One million page views

Thanks to all my readers for helping me reach this milestone.

I'll raise my glass to you all tonight, and promise to keep infuriating and entertaining you in equal measure in the future.

Our digital future....

Cynics might think that this refers to going back to using our fingers, as the promises from the politicians seem not to have materialised.

A brief recap....

The SNP promised a fund of £50m for the Scottish Futures Trust to give everyone broadband access.  That promise has now gone, as far as I can tell.

The Government recently offered £70m which required match funding from the Scottish Government, but this was derided as "not enough" by the Scottish Government.

Now, according to the Scottish Government it will cost £300m to wire the Highlands and Islands alone, money which they have neither promised nor hinted that they might find.

Is it any wonder that potential residents here are so confused and disillusioned about the Broadband offering (outside Stornoway) that they have to resort to public appeals for the information which the main publicly funded provider won't release.

I'm sure that there are many who can help him out with much more technical knowledge than I will ever have.

Update:  The Scottish Secretary has a go too.

Seismic

I think that's possibly the best word to describe the events of last night and today.

The collapse of the LibDems was to be expected, but not to the extent that we have seen today, which effectively wipes them out as a political force in Scotland.


The electoral system for once, also worked in the SNP's favour.

The self-destruction of the Labour Party continues apace, and I am not sure if they are going to have the parliamentary numbers to be able to manage a real change and bring forward new ideas.

A quick look at some of the results seems to suggest that Labour voters stayed at home in droves, whilst the LibDems and many Labour swapped to SNP.  This will warrant much further analysis by the Labour Party over the coming months, when they finish navel gazing.

The next 4 years are going to be a long period of reflection for the opposition, whilst the SNP are going to have to manage down the expectations of their supporters to fit the money available.

The big question is just how and why the Labour Party imploded.  I would suggest that poor or non-existent leadership allied to a serious absence of organisational skills met an ill-focused campaign in a head-on crash.  The positive publicity and the message disappeared with the momentum, and it was all a death-spiral from there.

Iain Gray will be gone by Monday.  But just who will be there to replace him?  Unless there is a new face and an entirely new approach to reality, then they might as well plan for the next loss and the next leadership contest.

You have been warned!

A simple 'please' would have changed the whole tone of this leaflet, which was distributed to every house in the area, and put a lot of backs up.

I am at a loss to understand what possible sanctions could be brought to bear on those who disregarded THE INSTRUCTIONS.

Is this now Council policy?  And does it apply to all skips or just to this individual one?

Libya

It is deeply, deeply, reassuring to know that the Scottish Government is ready to help Scots trapped in the Libyan crisis.

I didn't realise that we still had any Libyan prisoners left to give away trade.

Perhaps Salmond plans to send a CalMac ferry to rescue those trapped.  A minimum RET charge will apply, at a rate of £100 per mile plus £40 per foot of luggage.  Assuming the Muirneag can manage to pass the Arnish lighthouse by July, without turning back.

Rumour has it that retired helicopter winchman, Chris Murray, has been recruited by a crack team of the SSAS (Scottish SAS) under the direction of the First Minister to fly in supplies to trapped Scots.  He will be dropping haggis, Barley's marags, guga casserole and Irn Bru from a black ops helicopter.  The supplies have been chosen to stop the *nglish trying to steal the supplies, although rogue Welsh elements have threatened to eat Chris and the helicopter.

Practice runs are taking place over the Saharan dunes at Luskentyre as we speak...

Incompetence, sheer pathetic incompetence

The loss of the right to create a Scottish tax rate is unbelievable.

That such a loss came about because someone forgot to pay the bill is just jaw-droppingly pathetic.

With two-years notice now required, on top of the two/three years to get legislation drafted, voted upon and passed effectively rules out any use of the power inside a single term of a Parliament.

Hopefully, the SNP will admit just who was responsible for this stupidity.

Unless - of course - it was deliberate, to try and focus the debate on the extremes rather than all the possibilities.

However, it feels more like incompetence; but all the same, whose incompetence?

The royal engagement

Is it just me, or is the coverage just a bit too understated?

Labour selection process postponed

I have the first photograph of one of the candidates going into the meetings that led to the delay.

Jeez.  Defeat from the jaws of victory...

(Apologies for upload problems)

...and your inside leg measurement too!

An irate ballet lover emailed me about her attempt to see Scottish Ballet at An Lanntair.

Proffering her crisp £20 notes, she was told that the new ticketing system would only issue her tickets if she provided her title, name, address, gender(!) & phone number.

The justification from the staff member was simple: this was information required by the funding bodies to provide information about the type of customers buying tickets; but you could still opt out of receiving marketing information and avoid the inevitable deluge of fliers.

Mrs Irate knows a thing or three about the assimilation of data and pointed out that:

• To obtain reasonable statistical details about the type of visitors to the shows, you only need gender, postcode and age
• The phone number might be requested in case the show is cancelled, but is really, really, not necessary
• Why are An Lanntair not registered with the Information Commissioner if they are collecting and processing all this data?

Her spleen duly vented, Rev Lady Smith of Penzance will be using the home phone numbers of Directors of An Lanntair as her contact details until the situation improves or the database is so inaccurate as to be useless.

Lunatics; asylum; close the doors; burn the building down

You know that some people just have too much time on their hands and too little to do....

Holyrood staff to be taught Gaelic[...]

Alasdair Allan, the Nationalist MSP who represents the Western Isles, said he believed the plan would make life easier for some of his constituents.

Fuel poverty.  Jobs. Decent public services.  These will make life easier for people in the Western Isles, not this insane scheme to create a pan-Scottish Gaelic luvies section, of those who have a view on how us natives should live and converse, and by God, are they going to impose that view on us.

Making the workers work less

My jaw hit the floor...

Volunteers will be sought from among staff at Western Isles Council to work fewer hours to help the authority save millions of pounds.

Are the Councillors that blind and insane as to think that this will do anything but allow the overpaid and under worked to take a holiday at the expense of the overworked and underpaid?

It's not 1st April you numpties.

Make the staff all work their allotted hours and crack down on the flexi-time abuses - do managers know or even care about the staff who go for external 'meetings' and do their weekly shop in the Co-op?  Or the 2pm meetings on Friday which mean that the staff don't come back until Monday?  Or the 30 minute lunch break courtesy of a friend swiping their pass?

There are very many excellent staff in the Comhairle and then there are those promoted well above their ability who sit there and draw a fat salary, accrue a fat pension, and contribute f'all.  And their subordinates now them only too well.

Who said Gordon Brown doesn't have a sense of humour?

John Prescott a f'ing Peer of the Realm!

FFS, as social satire goes it couldn't be any funnier if it wasn't just so sad and so true.

Jonathan Swift, eat you heart out.

Just look at the other deadwood arriving at Platform 1 along with the verbal mangler of Hull, and the case for abolition (or involuntary euthanasia) for the Upper House as currently constituted is made.

To pee or not to pee

So the toilets in Percival Square are to remain closed after the building work in the square is completed.

This is in accordance with some vague, unspecified, Council decision made in light of budget cuts etc etc etc.

As the tender documents, issued in on 28 January said:

Comhairle Nan Eilean Siar, local authority for the Western Isles Area, is inviting expressions of interest for the construction of a new civic space in the centre of Stornoway. The works mainly comprise the remodelling of an existing car park and the resurfacing of approx 1100 sq metres in natural stone paving.
The estimated cost of the project is £350k.
Expressions of interest must be made through the Public Contracts Scotland Portal by 8th February 2010.

They seem to have forgotten that the new 'Civic Square' was to have what is now a derelict building right in the middle of the tourist attraction. That'll have the Cruise Liners queuing at the harbour mouth.

However, there won't be any queues at the public toilets in the Bus Station - the new main public toilet provision for Stornoway - at least on Sundays, as the Bus Station is locked, where Percival Square was coin operated.

Perhaps the £350,000 on remodelling Percival Square would have been better spent on toilets, showers and other facilities for yachtsmen and other tourists?

Perhaps the Councillor might try and find out who made this decision, with what authority, and why a major piece of work in the Town Centre is now to be ruined. Or will the building be demolished, to solve the problem?

Is there a cupboard in the White House in which the Council keeps the Councillors who are a danger to democracy?

Has one escaped the armed guards, scaled the barbed wire and shrugged off the straight jacket and gag, only to let let rip with the kind of comment which will have the Press Officer banging his head off the desk, and the lawyers writing suicide notes?

In the great spirit of the democratic system, public and civic responsibility and the maturity to make a decision based on the facts, ones understanding of the circumstances: and all tempered with the nuances of beliefs, public interest and a sense of judgement; the ability to ditch all of those and drop you colleagues into an expensive and embarrassing position whilst trying to avoid taking any kind of stance takes some doing.

Step forward Cllr Murdo MacLeod to receive the Arse-from-Elbow award for ludicrous decision avoiding.  The prize is a large pair of pliers to remove the splinters from the fence from your backside.

Unwilling to take a stand either for or against the application for a Sunday licence at Stornoway Golf Club, in true fashion he praised both sides and feigned an inability to come to a conclusion so as to try to offend no-one.

"This is not a cop out.  I have to abstain."

Hear that noise?  It's the bullshit detectors exploding.

You never HAVE to abstain, unless he is implying some kind of conflict of interest that he didn't declare.  Just what was the position of the Free Church of which he is a Deacon?  Should he perhaps have declared an interest and not participated?

He conceded that the club would be "highly likely" to win an appeal.

WTF?  He is pretty sure that the Licencing Board are taking the wrong decision, yet he allows the decision to go the 'wrong' way and encourages an appeal that he thinks the applicants will win.  Oh yes, and we the public will pick up the tab of perhaps £15,000 in that event.  But that's not important enough to take a stand about?

Now imagine the appeal by the Golf Club, and the Board having to write their defence of the decision.  Just how will Cllr MacLeod defend his view that the Board were wrong and their decision should be overturned, yet not feeling any obligation to prevent a waste of people's time, energy and money on something that he thinks was "highly likely" to be wrong.  And how will his colleagues on the Board appreciate him undermining them?

Of course, he has form in this area.  As a vocal and highly public opponent of Sunday transport to the islands, he was previously caught taking a secretive private Sunday flight on a Council sponsored trip to the US to go and see some tourist sights.  And let's not mention using another Councillors pin number to access executive lounges, so other Councillors could get the free booze.

Time to close that door again and double the guards.

Psychosomatic illness

Schoolgirls faint and collapse for unknown reasons.

'Mass poisoning by the Taliban' cry the coalition.

Nothing to do with us Guv, cry the Taliban.

With a long and (un)illustrious history of people assuming that spontaneous collapses had something to do with anything other than hysteria, it is worth looking at some similar examples before jumping to conclsuions which will only exacerbate the outbreak by giving official support to a probably baseless claim.

Remember, that when you read about the 'fact' of this outbreak that it is nothing more than the evidence of how the press and spin doctors can create a propaganda point out of nothing substantive.

And apply that scepticism to the current election.....

The Pairc Trust

With the community representatives on the Trust at loggerheads with the Landlord, Barry Lomas, and with recent accusations and counter-accusations flying around, I was grateful for some documents that reached me recently, and to which I will be giving detailed consideration shortly.

I looked carefully at the Pairc Trust website and was interested to note that the footer reads:

Copyright (c) 2009 Pairc.co.uk. All rights reserved.

So who owns pairc.co.uk?

A quick look at whois.co.uk produced an astonishing answer:

Domain name:
pairc.co.uk

Registrant:
BJY Lomas

Registrant type:
UK Sole Trader

Registrant's address:
Lomas
14 Offchurch Lane Radford Semele
Leamington Spa
CV31 1TN
Unknown
United Kingdom

Registrar:
Easily Limited t/a easily.co.uk [Tag = WEBCONSULTANCY]

URL: http://www.easily.co.uk

Relevant dates:
Registered on: 20-Jan-2000
Renewal date: 20-Jan-2012
Last updated: 04-Mar-2010

WTF is going on???

Why do the parties seems to be playing at being opponents at each others throats when there appears to collusion between the parties, not just in the simple matter of the website, but in apparently secret deals behind closed doors which apparently seek to benefit some of the Trustees interests and the sellers interest in a mutually beneficial way? (More on this to follow)

As a charitable trust, the Trustees have to show an even higher standard of probity than company directors, but the public in the Pairc area need to be make any decisions in the full knowledge of the full facts. And the politicians need an even higher level of knowledge before public funds and public approval are bestowed on the deal.

Of course, I may be wrong, and I will happily publicise any further information that may shine light on the nature of the dealings, if I have got the wrong end of the stick.

The Postman doesn't knock at all

Most people get one post delivery a day.

Some get a parcel delivery too.

Me? I have at least one other postman, who works the weekend night shift, posting plain brown envelopes through my letter box.

An enclosure of such importance (and delivered with impeccable timing for other events you couldn't know about) necessitates a shredding of the original document and the envelope as a further layer of protection.

Thank you my friend(s) for a document showing such a spectacular own goal, as to be almost unbelievable.

The public will just have to wait a few weeks longer to find out the size, scope and extent of the lies being told in their name.....and the associated huge waste of public money.

Conglomerate nan Eilean Siar

The Councillors had plenty to talk about last week, but sadly it seems like common sense was conspicuous by its absence.

The decision by the Stornoway Port Authority to refuse to allow the Bayhead Infill to go ahead was one of the hot topics.

A solution to the problem was mooted by senior Councillors: that the Comhairle acquire the powers of the Stornoway Port Authority and that the SPA be disbanded. This, it was said, would avoid any future problems over planning matters, and ensure that the Comhairle could bring it's skills and abilities to dealing with all harbour matters.

This idea seems to have met with approval, as there was a call to extend the remit of the Council by taking over absorbing the functions of the Health Board. Oh yes, and the major players in the Voluntary Sector. And a few other organisations too.....

How much easier - the Councillors concluded - if these organisations were able to better understand the views of the Council by being part of the Council. Strategic planning will be so much better and coherent if these independent organisations didn't take independent decisions, but instead were told what to do.

Unbelievably, this strategy is to be pursued (quietly and off the record, of course), so look forward for the Council planning to broaden its remit.

Meantime, Dear Leader Comrade Angus Camp Il Jong is authoring the new 10-year Collective Plan, "The People's Great March Forward", for the proposed Democratic People's Democratic Republic of the Outer Korean Hebrides.

The Nicolson Institute

Before the new schools project planned for 2011/12....


and after the project.....

Yet I am told that £250,000 of new windows are being installed in the school this year. With one window (surely set of windows) costing £60,000.

Can anyone shed any light on this element of the Council capital programme?

Windfalls and f'ups

Isn't it a wonderful feeling when you realise that you have got a very good deal on a purchase?

Don't you have this frisson of joy when you realise that the goods you ordered from the mainland were never charged on your credit card?

Have you ever had that sphincter-tightening realisation that you have forgotten to issue an invoice, or request payment, and you just know that the customer will never pay your bill?

I am told that there is a collective case of sphincter-loosening at the COU with the realisation that they failed to complete the necessary paperwork and hence failed to issue invoices totalling about £500,000 in the Summer of 2009.

The customer who will not now have to pay for this work is believed to be the Hebridean Housing Partnership.

Negotiations between the parties are understood to have started, but with the Bank of Taxpayer underwriting the COU, what's the urgency?