Lock-Up Time?

The announcement of a recommendation to close Peterhead Prison has dominated both the news headlines and my time.

But the closure is not a ‘done deal’ and there is everything to play for.

So it was an important step in the campaign having the Parliament’s Justice 1 Committee members visit the jail. Let me quote Donald Gorrie’s report to the formal meeting of the Committee after his visit. And remember too that he is a member of a government party.

“On all visits, we are never quite sure about the extent to which the wool is pulled over our eyes. On this occasion, I genuinely felt that the prison was very well run and that everyone involved, including all the staff—of every species—was committed to the approach adopted at Peterhead, which is very different from that of other jails. It was directed towards ensuring that sex offenders, when released, did not offend again. I was extremely impressed by the whole team.”

While the Committee Convenor, Christine Graham, said, “Inside and outside, the buildings were clean and in good condition. Peterhead is not like Barlinnie. I was struck by the cleanliness and the way in which the men kept their cells neat.”

So over the next few months it is clear that we can build on the support that exists across political parties to keep Peterhead Prison and build on its success.

Educating our Legislators

It has been quite some time since Aberdeenshire Council started to charge some 1,200 children for transport to school who previously went there for free.

The campaigners on the subject petitioned Parliament back in June last year. It took the Liberal-led Council and the Labour Executive in Edinburgh until February this year to respond to the Petitions Committee’s request for comment.

But now we have it and things are starting to move forward.

I went to the Parliament’s Education Committee and joined in their discussion of the situation.

They had various bits of information before them. The most devastating was probably a paper on how Councils across Scotland dealt with school transport. This was prepared by SPICe, our Scottish Parliament Information Centre, and it showed that Aberdeenshire now has one of the poorest and most expensive set of arrangements for our kids’ buses.

So it wasn’t surprising that our Education Committee felt that something should be done. They agreed with our local campaigners that the safety of pupils should be the main, perhaps even the only, consideration applied by Councils when they work out a local policy. So they have asked the Scottish Executive, our Scottish government, to comment on how the rules could be changed.

A good example of how input from ordinary folk, affected by the work of politicians, can influence and change things that matter.

It certainly would not have happened if there was no Scottish Parliament.

Scotland’s Web World

There is a rather strange organisation called ‘Scotland the Brand’. You and I meet this when we see their logo – a rather odd, multi-coloured, wavy representation of the word ‘Scotland’ with a hint of tartan woven through it – in adverts.

This is part of a cross-industry marketing campaign to sell Scotland as a tourist destination and to sell Scottish products and services. Because Scotland has ‘brand recognition’. Huh?

Well, all over the world, people can conjure up a view of what is meant when you say something is Scottish. And generally that is good. They think of they things we do well – whisky (of course!), tartan and bagpipes, and safe reliable hands for their money.

But as the hoo-hah about SCO on our number plates has shown, there is a definite limit to our ‘brand identity’. Because although there is now a wide international recognition of SCO among ordinary people, officialdom pretends not to understand because Scotland is not a country sitting at the top table.

And with the Internet becoming an ever more important part of our lives with each passing day, the same problem is afflicting is there too.

Would it not be great if our ‘brand identity’ was distinctive there too?

I would like my parliamentary email address to be stewart.stevenson.msp@parliament.sco but it can’t be. Because the Internet uses two character ‘names’ for countries and .SC is allocated to the Seychelles.

But that hasn’t stopped some enterprising Glasgow lawyers bypassing the Labour government’s reluctance to do anything about this.

They have simply gone out the Mahe and bought .SC from the Seychelles. So now Scotland really is ‘on the internet’. I have been to the web site at www.scregistrars.com and msp@stewartstevenson.sc will shortly be my new email address.

So Scotland still has entrepreneurs prepared to ‘make it happen’.