A rare day of sunshine last weekend beckoned me to the Pentland Hills. In the chilly wind the hills rolled away in snowy mounds to the south and here, high up above the city, Edinburgh lay below me, glistening in the morning air. I was home in time to watch the rugby, Scotland beating England 31-20, and a glorious day was complete.
When I came down to earth, I found a week of anxious struggle against climate change, council cuts and mobile phones. We learned from the Just Transition Commission that Scotland is not doing well in creating jobs in the renewable industries to replace those being lost in oil and gas. It warns against “de-industrialisation” and says we need to get on with investing in new low-carbon forms of manufacturing.
In all its 96 pages, it only gives of a few examples of what it has in mind, the manufacture of sub-sea cables at Hunterston and the Port of Nigg being two of them. It could have suggested wind turbine manufacturing, tidal machinery, or pharmaceuticals, or sport equipment. It urges the Scottish government to invest in such projects and not to give up on the “social licence”, or support, it has among the public for action on climate change.
To this end, the First Minister, John Swinney, has been celebrating the 50,000 homes now benefiting from the Warmer Homes subsidy scheme, at a cost of £400 million over the past ten years. But 60 per cent of houses in Scotland still have no insulation in their walls. And in November the government dropped its Heat in Buildings Bill which would have required householders and businesses to replace gas boilers with alternative energy soon after buying a property. So there is still a long way to go to meet the government’s own target of all buildings being low carbon by 2045.
As I write, our 32 local councils are deciding how much to increase their council tax and mitigate the effect of this year’s stand-still grant from Holyrood. So far it looks like Edinburgh and Glasgow will hold that down to 5 per cent, but the Borders Council is thinking of 8.5 per cent and some councils in the North East are considering increases of 10 per cent or more. This comes on top of an 8.7 per cent increase in water charges. Fortunately, local councils do not face elections this year. So we might expect an unseemly blame game between central and local government and the opposition parties blaming both for the increases.
The politicians have got themselves entangled with legal procedure this week. The Lord Advocate, the Rt Hon Dorothy Bain, KC, issued a note to the First Minister that the “Murrell case” is active for the purposes of Contempt of Court, and he and everyone else in should be careful what they say about it, because it has still to come to trial. This was sent to the First Minister on 19 January.
In the case of HMA v Peter Murrell, the former chief executive of the SNP, and now estranged husband of Nicola Sturgeon, a preliminary hearing was due to be heard in the High Court in Glasgow on Friday, but has been postponed at the request of both parties. It will now be heard in Edinburgh in May.
Opposition MSPs said they found the timing suspicious and the note to John Swinney, they claimed, was advance notice of the details of the case, and thus politically biased.
The Lord Advocate appeared in parliament to refute the claim and explain that she had a duty to warn people about jeopardising a fair trial and she herself has not been involved in the conduct of the Murrell case.
Details of the charges against Peter Murrell had already been leaked earlier in the week by The Scottish Sun, and were in public domain. They allege he embezzled nearly £460,000 from SNP funds, buying two cars and a campervan and various other items for his own personal use. So far the investigation – Operation Branchform – has taken three years.
The worldwide debate over the use of smart-phones has come to Scotland this week. A parents’ group Un-Plug Scotland has called on all political parties to commit to a low-tech education for their children. They want a return to paper-based schooling.
The Conservatives have backed the campaign but The Scottish Government is sticking to its policy that it is up to individual head-teachers to make rules on the use of phones in their schools. The Scottish Labour Party wants a complete ban on phones in the classroom. It follows the Starmer government’s promise this week to work towards a ban on all social media for under 16s. It turns out that the smartphone is not such a smart idea after all.
Finally, I can only admire members of the Dundonnell Mountain Rescue Team who went out into the snow a second time to search for a missing dog. A party of hill-walkers with their dogs fell through a cornice on Fionn Bheinn (933m) on Sunday. They were brought to safety by the Dundonnell team but one dog was posted missing.
The next morning three members of the team went to look for the 3-year old cocker spaniel. And lo and behold, they found her curled up, cold but alive, behind a rock not far from where she fell.
The power of endurance of both animal and man continues to astonish me.
