It’s been a dull week, with rain and low cloud dampening our spirits, except for a brief glimpse of the sun on Wednesday.
It was the aftermath of Storm Chandra which battered much of the west coast of Britain. In Scotland we try to brighten up these January days with Burns Nights, the Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow and the Viking festival Up-Helly-Aa in Shetland. All have been firing-up this week, like “ingles bleezing finely” each representing our different cultures.
It was heartening to see that “culture” featured in the entourage accompanying Sir Keir Starmer on his visit to China. Along with the business tycoons and financiers, there were leaders from the National Theatre, the National Galleries and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Soft diplomacy and cultural exchange may do something to tame the Chinese dragon.
One early win for Scotland as a result of the Prime Minister’s visit is that tariffs on Scotch whisky are to be cut from 10 per cent to 5 per cent, meaning a likely boost to sales worth £250 million over the next five years.
There was a curious silence, however, over the Ming Yang wind turbine project at Ardersier on the Moray Firth. This Chinese company is ready to invest £1.5 billion in a factory making off-shore wind turbines, creating 1,500 jobs, but The UK Government has blocked the plan while it considers the national security implications. What else might be in play is the agreement the UK energy secretary Ed Milliband signed in Hamburg on Monday with other European countries for co-operation on off-shore wind. In any case, the First Minister John Swinney has called for an end to the delay so that developers and the local community know where they stand.
Where the UK government has acted is in North Lanarkshire. It’s been declared Britain’s latest “AI growth zone”, meaning a large scale data-storage centre. The project will begin with an expansion of the existing centre in Airdrie run by Data Vita but will eventually grow to include many more centres with their own renewable power station. The heat generated by the computers will be used to heat the nearby Monklands Hospital. The UK government will be providing £500 million over the next 15 years and it’s hoped the zone will attract up to £8bn of private investment, creating 800 hi-tech jobs and 2,600 construction jobs. There’s wild talk of Lanarkshire leading the next industrial revolution.
Liberal Democrat Leader, Sir Ed Davey joined Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, Alex Cole Hamilton, in North Queensferry for the Scottish launch of the General Election Campaign 2024. PHOTO shows Sir Jim Wallace and Willie Rennie
both former leaders of the Scottish Liberal Democrats
PHOTO Alan Simpson
The cosy world of Scottish politics has been shaken by the sudden death of Lord Jim Wallace, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats. He died on Thursday at the age of 71 following complications during an operation at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. He was elected MP for Orkney and Shetland in 1983 and served as deputy first minister during the first term of the Scottish Parliament in the early 2000s. After he retired from politics he served as Moderator of the Church of Scotland in 2021. A life of cheerful service to church and state.
It’s not gone unnoticed by the political parties that there are less than 100 days to go till the Scottish parliamentary elections. Not that there are any detailed manifestos yet but the Conservatives and Reform have been promising tax cuts. The Conservative leader Russell Findlay says he wants to align Scottish income tax with the UK rates and bands (losing £1.2bn in revenue) and cut the welfare bill to pay for it.
The new leader of Reform Scotland Malcolm Offord wants to cut income tax by 3p for everyone over the next five years. This would lose the Scottish government £3.7 billion. That, he said, could be paid for by scrapping some of the 132 quangos and cutting back on environmental protection. The trouble for these right-wing crusaders is that the more detail they give of their policies, the more they will frighten the electorate.
The end of the week brought a shocking reminder of Scotland’s shameful past. Lady Smith’s long-running inquiry into child abuse published its 16th report. This time it focused on Fettes College, a private school in Edinburgh. It found that the school had failed to protect children from “appalling” physical and sexual abuse over four decades from the 1950s to the 1980s. Another report, from the Human Rights Commission, highlights the removal of Gypsy Traveller children from their families up until the 1980s and the poor standard of Travellers’ camps set up by local councils in what was called the “Tinker Experiment”.
Finally, it’s been a bitter week for Stranraer Football Club. Last week they thought they had won through to a game against Rangers in the Scottish Cup with a win on penalties against Queen’s Park. It turned out that their new young goalkeeper, who saved a penalty, had not been registered in time for the match (which had been postponed). He could have been registered as an emergency signing if the paper-work had been filled in correctly. Alas, the pettifoggers at the Scottish Football Association, ruled that Stranraer was out of the Cup, and Queen’s Park will play Rangers in the next round, and pocket the £200,000 share of the turnstile takings. Rough justice, or is it justice at all?
