each keeping a serious mortgage going. The Canadians recruit a dozen practicing artists for a year on a board, chaired by a civil servant. Decisions are made by those who’ve lived the life and, although they get little in the year they serve, they play fair because next year it will be someone else’s turn to vet their application.

When Lord Robertson of Port Ellen promised a ‘bonfire of the quangos’ over a decade ago, who would have thought that by now and in the midst of a recession it would be the quangos turning up their own heat while the public purse shivers out in the cold?

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Hollywood Comes to Town

Posted on May 17, 2012 by davidsberry

Not often our corner of the county gets the attention of the rich & famous but for the last ten days, we’ve had the production crew for Johnathan Teplitzky’s film of The Railwayman (from the book by Eric Lomax) camped out on Milsey Bay. The story is of a WW2 veteran of the infamous ‘death railway’ in Burma coming to terms later in life with the torture meted out to him during his years as a prisoner of war.

Shot in Thailand, Edinburgh and North Berwick, it stars Colin Firth as Lomax himself and Nicole Kidman as a nurse who first becomes involved with his tortuous personal journey and then becomes his wife. Names like that are quite a draw so the whole thing has become a highly entertaining hoot for locals. Since the production is at one end of the town, few are inconvenienced but curious crowds have been thronging the place and neighbours report an unusual number of locals walking their dog frequently in the area.

On Tuesday, a mass invasion of some 300 kids from the local high school almost brought production to a halt but good-natured intervention by the local polis kept everyone happy and lucky ones went away grinning with autographs and photos of them with Colin Firth. Managing to wangle me a set visit was the brilliant Film Focus team in Edinburgh (who have brought a raft of lucrative film productions to our area).

Thanks to Ros and Rosie’s faultless Film Focus PR, I was able to traipse around the set with Oliver Veysey the associate producer and Miglet Crichton the Location Manager, seeing how they’d crammed several sets into the terraced house they were using and marveling at the filmless, fully digital production systems now being used. Both director Johnathan Teplitzky and Cinematographer Garry Phillips seems very pleased with the reception they had received. Garry commented:

“When we arrive on set, there can sometimes be resentment at the intrusion to local life. Everyone here in North Berwick has been helpful, if rather curious. But we’re especially grateful that they have not insisted on spoiling shots by walking or driving past when we ask them not to. We rely on people’s co-operation; the locals here—even the swarm of kids who just showed up—have been great.”

Just seeing the amount of work that went into scene 47 was an eye-opener. Shot through the upstairs window into a front garden cluttered with tea chests and removal bric-a-brac  this scene depicts Mr Firth’s Eric confronting Ms Kidman’s Patricia moving in with him. It was fascinating to see several takes as the arriving Eric struggles with the mixed male emotions so many men must have experienced at equivalent watersheds in their life as his future wife’s presence sits ill with the bachelor chaos that characterises his home.

Film Location on Tantallon Terrace; Castle Hill in Background

Exciting though the visit was, more exciting to me was that the Anglo-Australian production was using mostly Scottish crews (which will help sustain our film industry and encourage further location business) and that such a film will showcase our area. Exquisite shots of Colin Firth strolling along Milsey Bay framed by Partan Craig, the Bass and Craigleith in cinemas round the world is an ad we could never afford to pay for.

After the film is released (around September 2013), look for strangers wandering along Tantallon Terrace, arguing about which house The Railwayman was actually shot it.

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The Early Days of a Better Council?

Posted on May 16, 2012 by davidsberry

Yesterday was the first day of term—the first meeting of the new East Lothian Council after the election of May 3rd. It would have been easy for me and my eight SNP colleagues to have grumped about the place but I was rather proud of the calm dignity with which handled ourselves under the political oxymoron of ten Labour and three Tory councillors forming an Administration.

We were put in this galling position by the Lib-Dem ‘snaw-aff-a-dyke’ act of losing all six seats they won in 2007 and thereby removing any option of working with them again. But it was not all bad. Whereas Labour administrations I had had to thole 1999-2003 and 2003-2007 would take every post for themselves then scoff at opposition impotence, the allocation of posts was equitable and approved nem con.

Having a Tory provost is a first, as is one who promises to be above party; he even resigned the group leadership to add weight to that assertion. But, as one of the two members with a quarter century of council service under his belt and a minuted record of strong moral dimensions, he certainly has the experience to make a decent fist of the job.

Indications of a more enlightened, even fair, approach to business was an allocation of one CoSLA delegate to each of the three parties, the allocation of chairs of the two Scrutiny Panels to the opposition members who the SNP group had nominated for them and a balanced spread of political balance among the committees allocated so far. Given we were the opposition (and in contrast to 1999 or 2003), there was no more to complain about than there had been when we proposed equivalent divisions in 2007.

So are the runes favourable for a quiet life in opposition over the next five years? Not quite. Of the 13 items on the agenda, the one that triggered most debate was Item 10 Manifesto. Unlike 5 years ago when the SNP & Lib-Dems took a month to hammer out a joint manifesto to bring to council for approval, this paper consisted of the two campaign manifestos stapled together.

Let’s leave aside that the Labour half still contained text decrying the SNP as a promise-breaking, baby-eating bunch of political barbarians that made our voting for it an exercise in self-immolation, there was such a gulf of philosophy that I’m not sure we need do much more than bring popcorn to meetings so that we can watch them go picnicking on each other.

Better yet, we had already had a chance to dissect both manifestos and, of the two, the Labour one, while showing a vast improvement in terms to having a few ideas to balance the flurry of brickbats aimed at their opponents, had some howler contraditions that may cause them some grief in implementation.

We are—as all but inhabitants of Rockall must know—in recession and money is getting tighter for all, including councils. Prominent on Page 3 of Labour’s manifesto was a promise “Every Council policy will be subject to an assessment of its impact on jobs and the economy in East Lothian, policies that threaten jobs will be rejected”. Laudable—and not far from our own policy of avoiding compulsory redundancies. But the manifesto is then peppered with unfunded promises, the logical conclusion of which is job losses, e.g.:

  • “Introduce a £100,000 budget for each secondary school cluster for the schools to determine their joint priorities”. Cost each year? £600,000 = 21.4 jobs
  • “Halt the outsourcing of home care services”. Cost each year? 280,000 = 10 jobs
  • “Improve the quality and accessibility of public transport across East Lothian, including restoring rural bus services cut by the SNP administration”. Cost per year? £180,000 = 6.4 jobs
  • “Restore “free special uplifts”, take action to reduce fly-tipping and introduce tougher penalties to deter dog fouling”. Cost per year? £300,000 = 10.7 jobs
  • “Keep our school buildings open and available for community use outwith school time and review opening hours of community facilities with a view to increasing activities and use by young people”. Cost per year (because of Labour-approved PFI)? £96,000 = 3.4 jobs
  • Not mentioned in the manifesto was a motion to take June 5th as a holiday at a cost of just shy of £500,000 = 17.8 jobs

There were plenty of other laudable promises in their manifesto but it would be difficult to give serious estimates of what delivery might cost. What is clear from the above is that, given a 3% shrinkage in money coming to ELC next year, the promises listed above  would require almost 80 staff to lose their jobs in order that these promises could be funded.

We strongly opposed such contradictory irresponsibility. That their Tory colleagues voted for this classic Labour exercise in overcommitment speaks either for their innocence or for their ambition for power. I suspect in won’t take the next five years to find out which.

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

Physician: Heal Thyself

Posted on May 15, 2012 by davidsberry

One of the few things upon which political parties the length and breadth of the country agree these days is the sanctity of the NHS. So Macca’s musical question of 1967: “—will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m 64?” can be answered with a resounding ‘yes’ now that our national health service has reached—and passed—that age.

People consider it so popular and essential that the Scottish Government promised to keep raising its funding, even through this time of fiscal shrinkage: no opposition party has dared quibble. Scottish Health Boards will receive £8.645bn this financial year, rising to £9.390bn in 2014/15—an 8.6% rise.

After Greater Glasgow, Lothian Health Board receives the second-biggest chunk of that—some £1.122bn—which includes five ‘off-the-books’ PFI projects, plus a huge one on the books: the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. It’s also been on the receiving end of unfavourable press and awkward questions both in terms of how well it is run and exactly what it does with all that public dosh.

Earlier this year, Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon ordered an investigation into the management culture at NHS Lothian after the board was accused of manipulating waiting-times figures to meet targets.

An independent review into the management culture of NHS Lothian said interviews with staff had depicted a “wholly inappropriate style of management” that exists in parts of the health board at the centre of a waiting times controversy. Two members of staff were suspended as part of the probe. Royal College of Nursing Scotland director Theresa Fyffe said:

“The unhealthy culture that is currently being investigated at NHS Lothian has resulted in unacceptable pressure on staff. It depicts an organisation where being bullied, whilst not representing the daily experiences of the majority of staff, is common at certain levels.”

The management styles described by staff were “creating an undermining, intimidating, demeaning, threatening and hostile working environment. A number of instances of bullying, intimidation and inappropriate behaviours were alleged, both first and second-hand“. Staff anecdotes of bullying behaviour are common, with the Lothian Way often being referred to as ‘the bullying way’.

At the same time, investigating how well public money is spent in NHS Lothian is far from easy. Its Annual Reports are long on fudge that seems to satisfy a supine Audit Scotland but short on detail that then begs many questions—for example explanations for large expenditures like:

  • £30.1 million relating to clinical and medical negligence claims
  • £49.5 million revenue costs for the ERI PFI contract
  • £93.0 million on administrative costs (rising £13m in a single year)

In fact, it took parliamentary questions just to establish the scale of that last item—almost 10% of their total budget and growing by 15%.

No-one questions the dedication of the medical staff. But over the last couple of decades, the NHS has become bloated with administrators who perform as ‘B’ team operatives—business graduates who could not hack it in the private sector and landed cosy jobs here.

Facilities and infrastructure, especially at large teaching hospitals, attract administrators like flies. Where they do their job well, both staff and patients benefit. But where they baffle with bullshit and create the illusion of management without much corresponding substance, money gets wasted. Some examples:

  • Catering management thinking they were doing a grand job preparing meals: “92% of plated meals are being consumed” they reported. But all meals being delivered to other facilities were automatically counted as consumed and if a patient took one spoonful, that also counted as ‘consumed’. In fact tonnes of food were being binned.
  • Electricity bills were centralised “to keep them under close scrutiny”. So hospitals are heated centrally. As none of the wards or departments face any heating bill when it got too hot, staff simply open windows.
  • Management of hospital porters were very proud to measure efficient porter usage to their management. However, investigation found they only measured dispatching porters from a central pool to move patients around the hospital—fewer than 40% of all porters employed. The other 60% were delivering pharmaceuticals or mail or dedicated to other locations

If there is one thing worse than management unaware what is going on, it is management that thinks it knows what’s going on but has little actual clue. Administrators paid £60k to push paper around appears endemic across the NHS and not confined to NHS Lothian. However, that’s whose ineptitude resulted in two active operating theatres there being plunged into darkness last month because electricians “cut the wrong cable”.

Professor James Barbour, 59, who spent 35 years in the NHS, ten of them running NHS Lothian as Chief Executive, retired just weeks after Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon ordered the investigation into manipulation of waiting-times figures to meet NHS Lothian targets. His abrasive dominance of meetings, including his Board, his ambition for a knighthood, and his reticence to work with any agency outside of his direct control were all legendary. In a decade, such a CEO sets the tone of the place.

Prof. Barbour and NHS Lothian may not be typical. But it is time for both the priority of patient welfare and the efficiency with which over £1bn in public money is spent (quite apart for personal ambitions) to come under proper public scrutiny. Had NHS Lothian been democratically accountable and Audit Scotland not such a limp wuss in what it regards as adequate detail in annual reports from such bodies, much of the litany above might not have survived the vigorously antiseptic effect of strong daylight.

Posted in Community | 2 Comments

An Army Fit for a Better Nation

Posted on May 14, 2012 by davidsberry

Twitterati with political agendas (especially Jim Murphy and staff of sundry opposition politicians) have been deprecating military careers in any Scottish Defence Force. Their argument is twofold: 1) more grievous losses to units and their identities would happen under independence than now; 2) no-one with real military ambition would join such an insignificant force.

In contrast to the US Army, soldiers enlist in geographically-based regiments of the British Army and remain there for their career. This builds loyalty and unit cohesion: soldiers live, fight and come to trust their comrades. Morale and cohesion being prime military virtues this is a major reason why the British Army has a formidable reputation, with Scots units (the “Ladies from Hell” as some unfortunates on the receiving end dubbed them) second to none.

But, consider what has happened to Scottish units of the British Army since its empire-spanning full extent. Whereas Scots regiments once made the doughty backbone of any foreign campaign and eighteen Scots foot and five horse regiments fought in the Napoleonic Wars, under the Union, the Scottish fighting units are now reduced to:

  • Royal Scots Dragoon Guards (formed 1971: to disband by 2013)
  • 3rd Regiment of Guards (Scots Guards; formed 1681)
  • Royal Regiment of Scotland (2008: 5th Bn Argylls to disband by 2013)

Add in some support units and these remnants of once-proud military tradition cannot be said to have prospered. At the end of this blog is a brief catalogue of cuts the UK Government has visited on famous Scottish regiments over the two centuries since Waterloo. There are now more Scots regiments in the Canadian Army than in the British.

Seventeen proud histories crammed into one regiment of five battalions, one of which will face the axe next year is an appalling record of MoD indifference to what made those units famous in the first place. The most ludicrous of fig-leaves conceal what has been lost: the superbly unconventional Lovat Scouts now exist as a cap badge for the Orkney Cadet Force. Phillip Hammond has recently promised to ‘protect cap badges’.

Does it matter that we have lost such names as Seaforths, Cameronians, Gordons, HLI, Scots Greys, Fife & Forfar, KOSB, and, soon, the Argylls? Not to Whitehall, obviously. But what if a Scottish Army believed in and restored pride in such glorious names? What if it revived the fierce courage that once made bagpipes strike more fear into the bad guys than artillery barrages?

What if a Scottish Army, built around a half-dozen regiments of tough infantry, determined to uphold centuries of proud tradition, were trained for deployment in the world’s trouble spots as light infantry, special forces, anti-terrorist and other 21st century military tasks? Would such top troops not be in demand? And, given the frequency of skirmishes (as opposed to conventional wars) would that not be how soldiers could see the world and officers make their mark?

Declan Power, a journalist and veteran of the Irish Defence Force wrote this week “We (Irish) have become specialists in low intensity conflicts, peacekeeping and peace enforcement and Irish and Scottish military tradition is very similar.” He was responding to a Scotsman newspaper article written by MoD advisor Hugh Strachan, who seems to think that mass armies and massive defence budgets were the only options.

Freed from ludicrously expensive items like nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, main battle tanks and global deployment, Scotland would be a far more useful partner in the world than the British manage at present. They would also be far better placed to defend crucial North Sea infrastructure than the ludicrously overstretched UK forces are now.

All of that—including revitalising Scottish regiments and their personnel—could be done on a defense budget under £2bn. That’s half per capita what we pay now. Time we restored our soldiers’ pride.

Appendix: Scottish Line Units of the British Army

Original Formations (does not include units disbanded in the period)

  • The Royal Scots (The Royal Regiment) (1633-2006; merged with KOSB; formed 1/RRS)
  • The Scots Guards (raised as Argyll’s Regt; 1642-present)
  • The Scots Greys (1678-1971; inc. into Royal Scots Dragoon Guards)
  • 21st Royal North British Fusiliers (Earl of Mar’s Regiment; Royal Scots Fusiliers; 1678-1959 inc. into Royal Highland Fusiliers)
  • 25th Foot; Edinburgh Regt; King’s Own Scottish Borderers (1689-2006; merged with Royal Scots; formed 1/RRS)
  • 26th Earl of Angus’s Regt (The Cameronians 1689-1881; inc. into Cameronians Scottish Rifles)
  • 42nd Foot; Royal Highland Regiment); Black Watch (1725 – 2006; formed 3/RRS)
  • 70th Glasgow Lowland Rgt (1758-1825; inc. into non-Scots E. Surrey Rgt)
  • 71st Foot (Lord Macleod’s Highlanders; Highland Light Infantry; 1777-1959 inc. into Royal Highland Fusiliers)
  • 72nd Foot (Earl of Seaforth’s Highlanders 1778-1881 inc. into Seaforth Highlanders)
  • 73rd  Foot (Perthshire Highlanders 1787-1881; inc into Black Watch)
  • 74th Highlanders (Glasgow 1789-1881; inc. into Highland Light Infantry)
  • 75th Foot (Abercrombie’s Highlanders; Stirlingshire Regt 1787-1881; inc. into Gordon Highlanders)
  • 78th Highlanders (Ross-shire Buffs) 1793-1881; inc. into Seaforth Highlanders
  • 79th Cameron Highlanders; Queens Own Cameron Highlanders (1793-1961 inc into Queens Own Highlanders)
  • Fife & Forfarshire Yeomanry (1793-1956; inc. into Queens Own Yeomanry)
  • Ayrshire (Earl of Carrick’s Own) Yeomanry (1794-1956 inc. into Queens Own Yeomanry)
  • 90th Perthshire Volunteers (1794-1881; inc. into Cameronians Scottish Rifles)
  • 91st Argyllshire Highlanders (1794-1881; inc. into Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders)
  • 92nd Gordon Highlanders (1794-1994; inc. into Queens Own Highlanders)
  • 93rd Sutherland Highlanders (1795–1881; inc. into Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders)
  • 94th Highlanders (1796-1809 discontinued as Scots)
  • Lothian and Border Horse (1797-1999; disbanded)
  • Queen’s Own Royal Glasgow Yeomanry (Glasgow Light Horse; 1798-1956; inc. into Queens Own Yeomanry)
  • Lanarkshire Yeomanry (1819-1956; inc. into Queens Own Yeomanry)

Cardwell Reforms (generally forming one active + one reserve Bn in each Regiment)

  • The Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) (1881-1968; disbanded)
  • The Highland Light Infantry (City of Glasgow Regiment) (1881-1959; inc. into Royal Highland Fusiliers)
  • The Seaforth Highlanders (Ross-shire Buffs, The Duke of Albany’s Own) (1881-1961; inc. into Queens Own Cameron Highlanders)
  • The Gordon Highlanders (1881-1994; inc. into Queens Own Highlanders)
  • The Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders (1881-1961)
  • The Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders (Princess Louise’s) (1881-2006; formed 5/RRS)
  • Lovat Scouts (1900-1981; inc. into 51st Highland Volunteers)
  • The Scottish Horse (1900-1956; inc. into Queen’s Own Yeomanry)

Post-WWII Reforms

  • Royal Highland Fusiliers (1959-2006; Princess Margaret’s Own Glasgow & Ayrshire Regt; formed 2/RRS)
  • Queens Own Highlanders (1961-1994; inc. into Highlanders)
  • 51st Highland Volunteers (1967-2006; formed 7/RRS)
  • 52nd Lowland Volunteers (1967-2006; formed 6/RRS)
  • The Highlanders (Seaforth, Gordons and Camerons) (1994-2006; formed 4/RRS)
  • Queen’s Own Lowland Yeomanry (1956-1999; disbanded)
Posted in Community, Politics | 3 Comments