Fishing!

Many years ago I spent three intensive days honing my skills in ‘getting my own way’. Or perhaps more properly ‘getting my employer’s way’.

And I will let you into the two secrets I learnt on that negotiating course.

First, one should always phrase any offer one makes in negotiation as “if you will ‘x’, then I will ‘y’”. Always put what they must do first.

The second secret has the aide memoire ‘LIMit’. That is a list you prepare of what you want from a negotiation. The categories are ‘like’, ‘intend’ and ‘must’ and they are headings for what you want.

Oh and the third secret on this list of two?– don’t tell your opponents what your strategy is.

You now have a better understanding of how we should be approaching the European fishing negotiations than Ross Finnie, the Labour-Liberal Scottish Executive’s Fishing Minister.

Because it has been astonishing to watch the man who is supposed to be our industry’s champion give up even before the negotiations. A bit of the beligerence of the Danish fishing Minister, or the Spanish or the Irish, would do nicely.

So when I meet fishing industry leaders shortly, I expect to come away with a a simple message for Ross Finnie.

Our ‘LIMit’ does not include closure of the North Sea for white fishing.

Money, money, money

In the Scots Parliament we are as ‘online’ as it is possible to get. And a large number of people email us their thoughts.

In the stream of ‘advice’ that reaches me from all over the world, the way we spend Scotland’s money comes well up the list.

The cost of the Parliament’s new building has been in the spotlight again.

When a new office block for some of Westminster’s MPs cost over £600 million – and generated little comment – to some people at least, the £300 million or so for a whole Parliament might not seem like a lot.

But Donald Dewar promised us the building for £40 million. And signed the contract even before our MSPs were elected.

So it is a matter of regret that one group of 19 MSPs have steadfastly refused to nominate anyone to the group trying to sort out Donald’s mess. The Tories seem content, as they always seem to be, to criticise the idea of a Scottish Parliament without being prepared to work on the real problems associated with change.

My colleagues in the SNP and I would have located the new building on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, used existing facilities and saved considerable time and money.

At the end of the day, we shall have a tangible asset for our money, and that’s something.

But as my recent investigations into the government’s advertising budget have shown, money can be spent for no visible benefit.

A Parliamentary question by me has led to the government publishing an analysis of their ‘foolsspeed’ campaign. This has going on for over three years, has cost a seven figure sum in advertising, and is designed to stop us speeding.

So you might expect the government to trumpet a reduction in speeding convictions. No! Their research tells us that attitudes have changed – to a limited extent.

And revealingly, the research tells us that campaigns which seek to change attitudes are rarely successful. So that’s another few million down the drain.

But what else could we do to stop speeding?

Well, with a typical speeding fine rather similar to the parking fine rate in Edinburgh, the Justice system is hardly sending out a message that speeding is a critical problem.

So why not just double the speeding fines? That wouldn’t cost millions and might even make some money.

The answer is that the Scottish Parliament does not have the power. The Road Traffic Act remains firmly in the hands of London and no matter how high a priority it might be for us, we have to wait for them to act – or choose not to.

Email Fraud

When you receive an email, do you know who it is from? Yes of course – because it says so in the ‘from’ field.

As MSP Fiona Hyslop has found out, not necessarily so.

The Internet allows anyone to send an email with anybody’s email address in the ‘from’ field.

And someone in Panama has been sending out marketing emails using Fiona’s email address.

How so? Well when we publish our email addresses on the Web it opens the door to this kind of abuse.

The price of openness.

Spend, Spend, Spend

It was years ago that a pools winner coined the phrase ‘spend, spend, spend’ to describe what she did. And soon she was back were she started – with little or nothing.

The advertising budget of the Labour/Liberal-Democrat Executive might suggest that they’ve won the pools as well. In the three years since they were elected their spending has gone from £1.6 million a year to over £6 million.

So I have been asking whether we get value for money. Firstly they told me it would be too expensive to even consider giving out information about their many campaigns.

I tried again and invited them to choose any one of their campaigns and tell us about it. And on Friday they finally did.

The advertising they have given us information on was “Foolspeed”. It is targetted at getting us all to stop speeding on our roads.

Well with our twisty, single carriageway roads carrying a large volume of mixed traffic – slow farm vehicles, large lorries, faster moving cars – our accident record certainly suggests that this is a campaign that we should support.

But do expensive TV adverts actually make a difference?

The evidence suggest perhaps not. It seems that even the evaluators did not think that this kind of advertising was effective. Less than a third of people asked could recall the adverts.

And this from the Scottish Executive who have now spent themselves into being the biggest advertiser in Scotland.

Ministers have been chanting ‘spend, spend, spend’ with our money for rather too long methinks.

Fifty Not Out

At the end of this week it will be 500 days since I was elected to Parliament. And last week saw me speak in my fiftieth debate. It was time a for wider look at the work of the Parliament.

One of the mistaken impressions left with electors is that we all sit in Edinburgh voting as our whips tells us. And that could suggest that we are not allowed to think through the consequences of our actions.

I have been looking at some of the statistics and a very different picture emerges.

In the Justice Committee of which I am one of seven members, we have been undertaking detailed consideration of the Land Reform Bill.

Over the last eight parliamentary committee days of debate, we have had sixty votes on proposed amendments to the Bill. A fair number are withdrawn after the government made a commitment to bring forward further changes.

With their access to lawyers to assist with drafting sometimes complex law, that’s fair enough.

I have tabled nearly fifty amendments so far but we’ve voted only a minority of them.

It seems that on 13 our of sixty votes, the three Labour members voted in different ways. And my SNP colleague and I diverged on 7 occasions.

So if my 500 days since joining the Parliament have shown me anything, it is that we are there to think, not just to “do as we are told”.