Brown Bullying and Holyrood Unrest

Another week, another shambles in what’s called the Mother of Parliaments. This time, Our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is labelled a bully in a book written by political commentator Andrew Rawnsley. In it, he alleges that Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell had to take the Prime Minister aside and urge him to curb his ‘volcanic temper’. The founder of the National Bullying Helpline, Christine Pratt, then said it had received three or four calls in the last 18 months from people working with the Prime Minister. During the past 48 hours, we’ve had claims and counter claims, and the only thing that seems certain is that quite a few folk in high office are lying – they certainly all cannot be telling the truth.

Meanwhile, north of the border, mayhem seems to rule as well. Scottish Enterprise, that job creation quango, is to spend more than £100,000 of taxpayers’ money on a ‘staff team building’ exercise, which will involve flying workers to Glasgow from offices in Moscow, New York, Hong Kong and other cities. What they are actually meant to be doing in those locations is anyone’s guess. Nationalist MSP Bill Kidd rightly pointed out that “it sounds like a junket.” Alas, he forgot to make any mention of his own party’s intention of hiring a special ‘tsar’ to oversee the independence referendum that his leader, Alex Salmond, is so intent on having. That exercise will only cost the taxpayer a mere £2 million, after all.

Two Labour and two Conservative MSPs have announced that they are to stand in the forthcoming Westminster election, whilst holding on to their seats in Holyrood as well. Again, Bill Kidd has gone on the offensive – he’s a very busy fellow – saying that it’s completely wrong for them to stand for election to both centres of government. Has he forgotten that the only person who holds a seat in both Parliaments at present is his own leader, Alex Salmond? No, he hasn’t, it seems. It WAS okay for Mr Salmond, he reckons, as he informed his constituents in the 2005 and 2007 elections that he was seeking a dual mandate. Sheer hypocrisy! In effect, it’s a case of doing two jobs on a part time basis, whilst pocketing two full time wage packets. Maybe, just maybe, their respective electorates will decide that they are not worthy of representing them either in Scotland or in the UK. I assume they all know how to use a pen, as it’s needed when paying the weekly visit to the Job Centre.

Despite the dire state of the economy, with inflation and unemployment rising, the Scottish Executive seems to be just as interested in the health of pet rabbits at the moment. It is launching a consultation which ‘seeks views on the draft code of practice for the welfare of rabbits which is designed to be a practical guide for owners and keepers of rabbits, but does not cover ‘rabbits which are farmed for food’. I think that if I had a pet bunny, and wanted some practical advice on how to look after it, I would get a good book on the subject, and not look up some Government website for it. The SNP are not the only party to blame for coming up with those daft ideas though – in 2006, it was revealed that there had been on average one new law or regulation every day since the Holyrood parliament came into being, so the Labour-LibDem coalition were at it as well. Some were plain stupid, such as the ban on mink farms, when there none in Scotland. The reasoning given, if I remember rightly, was that someone might want to start one, so it was better to have the ban in place. If someone leaks the story about the large pet in my garden, I’m sure they’ll soon have a law in place banning elephant farms as well.

I heard yesterday that the drug manufacturer Eli Lilly, which makes Prozac, the human anti-depressant, has come up with a form of the pill, called Reconcile, for our canine friends. In fact, it has already been approved for sale to British pet owners. The tablet is said to help cure ‘canine compulsive disorder’ and ‘separation anxiety’ brought on by owners’ long absences during the day. Symptoms are said to include whimpering, poor behaviour, and tail chasing. What utter tripe! The poor dogs are being ‘labelled’ or ‘diagnosed’ with illnesses, just so that drugs can be marketed to supposedly treat them. I would hope that dog owners in Britain would give those pills a wide berth – a large juicy bone from the butcher down the road has been known to keep der Hund very happy for quite a while.
bullying, dogs, Holyrood, rabbits, Westminster

Arrogance, Banks, and Football

What on earth is going on in the Scottish Parliament? We have Anne McLaughlin, Scottish National Party, who is to be sworn in as a list MP this week, secretly filming photos inside the building, and posting them on her blog. Although there are no firm guidelines on photographs being taken by workers in Holyrood, there ARE other things to be considered, such as respect and trust. I would think that she will not be accorded those in abundance by opposition MPs when she takes her seat. If she is voted out at a subsequent election, or decides for some reason that she would like another career, I don’t think she can depend on getting a phone call from David Bailey CBE.

 

Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray claimed yesterday that Scots could benefit from the “next stage of global economic development” if Labour policies were followed. Maybe he’s forgotten that Labour have been in charge for the past 12 years, and that a certain Mr Brown has been running  the economy, as Chancellor and now Prime Minister, when he’s not engaged in that other pursuit of his, saving the world.

In Westminster today, four disgraced members of the banking community were to be smuggled into the building to avoid having to face protests from angry workers. Those four are just some of the high flyers who managed to bring the UK’s financial services industry to its knees, but are too scared to face hard working bank employees. Having watched them on TV news bulletins, their so called apologies seemed to be rehearsed, half hearted, and insincere, and I must concur with John McFall, the committee chairman, that at the end of the meeting, they were as arrogant and unrepentant as ever. They can well afford to smirk, as the Government seems unable, or unwilling, to punish them.

 

Turning to football, we find the same kind of arrogance and incompetency coming to the surface. The guys running the Scottish Premier League have decided that the league programme for 2009-10 will begin on August 8, only days before Scotland meet Norway in Oslo in a World Cup qualifying tie. The manager, George Burley, asked that they have an earlier start to the league, and then leave the weekend before the international free, so the team could have a few extra days together. So far, they haven’t agreed to this sensible suggestion. Of course, it is not the first time that they’ve clashed – last May, Burley asked for talks to be held between the SFA and SPL over fixtures, as his first game in charge was wrecked with call-offs as it came immediately before an Old Firm game.

 

Burley himself is under scrutiny this week – he’s known for months that there was to be a Celtic-Rangers game this coming weekend, yet he arranged a get-together for the Scotland squad this week. There has been the usual spate of call-offs, and due to the freezing weather and the fact that Scotland doesn’t have one decent indoor facility, it looks as if the venture has been a waste of time. It seems to me that well paid people at the top in Scottish football arrive at decisions without giving a thought to the consequences, or the adverse effects they will have on our game.

 

A happy (or otherwise) note to end with :-- Research has shown that a bachelor is three times more likely to go mad than a married man. I tend to disagree, especially if the married man is the father of a bride-to-be, as the average price of a wedding is now £22,000.