On my way to Fir Park I’d heard that the ICM poll in Scotland on Sunday has YES at 45, up three points, but, true to their normal dismal form, the well-initialled SOS is leading on the idea that families across the nation are falling out with relatives as a result of the referendum process. What utter piffle.
Most papers (around thirty titles in all in Scotland) are hostile to independence because their predominantly London-based newspaper groups judge it to be in their interests to be hostile. Or at least they consider the idea of independence to be against their interests. However, the Scotsman and its sister paper Scotland on Sunday are on a suicide mission.
Andrew Neil once ran the European newspaper on an anti-European editorial and it did not last too long. Similarly, the Scotsman could survive, indeed prosper, with any editorial line – left-wing, right-wing, Liberal, Seventh Day Adventist, if it wished.
The only thing the Scotsman cannot be is unreliable on the national question, and yet that is exactly what it is. The endgame of that approach is certain. The Scotsman will disappear from the newsstands and on to the internet before long.
Back home in Strichen I arrive in time to see the second half of a pretty average Italian side cantering to a close (but still comfortable) victory over England. As I suspected YES will have to look elsewhere for a campaign boost!
Day Four: Sunday 15 June
Today I get to do what I enjoy most in politics: talking directly to people.
Taking part in the Colin Mackay phone-in for Bauer radio allows me to break out of the political bubble. That kind of contact is one of the real joys of the campaign. There are a number of points raised about the Health Service. I will make sure that the individual cases raised are properly pursued by my private office.
The Sunday Herald and the Scottish Sun on Sunday give us a good show on the apparent tightening of the polls. However, most of the papers do a post-mortem of the week’s episode of cyber abuse as if it was a YES prerogative. Interestingly, in the entire hour of the phone-in programme nobody wants to talk about ‘cybernats’ but about the Health Service and the economy. The lesson for the campaign is to keep on our own agenda and our own medium to deliver the message. We must not allow the old press to dictate the themes of this new campaign.
Day Five: Monday 16 June
Up at the crack of dawn. Destination: Orkney Islands. We have chosen Orkney to launch Our Islands Our Future.
Derek Mackay, the Minister for Local Government, has guided negotiations between the Scottish government and the three island councils* with skill, and the launch goes extremely well. The document and the process which has preceded it is an attempt to galvanise support for independence in the islands by providing the assurance (and the reality) that the process of local decision-making should not stop at Edinburgh but be community-focused across the whole of Scotland. It is important to the independence movement that we carry support in all of Scotland.
Visited Kirkwall Grammar School as part of the trip. It’s a ‘school for the future’ and I am greatly impressed by staff and pupils.
The new schools across Scotland are going to stand the nation in good stead. Actually they are the same design – for example, Kirkwall Grammar looks to my untrained eye very similar in terms of layout to Lasswade High, in Midlothian – and all the better for that. More than 460 new schools have been built or renovated since 2007 (almost a fifth of the entire estate) compared with just 328 during the first eight years of devolution. All of this has been achieved against a huge cut in capital spending and is a triumph of organisation and ingenuity over funding availability.
Day Six: Tuesday 17 June
Worried that Vladimir Putin might cause me problems – but boosted by an Englishman calling for a YES vote.
We were still in Orkney and Donna Heddle, former SNP candidate in Orkney and wife of the council convener, had arranged a lunchtime meeting at virtually no notice – and forty people immediately turn up. A chap, originally from Nottingham, tells me how he and his wife thank their lucky stars every morning for being in Orkney. He is a firm YES supporter but would just like to hear more people with his accent speaking up for the cause.
He is absolutely right!
This came after the first-ever Cabinet meeting convened from a school for the future. The Infant Cremation Commission report from Lord Bonomy was due out. This report follows the discovery that over many years babies’ ashes had been disposed of at Mortonhall Crematorium in Edinburgh without the knowledge of parents. I had promised the parents that I would chair the Cabinet that discussed the report. I was determined to keep my word and therefore I chaired the Cabinet over Skype from Kirkwall Grammar while my colleagues were in Edinburgh. High-tech stuff from a school for the future.
I hope to progress this sensitive issue through building on the excellent work of former Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini. As in everything she does, Elish has adopted a model approach and has earned the confidence of the parents affected by Mortonhall, where this depressing lack of humanity and dereliction of duty were discovered. If we can apply her comprehensive look across all of Scotland then we might implement Bonomy’s recommendations and secure the information, explanation and apology that the parents are due for their own treatment at the hands of officialdom.
This would avoid the long process of a public inquiry which can seldom, if ever, provide a satisfactory explanation for individuals as opposed to key investigations of policy. What public inquiries do provide, however, is a dripping roast for less than scrupulous legal companies.
Now to Putin. Flew back to Edinburgh to hold a meeting with the Ukrainian Community. I’m expecting a difficult discussion, since some had taken severe umbrage at an interview which I had conducted with Alistair Campbell for GQ earlier in the year.
In it Campbell had trapped me into saying what I ‘admired’ about Vladimir Putin. In fact I had been rather judicious in what I said, but that is not how it was reported. At any rate I needn’t have worried. The meeting goes well and we all part firm friends.
Day Seven: Wednesday 18 June
I was only here for the beer. Not drinking it but spreading the word about the exceptional entrepreneurship of a couple of lads from Fraserburgh, James Watt and Martin Dickie, who employ hundreds of people producing and selling great real beers with their firm BrewDog.
They’re giving a presentation at the Scottish Economic Forum and I find out that they have a bar in São Paulo, Brazil.
This is a great way to kick off the forum. Firstly I say it is nice to know that Scotland will be represented at the World Cup in some capacity, and secondly that it is reassuring to know that supporters of every nation – none in particular, mind – will be able to drown their sorrows in excellent beer now brewed in Ellon, Aberdeenshire!
I also raised a laugh by describing my recent visit to the Coca-Cola factory in East Kilbride which was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. One of that plant’s many achievements is to take charge of most of the commemorative bottles that Coca-Cola produce for the World Cup and the Olympic Games. Thanks to Coca-Cola executive Jim Fox they even produced one for Scotland’s Homecoming in 2009, when Robert Burns became the first person in world history to feature on the famous bottle.
In the presence of the company’s top executives I was taken around the impressive plant in a golf buggy by one of the workers, John McCafferty.
As we passed the World Cup bottle line, McCafferty said: ‘As you will know, we in East Kilbride produce the commemorative bottles. You will also know that Scotland, as a nation, decided NOT to participate in this year’s World Cup in Brazil. However, such is our generosity of spirit here in East Kilbride that we still produce the bottles for the rest of the planet.’
One of the Coca-Cola top guys turned to me and asked: ‘Is that right? You guys decided not to go? Was