Spring came upon us suddenly. On Saturday it was winter, cold and wet.
On Sunday morning, 1 March, there was glorious sunshine, blue skies and a mild air, at least here in Edinburgh. This has been one of the wettest and dullest winters on record across Britain, though Scotland escaped most of the bad weather. Our rainfall was 14 per cent below the long-term average and the four named storms of the winter did most of their damage in the south-west of England and in Wales.
However, the Western Isles were buffeted by high winds of up to 90 mph and in January, the Highlands and the North East had record snow-falls of 40-50cm. Hundreds of schools were closed. The ski centres were doing good business.
Now, we are rejoicing in the lightsome days of spring, watching the flowers and trees come to life and listening to the birds singing. The forecasters say we will get more snow mid-March but basically, we have survived another winter.
As far as the political season is concerned, there are now just more than 60 days to go to The Scottish Parliament elections. The latest opinion poll (Ipsos for STV) finds that the SNP are heading for 60 seats, just five short of a majority. Labour may get 20 seats, the Greens16, Reform 13, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats 10 each. But the poll also finds that 40 per cent of voters may change their minds before polling day on 7 May.
With so much to play for, The Scottish Government has been electioneering this week with an announcement that the latest ferry-building contract will be going to Ferguson’s shipyard on the Clyde. This is the yard, you may remember, which allowed a previous ferry contract to go four times over budget and six years late. But Kate Forbes, the economy secretary, has nailed her courage to the mast and has backed the state-owned yard for a second time with an order for two small electric ferries and replacements for the research ship Scotia and the protection vessel Minna.
Labour has followed this with a promise to build the long-awaited rail link to Glasgow Airport. And ministers at Westminster have been holding talks with the oil and gas companies about replacing the windfall tax on profits with an easier regime at the end of next year. We can expect much more of this effort to please different sections of the electorate over the next nine weeks. How useful this is has to be doubtful, because undecided voters will probably make their judgement on wider issues like the state of the economy or public services or independence.
Our national pride has taken a blow this week with the collapse of the fashionable brewing firm BrewDog. It’s a tale of derring-do and then exhaustion. It began twenty years ago when two likely lads, James Watt and Martin Dickie, invested their savings in a small craft-beer brewery in Fraserburgh. They filled bottles by hand and sold them at local markets around the North East.
It was at time of increasing demand for craft beers and, in a clever social media campaign, craft beer believers were persuaded to buy shares in the company. A state-of-the art brewery was built in Ellon in Aberdeenshire. A hundred bars and pubs were opened across England, Ireland and America, selling a wide range of beers in distinctive light blue bottles. At one point the company was worth over £1bn. But alas it over-reached itself. Profits turned to losses. Its value plummeted and it has now been bought over by an American private equity firm Tilray for just £33m. Thirty eight bars in Britain and Ireland will close, with the loss of 500 jobs. Individual investors will lose their money. Watt and Dickie are left apologising and say they are “heartbroken”.
Is China interfering in British democracy? The question came to Scotland this week with the arrest of a Scottish MP’s husband on spying charges. David Taylor, wife of the Labour MP for East Kilbride Joani Reid, was one of three men arrested on Wednesday under the National Security Act. Mr Taylor is a lobbyist working for the Asia House think tank. Back in September similar spying charges against two other men, Christopher Cash from Edinburgh and Christopher Barry, were dropped in controversial circumstances. So it’s not clear whether these suspects are accused of passing vital political and industrial secrets to the Communist regime in Beijing or whether they have simply been exchanging publicly available information.
What’s not in doubt is that we are living in dangerous times, with wars in Ukraine, Gaza and now Iran. Iranians living in Scotland staged a demonstration outside the US Consulate in Edinburgh on Thursday in support of American and Israeli actions in Iran.
But as the dark clouds of war loom over parts of the globe, it’s good to know that the natural world goes on regardless and the seasons keep turning.
As Robert Browning puts it:
“The year’s at the spring
The day’s at the morn
The morning’s at seven
The hillside’s dew pearled
The lap’s on the wing
The snail’s on the thorn
God’s in his heaven
All’s right with the world.”
(or is it ?)
