Report to the People
10th November 2003
Holyrood Glitz and Glamour
What a week.
The big stars have jetted into town; hordes of screaming fans hunt in
packs for a glimpse of their heroes; delighted crowds cheering hit after hit…
I refer, of course,
not to Morton’s victorious trip to Airdrie United last weekend, but the MTV
Europe Music Awards in Leith. It was as if the whole of the international entertainment
industry had descended on Edinburgh, packing it out with limousines, burly
security men and star-studded lavish showbiz parties.
Not that I got to
see any of it. In fact, my
only brush with fame was bumping into the European entertainment press pack
having breakfast in an Edinburgh hotel and seeing, for the first and probably
last time in my life, a waitress explaining to an immaculately turned-out
journalist from Milan what a black pudding was.
But the MTV awards
weren’t the only place you could see famous faces known for their expensive
tastes in Edinburgh last week.
Because, just a few
miles away from Leith, the Scottish Land Court is currently playing host to the
Fraser Inquiry into the fiasco that is the Holyrood Project.
And the list of witnesses – from our own Sam Galbraith, to ex-Presiding
Officer, Sir David Steel – reads like a Who’s Who of the Scottish
establishment.
Basically, the
Inquiry’s job is to find out why it has proved almost impossible to control
the costs of the new Parliament building. It
already seems clear that, as many suspected, there are serious questions about
how reliable the original estimate was. And,
if some of the evidence given to date is be relied upon, the way
in which decisions were taken seems deeply suspect.
While it would be
wrong to pre-judge the Inquiry, it is interesting to compare how things were
done in the old, remote Scottish Office days with what happens in the Scottish
Parliament era. The fact is that,
quite rightly, the Scottish Parliament is extremely – sometimes painfully –
open and accountable, making a wide range of information available for the
public to scrutinise.
There is no doubt
that this change in attitude angers and worries those who were too comfortable
in the old system, but there’s no going back.
You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
On occasions, such
complete transparency can make things difficult for politicians.
But, if it means a shambles like Holyrood can never happen again, I think
we’re better for it.
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