Football Mania

It is not that I was brought up in a football household because I wasn’t. Nor that even though my father played for … whisper it … Ross County. Or so I took from what he said but I have never got around to verifying it.

So it came as a shock to see the ‘Official Report’ of one of our Parliamentary Committees. It actually reads as if I were a football guru.

In response to a question from the Convenor as witnesses changed over, and I had joined to visit this Committee, I informed all present that Ireland had won 3-0.

A salutatory reminder that everything, just everything, we say in Parliament gets written down and reported.

Generally they get what we say just spot on. But every so often the results are amusing. So when I am reported as saying that the French have egg-shaped prisons you shouldn’t necessarily believe it. They are actually X-shaped. And they are correcting the report.

And we cannot relax in the corridors either. The 129 Members are shadowed – closely – by 41 accredited journalists and a flock of others. But not all of them work to the standards of Parliament’s Official Report.

So when First Minister Jack McConnell rose to his feet at Questions Time and congratulated SNP Leader John Swinney on his birthday, he was being unwise. Because he had relied on an Edinburgh daily paper. And they had it wrong, not just by a day, not by a week, but by a whole two months.

Anniversaries

One of the games newspapers play is the ‘anniversary game’. You know - who was born on this day, what happened on this day through history, that sort of thing. It is a useful and interesting way of filling up column space.

And I have found myself doing some of this introspective navel-gazing because of a personal anniversary.

It was only when I was preparing for a speech in Parliament on the subject of the Common Fishing Policy that I realised that like last year’s debate it was taking place on the second Thursday of June.

But more significantly for me, that previous debate marked my maiden speech, my first speech in Parliament. And thus it was a year since the election. Both the by-election that took me to Edinburgh and Prime Minister Blair back to power.

For me it has been a busy year. Seventy nine surgeries, about forty speeches, innumerable letters, telephone calls, Parliamentary Committee meetings, about 250 Parliamentary questions. And this doesn’t please me as much - a current mileage record running at a rate of about 42,000 miles driving a year.

The past year has seen the Labour backbenches go through many changes. One day your First Minister, the next you’re sitting on the backbenches. Henry McLeish is no longer First Minister and is seen in Parliament only occasionally and heard less but he has plenty of company amongst former ministers who join him on the Labour backbenches.

Rhona Brankin, the former Fisheries Minister, whom I clashed with a year ago – the person described by our local fishermen, in a totally non-sexist way, as ‘that woman’ – now sits on the back benches and no longer draws a ministerial salary. That’s the price paid for thwarting the will of Parliament on the tie-up vote.

The new First Minister is showing every sign of being a bit more politically acute. He has clearly recognised that the support for Peterhead Prison is strong. He also sees that his back-benchers are, at the very least, uneasy about private prisons.

So we know that he won’t be backing the Scottish Prison Service proposals. Because that would be to risk Parliamentary defeat. He’s a canny politician and when he visits Peterhead Prison over the summer it won’t be because he wants to see what we’re doing here.

He wouldn’t dare bring us bad news would he? So perhaps a little optimism is in order.

Jack McConnell and his cabinet have had a bit of a wake up call over the review of the Prison Service. There are cries of a backbench revolt among his Labour faithful who are opposed to privately run prisons. Jack McConnell and Jim Wallace need to be very careful over the next few months. The decisions that they make over the Summer will either make or break our Prison Service.