Photo: © Richard Webb CC BY-SA 2.0
The Mid Scotland and Fife MSP Murdo Fraser has been loudly banging the drum for the government to push ahead with a £4 billion upgrade of the Perth-Inverness road.
In case you hadn’t noticed, this vital infrastructure project has been on the menu for a while. There have been repeated calls for the Scottish government to pull its finger out and convert the road, on which 60 people have lost their lives since 2004, into a dual carriageway all the way from the Fair City to the capital of the Highlands.
Fraser’s call harks back to a commitment to “plan for dualling the A9” made by the SNP government in May 2007. As part of its strategic review of transport projects, Alex Salmond’s government reinforced its commitment to the project last December.
Mainly built in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the existing road is predominantly a well-cambered and fast, two-lane highway. However, it was designed to carry far less traffic than it does today. What’s more, the conventional two-lane highway is periodically interspersed with sections of dual carriageway — something that bamboozles many foreign tourists.
The road has arguably become an open invitation for delays, road rage, dangerous overtaking and, of course, accidents.
I agree with Fraser — no relation — that it is time Salmond produced some sort of timetable for the upgrade. This is not just because I use the road a lot. There are much wider economic interests here. Residents of the Highlands claim the road’s inadequacy has become a disincentive to living and working in the region.
However, I suspect that a couple of things may get in the way of Salmond’s grand plan.
The recession — and the consequent savage cuts in public-sector revenues expected from 2011 onwards — may have provoked government caution on this issue.
The government’s plan to slash Scotland’s carbon emissions by 42% (from their 1990 level) by 2020, unveiled with some razzmatazz last week, may also stymie plans for a full A9 upgrade.
According to Dr Richard Dixon, the director of WWF Scotland, the Scottish Climate Change Act will force the government to weigh up properly the climate implications of all public infrastructure projects.
In his view, A9 dualling is now almost certainly for the chop. Unlike railway projects, including the planned electrification of Scottish tracks, they increase carbon emissions instead of reducing them.
Salmond had better be careful. Conspiracy theorists might see this as another government-given bonus for ScotRail franchise holder FirstGroup.
Making it
Strathclyde University’s Fraser of Allander Institute last week came out with a marginally less gloomy picture of Scotland’s economic future than the Ernst & Young Item Club did a few weeks earlier.
What distinguished the Glasgow-based institute’s prognostications was that it considers boosting manufacturing — by luring more foreign direct investment (FDI) into Scotland — to be the best long-term solution to our economic woes.
Professor Brian Ashcroft, the institute’s director, believes Scotland really needs to tilt its economy back towards manufacturing, which currently generates just 14% of GDP.
He said: “There are obvious difficulties in the attraction and retention of high-quality FDI. But Scotland won’t make the transition from recovery to a higher growth path without it, given that Scotland’s domestic business birth rate remains stubbornly low.”
Ashcroft is not advocating a return to the failed policy of attracting “screwdriver” plants with government grants, which predominated from the 1960s to the 1990s. Instead he favours a focus on higher-margin manufacturing, and insists the issue of enhancing our export base in this way ought to become a topic for public debate in coming years. Personally, I don’t get it. If the screwdriver plants of yore were fly-by-night operators, how can we guarantee that higher-margin manufacturers will be any less disloyal to their host country?
Final whistle
It had been predicted for so long that, when it actually happened, Setanta Sports’ collapse seemed almost unremarkable.
It overpaid for just about everything, leveraged itself to the hilt and got found out once the tide went out.
Thanks to the Scottish game’s lack of international appeal, the queue of broadcasters waiting to take over the SPL broadcasting rights is likely to be very short and next season’s rights will probably end up being sold for a song.
Inevitably this leaves the SPL’s weaker clubs, its more heavily indebted clubs, and those that derived significant portions of their revenues from Setanta looking vulnerable.
A return of real-world economics to the world of football might yet avoid a spate of bankruptcies.
This Scottish Agenda column was published in The Sunday Times on 28 June 2009