SCOTLAND’S ruling Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition has been unusually busy in the past fortnight, particularly when it comes to promoting Scottish business interests overseas.
First minister Jack McConnell was recently in Los Angeles to outline the executive’s new US strategy, which revolves around trying to build stronger commercial links with America.
Last week Ross Finnie, the rural affairs minister, was at a gastronomic event in Paris singing the praises of home-grown beef, while deputy first minister Nicol Stephen briefly removed his cloak of invisibility to emerge as a champion of Scottish renewables in China.
It’s a shame, however, that this evangelism on behalf of Scottish business should be marred by an apparent desire to neutralise the debate on improving the performance of the Scottish parliament back home.
Delivering the John P Mackintosh Memorial lecture on Tuesday, McConnell gave a pretty good impression of someone who’s been brow-beaten by Gordon Brown into abandoning his support for further powers. It is a scaredy-cat approach to governance that is at odds with an emerging consensus among Scottish business people (with the exception of the traditional Unionist diehards at CBI Scotland).
Following on from remarks by Sir Iain Vallance, the former BT chief executive, last year, that fiscal autonomy could actually benefit Scotland and was worth exploring, Crawford Beveridge, the former boss of Scottish Enterprise — now number three at Sun Microsystems — has added his voice to the debate.
Ahead of an appearance at the Institute of Directors’ annual conference in St Andrews on Friday, and speaking exclusively to the Sunday Times Scotland, Beveridge says he now believes Scotland should be responsible for raising the the money it spends, instead of relying on handouts from Westminster.
“The real issue here is that, with notable exceptions, the devolution settlement leads Scottish politicians to be much more focused on how to spend money than on how money gets made,” he said.
Beveridge, who has developed a broad international perspective thanks to the globe-trotting he does on behalf of the California-based computer giant, added: “If the parliament was to become responsible for raising its own revenue, it would give Scottish politicians a greater incentive to create a bigger tax base by growing the overall economy. At the moment that incentive just is not there.”
If figures of Beveridge’s stature are now prepared to lend their support to the notion that giving greater powers to the Scottish parliament would create a more responsible and higher-calibre Holyrood, it would appear that McConnell has draped himself in the Union flag and the current construct created by the Scotland Act of 1998 at precisely the wrong moment.
SMG’s slow death
Is SMG, the Glasgow-based media group, in its death thoes? Not if you speak to the people who work for its flagship news programme, Scotland Today. There, the mood is quite bullish and the production team has become so used to hearing bad news about its parent group, it has almost become immune to it.
Scotland Today, it says, is doing rather well in the ratings, and the week before last overtook its rival, the BBC’s Reporting Scotland, for the first time.
Strange then that SMG is now widely seen by analysts as having little hope of surviving as a standalone plc. Not only is SMG rudderless, having lost its chief executive Andrew Flanagan in July, but it is also in the process of furthering a dismemberment that started some years ago when its banks forced it to sell off The Herald and the Sunday Herald to the McLean Virginia-based Gannett.
It may manage to get as much as £70m for its poster and cinema advertising businesses, but once they are gone, all that will remain are the group’s two television stations, STV and Grampian (which are now effectively controlled by the ailing ITV), and Virgin Radio. Most analysts believe the group’s chances of still being around in three to four years time are minimal
Sadly, few in Scotland seem to care, even though its demise would leave only DC Thomson and Johnston Press as home-grown media players of stature. It would have been preferable for Scotland, and perhaps for media biodiversity here, if the grand plan hatched by the former chief executive Andrew Flanagan to build a media conglomerate tha happened to be based in Glasgow had been better thought out.
At least the cannily managed DC Thomson seems immune from takeover and is expected to be still churning out The Courier and The Sunday Post for many years to come.
Call-centre safety
Oh dear. Wasn’t one reason that Scotland had such early success in the 1990s as the call-centre capital of Europe that Scots voices sounded trustworthy and competent on the old “dog and bone”?
Well that was shattered on Thursday when Strathclyde police revealed that one in ten of Glasgow’s financial call centres had been infiltrated by criminal gangs.
To me this sound far more serious than anything that’s been going on in Bangalore. The scam apparently works by underword figures either planting fellow crooks within a financial call centre, or else intimidating staff to obtain sensitive customer information. The data is then used to steal identities, fraudulently set up accounts or launder funds.
The quicker the forces of law and order can stamp out such activities, the greater the sector’s chances of rebuilding its reputation.
This Scottish Agenda column was published in The Sunday Times on 29 October 2006