Stephen Bird (Page 2)

It’s sometimes thought that Government is a piece of cake, you just take your manifesto and hey presto, it’s done, dusted and law. In practice, in the real world of course it’s far from that rosy picture. If you’re lucky enough to have a current or past Minister as your MSP, have a chat about the realities of office. Not the oft cited “Ministerial car” or the speeches but the hard graft of getting to grips with a subject and mastering that brief before you can even think about how you would make change work and find the money from within your own Departmental budget.Read More →

Over recent months the siren of voices who claim that they have the simple route to Independence has become a clamour to see who can shout the loudest, sadly not a debate about who has one which is actually workable and achievable. From withdrawing the SNP MPs from Westminster to declaring “UDI” we’re bombarded with sound, and not a little fury. The SNP should get their own policy house in order is followed by the SNP should open up to the rest of the YES movement. As is frequently the case, the calls are mutually exclusive. Everyone, it seems, has a plan to get usRead More →

Greedflation; the condition where business increases prices because of a crisis but refuse to reduce them when the crisis passes. It’s what I believe is happening now to most things we buy but especially to foodstuffs. We could all understand when the oil price went through the roof last year as Mad Vlad tried to rebuild the Russian Empire by initially invading Ukraine. It was easy to accept that the rocketing price of fuel meant there would be knock-on impacts on everything, not that we foresaw just how horrific those impacts would be. Everything rocketed, fuel for the car, or lorry, electricity and the costsRead More →

Well, it’s certainly been an interesting few weeks since the Leadership contest got underway, exploded into a fair bit of acrimony, settled down (largely) into a debate, was decided and then the famed iron discipline disintegrated as so many rushed to air their every grievance.  Every cop in Scotland except Taggart and Rebus descended on poor Uddingston and we found out that the auditors had resigned months ago and we had acquired a caravan for the Sandra’s to use at Saltcoats presumably. Just as well they had that exercise to dig up the soup pot. In the middle of this one of the most bizarre episodes when my local MP and LeaderRead More →

There was I, sitting on my bed in Aberdeen Royal after my latest cancer surgery, happily extolling the virtues of the Scottish Government and its stability compared to the never ending chaos in London when one of my fellow patients bursts in to say “Aye well but who’s going to replace Nicola now”? Talk about pulling the rug…. It’s sad to see Nicola and now John stand down after so many years of unstinting service but at least we now have the opportunity to blood a new FM and their team before going to the polls again. Like the vast majority of folk I’m enormously grateful to both for yearsRead More →

I’m frequently confused, baffled and frustrated by some of the commentators who claim to be ardent supporters of Independence.  On one hand there’s a steady stream of “advice” on what the SNP should be doing to lead the campaign and drive forward the case for various courses of action from convening conferences, parliamentary disruption and calling for yet more marches. In the following weeks some will have columns which will frequently demand that the SNP stand aside and let the “wider YES movement” take the lead in developing campaigns etc. Occasionally, I think that the habit some had developed of knee-jerk opposition to the SNP, built up over decades of slavishly following whatever line theRead More →

In a recent piece for The Atlantic, “How the UK Became One Of The Poorest Countries in Western Europe”*, Derek Thomson wrote ” When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, it hit hard, smashing the engine of Britain’s economic ascent. Wary of rising deficits, the British government pursued a policy of austerity, fretting about debt rather than productivity or aggregate demand. The results were disastrous. Real wages fell for six straight years. Facing what the writer Fintan O’Toole called “the dull anxiety of declining living standards,” conservative pols sniffed out a bogeyman to blame for this slow-motion catastrophe. They served up to anxious voters a menu of scaryRead More →