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Source: www.bbc.co.uk
IFF hosted a private seminar at Ramsay Garden last week with Angus Macleod of The Times and Alan Cochrane of the Daily Telegraph to consider the recent election, the formation of the coalition government, and the implications for politics in Scotland.
Photo: Craig Murphy http://bit.ly/aglTji
‘We are now in the recrimination phase‘. That’s how the British Medical Journal describes growing public scrutiny of the government’s response to the swine flu pandemic that broke out a year ago.
The Scotsman splashed its front page earlier this week with news that Scotland spent more than £1m a week protecting us from what turned out to be a mild influenza no worse than winter flu. Did we over-react?
The same questions are being asked, even more forcefully, in relation to the chaos, disruption and substantial cost of closing UK airspace following the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajoekull. Now the planes are back in the air the recrimination phase is in full flow. Did we over-react?
IFF hosted a small private seminar at Ramsay Garden this week with Sir Kenneth Calman, chairman of the Calman Commission whose report Serving Scotland Better: Scotland and the United Kingdom in the 21st Century was published in June.
Our meeting was timely, coming as it did shortly after the release of subsequent white papers from the UK government and the Scottish Government setting out in the first case a response to Calman and in the second a commitment to a referendum in which ‘implementing Calman’ could be one of the options on offer.
We learned a good deal about the internal discussions that led to the consensus recorded in the report. It is evidently a careful consensus, taking into account what the Commission judged the political market could bear. One participant saw it as a catalyst in the constitutional debate: speeding up the chemical reaction while remaining unchanged itself. Our discussion lifted the veil just a little on how much further the report might have gone in different circumstances.
It is clear that we are now firmly in ‘devolution is a process not an event’ territory. So how might things play out in the years ahead?
