Report to the People
25th September 2004
Will we Receive the Signals from Planet
Holyrood?
The
phrase “more heat than light” could have been invented for parliamentary
debates on the Holyrood fiasco.
Wednesday’s
huffing and puffing over Lord Fraser of Carmyllie’s report on the whole sorry
affair, for example, uncovered such revelations as: i) the opposition says
it’s all the government’s fault; ii) the government says it isn’t; iii)
wily businessmen can run rings round the “gifted amateurs” of the civil
service; and iv) the decision-making process in the old Scottish Office was
opaque and unaccountable.
I
don’t think we needed a four and a half hour debate on a 267 page report to
tell us that.
Thankfully,
however, I managed to avoid sitting through at least some of this, as I was
meeting with Malcolm Chisholm, health service trade unions and other MSPs to
discuss our serious concerns over the jobs Argyll and Clyde’s Clinical
Strategy could cut.
As
in the Chamber, the talk was of decisions being taken by unaccountable officials
with scant regard to the interests of the taxpayer and without proper
consideration of their implications. With
the Holyrood project, the effects of early decisions on the site and procurement
method were at the root of subsequent problems – just as previous decisions
on, say, working time regulations now run like a barbed wire thread through the
every NHS centralisation plan.
The
NHS can’t be another Holyrood. We
can’t keep paying more and more to wait longer and longer to get less and
less.
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