Mark Irvine - Blogger, Campaigner, Organiser

I found myself speculating the other day about Labour's Scottish leader - Johann Lamont - and why she has such a 'pot and kettle' approach to Freedom of Information (FOI).     By way of background here's an interesting report from the BBC on recent exchanges in the Scottish Parliament - where the Labour leader lambasts First Minister - Alex Salmond - for failing to come clean over FOI. Now what I find remarkable is that the Labour leader - Johann Lamont - is getting her knickers in a right old twist over the Scottish Government's refusal to accept a decision by the independent Scottish Information Commissioner. The Scottish Information Commissioner having previously ruled against the Scottish Government - in favour of disclosure.  The BBC reports Johann Lamont as asking   why the First Minister was spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of Scottish people's money ...

The Times managed to link two topical news stories with the following Brookes cartoon - which appeared in the paper the other day. The strop at Downing Street involving the Government's chief whip - which appears to have preoccupied the police trade union (Police Federation) ever since - and the public behaviour of the fundamentalist Islamic cleric, Abu Hamza. Hamza's well-heeled London lawyers have filed yet another last-minute, last ditch appeal to the High Court - in an effort to prevent his deportation to America where he is due to face charges as a terror suspect. 

The following post comes with a serious health warning because it contains a very strange speech made yesterday by the Scottish Labour leader - Johann Lamont. First we had Old Labour, then we had New Labour - but if Johann's 'volte face' is anything to go by, then the People's Party in Scotland has finally turned into - 'Bonkers Labour'. To my mind the speech is full of ridiculous thoughts and spurious claims - too many to deal with in a single post on the blog site - but here are one or two issues that jump out. First of all, councils in Scotland had their budgets doubled in the 10 year period from 1997 to 2007 - the last one in which Labour helped form a coalition Scottish Government. But the big question is what did Scottish councils (which were mainly Labour-led up until 2007) - actually do with all that extra money - how was all the new dosh spent?  Because it certainly wasn't spent on doubling the quantity...

What's the point of a public spending watchdog which is all bark and no bite? None in my opinion - and that's proved to be my experience of the regulatory authorities in Scotland (the Accounts Commission and Audit Scotland) whom I wrote to many months ago - about the cost of early retirement arrangements for senior officials in South Lanarkshire Council. After many months of looking into the issue - Audit Scotland finally apologised to me about the length of time taken to complete their investigations - matters having first been raised with the Accounts Commission - which is responsible for overseeing the financial affairs of Scottish local government. Confused? I was too - but my bafflement only increased as I read the spending watchdog's criticisms - followed by their failure to take any meaningful action, other than ringing their hands. Audit Scotland's final letter to me said: "We would expect that retirem...

I heard the news earlier today that Abu Hamza and a group of fellow terrorist suspects - are finally to be extradited to America. Which prompted the following thought to jump into my mind. How can the legal process have been allowed to drag on for all these years - more than 8 in total - while various appeals were held, all of which turned out to be spurious? Now this time frame is longer than either the American Civil War (1861 to 1865) or World War II (1939 to 1945) for that matter - which puts the whole sordid business into perspective.  Justice delayed is justice denied, as they say - yet the legal process has been cynically used in this case - to prevent serious criminal suspects from having to face their accusers. Maybe it will give Julian Assange pause for thought as he sits in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London - in a desperate attempt to prevent his extradition to S...

South Lanarkshire Council may be playing fast and loose with public money - with its spectacularly generous early retirement arrangements for some of the highest paid council officials in the land. But the council has also exposed - inadvertently perhaps - the true nature of 'final salary' pension schemes which require low paid council workers to subsidise their much better paid colleagues - who almost always turn out to be senior officials, of course. Take the latest example of South Lanarkshire's generosity towards its education director - who has been in post for only 5 years according to the Hamilton Advertiser. Nonetheless the contract drawn up by South Lanarkshire Council and the rules of the pension scheme - mean that a 'final salary' of £120,000 a year will still be used to calculate the  official's pension benefits. Quite why the trade unions are fighting to retain 'final salary' schemes is ...

I laughed out loud earlier today as I read on the BBC's news ticker - that the Police are now conducting an urgent investigation into the deliberate leaking of confidential statements (made to the Police) - as a result of the Downing Street 'spat' involving the Government's chief whip, Andrew Mitchell . Now since the only people who could possibly have shown these documents to The Sun newspaper are the Police themselves - we should surely get the result of the Police investigation very soon. I imagine some of their best officers have been put on the job - and been told to leave no stone unturned in their search for the culprits. Seems to me that the Police are only too happy leak confidential information when it suits their purpose - and that News International stable is still a very reliable route for the Police to use in their efforts to manipulate the news agenda. I thought that Private Eye put the whole issue ...

Political insults ain't what they used to be, I would say - if the trade union response to the latest Scottish Government budget is anything to go by. Apparently, the public sector trade unions are trying to portray John Swinney - Scotland's  finance secretary - as 'George Osborne in a kilt' over his proposal that public sector pay should increase by only a modest 1% in 2013. Presumably the trade unions believe that the Scottish Government should increase pay by much more than 1% - but if so, they remain conspicuously silent on how this should actually be achieved. 'How much more of Scotland's £28 billion budget should go towards public sector pay?' - is the obvious question - if the trade unions were in charge of the nation's biscuit tin. And if pay were to be given a much greater priority - then who or what should lose out in order to balance the books? It's not rocket science, you know. Should taxes or charges rise -...

Here's another interesting article from The Hamilton Advertiser - about the crazy goings on within South Lanarkshire Council. I had to laugh at the comment from the council's Labour leader - Eddie McAvoy - who told the newspaper he had no regrets about the decision to introduce fixed-term contracts for the council's highest paid officials - before going on to add: “Contracts such as those gave the council the power to get rid of senior officials if they didn’t measure up. The weakness was that they could leave whether they were a success or failure and still get the same package.” So that's just fine then - unless of course you're interested in the efficient and good use of public money. All I can say is that the concept of irony - is clearly lost on some people! South Lanarkshire Council official in £325,000 severance row Taxpayers will have to fork out an initial £338,000 so that a senior South Lanarkshire Council official can take ...

‘Never underestimate the stupidity of an angry mob' - is a sentiment that has echoed down the ages - but it's as true today as it ever was. American Embassies have borne the brunt of such attacks in the past week - but in the past European newspapers have met with the same response for daring to use even mild humour - to challenge the way that some Muslims practice their religion. Now once the righteous mob is in full cry they might decide to take the lives of perfectly innocent 'infidels' - for the perceived wrongdoings of their fellow countrymen. Or even fellow Muslims in the murderous feud between Shiites and Sunnis - which continues in large parts of the Middle East - in Iraq and Syria, for example. Salman Rushdie was faced with a similar threat for publishing a serious book (not a humorous one) on the Islamic religion - The Satanic Verses – some years ago. Yet the Ayatollah of Iran issued a 'fatwa' which called on all Muslims fulfil...