NICE TO SEE YA....

TO SEE YA... 

OH WAIT, THAT WAS THAT OTHER BABBLING IDIOT

Seriously, in all your born days, did you ever see anything more... hmmm... nauseating?

No... listen, don't laugh. Someone must have actually proposed that they take this portrait standing like a bruised lemon at the bottom of some stairs pretending to be Hughie Green...except that instead of 'double your money', this little reprobate will halve it.

Image the conversation...

"Now Mr Mundell, look statesman like; no? Well, ok, look man like; too hard? OK, erm, well just stand there and look your ordinary useless self."

"Aye, well".

For those who don't know "Double Your Money" was an incredibly badly produced, cheesy, early STV/ITV quiz show (1960s/70s), much loved by my late grandmother. It was hosted by super-slimy Hughie Green, who could make your flesh creep at 100 meters.

And he wasn't half as bad as this baw heid, who, for those of you who don't know, is the Scottish Viceroy, the bloke that presented the Scotland Bill, which two committees in the Lords have pointed out is completely financially unsound and incompetent.

WELCOME OPENNESS FROM ERIC PICKLES: WHEN WILL OTHER DEPARTMENTS FOLLOW?

A reader kindly brought to my attention the fact that MEPs and officials in Brussels can obtain Methadone and Viagra free on the Health Insurance taken out for them as part of their salary packages.

I had just finished a reply to him (or her) and turned to the papers to see if there was anything of interest worth blogging about.

Lo and behold, the Telegraph provided me with a story which I think probably goes to show that it doesn’t much matter where the government is, London or Brussels, or Edinburgh, and for that matter probably Paris, Helsinki and Bamako (just in case you don't recognise the name), ministers and officials will find ways of spending our cash that don’t directly benefit us, but do directly benefit them.

In an attempt to be open and clear about what happened under the last government Eric Pickles has opened the books of the Communities Department of England. It has to be hoped that other departments of state will be so open. Clearly, as a Scotsman, I’d like to see the departments that affect my country do the same thing, most particularly the Scotland Office.

Among the items that I found interesting in the spend were: £635,000 on taxis and cars, £16 million on marketing, advertising, promotion and events, and £310,000 on catering and food. Amazingly large sums were spent wellbeing and training companies, therapies, acupressure massage, Indian Head Massage and Reflexology.

Money was even spent on trips to Blackpool Pleasure Beach and a nature reserve and on football clubs, including Manchester City and Manchester United.

Nearly £200,000 was spent on hotels including the Hilton, Royal Horseguards and at the Thistle Hotel, Marble Arch in central London.

Of course it is normal for private enterprise to use hotels, take staff on away days and fund training courses provided by outside organizations, and of course, given the size of the department, some of the sums are pretty small. But it has to be remembered that we were in a deep recession during the year in question and all extraneous costs should have been cut from government departments’ budgets as they were from commercial organisations. I’m sure that under Mr Pickles’ guidance, there will be no spending of this kind at all.

Bob Neill, the Local Government Minister said that the department had been living it up at the taxpayers’ expense whilst thousands of households were struggling to make ends meet. It was unforgivable, he said, that a culture of excess was allowed to flourish for so long.

English Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said: "The simple task of putting spending online will open the doors to an army of armchair auditors who will be able to see at a glance exactly where millions of pounds spent last year went. Looking at last year's spending it is clear that there is room for improvement."

Both Mr Pickles and Mr Neill should of course be aware that the day to day running of government departments is not really the ministers’ job. That task falls to the Permanent Secretary and his (or her) staff. I expect that the fact that this was allowed to go on will be a black mark on the records of these senior staff, and that any impending honours, which by custom go to these “top” people, will be reconsidered very carefully.

Hopefully when next years’ figures are published, not one penny piece of money will have been wasted on fripperies. I image too that all ministers in the department will find that the Telegraph will scrutinize their own expenses very closely.

Jim McGovern claims the credit.......Joe Fitzpatrick does the work

From the pages of the Dundee Courier’s Political Round-up comes this heartening tale of hard work rewarded.

That hard work is, according to Labour, the work of Dundee’s sole flyer of the red flag, Dundee West MP Jim McGovern. The Courier reports that Jim claims to have put in a huge amount of effort to secure Dundee a £100 million taxpayer boost for the high tech gaming industry in which the city excels.

It is suggested that Jim has been slogging away night and day by all possible means to secure that huge (and it is huge so I will say it again) £100 million.....and, I suppose, to help secure his lonely outpost of ex-Labour domination on the Tay.

But wait a minute........... This is a Labour MP we are talking about. The sort that likes to take all the credit, but do very little for it. So imagine Jim’s ire when some busybody sent in an FOI request to the Scotland Office to actually see all the communications on this subject between our Jim and them.

How dare they not take Honest Jim at his word, the blackguards!

Just out of interest, how many communications where there, I hear you all ask?

Well the answer given from the Scotland Office was........ one, and that was a letter sent to Dundee West MSP, Joe Fitzpatrick, Jim’s SNP counterpart in the Scottish Parliament.

Oh dear!

Hardly value for money is Jim, the ninth most expensive MP at Westminster with a whopping claim for £171,989.

It seems that 'well done Joe' should really be the order of the day.

Jim Murphy wastes Scottish money doing up his offices in the middle of the recession

The lovely Subrosa has a very interesting post today on the subject of Jim Murphy and his expenditure on his offices both in London and in Edinburgh.

He continually calls for constraint and efficiency savings in the Scottish Government, but somehow feels no moral obligation... or indeed obligation of any other sort, to follow suit.

SR has the figures and the facts about what the money has been spent on... along with the fact that Murphy has tried to conceal the expenditure in “roof and exterior repairs because it's a grade one listed building and must be maintained at an 'acceptable standard of decoration’”.

Most decorations, and certainly new carpets are not included in the demands of “grade one” listed buildings to the best of my knowledge. In any case in the midst of a recession when people in Scotland are losing their jobs, what on earth is the Scotland Office doing spending money on carpets?

Can I make a suggestion? The cost of running the offices in London and Edinburgh come out of the Scottish Government’s Block Allocation of pocket money from England. The more that the now more or less redundant Scotland Office spends, the less that Mr Salmond has to do what he is going to make Scotland a better place to live in...

Sorted! Oh and the picture is of the interior of Dover House in London. Rather splendid, ain't it?

.....................

WHY IS THE COST OF RUNNING THE SCOTLAND OFFICE INCREASING?

I recently received a newsletter from Newsnet Scotland, and was interested in an article on the Secretary of State for Scotland using his position to promote himself and Labour. The following quote is from the minutes of the Joint Management Board at Dover House:

"The Secretary of State is still working hard to raise and maintain his public profile and has been doing well in the media so far. He continues to look for opportunities to promote his own position and the role of the UK Government in Scotland."

I didn’t know that the Scotland Office was funded from the Scottish block grant, assuming that as it is part of the “federal” government, it would be the UK that paid for it. Surely, given that, we need to ask if these funds have been used by Murphy for the “promotion” alluded to in the minutes. This would undoubtedly violate the ministerial code which states: 'ministers must not use government resources for party political purposes'.

Newsnet also revealed that the running costs for the Scotland Office increased by 27% in 2007-2008 with staff levels increasing by over 9.5% on the previous year.

This seems an odd situation given that the role of the Scotland Office has not increased and overall the UK government has expressed a desire to downsize its staffing. It couldn’t be, could it, that Labour prefers to spend the Scottish Block Grant on staffing in its Dover House Offices in London, than have the money spent in Scotland?

Staffing levels, as reported by Newsnet and shown here in the first line, are showing a strange trend, as are costs (shown in line 2):

• 2005-6 -9.6%; 2006-7 -3.70%; 2007-8 +9.50%

• 2004-5 -10.3%; 2005-6 -0.9%; 2006-7 +1.5%; 2007-8 +27.3%

It seems that since the SNP government was elected, the cost of running Labour's Scotland Office has increased.

The SNP's Angus MacNeil said: "Since devolution the remit of the Scotland Office has shrunk but its staffing levels have mushroomed. The £7m spent on the Scotland Office annually would be much better invested in services the Scottish people actually need - not in a New Labour anti-Scotland spin machine that specialises in doing Scotland down."

However, it is the decrease in staff and costs in the Labour years in Scotland, and the increase since the SNP took over that I find difficult to understand, unless Labour's idea is to waste as much of our budget as possible.


The role of the Secretary of State, a very small one since devolution, is to promote the devolution settlement and to act as guardian of it and to promote partnership between the UK Government and the Scottish Government. Well, there’s a laugh!

It is an interesting thought that £7 million is coming out of our budget in any case, but very worrying that some of it may be used to do down our own government. In any case it needs investigation.

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