It\u2019s sometimes thought that Government is a piece of cake, you just take your manifesto and hey presto, it\u2019s done, dusted and law. In practice, in the real world of course it\u2019s far from that rosy picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you\u2019re lucky enough to have a current or past Minister as your MSP, have a chat about the realities of office. Not the oft cited \u201cMinisterial car\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because every decision to paraphrase has\u00a0its consequences. Every pound you spend on a pet policy or aim\u00a0has to\u00a0come from somewhere and unless you\u2019re lucky enough to get an extra allocation of the (very) limited Scottish Budget, you will have to make a cut somewhere else. But that\u2019s the price and the privilege of holding Ministerial Office!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s often said that \u201cYou campaign in poetry but Govern in prose\u201d. Meaning that those wonderful soundbites have to be implemented or watered down perhaps even dumped because of the realities of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nowhere is this\u00a0more stark\u00a0than when we look at the farce which is Sir Keir Starmer\u2019s Shadow Cabinet and if ever a title was well earned it\u2019s that one. Every progressive policy \u201ccommitment\u201d is dumped as soon as the\u00a0right wing\u00a0media,\u00a0(and increasingly we have nothing else)\u00a0launch their inevitable attacks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u00a328 billion\u00a0Green Recovery Plan; dumped,\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reverse the \u201ccruel\u201d 2 child limit; dumped, <\/p>\n\n\n\n
House of Lords reform; dumped. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The one area where the Labour knight is entirely consistent is that he doesn\u2019t care if a pledge was made to get him the Leadership or a Conference commitment it can go just as soon as the Murdochs and their fascist buddies at the Mail, Express etc take a dislike to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Starmer is utterly obsessed with the idea of getting to Number 10; but has absolutely no grounding cause, no root value or driving principle which he will take into office and can be judged on. If you don\u2019t like his policy today just wait a few weeks – there\u2019s a new one coming along!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nowhere in the policy platform has this been more obvious recently that on the environment. Sadiq Khan as Labour\u2019s Mayor in London wants to make the quality of air better in the inner city, To do this he has taken a policy inherited from Boris Johnston (how unusual is that) and driven it forward. Sir Keir as far as I can see was quite content with that, at least until it became an issue. Not just any old issue but one which is being touted as having cost Labour the Uxbridge by-election. Suddenly it\u2019s for review and then the scrapheap. Labour didn\u2019t even have the guts to point out that it was a Tory policy they were implementing, something which would scarcely have raised an eyebrow these days!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ll accept that the ULEZ plans are far from perfect but once you have decided to go with it at least try and explain why! Explain the benefits and why they outweigh the disadvantages. As we watch wildfires rage across Canada, Greece, Italy and even North Africa coupled with flooding in China and India etc it\u2019s blindingly obvious that we are destroying the planet. (Unlike the oil campaigners who keep telling us that we must act now or risk catastrophic climate change, I\u2019m of the opinion that it\u2019s probably not one minute to midnight but 5 past!) Our generations are the last to have had the luxury of choice and we blew it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Labour knight has shown that on issue after issue he is unable to make a decisionand stay with it. If he can\u2019t take the attacks from the right wing media just now what chance is there when the heat of an election campaign is raging far less when the tory economic traps which Jeremy Hunt is laying make it a necessity to make hard choices, Running away from making the hard choices and explaining to people why is not the kind of behaviour which inspires confidence in your ability to lead when the going gets tough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To Govern is to choose and if you\u2019re not able to choose then you\u2019re not able to Govern.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s sometimes thought that Government is a piece of cake, you just take your manifesto and hey presto, it\u2019s done, dusted and law. In practice, in the real world of course it\u2019s far from that rosy picture. If you\u2019re lucky enough to have a current or past Minister as your MSP, have a chat about the realities of office. Not the oft cited \u201cMinisterial car\u201d 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 →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3524"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3527,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524\/revisions\/3527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}