Report to the People

The Legal Standard

You won’t thank me for reminding you, but it’s only a week until Christmas.   Despite the now traditional complaints about the festive season starting far too early (and they have a point - there’s been tinsel in shop windows and snow-covered adverts on television since about Halloween), it has rather snuck up on me this year... (more)

Back from the Dead

I might be the eternal optimist - I still think Paul Le Guen can turn it around at Ibrox and that Celtic will eventually get an away win in the Champions’ League - but there was a point a few years ago when even I thought the number was up for Inverclyde Royal Hospital... (more)

Plane Railing

Private Bills, to paraphrase Otto von Bismarck, are like sausages: it is better not to see them being made. But, until the Transport and Works Bill makes it onto the statute books, a Private Bill - that is, a Bill not introduced by the Executive, a backbench MSP or a Committee, but by a body outside the parliament - is the only way to authorise a major rail development... (more)

Age of Reason

What’s the worst mistake you’ve ever made?  Buying that timeshare while on holiday and on the wrong side of a jug of sangria?  Putting money on Manchester United to win the Champions’ League? ... (more)

New Man at Top of the Class

It wasn’t just personal feelings for the man which led politicians to express sadness that poor health has forced Peter Peacock to resign as Education Minister.  It was also respect for the politician... (more)

No NEET Solutions

You can’t turn on the television or open a newspaper these days without being confronted with adverts condemning you for wasting natural resources.  But, as important as warnings about saving gas and electricity are, there’s never a mention of one natural resource we’re particularly guilty of wasting: the potential of our young people... (more)

Say YES to Progress

If you’re a Council tenant, you’ll receive your ballot paper for the stock transfer vote this week... (more)

Green-Sky Thinking

Blue-sky thinking, a wise man once said, is thinking not encumbered by thought... (more)

Take Them for Every Penny

Not only did the recent Operation Triplicate raids seize nearly £55,000 worth of drugs from 30 suspected local drug dealers, they also netted more than £33,000 in cash.   Those arrested, though, stand to lose more than a few thousand pounds and their liberty... (more)

Bad Language

You can tell a lot about what someone really thinks by the language they use.   Take the phrase "petty crime".  It speaks volumes about how seriously someone takes, say, drunks using your close as a public toilet or yobs throwing bricks through your window, if they describe such behaviour as "petty"... (more)

No Need to Shout

Why is it, when normally intelligent people speak to the hard of hearing, they become like the worst sort of British tourist trying to communicate with a Spanish waiter?... (more)

Low-paid Can't Bank on Holiday Bill

Although it was debated by MSPs on Thursday, questions around the St Andrew's Day Bank Holiday Bill, some of which I have raised in this column before, remain unanswered... (more)

The Right Consistency

Does anything annoy football fans more than a referee’s inconsistency?  One minute, your player gets booked for winning the ball with a brave tackle.  The next, their burly centre half fells your striker with a tackle so late you’d need a calendar to time it and you don’t even get a free kick... (more)

Summary Justice

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of attending court as a victim or witness, you’ll know it’s rarely a pleasant experience... (more)

Giving Time

The most precious gift you can give a child, the cliché goes, is time.  But, cliché or not, the lengths to which busy working parents go to make time for their children shows we recognise there’s some truth in it... (more)

On the Records

If, God forbid, you were to collapse on a Sunday morning and be rushed to hospital, you’d expect the medical staff to know exactly what you need... (more)

Show Them the Door

Like traffic wardens and politicians, private landlords don’t have the best public image; often portrayed in the media as abhorrent caricatures, such as Leonard Rossiter’s Rigsby in Rising Damp... (more)

The Technological Age

Those of us of a certain age like the odd moan about technology - usually after spending half an hour on the phone pressing button after button in the vain hope of speaking to someone in a call centre, or having to queue at the checkout in Tesco’s because we don’t want to use the new self-service tills... (more)

Tools for the Job

With the exception of anyone caught up in last Thursday’s airport disruption, holidaymakers are usually full of good intentions when they return from their summer break... (more)

Take it as Read

If you’re not careful, the amount of badly-written rubbish you need to read every day - vacuous reports; unpunctuated emails; rambling memos laced with the latest management-speak clichés - would put you off reading for life... (more)

Walk and Learn

A report published by Scottish Natural Heritage last week argues that climate change is already affecting plants and animals in Scotland... (more

Heading for Harvard

American civil rights leader and Baptist Minister, Jesse Jackson, once said that, "Time is neutral and does not change things. With courage and initiative, leaders change things."... (more)

Good Enough for Yours?

Last Wednesday’s talk in the Wellpark Mid Kirk on the Executive’s partnership with Malawi was described by participants as “humbling”... (more)

Turn on the Powers

You’d be forgiven for allowing yourself a brief smile when you read about the Dundee drug criminal whose ten flats, fat bank accounts, cash, savings plans and pension policies were confiscated under the Proceeds of Crime Act.  It always gives you a sense of satisfaction to hear about serious criminals’ ill-gotten gains being seized and invested back into the communities they tried to bleed dry... (more)

Now that the school holidays are here (6 weeks of quality time with your little darlings;  1,008 hours of “mum, can you make me a…” and “dad, can you take me to…”  They can’t come round soon enough, can they?), your mind might be turning to thoughts of jetting off to the sun... (more)

eBlade

Communities like ours campaigned long and hard for tougher laws on knife crime.  And, in the recently passed Police, Public Order and Criminal Justice Bill, we got them... (more)

Don’t Repeat Mistakes

We understandably expect and demand that new health board, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, moves away from the old Argyll and Clyde strategy of improving our health services by effectively shutting our hospital down... (more)

We might have had to drag it kicking and screaming, but it looks like summer has finally arrived - just as everyone disappears into the lounge or the lounge bar to watch the World Cup... (more)

Protecting Animals

Every time I read one of those horrible press reports about the suffering someone convicted of animal cruelty has inflicted, I question the adage that we are a nation of animal lovers... (more)

Bin your Knife, Save a Life

Wednesday saw the start of the month-long national knife amnesty.  From now until the end of June, anyone handing in a blade at a police station or another disposal point will not be prosecuted for its possession... (more)

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

If you had two shops, one of which was queued out the door while the other was just ticking over, would you put the same number of staff in both?  Of course not.  So why does the NHS have the same number of doctors looking after the healthiest people as looking after the sickest?... (more)

Hidden Harm

Like, I imagine, most of you, I am amazed that there is actually a debate about whether a child should be left in the supposed “care” of drug addicted parents... (more)

In former heavy industrial communities like ours, the only reward many got for years of hard work in difficult conditions was an asbestos-related disease like Mesothelioma.  As you know, this is a particularly aggressive, painful cancer, for which there’s no cure and which kills in a year... (more)

Standing up to Antisocial Behaviour

As anyone who’s ever had the misfortune to experience it knows, the daily grind of antisocial behaviour wears you down... (more)

Civil Justice

If you’ve ever been involved in a civil court case, you know it’s an expensive, uncertain and stressful exercise... (more)

Marriage Care

If you’re reading this unaided, then congratulations - you’ve nearly made it to the end of one of the year’s worst weekends for DIY accidents without drilling through a gas pipe or falling off a ladder... (more)

The Eyes Have It

You might have thought it was never coming, but, after what seems like a very cold, very long winter, spring has at last made a tentative appearance... (more)

Curing the Violence Virus

Last week’s major violence reduction conference in Glasgow saw 300 delegates from across Scotland coming together to kick-start the Safer Scotland campaign... (more)

Stubbed Out

It’s been much discussed and argued over.  And now it’s finally happened... (more)

College Can’t be a Drop-Out

After years of continual expansion, it’s unusual to be talking about James Watt College scaling back its operations... (more)

If you were relegated to the portable television in the kitchen last week while your alleged better half took his pick of the Champions League and Scottish Cup games on Sky, you might have reflected that there were perhaps more fitting ways to mark International Women’s Day... (more)

That the First Minister, Deputy First Minister and Communities Minister all came to Greenock to launch the regeneration strategy tells us all we need to know about its importance.  But it also underlines the fact that, to win what we call the “regeneration game”, you need a team of players from every aspect of government... (more)

Sign of the Times

The figures released last week showing that the NHS has met the national maximum waiting times targets certainly made interesting reading... (more)

Sign-up to See More of Scotland

If you’re over 60 or disabled, you’ll doubtless know that, from April, you will be able to go out gallivanting the length and breadth of the country with your new nationwide bus pass... (more)

Criminals, by their very nature, look to prey on the vulnerable.  And the legal system must not make them doubly vulnerable by making it harder for them to get justice.  Criminals can’t be allowed to relax in the knowledge that, if they target a vulnerable individual, their victim won’t, or can’t, give evidence against them in court... (more)

Justice Reform

Law reform legislation, although necessary, can be a fairly dry affair, punctuated with debates which the Parliament’s ex-lawyers see as a great chance to show off their fine legal minds’ superior capacity for splitting hairs and dancing on pin-heads. .. (more) 

The Right Prescription

Whether it’s 2 for 1 pizzas at the supermarket, or the kids going on the family holiday for free, we all like to think we’re getting something for nothing... (more)

Not the End

One thing about the schools row on which everyone can agree is that the current situation cannot continue.  We know, as HM Inspectorate of Education confirmed two years ago, that our children are being held back because they’re being taught in crumbling classrooms... (more)

Taking Control

The Sanmina situation yet again sums up the problem with the labour market in parts of Scotland: we are still competing with low-wage economies on the basis of cost.  That clearly cannot continue... (more)

Help Can’t be 100-1 Outsider

Now that we’re a week or so into the new year, how are the Resolutions holding up? Still on the skimmed milk and low-fat spread?  Still walking to work?  If so, then well done... (more)

Happy 2006

Happy New Year! As we pin up our new calendars and polish off the last of the Madeira cake, our thoughts turn to what the next twelve months will hold.  You don’t, though, need to be Russell Grant to foresee that 2006 will be a make or break year for Inverclyde... (more)