Mark Irvine - Blogger, Campaigner, Organiser

I have to laugh at the furore which has been whipped up in England and Wales - in response to the Government's plans to open up and modernise police recruitment practices. At the moment, to become a senior a senior police office, you have to serve your time as a 'bobby on the beat' - which, of course, excludes lots of people in civil society. People who may have chosen a different career path in life - learning different life skills - and for whom chasing youg criminals down the street is not a desirable or even viable option. So it seems to me that introducing a system of 'fast-tracking' candidates in certain situations is a good thing - in principle - because it will shake things up and encourage people from different backgrounds and experience to join the police service. But the opponents of change want to keep things as they are - thank you very much - which means that you've got to start at the bottom - ...

So, the question is set - instead of the country being asked: Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country? We Scots in the forthcoming 2014 referendum will now be asked:  Should Scotland be an independent country? Now I have to admit I would have been perfectly happily with either question. But there seems little point in setting up an independent body to advise Government Ministers on such matters - only for the politicians to impose their own views. Just thank heavens that this particular issue is now settled - because we can now get on with the much more important task - of coming up with the right answer.

The cartoon by Gerald Scarfe which appeared in The Sunday Times at the weekend - has provoked an outraged and angry response in some quarters. But in my view it was perfectly fair comment about an Israeli politician - Benjamin Netanyahu - who has no qualms about trampling all over the rights of the Palestinian people - by building new and highly controversial Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.  I can think of no better way to scupper the stalled Israeli/Palestinian peace process - and its long awaited two-state solution - and to me that is the inevitable outcome of Netanyahu's new settlement building policy. Here's a thoughtful piece written by Simon Kelner for The Independent newspaper - and it's as good a riposte to the outraged Jewish lobby as I've read anywhere.   Rupert Murdoch, Gerald Scarfe, and why – as a Jew – I'm dismayed by the Jewish lobby's outrage This cartoon was provocative and grot...

Glasgow City Council has lost a big appeal case, I'm pleased to say - over whether or not thousands of council workers transferred to various arms length bodies (known as ALEOs) - can continue with their equal pay claims. The good news is that they can - so hip, hip, hooray - for the 2,700 claimants from Action 4 Equality Scotland who are affected by this decision! Last year Glasgow City Council managed to persuade an Employment Tribunal that these ALEOs were not an 'associated employer' - in employment law terms. The significance of which was that these ALEO workers effectively lost their ability to continue with an equal pay claim - once they had been 'TUPE transferred' to one of the new Arms Length External Organisations (ALEOs for short). Now that always looked like a crazy decision - since the council controlled all of these bodies and even paid some of its councillors extra 'top-up' payments for overseeing the ALEOs - which to ...

Here's little walk through previous posts from the blog site - which explain the long-running scandal involving significant top-up payments to elected councillors in the city of Glasgow - for sitting on ALEOs (Arms Length External Organisations). The practice has now been stopped, thankfully - but not because of any political leadership shown by the city council it has to be said. No, the practice was stopped because the council's behaviour was exposed in the press - and because a critical report by an independent Scottish Government advisory body (SLARC) recommended that the payments be outlawed. Recommendations which the Government's Finance Secretary - John Swinney - finally acted upon in June 2011. Shameful behaviour from the city's 'socialist' Labour administration - if you ask me. Toothless Tigers (8 October 2012) As regular readers know, I have a very low opinion of Scotland's public spending watchdogs - the Accounts Commission and Audit...

The picture of the week must be that of Sergeant Brendan Marrocco who - despite having both his arms and legs blown off in a deadly attack in Iraq - is still optimistic and upbeat. With so very much to look forward to in his life - especially now that he has two new arms after his gruelling, ground-breaking transplant surgery.  Apparently Marlon Brando starred in this George Bernard Shaw play - Arms and the Man - back in 1953 and, curiously, the famous Holywood actor has the same initials as Brendan Marrocco - albeit MB as opposed to BM.  Maybe that's a good omen for his future - I certainly hope so.

The reason that I have little time for the Labour party these days is that it's full of hypocrites - and people who behave like hypocrites on a regular basis. Take last week's Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs) at Westminster - during which a 'question' was asked by the Labour MP for Bolsover - Dennis Skinner. The question was really an attack on the Prime Minister as he prepared to 'swan off' to yet  another World Economic Summit at Davos where - according to Dennis - David Cameron would be in his element rubbing shoulders with other 'posh boys' and the world's great and good. Now David Cameron had the perfect riposte to this question which was that - if he remembered correctly, he happened to bump into Dennis Skinner's party leader - Ed Miliband - the last time he was in Davos. In other words, what was the old Labour warhorse banging on about - was this not  just another of Labour's double sta...

The row over plans to revamp Glasgow's George Square rumbles - with critics now demanding that Scotland's public spending watchdog - Audit Scotland - should step in to make some sense of the whole wretched affair. I find it hard to disagree with the call for an independent body to investigate the behaviour of Glasgow City Council and its Labour leader - Councillor Gordon Matheson. Here's a well informed article from the Sunday Herald which make interesting reading. If the newspaper's description of events is broadly correct - then I fail to see how Gordon Matheson can survive as Council Leader - because they make Glasgow look like a local government version of the Keystone Cops. The point is why bother to set up an independent panel to judge and advise on such an important project - if the politicians can simply overule everyone and impose their own will anyway? The waste of public money involved and the da...

Defence budgets and defence cuts are the talk of the town at the moment - which reminded me of the following extract from Alan Clark's diaries. For the uninitiated, Alan Clark was a minister in Margaret Thatcher's government - not one of the so-called 'wets' by any means - but he was famously sceptical about the tendency of the military boffins to spend public money on madcap projects. Ministry of Defence - Tuesday 3 April 1990. For months I have been resisting expenditure (some hundreds of millions) on a completely unneccessary new piece of Army equipment known by its acronym as ACEATM. It is a 'sideways firing mine - itself an unlikely, indeed contradictory concept, surely? The idea is that you position one of these incredibly 'intelligent' and expensive devices in the window of a house and when a tank goes past it shoots out at it, 'sideways'. From the first moment I saw the papers it was clear that this was a complete waste of money., ...