True Love?

St. Valentine’s day is for saying, “I love you”. Well I suspect Hugh Henry, MSP and Deputy Health Minister, is not my Valentine.

For at quarter to three on the 14th, he answered my question about Fraserburgh and Peterhead Ambulance stations with these words,

“I am not familiar with staff hours in the locality that Stewart Stevenson mentioned and members would not expect me to be familiar with them”

A perfectly reasonable answer except for one thing, I have had eight written parliamentary answers on this subject in the last two months.

For all the extra money we pay MSPs when they are Ministers, we should have people familiar with the topic of the day.

Hugh Henry knew in advance that the Ambulance service was the single subject he would be questioned on. So yes, we do expect the minister to be familiar with the topic. And this subject has been around for some time.

So flowers for my wife on Valentine’s day but none for Hopeless Henry.

Sitting Comfortably?

The volume of mail received by Parliamentarians is formidable. Sometimes it is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. So a paper titled ‘Anthropometric Study to Update Aircraft Seating Standards’ only got read because of the word ‘aircraft’.

In fact it contains quite good news for holiday charter travellers.

But one has to struggle through statements like “The current 660mm will only accommodate up to the 77th%ile of the European population” to get to the meat.

But the bottom line is - more room for bottoms, and legs, and arms. For the first time we are in sight of a pan-European minimum standard for airline passengers seats. And it is designed to give us more space.

It won’t mean less cramped flights to Spain in 2002. Perhaps we will get more room next year.

The only challenge now is the one laid down by my campaigning colleague, Kenny Macaskill – more flights from Aberdeen.

Arresting Moments

The most upright citizen has a moment’s pause for thought when a meeting with the police looms. But contact with the local police is another matter.

I’ve always found them highly responsive to the issues I raise with them. And I generally find a high regard for our police among constituents.

Not that people think there are enough of them. And I agree; we need more.

Our new Superintendent for the area is Ewan Stewart.

He appears not to be a tall gentleman, standing a clear six inches short of his Chief Inspector colleague. But as I approach I release that our new man is actually well over six feet.

It is just that the Chief Inspector is actually six foot eight! So when these two are seen on our streets, and they often are, criminals tak tent.

The police have cracking down on vandalism to very good effect in Fraserburgh. And the numbers show it. I will certainly be supporting similar initiatives throughout the area. The often small scale thuggery that vandalism really is, drags down morale in the community and success in tackling this is very welcome.

My SNP colleague Fiona Hyslop has found that there is a very serious problem with funding Fire Brigade pensions. Even though firemen and women have been contributing to their pensions all their working lives, the money has not actually gone into a fund anywhere. Instead it has been used to top up day to day Fire Service spending.

But with a large recruitment of fire service personnel in the mid 1970s, we are starting to see a sharp rise in retirements in the 2000s. And today’s funding is being diverted away from front line fire services to pay for pensions.

And it turns out that the police are in exactly the same position.

They pay in for a pension. But when they retire, the pension will be paid directly from money provided for policing. So in few years’ time, we could see enormous pressure on police budgets just to pay pensions.

And actual policing on the streets could suffer. So I’m working with my colleagues to ensure that police pensions are funded properly. The first steps are a raft of Parliamentary questions to find out the numbers.

Foxing Times

The biggest round of applause during this week’s Parliamentary on fox hunting debate came when a Labour member said,

“I would not have chosen the banning of fox hunting as a priority for legislation in our new Parliament.”

And so say all of us.