Transport group Go-Ahead said its rail division will contribute to Treasury coffers from April after seeing growth in its three commuter franchises.

Its London Midland service has been eligible for revenue support from the UK government’s Department for Transport (DfT) since November but Go-Ahead said this has not been required after passenger revenues on the commuter line jumped 13 per cent in the six months to 31 December.

Go-Ahead, whose joint venture with Keolis runs the Southeastern and Southern franchises, said its rail division will be a net contributor to the DfT from April, although Southeastern remains in revenue support.

Across the rail arm, which benefited from average regulated fare rises of 6% at the start of last year, profits were up 25 per cent to £16.5 million when £9m of one-off contracts are excluded from last year’s figure.

Passenger revenues leapt 9.6 per cent to £699.8m, which Go Ahead said reflected the continued shift away from car usage and better marketing. Passenger volumes rose 3 per cent on Southern and Southeastern and by 11.5 per cent on London Midland.

Go-Ahead expects revenues trends to continue into the second half but with January’s latest fare increases causing more modest growth in passenger numbers.

The period will see the start of a busy period for the UK rail market, with many franchises due for renewal and Go-Ahead working with Keolis on bidding for the Thameslink and Essex Thameside services.

Newcastle-based Go-Ahead described the performance of its bus division as robust after revenues increased by 4.7 per cent to £335.7m in the half year, with passenger journeys up 3.6 per cent. Profits were down 2.7 per cent to £18m as a result of implementation costs on a new contract.

The company is one of the UK largest operators with a fleet of around 3,900 buses carrying on average around 1.7 million passengers every day. It is the biggest operator in London and has secured two contracts to provide specific Olympic services this summer.

Across the group, profits were 13.2 per cent lower at £44m, reflecting the one-off contract boost in the rail arm last year and lower bus profits.

Energy giant Centrica today said mild spring and autumn weather had fuelled a 30 per cent slide in profits at its residential arms – British and Scottish Gas – to £522 million last year.

The UK’s biggest gas supplier, which lost 97,000 customers in 2011, said the unseasonably warm weather in spring and autumn led to a 21 per cent drop in average household gas consumption and a 4 per cent fall in electricity.

The slide in profits for the year to 31 December comes despite the energy supplier hiking gas and electricity bills by an average of 18 per cent and 16 per cent respectively in August. It has since announced a 5 per cent cut in electricity prices in January.

Centrica, however, reported a 1 per cent increase in adjusted operating profits to £2.41 billion as its upstream gas and oil exploration business – which includes the former Venture Production unit – saw profits jump 33 per cent to £1bn.

Some of the fall in profits in supplying gas and electricity to households has been clawed back through residential services such as boiler repairs, where profits were 10 per cent higher at £264m.

The upstream business smashed through the £1bn barrier for the first time, recording a 33 per cent increase in profits to £1.02bn, after benefiting from higher wholesale commodity prices and a good production performance.

The company claims it has invested £1.80 for every £1 it has earned over the past five years. Its dividend for shareholders increased 8 per cent to 15.4p a share.

Chief executive Sam Laidlaw said it had been a tough year, “both for Centrica and our customers”, but that the company was still making the investments “on which Britain’s energy future depends”.

A MAN named by sources as serving Labour MP Eric Joyce has been arrested on suspicion of assault following a disturbance at the Palace of Westminster.

Scotland Yard confirmed officers detained a man in his 50s after being called to reports of an incident at a bar within the House of Commons at around 10.50pm last night.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: “We were called at approximately 10.50pm last night to reports of a disturbance at a bar within the House of Commons.

“A man aged in his 50s was arrested by officers on suspicion of assault. He remains in custody in a central London police station. Inquiries are continuing.”

Mr Joyce, the MP for Falkirk since December 2000, served in the Army Education Corps before pursuing a career in politics.

In 2010 he resigned as shadow Northern Ireland minister after pleading guilty to failing to provide a breath test.

From 2003 Mr Joyce served as a Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to a number of government ministers.

Mr Joyce quit as the PPS to Bob Ainsworth in 2009 due to his concerns over the war in Afghanistan.

Prior to that he had been a parliamentary aide to John Hutton, including the period when he was defence secretary, Mike O’Brien and Margaret Hodge.

According to his constituency webpage, Mr Joyce has a constituency office in Denny and an office in Portcullis House, Westminster.

During his time in Westminster he has held an interest in defence and military issues due to his army background, the website adds.

According to reports Conservative MP Stuart Andrew was head-butted and punched in the incident which happened in the Strangers Bar, a Commons bar reserved for MPs and their guests.

Labour MP Paul Farrelly was involved in a brawl in a different Commons bar in 2010.

The MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme claimed he “wrestled” a man to the floor in “self defence” following the altercation, which took place during a karaoke party at Parliament’s Sports and Social Club.

TAXPAYER-backed Royal Bank of Scotland remained at the heart of the row over bankers’ pay today as it unveiled total losses of £2 billion for 2011 at the same time as paying £785 million in bonuses to its staff.

RBS, which is 82% state-owned after receiving a £45.5 billion bailout at the height of the financial crisis, said the bonus pool included £390 million for its 17,000 investment bankers.

While the total pot is 43% lower than the previous year, it follows a period in which the bank announced thousands of job cuts as it scales back its investment arm Global Banking and Markets.

• THE housing market has “plateaued” and shows no sign of “vigorous recovery”, according to a report out today.

The Scottish House Price Monitor from Lloyds TSB Scotland shows the quarterly price index for properties rose by 1.4% between November and January.

But over the year property values still fell 4.2%, making the average price of a home £155,528.

Edinburgh saw the biggest fall in average house prices in January 2012, compared with the same month last year, falling 10.8% to £188,892.

Donald MacRae, chief economist at the bank, said the housing market “remains down but not out”.

• A MAN has been taken to hospital after being knocked over at Edinburgh University.

The 24-year-old, believed to be a student, suffered head and facial injuries as a result of the accident at George Square.

The accident is thought to have occurred in the car park area.

The ambulance service said the man was taken to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary after the accident at 2.35pm.

A spokesman for the service said the extent of the injuries were not immediately clear but were not thought to be life-threatening.

• LANDLORDS who dodge tax on income from their properties in Scotland are to be targeted by HM Revenue and Customs.

The tax department said it has set up a taskforce to chase tax-evading landlords.

Similar groups were set up after the UK Government’s most recent spending review to clamp down tax evasion, avoidance and fraud from 2011 and 2012.

The move aims to raise £7 billion a year by 2014-15.

]]> 1.2133328 Thu, 23 Feb 2012 08:59:16 +0000 http://www.scotsman.com/scottish_business_briefing_thursday_23_february_2012_1_2133327

WELCOME to scotsman.com’s Scottish Business Briefing. Every morning we bring you a comprehensive round-up of all news affecting business in Scotland today.

RETAIL

Edinburgh Woollen Mill rescues Peacocks but 3,100 jobs are lost

Edinburgh Woollen Mill (EWM) yesterday emerged as the saviour of 6,000 jobs after acquiring part of the failed Peacocks discount fashion chain.. In Scotland, 15 stores will remain open while 30 have closed with an estimated loss of around 400 jobs ({http://www.scotsman.com/business/retail/edinburgh_woollen_mill_rescues_peacocks_but_3_100_jobs_are_lost_1_2132481|Scotsman|Scotsman}).

{http://www.scotsman.com/business/retail|Read all today’s retail news from scotsman.com|Read all today’s retail news from scotsman.com}

BANKING

RBS reports £2bn loss in 2011, fourth since bailout

The Royal Bank of Scotland has reported its fourth year of losses since the bank’s bailout in 2008. The bank posted an attributable loss of £2bn in 2011, up from a loss of £1.1bn in 2010 ({http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17128477|BBC|BBC}).

{http://www.scotsman.com/business/banking|Read all today’s banking news from scotsman.com|Read all today’s banking news from scotsman.com}

ENERGY & UTILITIES

Centrica adds to North Sea assets with Total deal

Scottish Gas parent Centrica added to its growing portfolio of North Sea assets yesterday, buying stakes in seven producing fields from Total for £246 million ({http://www.scotsman.com/business/management/centrica_adds_to_north_sea_assets_with_total_deal_1_2132510

|Scotsman|SDcotsman}).

{http://www.scotsman.com/business/energy-and-utilities|Read all today’s energy and utilities news from scotsman.com|Read all today’s energy and utilities news from scotsman.com}

INDUSTRY

Morrison constructing a positive story as staff grow

MORRISON Construction, the Scottish arm of builder Galliford Try, has boosted staffing by well over 50 per cent in the past year to some 800 as its parent posted higher interim sales, profits and dividends yesterday ({http://www.scotsman.com/business/morrison_constructing_a_positive_story_as_staff_grow_1_2132490|Scotsman|Scotsman})

Jobs to go as Dawn closes general construction arm

SCOTTISH company Dawn Group will implement an “orderly closure” of its general construction division with the loss of about 60 jobs, and focus in future on housebuilding and property development ({http://www.heraldscotland.com/business/company-news/jobs-to-go-as-dawn-closes-general-construction-arm.16830632|Herald|Herald}).

{http://www.scotsman.com/business/industry|Read all today’s industry news from scotsman.com|Read all today’s industry news from scotsman.com}

MANAGEMENT

Boards ‘hampered by non-executives’

Having more non-executive directors on company boards only reduces their effectiveness, according to the findings of research that could undermine a key claim of corporate governance activists ({http://www.heraldscotland.com/business/company-news/boards-hampered-by-non-executives.16745526|Herald|Herald}).

{http://www.scotsman.com/business/management|Read all today’s management news from scotsman.com|Read all today’s management news from scotsman.com}

]]> 1.2133327 Thu, 23 Feb 2012 08:56:38 +0000 http://www.scotsman.com/frank_boyle_cartoon_23_02_2012_1_2133310

Today . . .

Boyling Point

Follow Frank Boyle on Twitter {http://twitter.com/boylecartoon|Twitter.com/boylecartoon|Go to Frank Boyle on Twitter}

• Frank’s new book Boyling Point 2 is available for £8.99 with free postage and packing by ordering online at {http://www.shop.scotsman.com/bp2|www.shop.scotsman.com/bp2} or calling 0131-620 8400

Our cartoonist takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the situation between Michael Moore and Alex Salmond, with Moore claiming the independence referendum should be held in 2013, and not 2014 like Salmond would prefer.

Illustration by Iain Green

THE idea of Scotland playing a leading role in the space sector may sound to some like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s far from it.

The space sector contributes £5.6 billion to the UK economy, as well as supporting 68,000 high-value jobs. Not only that, it has soared above the recent economic headwinds, growing an average of 9 per cent each year since 1999.

Scotland-based companies are playing a key role in that success story. Clyde Space is leading the design and manufacture of the UKube-1 satellite – the UK’s first satellite commissioned by the UK Space Agency. Other examples include Star-Dundee, which sells its data-handling test products to almost every international space agency, while Selex Galileo is tapping into the market for European satellites.

Commercial success also goes hand in hand with globally recognised academic excellence, with the recent launch of the Space Glasgow research cluster by the UK Science Minister David Willetts. Scotland is also involved with key instruments for the James Webb Space Telescope, which will replace Hubble.

But don’t think that space research is something that can only be applied out in the great beyond. In fact, on 6 March Glasgow will host the second Scottish Space Symposium, exploring the theme of “Bringing space down to earth”. Scottish Enterprise is supporting the event in partnership with University of Strathclyde to showcase the benefits of using space-based information and technologies.

For example, use of space-based data will allow Network Rail to improve safety by monitoring landslides remotely via satellite rather than sending engineers to remote locations. Edinburgh-based Ecometrica is also using satellite data to monitor CO2 levels, putting them at the vanguard of carbon trading and tariffs which the EU is investigating placing on businesses as a means of tackling climate change.

So the Scottish Space Symposium will explore how businesses can benefit from terrestrial applications in such key fields as communications and transport. Science fact, as opposed to science fiction.

• Ross White is part of Scottish Enterprise’s aerospace, marine and defence team

THIS week Alex Salmond made a speech in Scotland. That came as quite a surprise. It was the kind of speech I suspect he rather enjoys giving.

commentary on issues, affairs or matters of state. This one was to the Scottish Council Development and Industry’s gathering about the first 40 years of oil and gas exploration in the North Sea and the potential for another 40.

As Scotland is now in the independence campaign, I had thought the senior audience would be treated to a polemic setting out how a Nationalist administration would tax the oil and gas industry. After all, Mr Salmond says he would cut corporation tax in an independent Scotland. He also says that public-sector pensions would be higher and social security benefit payments more generous than in other parts of the United Kingdom. So someone or some industry is going to have to pay for all this.

Salmond has also set out a plan for a Norwegian-style oil fund, although his speech this week was remarkably lacking in any detail on this. Perhaps that is understandable. To establish an oil fund and to, therefore, detail what it could do would depend on knowing how much would be in it and what rate of tax would be applied.

Mr Salmond never mentioned any of that, but lots of oil company people did over coffee.

They also mentioned their concerns over asking any such question of Mr Salmond’s Nationalists for fear of being branded “anti-Scottish” or worse.

Salmond set out some broad taxation principles that should be followed, not by his government, but by the UK one. A tax system that helps the recovery of oil and gas in the North Sea. Certainty for the industry on tax relief for decommissioning the 900 or so oil rigs to be brought ashore by 2020. And finally, the central approach, as Salmond saw it, to taxation. That there should be consultation with the industry prior to any changes in the tax regime. I agree. Philippe Guys, managing director of the French oil giant Total, explained that the North Sea industry has had three big fiscal changes in nine years. That is more than in some South American or African states. So there is a higher degree of political risk here in Scotland compared to elsewhere in the globe as a result.

But these principles would be all the better if the Nationalists practise what they preach.

The Nationalists introduced new business taxes in Scotland without any consultation whatsoever. So when asked if independence would mean lower oil taxes, the oil executive who manages a successful Scottish headquartered company said all politicians say so before they have to set the rate. Indeed.

It is, therefore, easy to see why no oil business is expecting any detail on a Nationalist tax regime until after the independence referendum. So, until then, Mr Salmond, far from being a player, is just a commentator. And that is exactly what he wants. But to assume such a role underestimates an industry which knows how to play politicians and governments.

]]> 1.2133220 Thu, 23 Feb 2012 02:01:57 +0000 http://www.scotsman.com/analysis_secularists_face_uphill_struggle_to_make_the_ultra_orthodox_serve_1_2133217

Amid the continued stand-offs with Iran and the Palestinians, Israel’s other struggle – that between secular and religious Jews – is heating up as secularists and their backers take a more muscular approach to defining the character of Israeli society.

On Tuesday, responding to petitions by secularists angry at government-sponsored mass draft-dodging by the ultra-orthodox, Israel’s Supreme Court annulled a law that allowed men to engage in religious studies instead of performing mandatory military service. A day earlier, Tel Aviv city council approved an unprecedented resolution calling for the launching of public transport on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath.

Both moves can be seen as indications that members of the country’s secular majority are becoming less willing to tolerate having their lifestyles determined by the ultra-orthodox minority, most of whose members are not part of the labour force and do not perform the three years’ military service required of other Israelis.

But religious parties are a main prop to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, and every government in recent Israeli history has been wary of alienating them.

Draft waivers for the ultra-orthodox go back nearly to the founding of Israel, when rabbis asked prime minister David Ben-Gurion to exempt religious seminary students from the army so that they could devote themselves to study of sacred texts and become successors to the European luminaries of Jewish learning who were killed during the Nazi Holocaust. He agreed to 400 exemptions.

But in 1977, then prime minister Menachem Begin of the Likud party, under pressure from religious coalition partners, agreed that anyone who studies in a seminary can be exempt. Today the number of ultra-orthodox exempt from service is about 62,000.

The supreme court ruling on Tuesday said that under the now annulled Tal Law, which had been in force for ten years, the government failed to enforce requirements for exemptions, so that the number of ultra-orthodox who did not serve actually increased.

Stoking the secularist sentiment, defence minister Ehud Barak is now proposing that, under new legislation to be drafted to replace the Tal Law, the number of exemptions should be brought down to 2,000. But that result is seen as highly unlikely because of the opposition of Shas, a hardline religious party that gives the government vital support.

The ultra-orthodox have largely shunned the army because they view it as incompatible with maintaining a lifestyle in accordance with strict Jewish law and they fear it would lead their youth to abandon their community.

Analysts say that while the number of ultra-orthodox drafted or performing national service can now be expected to rise, it is questionable whether Mr Netanyahu will be willing to abandon Likud’s long-standing alliance with ultra-orthodox parties, a step required to definitively end the exemptions.

Yossi Verter, a columnist for Haaretz daily, said: “Will the new bills bring tens of thousands of ultra-orthodox to the army induction centres beginning in August? It is highly doubtful.”

A MUSIC teacher faces losing her job after she drove on a motorway when she was more than four times the legal drink drive limit with two girls in the back of the car.

Linsey Aitken, 44, a classically trained cellist and folk musician, “took to a bottle of whisky” at home because she was stressed about her job, Stirling Sheriff Court heard yesterday.

The peripatetic Stirling Council primary school teacher then went for a drive, and was seen swerving between the lanes and straddling the centre lines of the M9. The court heard that motorists became so concerned they contacted police, who later stopped Aitken and found two girls, aged 13 and 15, in the back of her car.

Barbara Hughes, prosecuting, told the court Aitken’s car was first spotted swerving on the M9 between the Keir roundabout and the Craigforth interchange at about 6pm on 13 January.

The depute fiscal said: “Witnesses were of the opinion that the driver was drunk or unwell. A passenger in the car phoned the police.”

After Aitken left the motorway, police caught up with her when she stopped just off Stirling’s Dumbarton Road.

Aitken, of Drip Bridge, Stirling, admitted that on 13 January on the M9 she drove with 156 microgrammes of alcohol in 100 millilitres of breath. The legal limit is 35mcg.

The prosecution accepted a not guilty plea that Aitken exposed the young teenage passengers to danger by carrying them as passengers in a motor vehicle when she was under the influence of alcohol. Graham Walker, representing Aitken, said she had been suffering from a depressive illness at the time of the offence.

He acknowledged, however, that the court would have “very serious concerns”, given that she had been driving with two teenage passengers at the time. He added that Aitken had been dealing with an issue relating to employment and was “particularly stressed” that day.

The court heard that initially Aitken had not been intending to drive at all on the day, but “in the haze of alcohol” and the state of mind she was in, she later decided to do so. Mr Walker added: “To say she deeply regrets that is an understatement.”

The court was also told that Aitken was “presently signed off” from her employment due to stress.

Sheriff William Gilchrist deferred sentence for reports to be prepared, and the matter was then adjourned until next month, with Aitken disqualified from driving in the interim.

The General Teaching Council for Scotland said it would automatically be notified of any criminal offence involving a registered teacher and disciplinary investigation would then follow.

Teachers on the register can be struck off if it is proved that they have put pupils in danger.

A Stirling Council spokeswoman declined to comment on the case.

SCOTTISH researchers are to lead a major UK study into one of the world’s most devastating but least understood killer infections.

Invasive fungal infections are responsible for an estimated 1.5 million deaths a year. It was revealed yesterday that experts at Aberdeen University have been awarded £5.1 million by the Wellcome Trust to lead a major UK collaborative study to tackle the problem from the “laboratory bench to hospital bedside”.Professor Neil Gow, chair in microbiology at the university and director of the research consortium, said that, despite the death toll, fungal infections were poorly understood and had much less public awareness than diseases caused by bacteria, viruses and parasites.

Professor Ian Diamond, principal and vice-chancellor of Aberdeen University, said the award would place the institution at the heart of major research and training.

SCOTLAND’S main train operator is seeking a new supplier to deliver 48 million litres of diesel a year – by road.

The £31 million ScotRail contract, involving some 1,500 tanker movements, comes despite ministers urging further reductions in the environmental impact of railways.

It also contrasts starkly with Prestwick – Scotland’s fourth largest airport – which gets all its 70m litres of fuel a year by rail from the Grangemouth refinery.

Environmental campaigners called on the Scottish Government to stipulate that ScotRail switches its supply route as part of the next franchise from 2014.

ScotRail and other train operators in Scotland have received diesel by road since British Rail abandoned rail deliveries before privatisation in the 1990s.

However, ministers have said rail is one of the greener forms of travel and “there are still many ways that rail can reduce its environmental impact”.

They also aim to make this a “key environmental theme” of the new ScotRail franchise – which is their biggest contract – and they intend to electrify Scotland’s main inter-city routes, powered by renewable energy

ScotRail has some 150 diesel trains – more than half its fleet – which operate almost all routes outside Strathclyde.

The new one-year diesel supply contract, from April, comprises 23 million litres being delivered to three train depots in Glasgow, 10.6m to Haymarket in Edinburgh, 8.4m to Inverness and 6.5m to Perth.

Scottish Green MSP Patrick Harvie said: “The renewal of this contract to deliver fuel for Scotland’s trains by road underlines what we have long argued – we need to get serious about shifting freight from road to rail and need to speed up the timescales for electrifying the rail network.

“The SNP government’s 2014 consultation, widely accepted as a shambles, asks how Scotland’s rail service can reduce its environmental impact. This fuel contract would seem a golden opportunity that ministers should have acted upon before now.”

Paul Tetlaw, for sustainable transport campaigners Transform Scotland, said: “If the national rail operator is getting its fuel by road, road freight is too cheap and it should be encouraged to switch to rail.”

David Spaven, Scottish representative of the Rail Freight Group, said: “Virtually all oil refineries are directly rail-connected so for the longer hauls it’s hard to imagine anything more suited to rail transport.

“For many years there has been a weekly oil train from Grangemouth to Lairg which passes right by the ScotRail fuelling point at Inverness.”

A spokesman for Aberdeen-based FirstGroup, which runs ScotRail, said: “As a result of suppliers’ arguments on grounds of costs and flexibility, British Rail removed the facilities for deliveries within rail locations under a rationalisation programme. ScotRail inherited that position.

“The latest tender for fuel on the open market is designed to get the best price possible.”

A Scottish Government’s Transport Scotland agency spokeswoman said:‬ “ScotRail supplies and contracts, and environmental considerations regarding these, are a matter for ScotRail under the current franchise contract.

“We recognise this could potentially be improved upon and are considering the environmental criteria for the future franchise.”‬

FOOD scientists are to discuss the future of what goes on our plates at a festival in Edinburgh.

Science on a Plate – whose media partner is The Scotsman – aims to create dialogue between research scientists, the food industry and general public on issues relating to food, health and science including food security, sustainability and supply.

Scotland’s super-foods and seasonal vegetables are expected to come under the spotlight during interactive cooking demonstrations involving both chefs and scientists at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, while experts Miles Irving and John Wright will host a foraging walk and breakfast.

Rural affairs secretary Richard Lochhead said: “Scotland has a well deserved reputation for its first-class natural larder and exceptional research base.

“Science on a Plate offers people the chance to engage with science through food, creating a unique opportunity to learn about both subjects in an exciting atmosphere.”

Neil Forbes, chef director of Edinburgh’s Café St Honoré and the festival’s ambassador, said: “I’m delighted to be involved.”

A SENIOR police officer has warned that staff may bear the brunt of a potential £22 million annual VAT bill through the creation of the new Scottish national force.

Chief Constable Kevin Smith, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland, urged politicians to ensure the levy is waived by the UK government when the eight regional forces are merged.

Under current rules, police forces are treated the same as local authorities and are exempt from the charge under the VAT Act 1994.

However, the Scottish Government drew up its worst-case scenario that the HM Revenue & Customs might insist on the payment when the Police and Fire Reform Bill is passed at Holyrood.

Mr Smith said the money equates to about 800 staff. He said: “No one in Scotland wants this. This will be bad for policing and bad for Scotland.”

THE day before her death, Marie Colvin sent a message to a war reporters’ Facebook group, urging colleagues to break her newspaper’s online paywall and repost her remarkable report from inside Homs.

“I don’t often do this but it is sickening what is happening here,” she wrote. “I cannot understand how the world can stand by … Watched a baby die today. Shrapnel, doctors could do nothing. His little tummy just heaved and heaved until he stopped. Feeling helpless. As well as cold! Will keep trying to get out the information.”

Spending time with Marie was a reminder of what journalism is about. Her choice to live so much of her life in the world’s worst conflict zones was born from the belief that what she did mattered; that bearing witness to some of history’s darkest moments and giving a voice to its victims could curtail the perpetrators of such brutality and spur the rest of the world into action.

Marie and her photographer Paul Conroy, who was injured beside her in Homs, spent three months living in the Libyan city of Misrata witnessing the heavy, indiscriminate rocket fire from Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi’s forces, and the ensuing battle with rebel fighters.

While the rest of us would venture to the front line for a brief look before a quick retreat, Marie would disappear into the haze of battle in a rebel commander’s vehicle. Sometimes she would be gone for days, embedding herself with the rebel troops.

Her tremendous courage was complemented by a great humility and spontaneous wit. She treated those she worked with and wrote about as equals, and refused to source friendship only from the press pack in the area. In Misrata, her Libyan fixer and translator became one of her closest companions.

They sat together in his car one sunny afternoon, the doors open to let in the breeze, giggling about the day before, when they had accidentally driven so far through the front lines that Nato bombs aimed at Gaddafi loyalist targets were falling behind them.

Her work was inspirational in its bravery, thoroughness, compassion and honesty. She cared, and it showed.

• Ruth Sherlock covered the Libyan revolution for The Scotsman

Rich people are more likely than the poor to receive NHS treatment for heart disease, according to the public spending watchdog.

An estimated 182,000 people in Scotland have coronary heart disease (CHD), about 3.3 per cent of the population.

In some more deprived areas, about 25 per cent of men over 75 have CHD, but, according to Audit Scotland, people in deprived communities “are not always getting the same level of treatment as the rest of the population”.

Treatments such as angioplasty, which widens the arteries, or heart bypass surgery are more than 20 per cent fewer than expected in deprived areas. The least deprived areas saw over 60 per cent more than expected.

Audit Scotland said this “implies a lower level of access to these treatments for people in more deprived areas”.

The report states: “The Scottish Government and NHS boards should monitor rates of the main cardiology procedures, compare these by board and by different groups, particularly in more deprived areas and with other countries, and review whether variation is warranted, or if action needs to be taken to ensure patients are receiving the most appropriate treatment.”

It adds that they must also “continue to improve the evidence base on the impact and cost-effectiveness of measures to help prevent heart disease, and use this evidence to identify priorities for spending to help improve outcomes and address inequalities, particularly in deprived areas”.

The report found limited evidence of the effectiveness of the government’s Better Heart Disease and Stroke Care Action Plan which set a national target for cardiovascular health checks.

Rates of heart disease in Scotland remain the highest in western Europe, despite new cases falling by nearly a third in the past ten years. Death rates have reduced by about 40 per cent.

Audit Scotland found NHS cardiology spending had risen from £80 million in 2002-03 to almost £146m last year, a rise of 50 per cent when inflation is factored in.

The report found that the NHS could save at least £4m a year by making cardiology services more efficient.

The Royal College of Nursing has also highlighted pressure on funding for specialist heart nurses, with NHS Orkney no longer employing one and other boards, including NHS Grampian and Borders, facing uncertainty about future funding.

Director Theresa Fyffe said: “Cutting back on specialist heart-failure nurses is counterproductive, not just for patients but for NHS finances as well.

“Indeed, it is symptomatic of the wider approach that health boards are taking to saving money, [such as] cutting posts to reduce their wage bills and therefore storing up potential problems for the future when there won’t be enough nurses to deliver high-quality patient care.”

Labour health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie said: “If people from poorer communities cannot get treatment that would save their lives, ministers should hang their heads in shame.”

A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: “The report shows that people affected by heart disease are getting access to better treatments faster than ever, while service improvements have helped NHS Scotland cut the number of deaths from heart disease by almost 40 per cent over the last ten years.

“We are determined to do all we can to drive further improvements. Encouraging people to eat healthier options, become more physically active, stop smoking and drink less alcohol is key to achieving this, which is why we are taking forward a number of initiatives to create a healthier Scotland.”

SCOTTISH prosecutors have asked the new Libyan government for access to information and documents relating to the Lockerbie bombing.

The Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland QC and Chief Constable Pat Shearer of Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary broke the news to the UK families of victims of the 1988 atrocity, which claimed 270 lives, in London yesterday.

The investigation is being carried out jointly by Scottish and UK investigators. US law enforcement officials were also at the meeting.

A statement from the Crown Office said: “The purpose of the meeting was to update the families on progress in the ongoing criminal investigation.

“The families were advised that a formal request has been drawn up and sent to the new Libyan government requesting access to Libya for police officers and prosecutors to examine information and documents relating to lines of inquiry.”

The Crown Office said a further meeting with other UK families is scheduled to take place in the near future in Glasgow.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is the only person to have been convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.

He was freed on compassionate grounds by the Scottish Government in August 2009 after doctors said he had three months to live.

OIL tycoon Sir Ian Wood has made an 11th-hour appeal to the public to back his controversial plans for the transformation of Aberdeen’s Union Terrace Gardens.

Scotland’s second richest man insisted his dream of placing a futuristic City Garden at the heart of a revitalised city centre was not a “vanity project”.

He said: “I greatly regret that this has become such a divisive issue. This is not about big business trying to control Aberdeen’s future. The business supporters genuinely care about Aberdeen’s future. They know that something needs to happen in the city centre to help them attract the talent they need to grow.”

Sir Ian, head of energy giant Wood Group, has pledged £50m to kick-start the £140m plans to make the “Granite Web” design by New York architects Diller, Scofidio and Renfro a reality.

THE SNP had outstanding loans of more than £500,000 at the end of 2011, newly released figures have revealed.

Electoral Commission figures for the final three months of 2011 showed that the Nationalists owed £509,503 to supporters who had lent the party cash for campaigning.

The UK Labour Party had nearly £10 million in outstanding loans. The UK Conservatives’ debt stood at almost £2.7m, and the Liberal Democrats’ debt was just under £400,000.

CHERIE Blair has lodged a claim over alleged hacking of her telephone, her lawyers have revealed.

The wife of former prime minister Tony Blair is understood to be taking action against News Group Newspapers.

A statement released by Graham Atkins, of Atkins Thomson, said: “I can confirm that we have issued a claim on behalf of Cherie Blair in relation to the unlawful interception of her voicemails.”

Tony Blair’s former communications director Alastair Campbell told the Leveson Inquiry into press standards in November that he believed a story the Daily Mirror published about Cherie Blair’s pregnancy in 1999 may have come from hacking.

He admitted he had “no evidence” that journalists intercepted either her voicemails or those of her lifestyle consultant Carole Caplin, but queried the source of articles about Mrs Blair.

“During various periods of the time that we were in government, we were very, very concerned about how many stories about Cherie and Carole Caplin were getting out to different parts of the media,” he said.

“I had no idea how they were getting out.”

]]> 1.2133177 Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:46:58 +0000 http://www.scotsman.com/sketch_why_salmond_is_a_bone_of_contention_for_young_tom_1_2133176

THE thoughts of Mrs Bone, a matron of a quiet middle England town, may not be familiar to Scottish voters, but for some time now they have been influencing government policy on a range of issues.

David Cameron has on several occasions complained that he seems to be spending too much time “trying to satisfy” the woman who happens to be the wife of the right-wing back-bench Tory MP for Wellingborough, Peter Bone.

And yesterday it was the turn of the referendum and public spending in Scotland for Mr Bone to relay the thoughts of his spouse to MPs in the Commons chamber.

Liberal Democrat Scottish Secretary Michael Moore, fielding Scottish questions yesterday, was not only to be treated to the musings of Mrs Bone, but also young Thomas Bone, their 11-year-old son.

Mr Bone, part of a group of Tory back-benchers who would not mind Scotland and its Labour MPs departing and no longer taking what they believe is an English subsidy, asked: “Last week at the breakfast table, Mrs Bone and I were talking about public expenditure in Scotland and the First Minister, as one does, when suddenly our 11-year-old son Thomas asks ‘Is Alex Salmond a goodie or a baddie?’ What do you think?”

Being a true Borders gentleman, Mr Moore seemed to not be as willing to “give satisfaction” to Mrs Bone or answer her son as Mr Cameron.He answered: “I think as ever the goings-on at the Bone household breakfast table are of national interest and we look forward to further updates in due course. I think when your son gets a chance to meet with the First Minister, he will be delighted by the conversation he has. But one point he should know: he wants to get England separate from Scotland, we don’t.”

However, the family Bone was not to be thwarted. And the Tory MP known not to like his Lib Dem coalition colleagues much was happily – for him – listed for Prime Minister’s Questions as well.

This time it seems that in a strange echo of the previous question, that the Bone family had been also much irked by the way the radical Muslim cleric Abu Qatada, was allowed to stay in the UK and blamed Lib Dem Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

He asked: “Last week at the breakfast table, Mrs Bone was saying how she knew the Prime Minister wanted to deport the terrorist Abu Qatada straight away.

But she knew it was being blocked by the Deputy Prime Minister and the Liberal Democrats. Suddenly, our 11-year-old son Thomas asked, ‘Is Nick Clegg a goodie or a baddie?’ What do you think?”

THE SNP has insisted that the 44,341 under-18s already on the electoral register in Scotland would be given the vote in the independence referendum.

Official figures released yesterday revealed the total number of 16- and 17-year-olds who are on the electoral roll. The 44,341 teenagers are classified as “attainers”.

Ordinarily, they register early so that they can vote as soon as they turn 18. The SNP argue that previous Scottish elections to health boards and on crofting legislation, which had seen 16- and 17-year-olds vote, created a precedent for increasing the franchise for the referendum.

They claim the number of 16- 17-year-olds eligible to vote would increase dramatically before a referendum, boosting the numbers to 120,000.

Yesterday’s figures revealed a rise in citizens moving to Scotland from the rest of the EU had resulted in the electorate increasing. According to the National Records of Scotland, the number of EU citizens registered to vote in local government and Scottish Parliament elections is up 17 per cent since 2010.

The number rose by 9,945 to 67,949, of a total electorate of 4.01 million, although this is likely to underestimate the total number of EU citizens living in Scotland, since many may not be registered voters.

WE should hardly be surprised that the UK government should be keen for the independence referendum to be held “sooner rather than later”.

For all the nuances of the opinion polls, one simple fact is clear. No recent poll of Scottish opinion based on an adequately sized sample has found a majority in favour of independence.

That is even true of those polls that have posed Mr Salmond’s referendum question, even though it seems to produce a slightly higher level of support for leaving the UK than other questions included on recent surveys.

So giving Mr Salmond more time simply gives him more opportunity to turn things around. Better to bag victory when success seems more or less guaranteed.

Moreover, Scotland is an unexpected and unwanted problem for the coalition.

When they came to power David Cameron and Nick Clegg knew they had to deal with a broken economy.

What they did not anticipate was that they would have the potential break-up of Britain hanging over them for most of their term too.

The economy’s problems cannot be solved quickly. But all that is required to preserve the integrity of the United Kingdom is a decisive “No” vote in a referendum.

However, on Mr Salmond’s proposed timetable the threat of possible break-up will continue to hang like a dark cloud over the coalition until little more than half a year before its term of office ends.

Nevertheless, Westminster might want to consider whether it would still be better to wait.

At the moment Mr Salmond and his party remain popular, and thus more likely to have some sway over voters in the referendum vote.

The longer the ballot is delayed, the more likely it is that by then the SNP bubble will have already been burst.

• John Curtice is professor of politics, Strathclyde University.

David Cameron has come under pressure to give as much time to dealing with “English grievances” over devolution as he has on the independence referendum.

The intervention by Labour MP Frank Field was met with support from the Tory back-benches as he challenged the Prime Minister on perceived constitutional inequalities caused by devolution. It came as Mr Cameron accused the SNP of running away from a referendum as he was also pressed by Nationalist Western Isles MP Angus MacNeil on what he meant last week on more powers for Scotland.

And earlier in Scottish questions there was pressure on the government to make sure that if Scotland breaks away from the Union that it takes a Barnett Formula share of debt, which is bigger than its population share. The point raised by Tory Vale of Glamorgan MP Alun Cairns was dismissed by Scottish Secretary Michael Moore who said he “did not envisage Scotland voting for independence”.

Mr Field, MP for Birkenhead, asked Mr Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions: “Will you devote as much time to facing up to the grievances the English feel from the proposals of devolution as you will be giving to considering new proposals of devolution for Scotland?”

But Mr Cameron said: “I want to appeal to my fellow Englishmen to say, ‘This has been a great partnership for Scotland and a great partnership for England too’.”

Western Isles MP Mr MacNeil then told Mr Cameron: “Last week in Edinburgh you said there were more powers on the table for Scotland, but couldn’t name any. Can you name one power you have on your mind in this latest U-turn?”

But Mr Cameron hit back: “I didn’t think the Scottish National Party favoured devolution; I thought you favoured separation. Yet as soon as you’re offered a referendum that gives you the chance to put that in front of the Scottish people, you start running away.”

]]> 1.2133173 Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:41:30 +0000 http://www.scotsman.com/scottish_independence_let_scotland_vote_on_independence_in_19_months_says_michael_moore_1_2133172

SCOTTISH Secretary Michael Moore has opened up a new front in the referendum power struggle between Westminster and Holyrood by demanding it is held in September next year.

In evidence to the Scottish affairs select committee, Mr Moore dismissed claims by the SNP Scottish Government that the poll cannot be held before autumn 2014 and said it could and should be held 12 months earlier.

The move came the week after Mr Moore and Prime Minister David Cameron held talks with First Minister Alex Salmond over the terms of the referendum, with the UK government looking to temporarily devolve powers to Holyrood to allow it to set it up.

Briefings had suggested that Mr Salmond’s preferred date of autumn 2014 poll would be accepted.

However, yesterday Mr Moore made it clear that the UK government would push for an earlier date with both sides believing that, the timing will be important in the final outcome.

Pro-UK parties have always preferred 2013 because it is a year without another election and follows on from the 2012 Olympics. The SNP preferred a later referendum to follow on from the Glasgow Commonwealth Games and the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn in 2014.

The dispute over the date appears to have opened up as a result of the Scottish Government, which is holding its own referendum consultation, refusing to give ground on having a single question and allowing the Electoral Commission to set the rules of the referendum.

Speaking to the Scottish affairs select committee yesterday Mr Moore said it is feasible to bring forward the vote from the autumn 2014 date proposed by Mr Salmond.

He said: “I believe you can actually deliver this referendum by September 2013 which, give or take a few weeks, is close to the First Minister’s declaration that it would be in the second half of the Scottish Parliament.”

The bill, he said, could be introduced by autumn this year followed by Royal Assent in March next year. The regulated period for the campaign would then begin in June with the question going to the people in September, he said.

Mr Moore claimed all legal and procedural requirements would be met and criticised the SNP’s “go-slow” approach.

He added: “It seems they’re kicking the can down the road on this one for no good reason.”

His view has been backed by business organisations such as the Confederation of British Industry Scotland, which has raised serious concerns over the economic impact of the uncertainty delay will cause.

Labour’s constitutional spokeswoman in Holyrood, Patricia Ferguson, pointed out the referendum on devolution was organised much more quickly.

She said: “Donald Dewar held a referendum within 134 days of being elected. On Alex Salmond’s timescale, it will take him seven and a half years. The longer he delays, the more it fuels suspicion. There is nothing in the SNP manifesto which prevents them hold a referendum now, and the slower they go the more it looks like they fear the verdict of the Scottish people, who overwhelmingly back devolution not separation.”

But last night SNP ministers were dismissive of Mr Moore’s attempt to bring the vote forward. Parliamentary business and government strategy secretary Bruce Crawford said: “This is a silly distraction by the Scotland Office. The more they try to dictate the terms of the referendum from Westminster, the more unpopular the anti-independence parties will become, and the more popular independence will be.

“We have published a detailed timetable to hold the referendum in autumn 2014, and that is when it shall be held. This fully reflects our election commitment for which we received an unanswerable mandate – while the Lib Dems lost every single seat in mainland Scotland.”

He went on: “Autumn 2014 is the correct timetable for the referendum, which reflects the proper procedures of the Scottish Parliament, and the need for the fullest possible public debate on Scotland’s most important decision for 300 years.

“The Scotland Office timetable is flawed and full of holes. We have already secured thousands of responses to our consultation, and these will be analysed in the summer.

“This autumn and winter there needs to be a minimum of ten weeks to test the ballot paper – as required by the Electoral Commission.”

He also pointed out that the Electoral Commission criticised the timetable for the AV referendum on electoral reform last year, which caused problems for those organising the poll and for the voters themselves.

Referendum expert Alan Trench from Devolution Matters claimed that the vote date would not affect the outcome.

He added: “What needs to be done now is for there to be a clear timetable rather than bringing the date forward and enough time for the SNP to spell out details of what an independent Scotland would be like on a range of issues, but also for the pro-UK parties to say what the extra powers promised last week by David Cameron would be. ”

MPs on the Scottish affairs committee, which is boycotted by the SNP, were also critical of UK government tactics in dealing with the referendum.

Labour chairman Ian Davidson said that it was “an error” by the Prime Minister to suggest last week that there would be more powers devolved if Scots did vote “No” to separation without identifying them.

He said it would “allow the SNP to throw dust in people’s eyes” and avoid questions on details of what would happen to an independent Scotland.

ALEX Salmond’s post-independence plan to put Scotland’s oil billions into a massive investment fund for the future would require either a cut in funding for schools, hospitals and roads, or an increase in the country’s debt, a major independent think-tank has declared.

A report by Glasgow University’s Centre of Public Policy and the Regions (CPPR) argues that, while there may be “moral” grounds for putting aside Scotland’s North Sea windfall for future generations, politicians would not have any spare oil money after independence to do so.

Instead, the CPPR says that after independence, a new Scottish Government would need the revenues to pay the bills and keep public services going.

If they did decide to salt some of it away, the choice would be to cut existing spending, raise taxes, or to borrow more cash from the markets, the CPPR concludes.

The report comes a week after Mr Salmond declared that he hoped to put aside £1 billion a year of oil taxes for 20 years after independence, saying that – with interest – Scotland would eventually build up a £30bn cushion.

His plan follows the example of oil-rich Norway, which has built up a huge multi-billion kroner pension fund on the back of its own oil reserves.

In his speech to the London School of Economics, Mr Salmond attacked the UK Treasury for having spent most of its North Sea oil windfall, saying the UK was now one of the few oil-producing nations which had not built up a fund on the back of its natural resources.

SNP ministers argue that there will be a surplus after independence because the new system of government will trigger higher growth in Scotland, giving them more tax revenues to play with.

However, the report by the CPPR says there is “little prospect of any fiscal surplus becoming available” to help set up such a fund. It notes that all the tax revenues from the North Sea will be needed to “help close the budget deficit that emerges from maintaining existing levels of public services”. Therefore, it would be difficult in the period after independence to find the money to set up a new fund “and certainly not in the size being suggested”, the report concludes.

Report author Jo Armstrong said: “With current oil prices and more importantly, with declining North Sea production, such a level of investment will put current service levels at risk or will require adding to Scotland’s debt levels.”

Mr Salmond acknowledged in his LSE lecture that an oil fund could only be set up once “fiscal conditions allowed”.

The CPPR report notes Scotland’s most recent Government Expenditure and Revenues for Scotland (Gers) report says that – including North Sea oil – the country ran a deficit of £8.9bn, or £13.9bn, when capital spending is included.

Unless there is a sudden spike in the oil price or a decrease in Scottish Government costs, the CPPR says it is hard to see from where an oil fund would get its money. Even if there is a surplus, the think-tank says backers need to prove that saving it up would be a better option that spending it in other ways – such as by reducing the national debt, cutting taxes or building better infrastructure.

Scotland’s leading oil economist, Professor Alex Kemp of Aberdeen University’s Business School, said: “Over the next ten years there should be oil revenues of between £5bn and £10bn a year. What they could do with it [if the country was independent] would depend on the public spending they have.”

On the question of an oil fund, finance secretary John Swinney has argued that once independence beds in, a budget surplus would emerge, thus allowing SNP ministers to build up a new kitty.

Scottish ministers would be able to use “the levers of power of independence to create a more dynamic economy”, Mr Swinney said.

He added: “A more dynamic economy will generate higher growth and as a consequence higher revenues.”

A Scottish Government spokesman last night said that compared with the UK, which is also in deficit, Scotland remained in a stronger position.

He said: “The Gers figures show that year-on-year, Scotland is in a stronger financial position than the UK as a whole.

“Taking all spending in Scotland into account and all of our revenues, Scotland has run a current budget surplus in four of the five years to 2009-10 – while the UK hasn’t run a current budget surplus since 2001-2.”

However, Scottish Labour’s finance spokesman, Ken Macintosh, said: “Alex Salmond needs to spell out what further cuts he is proposing, because you can’t spend the same money twice.

“Basing our entire economy on a single commodity that is volatile in price and finite in supply is a risk that we avoid by working in partnership with the other countries of the UK.”

MSPs have backed Edinburgh’s bid to become home to the UK Green Investment Bank.

Speaking in a Holyrood debate yesterday, energy minister Fergus Ewing called on MSPs to unite in their support for the bid, saying Edinburgh’s Green Investment Bank Group had made a “compelling argument”.

He said: “As we await the decision by the UK government, I am asking that this parliament once again shows unanimity in recognising the strength of Edinburgh’s bid, and the considerable benefits to the UK by having the Green Investment Bank located in Edinburgh.”

He added: “I am sure that we are all convinced of the merits of the bid.”

Mr Ewing said: “Edinburgh is the only location in the UK which brings together both finance and the clean-energy industry in a single location. It has an unrivalled concentration of industry skills and experience.”

Edinburgh is one of 32 UK towns and cities to put themselves forward to host the headquarters of the proposed new institution.

The UK government is setting up what it describes as “the world’s first investment bank solely dedicated to greening the economy”.

A decision on where the bank will be based is expected by the end of this month.

Edinburgh Woollen Mill (EWM) yesterday emerged as the saviour of 6,000 jobs after acquiring part of the failed Peacocks discount fashion chain.

EWM has bought 338 stores out of administration but 3,100 staff lost their jobs as 224 stores were closed with immediate effect.

In Scotland, 15 stores will remain open while 30 have closed with an estimated loss of around 400 jobs. The price EWM paid for the stores was undisclosed.

EWM was a surprise bidder for Peacocks, a private equity-backed company which collapsed into administration under its £700m debt mountain in the biggest retail failure since Woolworths, placing 9,000 jobs in jeopardy.

Administrator KPMG had renewed talks with EWM in recent days after a potential £25m deal fell through with Pakistani textile billionaire Alshair Fiyaz, who was thought to be the sole bidder for the chain just last week.

Philip Day, the chairman and chief executive of EWM, held out hope that further jobs could be saved despite the immediate closure of the 224 stores.

He said: “We do hope that there will be scope to save more jobs and stores from those being forced to close now due to performance issues and overhead pressures.

“As you can imagine, there will be a considerable amount of work to undertake over the next few months to stabilise the situation, turn this business around, get the supply chain moving again and excite the customers with great products.”

The acquisition includes 338 stores, 57 concessions, three distribution centres and the head office operations in Cardiff. Around 250 head office staff were previously made redundant when the company entered administration on 19 January.

John Gorle, national officer for the shopworkers’ union Usdaw welcomed the deal but said the loss of 3,000 jobs was “one of the worst redundancy situations of recent years with Scotland being particularly hard hit”.

“Usdaw will be seeking a meeting with Edinburgh Woollen Mill as soon as possible to discuss its plans for the business,” he added.

The Langholm-based EWM has been leading an aggressive expansion, picking up troubled retail assets such as home wares chain Ponden Mill and linen shop Roseby’s, which it merged into Ponden Home in 2010.

In June it bought failed retailer Jane Norman, but later missed out on a deal to buy troubled outdoor wear retailer Blacks.

Barclays, the last of Peacocks’ original trio of lenders, and Santander backed EWM with funding for the acquisition.

Day intends to continue trading the stores under the Peacocks brand.

The administrator said that the retailer had failed due to the “decline in consumer spending due to the tough economic conditions...a surplus of stores and unsustainable capital structure”.

In 2007, Peacocks’ chief executive, Richard Kirk, took the company private in a highly leveraged £405m deal with Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, and Och-Ziff and Perry Capital, two hedge funds.

It is thought that two of its lenders, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group, put the firm into administration after talks to restructure £240m of debt failed.

Last year EWM made a £12.5m pre-tax profit on sales of £196m.

Day staged a £67.5m management buy-out of EWM in 2002 and the group is now owned by him and his family.

COMMENT, PAGE 35

A LANDSLIDE blackspot was closed yesterday for the second time in two months after up to 50 tonnes of debris slid down the hillside towards the road.

Engineers will today assess whether it is safe to re-open the Rest and Be Thankful pass on the A83 – the main route between Glasgow and Kintyre.

Yesterday’s landslip did not reach the road, but it triggered a precautionary closure of the pass for the first time.

The alert was triggered by new “tiltmeters” installed on the slope above the road which detect signs of movement.

Drivers are again being forced to take a 26-mile detour via Tyndrum and Dalmally to the north.

The incident, which followed heavy rain, is the fourth in five years – and comes five days after transport minister Keith Brown visited the site.

The road was closed for two days in December following a 120-tonne landslide and then kept shut overnight for a further 11 days in case of further rockfalls during darkness.

The Scottish Government’s Transport Scotland agency, which is responsible for the trunk road, said yesterday more than 2in of rain had fallen in the area in the past 24 hours.

A spokesman said: “[Road maintenance firm] TranServ engineers have reported a slip has occurred further up the hillside and that approximately 30 to 50 tonnes of material has slipped, but not reached the road.

“The road will remain closed overnight with a further inspection taking place at first light tomorrow to determine if the road can re-open.

“Our absolute priority is the safety of motorists. We appreciate their patience, as this matter is dealt with as a matter of urgency.”

Two weeks ago, Mr Brown announced £1 million for additional measures to mitigate future landslips. A study is under way into long-term options, such as upgrading a forest track to become a diversionary route.

A RANGERS supporters leader was caught drink-driving on the way home from the club’s first game since plunging into administration.

Andy Kerr, president of the Rangers Supporters Assembly, was stopped on the M74 after attending his team’s 1-0 defeat to Kilmarnock on Saturday.

He was breathalysed by police and found to be more than three times the legal limit.

Kerr, 54, spent two nights in police custody before admitting the offence at Lanark Sheriff Court on Monday. He had been travelling back to his home in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, when he was stopped on the motorway near Coalburn in Lanarkshire.

Kerr, a first offender, was banned from driving for two years and fined £670.

EMBATTLED Rangers boss Craig Whyte used borrowed money from the sale of season tickets as proof of funds to convince Sir David Murray to sell him the club, former chairman Alastair Johnston has claimed.

Mr Johnston also said he believed Mr Whyte could face criminal investigation based on evidence he had submitted to the Insolvency Service, Strathclyde Police and the Crown Office.

Mr Whyte finally admitted on Tuesday that he used Ticketus money to “complete the takeover” of the club in May last year, having previously denied it.

The money was paid by Ticketus in return for the rights to sell three years’ worth of season tickets at the club.

However, Mr Johnston says he has seen evidence – and shared it with the authorities – that indicates the money was also used when Mr Whyte offered “proof of funds” to former owner Sir David.

Mr Whyte’s ability to continue to fund the club through his own wealth was a prerequisite to the deal going through.

The claims will cast new doubt over whether Mr Whyte had the necessary money to become owner of Glasgow football club.

Mr Johnston, who is a director of sports and entertainment group International Management Group, said: “I’ve submitted material and requested that the Insolvency Service look into it, specifically, whether there was any contravention of the financial assistance provision of the Companies Act.

“And I’ve asked the Crown Office and Strathclyde Police to do the same thing.

“These are only allegations. If, over a period of time, they prove to be founded, they will be criminal acts.”

In his statement on Tuesday, Mr Whyte said he provided Sir David and Lloyds Banking Group with proof of £33m in funds in November 2010.

However, Mr Johnston says a meeting to establish this took place at a later date.

“The evidence that was presented as proof of funds to Murray International, on 7 April, before the deal was done, was the Ticketus money,” he said.

“The amount that was required to be proved was £27.5m, and that was provided by Mr Whyte’s lawyers, Collyer Bristow.”

He believes that if the terms of the purchase have been breached, the £18m debt the club reportedly owes Mr Whyte could be cancelled, loosening his grip on Rangers.

Mr Johnston said: “[Sir David’s] Murray International (Holdings Limited) has, as part of the sales agreement, certain rights in respect to enforcing compliance of the sales purchase agreement.

“If there was failure to comply, then Murray International could bring an action that the consequence would be a waiving of the debt.”

However, football finance experts questioned whether Mr Whyte has broken the law.

Neil Patey, partner in Ernst & Young, said: “From the outside, there is no evidence that he has broken the law and it could well be possible to do what he has done without breaking the law.

“Fans and the public may feel he has misled people, but that does not mean he has broken the law. As he has described it, he borrowed the Ticketus money pre-takeover and personally guaranteed it from his group assets, which is legal.”

Ken Pattullo, partner with accountants Begbies Traynor, said: “What have Ticketus acquired? They claim to have acquired the next three years’ season tickets, but is that decision bound on the administrators?”

Asked whether he thought Mr Whyte might face criminal action, his spokesman said: “Craig Whyte does not believe that is a likelihood.”

A spokeswoman for Strathclyde Police confirmed it had received information from Mr Johnston, which was being “examined by police officers”.

A Crown Office spokesman added: “Strathclyde Police are considering the information provided, and it would be inappropriate to comment further.”

TWO Rangers supporters have been jailed for a total of eight months and banned from attending any football match involving a senior British team for four years.

Vehicle parts trader Stephen Campbell, 23, from Glasgow, wept in Perth Sheriff Court as he was jailed for four months for carrying out a violent sectarian attack on Celtic supporters after a match.

He and ground worker Kevin Anderson, 33, from Gourock, who was also jailed for four months, were made the subject of a wide ranging football banning order until February 2016.

The pair had clashed with rival Old Firm fans when the two supporters’ buses pulled into the Broxden service station in Perth at the same time.

Sheriff Michael Fletcher banned them from watching not only Rangers, but every senior football team in Scotland, England and Wales, along with those countries’ international teams. The ban exists throughout Europe.

THE rector of St Andrews University has resigned his membership of an all-male club in support of a new splinter group that will admit women.

Earlier this week, members of the Kate Kennedy Club, which has been for male students only since it was set up in 1926, broke away to form the Kate Kennedy Fellowship.

Alastair Moffat, an author who was elected as the university’s rector last year, said he would resign his life membership in support of the new club.

He said: “When I joined the Kate Kennedy Club 40 years ago as a student, the world was very different.

“In those days the university still had beauty competitions to elect a Charities Queen and all manner of other relics now swept away by the tides of history.

“Now that the new Kate Kennedy Fellowship has been established with the explicit aim of admitting women students so that their work and talents can enrich all their activities, I have resigned as a life member from the Kate Kennedy Club and will now support enthusiastically the establishment of the new fellowship and all the good things it proposes.”

With roots in the 15th century, the current Kate Kennedy Club was set up in 1926, and is most famous for its annual procession through the town.

It is thought the new club will now win the right to stage the procession.

ROYAL Bank of Scotland will today impose a pay freeze on 10,000 staff, while it prepares to pay £400 million in bonuses to its highest earners.

The bank is expected to claim that it needs to cap basic pay in order to manage its costs ahead of announcing a bottom-line loss of up to £2 billion.

But it will also be seen as a move to deflect attention from the huge bonuses to be paid to those already among the bank’s top paid staff.

Sources say the freeze will apply from board level down to senior managers, including those receiving a bonus, and will be effective from April.

Chief executive Stephen Hester, who earns a basic pay of £1.2m, is said to be determined to bring costs under control and show that the bank is applying a prudent pay policy. The bank declined to confirm or deny that it would be freezing pay. It was not known how much it might save.

But the bank will still announce today a widely-anticipated bonus round of about £400m for investment bankers, which is likely to extend to almost £800m when extended to other staff. The main beneficiaries will be traders working mainly in London, Hong Kong and New York. Although the handout is lower than last year it has attracted criticism following a “bad year” at the division.

The investment banking arm at RBS, which is 82 per cent owned by the taxpayer, is headed by John Hourican, who is in line for a personal bonus of 21 million shares – worth about £5.7m at today’s prices.

The news comes as the bank’s chairman, Sir Philip Hampton, publicly warned that bonuses in the sector could not continue at the current level.

Claims that payouts to investment bankers have been reduced from about £500m following discussions with the Treasury and UK Financial Investments have been dismissed by banking sources, who say that the bodies – as well as other major stakeholders – are “consulted” over bonus issues, but did not have a direct hand in reducing them.

A source close to RBS said: “The bank has said for a while now that bonuses would be lower. They have been reduced because profits are down and no extra money has been accrued for bonuses in the third quarter. The performance at the investment banking division has had a really bad year, so there is a decrease in what the bonuses will be.”

The source added: “The bank does consult with shareholders over big remuneration issues.”

But David Hillman, spokesman for the Robin Hood Tax campaign – a group of charities, trade unions and economists opposed to large bonus payouts – called for the bonuses to be reduced further.

“It is incredible that while the rest of us suffer, a loss-making bank bailed out by the taxpayer is allowed to pay out hundreds of millions in bonuses.

“The British public is getting a raw deal from RBS and the wider financial sector: it is time they were made to pay their fair share rather than line their own pockets.”

A survey carried out yesterday by YouGov found that three out of four people think bosses at bailed-out banks should not get a bonus. About 58 per cent of respondents to the poll said Britain’s business reputation was being damaged by the actions of bankers.

Ian Murray, Edinburgh South MP and shadow minister for business, has called for a bonus tax that would apply to all banking executives – and which would raise about £2bn.

“I have absolutely no problem with people being paid the most vast salaries in the world if they are creating growth and doing something exceptional,” he said. “But when a bank has had a bad year, why are bankers still being paid multi million pound bonuses, when ordinary people are struggling?”

Sir Philip, who turned down a £1.4m bonus earlier this month – followed by Mr Hester, who eventually rejected his £963,000 bonus amid mounting public pressure – said: “Part of the reason for the pay is that the profits were not sustainable,” he said. “They were there for a few years, but they were not sustainable and the pay moved up to that level of profits and it now needs to be corrected down.”

Lloyds boss Antonio Horta-Osorio also waived his payout, following a leave of absence.

However, yesterday, Nigel Rudd, former deputy chairman of Barclays, claimed he would have paid more money to Barclays’ former chief executive John Varley, who stepped down in 2010 with a package worth nearly £4m.

He said: “Bob Diamond [the current chief executive] and John Varley made a huge difference to Barclays as they went through this terrible period.

“You realise Barclays never made a loss throughout all this period? I think John Varley was underpaid actually… because I think what he did throughout that crisis was phenomenal.”

Mr Hester last night revealed that he “hates” the publicity he has received since taking over at RBS. He said: “I don’t know whether I’d have done this if I had my time again, but I’m here, and so what I care a lot about is, can RBS succeed? I think it can, I want to be part of the team that made it succeed, and I guess I’m gritting my teeth about the rest, and pushing on with that.”

RBS will disclose the exact payouts to be handed to John Hourican – who has led a major restructuring at the business in recent months – and group finance director Bruce van Saun. later this year.

RBS has moved to strip down its investment arm, which employs 18,500 worldwide, amid increased government pressure to focus its operations on UK high street services.

The restructuring will ultimately lead to around 3,500 job losses, on top of the 2,000 the bank announced last summer.

No details of bonuses are set to be revealed at today’s full year results announcement – but the institution’s remuneration report is likely to be published in mid March – about three weeks before the company’s annual general meeting, which is yet to be formally scheduled.

RBS and Lloyds are set to reveal combined losses of between £4bn and £5bn as the eurozone debt crisis and increased regulation bear down on them.

The annual results will underline the scale of the struggle faced to turn around the banks. Plans to give the shares directly to taxpayers to ease some of the public anger are reported to have been ditched because the investments are too shaky.

The government injected £45.5bn for its 82 per cent stake in RBS, but those shares are today worth about £26bn, despite a 40 per cent rise in the share price in recent weeks. It needs shares, which are currently trading at about 28p, to rise to 50p before it can break even.

It is a similar story at Lloyds, which benefited from a £20bn bailout. The taxpayer needs shares to rise to 61p to get its money back but they are currently trading at about 35p, leaving the government nursing losses of nearly £10bn – although £2.5bn has already been repaid.

The bank recoveries have been made more difficult because the government has announced drastic reforms of the sector, including forcing banks to separate their retail and investment banking arms.

RBS is expected to announce today that it has made underlying losses of £2bn, while Lloyds is set to reveal losses of as much as £3.5bn tomorrow, after compensation for mis-selling payment protection insurance is deducted.

Lloyds is close to selling off 632 branches, a move enforced by the EU as a condition of taking a state bailout. It has named the Co-operative Bank as a preferred bidder.

]]> 1.2133031 Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.scotsman.com/jim_gilchrist_calling_time_on_the_gathering_is_a_gaffe_of_global_proportions_1_2132430

Mary Ann Kennedy offers a culturally informed perspective

THERE was a certain world-weary irony in learning that BBC Radio Scotland, in another of its unfathomable scheduling deliberations, is planning to axe the excellent Mary Ann Kennedy’s Global Gathering. I had, after all, just recently witnessed yet another highly successful Celtic Connections season in Glasgow, bursting at the seams with the kind of culturally diverse music that Global Gathering celebrates.

Mary Ann Kennedy is an accomplished broadcaster, presenting studio shows as well as such live broadcasts as Radio Scotland’s The Young Traditional Musician of Year and the now defunct Radio 3 World Music Awards. She is also a seasoned traditional musician, a Gaelic singer and harpist, and with her husband, Nick Turner, runs a recording studio, Watercolour Music, on the shores of Loch Linnhe. She is therefore able to offer a particularly personal and culturally informed perspective on the material she has broadcast over the past couple of decades on Global Gathering and its predecessor, Celtic Connections, introducing listeners to everything from traditional Gaelic puirt á beul to Balkan wedding music, psychedelic ceilidh grooves to Portuguese fado singing.

In the past, Kennedy has championed such influential Scottish musicians as Martyn Bennett and Shooglenifty, Michael Marra and Salsa Celtica, and just last month broadcast the premieres of four new works by young Scottish folk-based composers, commissioned by Creative Scotland to celebrate 2011’s Year of Scottish islands.

Earlier this month she featured several international acts who appeared in this year’s Celtic Connections – Meschiya Lake and the Little Bighorns and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, both from the United States, as well as the smouldering-voiced Portuguese singer Ana Moura, recorded during her appearance at Glasgow’s Old Fruitmarket.

According to Radio Scotland, the plan is to replace Global Gathering with a revamped version of the classical music programme Classics Unwrapped, which currently goes out on a Sunday afternoon. I’m also a classical (and contemporary) music listener, but for that I tune in to Radio 3, which makes a proper job of it, as well as managing to schedule some first-class jazz and world music programmes. If Radio Scotland wants to develop its currently rather limited approach to classical music, that’s well and good but it should not be at the expense of a distinctive and widely valued show such as Global Gathering.

The tired old adage that this is somehow “minority music” just no longer wears. If Radio Scotland requires hard proof of popular demand for the material promoted by Kennedy on Global Gathering, it needn’t look further than the bums-on-seats phenomenon that is Celtic Connections, which this year boasted gross ticket sales of over £1.1 million for the fifth year running. Many of these events featured acts from as far afield as Mexico, Serbia and Senegal, demonstrating the popular appetite for what we conveniently lump together under the title of “world music”.

Such heady moments during this year’s Connections included a barnstorming performance by Cuban pianist Omar Sosa and his band and a similarly memorable collaboration between the Pakistani qawwali (Sufi devotional song) exponent Faiz Ali Faiz and French guitarist Thierry Robin. Then there was the exuberant crosscultural ceilidhing at St Andrew in the Square between Donegal fiddle trio Fidil and Senegalese kora player Solo Cissokho, on a bill which also had flautist Michael McGoldrick’s band hosting the hugely personable young Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara. Their audiences were not earnest convocations of ethnomusicological geeks, but demonstratively enthusiastic Glasgow concertgoers (the St Andrews in the Square event had 90 per cent ticket sales).

Global Gathering, in one guise or other, has been priming us for such eclectic delights and broadening our musical horizons immensely for some 20 years, from a distinctively Scottish standpoint. To do away with it gives a hollow ring to Radio Scotland’s catchphrase of “culturally distinctive programming”.

ST JAMES’S Place, the wealth management business majority owned by Lloyds Banking Group, hiked its dividend by a third yesterday as it continues to defy the downturn and attract new business.

The firm said yesterday that the funds it manages grew by £3.3 billion last year, a 10 per cent hike on 2010’s figure, taking its total to £28.5bn despite market conditions that were “far from helpful”.

Chief executive David Bellamy said most of the new business came from existing clients and word-of-mouth recommendations. “We build long-term relations with our distribution channels and our clients. The success of this business will be about the attention we pay to our clients.”

St James’s made pre-tax profits of £109.7 million, up 30 per cent on the year before. The firm proposed a final dividend of 4.8p, up 21 per cent, taking the total to 8p for the year, 33 per cent higher than in 2010.

It also said it was appointing former Sunday Telegraph editor Baroness Wheatcroft as a non-executive director.

A COCAINE-ADDICTED former nightclub bouncer has been jailed for at least 35 years for the rape and murder of heavily-pregnant teenager Nikitta Grender.

Carl Andrew Whant appeared to yawn as he was found guilty by a jury of raping the 19-year-old before stabbing her to death and setting her body on fire.

Miss Grender’s family made an emotional plea for Whant, 27, to tell them the truth yesterday after a judge said the full facts of what happened in the early hours of 5 February 2011 may never be known.

Days after murdering Miss Grender, who was girlfriend of his best friend and cousin Ryan Mayes, the window salesman visited her grieving parents with flowers.

Miss Grender’s uncle Michael Brunnock said: “Nikitta was so young and beautiful.

“Together with Ryan, they were to become very proud set of parents. This has been ripped from them by Carl Whant, who has never had the decency to tell us the truth.”

Whant fatally stabbed Miss Grender, who was eight and a half months pregnant with a girl, at her home in Newport, south Wales, after he had left a house party he had been at with her boyfriend.

AMID all the argument and political jockeying that has now broken out over the date for Scotland’s independence referendum, there is one central and over-riding requirement: this is that it is a fair vote, seen to be a fair vote and one that will stand the test of time.

But already trenches are being dug over the protocols of this referendum and they look to be being dug particularly deep over the question of its timing. First Minister Alex Salmond has made clear he favours the autumn of 2014.

Yesterday, Scottish Secretary Michael Moore told the Commons select committee in Westminster that the vote should be held 12 months earlier, in the autumn of 2013. For the Nationalists this seems more than just perverse but an obstructive move by the Westminster government to dictate the timing against the wishes of Scotland’s First Minister.

In last year’s Holyrood election, which saw the SNP swept to power with an overall majority, Mr Salmond indicated that a referendum on independence would be held towards the latter half of the parliament. He has taken the SNP’s resounding victory as a mandate to hold it on a date he then chose as the autumn of 2014.

What is so difficult or objectionable about this date? There are several reasons why the date of the referendum needs to be determined by a process more inclusive than first ministerial fiat. No detailed set of reasons was given for the timing, which was not in fact in the SNP’s election manifesto. And to many it looks opportunist: holding a referendum on independence for which the polls show still only a third of Scots voters support in a year that will see the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles and the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn.

A nagging concern is the effect that such a long period of uncertainty could have on business and investment decisions. CBI Scotland claims its members could suffer damage from a prolonged political battle that not only saddles business with almost three years of uncertainty but which also could have the effect of driving other issues deserving of attention to the political sidelines.

A second concern is that – if the intensity of debate of recent months is anything to go by – the Scottish public may weary of a battle that seems to bring new twists and interventions by the day. This may not be to the SNP’s advantage. An earlier referendum is favoured by many, and the SNP may be doing itself no favours by dismissing this sentiment as a “silly distraction”.

And third, a set of arguments has to be made for such a long campaign. What is it that will not be fully evident or exhaustively explored by voters in 2013 that requires a further year of argument to 2014? As Patricia Ferguson, Labour’s constitutional spokeswoman in Holyrood, pointed out yesterday, Donald Dewar held a referendum within 134 days of being elected. Why should this referendum take so much longer?

Bonuses show banks still have a long way to go

Finally, it seems, bankers are just starting to get it. Sir Philip Hampton, chairman of taxpayer-owned RBS, said in television interview that the high water mark of bonuses had been reached. Lloyds Banking Group went some way to penalising the senior staff who permitted the disgraceful mis-selling of personal payment protection insurance by clawing back some previous bonuses.

But even with the RBS announcement that 10,000 staff are to have their pay frozen, there is clearly a long way to go. Senior bankers were responsible not just for the trashing of their own institutions, but also for the wrecking of the world economy through their invention and sale of unsustainable derivative products based on the impossibility that house prices will keep on rising. The dogs on the street know this fact. Hard-working people earning (by investment bankers’ distorted standards) pittances, cannot understand why they are still awarding themselves Lotto-style fortunes, and even with a pay freeze top RBS staff will still receive hefty bonus top-ups

Yes, Stephen Hester may be doing a good job restoring RBS to health, but yesterday showed just how far off the job is from completion. When RBS sells the taxpayers’ shareholding, starts to earn profits again as a privately owned company, then might be the time to consider whether big bonuses should be paid.

Even then, bonuses – which were a product of the boom years – should match the context, which will be years of fitful growth and continuing heavy burdens on the taxpayers who have paid an enormous price to ensure that banks did not fail.

Deaths remind us of journalism’s honourable cause

Journalists have been in the news for all the wrong reasons – phone hacking, payments to police officers, and e-mail hacking. Yesterday came sad and tragic news which served as a reminder that there is also honour and bravery in the profession: the deaths of Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times and French photographer Remi Ochlik, both killed by Syrian army shells in the city of Homs. In the murderous confusion of an insurrection by the Syrian people against the dictatorship of President Assad, experienced and independent journalists such as Ms Colvin and Mr Ochlik are the only reliable means for the rest of the world to know what is really happening on the ground in Syria. Ms Colvin’s reports in particular, as she detailed the injuries and agonies being inflicted on civilian adults and children, tore away the pretence of the Syrian regime that only terrorists are responsible for the violence. Pictures by photographers such as Mr Ochlik add even more authority to such reports. In such conflicts, good and honest journalism is a weapon – a weapon of truth which all dictators are unable to tolerate. Journalists in such environments know that they will be targeted because of that and yet Ms Colvin and Mr Ochlik decided that getting the truth out was more important than their own safety. In an honourable cause, they paid the ultimate price.

]]> 1.2132552 Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.scotsman.com/visual_arts_roundup_luke_fowler_roger_ackling_andrew_miller_barry_mcglashan_alistair_grant_1_2132438

There is a difference between simple and elementary, and while he occasionally lands on the right side, Luke Fowler’s playing with RD Laing’s concept of the divided self more often than not misses the mark, discovers Duncan Macmillan

ONE of the first rules of contemporary art is take yourself very seriously indeed. If you do, others will too, no matter how fatuous your art may actually be. Luke Fowler at Inverleith House helps demonstrate this rule. There’s no doubt he takes himself very seriously. He expects us to do the same and, indeed, some of his show is pretty fatuous. He makes films, and my own second rule of contemporary art is that artists shouldn’t make films. Film is a sophisticated medium and any artist approaching it is bound to be a tyro. Up to a point Fowler is an exception to that rule. He does have some skill and it is not the two- hour film, All Divided Selves, in his show that is really fatuous, but I still mistrust this way of using the medium. .

His film is the third in a trilogy devoted to RD Laing, the psychiatrist who rebelled against psychiatry. Laing was from Glasgow, so is Fowler. Laing had radical views on the causes of schizophrenia and on its treatment. Film by its nature is equipped to cut and rearrange reality and so can replicate, as no other art form, confused states of mind. That is what this one seems to intend to do, but if so that’s an odd sort of compliment to Laing.

The film is a collage of clips of Laing speaking, of his unconventional and sometimes startling methods of therapy and of life generally in the 1960s. These are interspersed with short clips of what seems to be almost anything. Arbitrary is not the same as inspired, however. Laing’s ideas are also contrasted with other psychiatric practices, occasionally to sinister, sometimes to simply comic effect. The stuffed-shirt doctor, for instance, who suggests genially to a pretty girl suffering from depression that she should try sex. A few people are recognisable, but no-one is identified, nothing explained. Laing himself is always impressive, but is so much cut and pasted that it is difficult to follow what he is saying, particularly as the soundtrack and acoustics in the gallery are not good. It is all pitched to identify him with 1960s counterculture, rightly or wrongly, and in doing so resembles one of those random films of the period full of people supposing themselves profound that look as though they were made in a cloud of pot and probably were.

You can glean fragments of Laing’s often remarkable insights and also something of his fiery personality. He clearly did not endear himself to his colleagues when he said, for instance, that psychiatrists are one of the principal causes of madness. He also said that schizophrenia means literally a “broken soul”. He renders this as broken-hearted. It follows that the cure lies in mending the broken heart, not breaking it further, or bashing it with a chemical cosh. He ended up on the side of humanity against the chemists, or indeed worse, the surgeons. Lobotomy was still a respectable practice. He was a remarkable man. This film does give some sense of what he was about, but offers confusion where there should be clarity.

It is in the rest of the show that Fowler does get really fatuous. Ridges on the Horizontal Plane is a collaboration with sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda. Against a gentle musical humming, random slides are projected onto both sides of a sheet flapping gently in the breeze from an electric fan. It is an image of the unstable, insecure divided self, no doubt, but really not an insight, just a ponderous pun.

There is also a series of photographs taken with a half-frame camera. Briefly fashionable in the 1960s, these cameras split a 35mm film to double the number of single exposures. Fowler, however, prints both exposures in one frame to create a series of randomly associated double images, a fatuous metaphor for the divided self, and another laboured pun. Simple and elementary can sometimes be synonymous, but are not the same. Simple can be profound and very beautiful. Elementary never graduates from the bricks on the primary school floor. This is elementary.

The exhibition also includes portraits by John Hayes, not only of Laing himself, but of other cultural figures of the 1960s. If for no other reason, the show is worth the visit just to see Hayes’s photo of Samuel Beckett. Sharp as a pin, Beckett’s face hangs against darkness looking more like some fierce bird from a David Attenborough documentary than a mere human being. It is an extraordinary image.

If it once seemed that madness and genius were akin, now we are quite specific in the mental disorder we most favour. It is obsessive compulsive behaviour. A good example is Roger Ackling at the Ingleby Gallery. He has taken everything from his garden shed, the forks and spades, the rakes and the hammers, even the old tomato boxes, and has apparently used a magnifying glass, following the sun to burn rows and rows of close packed parallel lines along their wooden handles and flat surfaces. Implicitly their sequence measures the cycle of the sun’s annual trajectory in a sort of fiery calendar. He has also pinned a black thread along the wall to suggest the horizon against which that trajectory is measured. But what about the weather? A burning glass needs sunshine. There are never so many sunny days in any British year. That thought casts a doubt on his whole project.

Nevertheless, the garden tools make a charming spectacle arrayed along the pristine white walls of the gallery. The suggestion of the sun’s movement is nicely apposite to gardening too, but such gentle metaphors are really upstaged by the evidence they also offer of his obsessive application to his task.

Showing alongside Ackling is Andrew Miller, an artist who recycles the things we discard and turns them into art. He makes a sculpture out of a tower of lampshades and an abstract picture out of a piece of patterned vinyl, for instance. He does it all with a certain charm, but it is scarcely an original idea. His photographs are more intriguing – a tree trunk with “no future” written on it, or a ramshackle house in Jamaica with an exactly matching chicken house alongside.

Roger Ackling is introduced as a friend and contemporary of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, both artists who make, or have made art, by taking a walk. At the Open Eye Barry McGlashan is also a walking artist, but he is a painter. For him, the walk is not the art but an opportunity. He takes his backpack and sets off, but the results are not so much about him or even a record of what he has seen, as just an opportunity for inspiration. His pictures like Drifter, for instance, a man and his dog in a desert, are unpretentious and often humorous, but they have the ring of truth. Alistair Grant, in Eye2, was teacher of printmaking at the Royal College for 35 years until he retired in 1990. He was brought up in France and so his etchings made in the 1950s of children playing in the streets or on the beach at Le Touquet are not the usual artist-on-his-foreign-holiday kind of thing, but observations of life as it is lived. They are quite brilliantly alive and informal, but taste changed and he became an abstract artist. The abstract prints he produced in the 1960s now look sadly dated, but his etchings of children are as fresh as the day they were made.

Luke Fowler (With Toshiya Tsunoda and John Haynes)

Inverleith House, Edinburgh

Rating: ***

Roger Ackling

Rating: ***

Andrew Miller

Rating: ***

Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

Barry McGlashan; Quiet Please

Rating: ****

Alistair Grant (1925-1997)

Rating: ****

Open Eye, Edinburgh

• Luke Fowler runs until 29 April 2012; Roger Ackling until 21 April; Andrew Miller until 10 March; Alistair Grant until 24 March; Barry McGlashan until 7 March

Bankers head overseas; Call for tax relief on mortgages; Over 20% of Heathrow flights delayed and GM in talks with Peugeot Citroen

Bankers heading for foreign shores

The boss of recruitment firm Hays yesterday said there was still evidence that bankers were heading overseas as hiring in the sector fell around 10 per cent and pushed its UK division to a £3 million loss. Chief executive Alistair Cox said the recruitment squeeze in the banking industry would persist for “some time” and had spread beyond the UK to markets such as Hong Kong. The slowdown was behind a 1 per cent drop in private sector fees, which make up 78 per cent of UK revenues.

Call for mortgage interest tax relief

The head of Travis Perkins, the British builders’ merchant and DIY retailer, has called on Chancellor George Osborne to re-introduce mortgage interest tax relief for first-time buyers to release pent-up demand in the housing market.

“The housing market is so important to the UK economy, it’s operating at such low levels at the moment and there’s huge pent-up demand,” chief executive Geoff Cooper said yesterday. “We have to find a way of releasing that pent-up demand.”

21% of Heathrow flights delayed

More than a fifth of flights departing from Heathrow airport were delayed last year, operator BAA said yesterday, although this was an improvement on snow-hit 2010.

It said 21 per cent of flights left Heathrow 15 minutes or longer after the scheduled departure time in 2011, although this was better than 29 per cent the previous year. The delays came as Heathrow handled 69.4 million passengers in 2011, helping BAA to narrow its losses from Heathrow and Stansted to £255.8 million, from £316.6m.

GM in talks with French carmaker

General Motors and European peer PSA Peugeot Citroen were last night thought to be discussing a manufacturing alliance designed to stem losses in Europe and reduce production costs elsewhere.

Talks between GM, the world’s biggest carmaker, and European No2 Peugeot focused on sharing vehicles and parts rather than swapping stakes, according to sources. Any new shareholdings that emerged are likely to be small. Like Peugeot, GM’s European division already faces heavy restructuring.

]]> 1.2132505 Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.scotsman.com/scottish_universities_avoid_worst_of_cuts_in_courses_1_2132544

SCOTLAND’S universities have avoided the worst of higher education cuts, which have seen the number of courses slashed by more than a quarter across the UK, a new report has found.

Research by the University and College Union (UCU) found that the number of full-time undergraduate courses at Scottish universities had fallen by just 3 per cent since 2006.

That compared with a figure of 31 per cent for England and 27 per cent for the UK as a whole.

UCU general secretary Sally Hunt said: “Scotland is to be congratulated on not only maintaining free education, but also choice, in contrast to the rest of the UK. However, there are real dangers with introducing markets into education and we really cannot afford to limit choices for students.

“Scotland’s global academic reputation is built on the broad range of subjects available and on the freedom of academics to push at the boundaries and create new areas of study. It is to Scotland’s credit that this has been secured and that academic freedom has been protected and enhanced.

“We will work with the Scottish Government to ensure this continues to be the case.”

The union said the number of students in Scotland had remained steady over the past six years, with an increase in applications leading to most courses being full.

From the start of the next academic year, students from the rest of the UK studying at Scottish universities will be required to pay fees of up to £9,000 a year. Scots and students from the rest of the EU will remain exempt from the fees.

According to the UCU research, the biggest cuts were seen in so-called Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths). While there was a 9 per cent drop in the number of Stem and social science subjects offered at Scottish universities, arts and humanities courses fell by only 2 per cent.

Alastair Sim, director of Universities Scotland, said: “Scotland’s universities are proud to offer a wide breadth of courses that are developed and reviewed in response to student and employer demands.

“A strength of the four-year degree is that it offers students greater opportunities for combined studies to take advantage of that breadth.”

Last month, the Scottish Government claimed its position on tuition fees had been “vindicated” after figures showed the country’s universities had been protected from the worst of a UK-wide downturn in applicant numbers.

Figures published by the Universities and Colleges Admission Service (Ucas) showed a 1.1 per cent fall in the number of Scots hoping to study in their home country, with a 5.6 per cent fall also recorded in the number of English applicants.

The Ucas figures, which compared January applicant numbers with the same period last year, showed that, overall, there was a 0.2 per cent rise in the number of people applying to study in Scotland, compared with an 8.5 per cent fall in England.

A FURTHER bout of money printing to prop up Britain’s ailing economy remains on the cards, analysts said yesterday, as signs of division emerged at the Bank of England.

Minutes of the bank’s latest rate-setting meeting showed that two officials voted for a bigger increase this month in quantitative easing (QE) than was eventually agreed.

Many economists had judged that the momentum for additional stimulus was fading after last week’s cautiously upbeat forecast from the central bank.

Governor Sir Mervyn King said that while he expected the UK economy to “zig-zag” in and out of growth in 2012, the recovery was heading in the right direction.

That optimism, coupled with a string of positive business surveys in recent weeks, had prompted many analysts to call time on further QE.

But news that David Miles had joined long-standing dove Adam Posen in voting for a £75 billion boost, rather than the £50bn increase favoured by the rest of the bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC), reopened the debate over whether policymakers will embark on further emergency support.

The split among the nine MPC members appeared to run deep as some considered doing nothing, worried that inflation may turn out higher than the central bank expects.

David Tinsley, chief UK economist at French bank BNP Paribas, said the minutes to the February meeting revealed “a somewhat surprising voting pattern”.

He said: “In terms of the policy outlook, these minutes are more dovish than we were expecting. But we would not overstate that case.

“Posen is something of a perma-dove, having voted to increase QE in every meeting over 2011 until it actually occurred in October. Miles, on the other hand, has tended on average to vote with the pack.”

In their argument for a greater bout of fiscal stimulus, Posen and Miles noted that there was “a risk of a prolonged period of depressed demand”.

Howard Archer, chief UK and European economist at IHS Global Insight, has forecast QE will rise in £25bn increments in May and August to top £375bn.

TECHNOLOGY giant Microsoft yesterday lodged a formal complaint with the European Union’s competition regulator against Motorola Mobility and its soon-to-be owner Google, claiming Motorola’s aggressive enforcement of patent rights breaks EU anti-trust rules.

The complaint follows a similar step by another US tech giant, Apple, against Motorola last week. Analysts said yesterday that the regulatory developments were not unexpected given that Apple and Microsoft have been hit by legal cases in Europe and the US. Motorola claims that its big rivals are using key patents it owns without permission.

But Apple and Microsoft have hit back with allegations that Motorola overcharges for the use of these patents, which cover technologies necessary to connect wirelessly to the internet or stream video online.

Dave Heiner, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, said yesterday: “We have taken this step because Motorola is attempting to block sales of Windows PCs, our Xbox game console and other products.

“Motorola is on a path to use standard essential patents to kill video on the web, and Google as its new owner doesn’t seem to be willing to change course.”

Motorola is being taken over by search engine Google for $12.5 billion (£8bn), the biggest acquisition in the Californian company’s history. Analysts said Microsoft fears that Google will continue Motorola’s tight hold on key patents.

A spokesman for Google said that the company had not seen the Microsoft complaint. Motorla was not immediately available for comment.

The complaints are the latest development in increasingly bitter disputes between global technology giants over patents on standardised technologies.

When the European Commission, the EU’s competition watchdog, cleared Google’s takeover of Motorola earlier this month, it indicated concern over Motorola’s aggressive patent enforcement. The US justice department in its clearance of the merger made similar comments.

Microsoft says Motorola is demanding an unreasonable fee for using its patents, amounting to 2.25 per cent of the products’ total price. For a $1,000 laptop that would mean a royalty of $22.50 for using 50 patents related to a video standard. Microsoft says a group of 29 companies that hold the other 2,300 patents related to this standard charge a total of 2 cents for using them.

Heiner said yesterday: “If every firm priced its standard essential patents like Motorola, the cost of the patents would be greater than all the other costs combined in making PCs, tablets, smartphones and other devices. Obviously, this would greatly increase prices for consumers.”

By keeping the story and staging simple, the Lyceum allows the power of John Steinbeck’s Great Depression classic to flow freely and resonate with our own time

Of Mice and Men, Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh

Rating: ****

TODAY, a life without fame or celebrity seems like a living death, to many young people; but there was a moment, back there in the mid-20th century, when being an ordinary guy or girl didn’t seem such a bad option. It was partly a reaction to the horrors of war, that made the suburban nine-to-five look like a kind of heaven; it also had to do with the upbeat energy of postwar economic growth.

It was also, though, partly a political response to the 1930s, and to an economic depression so severe that working people often had to stand up and fight for their lives, acquiring a sense of dignity and mutual respect in the process. Aaron Copland’s iconic Fanfare For The Common Man was composed in 1942, as the United States emerged from the deepest recession in its history; and John Steinbeck’s play-novella Of Mice And Men – now revived in a quietly magnificent production by John Dove, at the Royal Lyceum – belongs to the same period, emerging in 1937 from Steinbeck’s bitter experience of the lives of itinerant farm workers in his native California.

Unlike Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath, though, Of Mice And Men does not deal directly with questions of economy and politics, although they make a powerful backdrop to the story. Instead, it offers what Wordsworth called “the still, sad music of humanity”; a profound and beautiful reminder of why every human being matters, and why our deepest duty is to try to build a world where people are valued and cherished, rather than punished and destroyed for every weakness they show.

George and Lennie, Steinbeck’s two central characters, are two itinerant farmworkers from the same small town, bound together by the simple fact that Lennie – though a giant in physical strength – is more a child than a man, very simple in his understanding, and that George therefore feels responsible for him. In an economic world where male farmworkers have increasingly become lone travellers, unable to support any bonds of family or affection, their very friendship is seen as strange. And because Lennie is not sharp enough to suppress his human needs for comfort and affection as the other men have learned to do, the story is driven from the start by a profound sense of looming tragedy, and of Lennie’s vulnerability to a terrible, scapegoating violence.

John Dove’s production – graced by two fine leading performances from William Ash as George, and Coronation Street actor Stephen Jackson as Lennie – absolutely avoids any flashy interpretation of Steinbeck’s work. Colin Richmond’s farm-shed set is a model of restrained effectiveness, Jeanine Davies’ lighting is quietly beautiful. Like all of John Dove’s Lyceum productions of mid-20th-century classics, though, this Of Mice And Men offers the kind of profound theatrical intelligence and feeling that is often absent from flashier shows. There is never a moment when the positioning of the actors jars against the needs of the story; never a moment when the actors themselves – including a fine range of Scottish-based talent, in supporting roles – seem less than fully aware of the meaning of the story they tell, or of the need to deliver it to the audience with uncluttered clarity and energy.

And the result – without fireworks or self-advertisement – is a theatrical experience that is sometimes almost overwhelming in its sheer storytelling power. We live in a changed world, from the one inhabited by George and Lennie. Yet at the core our dilemmas are the same, and in George’s daily choice between the demands of a ruthless system, and the tug of human love and obligation we see a painful truth about our own lives, addressed with a passionate, straightforward humanity that often puts contemporary writers to shame.

Serov’s People, Glasgow Oran Mor

Rating: ***

There’s no lack of humanity, of course, in Peter Arnott’s new Play, Pie and Pint show Serov’s People, this week’s lunchtime offering at Oran Mor. When it comes to straightforward theatrical energy, though – well, Arnott is never a man to attempt one clever idea when three will do. His latest play is inspired by the work of Valentin Serov, a Russian portraitist of the turn of the 20th century, whose beautiful and eloquent paintings capture the mood of an intelligent, good-looking, highly-cultivated Russian bourgeoisie at the moment when they began to sense that their way of life was doomed to collapse.

Typically, though, Arnott is not content to write a play about Serov’s work, with appropriate contemporary resonances. Instead, he sets up an immensely complex and none-too-dramatic situation in which we meet three figures in adjacent portraits not by Serov, but by a contemporary Scottish artist/curator who has been inspired by his work. The three pictures feature this painter himself – as well as his sister (portrayed sitting on a No 31 Edinburgh bus), and a friend of his called Charlie, who committed suicide in his early thirties.

It’s an understatement to say that all the dimensions of this play are difficult to grasp on first viewing; its structure seems all over the shop, and its preoccupations almost limitless, including the likely demise of the entire planet. In the end, though, there’s something irresistible about its vividness, its ambition, and the quality of the performances it draws from George Docherty as the painter, Jeanette Foggo as his sister, and Robert Jack as Charlie; although if Arnott does not soon find a director who can persuade him to knock his brilliant ideas into a slightly more legible shape, there’s a danger that his entire playwriting career will disappear, down an ingenious plughole of its own devising.

• Of Mice And Men runs until 17 March; Serov’s People until 25 February.

]]> 1.2132418 Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.scotsman.com/classical_music_baroque_on_a_roll_1_2132441

Bach is a technical challenge even for those schooled in European music traditions, so it’s to Masaaki Suzuki’s credit that the Bach Collegium Japan is such a great success, finds Kenneth Walton

BACK in 1991, the idea of founding an instrumental ensemble and choir that specialised in authentic performance of Baroque music would hardly have been considered a pioneering initiative. After all, the likes of Christopher Hogwood’s Academy of Ancient Music, John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, or such illustrious European models as Philippe Herreweghe’s Collegium Vocale Ghent and his Parisian ensemble La Chappelle Royale – all products of the 1960s and 70s – were by then mature period ensembles with progressively global reputations.

The difference was that this new ensemble was being put together in a part of the world where the music of Bach and his mainstream European Baroque contemporaries was about as relevant and familiar as Shomyo Buddhist chant is to us. For this was the group now internationally known as the Bach Collegium Japan, set up 21 years ago by the Japanese organist and harpsichordist Masaaki Suzuki in a country where only 3 per cent of the population is Christian, and where a Bach Cantata would, to the wider Japanese masses, have been about as spiritually relevant as an Irish limerick set to music.

But Suzuki saw a future in the idea, even although the original impetus was a purely practical response to a request to provide music at the opening of a new concert hall in Osaka in 1990. He had just returned from studying in the Netherlands – the hotbed of European early music scholarship – and as well as pursuing a career as a soloist performing mainly Bach, was now teaching in his home town of Kobe.

“I put together several student ensembles for the hall opening and together we developed a full concert programme,” he says. By 1992 the official Bach Collegium Japan (BCJ) was formed and giving regular performances of Bach’s cantatas. In 1995, it was signed up by the Swedish BIS record label, from which a comprehensive series of Bach recordings emerged to massive critical acclaim. The rest, as they say, is history, and the BCJ is now as lauded in Europe and America as it is in Asia, and is a living legend on its Japanese home turf.

Until now, its only Scottish presence has been at the Edinburgh International Festival, where it took part in the 2009 Bach Cantata series at Greyfriars Church, as well as giving a memorable concert performance of Handel’s Rinaldo at the Usher Hall. Next week, however, Suzuki and his musicians make an exclusive UK appearance in Perth, with a three-concert weekend residency featuring music by Bach and his contemporaries, with a single Bach cantata as the focal point each night, sung by the English soprano Joanne Lunn.

The opening programme on Friday 2 March includes Bach’s buoyant Double Violin Concerto and a Handel organ concerto performed by Suzuki’s son Masato. Saturday’s concert, following an afternoon discussion between Suzuki and Glasgow University professor (and fellow Bach Scholar) John Butt, includes a Vivaldi Bassoon Concerto. Suzuki’s own virtuosity as a harpsichordist comes under the spotlight on Sunday 4 March in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 5.

Nowadays, finding players up to par with Baroque performance in Japan is not the problem it once was. And for this particular series of concerts, Suzuki has chosen his players from a pool of largely Japanese musicians now based in Europe. But when he started the BCJ it was never that easy.

The biggest problem was finding singers, he says. “Bach’s name was as famous in Japan as it was elsewhere, but at that time it was not so usual to find professional ensembles willing to take up the Bach repertory, especially the vocal works where the German text was a particular barrier.

“Also, in Japan we had no choir tradition, so it was very difficult to assemble even amateur choirs that might be able to sing a classic like Bach’s B Minor Mass. Even in the conservatories the good young singers wanted to be opera singers; the challenge for me was to catch them young and encourage them to sing Bach, which is technically much more difficult than the operatic repertory.”

Suzuki’s appointment in 1991 as a professor at the national conservatory at Tokyo University was perfect timing, bringing him into direct contact with the right people at the right time in their development. His influence was immediate.

“It took a long time to train them in a style that suited Bach, getting them to sing together with perfect clarity and precision.” As a result of his success, Suzuki found that in the early years of the BCJ he had a steady enough turnover of singers to allow the vocal ensemble to develop and refine the definitive sound it can now call its own.

As for the instrumentalists, it was an equal challenge in the early days to find players skilled enough in such rare antiquities as the oboe d’amore. “When I was studying in Tokyo in the 1970s there were not so many professional ensembles specialising in Baroque excellence.” Suzuki himself eventually set up a department of early music at the University of Tokyo, which has been influential in developing a whole new generation of musicians capable of populating his specialist ensemble.

But what of the other obvious issue – that of developing audience interest in music that was intrinsically anathema, both culturally and spiritually, to Japanese ears? Curiously, that was never a problem for Suzuki. “When we started performing the church cantatas I was amazed that so many people turned out to hear us. It is still generally hard to make it fully understood why Bach’s music was composed, and what it was intended to convey, but we have tried to overcome that from the very earliest days by providing our own Japanese translations of the texts.

“We still do it, and not just for the audiences and singers. Our instrumentalists are keen to know what the singers are singing, so that they can capture the inflexions of the text in their own playing.”

It’s that immaculate attention to detail, combined with a genuinely fresh sense of discovery that gives the BCJ’s performances such a distinctive and distinguished quality. All the more reason to head to Perth Concert Hall next week.

• The Bach Collegium Japan features exclusively at Perth Concert Hall from 2–4 March, www.horsecross.co.uk

The Scotsman’s film critic casts his eye over the latest cinematic offerings

Rampart (15)

Directed by: Oren Moverman

Starring: Woody Harrelson

Rating: ****

SET against the backdrop of the same late 1990s Los Angeles police corruption scandal that inspired TV’s The Shield, Rampart puts a fascinating character-based spin on the dirty cop movie courtesy of an off-the-reservation performance from Woody Harrelson. He plays Dave Brown, an immutably old-school patrolman caught on camera using excessive force to beat a perp. Subsequently thrust into the eye of the bad publicity storm tearing his division apart, Dave’s not the sort of person to go quietly, and, suspecting he’s being made a patsy for an already scandalised department, starts buttressing his external defences. But it’s how he starts falling apart on the inside that becomes the film’s primary focus. As Dave’s complex family life and soul-sickening past deeds start taking their psychological toll, the film gradually changes from another Bad Lieutenant-esque trip into insanity to a more meditative film about the cost of crossing the line to get the job done.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (12A)

Directed by: John Madden

Starring: Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie, Tom Wilkinson, Penelope Wilton

Rating: **

CORRALLING a group of pensioners together for a mission to a foreign land, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel could almost be regarded as The Expendables for grannies, assembling as it does a big-name cast of veteran actors to do what they do best: provide simple thrills in sunny locations for a specific target audience. In this case that means Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith being (mostly) delightful as they front a rag-tag group of impoverished pensioners (Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup and Penelope Wilton) as they relocate from dreary Britain to colourful India. Gently grappling with the attendant cultural differences, their shenanigans raise smiles mostly via the usual isn’t-the-food-strange? observations while plentiful shots of kids playing cricket bolster the tourist brochure aesthetic. Designed to represent and serve an ignored demographic, the film can’t be faulted in its intentions, just its condescending execution, which spoon-feeds the audience in a way its characters would surely disapprove of.

Red Dog (PG)

Directed by: Kriv Stenders

Starring: Josh Lucas, Noah Taylor, RachAel Taylor, Luke Ford

Rating: **

EVEN for a confirmed pooch lover, this Australian-set dog story is fairly easy to resist. Inspired by a true story that’s been filtered through the twee comedic mindset of Louis De Bernières (the film is based on his novel of the same name), it parses out the story of a red cloud kelpie who loyally searched the Outback for his deceased master in the most egregious manner possible: by focusing on the dog’s final hours and having the townsfolk who adopted him share their memories to a newly arrived stranger. Red Dog’s imminent demise is thus ruthlessly exploited to keep us on the verge of tears, but it’s the De Bernières-inspired human characters – including a cringeworthy Italian immigrant that makes Nic Cage’s Captain Corelli seem like a paradigm of neo-realism – that makes you want to cry. Its noble canine star (six-year-old Koko) deserves better than being the antipodean Greyfriars Bobby.

Black Gold (15)

Directed by: Jean-Jacques Annaud

Starring: Antonio Banderas, Mark Strong, Tahar Rahim, FrEIda Pinto

Rating: *

CLEARLY fancying itself as an old-fashioned riposte to There Will Be Blood, this deathly dull period drama homes in on the birth of the Arabian oil boom of the 1930s and promptly renders a fascinating story rich in historical significance thoroughly mundane. Blame director Jean-Jacques Annaud, whose misplaced sense of grandeur has convinced him that sweeping shots of deserts and vaguely ethnic-looking Euro actors spouting exposition-heavy dialogue makes for compelling drama. It doesn’t, and nor does the screenwriting-101 approach to the themes, which pits the old world against the new in the form of two sheiks – one a ruthless moderniser (Antonio Banderas), the other staunchly devout (Mark Strong) – whose visions for the future of their lands are challenged by an uprising inadvertently led by the bookish Auda (Tahar Rahim) – who just happens to be the latter’s son and the former’s son-in-law. Laughing at the ripe performances is the only thing that relieves the torpor.

First Minister has ensured no Celtic fan will be voting his way after backing crisis-hit club amid Old Firm bigot-fest, writes Michael Kelly

I am a big fan of conspiracy theories. There are many strands to be separated from the continuing Rangers’ saga. One is the establishment conspiracy that Celtic fans see is being organised to save Rangers. They argue that, when Celtic were in trouble, no-one from the banks, the media or politics was preaching how much their club’s demise would harm Scottish football. In fact, one tabloid in the middle of the struggle held a mock funeral complete with coffin outside Celtic Park. And I certainly do not recall any sympathy, never mind support, from the SNP.

Another theme is the depressing re-emergence of the religious intolerance which has surrounded the Old Firm for decades. Last Saturday, Ibrox saw the worst display of sectarian singing for years, with at least half the 50,000 supporters joining in. Yet there was only one arrest inside the ground for an alleged sectarian offence. How come the leniency?

The new anti-football law was one that the police welcomed. Yet they refuse to enforce it. And the First Minister, whose idea it was to restrict freedom of speech at football, has said nothing.

But, of course, sectarian singing was, for him, last year’s issue. The police raised it in the hope of getting more resources. Salmond outmanoeuvred them beautifully by turning it into an issue of new legislation. Now the police either cannot or will not implement it – and not just at Ibrox. Offensive songs were also clearly heard from the Celtic end during the TV coverage of the match from Easter Road.

But prosecutors are dropping sectarianism from charges because of the difficulty of proving it – as we saw last year with the one-man attack on Neil Lennon at Tynecastle. The new law has actually worsened the position. Before, judges were able to take into account any sectarian aggravation if an offence was proved. Now, unless it is there in the charge, they can’t.

This is characteristic of Salmond’s approach to problems. Seek a quick public relations success and move on, ignoring the long-term impact of his actions. Why otherwise would he not be up in arms about the police’s inactivity?

Now after doing nothing on Saturday, the police want to intervene in the timing of the next Old Firm game. The role of the police is to be told what events will take place and when. It is then their job to cover them, not bicker about time and location. We’ve got things the wrong way round.

As the First Minister becomes more and more complacent with his parliamentary majority behind him, we can see this once sure-footed politician beginning to make mistakes.

The first was to alienate both sets of Old Firm’s fans with his attempts to stop them enjoying themselves. Now he’s compounded this by his overt support of Rangers. Why? He surely cannot have misled himself into thinking that by saying a few sympathetic words about their team he will persuade the loyalest, most vigorously Union-Flag-waving section of Scottish society to vote “Yes” in his referendum?

He’s certainly ensured that no Celtic fan – people who might have had some sympathy with him – will now.

But much more fundamentally wrong than making a gesture of understanding towards Rangers was his plea that the tax authorities found some way of going easy on the club. This is a blunder, not of tactics, but of political principle.

The First Minister is the man who wants to have control of all of Scotland’s tax revenue. Yet at the first public challenge to the authority of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs – and Craig Whyte has renewed his criticism of the taxmen again this week – he wants Rangers off the hook. His own team, Hearts, have been having their own tax troubles – no intervention call for them. And has he spared a thought for Dunfermline? They are owed £80,000 by Rangers. Obviously given the precarious financing of Scottish football, they are going to need a big chunk of that money to pay their taxes. Are they too to be a special case.

And what about me? I’d rather spend my VAT and PAYE on a skiing holiday, repaying it to the government over five years. Is that OK, Mr Salmond? He says he wants Rangers given time to meet their obligations. He has misunderstood the whole situation. The reason Rangers went into administration was to avoid their obligations. And liquidation could be the next step in that direction. Indeed, one wonders why the administrators seem so desperate to avoid a solution that would eliminate all of Rangers’ debts. For a business in these dire circumstances the focus must be on the creditors and not the customers. However, I would rule out any conspiracy as regards the company being allowed to appoint a “friendly” administrator who had previous business links with it. It seems to me unwise that a large international firm like Duff and Phelps would want to attract even the perception of a conflict of interest. But the statutory obligations on an administrator are so clear and with the penalties so personal that, especially in a high profile case like this with HMRC breathing over their shoulders, it is certain this process will be carried out to the letter of the law.

The tax authorities too will do their duty resisting the influence of the man who likes to think of himself as the UK’s most brilliant politician. Meanwhile, Rangers as a club and a team will carry on while a new owner is sought. Let us hope that the new owners not only run Rangers more prudently than in the past but that they make a commitment to end the sectarianism which hangs heavily around the fringes of the club. There are many people, including many Celtic fans, who want to see Rangers’ financial problems resolved. But they also want to see the bigotry which simmers just below the surface pulled out by the roots. Equally, Celtic must ensure that the triumphalism currently being enjoyed by the fans is not used as an excuse for unacceptable behaviour.

FTSE 100 CLOSE 5916.55 -11.65

Royal Bank of Scotland led the financial sector lower yesterday as traders took a cautious view ahead of today’s results.

The part-nationalised bank was down 3.1 per cent at 27.33p as it prepared to unveil hefty bottom-line losses. That was despite Espirito Santo upping its “fair value” price for the stock to 27p.

Barclays also fell, down 3.5 per cent at 239.2p, albeit as the stock went ex-dividend.

Carnival and Reckitt Benckiser also traded without their payment attractions, down about 2 per cent each at 1,903p and 3,500p respectively.

The FTSE 100 closed down 11.65 points or 0.2 per cent at 5,916.55 as weak economic data from the eurozone added to scepticism over the recent Greek bail-out. Mike McCudden, head of derivatives at Interactive Investor, said that with the Greek debt crisis now shifting to the background, oil was coming to the forefront of traders attention once again.

“Signs of a global recovery mixed with supply issues and increasing tensions with Iran is all the ammunition speculators need to talk oil up as high as $150 a barrel,” he said.

Royal Dutch Shell was up 0.2 per cent to 2,309p after it launched a near-£1 billion offer for Mozambique-focused small cap oil explorer Cove Energy. Cove’s shares jumped 25 per cent to 194p, just shy of the offer price.

And shares in Edinburgh oil and gas explorer Bowleven added 4.5 per cent at 123p amid heavy trading in light of interest in the company from Dubai-based Dragon Oil.

Alan Bonner, the chief executive of Stirlingshire-based Pinnacle Telecom, upped his stake in the firm to 9.6 per cent with a £14,000 share purchase, but it closed 5 per cent lower at 0.37p.

New York: Banks led U.S. markets lower last night as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index stalled near a ten-month-high after signs of weak European business activity rekindled concerns about a recession overseas.

The Dow Jones industrial average ended the day down 26.72 points, or 0.21 per cent, at 12,938.97 while the S&P 500 closed down 4.57 points, or 0.34 per cent, at 1,357.64. The Nasdaq Composite Index ended down 15.40 points, or 0.52 per cent, at 2,933.17.

DEPUTY Prime Minister Nick Clegg will announce today that an extra £1 billion is to be made available to businesses seeking support to help them grow and create jobs.

The new money will be part of the Regional Growth Fund and takes the total fund to £2.4bn, available to businesses and public/private partnerships to drive local economic growth.

Clegg will make the announcement at the UK government’s national manufacturing summit at the Bristol & Bath Science Park.

He is set to confirm that 48 firms have completed their legal checks and have access to the Regional Growth Fund which leverages private sector investment, with at least £5 of private money for every £1 of public money.

The deputy PM will say the fund “is already having a huge impact across the UK”. Clegg will argue that he wants to see “more businesses that are confident they can create jobs and get Britain building and making things again”.

A key part of government economic strategy is to make manufacturing more important again.

The British Chambers of Commerce welcomed the extra £1bn. Adam Marshall, the BCC’s policy director, said it would “help improve the business environment” in the regions “because it creates jobs and prosperity”.

He added: “We will watch carefully to ensure that strong applications do not get caught up in red tape or unnecessary delays.”

Senior Conservative David Davis has launched a stinging attack on David Cameron’s record on “crony capitalism”.

The former Tory leadership contender hit out at the coalition government for failing to block the near £1 million bonus for Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Stephen Hester, arguing it should have been “out of the question”.

In an article for Prospect magazine, he also suggested the Leveson inquiry into media ethics should turn its spotlight on political leaders. Mr Davis suggested ministers were too close to big business, while smaller firms were struggling to get access.

“Since the term was coined, coalition and opposition leaders have battled to be seen to lead the fight against crony capitalism and all that it entails. But when it comes to crony capitalism, government is often not the solution, but part of the problem,” he wrote.

Last month, Tory London mayor Boris Johnson claimed it was “absolutely bewildering” that a state-backed bank should pay out such a high bonus to its chief executive, but Mr Cameron refused to block the payout.

Mr Hester later bowed to intense political and media pressure to waive the 3.6 million shares package worth £963,000.

“This government got itself into a terrible pickle over whether RBS boss Stephen Hester would pocket a £1m bonus on top of an annual salary which dwarfs most people’s lifetime earnings,” Mr Davis wrote.

“The government thinking is instructive.

“Apparently the government, which owns 83 per cent of RBS, feared Hester would quit if it vetoed the bonus. So what? A business doesn’t instantly collapse if the chief executive leaves.”

The former shadow home secretary said after his experience chairing the independent Future of Banking Commission he finds it “laughable” that politicians “imagine the banks are so difficult to run”.

“If Hester did quit I doubt there would be a shortage of suitable applicants,” he added.

“At a time where living standards are falling fast, handing huge bonuses to the heads of banks which owe their very existence to taxpayers should be out of the question.”

The UK government’s welfare reforms are having a devastating impact on thousands of sick and disabled Scots – according to evidence published today by Citizens Advice Scotland.

The employment and support allowance scheme (ESA) was introduced in 2008 for those who were “new” claimants and is now being applied to those who are currently on incapacity benefit who have previously been deemed to be too sick to work.

The CAS report, From Pillar to Post, details individual cases of people who have been considered healthy by the ESA assessment, but actually suffer from severe health problems.

The report includes the case of a man who was considered fit to work after an ESA assessment, despite having suffered a stroke that continues to affect his right side and speech and which has left him able to only walk a few yards without pain.

CHANGES to the education system will be “worth the effort”, pupils and parents have been told.

Education secretary Michael Russell defended the Curriculum for Excellence. National 4 and 5 qualifications are being brought in to replace Standard Grade and Intermediate qualifications from 2013-14.

Teachers’ leaders have voiced concerns, with Ann Ballinger, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association, saying staff were “in some distress” about the changes.

Ms Ballinger said the union was “concerned that things are not going to be ready in time”.

Visiting St Peter the Apostle High School in Clydebank yesterday, Mr Russell said: “I firmly believe the prize of giving our young people the skills they need for learning, life and work will be delivered and will be worth the effort.”

THE well-known 17th century idiot René Descartes declared that “animals are destitute of reason” and argued that since they couldn’t hold serious conversations with humans, they really didn’t count for much.

I’d argue that holding conversations with many humans is a total waste of time, so I understand why animals don’t always bother. And if their inability to speak human makes them thick and unimportant, maybe arrogant old René should have said: “I can’t speak gorilla, ergo I’m thick.”

Thankfully, we’ve come a long way since Descartes dissected live animals and put their screams down to reflex reactions, but now a broad coalition of scientists, philosophers and conservationists called the Helsinki Group want to take things even further.

In their “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans”, they state that “dolphins should be regarded as ‘non-human persons’. From an ethical perspective, the injury, deaths and captivity of dolphins are wrong… Dolphins are, like humans, self-aware, intelligent beings with emotions and personalities”.

I’m all for that and I’m happy to treat dolphins as equals. After all, some dolphins can already understand some of our speech, but we still can’t comprehend theirs. Dolphins, one; humans, nil. But if we say the dolphins are equal with us, where do we stop?

There are some very bright creatures out there who deserve just as much attention as the dolphins. There’s a chimp in Japan who can remember the location and order of a set of numbers on a screen in less time than it takes me to think: “Oh my God, I’m thicker than a chimp.”

And I am. When it comes to memory skills and number recognition, I am much thicker than that chimp. Equally, like René Descartes, I do not speak any ape, but a bonobo called Kanzi can understand English grammar, tenses, make jokes and has a vocabulary of 400 human words. The only thing stopping him from saying them out loud is the physiognomy of his face.

Crows can fashion tools and use water-displacement techniques (which took Archimedes ages to work out) to get themselves a drink. Elephants grieve; rats show empathy; monkey mothers get embarrassed when their kids have tantrums in public.

If you’ve ever had a pet, I probably don’t need to go on to convince you that animals have never, ever been dumb.

But are humans intelligent enough to treat other animals as equals? After millennia of exploiting them, are we up to the task?

Think about it. Those dolphins are clever. Probably cleverer than us. They won’t be satisfied with a few warm words and some extra tuna. They’re going to want real rights – like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And what about the right to bear arms? Their brains are bigger than ours – are we opening the floodgates to Planet of the Dolphins?

The least they’re going to demand is representation, and where will that leave us, with our limited language skills? I can imagine what Fisheries Questions in the Scottish Parliament will be like:

MSP for Malin: “Eeeeee! Eeeeee!”

Minister: “Thank you. I …er…will reply to the Honourable Member’s question in due course. Is there an interpreter in the parliament today? A porpoise will do.”

I applaud the Helsinki Group’s intentions, but they are being speciesist. They only want the cetaceans, but that’s narrow-minded. We’re using human judgment to decide who we want to include as “persons”, and human judgment is flawed.

We regularly deprive species of rights because we don’t like the look of them, while adopting others for no good reason except that they look friendly. Pandas, for instance, are cute and cuddly, so we want to save them and adore them in zoos.

But pandas are thick. Conservationist Chris Packham says he would “eat the last panda” if the resources lavished on them could be given to “more sensible things”. So, if we’re going to accept the clever cetaceans, I reckon we should include the whole of animalkind as our family members. For different reasons, they all deserve our respect and kindness. Besides, there are many humans who don’t deserve to be called “persons”. I, for one, would happily put horses before Descartes.

From the Golden Globes to the Baftas, The Artist has dominated this year’s awards – and could do the same at Sunday’s Oscars. But its success is part of a bigger phenomenon, says Alison Kerr

SILENCE is golden. Or it is for The Artist, at least, which won eight Baftas last week and now looks set to repeat some of that success at the Oscars on Sunday.And yet the film is one of only a small group of silent films made since 1927.

Silent movies didn’t completely die out with the advent of “talkies”. Charlie Chaplin, who understood that part of his screen persona’s universal appeal was the fact that he didn’t talk, continued to make partly silent films well into the 1930s, while the French comedy genius Jacques Tati developed a highly effective and successful system of sounds for such hit comedies as Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), in which his characters made noises but didn’t speak as such.

The difference with The Artist is that there is no obvious reason for it to have been made without dialogue, apart from the fact that its story – about a silent screen star’s traumatic transition to talkies – was already familiar to audiences as a sound picture, and not just any sound picture: it bears an uncanny resemblance to the film regarded as the best musical of all time, Singin’ in the Rain.

Making it as a silent film is refreshing, and adds interest and a novelty factor to what is otherwise a pretty slight although undoubtedly beautiful-looking, film. (Kim Novak was spot-on when she said that the use of Bernard Herrmann’s heartbreakingly poignant love theme from Vertigo, at a key point in the film, was entirely responsible for providing emotional depth which would otherwise have eluded it.)

But The Artist isn’t the only silent film to have been released recently. Just three months ago, I attended the premiere, at the London Jazz Festival, of a film entitled Louis, a silent movie celebrating the childhood of a jazz great, Louis Armstrong.

On paper, the idea sounds bonkers. Celebrate a music legend with a soundless film? But seeing that film – or rather experiencing the film which was accompanied by a live band – was an unforgettable treat. As much a loving homage to silent cinema as a tongue-in-cheek evocation of the myths about early jazz, Dan Pritzker’s film may not be a brilliant movie – the characters (like those in The Artist) are pretty one-dimensional, the storyline a little simplistic and some of the scenes a bit self-indulgent. But taken as an experience, rather than as a film or as a concert, it was wonderful. At the end, the audience leapt to its collective feet, all of us aware that we had been part of a unique event.

It’s that uniqueness that has led to a resurgence of interest in silent cinema in recent years, thinks Alison Strauss, director of the Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema in Bo’ness, which was a popular and critical success when it launched last year.

“There’s a constant push for people to have new cinema experiences,” says Strauss, “whether it’s innovations like the IMAX screen or Smellovision or 3D or whether it’s one of these immersive experiences like Secret Cinema [a pop-up movie club which has been gaining momentum over the last couple of years] where people dress up; there’s a demand for new cinema experiences.

“Silent cinema for me is like an ultimate cinema experience because you’ve got this relationship between the film that’s on the screen and the audience – which, of course, you always had, but you’ve also got the third element, which is the live music and it really creates the magic. It’s an experience you don’t get if you go to a regular new release that’s been churned out. That gives it the uniqueness that I think people are looking for from the cinema, it elevates it. You know, you can walk into any multiplex and see what’s being released that week and it would be the same if you were in any Cineworld in any part of the country. But when you’ve got live music – particularly if, as is the case at our festival, it’s being played by a musician who has scored it specially – then it’s a completely unique experience.”

Of course, writing new scores for films from the silent era is nothing new. Carl Davis has been doing it for years, and some of the best silent movie experiences I’ve ever had were in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in the 1990s, when the RSNO played Davis’s scores while Greta Garbo and John Gilbert steamed up the big screen in Flesh and the Devil, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr buckled his swash in The Thief of Bagdad.

But there is undoubtedly an appetite for silent cinema in the 21st century, as the success of the Hippodrome festival highlights. Strauss reckons that there’s a new awareness – triggered, possibly by the likes of Martin Scorsese, whose recent film Hugo celebrated the pioneer of early cinema, Georges Méliès – of the fact that many of the great film-makers of the 20th century began during the silent era.

“In our festival, we have work by some directors who are best known for their work in the sound era,” says Strauss. “It makes sense for people who are interested in film to look back at all of their work. Why stop at 1929? So, Yasujiro Ozu for example, he’s most famous for a film he made in 1953, Tokyo Story, but he was working during the silent period… I think that this is why some directors, like Scorsese, are looking back to the silent era. They’re interested in the whole of film language and development, and by the end of the silent era, there had been 30 years of development.”

The idea of revisiting films from the silent era and revivifying them with new scores seems to tie in with a broader cultural phenomenon which the writer Simon Reynolds has christened Retromania – a need to return to the past. He reckons 21st-century popular culture is increasingly “chronically addicted to its own past”. But surely this has always been the case? Just as in fashion, where certain trends from earlier decades come round every ten or 20 years, and are given a contemporary twist, so the pop culture of earlier decades floats in and out of vogue and is, often, enriched and expanded each time.

The current mania for The Artist, and reborn fascination with the silent cinema era, seems to me to belong to a 2010s love affair with the Jazz Age, which has so far manifested itself in Martin Scorsese’s TV series Boardwalk Empire, in this season’s vogue for flapper dresses, in the revival of the bob (which, like the flapper dress fad is being fuelled by the images being released of Carey Mulligan as Daisy in Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming movie of the classic 1920s novel The Great Gatsby) and in the number of speakeasies springing up all over the place.

It’s easy to dismiss “Retromania” as less worthy of attention than new art movements, but had it not been for this sort of phenomenon, many masterpieces would be undiscovered and many great artists would now be forgotten. Such kings of silent cinema as Buster Keaton were languishing in near-obscurity until the 1960s when their work was rediscovered and made fashionable by the first generation of film students.

That resurgence of interest prompted the preservation and restoration of their films, and the first wave of commissions of scores to accompany them. It also ensured that they received the recognition that they deserved; recognition that often eludes great innovators at the time of their most important work.

• The Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema runs from March 16-18. For information and tickets, call 01324 506850 or visit www.falkirkcommunitytrust.org/silentcinemafest

Scotland’s Information Commissioner has accused a health board of “perhaps the most serious catalogue of failings” for not handing over more than 50 reports on serious incidents at its hospitals.

Rab Wilson, who worked for Ayrshire and Arran NHS Board, asked it for copies of all “critical incident” reviews and significant “adverse event” reports.

Mr Wilson turned to Information Commissioner Kevin Dunion after the health board told him it did not hold any critical incident review plans, apart from one it had already given to him. But when the commissioner investigated, 56 such plans were found on a computer drive. The NHS board has been ordered to provide Mr Wilson with a copy of the reports.

INVESTORS in oil and gas explorer Cove Energy were rewarded yesterday after Royal Dutch Shell offered nearly £1 billion for the company in order to get its hands on its East African gas assets.

Cove’s main asset is an 8.5 per cent stake in a drilling area off the coast of Mozambique, where operator Anadarko says reserves could top 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Analysts said Shell would probably approach other parties in the project and offer to buy part of their stakes. Irene Himona, oil analyst at Societe Generale, said: “As the number one liquefied natural gas player, Shell absolutely must be in East Africa.”

Shell said it had a “firm intention” to make a 195p per share cash bid, valuing the firm at £992.4 million, which Cove’s directors said they would recommend to shareholders. The offer is a 70 per cent premium on Cove’s 4 January share price, when the firm put itself on the market, and 25 per cent above Tuesday’s closing price.

For his debut film in English, Daniel Espinosa pulls off a great looking action thriller which is sadly let down by a script that falls apart towards the end, finds Alistair Harkness

APPEARANCES can be deceptive in a spy movie, and so it proves with Safe House: a film that looks much better than it is and boasts performances more intensely realised than the story they’re serving ultimately deserves. Still, better that than being just another lazily thrown-together Bourne rip-off or overblown Mission: Impossible movie. The plot beats may eventually prove wearyingly familiar as this tale of rogue CIA agents unravels over 110 minutes, but for its first two-thirds there’s a visceral intensity and seriousness of purpose to the action that makes it easier to forgive the film’s frustrating inability to build to any kind of true complexity or fully engage on a gut-punching level.

Not that there isn’t plenty of gut punching on display (or shootings, stabbings and neck breakings). As Tobin Frost, a suspected traitor, Denzel Washington is certainly handy with his fists. He may be 57, but Safe House proves Washington is still a very credible action star. Carrying himself with the vigour of a man 20 years his junior (not for nothing do they call him “the black Dorian Gray”), he takes out various nefarious guys in ruthlessly proficient fashion. The film calls on him to do this often, but it also gives him just enough space to unleash his usual acting fireworks after the plot kicks in.

This happens swiftly with an impressively and economically orchestrated opening salvo that sees Frost, a former CIA “wet ops” agent, voluntarily walking into the American embassy in Cape Town and giving himself up after nine years on the run. Nervous about his motives, the higher-ups at the Agency’s HQ in Langley, Virginia (among them Sam Shepherd, Brendan Gleeson and Vera Farmiga) move him for debriefing to a nearby safe house and into the charge of an untested, but desperate-to-prove himself agent called Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds, raising his game admirably). There we learn that Frost is an expert manipulator of “human assets” and when the security of the safe house is breached, he goes to work on Weston, planting seeds of doubt in his mind about the virtue of his employers as Weston attempts to get Frost to a new, secure location while negotiating tyre-screeching car chases and hails of gunfire.

The film’s up-and-coming Swedish director Daniel Espinosa (making his big-budget English-language debut) handles such action well, delivering coherent chaos that never loses track of the characters amid all the rapid cutting and bleached-out cinematography (the film is certainly something to look at). Despite all of these positives, however, Safe House is neither as memorable nor as satisfying as it should be. Its final act twists are too generic and the drawn-out and naïve coda betrays the high-octane, downbeat mood the film seems to be going for in its earlier stages. They’re functions of a script (and doubtless studio notes) that lacks the sophistication of Spinosa’s clear abilities as a visual storyteller. That’s too bad, but the fact that he’s able to make something out it for so long suggests he’ll be a name to watch in the future.

Safe House (15)

Directed by: Daniel Espinosa

Starring: Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds, Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson Rating: ***

An action film that manages to serve up carnage in new and interesting ways, The Raid lives up to all its hype, finds Alistair Harkness in his second report from the Glasgow Film Festival

AS THE Glasgow Film Festival moves into its final weekend, it sees the premiere of its first truly buzz-worthy film. The Raid (****) was among the earliest films to sell out this year. It’s been given a prime late-night slot as the closing film of GFF’s Frightfest strand that’s more befitting its likely cult status than its horror credentials, and it certainly justifies the hype. A relentlessly and inventively violent action film directed by Indonesia-based Welsh film-maker Gareth Evans, it does for knife fighting and martial arts action what Hard-Boiled did for gunplay, serving up a surprising number of new ways to deliver wall-to-wall carnage without boring the viewer.

Set in Jakarta, the streamlined plot revolves around a police assault on a high-rise slum that’s been taken over by a drug lord and transformed into both a factory for producing narcotics and a fortress-like residence for his numerous generals and underlings. Consequently, though heavily armed, this mostly rookie SWAT team soon find themselves under siege within the building’s labyrinthine environs as the dealers fight back and hunt them down. Dropping in just enough well-placed plot twists to keep us involved in the story, Evans promptly proceeds to unleash a dizzying and dazzling array of action set-pieces, mostly revolving around the ruthlessly proficient abilities of his star, Iko Uwais. Heads are cracked, bones are crunched, faces are sliced and jugulars are stabbed with an unparalleled frequency but – thanks to characters who define themselves through tightly choreographed but still raw and edgy action – such things never cease to be gleefully entertaining.

In musical terms, the in-your-face thrills of The Raid could probably be equated with the anti-authoritarian, confrontational stance of punk rock, numerous examples of which can be found in the The Other F Word (***). Playing as part of GFF’s Music and Film Festival, it delves into the somewhat nihilistic Southern Californian punk scene. The film’s intriguing hook, however, is to explore what happens to all that energy and attitude when its proponents get older and are suddenly forced to confront the responsibilities of fatherhood. Following a bunch of semi-famous ageing punk rock dads who now spend their evenings encouraging teenagers to “f*** authority” before going home to tuck their own kids in at night, the film mines this amusing contradiction for all it’s worth with scenes of heavily tattooed men melting in the presence of their daughters (most of them have daughters). That’s not enough to sustain an entire film, but mercifully director Andrea Blaugrund Nevins digs a little deeper and gets her interviewees – including Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea (he started out in the punk band Fear) – to open up about their own neglected childhoods.

Flea turns up again in Bob and the Monster (****), another LA-based redemptive music doc, this time set around the drug-fuelled alternative rock scene of the 1980s that gave rise to the likes of the Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction and Courtney Love. Its subject is Bob Forrest, a self-destructive wannabe singer who bought into the romanticised self-destructive myths of the music scene and blew his shot at the big time in a haze of heroin addiction. First time director Keirda Bahruth has access to a lot of good, scuzzy archival footage, but it’s when she gets onto Forrest’s subsequent rehabilitation as an addiction specialist who helped many of his rock star pals through their own battles that the film becomes genuinely compelling.

Helping people is also at the heart of Superheroes (***), a so-so documentary playing as part of the festival’s Kapow! comic-book strand. Exploring the increasing phenomenon of real superheroes in America, it starts off as an interesting look at a bunch of disturbed individuals who come across either as deluded pour souls or garishly costumed Travis Bickles-in-waiting. Alas, the film pulls away from all the nutters desperate to try out their dangerous-looking home-made weapons on actual criminals and ends up focusing on the few who dress up and help out at homeless shelters. That’s certainly a more noble use of their philanthropic instincts, but it feels welded on to a film that’s more interesting when exploring the darker side of the phenomenon.

There are more comic-themed shenanigans in Electric Man (*), a disappointingly feeble Scottish caper about a pair of comic shop workers who become embroiled in a convoluted quest to secure a copy of an ultra-rare and valuable first issue of the titular comic. Shot on a micro-budget in and around Edinburgh, it’s embarrassingly badly acted, flatly directed and boasts a script full of naff jokes and dated pop culture gags, making it more of an East Coast Fast Romance than a Scottish Clerks. It might have been made with love, but aside from the nifty opening credits sequence, I can’t imagine it will be of much interest to anyone other than the people who made it.

The Decoy Bride (**) isn’t much better. This twee, Scottish-set romcom starring David Tennant and Kelly Macdonald received its British premiere at the festival on Tuesday night ahead of its DVD release early next month. It’s certainly not hard to see why it is mostly bypassing cinemas. Tennant is surprisingly charmless as an author who falls for Macdonald just as he’s about to wed a Hollywood movie star (Alice Eve), and Macdonald, despite her best efforts as the unlucky-in-love island girl roped in to throw the press off the scent of the couple’s Hebridean wedding, is fighting a losing battle against some pretty corny dialogue and slack pacing.

Much better is Up There (***), the debut feature from award-winning British short-filmmaker Zam Salim. Shot in Glasgow, it’s a melancholic comedy about the bureaucracy of the afterlife revolving around dead man (Burn Gorman) stuck in limbo doing a dead-end job. The film’s central joke is that the same boring mundane problems we experience in life are repeated in death, and though this gag does wear a little thin, things are held together by an engaging central turn from Gorman and the sense that Salim has created a fully realised world. And it also shows there are at least some interesting films being made in Scotland.

• The Raid is screening at Glasgow Film Theatre on 25 February; The Other F Word, GFT today and CCA tomorrow; Bob and the Monster, CCA tomorrow and GFT on 26 February; Superheroes, GFT today; The Electric Man, CCA today; The Decoy Bride, run ended; Up There, GFT tomorrow

Fence Records started life as a small shop in St Andrews. Now a new festival is taking the Fife label back to its roots - with KT Tunstall as the superstar main attraction. By David Pollock

I DON’T feel at home in the Eye o’ the Dug,” sang the Beta Band’s Steve Mason on his little-remembered 1998 solo EP, King Biscuit Time Sings Nelly Foggits Blues in Me and the Pharaohs. The lyric was a reference to St Andrews’ position on the dog’s head-shaped profile of Fife: “This is the town where we all come from / it’s an animal sanctuary.”

It wasn’t meant as a compliment, as Mason explained to the Fence Collective’s Johnny Lynch when he approached him to use the name for Fence’s new music festival.

“He told me it was odd because the song’s about how much he hates St Andrews,” says Lynch. “I know, I told him, that’s partly why we’re putting on this festival. There are plenty of people there who want to hear good music, who aren’t from that very rich, elitist background.”

Fence, the Anstruther/Cellardyke-based record label and festival promoter which Lynch runs with 2011 Mercury Prize nominee Kenny ‘King Creosote’ Anderson, has a love/hate relationship with St Andrews. It was where the brand started in the late 1990s, with Anderson’s Fence record shop – yet it was the arrival of Prince William to study in the town, and the subsequent influx of old money, that caused the shop to close.

At one point, says Lynch, rents on St Andrews’ main streets were higher than on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, driving out any opportunity for ventures like Fence to survive.

April’s two-day Eye o’ the Dug is partly an attempt to redress that balance now that the Royal effect has faded. Lynch describes the festival – which announced its line-up a few days ago – as a larger-scale version of Fence’s Anstruther-based Homegame festival. It’s aimed at both the town’s music-savvy students and at homegrown Fifers like Mason and Anderson, as well as people from further afield.

“The main venue at the students’ union is the biggest union venue in Scotland,” says Lynch. “It’s bigger than the QMU (in Glasgow), it holds about 1,200 folk and it looks amazing when it’s done up properly. There are posters of all the bands they’ve booked on the walls there, people like Dexy’s Midnight Runners and The Jam, and even Frank Black when I was there.”

To that list Eye o’ the Dug will add a pared-down set from Alexis and Joe of Hot Chip, as well as Fife-bred Fence friends and alumni KT Tunstall, Django Django and James Yorkston, amongst many others.

Lynch isn’t precise on all the details of the festival yet, although the list of 15 announced bands should rise to around 40, including “some familiar names”, playing to an audience of between 800 and 1000, or more if ticket sales go well: roughly three or four times the capacity of Homegame.

Again, the list of venues being used hasn’t been finalised, but Lynch is excited about hearing King Creosote and Jon Hopkins play their Mercury-nominated album Diamond Mine in full in the Younger Hall.

All of which begs the question, why cancel Homegame this year and decamp to St Andrews instead? “Well now,” laughs Lynch, “that all depends on who you ask and on what day of the week. If you asked Kenny when he was in a bit of a mood, for example, he would say there might be political reasons. We purposely put Homegame on outside the tourist season to help local businesses bring a bit of money in, but then a lot of the holiday lets and so on would start putting their prices up just for that weekend. They were ripping our fans off, basically, and they didn’t need to do that.”

While Lynch and Anderson clearly feel there’s a certain ingratitude in some quarters, Lynch also points out the support they’ve had from other areas of the local community. He names Fife Council and Lindsey Brown of the East Neuk Centre, and says Fence might even return to the village later in the year – the ongoing renovation of regular Homegame venue, the Hew Scott Hall, is another just-as-significant barrier to the festival happening this year.

But will it be back ever again? Lynch is currently living on a static caravan on the Isle of Eigg with his partner, Sarah, recording his next album as the Pictish Trail. This is where July’s second Awaygame event will be held, which he hopes will be a precursor to similar touring Fence festivals within and without Scotland, including an event co-hosted with the independent Moshi Moshi label.

“We just thought it best that Homegame take a few years off,” Lynch says. “But in saying that, who knows, it might be back next year. Or it might never happen again. There you go, there’s a headline!” If his new festival comes together as planned, maybe we won’t even miss it.

• Eye o’ the Dug is at various venues around St Andrews, 14-15 April. www.eotdfestival.com

MORRISON Construction, the Scottish arm of builder Galliford Try, has boosted staffing by well over 50 per cent in the past year to some 800 as its parent posted higher interim sales, profits and dividends yesterday.

The news came as Ken Gillespie, head of the group’s construction division, claimed Holyrood was better than the UK government at green-lighting public-sector building projects “to help get the economy moving again”.

Now in the third year of a turnaround programme, Galliford revealed that pre-tax profits had surged 89 per cent to £32.2 million on sales up 30 per cent to £746.8m in the six months to end-December. Investors benefit from a doubled dividend payment of 9p, up from 4.5p.

While Galliford’s housebuilding profits, skewed to the south of England, leapt to £35m from £9.9m, construction profits were flat at £10.9m in what Gillespie said was a “difficult” climate. The construction division turned over about £500m, of which £100m was in Scotland, with contracts including Morrison’s part in a consortium working on the new Forth road bridge and schools built in Orkney.

Gillespie said Morrison was able to boost its staffing to beyond the peak of 750 in 2009.

He forecast that group profit margins would slip below 2 per cent after falling to 2.2 per cent from 2.5 per cent in the latest period.

“The Scottish Government has managed to keep its capital projects moving while we have seen many shelved elsewhere in the UK,” Gillespie said.

“Holyrood has made the connection quicker than central government that investing in major infrastructure projects in the public sector is the quickest way to get the economy moving again.”

Galliford’s shares closed up nearly 9 per cent, or 44p, at 545p.

Scottish Gas parent Centrica added to its growing portfolio of North Sea assets yesterday, buying stakes in seven producing fields from Total for £246 million.

The company, which has been building its oil and gas reserves in recent months, said the deal increased its scale in the central North Sea and was expected to add “immediate strong cash flow”.

Mark Hanafin, managing director of Centrica Energy, said the acquisition marked another step in the growth of the firm’s upstream oil and gas business.

“This acquisition in the North Sea provides a good fit with our existing portfolio and strategy, bringing strong cash flow and adding value,” he added.

“It underlines our commitment to invest where we see attractive opportunities, securing future energy supplies for the UK.”

The fields are in three major areas of the central North Sea – the Alba field, Greater Armada and the Mungo and Monan cluster – and will boost Centrica’s oil and gas reserves by some 5 per cent.

The group’s increased share in the fields, all operated by other companies, gives it an estimated 22 million barrels of oil equivalent (mboe) of reserves in the region. They are expected to produce 9,300 barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2012.

The oil and gas is mostly un-contracted and linked directly to the UK market, where Centrica sells directly to consumers, operating under its British Gas and Scottish Gas brands.

It marks the latest investment in production from the British energy giant. Last month, the firm bought ConocoPhillips’ share of the Statfjord gas field, which straddles UK and Norwegian waters, for £142m, while in November it bought £1 billion of oil and gas assets from Norway’s energy giant Statoil.

Centrica has also moved to secure its long-term gas supplies by signing a £13bn ten-year deal with Norway relating to assets it does not own.

In July, the group warned that the Chancellor’s tax grab on the North Sea may force it to switch some of its investment programme towards Norwegian waters and to other territories such as Trinidad.

John Musk, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said Centrica had, in short order, increased its production profile from 50 mboe a year to around 70 mboe, including the recent Statoil and Statfjord deals.

“For 2012, taking account of when the various deals will complete, we estimate that production is likely to be around 63 mboe,” he said.

He said that, although the newly acquired capacity would add about £100m to Centrica’s earnings before tax and interest, the impact on its earnings per share would be limited because of the 70 per cent effective tax rate on the assets, all in the UK section of the North Sea.

Centrica’s shares showed little reaction as investors awaited the firm’s full-year results, due today. It is set to report record overall profits of £2.5bn, up 4 per cent on 2010, as its burgeoning upstream business smashes through the £1bn barrier for the first time. That is expected to offset a poor performance from its retail arm as UK consumers used less gas and electricity in this year’s milder winter.

He says he hates his own work, didn’t want to be a director and isn’t political – except when he is… Alistair Harkness tries to get to grips with Aki Kaurismäki

IINTERVIEWING Aki Kaurismäki, the Finnish auteur responsible for deadpan arthouse favourites Leningrad Cowboys Go America and the Oscar-nominated The Man Without a Past, is a little like talking to a character from one of his films. Conversation is stilted, questions are met with silence and it’s never clear how seriously anything is supposed to be taken.

This might have something to do with the fact that I’m chatting to Kaurismäki about his new film Le Havre – a poker-faced comedy-drama about an ageing shoeshine who befriends an illegal immigrant boy hiding out in the titular French port. And it doesn’t help that we’re talking over an inexcusably bad phone line (he’s only in London). But I think it might also have something to do with Kaurismäki’s general despondency.

Before I can say anything about Le Havre, for instance, he provides his own assessment: “It’s another piece of shit, as always.”

A sampling of press clippings reveals this is one of his standard self-deprecating refrains. Usually it’s accompanied by protestations to the contrary from the interviewer, but I’m prepared to take him at his word. He can’t genuinely believe he’s made a piece of shit, can he?

“Of course I can, because my references are higher.”

So, he really just thinks it’s a piece of shit in comparison to his inspirations?

“My inspirations are all art,” he replies, letting out a long declamatory sigh. I wait for him to expand on this, but I’m met with silence. A few minutes in and already it’s like wading through quicksand.

I proceed by asking him about his characters. His films tend to focus on those living on the margins of society. Where previous works have been political without being issue-driven, Le Havre seems more didactic in the way it serves up pointed critiques of government policy towards immigration. Does he think it’s more directly political?

“It’s a complicated question because I am political in private…” He trails off. “Eh, what did you ask?”

I rephrase the question another couple of times. “I’ve never been a political director,” he says, finally. “When people go to the cinema, they don’t want a political lesson and, so far, I hide it in the stories very deep because if I’m a worker and going to the cinema after working eight or ten hours a day, I don’t want to see any politics in the film… Of course, all my films have politics, because I don’t see any reason to make a film if you don’t have anything to say. In my case I have something to say. But it’s obviously not something political.”

Perplexed, I ask him, then, if Le Havre started out more simply as a story of an immigrant African boy adrift in a foreign port, rather than, say, an attempt to address immigration. Contrary to the previous answer, though, he says no.

“I always saw news of people who have died trying to get to Europe and this news continued to come and somehow this started to be a story. This tale is a fairytale, but it started to be a political question to me. I couldn’t stand the situation without doing something, and for me, that means a film.” A film he thinks is a piece of shit, I remind myself.

I come at it from another angle. Did he make the lead character, Marcel, a shoeshine for any symbolic reason? Typically, he says no. After some cajoling, however, he says he has a story he can tell me about this.

“I saw a shoe-shiner in the town in Portugal where I live and he had no customers, so I took my shoes for a shine. At the same time I was thinking, ‘Who the hell is the main character?’ And then I looked down and saw the shoe-shiner shining my shoe and I said to myself, ‘OK.’”

Now it’s my turn for stony-faced silence. Nevertheless, I persevere. I bring up the fact that Marcel is played by the actor André Wilms who, 20 years earlier, played a struggling artist called Marcel in Kaurismäki’s only other French language film, The Bohemian Life. Is Le Havre a continuation of that film?

“It’s a joke, more or less,” he says, “but it doesn’t mean anything.”

Sheesh – it’s like pulling teeth. I ask him (twice) about his love of early rock’n’roll and its prominence in his films. He says he uses it so that “I don’t have to write dialogue”. Seeking more detail, I wonder why he features a concert by an ageing French rocker called Little Bob in Le Havre. Is Little Bob a well-known French star?

Kaurismäki: “What?”

Little Bob?

“He was just there. And I’m not blind.”

Huh?

“He’s the Elvis of France,” he says, eventually.

Isn’t that Johnny Hallyday? I ask. Silence.

I change tack. Having made a silent film (Juha) back in 1999, what does he make of the revival of interest in the format since The Artist?

“Yeah, I never understood this silent stuff,” he says. “I think people talk too much anyway.” Evidently.

Since Kaurismäki makes films that he not only thinks are shit but apparently isn’t particularly interested in discussing, I wonder why he got started in film-making in the first place.

“Got started with what?”

Why did he want to become a director?

“I never wanted to become a director. I wanted to be a writer. They didn’t trust me to be a writer, so I became a director. I was not talented enough to be a writer.”

It seems too complicated to take issue with such specious I-accidentally-became-a-director nonsense, so I ask if he means he wanted to be a novelist. “Yeah,” he says.

I look at my watch. I have another few minutes, but decide life’s too short and thank him for his time. He apologises again for the bad line. I tell him not to worry, that these things happen. I still feel like I’m in one of his films, though, and we all know how he feels about those…

• Le Havre is the Glasgow Film Festival Closing Night Gala 26 February and goes on general release on 6 April.

Move to produce first academic edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy highlights the centuries-long ties between Scotland and Germany, writes Stuart Kelly

When I was growing up in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders, the whole school had to turn out once a year to welcome the Braw Lad and the Braw Lass for the town Common Riding. This involved singing a positively funereal song – Braw Braw Lads – which we all knew was written by Robert Burns.

It was only years later, listening to the Schottische Leider (Hob Xxxia:15, to be precise), that I realised the music was by Haydn – and that it was actually rather tender and wistful when not sung by truculent ten-year-olds.

It’s a reflection in miniature of a centuries-long relationship with German-speaking countries; a connection which will be celebrated in Edinburgh this Saturday when the German consul, Dr Wolfgang Mössinger, will welcome members of the newly formed Society for Scottish Studies in Europe.

Part of their work includes a €500,000 (£423,000) academic collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft of the Federal Republic of Germany, to produce the first academic edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy Of The Scottish Border.

For anyone with a smattering of history, such co-operation is entirely unsurprising. Indeed, it could be argued that Scotland’s relationship with German-speaking countries, and Germany in particular, is the other “Auld Alliance”, and one which provided far more cultural benefits than the medieval and strategic entente with France.

Scotland’s links to Germany began in trade, were confirmed in religion and were strengthened in war. The Low Countries, Germany, Poland and the Baltic States were natural first ports of call for trade, particularly in timber, which stretched as far as Moscow. With the Reformation, Scots abroad found it easier to deal with the Protestant north of Europe, rather than the Catholic south; and the bond of co-religionists soon provided opportunities in terms of the religious wars that racked 17th century Europe. Andrew Melville, for example, became Commander of Troop to the Electress of Hanover.

Scottish mercenaries played a significant role. Scott immortalised one of them in A Legend of Montrose’s Dugald Dalgetty, who famously says: “I had swallowed, without chewing, in Germanie, a very dangerous maxime, which militarie men there too much follow, which was, that soe we serve our master honestlie, it is no matter what master we serve.”

Billy Kay observes that “during the 17th century, more Scots went to the Baltic lands of Poland and Prussia and from there eastwards into Lithuania and Russia than took part in the massive plantation and settlement of Ulster”.

But it was in the cultural sphere that the interweaving became most evident. In 1760, James Macpherson published the first of his Ossian works, purporting to be indigenous Gaelic epic fragments (but in fact, some shards of true Gaelic poetry swaddled in 18th century sentiment).

Its provenance notwithstanding, its effect in Europe was electric. It inspired the German thinker Johann Gottfriend Herder to formulate the first expression of cultural nationalism, and Goethe translated parts of it in The Sorrows of Young Werther. Herder argued that the northern parts of Europe had preserved and evolved a different culture from “neoclassical” France, Spain and Italy. It was in this intellectual climate that the young Walter Scott collected ballads for the Minstrelsy.

They were not defective versions of the classics, but classics in their own right by their own rules. In this, more than in any other factor, was the beginning of Romanticism. Just as Goethe had translated Ossian, Scott began his career as a writer by translating Goethe, before collecting ballads, writing long poems based on ballad material and finally becoming Europe’s pre-eminent novelist. His example would inspire the Brothers Grimm to collect their folktales and fairy stories, to the delight of children to this day.

Moreover, the idea of synthesising an epic – taking traditional stories and reworking them for a modern medium and audience – would culminate in the 19th century’s great “total work of art”, Wagner’s The Ring Cycle, which was written fully as a poem before it became the opera we know. Scott’s son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, continued the tradition by translating Schegel’s Lectures On The History Of Literature.

When Scott died, the young Thomas Carlyle pondered how appropriate it was he passed away in the autumn, just as Carlyle’s hero, Goethe – whose Sorrows Of Young Werther he had translated – had died in the spring of the same year.

Carlyle would come to embody the spirit of the “Germano-Scottish”. Carlyle is, nowadays, a figure held at arm’s length. This is regrettable. Although some of his ideas are naive, and others offensive, he was to his 19th-century peers the single most important mind on the planet.

He is also an acquired comic taste. In one early book, Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Re-Tailored), he semi-seriously, semi-sardonically proposed a “philosophy of clothes”, through the musings of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh – whose name means, literally, “God Born Devil Dung”.

In part the book was a parody of the German philosopher Hegel, in part a homage to his contemporary Fichte, but it also includes a nod to Scotland. There is a city, in Book II, called Weisnichtwo (“Know not where”) – and Scott set his novel The Monastery in Kennaquhair (“Ken not where”, if you pronounce it properly). Carlyle would go on to write on both the French Revolution and Frederick the Great – the book which, supposedly, Hitler was reading in the bunker in 1945.

If Scotland wooed and wowed Germany with literature and philosophy, Germany reciprocated, most of all with music. Burns may have provided the words for George Thomson’s Select Collection of Scottish Airs for the Voice, but it was composers such as Beethoven who provided the music. Beethoven’s Op. 105 and Op. 107 “Themes and Variations for Piano and Flute” used “Scottish Air” far more than any other term – in fact, only one variation in Op. 105 is not Scottish.

Felix Mendelssohn harked back to the earlier infatuation with Ossian when he composed the Hebrides Overture, which took on the nickname “Fingal’s Cave”, and his Third Symphony plays with Scottish folk music in a way that no composer from Scotland would do until the 20th century.

The alliance between Scotland and Germany persisted into the 20th century. Willa and Edwin Muir introduced Kafka to an Anglophone audience; Allan Massie has sensitively explored the family of Thomas Mann.

The 20th century posed its own problems to the relationship – phrases such as Herder’s rallying call for German language literature, “spew out the slime of the Seine”, take on an unappealing shade under some lights. One can easily imagine Hugh MacDiarmid commanding that we “throw up the filth of the Thames”. Scotland and Germany have a long history, and at this present moment, a relationship which ought again to be a source of mutual sustenance and mutual critique. These are exchanges that could strengthen both countries. It was an English poet, John Donne, who said “no man is an island”, and Scotland’s links with Germany show that no country – not even Britain – is an island either.

IF your existing kitchen cabinets, worktops, appliances and lighting are in good shape but you want a new look for spring, try the following tips.

Clear the space of everything that is not fixed. That means not just a de-clutter, but also taking down curtains, pictures, mirrors and memo boards. Temporarily remove or pack away all kitchen paraphernalia, including cooking equipment, on-view storage and accessories, tables and chairs. Then take stock of the features you like most in the room and any you want to conceal. Note light levels and effectiveness. Identify the main colour scheme and any co-ordinating or contrasting shades.

Now think how, ideally, the space might look and function and assess what changes you could make. For a modern, streamlined look, keep to a single colour family. Bright shades can look stunning but remember that fashions change quickly so be prepared to change your colour scheme too. Neutrals maximise space and light, and are easy to liven up with accent shades.

If cabinet doors are looking worn, consider repainting them with two coats of an oil-based eggshell paint. You may find all that is needed is new cupboard and drawer handles.

If choosing new accent colours, citrus shades pep up a contemporary scheme while pastels open up a space. Try exciting mixes such as pink and purple or turquoise and yellow. Bear in mind that more than three different accents can give a cluttered feel.

Gradually re-introduce useful or much-loved accessories, disciplining yourself about how much you will have on show. It is amazing how quickly we become blind to the living spaces around us.

• Pat Elliott, The Borders Design House.  Visit our online shop for our design services and courses together with unique, eco, chic home accessories. Learn to ‘Be Your Own Designer’ with our distance-learning interior design course (07765 057409, www.thebordersdesignhouse.co.uk)

]]> 1.2132404 Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:31:43 +0000 http://www.scotsman.com/interiors_style_doctor_1_2132401

Q: I love 1950s-style furniture and have bought quite a few pieces at auction. I am currently trying to find bedside tables, without any success. Could you help?

P Johnson

A: Interior designer Doreen Smith says, the Mid Century two-tone solid wood side tables with drawers will look stunning in your room. This classic 1950s-style retro cabinet has two-tone drawers in dark and light wood, aged metal handles and angled legs, which give it a vintage appeal. It stands at 45cm (w) x 40cm (d) x 45cm (h) and costs £259.

Artisanti (0845 259 1410, www.artisanti.com)

Doreen Smith Interiors (0141-884 2319, www.doreensmithinteriors.com)

Q: I thought I had come across a coffee table with stools that sit under it, but can’t remember where. Do you know where I might find one?

A Hill

A: Dwell does a square walnut veneer coffee table with hidden legs, creating a space for four faux leather stools – extra seating that tucks neatly under the coffee table when not needed. The table measures 45cm (h) x 90cm (w) x 90cm (d), while the stools are 41cm (h) x 43cm (w) x 43cm (d). It costs £499.

Dwell (0845 675 9090, www.dwell.co.uk)

OVER the coming weeks I will be speaking to nursery folk around Scotland about how to mix new plants with old favourites in a way I hope will inspire you to transform or create borders in your garden. Remember, don’t think of plants in isolation – good plantings are about smart partnerships of colour, texture and shape.

Perennial Performers: Astrantia major ‘Ruby Star’ (masterwort) – a relatively new cultivar that is proving popular and that Gavin McNaughton from Macplants (www.macplants.co.uk) believes is the best red Astrantia around. Dark red flower heads with black-tipped bracts appear from June to August. It looks good planted with Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’ and Aquilegia vulgaris var. stellata ‘Ruby Port’.

Agastache ‘Black Adder’ (hyssop) – another long-flowering perennial with attractive scented leaves and purple flowers, and loved by bees. Reliably hardy, it adds height to a border and works well with ornamental grasses and echinaceas.

Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’ (black-eyed Susan) – easy-to-grow, reliable, long-flowering plant that doesn’t need staking. Debbie McIsaac of Maclarens Nurseries (www.maclarensnurseries) says: “Anyone can grow this.” It works well with the Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ and the Russian sage (Perovskia atriplifolia) which come into their own in late summer.

Scabiosa ‘Crimson Cushion’ (pin cushion flower) – Stan Green of Growforth (www.growforth.co.uk) is a fan of this low, compact, hummock-shaped plant which produces crimson button flowers from June to August. It works well with vertical flowers of Veronica, Lupinus (lupines) or Antirrhinum (snapdragons).

• Rebecca Govier, Garden Designer (0781 750 5571; info@greenedgegardendesign.co.uk; www.greenedgegardendesign.co.uk

STANDING at the centre of a group of ancient yew trees, you begin to understand the magical nature of Traquair. Only a few metres away, a well-clipped maze can hold you as tightly as any embrace. It’s this duality of nature and formality that runs through these grounds.

On the banks of the Tweed, near Innerleithen in Peeblesshire, Traquair is both an ancient seat and working grounds, with many secrets to be revealed.

Catherine Maxwell Stuart almost apologises for not referring to Traquair as a garden, because of the lack of formal design or herbaceous borders. But the grounds are split into various uses or have pivotal features that mean this is far more than a wild landscape and woodland. There is no great plan to return the grounds to the formality they once had, but the family and the two full-time gardeners have begun restoring plants that would have been grown in the 18th century, such as quince trees.

Catherine’s aim is to ensure that the house and grounds are an authentic piece of living history, but it is no museum. It is a home to her and her husband and young family. The grounds open for the last weekend in February under Scotland’s Gardens, primarily to show off the snowdrops in the woods. “There has been quite a lot of flooding this year, but we thought we would risk it,” says Catherine. Far from fighting battles with the elements, there is a sense at Traquair of a deal brokered over centuries, allowing nature its successes, and the Stuart family their own.

The maze is the most famous of these. It lies where the formal garden would have been. That comprised a parterre and pavilions designed by the Edinburgh architect James Smith, but by the 1900s it had disappeared. Catherine’s parents planted the maze in 1980 with 1,500 leylandii. A severe winter in 1981 killed off two-thirds of the young trees, so it was replanted with hardier beech. The maze took a long time to establish, says Catherine, with visiting children making their mark by crawling through the lines. Twenty years on, the maze is a pleasing mixture of green and copper. Half a mile to the centre, it is believed to be the second-largest maze in Scotland, after the one at Hazlehead Park in Aberdeen. The design comprises four sub-centres that must each be visited before reaching the middle, and every Easter Sunday the maze is the perfect place for an egg hunt.

Traquair, Scotland’s oldest inhabited house, is inextricably linked with dramatic times in Scotland’s past. Dating from 1107, it was first a hunting lodge for Scottish royalty. After the Reformation it became a refuge for Catholic priests, and the Stuarts supported Mary Queen of Scots and the Jacobite cause. Traquair’s strategic position in the Scottish Borders turned it into a fortress that was periodically seized by English troops. The Bear Gates, installed in 1738, next to the main entrance, take their name from the stone bears that flank them and support the family’s coat of arms.

You won’t be able to resist touching the thatched heather hut, built in 1834. Hazel branches form seats and a table, and walls are packed tight with heather. It shows how materials such as willow and hazel could be used today to create a gazebo with much more character than the mass-produced pine versions. It was so admired by Catherine’s great-uncle, Arthur Maxwell Stuart, a champion croquet player, that he had it moved to the croquet lawn, where it sits today. From the inside you can sit and look out through the open double arch, towards a children’s play area – which includes a willow play tunnel – and the house.

The line of lime trees along the avenue and the poplars next to the Well Pool convey a sense of what was in the past a formal garden. The extensive tree planting in the 18th and 19th centuries also included Douglas firs, ash, horse chestnut and beech. Some hulking specimens tower over the start of the woodland walk that runs from the house to the burn and passes the Tweed before returning to the maze.

But it is the yews that will have you catching your breath. Some of the yew trees may have stood in the face of more than 500 Scottish winters. They were thought to have been part of the Ettrick Forest and one group of four appear to form in a circle, designed by nature, about halfway along the woodland path. The bark is so old it’s smooth, but so pitted by the weather it looks like a frozen waterfall. Gnarled branches sweep overhead before swooping down to envelop visitors in a Harry Potter-like cavern.

A craft community has thrived at Traquair since Catherine’s mother, Flora, brought some of the outbuildings back into use in the Seventies. The workshops for self-employed craft workers can be visited when the house is open. A domestic brewery that had lain untouched since about 1800 was rediscovered by Catherine’s father, Peter, in 1965. He brought it back into production and brewing is now one of Traquair’s main businesses. Following the path back towards the house, the faint aroma of hops hints at the brewery. It looks out over the Well Pool, a large pond that was part of the Tweed before the river was re-routed away from the house in the 1600s. But nature finds its way back. Catherine adds: “When the river floods, it’s like it’s trying to come back to the Well Pool.”

After the 20th laird died, Catherine and her mother Flora continued to run Traquair and carried on improvements. Now, as the 21st Lady of Traquair, Catherine has brought the walled garden back into use, and it is the venue for Traquair’s annual fair in August. There you’ll find some great examples of espaliered fruit trees, with branches trained along the walls or against trellis. Last year, some of the land next to the walled garden was brought back to use as ten allotments for local people, and the next stage is plans for the land around the walled garden to include a community garden.

With a rerouted river, the neatness of the maze and arrow-straight lines of poplars and limes, a “wine glass lawn” that owes its name to the shape of the surrounding path, it could be easy to forget that nature writes the rules for most gardens. But with regular river floods, ancient yews, carpets of snowdrops and frosts that saw the mass destruction of leylandii, Traquair has never forgotten this.

So what do Traquair and its grounds mean to Catherine? “It’s the trees and the woodlands I’ve always loved. You can feel history in the house but you can feel it outside too. It’s a bit more kept than it was, but it’s been the most fantastic playground.” Luckily for visitors and the community, it’s one that can be shared.

• Traquair’s grounds are open next Saturday and Sunday, 25 and 26 February, 11am-4pm (www.traquair.co.uk)

Designer tidbits to get your creative juices flowing

Eat your words

WE ALL know kids love messing around in the kitchen, but if they are looking for a change from the regular gingerbread men or star-shaped biscuits try these cool double-sided letter-press cookie cutters. Let them make a statement by punching out the shape then turning the cutter over to stamp the letter. The set contains all 26 letters plus an ampersand and an exclamation mark, and is made from durable, food-safe plastic. Creative cookies guaranteed, although you’ll probably still have to do the clearing up.

Letter Pressed Cookie Cutters, Folly (01455 631984,

www.follyhome.co.uk), £12.95

Community spirit

Head to Edinburgh’s Open Eye gallery for Primavera, an exhibition of new jewellery for spring. Featuring the work of three artists, it has leaf necklaces and coloured-edge bangles from Sarah Packington, beautiful bird brooches and pendants from Sue Gregor and striking leaf-patterned acrylic cuffs from Caroline Temple.

Primavera, 20 February to 24 March, Open Eye Gallery, 34 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh (www.openeyegallery.co.uk)

Light source

DESIGNER Louise Campbell’s intention was to create a new pendant light with a minimum of processes involved, based on a single shade. The challenge of simplicity resulted in the LC Shutter, derived from just three processes: turning the shade, stamping the pattern and painting it.

Available in white or patterned colour, the end result is glare-free lighting. The designer says, “The shade and diffuser are integrated: a single unit with a clear function – protecting against glare, creating atmosphere, but also spreading the light.” One for creating the perfect ambience in any room.

Louis Poulsen (www.louispoulsen.com), £345 (white), coloured (£425)

WHEN designer Bernie Hurst went on holiday seven years ago, she was dismayed to find the footwear she had packed was going to cost her more than £200 in excess baggage charges. Which is when she came up with the idea for... detachable shoes. “I have always loved shoes and have more than 100 pairs,” she explains.

“At that point, it suddenly crossed my mind that I could develop a range of shoes that had interchangable uppers and heels. You could attach your own colours to the same base of the shoe.”

Several months later, she had her first pair made in China. “It wasn’t the quality that I was looking for, so I did further research and found a fantastic craftsman in Brazil who hand-makes all his shoes, and for the last five years he has been my supplier,” she says.

Singers Alexandra Burke and Kelly Rowland are already fans of her shoes, and Bernie is hoping Michelle Obama will follow in their footsteps. Having always been a fan of the US First Lady, Bernie contacted the White House three months ago and eventually managed to speak to her aide. Having explained what she did, she was given the First Lady’s foot measurements and asked to make her a pair.

A self-taught designer, Bernie has also worked as a chef in the south of France and as a personal trainer. However, when she broke her shoulder in an accident seven years ago she received a substantial compensation payout, which enabled her to invest in her new shoe business.

Growing up a few miles from Worthing, where she now lives, Bernie was part of a large family. “I had seven brothers and sisters, and shared a room with two of my sisters,” she explains. “Our house was so small in comparison to the house I live in now.

“I love living on the south coast. My son and husband both love fishing and the south coast has some wonderful fishing spots, and I love the landscape and beaches.”

Her husband Pete is a builder, so the couple created their own dream home. They found a two-bedroomed detached house with a swimming pool in the back garden and decided to demolish part of it and rebuild to their own specifications. They kept the living room, dining room and one bedroom, while Pete built up and around the rest of the house, adding four bedrooms and three bathrooms. In contrast to the original house, today’s kitchen is huge. “It had such a tiny kitchen, I could cook and do the washing up at the same time,” Bernie says.

It is now the perfect family home for Bernie and her children, Peter, 11, and Alicia 13, while elder daughter Janine, 26, lives nearby. At the top of the house is the master bedroom, which is decorated in a muted range of turquoise and blues with a wooden floor, while Alicia’s bedroom is decorated in cool plum tones. The large living room has two huge sofas, which Bernie had made in Italy, and a table from a nearby antique store.

Bernie’s office is also on the ground floor, and that’s where she keeps all her shoes and packaging. “I love working from home. At the moment, with the state of the economy, there is no point opening a shop. Lots of the large shops are already in trouble,” she says.

“I love making ladies I work for feel like Cinderella,” Bernie adds. “All of my designs have three layers of padding on the insole and I give all my shoes what I call the ‘12-hour Bernie test’. I have to be able to wear them for 12 hours; work in them, walk in them, do the school run, go shopping and even do housework in them. If, after that, they don’t hurt, then I know I have achieved something.”

MY FAVOURITE THINGS

What is your favourite film?

The Shawshank Redemption.

What is your favourite perfume?

Amber, by Prada.

Who is your favourite designer?

Roberto Cavalli.

Where is your favourite holiday destination?

Dubai.

Who is your favourite artist?

Claude Monet.

Who is your favourite singer?

Madonna.

What is your favourite book?

The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron.

• Nooshooz (01903 261806, www.nooshooz.co.uk)

SEEING potential in some properties can require a huge amount of imagination. In December 2009, when builder and developer Ian Murray viewed an A-listed garden apartment at 31a Heriot Row in Edinburgh’s New Town for potential clients Grant and Laura Clouston, he needed all the imagination he could muster.

The previous owner had been a taxidermist and 31a was his home and workshop. Each room in the basement level flat had one tiny access window, and all were boarded up so there was no natural light.

Ian is managing director of the Edinburgh-based SI Construction, which specialises in everything from refurbishments to extensions and new builds. Grant Clouston, had asked for his thoughts on the property. Was it possible to transform a tired, gloomy, partially subterranean apartment into a vibrant, design-led, aesthetically exciting second home for himself and his wife, Laura? And could Ian tackle the project, working closely on the design concept with Grant and Laura, while the couple were based 3,600 miles away in Dubai?

The answer to both questions was yes. Looking at this immaculate interior, it would be easy to overlook the work required to create this five-bedroom home. Number 31a is the lower two levels of a Georgian townhouse and, because the building is A-listed, various permissions were required before work could begin.

The property was rewired and replumbed, and new drainage was laid. Light wells were built at the front, with large iron grilles inserted into the stone patio, pulling light into the two guest bedroom suites.

The master bedroom was reconfigured to create an en-suite bathroom behind a wall of bespoke storage. This involved losing some bedroom space but it improved the proportions, while adding wardrobe space and a striking en suite. French doors were also installed here, opening onto a stone patio and the rear garden.

There was substantial structural work involved in the refurbishment, both at basement level – especially the master bedroom – and above in the new L-shaped kitchen-dining-living space. The most problematic task was removing the wall between the dining-kitchen and the snug, as this wall formed the main spine that extends up the townhouse. Ian says: “The structural work to achieve this opening was staggering.”

The kitchen-dining-living area, the master bedroom suite and the drawing room at the front were the three areas that took priority in Laura and Grant’s brief to Ian. “We both had quite a clear vision of what we wanted, and in particular with the kitchen, which Ian created exactly as I wanted,” says Laura.

Ian, Grant and Laura shared ideas via the Dropbox app, enabling Ian to take progress or product photos on his iPhone and share them with the couple, which in turn allowed Grant and Laura to upload images for Ian to view. Between them they shared just under 4,000 photos during the whole process.

“It was a fantastic way to watch the photographic progress and milestones that Ian was achieving,” Laura agrees. The couple, who have a nine-month-old son, Henry, and a daughter due in May, scoured online sites and magazines for design ideas, plus, as Laura says: “Living in a city full of amazing interiors and architecture gave us inspiration.”

The kitchen was inspired by photos the couple spotted online, and reproduced in detail, down to the handles and chrome edging under the worktop, by bespoke kitchen designers Murray & Murray. The cabinetry is painted in Strong White by Farrow & Ball (the company’s paints were used throughout), and contrasted with dark walnut cabinetry and Ceasarstone Misty Carrara worktops, while retaining the original range was part of the planning consent.

The bold chrome pendants came from Marks & Spencer, and the couple added individual touches, as with the colourful mismatched dining chairs from Annie Mo’s. Laura says: “Opening up the kitchen and snug absolutely made it for us; it’s our favourite room.”

In the drawing room the couple opted for a more traditional feel, and the surprise here is that the period detailing isn’t in fact period. The cornicing, dado panelling and ceiling rose were all added by Ian, and are complemented by decorative cast iron radiators and distressed oak flooring, while the bespoke leather button-backed wall panels were an inspired addition.

Technology was also important. Grant specified 3D flatscreen TVs for the main rooms along with a high-specification integrated sound system, all requiring extensive sound insulation. Laura explains: “We wanted to retain appropriate period detailing while including as many modern gadgets and features as possible to create a luxurious individuality.”

Coloured lighting plays its part in adding drama. In the wet room on the upper level, it adds a vibrant glow to the honey-toned porcelain tiling and mosaics, and again in the guest bedroom on this floor where the lighting in the dressing area punctuates the monochromatic palette.

The lighting is used to best effect, however, in the master suite. At one end of the space, a raised walk-in shower featuring a giant rain shower and body jets is bathed in blue light, while the other end of the space features a Victoria & Albert Amalfi contemporary slipper bath with a floor-standing Crosswater Love Me tap. The ceiling above is peppered with colour-changing fibre optics, creating a beautifully soft effect. The walls are lined in giant-profile Porcelanosa tiles that look like marble, while the bespoke walnut cabinetry is a continuation from the adjoining bedroom.

Ian readily credits his clients for having the vision to go for such bold ideas, and for challenging him at times, as when Laura suggested using Cole & Son’s Orchid print wallpaper in the hallway upstairs and down. She says: “I think it’s fun, vibrant and welcoming, which is hopefully how our home feels to visitors.”

And, in the end, distance wasn’t an issue. “There are always challenges when you’re not on site, in decision making and visualising where everything had to go, but modern technology allowed us to make those decisions,” Laura says. “And Ian really went above and beyond the call of duty to make this into a fantastic home.”

• Offers over £945,000; contact Rettie & Co (0131-220 4160, www.rettie.co.uk)

SI Construction (0131-332 1002, www.siconstruction.co.uk)

WITH backgrounds in fashion, it is no surprise that John and Marie Owen’s property is one that sets trends rather than follows them.

The couple bought their five-bedroom bungalow in Eskbank ten years ago, attracted by the layout and its potential, as Marie recalls: “The house had been well looked after and was very clean, but dated. It also had a lovely feel and an almost circular layout, which we really liked and we knew we could do a lot with it.”

When John and Marie moved in with their baby, Grace, they wasted no time in starting their renovation plans. “Over a period of two years we did the serious work such as replacing the windows, taking out the back boiler, installing new central heating and upgrading the bathroom, but we lived with the threadbare carpets and the woodchip décor which, looking back, was pretty horrendous. We then found out I was expecting twins so we put the plans for the loft conversion on hold and put in a new kitchen and added a conservatory. When the twins (Ralph and Lily) were two we did the loft conversion, which gave us another two bedrooms, a bathroom and an office. Apart from when the builders were knocking through the staircase, we lived in the house through all the work. When I look back and remember being heavily pregnant with no kitchen, and foundations for a conservatory in the back garden I do sometimes wonder how we did it.”

Today, according to Marie, the only things that are still original in the house are a few internal doors. The avocado bathroom suite is long gone. What this house has now is a fabulous, bold interior. “The décor is probably a reflection of my entire life – busy and a lot going on,” says Marie. “If I see something I like I buy it and then make it work. For instance, I went to TK Maxx to buy a photo frame. I saw the Union Jack chest of drawers and really liked it. I didn’t have a place for it but I bought it anyway. For larger pieces of furniture or wallpaper I probably take a little more time before I spend, but I still just go for what I like. I don’t really have colour schemes or an end result in mind, for me the rooms just grow.”

The colour scheme is bold, but it’s also flexible. A white backdrop dominates many of the rooms with just one feature wall adding interest, while it is the accessories that do all the talking.

“I do like things that clash – matching takes time which I don’t have a lot of. I really enjoy being in people’s houses who have a mix of things and everything has history – that’s what this house is like. It’s a mixture of pieces from different periods of our lives.”

The couple aren’t afraid of their critics either. “The leopard-print chest of drawers provoked great hilarity in my office, being named the most hideous piece of furniture ever seen,” Marie says. And even the woodburning stove prompts mixed results, such as ‘why didn’t you put in something more modern?’ But John had one in a previous house and we really liked it and we like the effect of having it on so we just looked for one in a design we liked.

John is a fashion photographer and Marie runs Location Scotland, sourcing locations for fashion and advertising photo shoots. “I do think we take inspiration from our work and it perhaps makes us a bit more risqué in our choices. We see a lot of styles and designs that push the boundaries and that perhaps shouldn’t work but do, and that gives us the impetus to have a go ourselves.”

The dining room is a perfect example. “I’ve always wanted a dark dining room and if didn’t work I thought, I can change it. I’m not scared to try things – you can always redecorate. Although, I really wasn’t looking for a black glass table and pink chairs as I already had dining furniture, but when I saw them in Martin & Frost they looked really good together so it was another instance of making it work.”

The kitchen is in complete contrast to the dramatic dining room with a gentle, country design in calming cream with pretty printed Laura Ashley wallpaper. I saw the kitchen in Ikea and instantly liked it. The fashion was for white, high gloss but that just wasn’t me.”

This house certainly reflects the personalities within it but now the Owens are ready to take on another project, as Marie explains: “There’s not much else we can do in the house and because of the company I run and the shoots we handle, we’ve always had a dream that we could find a house that we could use as a home and as a location for photo shoots. So, we’re taking the plunge and seeing what’s out there. I imagine we’ll find something by accident, just like most of my purchases!”

• This house will be coming on the market soon. Offers over £410,000. For further details contact Simpson and Marwick (0131-525 8600)

Location Scotland (www.locationscotland.com)

COLOUR, print and embellishment are Holly Fulton’s strengths, and she made sure to play to them with a collection which focused on what she does best.

As she prepared this collection, the Edinburgh designer envisaged a young Lady Chatterley falling for the gardener, using her home city’s Royal Botanic Gardens as inspiration.

Boxy jackets, simple shift dresses and classic tailoring were the canvas for accomplished prints which worked in harmony with the lines of the clothes. The architectural hothouse windows of the Botanics could be seen on a fuchsia coat while layers of 3D butterflies clamoured for space on the neckline of a cocktail dress.

Vibrant knitwear - the result of an ongoing collaboration with Caerlee Mills in Innerleithen - saw silhouettes of palm fronds stretching across beautiful hand intarsia cashmere sweaters, while chunky embellishment clustered subtly on necklines.

A palette of kitschy turquoise and hot pink with black accents was signature Fulton, but there was plenty of evidence of experimentation. A simple black dress featured gold art nouveau-esque forms snaking down it, while the butterfly print flitting up the legs of a pair of classic black trousers was pared-back and elegant.

Examine just one look from this collection, and it’s immediately apparent that it’s Fulton’s work. Her signature is strong, and could prove suffocating and repetitive in the wrong hands. However this collection proves that Fulton is always capable of exploring the new while staying true to her brand.

I HAVE been trying to streamline our home life – again – in a bid to make it to the car in the morning without returning to the house half a dozen times. Progress to date has involved clearing the passageway to our garage, where coats, boots and shoes converge, assaulting me from all sides as I attempt to squeeze past.

This area is now working well, largely because I’ve chucked everyone else’s stuff out and am using it as my own personal coat-donning space.

I got rid of all the too-small, too-old, too-ugly coats and cagouls, as well as the bargain buys that never were, and released the lovely Hang-It-All coat rack in the hall from several layers. I found a basket for hats, scarves and gloves, and stuck that by the front door so that:

a) I would never send either of my children out in the cold again without a hat, scarf or second glove, thus reducing the bad mother marks that rack up against me on a daily basis.

b) We would never be late for school again because we were looking for a hat, scarf or second glove. (Another bad mother mark rubbed out.)

c) My children would be wearing coats instead of looking at me blankly as I screech, “Where are your coats?” at 8.30 every morning.

What are the chances we make it a week without a single un-motherly screech?

This week we take a look at the beautifully bold Eskbank home that belongs to John and Marie Owen on page 4. Both working in creative industries, they have the knack of making unique and unusual pieces work together in their fabulously stylish home. We also get the story behind the long-distance renovation of an A-listed Edinburgh Georgian apartment, which turned a dark, dingy space into an immaculate home. See for yourself on page 10. And on page 14, shoe designer Bernie Hurst reveals how an excess baggage charge led to business inspiration.

When it comes to London Fashion Week, Burberry is the biggie. It’s the collection that grabs the headlines, thanks to an A-list front row and a show that’s as much theatre as it is fashion.

As guests took to the cream carpet at the specially-constructed marquee at Kensington Gardens on Monday, a crowd of onlookers seven-deep clamoured to catch a glimpse of the celebrities heading for the front row.

Eddie Redmayne, Clemence Poesy, Mario Testino, Kate Bosworth, Will-i-am, Alexa Chung and Samantha Cameron were all present for a show that was pure performance.

Burberry has found its niche offering a polished, quintessentially British aesthetic which appeals to a global market, and this was a collection which played to that with a ‘town & field’ theme.

Creative director Christopher Bailey delivered country living with a city sheen; models wore tweed flat caps and carried umbrellas with duck head handles. A palette of neutrals, plums, greens and mustards was distinctly autumnal, as were the herringbone tweeds and horse blankets, manipulated into structured coats and bulky bomber jackets.

As ever at Burberry, the outerwear was the star attraction. Jackets were cropped or featured extreme peplums splaying out from fitted waists. The final look saw model Cara Delevingne in a striking deep plum quilted princess coat which drew gasps from audience members.

Bailey is a fan of a spoiled rich-kid vibe with a tousled edge, and as such, structured cord pencil skirts were paired with T-shirts with cutesy owls scrawled across them.

There was plenty here to satisfy the English eccentric looking to blow her inheritance. Knits were oversized and cosy, white blouses voluminous, and tweedy looks were softened with ruched bow belts.

References to the countryside were frequent and overt, taking the form of bellow pockets on blazers or gold fox heads on belts and bags. By the time the last model exited the runway The assembled audience might have been happy to skip summer altogether and head straight for September, such was the autumnal mood.

We got our wish; a storm brewed over the sound system and to the soundtrack of thunderclaps, staged ’rain’ fell on the transparent tent above our heads. Models re-emerged carrying umbrellas as glitter tumbled from the ceiling. Even US Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour smiled.

Burberry doesn’t tend to break new ground but it certainly sells clothes, and this collection was available to buy on their website instantly. Fashion fans watched the show online around the world and it was beamed into Terminal 5 at Heathrow. Twitter went wild the moment it finished with fans eager to buy into the Burberry dream of youth and privilege, and the brand cemented itself as the biggest, splashiest draw at London Fashion Week.

A FALL in direct flights to Scotland could reduce the number of export deals and discourage inward foreign investment, a government adviser has warned.

Crawford Beveridge, chairman of the Scottish Government’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), told MSPs a lack of direct air routes is forcing many executives to make an extra journey via London, potentially

deterring them from doing business in Scotland.

Mr Beveridge, a former chief executive of Scottish Enterprise, appeared before members of Holyrood’s Economy Committee, alongside fellow CEA member Professor Andrew Hughes Hallett.

The pair answered questions from MSPs on the council’s work, following its first formal meeting last month since being relaunched by the First Minister in November 2011.

The council consists of academics, economists and entrepreneurs whose role is to give economic advice to ministers.

It has been given a specific agenda to look at jobs, economic recovery, internationalisation and “economic levers”.

Committee member and SNP MSP Chic Brodie raised the issue of direct flights during a discussion on internationalisation and the council’s advice on increasing exports and inward investment.

Mr Brodie referred to airline Ryanair’s recent announcement that it will be axing five routes from Edinburgh Airport.

He said: “I was just wondering what advice had been given to the Government in terms of having more direct connectivity.”

Mr Beveridge replied: “I think you’re spot on there. One of the things that makes it hard to even get people to come and visit us is the difficulty in getting here.

“When you’ve already made the 12-hour flight from Beijing or California, or anywhere else, into London and then you have to hang around for another two or three hours to get that last flight up here, it’s a problem.

“If there are easier places to get to, many executives will just go to the easier places. It’s just too hard to make this extra dimension.”

The Scottish Government has already set out ambitions to improve international air connections with key global economies such as China.

Mr Beveridge said it is “very important” to consider measures such as funding airlines to set up direct flights, in order to see if a market can be established.

THE PRIME Minister today accused the Scottish National Party of “running away” from an independence referendum.

Speaking in the Commons, David Cameron spoke out as he was grilled on possible new powers which could be granted to Holyrood if it rejected splitting the UK.

SNP MP Angus MacNeil (Nahh-Eileanan an Iar) told Mr Cameron: “Last week in Edinburgh you said there were more powers on the table for Scotland, but couldn’t name any.

“A few months ago you go mocked the idea of Scotland controlling its own oil wells. Can you name one power you have on your mind in this latest u-turn?”

But speaking at Prime Minister’s Questions, Mr Cameron hit back: “I didn’t think the Scottish National Party favoured devolution; I thought you favoured separation.

“Yet as soon as you’re offered a referendum that gives you the chance to put that in front of the Scottish people, you start running away.”

Labour MP Frank Field called for MPs to debate English devolution so voters south of the border could “gain equity with other countries of the United Kingdom”.

The Birkenhead MP asked the Prime Minister: “Will you devote as much time to facing up to the grievances the English feel from the current proposals of devolution as you will be giving to considering new proposals of devolution for Scotland?”

But Mr Cameron said experts were examining the “West Lothian question”, named after the constituency of Labour’s Tam Dalyell, who first raised the issue of Scottish MPs voting on issues which affect only English electors.

“We want to make sure devolution works for everyone in the UK,” said the PM.

“The UK has been an incredibly successful partnership between all its members and far from wanting to appeal to English people to nurture a grievance they feel, I want to appeal to my fellow Englishmen to say, ‘This has been a great partnership for Scotland and a great partnership for England too’.

“Of course Scotland must make its choice, but we hope Scotland will choose to remain in this partnership that has done so well for the last 300 years.”

SCOTLAND’S Information Commissioner has accused a health board of “perhaps the most serious catalogue of failings” for not handing over more than 50 reports on serious incidents at its hospitals.

Rab Wilson, who worked for Ayrshire and Arran NHS Board, asked it for copies of all “critical incident” reviews and significant “adverse event” reports.

The reports are used as a way of investigating incidents, improving safety and patient care and minimising risk.

Mr Wilson turned to Information Commissioner Kevin Dunion after the health board told him it did not hold any critical incident review plans, apart from one it had already given to him.

But when the commissioner investigated, 56 such plans were found on a computer drive.

The NHS board has now been ordered to provide Mr Wilson with a copy of the reports.

A report on the case said: “This decision involves perhaps the most serious catalogue of failings to search for and find information within the scope of a request that the commissioner has ever had to deal with.

“Claims were made to the applicant which turned out to be wrong. Prior assurances were given to the commissioner which turned out to be unjustified. Explanations for the failings were given in the course of this investigation which cannot be relied upon.”

It added: “At the very least, this constitutes a significant failure of records management. Given the nature of the information involving critical incidents and significant adverse events, which needs to be shared professionally for lessons to be learned and for the public to be reassured that action has been taken in response, the information failings may point to wider governance issues which have to be addressed.”

Mr Dunion told BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland: “In the course of the investigation we discovered that over 50 action plans which we had been assured by the health board no longer existed, or were no longer held, were indeed held by them and had not been discovered despite supposedly exhaustive searches and assurances given to my investigators that they could not be found.”

Mr Dunion, who stands down as Scottish Information Commissioner tomorrow, said that when he persisted with his investigation the health board became “extremely irritated”.

He said there was a “degree of incompetence and ignorance” at the health board, “which is not at all satisfactory” but Mr Dunion said the case did not involve a “deliberate cover-up”.

But he added: “Nevertheless I still haven’t got any satisfactory explanation as to why so many reports could not be found by the health authority, despite their searches.”

The commissioner said some authorities needed to “wake up and realise that we’re now seven years into the FoI (freedom of information) regime in Scotland”.

He added: “This is my last-ever decision. I’m leaving office tomorrow. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved so far but clearly there are still instances where authorities haven’t recognised that things like records management and recovering information and making it available promptly when requested is what they are expected to do.”

Battery life is the elephant in the room among iPhone users.

We all know it, but no one wants to say it out loud. Many Apple fans are far too proud of the other features of the phone to admit it has flaws.

Far too often you’ll find yourself cursing the short battery life of the iPhone, letting you down when you need it most. By the time you’ve logged on to check the news in the morning (or whatever website you ogle on the bus, I won’t judge), checked your emails and had a peek at Twitter, you’ll notice your freshly charged battery power has already taken a dent and you’re not even at work yet. Worse still, if you’ve used your iPhone a fair bit throughout the day you could find it needs charging nightly.

The Mophie Juice Pack Plus aims to correct the battery weakness in the iPhone while protecting it from the odd knocks and impacts daily life can dish out.

A surrounding case which plugs into the bottom of the phone, the Juice Pack Plus provides an additional battery, one which you can charge at the same time. Phone out of power? No problem, flip a discrete switch on the side of the case and the Juice Pack Plus starts charging your phone and in a short while you’ll be back up to strength. Switch it off and you can add another charge when you need it later.

The case itself is sturdy - covering the vulnerable corners where some other cases leave the device open to disaster. A series of buttons and small holes still allow you access to volume, headphone, standby, and silent mode functions.

You can even tell how much charge you’ve got left in the case, pressing a button on the bottom lights up four LEDs to give you an idea how much you’ve used. I swithced on the Juice Pack’s charge when phone power dipped to 35% and found that even after restoring full power, the LEDS showed around three quarters of charge left to give.

The Mophie Juice Pack Plus can be an invaulable tool for both power and safety, but perhaps is of most use to those set on outdoor persuits. A few days away from a power point, hiking through the hostile outdoor environment of the Highlands in rough weather could be the ideal situation for the juice pack. It’s difficult to turn down added protection and a extended battery life.

If there’s one small drawback it’s the added size it gives to your iPhone. There are a couple of power-boosting cases out there but generally they are all cumbersome. If you want something paper-thin that holds a charge and protects your phone then you’ll have to wait a few years for technology to develop. The Juice Pack isn’t too bad as far as size and weight goes but it takes a little getting used to.

But the real difference here is price. Costing around half as much as some other iPhone power cases, you could do a lot worse than the Mophie Juice Pack Plus.

• The Mophie Juice Pack Plus can be found at {http://www.amazon.co.uk|amazon.co.uk|amazon.co.uk}, {http://mophie.com|mophie.com|mophie.com} or in Apple stores.

]]> 1.2131754 Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:55:49 +0000 http://www.scotsman.com/rangers_administration_craig_whyte_s_promise_to_step_aside_and_hand_rangers_over_to_fans_ludicrous_1_2130271

CRAIG Whyte’s promise to stand down as Rangers chairman and consider handing over control to fans has been branded “ludicrous” by supporters angered by new revelations over the financing of the deal that has plunged the Ibrox club into crisis.

Mr Whyte made his promise in an extraordinary and lengthy statement, which attempted to defend his controversial reign at the beleaguered club he bought from Sir David Murray in May last year.

However, his attempt to mollify the fans failed as – contrary to previous denials – he admitted that money from Ticketus, the London-based company that paid for the rights to sell three years’ worth of season tickets, was used to “complete the takeover”.

Minutes after Mr Whyte’s statement, this was explained by the club’s administrators, who revealed the £24 million received from Ticketus was, in fact, used to clear an £18m debt with Lloyds Banking Group inherited from Sir David.

In a further development, the Scottish Football Association has appointed Lord Nimmo Smith, one of five judges who heard the appeal of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, as chairman of a new independent inquiry into Rangers, which is also the subject of an investigation by Strathclyde Police.

In his statement that provoked the fans’ hostility, Mr Whyte said he was “personally on the line for £27.5m in guarantees and cash” to Ticketus.

He has criticised HMRC, who he claims were “simply determined to make an example of Rangers”.

And he claimed an offer to pay back outstanding VAT and PAYE was made in the weeks before the club entered administration, but rejected by the HMRC.

However, fans have hit out at Mr Whyte, calling the statement “ludicrous” and saying his offer to gift them shares is a “dead weight around our necks”.

HMRC declined to comment, but sources at the UK government’s tax arm said they were shocked by the statement.

An insider said: “This is money from groundsmen, cleaners, players and, of course, fans that they have decided not to pay.

“PAYE, VAT – that’s not their money. They’re allowed to hold on to it for a certain period of time – VAT for three months, PAYE for 14 or 15 days – then they have to pay up.”

Mr Whyte said he would be in favour of a fans’ foundation taking over the club, and would gift them the majority of his shares, but only once the club was breaking even.

“If I can succeed in coming through this administration process I am very keen on the idea of gifting the majority of my shares to a supporters’ foundation,” he said.

“It makes a lot of sense, but fan ownership would work only after the current process is completed, because the club has to get into a position where it is running at break-even in order for that prospect to be viable.”

Mr Whyte said he was in “active discussion with a number of potential bidders and investors”, but any potential takeover would depend on a resolution to the “big tax case” – the disputed employee benefit trusts (EBT) – which he believed could cost the club £75m if the tribunal decision went in favour of the HMRC.

Mr Whyte acknowledged there was a lot of “raw emotion” about the club’s current plight and admitted there were times he wished he had never launched last May’s takeover bid.

“I will not continue as Rangers chairman post-restructuring,” he revealed. “I will admit there have been times when I have wished that I had never entertained the idea of taking over Rangers.

“But I am a Rangers fan, and, like other Rangers fans, I don’t do walking way.”

However, if that use of what has become a Rangers’ battle cry was aimed at currying favour with fans, it fell on deaf ears,

Mark Dingwall, director of the Rangers Supporters Trust, said: “It’s a ludicrous statement. He purchased the club with the fans’ season ticket money, so it is not his to give.

“He has lumbered the club with the potential liability of £50m which is rightly David Murray’s, so his gift is in fact a dead weight around our necks.

“All of these deals are the fruits of a poisoned tree.”

Mr Dingwall added: “His credibility is now shot to pieces. This statement is ludicrous from start to finish, contradictory and misleading.”

Earlier this month, Mr Whyte was asked by our sister paper, Scotland on Sunday, if he had used the Ticketus money to buy the club.

He replied: “The sale of the club went through prior to the arrangement for the tickets. It’s absurd. Do you think Lloyds and Sir David Murray would have given me the time of day if I hadn’t proved I had the money?”

However, in his statement on Tuesday afternoon, Mr Whyte said: “The arrangement with Ticketus was originally to provide additional working capital.

“My corporate advisers came to me with the proposition that it was entirely possible, as well as highly beneficial, to negotiate a deal with Ticketus that would allow us to complete the takeover and maximise working capital for the club’s day-to-day business.”

He added: “The only person at risk from the deal is me personally, because I gave Ticketus personal and corporate guarantees underwriting their investment.The club and the fans are fully protected.

“In terms of exposure, I am personally on the line for £27.5m in guarantees and cash.”

Mr Whyte admitted he faced “huge financial losses personally if the restructuring fails or is not allowed to proceed”. He said: “Any suggestion that I am trying to make a fast buck, or have indulged in illegal manoeuvring, is clearly ludicrous.”

He also revealed that only half of the £9m demanded by HMRC was unpaid PAYE and VAT, with the other half relating to a disputed debt he inherited following the takeover in May, last year, which at the time was reported to be £2.8m, but appears to have grown by more than 50 per cent.

Mr Whyte said: “It is simply not true to say that Rangers or I have reneged on paying these liabilities since the takeover. The truth is that around £4.4m of the £9m demand is, in fact, the ‘wee tax case’, including penalties, and which is in dispute.”

The club attempted to strike a deal for PAYE and VAT in the weeks before it entered administration, but refused to settle the ‘wee tax case’ at the same time.

“We offered to pay £2.5m of the PAYE and VAT up front, with the remainder at £500,000 a month, but HMRC flatly rejected that,” he said.

The outcome of the disputed EBT will be decided at tribunal, but Mr Whyte expects to lose and had proposed a payment plan which, he said, HMRC also rejected.

“We wanted HMRC to confirm that they would accept repayments of £2.5 million a year if we lost. But again they said, ‘No’.”

He added: “Anyone who pretends that this has somehow been my goal is either a fool or has a particularly sharp axe to grind.”

Meanwhile, Duff and Phelps said they were still looking into where the rest of the Ticketus money had gone.

FOR more than 85 years it has been the exclusive men-only club for students at Scotland’s oldest university. But a late-night coup by two members of the Kate Kennedy Club at St Andrews University means women will finally be allowed to join in.

In a move which has caused ructions in the normally sedate surroundings of Prince William’s alma mater, a splinter group has formed the Kate Kennedy Fellowship.

The new group, which has the backing of the university’s principal, Professor Louise Richardson, will admit female members, breaking a tradition which goes back to 1926.

Set up to honour the niece of Bishop Kennedy, a founder member of the university, the Kate Kennedy Club has its roots in the 15th century.

It fell into disuse but was revived in 1926. It is most famous for its annual procession in which students dress as historical characters connected with the town, such as Mary Queen of Scots, John Knox and Andrew Carnegie. A male first-year student is selected on the morning of the event to dress as Kate.

Prof Richardson withdrew official support for the club and its procession in 2009, e-mailing all students to tell them its values were “completely at odds” with those of the university.

Earlier that year, she became the first principal of the university not to be offered an invitation to join the Royal and Ancient Golf Club due to her gender.

Yesterday, she once again wrote to students telling them the new Kate Kennedy Fellowship was “altogether more in keeping” with the university’s ethos. She also praised the two male students, Sunny Moodie and Pat Mathewson, who broke away to form the new club.

Prof Richardson said: “The traditions around Kate Kennedy have been a long-standing part of the lore of this university and the annual procession has been a highlight of the town’s activities.

“Three years ago, shortly after my arrival in St Andrews, I withdrew university patronage from the Kate Kennedy Club on the grounds that all members of our community should have equal access to the traditions of Kate Kennedy, that no group has a right to arrogate to themselves the role as sole preserve of the university’s traditions, and that in this day and age we cannot tolerate discrimination against women.”

Prof Richardson said she was “delighted” to endorse the new group, which will elect a core group of 36 fellows, and said she looked forward to the “best and most inclusive Kate Kennedy Procession ever”.

University insiders said they now expected the existing Kate Kennedy Club to die a “slow death”, with the support of life members and the right to host the procession set to pass to the new organisation.

Mr Mathewson, one of the students who broke away to form the new club, said: “All students will be members of the Kate Kennedy Fellowship. We will also appoint a number of Kate Kennedy fellows from the student body.

“They will be tasked with the practical work of organising the Kate Kennedy Procession, the opening and May balls and the numerous other charity and volunteering opportunities that are such an important part of the Kate Kennedy tradition. Every student is invited to apply.”

In a statement, members of the existing club said: “We have always been open to discussing our membership and will continue to consider these proposals. We look forward to welcoming the town and students to the Kate Kennedy Procession on 14 April and the May Ball on 6 May.

“We hope the university will not attempt to prevent us from putting on these special events that the townsfolk and students have enjoyed for over 85 years.”

History shows that Scots were once the driving force behind unionism and all that partnership with our neighbours had to offer, writes Allan Massie

A little learning is a dangerous thing;/ Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.” Alexander Pope’s warning may certainly be applied to history. There’s a well-known rugby story which points this up. In the dressing-room before a Calcutta Cup match, the Scottish captain, Peter Brown, was delivering a blood-stirring speech. Bannockburn featured. Then he said: “Remember Culloden.” His brother Gordon intervened: “I don’t think we did very well that day.” Peter quickly recovered, “but at least after Culloden we didn’t have to go and have dinner with the b*******”.

Well, of course, you see the misconception. For most of Lowland Scotland, Culloden wasn’t a disaster, it was a success. Bells were rung in celebration. The victorious general, George II’s younger son, the Duke of Cumberland, was given the freedom of Glasgow and elected chancellor of Alex Salmond’s University of St Andrews. The Reverend Alexander Carlyle hoped that “Britain would never again be in danger of being overrun by such a despicable enemy”. Yet in popular memory Culloden has been transformed into a Scottish defeat and disaster – partly, of course, because of the brutal subjugation of the Highlands which followed.

Jacobitism was both Scottish and English, though active Jacobites were more numerous in Scotland. It is not, however, only the gates of Traquair House which remain closed until a Stuart monarch is on the throne again; so too are the gates of Trinity College, Oxford. But, as the response at the time of Lowland Scotland shows, Whiggism, which was unionist, was Scottish and English, too. Subsequently, tenderness for the Jacobite cause developed, but only when it was lost, and because the Jacobites had the best songs.

The Liberal prime minister Lord Rosebery opined that every Scot is at least half a Jacobite at heart. So we are; Jacobitism has become proto-nationalism, but for many the other half of the heart is Whig or unionist.

Our history is complicated, and our emotional history even more so. David Cameron came to Edinburgh last week and gave a speech extolling the virtues of the Union. It was one of the best speeches a unionist politician has given for a long time, partly because he had the sense to admit that an independent Scotland was quite feasible, and eschewed the stupid and offensive scare-mongering in which so many unionist politicians have indulged.

David William Donald Cameron, educated at Eton and Oxford, is an Englishman, even, one may say, a typical one, being of Scottish descent; his clan chief, Donald Cameron of Lochiel, was one of the first to rally to Prince Charles Edward in 1745, even if he did so reluctantly and doubtfully. So there’s a streak of Jacobitism in the Prime Minister’s heritage.

In one way, unionism and nationalism are clean opposites. Yet equally evidently Scotland today is the product of 300 years of the Union – for better or worse. During the 1997 general election, I spent an afternoon with Mr Salmond. We found ourselves agreeing that the 19th century was the most remarkable and, in some respects, the most successful in Scotland’s long and tangled history. This agreement didn’t make me a political nationalist or Mr Salmond a unionist. His position was that the Union had served Scotland well then, but no longer did so. I don’t agree with his conclusion.

Yet, the matter is more complicated. The 19th century was certainly unionist. As Paul Scott has remarked, explaining away Sir Walter Scott’s commitment to the Union, this was the only time in our history when breaking the Union seemed unthinkable. Yet 19th century Scottish unionism was also nationalist, jealously protective of Scottish interests within the Union and of the distinct Scottish identity. It was in this century of unquestioning unionism that the cult of Wallace and Bruce took off, statues of the heroes of the Wars of Independence being erected all over the country. It was recognised – proudly – that the wars had ensured that Scotland was never a conquered country like Ireland, but had embraced Union as a partner, not a dependent.

It is true that the Treaty of Union was unpopular in much of Scotland. People feared the economic consequences. Only when these proved after some 30 years to be happy rather than unhappy were people reconciled to the Union, agreeing with Scott’s Bailie Nicol Jarvie that, though “there is naething sae gude on this side o’ Time but it might hae been better”, the Union , by opening “a way west awa’ yonder” was making Glasgow and Scotland flourish. In any case, despite the tendency of some nationalists today to regard the men who made the Union as traitors, it is another of the complications of our history, that, for the century before 1707, it was Scots who advocated Union, and English politicians who weren’t interested.

For many all this history is irrelevant, except perhaps when they cherry-pick it, usually resentfully. We are where we are, they say, and the Union no longer serves our interests, even if it once did so. This is a tenable argument. Nevertheless it ignores the fact that the Union is to a great extent a Scottish creation and one to which many of us remain strongly attached.

Scots have contributed much to it, and have given it much of its tone. We may grumble about the inadequacies of BBC Scotland, but even today the character of the BBC itself derives from its first director-general, John Reith, a Scots Presbyterian. Our universities, even those such as Edinburgh and St Andrew which draw many students from England, are Scottish institutions in the way that Oxford and Cambridge are not English ones. We talk of the London media; yet newspaper offices are stuffed to the gills with Scots. It’s only a few years since English commentators complained about the “Scottish Raj” which was dominating England, and the Aberdonian Michael Gove, who is remodelling the English schools system is evidently inspired by the Scottish tradition of “the Democratic Intellect”. History has bound us together. Tearing the Union apart might be more painful than many who wish to do so imagine.

Parliament has to spell out safeguards to ensure merger of Scottish forces protects key freedoms, writes Jim Gallagher

Getting the governance of policing right is unusually important. The police hold the coercive power of the state over citizens and have a lot of discretion in its exercise. So they must be held to account, and be subject to democratic scrutiny and influence.

We must avoid the risk that this coercive power can be directed for political purposes. That’s why oversight of the police is complex. Powers and discretion are vested in constables as officers of the law. They are answerable to the courts, and can be directed by the prosecutor, but not by local or national politicians.

Great Britain also has a tradition that policing is a local service, enforcing the law of the land, and not a national agency enforcing the will of government. Of course, central government has always taken an interest in policing, especially in recent decades. But Scottish policing has rested on a tripartite model, in which responsibility is distributed between central and local government and chief constables.

It’s easy to see what’s wrong with the tripartite system. It’s not easy to see who is in charge, and change is difficult to push through. Police boards have not always been strong supervisors of forces. It’s pretty clear that St Andrew’s House thinks chief constables are not sufficiently controlled and directed.

The relative weakness of police boards is a problem, but they have been getting better. Abolishing them may make it easier to push through change; and may subject a chief constable to greater control. But more control and direction carries risks. The reform bill, currently before MSPs, could have stronger safeguards against such risks. These could be built on the role of local councils and the operational independence of the chief constable.

Local control has provided a safeguard against central state control. But under the bill, policing will no longer be a local government function. Councils will have some replacement powers, but much weaker than at present. The commander for each council area must submit a local policing plan to the council. The police must also participate in community planning, which is led by the council. These things already happen in practice now. So this is hardly greater local accountability.

Alternatively, a single force could still be part of local government. Rather than a quango appointed by ministers, the new Police Authority could be a local government body, consisting of elected councillors. Ministers could have the powers over funding and appointments as they do now. If the objective is to cut costs by reducing the overheads of eight forces, this approach might deliver it just as well.

Financial control counts for a great deal. Under the bill this will be centralised with ministers. Apparently local councils will be able to supplement police budgets, but will not be able to decide to spend less – say to have fewer police officers in their area and more youth workers, and transfer resources accordingly. Even if councils are no longer to run policing, there is no obvious reason to forbid them this choice.

Those who sentence criminals, prosecute or investigate crime, need appropriate independence. Judges are wholly independent of government. The Lord Advocate prosecutes “independently of any other person”. Chief constables have operational independence. The local authority employs but cannot direct them, and ministers cannot direct the council, still less the chief constable.

The bill makes a valiant attempt to create a framework of legal powers to allow this to continue. The chief constable is “responsible” for the policing of Scotland and must “account to” the new Scottish Police Authority, which “maintains” the service. Plans are to be approved, alongside the budgets which ministers will set. They will also have a power to direct the Authority.

This does gather a lot of power into ministers’ hands. The most important is the power of the purse. Ministers are not afraid to exercise it. They have used it – in the absence of any specific legal power – to determine the number of police officers forces employ. If policing is to be national not local then this power will inevitably rest wholly with ministers. How many more powers do they need?

The power to appoint and dismiss is critical. The Police Authority for Scotland is to appoint the chief constable, but only with ministers’ agreement. There are also new powers for the Authority to retire senior officers. In a rare example of the legislation draftsman’s humour, the clause is entitled, “Senior officers: retirement for efficiency or effectiveness”. This need not be because the individual is inefficient or ineffective, but because the Authority thinks it would be better if he went. It could apparently be exercised to dismiss the chief constable, with ministers’ agreement, if there were a dispute about how operational responsibilities should be exercised.

Ministers also want a power to give directions to the Authority. These will not apply directly to the chief constable, but there are no limits on what they can be about – except not to a specific police operation. So they might be about numbers or deployment of staff, style of policing, or indeed dismissing senior officers.

This very wide set of powers will give ministers much more control over policing than now. I am sure they want them so they can make the police service run better, and to ensure that public services are “joined up” in pursuit of national outcomes. And, understandably, ministers always feel that they are accountable for what happens anyway, even when they have no control over the decision of an arm’s length body.

There are, however, dangers. If ministers are micro-managing, they are not exercising strategic oversight. For policing there’s also a danger of misuse. It is unlikely, but it would happen, if at all, only insidiously and gradually. It might be better to draw firmer boundaries around ministers’ powers over operational policing to be as sure as possible it doesn’t. Here are some suggestions.

l First, appointments: ministers have always approved the appointment of chief constables. When there were numerous forces this safeguarded against the risk of perverse local decisions. In practice, central government approved the short-list from which the local police board chose. This emphasised that the police authority made the choice. If this practice were followed in future, it would make it quite clear ministers were not appointing “their man” to police Scotland.

l Second, dismissal: the powers to require the chief constable to retire are broadly drawn and capable of misuse. It is not clear they are needed at all. Proper independence surely requires security in appointment unless actually “inefficient or ineffective”. Removal should require the agreement of parliament as well as ministers, as in the case of a judge.

l Third, powers of direction: These are the sort of “belt and braces” that officials love. The trousers would stay up without them, but if they remain then they must have a defined purpose. Obviously they should not extend to a specific police operation; but not to classes of operation either: for instance, policing protests against government policy. Nor should they extend to hiring or firing individuals.

l Finally, operational independence: in the past this was implicit – chief constables must be independent because there are no powers to direct them. With more centralised governance, it would be better made explicit. The Lord Advocate offers an excellent precedent: he accounts to the Scottish Parliament, but his independence is explicitly safeguarded in statute. This could work equally well for the chief constable so that he or she discharged operational responsibilities “independently of any other person”.

It’s clear that the Scottish Parliament wants a single Scottish Police Force. Let’s be sure to get its governance right.

• Jim Gallagher is a fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, visiting professor in the School of Law at Glasgow University and former head of the Scottish Justice Department.

ALL political ideas need a parent to push them to the front of class. Unfortunately, devo-max is a political orphan.

It does, to be fair, have a guardian: a Mr A Salmond. But Mr Salmond is currently busy polishing the shoes of his own offspring – Independence – and doesn’t have that much time for it.

He does want to keep devo-max alive, however; he knows independence may not make it to adulthood. So he is diligent in trying to find someone to adopt it.

For the time being, he is hoping the task will be fulfilled by something called “Civic Scotland”. But nobody knows who or what this is, least of all itself. For the time being, poor devo-max is left to wander the streets.

Last week, optimistic nationalists may have thought that David Cameron, or perhaps Alistair Darling, was preparing to offer to adopt it. First the Prime Minister said he would look again at the devolution settlement. Then, at the weekend, Mr Darling backed the principle of ensuring that the Holyrood parliament raises the money it spends. But neither will go anywhere near backing devo-max.

This is if we accept the SNP’s version of what devo-max actually is. The party defined it in its 2010 consultation paper on independence (and strangely then left out of its version earlier this year). It reads: “Under this proposal, the Scottish Parliament would, with certain exceptions, be responsible for all laws, taxes and duties in Scotland. The exceptions, which would continue to be the responsibility of the UK parliament, are defence and foreign affairs, financial regulation, monetary policy and the currency.”

Mr Cameron as near as dammit ruled this out on his visit to Edinburgh last week. In a Q&A afterwards, he said that the country needed to “get the balance right” over devolution. He talked up the need for “solidarity” across the UK. By this, he meant the continuation of fiscal transfers – so, for example, Scottish cash helps out Kent (or vice versa) when required. Talking up the benefits of the UK, he expressly mentioned “the fiscal union”. That is not devo-max.

Meanwhile, Mr Darling appeared to be backing the idea of assigning more taxes to the Scottish Government – where the block grant is gradually reduced and replaced instead by a cheque from the Inland Revenue made up of taxes collected here. That isn’t devo-max either. As one political hack has put it, it’s more like “Devo Plus Minus”.

Mr Darling conceded at the weekend this was likely to get “complicated”. Given this, the pro-Union cause is now keen to focus attention back onto the main question around independence. But having let the devo-more genie out of the box, they may now need to find it a new one. Under Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrats are holding their own commission into more powers. The talk is that this could now develop into a new cross-party group. Might Devo Max/More/Plus soon have a home after all?

I RECENTLY moved house. So recently in fact, that I have only just finished unpacking all the boxes. By which I mean it was actually three months ago and if I hadn’t had house guests staying last weekend I’d probably have left it another three months, but don’t judge me.

You know you’ve done it too. To be fair, I did make a decent stab at the majority of the packing cases in the first fortnight. Apart from the ones sporting ominous labels such as “hall cupboard miscellany” and “old cat beds”, I made quick work of all the essentials, not least because there is nothing worse than sitting on a cushionless sofa in a new house a month after you’ve moved in, staring at a bare wall and wondering if you’ll ever see your cheese grater again.

But there were some boxes that defeated me. Namely, the ones with the label “books”. They sounded harmless enough, and indeed, serried in their bookshelved ranks in my old pad, they looked fairly harmless too. But I was barely half an Ikea Billy bookcase worth’s into the packing process before I realised that books were going to be my bête noire.

I have hundreds of books. Thousands, possibly. In my teens and twenties, I perused the shelves of bookstores as though they were Tiffany & Co – swooning over the latest Anne Tyler novel as if it were a string of yellow diamonds. As the majority of those shops shut down I switched much of my habit online, with an Amazon account that would have rivalled a celebrity’s cocaine habit for sheer use and abuse.

I have forgone new outfits to buy books, and cancelled dates to read them. I have haggled over rare editions, tracked down long out of print tomes and even rearranged my living room around the colours of my book spines. I am, in short, a book addict.

So it may come as something of a shock to discover that I am now the proud owner of a Kindle. Strictly speaking, I am the owner of an iPad with a Kindle App, but you will no doubt get the idea when I tell you that since I bought it a month ago, I haven’t read a book – but I have read five novels electronically.

Julia Donaldson, the wonderful author of the Gruffalo series of books for children, and the current Children’s Laureate, would certainly have something to say about this.

Recently Donaldson opined on the thorny issue of library closures across Scotland. “People are kidding themselves,” she said. “If they think adults will download books to their Kindles if they haven’t got the reading bug as children.”

She’s right of course. My love for books was born out of old, much thumbed copies of Grimms Fairy Tales and Watership Down at my local library, but as an adult, I’m starting to feel there is a place for both. Friends have looked at me askance when I tell them I have succumbed to the joys of iBooks. “Oooh, you’ve got an iPad,” soon turns to “Emma, I’m disappointed in you”, but the truth is, there is a happy medium.

Up in the eaves of my house sit boxes of books (I may have elongated the truth when I said they were all completely unpacked), puffed up there by increasingly crest-fallen removal men, that I will never read again, some of which I have never read in the first place, and all of which I have no use for. I will take them to my local charity shop at some point, although how many of them will survive the dog-eared test is debatable.

Meanwhile on my iPad, I have a copy of an out of print book I have been trying to get hold of for years sitting waiting to be read. If I decide I don’t fancy it half way through I can simply press the delete button without troubling anything more than my little finger. There is a freedom to reading via a Kindle or a Tablet that hasmade me explore several authors, books and genres that I would usually ignore. It is no exaggeration to say that since I bought it, I have read more books than I did in the previous three months put together.

None of which means to say I will never buy another book, nor that children should have to miss out on library visits because Mummy might one day buy them a Kindle. Libraries are a crucial part of how we learn to read, and the proposed cuts to opening hours and staffing levels around the country are a disgrace. My hope is that today’s young library goers will become tomorrow’s electronic book readers with a healthy few bookcases to boot. Not only would it keep our love of literature alive, but it might make our removal men a little happier too.

THE Temperley show flaunts its blue-blooded connections with a regal and heavily bejewelled collection

At the Temperley show, the two weighty crystal chandeliers hanging above the runway hinted at the opulence of the collection. Inspiration was drawn from the measured decadence of the renaissance, and there was barely a garment which wasn’t gilded or bejewelled. Dresses (for this was a dress-heavy collection) brought to mind renaissance paintings and tapestries, with brocade, gold detailing and jewelled straps a-plenty. Models wore (reclaimed) fur hats and stacked piles of chunky gems up their wrists like Italian grandmothers going to mass wearing all the jewellery they own. The collection built from simpler printed or embroidered dresses inspired by folk art through pieces in velvet and jacquard towards weighty gowns dripping with excess. The middle ground perhaps proved most successful, with a navy draped silk gown drawing particular admiration from the assembled audience when

the model turned to reveal crossed straps adorned with chunky gems. This was a distinctly regal collection; unsurprising really, since Alice Temperley has a firm fan in the Duchess of Cambridge. The irony is that Kate would never don such unabashed bling, so between jewel-encrusted looks came the occasional palate cleanser in the form of a navy princess coat with bold gold buttons, or a modest royal blue day dress. Indeed, it was possible to pick out the looks the young royal will be wearing come autumn, so grounded were they in her aesthetic. The rest of the collection spoke of Duchesses of old, before mixing high street with designer was considered the most sensitive way to appease the masses, and it was the more fun for it.

• Pictures: Getty/PA/AP

A thorough scrutiny of the Scottish Government’s budgetary plans is being hindered by party agendas, writes Arthur Midwinter

In recent months, I have expressed concern over the extensive use of spin in the presentation of official reports on the constitutional reform issue. With the recent passage of a new budget, with only minor modifications to the initial Spending Review 2011 report, it is appropriate to evaluate this report also, as it sets out the Scottish Government’s budgetary objectives and priorities until 2014-15.

Although covering the period 2011-12, the document opens by setting out figures for 2010-11. The reason is not made clear, but it allows the government to use a high baseline in drawing out its arguments. The figures have been tabulated for the Scottish Departmental Expenditure Limits (DELs), and show that in real terms, the brunt of the block grant reductions took place this year, with a cut of £1.257 billion in revenue, and £848 million in capital, or 7 per cent overall, with much smaller – but still difficult – reductions in the following three years.

The review also repeats a long-term estimate of Scottish spending from 2009-10 to 2026-27, to show that it will take that long for spending to return to 2009-10 levels. This figure is completely meaningless, as no plans exist beyond 2015-16, and current plans have already been revised upwards, so the calculation of £39bn resources lost is frankly, spin run amok.

A second table in the annex of the report allows us to assess priorities on the basis of budget shares. Basically, these continue a long-term pattern.

Health’s share of the DEL grows from 40.5 per cent to 42.2 per cent, whilst local government’s falls from 32.3 per cent to 30.3 per cent. Most departmental budget shares are falling, except for education and infrastructure. It is difficult to see how these plans are prioritising “sustainable economic growth”.

The budget process in Holyrood was designed to promote improved transparency and scrutiny of Scotland’s spending plans. In recent years, however, these objectives have been ignored, as the Scottish government has used its executive power to control the budget agenda and the accounting information provided. The SNP has used its political majority to ensure the annual finance committee report supports its line, rather then scrutinising its plans, priorities and assumptions.

In the current year, the SNP’s political control of the process made it difficult for opposition members to contribute to scrutiny, leading to a minority report of dissent for the first time. The SNP’s spinmeisters oversold its plans and over-claimed their potential impact. The budget was described by the finance secretary, John Swinney, as a budget for growth, which would accelerate economic recovery and support employment, but he has consistently failed to validate such claims, and no progress has been made against economic performance indicators set out in 2007.

Indeed, despite the First Minister’s rhetoric of “aligning policy and finance”, independent appraisal by a series of advisers has consistently identified the lack of clear links between strategy and allocations.

A second assertion is that the SNP government has acted to support employment, by prioritising capital expenditure which provides work in the private sector. The finance secretary has claimed his capital budget has been cut by £6.7bn in real terms over four years by the UK Treasury, before the recent supplementary allocation of £587m in budget consequential as a result of increased Whitehall spending.

How this figure of £6.7m was arrived at was not made clear, but it obviously reflects more dodgy accounting. The fact is that the annual capital budget is being reduced by only £1.7bn over the period 2010-11 to 2014-15, from £3.4bn to £2.1bn. This smacks of treble counting.

The finance secretary made choices to supplement capital spend by transferring £200m from the resource budget, and to establish a private finance programme of £2.5bn, most of which will not be spent until after 2014-15, with only £100m allocated in the current year. This is not a fiscal stimulus.

A further example of financial spin is to be found in the Scottish Government’s claim to be sustaining public employment to aid recovery, by maintaining health resource spending in real terms as the NHS is a major employer. In fact, health spending has consistently been the top priority, although it is difficult to see how this is prioritising growth, when most of such spend is on elderly patients.

This economic argument would apply even more so to local government, whose staffing levels of 301,900 far exceed the NHS total of 162,600. In fact, both institutions lost staff in the current 2011-12 budget, 4,200 from the NHS and 13,300 from local government.

The heavier cuts in local government are caused by the council tax freeze. In practice, this is a cut in real terms, which so far has taken £350m out of services. The finance secretary’s spin that he is protecting local government’s share of the budget is the direct result of the freeze.

Funding for services has been falling each year. Ironically, had council tax moved in line with inflation, additional resources would have accrued through council tax benefit.

From 2007-11, spending on health grew by 2.5 per cent in real terms, whilst spending on local government services fell by 3 per cent. This is not a strategy to sustain public employment, when together health boards and councils employ 97 per cent of devolved public sector staff. The funding gap caused councils to lose 14,000 staff before the coalition government’s funding squeeze began.

The new spending plans face one major financial risk, the reliance on unidentified efficiency savings of £1.6bn to balance the books. These targets are now set for all budgets, not just specific efficiency projects as under the former Scottish executive.

In fact, parliament has not received a statement of how these would be delivered. There is therefore no audit trail for monitoring, and one suspects the savings may be simply being “managed out” as they were intended to be in the case of the new parliament building.

As a consequence, the parliament has no meaningful basis for scrutinising the realism of the efficiency savings, and ought to in future make it clear it will not agree to a budget which fails to identify and cost all savings. Audit Scotland has consistently advised parliament it cannot provide assurances over the reliability of the efficiency savings.

This combination of information gaps and presentational spin have thwarted proper scrutiny of the budget. The finance committee cannot be relied on to fulfil its crucial role of questioning plans, priorities and assumptions. This is further evidence of the need for a Scottish Office for Budget Responsibility to ensure parliament can hold the Scottish Government to account.

In its election manifesto, the SNP claimed that it had demonstrated a clear capacity not only to manage Scotland’s money effectively, but more effectively than any previous administration. In fact, they have failed to target priorities effectively, or to account properly to parliament.

This matters because unemployment continues to rise, and requires a serious response from government, not more rhetoric. First, the SNP could accelerate its private finance capital programme to provide a stimulus now. Secondly, if it is serious about sustaining public employment, in a context of declining block grant, then it needs to increase income from taxes and charges in compensation, dropping the unsustainable council tax freeze as soon as practicable.

• Arthur Midwinter is a visiting professor at the Institute of Public Sector Accounting Research, University of Edinburgh

Union debate throws up strange bedfellows, but Brian Wilson wonders if all this effort would be better spent on non-constitutional issues

Common sense suggests that referendums are bound to produce unusual alliances. Where there are two options on offer, it is inevitable that people of unlike minds on other issues will coalesce round each of them; strict party lines do not apply.

In defence of that thesis, I once earned a modest footnote in Scottish legal history by taking broadcasters to the Court of Session. That was during the 1979 referendum campaign when BBC and ITV planned to include party political broadcasts along the usual lines. On behalf of the Labour Vote No Campaign, I sought and obtained a ruling from the good Lord Ross that they should do no such thing. As a result, broadcasts were divided equally between the two sides of the argument and that is how it has been in subsequent referendums.

I feel sure that the Scottish Nationalists are now suitably grateful for my stance in defence of fair play, though they omitted to say so at the time.

To a surprising extent, the Scottish independence referendum will itself cross party lines. According to all polling, at least a third of people who vote Scottish Nationalist do not support independence, while there are significant minorities voting for unionist parties who do. All of these nuances should be reflected in the long run-up to a vote.

We should hear from SNP voters who do not want, in the last analysis, to break up the United Kingdom and, equally, there should be a voice from those who cannot thole Alex Salmond but would quite like to see an independent Scotland. If the campaign is run only on party lines, then it will be to the exclusion of these voices.

By the same token, it is not always possible to choose one’s bedfellows, who may arrive from unexpected directions. Rupert Murdoch, for example, seems to have arrived at Scottish separatism from the direction of Australia via Thatcherism, American citizenship and phone-tapping on an industrial scale. All UK parties are now competing, somewhat belatedly, to condemn his organisation and its vile methods. So the old rogue – if his Tweets are to be believed any more than his newspapers – has concluded that they have all outlived their usefulness and sought political asylum in Scotland. The break-up of Britain could be his last act of revenge on the political class that once cowered before him.

In response to courtship by Tweet, Murdoch has been given a warm embrace by his new hero, our First Minister. “Many people at home and abroad are expressing views on Scotland’s future,” he intoned, “and all contributions are welcome, including Mr Murdoch’s.” Not to mention, he might have added, the contribution of Mr Murdoch’s newspapers, soon to return to seven-day dissemination of truth and enlightment. But I do agree with the First Minister. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, whether mad or sane, weak or powerful, foreign or indigenous. As Mr Salmond so rightly put it, “all contributions are welcome, including Mr Murdoch’s”. How sweet!

Alas, the First Minister’s generosity of spirit did not extend to David Cameron, who visited Edinburgh last week and made a good speech. To the great irritation of the nationalists, who had their little cue cards ready, Cameron did not fall into any of the appointed traps. He was not patronising. He did not say that Scotland “could not survive” – actually, I don’t know anyone who ever has. He was self-effacing about his party’s weakness in Scotland.

He set out an intelligent, philosophical case for maintaining our place in the United Kingdom, which was there for his audience to take or leave. I had been asked to comment from a radio studio and said that many people across party lines would be glad that Mr Cameron had made this speech in the way he did. The nationalist who was on with me burbled happily about the disgrace of “supporting a Tory Prime Minister”.

It was actually quite a therapeutic moment because it clarified in my own mind the urgent necessity of facing down this kind of playground taunt. It is not necessary to go back to 1979 to find the SNP voting with the Tories when the party did so to historic effect. Much more recently, the SNP spent four years at Holyrood in informal alliance with the Tories, until it got its present majority.

Looking forward, the nature of a referendum on a constitutional issue inevitably means that people will arrive at the same conclusion from both left and right of the political spectrum. To pretend otherwise, or refuse to co-operate on that basis, is ridiculous. Not the least of Mr Cameron’s successes last week was, by eschewing partisanship, to make it a lot easier for people who might disagree with him about everything else to buy into that shared approach.

Each party should campaign in its own way. But there should also be cross-party campaigns with room for distinctive ideological threads and political perspectives within them – and the sooner the better. The Scottish public expects that display of grown-up pragmatism.

And let us unite on one principle – just as Rupert Murdoch has a right to contribute to this debate, so too does the Prime Minister of Britain. I hope that Mr Cameron will make many more such speeches, that others will follow him and I do not for one moment believe that the anti-separatist cause will suffer from “association” if they do it in the same spirit – quite the reverse.

The toxicity of the Tory brand in Scotland is a self-inflicted ailment which should not be confused with any delusion that the only people who hold right-of-centre opinions in Scotland are those who vote Tory. The irony is that large numbers of them vote SNP, mainly because they have nowhere else to go – but that does not make them natural separatists. That is a crucial audience for Mr Cameron to address. Anyway, for those of us who have always thought that politics should be about improving people’s lives and prospects, rather than arguing about constitutions, it is difficult to see anything that Holyrood is currently delivering which the Tories would not feel at home with – council cuts, low-paid workers’ pay freeze, further education cuts, and so on and so forth. It all sounds very familiar.

I have a simple faith that more and more voters will realise that the vast amounts of time, energy and political guile being devoted to a debate on the constitution which will not culminate for almost two and a half more years and that they will ensure it does not come at a very heavy price.

Just think where we might be if as much effort was going into creating jobs for school-leavers or improving the standards of education – neither of which depends on constitutional change and each of which is a lot more urgent.

AMID WHAT seems a relentless paring of government budgets and public expenditure, the latest figures on the public finances are cause for encouragement on two fronts.

First, the better than expected surplus of £7.8 billion in January puts the UK government on course for a lower than forecast deficit for the financial year, the best counter that Chancellor George Osborne could have against the decision by rating agency Moody’s a fortnight ago to put the UK on “negative credit watch”. And second, the figures – the last set to be produced before the budget on 21 March – provide more room for him to offer a recovery stimulus by way of tax reduction. The scope, however, is severely limited: the deficit reduction programme has years to run and the Treasury will argue ferociously against what could prove a temporary improvement in the deficit numbers being used as a basis of a headline-grabbing giveaway. But, together with tentative signs of an improvement in the economy, the coalition will at least be able to point to an improvement greater than most had dared to hope for just six months ago.

The overall position is this. The January surplus (always a good month for the public finances as companies and individuals act before the 31 January deadline to settle outstanding tax bills) is well up on the figure for January a year ago. It brings the cumulative deficit for April-January to £93.5bn, a reduction of £15.6bn from the comparable figure a year ago.

This decline in the deficit sets the Chancellor up for a final figure for the financial year considerably better than that expected by the Office of Budget Responsibility: it projected that the deficit will fall from £135.8bn in 2010-11 to £127.1bn in 2011-12.

Economists’ estimates of how much the final out-turn will be better than the OBR projection vary from £5bn up to £10.5bn. Given the worrying slowdown in the economy in the third and fourth quarters of last year, any out-turn which came in on the right side of the OBR forecast can fairly be regarded as an achievement. Particularly heartening is a 9.3 per cent increase in corporation tax receipts on last January. And local authorities seem to have cut their spending rather faster than had been assumed in the Pre Budget Report

That, however, does not give the Chancellor licence to gamble. One favourable month cannot be taken as a guarantee of improved performance in the year ahead. Nevertheless, the economy is so frail and the recovery so tentative that a reduction in the tax burden is surely due. Mr Osborne could follow the advice of Nick Clegg and raise the starting threshold for tax to £10,000. This would certainly be popular. Or he could cut corporation tax by more than planned. However, given the continuing rise in unemployment and concern over youth unemployment in particular, there would be merit in cutting National Insurance. Any reduction in the tax on jobs for employees and employers would be warmly welcomed and difficult for Labour to criticise as a reckless giveaway. A boost to labour hiring would be apposite and timely.

Some light but only a little illumination

It would be fanciful to present the statements from Rangers’ owner Craig Whyte and the administrators as piercing lights of transparency. But at least a veil of sorts has been lifted on the mystery of the season ticket holders’ funds of £20 million plus VAT which fans paid to Ticketus.

Of this, some £18m was transferred to Lloyds Banking Group as bridging finance to enable Mr Whyte to complete the take-over (the whereabouts of the balance is still under investigation). In his statement, Mr Whyte protests that he has acted in the interests of the club; that he personally was on the line for £27.5m in guarantees and cash; that he followed expert legal and financial advice; and that he has been subjected to press misinformation and abuse. Much of this could have been avoided had he been more open and transparent far earlier.

That he may dislike such disclosure is curious for someone aspiring to the ownership of a leading Scottish club whose affairs are intensely followed here and overseas. At least his statement sheds light, up to a point, on what was a deeply troubling mystery. He adds that if he emerges from administration still in control of Rangers – a telling condition – he will give “immediate consideration” to gifting the majority of his shares to a supporters’ foundation. Even taken at face value, this is likely to divide fans as to whether it has been made too early in the proceedings or far too late. Meanwhile the administrators are continuing to probe “all the circumstances surrounding both the purchase of the majority shareholding” and “the flow of funds which stemmed from the transaction”. Judgment must await.

Not too far down line to abandon rail project

What is it about Scotland and major building projects? From the Scottish parliament to the Edinburgh trams, we do not seem to be able to get things done either on budget or on time. Or both. Guess what? Yes, it has happened again. Now the Borders rail link is to be delayed by another year.

Industry experts told this newspaper the Scottish Government’s decision to appoint Network Rail to take over the project after the original private sector scheme failed because of the lack of bidders is the main reason for the delay and there is “not a hope in hell” it will be completed by the end of 2014 as planned.

In this space previously we have often be critical of the rail link. We said it was ill-conceived; that studies of likely passenger numbers taking what will be far from an express to Galashiels did not stand up to scrutiny; and there was little to prove there was much demand beyond Gorebridge, Midlothian. To those criticisms we can now add that it will not be finished on time. We rest our case.

The Borders rail link was agreed in a shameful political deal by Labour and Liberal Democrats in government, carried on by the SNP. Even at this late stage, the Scottish Government should abandon its plans to press ahead with this scheme beyond Midlothian.

]]> 1.2130254 Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:40:33 +0000 http://www.scotsman.com/single_police_force_at_risk_of_political_bias_1_2130792

THE former head of the Scottish justice department has issued a stark warning that the SNP’s plans for a national police force will hand ministers “much more control over policing”.

Jim Gallagher’s strongly worded criticism of the scrapping of Scotland’s eight regional police forces came as MSPs were warned of the “sketchy” details about local council access to the new national force.

Justice secretary Kenny Mac-Askill yesterday said the new interim police HQ would be at the Scottish Police College in Tulli-allan, Fife, while the new base for the single fire and rescue service would be at Perth Community Fire Station, when the shake-up comes into force on 1 April next year.

However, Mr Gallagher, writing in The Scotsman today, calls for chief constables to be given the same status as Scotland’s chief law officer – the Lord Advocate – and to give the position parliamentary protection to “avoid the risk” that police powers can be “directed for political purposes”.

Mr Gallagher goes on to warn about the dangers of ministers using powers to direct the new national police authority to dismiss and retire senior officers, as well as imposing decisions about the style of policing in different areas of Scotland. He writes: “Chief constables must be independent, because there are no powers to direct them. The Lord Advocate offers an excellent precedent: he accounts to the Scottish Parliament, but his independence is explicitly safeguarded in statute.

“The power to appoint and dismiss is critical. The police authority is to appoint the chief constable, but only with ministers’ agreement. There are also new powers for the authority to retire senior officers.”

Mr Gallagher also calls for the new national police authority to be made up of elected councillors to safeguard some local control over policing under the new national structure.

The demand came as councillor Barbara Grant, community safety spokeswoman at the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, told Holyrood’s local government committee yesterday that there was a “big hole” in the plans.

She said: “There’s a huge gap in the information that we have at the moment in the bill about how these things are going to work. It’s not at all helpful, from what we’ve seen already, on how we’re going to engage.

“We’re OK with the lowest level and maybe the person at the very top. But it’s that huge gap in the middle that we really don’t have enough information about. It’s all far too sketchy.”

However, Mr MacAskill insisted the creation of national police and fire services would be more “convenient” and “cost-effective”, as he dismissed suggestions that services would be disrupted by the shake-up.

He said: “The transition to the new services should be as smooth as possible and using existing venues as interim headquarters will keep costs and disruption to a minimum.”

Meanwhile, a Scottish Government spokeswoman rejected Mr Gallagher’s claims and said the bill “makes it clear that the chief constable is accountable to the Scottish Police Authority, not ministers”.

She said: “It also provides strong safeguards to ensure ministers cannot control or direct the authority or the chief constable to do anything relating to specific police operations.”

THE UK government took in more money than it spent last month, leaving it with its highest monthly surplus for four years.

Ahead of next month’s Budget, there were calls for George Osborne to use the cash to stimulate the economy, as it was revealed yesterday that the public sector made a net repayment of £7.75 billion, up from £5.2bn this time last year.

According to the figures released by the Office for National Statistics, the UK government has borrowed £93.5bn so far this tax year, a reduction from the £109.14bn recorded at this stage in 2010-11.

However, the UK economy still has massive challenges to overcome.

The nation’s total public- sector net debt, excluding financial sector interventions, is still at £988.7bn, or 63 per cent of gross domestic product. But total public-sector net had fallen from the £1 trillion recorded in December.

Despite the improved borrowing figures, the UK economy remains on shaky ground.

Official data on Friday is expected to confirm the economy shrank by 0.2 per cent in the final three months of 2011, and the Bank of England last week said it expected the economy to “zigzag” in and out of growth this year.

Despite the difficulties that still have to be overcome, the chief economist at the British Chambers of Commerce, David Kern, said the January borrowing figures gave Mr Osborne scope to help the economy grow.

“This gives the Chancellor some room for flexibility in his upcoming Budget to implement measures to support growth and help companies create jobs, invest and export,” he said.

“This should include an effective credit-easing programme and an aggressive reduction in red tape.”

A similar plea was made by the CBI, which yesterday urged the government to give a £500 million Budget boost to business through a series of changes to the tax system aimed at stimulating growth.

In its submission to next month’s Budget, the CBI said a “modest” amount would help firms to create jobs, invest more and meet their carbon commitments, as well as freeing up spending on infrastructure.

Director-general John Cridland said the money was affordable, especially as the government had found cash for weekly bin collections and the freezing of council tax.

The CBI called for new models of private finance on infrastructure projects, including investment by pension funds, a simpler way of taxing foreign profits and extending the government’s youth contract to those aged 16- 17.

The Chancellor was also pressed to introduce a new capital allowance to attract investment in types of infrastructure which do not currently qualify, including nuclear power stations, airport terminals and waste treatment buildings.

Mr Cridland also proposed replacing the carbon reduction commitment with a new climate change levy which, he said, would reduce red tape while maintaining revenue for the Treasury.

He said the Chancellor appeared keen to pursue measures that targeted growth, but should do more to deliver on announcements made in last year’s autumn statement, rather than bring forward a raft of new measures.

“The Chancellor must use this Budget to score the growth and investment policy goals he put forward in his autumn statement. We’re calling on the government to make some targeted changes to the UK tax system, which could make an impact on business decisions and create new opportunities for growth.

“While the state of the public finances is tight, the Chancellor still has an opportunity in this Budget to make sure the UK tax system is as internationally competitive as it can be.”

The CBI also urged the government not to press ahead with a planned rise in air passenger duty, and said some Whitehall departments did not give as high a priority as they should to economic growth.

Mr Cridland gave the example of “visa hassles”, which he said were making it difficult for firms and universities to attract skilled staff.

He said calls by shadow chancellor Ed Balls to boost the economy through additional borrowing “just wasn’t affordable”.

Coming a week after the ratings agency Moody’s warned that Britain could lose its triple-A credit rating in the next 18-months, yesterday’s figures provided some encouragement.

The level of government borrowing is one of the data series looked at by ratings agencies, which judge the likelihood of a borrower defaultingg.

Ross Walker, an economist at RBS, said these borrowing figures could weigh positively on Moody’s continuing assessment. “It’s a good set of data,” he said. “We are still borrowing huge sums, but against a backdrop where we had Moody’s negative outlook and there was growing talk about the UK’s rating… these numbers help.”

Despite the more positive news, economists said that the severe structural problems with the economy meant that Mr Osborne would continue with his deficit-reduction programme.

“The government has so far heralded Moody’s decision as confirmation of the importance of sticking to ‘Plan A’, and there are few signs that its will to implement ‘Plan A’ has weakened in the face of economic stagnation,” said Blerina Uruci, at Barclays Capital Research.

Chris Williamson, chief economist at financial data company Markit, said January’s good result gives Osborne leeway for some modest stimulus measures in the budget on 21 March.

THE troubled Borders Railway project will be delayed by another year because of the Scottish Government’s U-turn over how it will be built, industry experts have told The Scotsman.

One insider said there was “not a hope in hell” the line would be completed by the end of 2014 as planned – and trains would now not run until 2015 at the earliest.

Construction work on the Edinburgh-Tweedbank line is not expected to start until at least this autumn – a year late.

This came despite transport minister Keith Brown insisting the project was on course when he viewed preliminary work in Galashiels yesterday.

Mr Brown announced five months ago that Network Rail would take over the scheme after novel plans for the private sector to run it were scrapped. That came after two of the three shortlisted bidders pulled out. However, Network Rail is still assessing the 30-mile route to see if it can be finished on time and within the £235 million-£295m budget.

The rail firm is not expected to reach a decision until next month, to be agreed with the Scottish Government’s Transport Scotland agency in April.

Network Rail would then have to advertise for a contractor before work could begin.

Scottish Borders Council leader David Parker, who met Mr Brown yesterday, said he expected work to start in November or December and “probably be complete” in mid-2015.

He said: “The timetable is ambitious and will be tough for the contractors to meet.”

An industry source said: “There is not a chance in hell of delivering it within the current timescale. There is some way to go – it could be a year late.” The source said the project would be prone to delays from bad weather and problems with bridges and ground conditions.

Another industry source said: “Nobody in the rail sector feels it can be delivered at a sensible cost if the Scottish Government sticks to the existing timetable.”

Labour transport spokeswoman Elaine Murray said: “It would seem extraordinary that Transport Scotland can guarantee a delivery date when the programme of works has still to be finalised and a contractor has still to be appointed.”

However, Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale Nationalist MSP Christine Grahame, who had invited Mr Brown to visit the project, said: “Progress is going ahead as expected. There is no slippage.

“The preparatory work will mean the job of track-laying is done more efficiently.”

A Network Rail spokesman said it was reviewing the project prior to taking it over. He said: “Network Rail is carrying out a due diligence exercise and review of the project prior to the transfer of Authorised Undertaker powers later this year. As part of that process we are considering the programme and milestones for the project.

“We expect to discuss the outcome of our review and our subsequent proposals for the delivery of the new line with Transport Scotland and the ORR [Office of Rail Regulation] this spring. How the new line will be delivered forms part of our review and no decision on the tendering process has yet been made. We will deliver the new line as quickly as possible and are aware of the timelines and budgets the government would like to meet.”

Last night a Transport Scotland spokeswoman said: “The advance works viewed by the transport minister will ensure the project can be built by Network Rail in the shortest possible time.

“Ministers remain committed to the target project delivery date of December 2014.”

EU proposals on pilot fatigue, which would see pilots asked to fly aircraft more than 20 hours after being awake, have been criticised as ‘a danger to public safety’ by pilots’ union Balpa.

The proposals could legally allow pilots to land their aircraft 22 hours after they had woken for the day, Balpa said. The organisation said it was worried that the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) appeared to be supporting the plans. Balpa was highlighting its concerns today at a House of Commons Transport Committee hearing into flight time limitations. Airlines and the CAA were also among those giving evidence to MPs. Before the meeting Balpa general secretary Jim McAuslan said: “Twenty

hours of wakefulness is far from the only part of the proposals which give us serious concern. “Compared to the UK’s domestic rules, the EU proposals would see pilots being able to fly further - as far as California - with no back-up crew and, contrary to scientific advice, allow pilots to do up to seven early starts in a row, which is desperately fatiguing.” He went on: “We have met with the CAA to try to get them to realise the dangers of what is being proposed here, but they seem intent on supporting this European scheme. “We need the Government to say it won’t support this danger to public safety, and will demand that we either get the proposals to a much safer position, or retain our own domestic rules. “The Government have to answer this question: ‘Is it safe to land an aircraft after 22 hours?’. If not, they need to reject these EU proposals now and keep the current UK rules in place until they have been significantly improved.” Aviation minister Theresa Villiers told the committee there would be “significant safety gains for UK passengers” from the European proposals. She said UK passengers travelling on some European airlines were currently flying with carriers not subject to the existing pilot flight times under which UK airlines operate. Ms Villiers said the European plans would “broadly” bring the whole of the continent up to UK standards and would not see a “levelling down” of standards. She went on: “It’s never going to be possible to get complete scientific consensus (on fatigue).”

TWO Doberman dogs have been impounded by police after causing havoc in a village street.

Children had to be pulled to safety after the dogs went wild in a convenience store in Newtongrange, Midlothian.

After tearing around the shop, the dogs ran out and caused panic in the street as they pounced on another dog outside a nearby chip shop.

Police today said they were trying to trace the owners.

The two dogs darted into the convenience store around 8.15pm last night as a man and his daughter were at the till with their small mongrel dog.

The man had to pull his daughter away from the dogs when they acted aggressively.

Shopkeeper Vikki Ashraf said: “The dog was about to take her hand off. It’s just as well the guy pulled his daughter out of the way.”

The 32-year-old was working in the stock room of Newton Stores in Main Street when the two dogs burst through the door and ran around the aisles. He said: “I saw these two massive Dobermans push open the door and run around the aisles going mad. There was a much smaller dog at the till with his owner and his daughter and they just went for it.

“The wee girl, who was about six or seven, put her hand out to stop them going at her dog and her dad had to pull her back. It’s just as well he did.”

Mr Ashraf said the dogs ran out of the shop after the door was pulled open, but pounced on another dog outside the nearby Nitten Chippy.

A 19-year-old worker at the takeaway, who asked not to be named, said the attack only stopped when a boy aged about 12 – believed to be the owner of the Dobermans – chased the pair away with a stick.

He said the elderly owner of the dog, understood to be a spaniel, was left panicked.

He said: “We saw this little boy walking down the street with the dogs off their leashes before they ran into the shop down the road.

“He wasn’t in control of them at all and they just bolted. We heard they attacked someone’s dog at the shop down the road then they ran up here and went for our customer’s dog, which was outside.

“It only ended when the boy grabbed this stick and chased them up the road. The owner of the spaniel got a real shock.”

A spokeswoman for the ambulance service confirmed that paramedics had checked over an elderly male but said that he did not require medical attention.

A police spokeswoman said officers had traced the dogs and taken them to police kennels. She added that police are attempting to trace the owners and are still making enquiries.

]]> 1.2131527 Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:12:51 +0000 http://www.scotsman.com/waverley_s_vehicle_ban_proposals_go_off_the_rails_1_2131524

Plans to ban all vehicles from Waverley Station are to be put off until Christmas.

Station owner Network Rail had told the city council that it would close Waverley to all cars and taxis before July in order to deal with terrorist threats ahead of the London Olympics.

But council chiefs have confirmed that the ban has been put off until December to allow alternative arrangements to be made for the taxi rank.

The announcement came after an emergency motion was lodged at a meeting of the city’s transport committee calling for urgent talks with rail chiefs to block plans for the closure.

Network Rail contacted the council last month to tell it of the proposed changes that would take effect from July.

The council has now been informed that extra time is likely to be available before the changes are enforced.

Councillor Gordon Mackenzie, the city’s transport leader, said: “Network Rail are not requiring us to remove taxis until the end of the year, which gives us more time to try to persuade them there could be a better way forward.

“We acknowledge that Network Rail have the power to stop vehicles coming into Waverley and the council cannot stop that, but we are keen to engage with them and see if we can find a better solution.”

Marshall Poulton, the council’s head of transport, said: “What has transpired is that they have identified that Waverley is one of the most vulnerable [stations] to a terrorist attack throughout the UK and, to that end, they want to get all vehicles, including taxis, out.”

He confirmed that Network Rail had written to Dave Anderson, the council’s director of city development, last month asking for its support in banning all vehicles by the end of July, but said that the council replied that it could not meet that date, adding: “We have now heard that the date of July may be moved to Christmas.”

Network Rail says Waverley is the only major station where private vehicles are allowed to drive under the roof.

A company spokesman previously said the traffic ban had to happen before the Olympics, although that appears to no longer be the case. When asked if the reference to the Olympics was a “red herring”, Mr Poulton said: “Yes, that’s correct.”

Cllr Lesley Hinds, transport spokeswoman for Labour on the council, said: “I welcome that this now gives an opportunity for the council and other groups to be consulted on this proposal and for them to feed into ideas to make Waverley Station more accessible.”

Independent cab driver Rob Smith, from Kirkliston, said he was disappointed at the delay. He said: “I would like to see it closed permanently. Make it fair trade for all drivers.”

A spokesman for Edinburgh Licensed Taxi Partnership said: “The important thing is that we have taxi ranks working efficiently and effectively for station users and taxi users. We hope there will be genuine consultation and that we can find a solution that works for everybody.”

No-one from Network Rail was available to comment.

THE man accused of murdering Suzanne Pilley threatened to kill one of her neighbours after taking a shortcut through his garden, her murder trial has heard.

Painter and decorator Scott Stewardson told jurors that David Gilroy thrust his car keys in his face and threatened to stab and kill him.

The 26-year-old, who lived in Whitson Road, Stenhouse, at the time of the incident, told the court the man he spotted in his garden thrust out his car keys and pointed them only “one or two centimetres” from Mr Stewardson’s eyes.

Mr Stewardson told the court that Gilroy said: “I will stab you if you don’t go away.”

Mr Stewardson said he took a step back saying: “I’m not looking for a fight”. He added that Gilroy then told him: “I’ll kill you if you don’t stop it.”

He told the court that Gilroy then said, “Hear no evil, see no evil”, pointing at Mr Stewardson’s eyes then his own. Mr Stewardson said he had gone outside his flat shortly after hearing noises from Ms Pilley’s upstairs flat.

His partner, Lindsay Knowles, who lived with him, went upstairs to check on Ms Pilley after her boyfriend returned from the altercation outside.

Ms Knowles told the court that she had heard two people “shouting at each other” and doors slamming.

When Ms Pilley opened the door, Ms Knowles said the bookkeeper was crying, her hair was “messed up” and she was “visibly upset” and “scared”. The witness said that a chair was overturned in the kitchen and glass was shattered on the floor.

Ms Knowles said that Ms Pilley told her that she had “broken up with her partner”, and there had been an argument where a “bottle of wine and things” had been smashed.

One of the charges against Gilroy alleges that on November 9, 2009, he assaulted Mr Stewardson and threatened to stab and kill him. He denies all charges.

A FORMER community councillor who had to stand down from his post after a lengthy legal battle with the city council is mounting a comeback – as a Labour candidate for the City Chambers.

Craigmillar community activist David Walker will fight the Portobello/Craigmillar ward at the elections in May.

His selection has proved controversial locally, as he was previously stripped of his role as secretary and returning officer of Craigmillar Community Council in 2008 following a lengthy legal battle about the way he and two other officials were elected.

The case ended up in the Court of Session and cost the taxpayer around £60,000.

He was also involved in a separate legal dispute with the council in his capacity as secretary of the Capacity Building Project (CBP), which ran the Craigmillar Settlement community centre and had unsuccessfully fought against council plans to turn it into offices.

The CBP lost the dispute after the Court of Session ruled in the council’s favour last year – but the wrangle cost the taxpayer £75,000.

It was a Labour-run council that launched the first legal battle with Mr Walker, as well as fellow Craigmillar Community Council officials Paul Nolan and Patsy King, branded locally as “the Craigmillar cabal”, in 2006.

The council instigated the judicial review following concerns that their appointments had broken community council rules. Mr Nolan was appointed unelected as a nominated representative of the Jack Kane Centre and was said to have had his selection ratified when many of his opponents were on holiday.

The stand-off on the Craigmillar Settlement building ran for two years following the CBP’s lease expiring in 2009. Lord Malcolm did not back the CBP’s call to quash the council’s decision to terminate the CBP lease but did say he was sympathetic to concerns about the loss of a community facility and the lack of consultation.

SNP councillor Mike Bridgman, who has represented the Portobello/Craigmillar ward since 2007 and is standing for reselection in May, said: “It is up to the Labour Party who they feel is a reasonable person to represent them.”

Councillor Andrew Burns, leader of the Labour group on the council, said: “Edinburgh Labour has a very robust selection process. All candidates went through that and several were not selected.”

Mr Walker, who will stand alongside fellow Labour councillor Maureen Child for the ward, was not available to comment.

NOT so long ago they were the last places on Earth anyone would want to visit.

Civil wars, brutality and political turmoil made Rwanda, Uganda and the Ivory Coast among the most dangerous and unstable places in the world.

No-one, surely, in their right mind would want to quit the comforts of Edinburgh for the African nations’ blood-soaked killing fields.

Today, peace has brought fresh hope. But still it’s hard to imagine why anyone might want to exchange the easy life here for the harsh realities of living there.

Yet, for three Edinburgh women, the lure of a Saturday afternoon browsing in Harvey Nichols, afternoon tea at The Balmoral and a night on the town in George Street simply cannot compete with the sheer satisfaction of living and working in some of the most challenging environments in the world.

RWANDA

MARY’S home wasn’t so much a house as a rough frame consisting of four walls – no roof – a mat and an open pit for a toilet, and Deborah Livingstone gazed upon the dire vision of poverty with shock. Mary, a widow, HIV positive, sick and frail, was barely able to care for herself never mind her starving children.

The idea that one day she could be self-sufficient, healthy and, even more astonishing, running her own businesses seemed unthinkable.

Deborah, 40, had left Edinburgh behind to come to Rwanda, a country which tore itself apart in the mid-90s when rival tribes clashed. Genocide resulted in around 20 per cent of the entire population dying.

Now she was at the young widow’s pitiful home in the Musanze district of the mountainous northern province of Rwanda – the very area where the first rebel group of Tutsi rebels invaded from neighbouring Uganda – to see for herself what might be done to help.

“Mary was very sick,” recalls Deborah. “She couldn’t look after her children, her house had no roof and it rains a lot in Rwanda. She couldn’t get to hospital for the drugs she needed to help manage the infections that come with being HIV positive.

“And these are strong drugs. You have to eat well when you are on them. Without money to buy food she couldn’t have managed to even take the medicine without becoming very sick.”

The situation could have been overwhelming for the former Currie High pupil, who had left university with vague plans to become a writer. But her role in Rwanda was to bring not only hope to widows such as Mary but a chance to help them change their own lives.

Back at her base in the country’s capital Kigali, Deborah pours over page after page of government documents.

As a social development adviser in the Department for International Developments (DFID) office, she is responsible for the UK Government’s work to improve the lives of the poorest people through social protection programmes.

Among the UK-backed projects – aided by cash from British taxpayers – is the Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme, which not only provides basic equipment such as water pumps to some of the poorest communities, but also offers small cash loans to help individuals like Mary claw their way out of poverty.

“It’s incredible how a small amount can help people get their head above water so they can feed their family and help children go to school,” explains Deborah, whose parents Owen and Carine still live in Currie.

“Mary’s children were suffering from malnutrition, they were either going to get sick and die or their physical and mental development would suffer.

“The money we gave her helped her get the drugs she needed from hospital. As she got better she was able to care for the children,” she adds.

“Eventually she was able to apply for a loan of around £60, which she has used to start a small business buying milk in her village which she takes to the nearest town to sell to hotels.

“Last time I saw her she had bought a cow so she could provide the milk herself.”

It is nearly two decades since Rwanda plunged into a violent crisis when Tutsi refugees clashed with the Hutu rivals. Around 800,000 people died in the civil war that made the country one of the most dangerous places on the planet.

But, while calm has descended on the country – indeed, tourism is among its emerging industries – the horrors of what happened linger just below the surface.

Today, 77 per cent of the population survive on less than 80p a day, HIV is a major health problem and families are still rebuilding lives shattered by the troubles.

“People are still feeling the effects of the genocide 18 years ago,” agrees Deborah, who first quit Edinburgh to do voluntary work in Malawi in 2001.

“It’s very present for people. It still affects what they think and feel.

“But where I live is the calmest, safest place. It’s a very clean, very safe city to live and work in. I feel safer walking around Kigali than I do in Lothian Road on a weekend night.

“There’s an internet cafe on every corner, you can visit the mountains and see gorillas. There are beautiful mountains, calm lakes.

“And there are museums and memorials to the genocide – these people will never, ever forget what happened to them here.”

UGANDA

FOR years Uganda was most widely known for its corruption, human rights abuses and the terrifying regime of leader Idi Amin.

State-sponsored violence created a reign of terror during the 1980s, when nearly half a milion people lost their lives. But for mum-of-two Rhona Hogg, today’s Uganda is one of the safest places she knows.

“The trouble in Uganda was a long time ago,” she insists. “Now it is probably one of the safest countries to live in. Yes, there’s a lot of corruption – it’s said to be the third most corrupt country in the world – but the streets are very safe and there’s virtually no street crime.”

Rhona and husband Bobby decided to leave the comfort of their Newington home to work in healthcare in Uganda, in spite of Bobby now being retired and Rhona admitting to being “mature”.

There, they worked with Voluntary Service Overseas, IT specialist Bobby setting up a computerised health management system to rival anything found back home in Edinburgh, and Rhona, an NHS Lothian research lead, working with an HIV/Aids project.

“With our two sons grown up and settled, and no elderly relatives, we were ready for an adventure,” says Rhona, who has now returned to her NHS role.

As well as carrying out research linked to the HIV projects, Rhona worked on a programme that provided support for the most vulnerable of Uganda’s population – its young orphans and starving babies.

“The project provided free healthcare for orphans, and support for grandparents looking after grandchildren.

“We even had a piggery which was used to teach families how to look after piglets and breed them, and a tailoring workshop so they could learn how to make school uniforms.

“Seeing how the majority of people live is life-changing,” she adds. “It made us appreciate the safety nets of our emergency, education and welfare services.”

IVORY COAST

THE streets of Yamoussoukro, the Ivory Coast capital city, were eerily quiet when Fiona Gilmore arrived.

It was the aftermath of the second Ivorian Civil War – a conflict sparked by a general election that set tribe against tribe – and she was there to help set up a medical facility for the country’s most desperately poor and needy.

But there was tension in the air. “Things there had just calmed down,” she recalls. “I arrived on the day of the inauguration of the new president. The situation was pretty tense – there were still UN soldiers on most crossroads, and armoured vehicles. There had been reports of shots the night before.”

A few years earlier, Fiona, 37, of Elgin Terrace, was manager of a small cleaning company until being made redundant. A spell in Belize with the Red Cross had given her a taste for voluntary work overseas, and with MSF she ended up in Tabu, a small coastal village where there was no running water.

“We built a pharmacy and medication started to arrive from Europe for distribution. The main problems were malaria, skin disease and diarrhoea. We employed 50 staff from the Ivory Coast, a mix of nurses, staff who could register patients, and drivers and security staff.

“We did mobile health clinics three times a day, sometimes treating up to 250 patients. It was full on and quite intense,” she adds.

A key focus was launching a malnutrition programme for children.

“Sometimes I found myself saying ‘oh gosh, this is so tough’. But then I’d see a kid ready to go home looking well and fit and happy when a few weeks earlier they were malnourished. That’s what makes it worthwhile.”

NEW classrooms and a 270-seat auditorium would be created under plans for a £12 million revamp of Fettes College, sparking objections from heritage body The Cockburn Association.

Plans for an auditorium plus music, art, maths, languages, economics and geography classrooms at the private school have been recommended for approval by council officials, but still have to be given the green light by councillors at a planning meeting today.

It is also recommended that a proposal to demolish the existing concert hall building and later extensions to the north building is granted.

The concert hall building was originally built as a gymnasium in 1872.

The council’s head of planning, John Bury, said the development would comprise three main elements – a new teaching wing, music courtyard and drama auditorium.

Under the plans, the existing north building would be refurbished to provide the new music courtyard, while the final phase would involve the demolition of the old gymnasium to make way for a 270-seat auditorium and teaching spaces.

However, in a letter to the city council, The Cockburn Association said it was “strongly opposed” to the plans. Director Marion Williams said the loss of the old gymnasium building, which has “many good qualities”, would be “considerable”.

She added: “We are concerned that buildings of low architectural quality such as the 1950s north building extension are being carefully salvaged and incorporated into the new design, whilst a building of high quality is to be lost.”

Michael Spens, headmaster at Fettes College, said: “Fettes is thriving, at full capacity and demand for places is incredibly high,” he said. “However, we are still teaching in classrooms, many of which were built at the end of the 19th century when the school roll was far smaller, so it is time for us to upgrade in order to maximise the learning environment for our students.”

If the application is approved, it is hoped that work will start next year, with stage one and two completed 18 months after the start date.

Mr Spens added: “In terms of costs, we can provide ballpark estimates – £5m for phase one, £2m for phase two and £5m for stage three.”

Another application recommended for approval includes an extension to the rear of Corstorphine Primary School.

And Napier University’s Merchiston campus wants new facilities for music, a new main entrance and multi-use space approved at today’s meeting.

laura.cummings@edinburghnews.com

THE number of people who are satisfied with the management of their neighbourhood has reached a five-year high, new figures have revealed.

Nearly three quarters of Edinburgh residents said their local area was well run, with the highest level on record – 53 per cent – saying they were “very satisfied”.

However, fewer than half of those questioned said they were happy with city management overall, with the handling of the tram project the most common complaint.

Poor use of public funds, general mismanagement, high council tax and issues with the quality of pavements and roads were among the complaints reported as part of this year’s Edinburgh People’s Survey.

Satisfaction levels have varied between 35 per cent and 57 per cent over the past five years, with 46 per cent satisfied with performance in 2011.

The survey, which involved face-to-face interviews with 5000 city dwellers towards the end of last year and cost around £50,000, is one of the largest of its kind in the UK.

Residents were less satisfied with the way the city council has dealt with community safety than in recent years.

Satisfaction with the way vandalism and graffiti is handled fell from 83 per cent in 2009 to 71 per cent in 2011, while the figures for tackling antisocial behaviour fell from 75 per cent to 67 per cent.

Despite the drops the figures are an improvement overall on the last five years. Council leader Jenny Dawe said: “I’m very pleased to see that satisfaction with how we are providing vital services is increasing overall.

“This is thanks to the efforts made by the whole council to keep the city clean, green and safe, as well as the investment we have made in facilities and support for children and vulnerable people.

“We know that the tram project has an impact on how people feel about the council but I’m confident that the recent progress made will show itself in future surveys.”

“We also responded to public feedback in our recent budget by investing in their priorities. However, we will continue to work hard, especially on how we communicate with our customers.”

Overall, those living in nine out of the city’s 12 neighbourhood partnership areas were happier with the way they were run.

Council chiefs said they are keen to improve communication with city residents. Exit polls of customers who had just received a service from the council were high, at around 96 per cent.

Alastair Maclean, director of corporate governance, said: “Our neighbourhood management appears to be working well. However, we do need to communicate more effectively at a corporate level and continue to follow through on the priorities identified.”