Leckie

 

Leckie estate top left below Gargunnock hills

Birthday Photo

Bridge over troubled waters

Snowdrops and wild garlic

After over 30 walks up Lime Craig this year and accompanying me on sorties to local micro hills, Aileen decided that her birthday walk on a cold and windy day should be less aerobic and not involve any climbing. The view to the Gargunnock hills from the house reminded us that the Leckie estate is a place of interest when it is not the shooting season for pheasants, partridge or grouse. It had belonged to the Younger family (Brewing and the former Secretary of State for Scotland) for many years but has since been sold twice in the last five years. 

The estate comprises a curious hotchpotch of landscapes with the bedrock of red sandstone carved by fast flowing burns, old estate plantations of massive and damaged deciduous trees, new ugly coniferous forests, and the remnants of old mills, sawmills and bridges lost in the vegetation but acting as reminders of the grandeur of Victorian estates. The undergrowth of the older plantations is lush with a carpet of snowdrops, wild garlic and patches of daffodils. An area of rhododendrons has been cleared over the winter and adds to the desolation.

We did a long loop around the tracks and paths. Gregor had been running there earlier in the week and felt that he was being chased by an animal at one point, presumably a deer but who knows what lurks in estates like this that are hoaching with game birds. We walked back via Watson House, now divided into flats, and along the beech avenue back to Gargunnock. The next stop was the Woodhouse for a cake to celebrate the birthday. There were none available so for the second year running I made a Victoria Sponge, successfully, although the strawberry and cream filling would have been annihilated on bake off for taste and presentation. 

Tomorrow I will be back to climb Lime Craig for the 44th time this year, its views are the best value in the vicinity from a mere 300 metre ascent.

Lime Craig

National Anthems

Soweto Gospel Choir - Nkosi Sikelei l'Afrika

We were blowing ideas and nonsense during a Friday night Zoom meet-up during lockdown when the subject of national anthems strayed into the conversation. What was the best and what would we like to see as Scotland's national anthem to replace the dirge that is Flower of Scotland. Our homework for the next week was to make nominations for both categories. The entries included Scotland the Brave, which along with the Flower of Scotland, is often used as the assumed Scottish anthem instead of God Save the Queen. 

The general feeling seemed to be that glorified patriotism, the sentiment "Wha's Like Us? Gey few and they're aw deid" was perhaps no longer the image that Scotland should be promoting. Something more self-effacing and humorous would be better. Hence my colleagues nominated Michael Mara's Hermless and Harry Lauder's offering A Wee Deoch and Doris.

We invited an independent former colleague to judge the suggestions and I was delighted that my nomination, Gerry Rafferty's Get it Right Next Time was chosen. There is no triumphalism here, just the reality of life. It sums up the mistakes of the Scottish Parliament as it steals power from local communities and centralises decision-making.

Out on the street I was talkin' to a man
He said "there's so much of this life of mine that I don't understand"
You shouldn't worry I said that ain't no crime
Cause if you get it wrong you'll get it right next time, next time.....

You gotta grow, you gotta learn by your mistakes
You gotta die a little everyday just to try to stay awake
When you believe there's no mountain you can climb
And if you get it wrong you'll get it right next time, next time.

Next time you-hum

As for the best anthem, well that's easy: It's Nkosi Sikele L'Africa, the South African anthem that is sung in all the main languages and in many ways has brought together a divided nation. Other nominations were France, Italy and Russia as well as a reference to Billy Connelly's choice, Berwick Green, the Archer's theme tune.

Peak Sunak

Half-price on me, anyone?

It was yet another budget day and Rishi Sunak had progressively leaked most of it in advance. He is promoting himself as the most intelligent man in the cabinet, not an impressive accolade, and has been exploiting social media to sustain this image. His Instagram and Twitter accounts have even adopted a new font for his signature.

Unlike his predecessors: George Osborne, Philip Hammond and Sajid Javid, who had been scrooge-like in their custodianship of public services. Rishi Sunak was forced to splash the cash when dealing with Covid and declared he would do whatever it takes to address the pandemic. Covid spending has already exceeded £400bn and still rising. He presented several mini budgets as the grip of Covid tightened, ran up the largest debts in the post-war period of £355bn, and became the most popular chancellor since Dennis Healey.

However, his star began to wane when his Eat Out to Help Out scheme in August 2020 produced indigestion amongst the Sage group. It cost £849m, undermined the public health messaging and was found to have been a major reason for the second wave of the pandemic in October 2020. 

He failed to provide furlough and income support for 3 million self-employed during the first year of the pandemic. His cavalier funding for PPE contracts that were let to companies recommended by Tory MPs and exempt from tendering processes, the phone app that never worked, and the Test and Trace initiative that was centralised instead of using established public health teams have all been hugely expensive failures that have diminished his stature.

These ill-considered spending sprees were then contrasted with his unwillingness to fund more than a 1% rise for nurses and his continued reduction of council funding which includes education and community care. His latest budget heralded £1bn for Town Funds, supposedly part of the government's levelling up Initiative. Detailed analysis by various think tanks discovered that 39 of the 45 towns receiving grants were to Tory-controlled constituencies including Richmond, Rishi Sunak's own constituency and Newark, the Community Minister, Robert Jenrik's constituency. It is a Rishi mystery how Cheadle, Bournemouth and Southport qualified for the Town's fund? His levelling-up claims have been seen as yet another example of how economical he is with the truth. 

His proposal to introduce eight low-tax freeports is a reprise of Mrs Thatcher's previous attempt to introduce them as part of the package of deregulation. They proved largely ineffective and merely shuffled trade away from existing ports so that even David Cameron's government abandoned them in 2012. 

His funding of Test and Trace will go down as one of the greatest financial scandals in the history of any UK government, although the responsibility for this will be shunted to the Health Secretary Matt Hancock and its serially incompetent leader, Dido Harding. But it was the Treasury under Rishi Sunak who authorised spending this avalanche of public money with minimal accountability and who is now reaping the consequences as he levels back on public spending.

His polished ingratiating persona has become tarnished even amongst the Tory right-wing supporters. They have realised that he is no magician, just another oleaginous accomplice to the prime minister. His latest budget has simply extended the inequalities that have been the enduring outcome of the austerity years. Levelling down is not just for Covid but the years that follow. Rishi Sunak's belief in Freeports, Brexit, Hedge Funds and the power of his social media presence is not going to change anything.

Vince Cable when addressing Gordon Brown at PM questions as his reputation was collapsing asked whether "The house has noticed the prime minister's remarkable transformation in the past few weeks - from Stalin to Mr Bean." A similar putdown for Rishi Sunak might go something like, "the chancellor has become less like Kevin Spacey and more like, well, Kevin Spacey". I suspect there will soon be far more chancellors than Denis Healey ahead of him in the popularity stakes.

Eck v Nic

Control and Command

What a palaver! The past and present first ministers of Scotland, Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon are playing a game of poker with their reputations for chips. Holyrood is the stage and the first ministers are merely players, they have their exits and their entrances.

I watched live on BBC a fair chunk of the eight-hour interrogation of Nicola Sturgeon by the Scottish Parliament Committee on the Scottish Government Handling of Harassment Complaints. The first minister's ability to present detailed arguments and recall events is both impressive and legendary, although she uses far too many conditional clauses for my liking. She also has a tendency to apologise when things have not gone well and claims that she empathises with whoever is suffering as a result of the issue under discussion. It plays well when compared to the unwillingness of the UK government ministers to acknowledge any of their mistakes, but she overplays her hand on this.

She did not miss the opportunity to play her apologies and raise Alex Salmond on his dubious claims of being found not guilty for any abuse or his failure to offer any apology to the women who had raised the complaints. 

The purpose of the Committee was to establish how the Scottish Government had failed to conduct the inquiry into Alex Salmond's alleged harassment of women with due propriety. It has always been acknowledged that the senior civil servant originally asked to carry out the inquiry knew the complainants and was therefore unsuitable for the task. The focus of the interrogation was when the first minister first knew about the complaints and what actions had she taken. The crux of the issue became whether she had lied about first hearing about Alec Salmond's indiscretions with 9 women on Maundy Thursday or Easter Monday. 

According to the mendacious acting leader of the Tories, Ruth Davidson, this was a resigning offence and the first minister should resign for forgetting that she had heard this on Maundy Thursday. As an act of political grandstanding, it truly takes the Easter egg but then Ruth Davidson and Nicola Sturgeon have always been doughty street fighters, both incapable of not having the last word.. 

Not since the Scottish play has Scotland witnessed such bloodletting as the feud between Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon. These two formidable politicians have exercised Command (Salmond) and Control (Sturgeon) leadership for the past 14 years. They have stooped at nothing when it comes to ridding their governments of those who do not follow their direction of travel. Unlike Boris Johnson, the SNP leaders have no hesitation in sacking ministers, MPs or MSPs as Joanna Cherry, Neale Harvey, Margaret Ferrier or Derek McKay could testify over the past year. And woe betides any of the Scottish agencies, Health Boards or Councils who gainsay their authority.

With the Scottish Parliament election looming in May, my guess is that the Inquiry will dribble on and then fade away. Holyrood has a tendency to despatch incomprehensible subjects into the ether. Already the result of the election has been assumed to be a shoo-in for the SNP and therefore the start of another saga of calling for a second independence referendum. The result is becoming less certain as the two most recognised faces of the SNP slug it out. This is likely to be exacerbated by the loss of many of the more experienced and competent SNP MSPs like Mike Russell, Bruce Crawford, Roseanne Cunningham and Stewart Stevenson who are standing down. So are several able younger women MSPs such as Aileen Campbell and Gail Ross. This will deplete the SNP of political nous and make them even more dependent on the first minister. There are not many of the current MSPs who have shown any great capacity to govern. The consolation, for the SNP, if not Scotland, is that the same comment could be made of the other parties. 

What most concerns me about this is the loss of the proper scrutiny of Scotland's real issues: the lack of an industrial strategy, the decline and prevarication about the future life of the oil industry, the lacklustre performance of schools, the appalling failure of care homes and the centralisation of public services. Localism has been exorcised by the monoculture of the Scottish Government, all subsidiarity stops with the Scottish Government. Holyrood has allowed its internal squabbles and regular fights with Westminster to dominate politics in Scotland for too long. It is time for politicians to focus on the real issues that will determine whether or not Scotland emerges from Covid with a realistic vision for the future.