Rolled-up Trousers

McDonald's reply on recycling

McDonald's have replied to my recent query regarding why they don't recycle customer waste, especially when their counterparts in other countries do. Here's the relevent bit:

"There are many challenges with this, most notably that many UK recycling facilities are contracted for household waste only and not for commercial use. In addition, few facilities will accept 'dirty' paper or plastics, deeming that waste that is contaminated with food or drink residues is unsuitable. That said we are committed to finding ways to reduce the amount of waste we send to landfill and will continue to explore this area."

I've replied asking what steps they've taken to lobby the powers that be to ensure sufficient recycling facilities are set up. As I pointed out in my last blog post on this, other chains are recycling with food. Also see the interesting comment by Michael King underneath this article.

For the sake of balance, a similar epistle has now also been sent to Burger King.

EDL Abdul video

Muslim singing anti-Catholic songs, treating all Catholics as terrorists.Words fail me.

One of the features of the current Islamophobia is that it is just the latest manifestation of hatred that has spewed against Catholics, Jews and blacks in the past. To see a Muslim carrying on in such a fashion has left me dumbfounded.

Abdul Salaam or Abdul Hussain as I've seen him referred in different quarters was at the English Defence League protest in Bradford at the weekend.

UPDATE: From Azhar on Facebook: "The best video of him is this one where he desperately tries to persuade us that the head of the edl welsh division is not racist. This goes on after the chap says he has sieg heiled, that he is racist, and that he has swastikas tattooed on his body"

50,000 green jobs sitting on the wall

The Scottish renewables industry needs to shift emphasis from its great potential to what needs to be done to realise it

The Scottish Renewables report released last week on the future of the green energy industry lays out exactly how many jobs are at stake over the next 10 years.

If we do the things that we should, that number will be in the region of 48,000. On the other hand, if we get this wrong, it could only be just 900 jobs that are created.

It's all well and good and should further whet our appetite to unleash Scotland's potential in this field, with famously, one-quarter of Europe's wind offshore. That does mean three-quarters is elsewhere and the report warns that if we don't get it right, other countries will become the leaders in this field instead.

What the report doesn't stress is exactly how much investment is needed, what that should go into, and who should be pumping it in. The report seems to fall into the common trait of the renewables industry in Scotland in dwelling on how much potential there is instead of emphasising how we access it. By way of example, the Conservative government's recent Green Investment Bank Commission recently concluded that UK-wide there would have to be £550bn worth of investment over the next decade to achieve carbon reduction targets, albeit this isn't just for wind energy but also includes upgrading buildings and helping industry. There aren't any such figures readily promoted in Scotland.

Locked away in Annexe E of the Scottish Renewables report are some actions such as finding investment through the UK government releasing the Fossil Fuel Levy money, and making use of the upcoming Green Investment Bank. On the latter, Rob Gibson MSP recently suggested that the GIB should be located in Scotland, a call backed by a leading lawyer (although the Tories seem to be wading backwards on how it will be funded).

The report also states other practical measures: shortening of consent periods; the upgrading of and access to the national grid; and widening mid-career training as well as gearing universities to produce qualified people for the industry.

All of this requires money, money that does not seem forthcoming from the UK government and which the Scottish Government are powerless to raise. The Tories are crazily cutting spending at the time when we need to be investing in new industries, creating jobs and getting into a situation where we are producing things other countries want to buy. This report therefore underscores the need for the Scottish Government to have entirely normal economic powers to raise money to spend in this area. We also should be able to reap the benefits of it, meaning the proceeds shouldn't just be funnelled through to London as it has been with the oil. We should be greener and wealthier from this.

As with so much in Scottish politics, it returns to the constitutional question. It's all very well having values and principles, but if you don't have the power to implement them, they are pretty pointless.

Tony Blair should pay for his own security

Electoral Commission returns have shown that former PM Tony Blair donated £75,000 to Labour Party coffers for this year's general election drive.

This of course dwarfs the generosity shown to the British Legion with profits of around £5m from his memoirs going towards a gym for injured soldiers.

At the same time, it costs us £6m a year to provide protection to the man who took us to war in Iraq. One book signing next month alone is expected to come in at a quarter of a million pounds. The expenses of bodyguards when abroad fetches £250,000. It is right that former PMs should receive security. Prime ministers before Blair did not engage in so much foreign travel though.

Whenever he jets off around the world, which is understood to be the majority of the time, whether he is doing business for international high finance, or entering war zones as peace envoy, we should not be expected to pay for it. If a bank wants him, they should pay his bills. If the Quartet want him - the man who was pushed out of office because he couldn't say Israel should ceasefire in Lebanon - to try and broker peace in the Middle East, let it be on their own dime. If not, it's not unreasonable for Blair to foot the bill himself from his considerable earnings.

So let him cover the cost of that, and let the government get on with the job of helping injured troops.

Government should force sale of Glasgow Airport

The Herald have reported that Edinburgh Airport is increasing its passenger number lead over Glasgow Airport, with the gap up to 200,000 every month only three years after it took over as the busier of the two.

What the article didn't mention is the ongoing ownership issue of the airports, which is something I campaigned on at the general election. They are both controlled by BAA, despite a Competition Commission ruling that they must sell one. BAA successfully challenged the ruling on a technicality last December, with no dispute about the merit of it. The original CC inquiry took two years, and it may take years again just to get to the same point, whereupon BAA are given a number of years to make the sell-off.

Meanwhile Glasgow is languishing when it should be robustly competing with its neighbour. BAA have every incentive consciously or unconsciously to let the current trend continue. This was the whole point of the CC ruling.

This cannot be allowed to go on like this. The UK government can look at forcing a sale through the Competition Act (2000) or if not viable, enacting legislation specifically to do it. They should do so.

Who's given what for Pakistan

Aid to Pakistan has started to pick up after a pitiful early response to one of the biggest humanitarian disasters in recent times. It is still considerably short of the UN's $460m target, which itself appears well below the £15bn or so that is estimated to be needed for rebuilding.

The first bits of aid have been less than those given at the 2004 tsunami and the Haiti earthquake in the last year. By affecting 15-20m people, the current Pakistani catastrophe is considerably worse than both combined.

Comparison to the response to Hurricane Katrina (2005) in the US also bears examination. There, international governmental pledges of support reached $840m. This included $100m from the UAE and $500m from Kuwait.

As seems par for the course with such pledges, not all of this was given, but not just because of reluctance from donors to deliver on promises. The US themselves were found to be wanting when handling donations that came in. Suspicions therefore of how Pakistan would handle aid that arrives, is not unique to them.

It does not help of course that Pakistan is led by a man of Asif Ali Zardari's lack of stature. Criticism of George W Bush for being a day late getting back to the White House to deal with Katrina, and only visiting the hit area two days later, pales into insignificance with the Pakistani prime minister's jaunt to the Abu Dhabi, Paris and London in the flooding aftermath.

He has defended the visits saying that they generated aid. This does not stand up to scrutiny with paltry figures such as France's $2.5m and the UAE's $1.5m compared to their $100m Katrina commitment. Poor contributions from Western countries to Pakistan have been put down variously to associations with terrorism, fear of corruption and racism. It can only be surmised given the response of Muslim countries that their view of Pakistan is even worse. Kuwait's $500m offer to the US is put alongside their $5m pledge to help Pakistanis.

The UK and the US have led the way with £100m and $150m respectively, though it needs to be ensured that commitments are followed through. Analysis of their support says it springs from the relationship in with Pakistan in tackling terrorism. On that, handily we have human resources in Afghanistan, and the US have sent six choppers from the war theatre to help with relief efforts in Pakistan.

It is at times like these though that the absurdity of priorities becomes clear. We are apparently fighting a war in Afghanistan to reduce terrorism, and therefore save lives. That itself is being prosecuted by taking more lives than said terrorism has. Next to Afghanistan is Pakistan. In the former, the UK is spending in the region of $6bn a year waging a war with little discernible effect in life preservation to say the least. Next door, there are 4,000,000 people who have just lost their homes, but only $100m can be found to help them. 

No country has suffered more at the hands of terrorism without being invaded than Pakistan. The country has been lurched into crisis after crisis as the 'war on terror' has gone on, spilling more and more into its borders. Yes, Zardari is inept, but again, ordinary Pakistanis suffer him the most. We may question Mr Ten Per Cent's morals, but we can't let that muddy our moral imperative to help people in dire need. The world showing Pakistan that it cares may be just the light that is needed to rebuild not just houses, schools and roads, but the entire fabric and future of the country.

‘McGrahi’

The Libyan’s death in prison would have harmed Scotland - we now need to focus on getting a full inquiry into Lockerbie

The phrase repeated ad infinitum by the Scottish Government last year after the release of Abdelbaset Ali Al-Megrahi was that it was the “right decision for the right reasons”.

The good faith with which the decision was taken is apparent. There can have been no trade deal. The Scottish Government doesn't even have the economic powers to benefit from that. Yes, the UK government though seem to have sold out for a BP oil deal. Tony Blair was present when CEO Tony Hayward signed on the dotted line in tent of Colonel Gadaffi, Megrahi's boss. The MOU between Libya and the UK, including the prisoner transfer agreement, was thrashed out at the same time. Coincidence perhaps, but the correspondence suggests not.

The Scottish Government rightly rejected this PTA. Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill took the decision to release Megrahi on the basis that the prisoner had a prognosis of three months to live in prison due to his prostate cancer. That followed the normal process of law for someone in Megrahi’s condition. The easy thing for MacAskill would have been to let Megrahi rot. If he was a man driven by petty party politics, it would have stuck one to London at the same time too. He’s not a short term man though. He doesn’t do things purely for the sake of courting popularity.

That Megrahi is still alive is not a shock, I myself recently met someone who was given a few months to live due to cancer but seven years later is still with us. Incidentally, they are not exactly living it up, they are dying of cancer. Add to this the likely added life expectancy from moving out of prison to go home.

MacAskill’s opposite number in Labour, Richard Baker, in a real signal of confidence to the Scottish medical community yesterday said his position was that if doctors from the EU and US had come to the same conclusions, he would have backed release too (one can’t help thinking that given Scottish Labour’s track record, Megrahi would actually have been put on a plane to Tripoli in 2007 faster than you could say “Tony’s signed a Prisoner Transfer Agreement”). Baker’s release would albeit have been into the community in Scotland, with the security costs of this outweighed by the consideration of Scotland’s image in the world.

By this, presumably he means Scotland’s standing amongst the US political establishment. Because around the world, there is the same feeling that at the very minimum most people in Scotland who have examined the case will privately express – that Megrahi is in all likelihood not the man behind the Lockerbie bombing. If he had died in Scotland from cancer it would have done irreparable damage to our reputation not just in Libya and the Muslim world, but beyond.

This is just pure speculation on my part, but unconsciously the lack of confidence in his guilt may have affected his release. Had he been an undoubted stonecold killer, Megrahi may have remained in prison, and probably be dead by now. We have to be sorrowful that since Megrahi dropped his appeal, we have no obvious method of getting to the bottom of the doubts regarding the safety of his conviction. This is why we need to move beyond the bellyaching, BP conspiracies and political pointscoring, to securing the inquiry - with the evidence that was to be used in the appeal - to get to the truth.

Mosque and the City

The first time I was introduced to the hallowed ground of the World Trade Centre in New York was during my US State Dept visit in 2008. As we travelled down West Street, our guide pointed across some wasteland and shouted in his brilliant New Jersey accent “There’s Century 21!”.

For the unitiated, this is a department store with top labels at bottom prices. There was some great shopping to be had. Some real bargains I’m wearing still on a regular basis. But the rubble he was pointing over was clearly the WTC site, which went unmentioned. I should also add that one of the best kebabs I’ve ever had, or kabobs as they call them over there, was from a stall on the north-east corner of site. It was halal, but let’s not open another flank of attack for the US loony right.

When Mayor Bloomberg made his fantastic speech in front of a glorious backdrop of the Statue of Liberty a couple of weeks ago, it seemed over the top for such a senior politician to have to go to such lengths on a simple planning application. Still we thought, this should draw a line under it. Never underestimate the forces of hysteria and bigotry though.

One of the things that impressed me most during the visit to the US was the commitment from both left and right to uphold religious freedoms. Much early immigration to the US was from communities fleeing religious persecution in Europe so it was built into the foundation of the country to guarantee the state would not intervene in matters of faith. This is at odds with the models of secularism practised in countries like France who will regulate things like clothing. It is therefore extremely sad to see this whipped up hysteria.

I personally know Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam at the centre of the controversy. I first came across him through his wife Daisy Khan, whose organisation we were introduced to by the State Department on the aforementioned visit. To the GOP throwing round the now all too predictable accusations of extremism, this introduction and visit took place during the George W Bush era.

I’ve no doubt that given their trackrecord of interfaith work that the proposed Park 51 centre will be the community hub that it’s aiming to be. The mosques that we visited across the US during the 3-week trip were on the whole infinitely more outward looking and vibrant than their UK counterparts. I know there is a distinction between mosques and community centres, but many of the masjids we visited had sports halls, first class educational facilities and even health care available.

The truth is though that mosque applications always court opposition wherever they appear now. The Park 51 episode is just the pinnacle of it. In the UK the usual covers for complaint are traffic management and ecological issues.

There was one very curious case in Glasgow recently where an Islamic organisation and sent mailings to local residents attempting to put their minds at rest about their plans to take over a local hall. Except it seems someone had actually forged the organisation’s letterhead and there were no such proposals. Nevertheless, residents got het up and a the local shop began a petition against it. Sections of the community wanting to whip up anxieties for their own nefarious ends are not just confined to NYC.

Ripped Off Glasgow: HSR

The Evening Times have been running a campaign for a while now on funding issues affecting Glasgow. The latest is on the state of the roads.

I’d like to see them take up the issue of high speed rail. The government’s current proposals of linking up Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and London will put Glasgow at an even further competitive disadvantage.

The UK government may not care about this, but the environmental benefits of HSR will not be achieved unless the network links to Scotland.

The impact of such a campaign would be enormous. If not the Evening Times, maybe the Daily Record? Yorkshire has been successful in being included in the current proposals in large part due to the local newspaper’s ‘Fast Track to Yorkshire’ campaign which was praised in Parliament.

I suggested the idea to a Herald and Times journalist a few months ago and I really hope they end up running with it. The same would go for the Evening News in Edinburgh. With a Y-shaped model, this is one for the east and west coast.

Cancel London's Crossrail and start high speed rail now

Simon Jenkins:

"It is an open secret that Transport for London strategists have long been sceptical of Crossrail. When he left in April 2009, TfL's then boss, Tim O'Toole, pleaded with colleagues to concentrate on upgrading the tube, fearing that London would end the next decade with years of Crossrail chaos still ahead, while the rest of the undercapitalised network degenerated. Johnson was half-persuaded of this, until the construction industry lobby told him Crossrail was a virility symbol and he capitulated. Hammond should kill the project forthwith."

This is interesting as one of the reasons given by the last Labour government about why their limited national high speed rail plans couldn't begin for another full seven years in 2017 was Crossrail. Indeed, Lord Adonis said that HSR would be a successor project to Crossrail.

If Crossrail is unneccesary, let's make a start on HSR now, and use the money saved to make the Tory plans of going from London to Leeds more ambitious to connect Scotland on it. It is after all what will be best for the environment.

Why next year's election is one to win

There is a theory that no one wants to win next year’s Holyrood election given the public spending cuts that will have to be implemented.

After all, Labour were not all that keen on holding onto power following the general election, with the reported words of Bank of England Governor Mervyn King ringing in their ears that whoever won would be out of power for a generation given what needed to be done.

Moribund discussions of cutting free personal care for the elderly, taking away their bus passes, taxing ill health and charging for education is certainly not why the SNP are around. This though is the dominant discussion in media and political circles. The SNP can’t avoid it either, with a tough budget due before the election. Labour are meanwhile allowed to assiduously avoid saying anything about what they’d do.

It doesn’t have to be this way though. The UK has gone from an economic model where the priority used to be solely on achieving economic growth, to one which is aiming to satisfy bond markets allegedly hungry for public spending cuts. The money the Tories are taking out of the economy, and the unemployment that will be created, is widely expected to lead us into another recession - and possibly depression.

Scotland meanwhile has been in surplus even after the banking crash and even despite not having the normal economic powers to deal the economic crisis. Not only must we maintain investment in our communities, but everyone also recognises the need for new industries. Luckily in Scotland we have a massive green energy jobs potential to invest in. We can do this with financial independence. This is a stone’s throw from political independence which is why the London parties are reluctant to embrace it.

So next year’s election is not about who would most competently administer Cameron’s cuts in Scotland. This is clearly where the opposition want us. We must not just talk managerially about the current budgetary pressures. Every public utterance, media appearance and press release needs to state the alternative. This will get us on the front foot from strategies advised by Labour spin doctors for the ConDems to “passport the responsibility for unpopular decisions” onto the SNP. Iain Gray tries to pin everything on Alex Salmond every week at First Ministers Questions.

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it’s the economic powers, eejits.

Pakistani told to go home

 The president of Pakistan is in the UK while his country is in the midst of its worst flooding in 80 years. 1,500 are estimated dead, with over a million having lost their homes. The situation is forecast to get even worse with more rain.

So it’s appalling for Asif Ali Zardari, husband of the late Benazir Bhutto, to be seen stepping off planes in the Arabian Gulf, Paris and now London.

To make matters worse, this is not an official state visit. Pakistani security officials last week refused to come to Britain following David Cameron’s remarks about the country playing a double game on terrorism. Zardari will be dropping in on Cameron though.

The real object of the visit is said to be a rally of his party, the PPP, in Birmingham this Saturday (he arrived in the UK yesterday, Tuesday). 3,000-4,000 supporters are expected to be there, to witness something akin to a coronation of his 21-year-old son Bilawal to active political life now that he has graduated from university. The PPP are now playing down the significance of the event, but if it’s not important, it actually makes the state of affairs even worse.

Zardari has come under a torrent of criticism, but he doesn’t seem phased by it. Such lack of accountability and distance from your people is what comes when political leadership is passed as a family heirloom literally written in last will and testaments.

The SNP are promoting Scotland. Somebody call The Bill!

Ofcom last week dismissed the claim that Scottish Television's output had been influenced by the Scottish Government through sponsorship of programmes.

The money came from the Homecoming budget, which promoted Scotland amongst the diaspora worldwide in 2009.

What got me about this was how the SNP was supposed to have benefited. Government money cannot be used for party political purposes and no one could point in this instance to how the SNP gained. Advertising of this nature has been half as much under the SNP as it was under Labour. What we were told was that Scottishness was being promoted, and jings, crivvens, by jove, gosh, the Bill was knocked off the schedule and Scottish programmes were on instead.

Said the Tories at the time in February:

“The Government has a multi-million-pound advertising budget. It must be used for the public good not party political advantage.

“We also need to know whether the SNP Government had a role in removing popular programmes, like The Bill, from our screens.”

Labour and the Lib Dems also joined in. They seem to think that just because a programme is Scottish, it’s an SNP thing. Yet they will all claim to be Scottish parties, and bristle at any slight comment which may question their patriotism. 

By their works ye shall know them.

One final thought - this complaint to Ofcom came in the lead up to the general election, a campaign which was defined by the leaders debates between the Tories, Lib Dems and Labour. So at the same time as those three were being boosted by basically free advertising on the BBC, ITV and Sky, Ofcom were deliberating this frivolous complaint about the SNP.