IT was meant to be flagship policy, designed to show the SNP was different from the Tories and Labour. It was sold as a way to deliver first-rate infrastructure for Scotland's public services – but without financiers making obscene profits in the process.
Like so many promises that now lay broken on the floor of the Holyrood debating chamber (class sizes below 20 anyone?) the SNP's answer to the Tories' Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) and Labour's Public Private Partnerships (PPP) – the Scottish Fut
ures Trust is an attempt to increase the amount of investment possible and allow it to happen earlier – but at less cost.
Flagship policy it may have been, but this is one vessel now holed below the waterline. In the Scottish Government's latest publication explaining how its Scottish Futures Trust will work it, er, doesn't explain how it will work. Because, actually, it can't work.
The excuse is given that to work properly, the Scottish Futures Trust requires the powers of an independent parliament. But wait a minute. That wasn't what was offered.
It was argued that Edinburgh's phase three school rebuilding programme, the next Forth bridge, hospitals, sewerage systems and all sorts could be delivered using the scheme. It was sold, not for when Scotland might be independent, but for the here and now. For we need that investment like yesterday, not some time later in some peoples' dreams.
The SNP has to stare reality in the face. The only flagships happening in Scotland are the two Royal Navy carriers that will be built in Rosyth – and they are the fruits of a British policy delivered by a British Government.
Well, I'm just back from working in Nigeria where the infrastructure for water, roads and power is crying out for investment – after years of military rulers squandering the country's oil riches what are the new democratic federal and state governments turning to – why PFI/PPP of course. As a proud nation of traders they're not against profits, and certainly not against them when it means water will come through the taps and the power failures in Lagos will come to an end.
Thanks to the SNP's dogmatic stance against private finance, much needed schemes are already delayed a year. With this policy sinking fast the prospect of the Forth bridge being funded now looks like wishful thinking.
Part of the Salmond strategy to achieve independence was to show that the SNP could govern, that things really wouldn't be all that different, and could even be better. Well, he may be having the time of his life dealing with Waspish Wendy, Androgynous Annabel and Nonplussed Nicol, but when it comes to delivery, one superhospital in Glasgow – that won't be completed until 2014 – isn't going to convince the voters the SNP knows how to run a whelk stall, never mind a country.
Harder shell nowTOMORROW is National Escargot Day, well there's a day for everything, even condoms, so why not the delicious snails. I suppose I should rush off to one of my favourite French restaurants like Petit Paris and order snails in garlic butter – a dish I first took to when a student exploring the brasseries of Covent Garden.
Unfortunately, I've rather been put off snails of late. I ordered a bowl of Hot Peppered Snail Soup in Lagos and discovered that the river snails there are so big they have to chop them up to get them in the bowl.
I mistook them for Portobello Mushrooms – but they tasted of India Rubber and were about as edible.
For people of my generation, however, there is only one L'Escargot, of course, the great winner of the Grand National in 1975. I don't know if my dad backed him but we had a good holiday in Tranent that summer! I might just raise a glass to that memory with some beurre d'escargots.
Just a smokescreenSO there are to be yet more restrictions on smokers, this time making it harder for them to buy their fags by banning ten packs and pushing the rest under the counter – all in the name of discouraging youngsters from smoking. Oh Yeah?
Well, all of these things have been tried and failed elsewhere. In Iceland (where sales have been under the counter for ten years) the trend for numbers of young smokers has, if anything, increased. In Ireland (where packets of ten are already banned) the average number of cigarettes smoked has increased – because people were forced to buy packs of 20.
What this is really about is de-normalising smoking, making the smoking act dirty and outside the herd. Imagine if politicians did this to homosexuals – there would be a moral outrage amongst Scotland's MacChattering classes.
Scotland will soon be a place where porn will be on display shelves but cigarettes won't.
Welcome to the weird puritania of independent Scotland.
