Martin Hannan: Heads must roll after 'Taxigate'

When Vic Emery, chairman of the infamous trams project company TIE, recently compared Edinburgh to Tripoli because the city "looks like a bomb site", he was forced to issue an apology.

Personally, I thought Emery should have been made to apologise - to Tripoli. They may be in the middle of a civil war that has Nato dropping some heavy duty ordnance in and around the city, but most citizens of Libya's largest city would be affronted to see their home compared to the hell-hole that is Edinburgh these days.

I am reliably informed that when stray bombs afflict the roads of the Libyan capital, any craters are repaired in hours, or a few days at most. Compare that to the utterly appalling record of this city's council in keeping our roads and pavements in good order. We are living in a city of crevasses, a place where Tarmac seems to be in short supply if you judge by the sheer number of holes in our roads.

The recent footage from Japan after the tsunami was instructive. A vital length of coastal road disappeared off the map due to the giant wave, only for the Japanese to completely rebuild the entire road in less than a month. In tsunami-less Edinburgh, road repairs take an age - that's if they get repaired at all.

Soon Princes Street will be dug up again, this time because someone somewhere in the broken machine that is the trams project did not compute that massive concrete foundations for tram lines would cause seismic faults in the rest of the carriageway.

Yet it is not just trams and water works which are gouging our roads to smithereens. Even routine maintenance is way out of date. There's hardly a road in the city that doesn't have a pothole or signs of subsidence or a surface that is replete with cracks which, when winter returns, will open up as chasms to shake cars to pieces.

As a good SNP member, it pains me that our group on the council is being dragged down by its association with gross failure, for that is what the roads fiasco is. Yet it is not an SNP person who is in charge of roads in this city - it's a Liberal Democrat, and Gordon Mackenzie has just handed his opponents a marvellous opportunity to kick him out of his job.

I cannot ever remember laughing so much while reading an Evening News story as I did when this newspaper reported last week about the end of "Taxigate". You will recall that the council and Historic Scotland had been bizarrely instructing the police and courts to fine taxi drivers for travelling through Holyrood Park with their "for hire" lights showing or displaying adverts.

Not too long ago in this column, I suggested that the legal grounds for this ignominious offensive were dodgy, and last week the procurator fiscal agreed. In no uncertain terms the fiscal told the council and the quango that their persecution of taxi drivers was, ahem, illegal.

I understand Historic Scotland was always queasy about using the law in such a way, and it was Edinburgh Council - surprise, surprise - which was the big bad wolf in this sordid scheme. For it was the council which really launched this Holyrood Park campaign at the instigation of Councillor the Rev Ewan Aitken, who took up the case on behalf of people in Duddingston.

The fiscal has certified that what the council was doing was wrong - perhaps "ultra vires" in their jargon - and the use of Lothian and Borders Police to prosecute perfectly innocent drivers can only be deplored. The police were only doing their job - it is the council which is overwhelmingly to blame.

Now forgive me if I am being a tad too sensitive here, but in days when moral decency was a prerequisite for public office, if councillors were found to have abused their position or had done things that were outwith the law, knowingly or not, then resignation followed instantly.

The two men who drove forward this illegal hounding of cabbies were Aitken and Councillor Mackenzie, the convener of the transport and infrastructure committee. I don't expect Aitken to resign - he was, after all, only doing what he thought was correct in pushing forward the concerns of a few residents in Duddingston, and from what I've heard in the back of numerous cabs, he seems to have paid for his principles by losing the votes of commercial vehicle and taxi drivers in the recent Scottish Parliament election when Kenny MacAskill beat him into second place in an Edinburgh Eastern seat that was nominally Labour.

The buck has to stop somewhere, however, especially when you regard the mess that Edinburgh's infrastructure is in, and Gordon Mackenzie's desk seems the appropriate place.

Mackenzie was happy to issue statements promoting the new policy, but he clearly did not do what committee conveners must do, which is to make sure that a policy complies with the law above all. For his illegal pursuit of innocent cabbies, and for presiding over inadequacy and incompetence on a grand scale, Mackenzie should resign forthwith.

While you're at it, councillor, take your Liberal Democrat colleagues with you, because more and more you simply confirm what many of us have always suspected - you're rubbish.