Invisible Transport Minister escapes again
published this on 5:30 pm, Monday, 28th December, 2009Climate Change| Community News| Politics| hallowe'en | Comments (rss) | No Responses | No Pinging |
Macavity has nothing on Stewart Stevenson.
Yesterday’s Sunday Herald had a major article in the business section which was carrying a series of features on aspects of the past year.
One ‘award’ was entitled: ‘Transport: shambles of the Year’, heralding an article with the headline: ‘The wheels came off: a masterclass in how not to do transport infrastructure projects’.
It proposed that Scotland was: ‘… a kind of transport laboratory that would demonstrate how many projects it was possible to plan and build at the same time’.
In what was an all-but-full-page feature, it failed to mention the responsible Transport Minister, Stewart Stevenson once. That’s right. Not once.
How is it possible for Scotland’s authoritative national newspaper to devote most of a page to an analysis of a problematic performance in developing the country’s transport infrastructure and not once even refer to the responsible Minister, never mind look for a comment.
- Have they forgotten we have a Transport Minister?
- Do they just not rate Stevenson?
- Has he friends in useful places?
- Is he highly skilled at keeping an unimaginably low profile.
- Are they afraid of him?
Certainly he seems to emerge only for ill-judged photocalls, as in:
- appearing – after a period of well noted invisibility – at the site of the rushed job to reopen Argyll’s lifeline A83 after yet another massive landslide at Rest and Be Thankful. On this occasion he dismissed concerns with the line: ‘This is Climate Change. We’ve just got to get used to it’. He seemed to forget that he is also Minister for Climate Change – which we had innocently assumed was about anything but ‘just getting used to it’.
- hanging off the back of an Edinburgh bus, boasting less that he used public transport – which is admirable – than that he used his Senior Citizen’s Travel Card and bussed free.
The spiralling cost of the socially important transport subsidy for Senior Citizens threatens the survival of the scheme. That cost is inflated by the hordes who do not need the subsidy but who use it – to paraphrase Bill Clinton’s words to explain a different abuse.’because they can’.
It is unhelpful to see a well paid Government Minister so blind to the need for a self-denying ordinance on such matters that he can expect to be congratulated for milking the system.
In any case, we think journalists should pay far greater attention to the performance of the Transport Minister. It is one of the most important briefs in a country like Scotland. His colleagues speak well of him so the rest of us should hear more from him and find out why.
If he is indeed the Government’s secret weapon, it is now surely tine for him to come out and start taking hostages.
Westminster’s Scottish Secretary, Jim Murphy is getting far too much room to peddle distortions – as when he recently warned that the Scottish Government would have to slim savagely Scotland’s public sector which he sanctimoniously said had: ‘… very, very, very much spare flesh on it’.
No one asked who had fattened up this sacred cow. The SNP administration has been in power for two and a half years – for the first time. If there is public sector obesity in Scotland, it is a health problem inherited from Labour and from Labour / Liberal Democrat Holyrood administrations. But Murphy got away with it.
Whatever your politics and whatever the current difficulties, some self-generated, this is the most effective Government Scotland has had. It needs to get on with the job without distraction.
It has to be time for the big hitters, as Stevenson is said to be, to come out of hiding and slog a few sixes for the Government on the brief that matters daily to all of us. (And let’s never lose sight of the shocking condition of the roads on Mull.)
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