This went to the wire. Most Westminster MPs don’t work Fridays (many don’t work Thursday either) – so Michael Russell, Argyll and Bute’s MSP, was, with his colleague, Angus MacNeil MP, taking the battle to that mysterious last chance saloon at a meeting today (Friday 26th August 2011) with UK Immigration Minister, Damien Green.
The purpose was to win an extension to the concession that has been available to Scottish inshore skippers to employ Filipino crews on their boats.
They had wanted three years. They got one. For the boats whose Filipino crews’ visas expire in days – on 31st August, this at least secures their business for one further year.
What it does not do is deliver the constructive scheme proposed by Mr Russell and Mr MacNeil – to use the excellent Filipinos over three years to contribute to training UK crews to take their pace.
The problem for the skippers is that no one wants to do these jobs.
So a year’s extension is a buffer between them and immediate disaster – several, if not all of the boats concerned will be unable to continue fishing with no crews.
This is typical of the short-termist, disconnected thinking of Westminster governments of all persuasions; and their inability to plan for the future.
The proposal to use these skilled and committed crews to help, not only to train replacement local crews but to imbue them with the work ethic that characterises the Filipinos, was forward looking and inspired.
But whatever game the UK government is playing, it has nothing to do with inspiration and little to do with practicality.
We can only hope that this year’s welcome grace will give the Russell / MacNeil initiative time to maintain the argument and work to get some traction on the UK Immigration team.
Mr Russell has given detail of what it has taken to bring this one year extension about – in a comment he has posted a short while ago to our story yesterday of the effort to be undertaken today. Read it there.
Your continuing attempt to portray this issue as another example of the goodies of the SNP saving Scotland from Wicked Westminster is completely misleading .
This is a UK issue and I suggest you read the excellent contribution to a Westminster debate on the subject from Jim Shannon DUP MP rather than blindly swallow the propaganda of the SNP’s press department .
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For KIntyre 1: This issue is not an SNP v Westminster issue, It is an issue of ossified government unable to envisage a regulatory regime capable of responding to clear regional differences in circumstance and need.
The separatist argument is that the differences between the various components of the UK are such that only independence is the solution to the strains.
The unionist argument is that it is the very differences between the national components of the UK that creates its greatest strength – in the spectrum the nations cover together.
At an analytical level, we are unable to understand the political stupidity of successive unionist administrations at Westminster in failing to embrace joyfully the national differences and in failing to create regulatory and legislative regimes capable of responding to these different cultural and physical situations.
The south east of England – where the UK Government is based – is very heavily populated, as are its major cities
Scotland not only is not – but is in need of a larger working population to support and grow its economy.
So immigration will, of obvious necessity, be regarded very differently in these two circumstances.
The UK seems either not to recognise this or to be unable to respond to it in its management of its reserved powers in this matter.
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I must agree with ‘Kintyre 1′ on your attitude to our government at Westminster and assosciated references (Uk government, disconnected thinking, political stupidity of succesive unionist administrations, and many more in this article and throughout this website) tend to treat your contributors as some sort of clowns unable to make their own minds up. It is propaganda on occasion up there with the scale of Lord HawHaw’s style.
Forargylls transparent support of all things SNP is not in itself wrong but to come to conclusions tediously everytime on every issue that support nationalist politics while at the same time suggesting you come to individual conclusions as a result of your analytical style is contempuous of an educated elctorate and will or may result in you only attracting seperatist sympathisers. You need to mature a bit in this one.
As is say there is nothing wrong with your support for snp, and to a lesser extent your perpetual criticism (other than token compliments) for other parties) but to say you take purely objective views on issues is not clever. Lets be honest here as we are not puppets.
I am not trying to point score and admit the current snp government is the best for Scotland at this time, but to refer to the British parliament in the monotonous slant and tone you undermine your otherwise talented operation.
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For phill: It is important to avoid monotony and we accept that we are not always successful in doing so.
Difficulties arise when we exist in a situation, which we do, where the ideas, the drive for growth and the belief in Scotland are coming from only one part of the political spectrum. That is why we have said – and repeat – that, in their own interests, the successive unionist administrations at Westminster have been and remain politically stupid.
Who is not going to respond to a marriage of the ‘can do’, the inspiration of initiative and the commitment to place? We respond to that from wherever it comes but we are not in the business of manufacturing its presence where, on evidence, it does not exist.
This does not mean that we have been uncritical of the Scottish Government – by a long way – and often excoriating.
There has been:
- the mess that Stewart Stevenson made of transport;
- Alex Neil, as Housing Minister making a profit – and taking it – from a taxpayer-funded second home in Edinburgh;
- not removing independence from the political agenda as soon as the banks failed;
- not changing the circumstances of the Crown Estate Commission within the devolved powers they already possess but trying to make Westminster do it in order to gain political capital;
- making a decision to allow Crossroads School in East Ayrshire to be closed – against all the evidence centrally in line with the requirements of the 2010 Schools Act;
- not facing COSLA down when they now have the majority they need to bring about the long needed reform of local government;
- being pretty much the only voice to say that Alex Salmond should end the long apprenticeship of the eminently able Nicola Sturgeon…
We have been supportive of Annabel Goldie’s leadership of the Scottish Tories – the town centre regeneration funding from which Argyll is benefiting was a deal she did in her group’s support of this Scottish Governments first budget. Of all of the leaders of the opposition parties, she has been the only one to adjust strategically to the reality of an SNP administration. The hackneyed political perspectives of the national media have been unable to see or credit that achievement. And she gave Alex Salmond the opportunity for his best – possibly the best – political joke when, at First Minister’s Questions in the early days of the SNP minority administration in 2007, she asked him to ‘confirm when he last heard from the Prime Minister’. The answer was a rueful: ‘He never phones. He never writes.’
We support the social justice agenda which is the heart of Labour and continually highlight the fact that there is a real democratic deficit in Argyll between the absolute absence of Labour councillors against a solidly significant Labour vote in both Westminster and Hoiyrood elections. We blame the party for not organising and not offering their obvious number of supporters in Argyll candidates to vote for who are so good that they will draw additional support from the discriminating floating voter (of which there are many) and get elected.
We may well be the only media presence across the UK that wholeheartedly supported the Liberal Democrats in their decision to go into coalition with the Conservatives. The country had rejected the Labour administration of Gordon Brown. For the Liberal Democrats to have put them back into power despite that popular decision would have been indefensible and anti-democratic. And the generosity of the deal done with the LibDems by the Conservatives saw the party get an unimaginable number of its MPs into ministerial positions, some centrally important and one in every department of government.as we said at the time, this leaves the LibDems with a breadth and depth of experience of government within their ranks that they could not never have anticipated acquiring at this stage. Political parties exist to take power – the challenge is then to use that power responsibly with a care for the core interests and needs of all.
As for the UK Government, how has it not been stupid – and worse?
- to leave the House of Lords an incoherent part of our political system?
- to take us to war against Iraq on a spectrum of false premises, leaving that country with its infrastructure bombed, as they proudly claimed ‘into the dark ages’ and prey to random warring factionalism?
- to bring about the end of Dr David Kelly?
- to ‘sell’ honours and to seek and take donations from any source regardless of dubious propriety?
- to award government contracts to cronies without proper competitive tendering – and see the UK’s public services a morass of grossly overpriced computer systems which don’t work?
- to give the banks and financial institutions a free rein to make mistakes at the level that has all but bankrupted the country?
- to support the rebels in Libya with no thought to the future ahead? (And we note that the only real winners, both in Iraq and in Libya, are the major western powers who get freed up access to the oil fields in these two countries.)
- to reduce, yet continually stretch the capability of the armed forces, who may now also be asked to contribute to a transition force of some kind in Libya?
And what exactly is there to weigh in the balance against this sequence of incompetence, failure and lack of probity? MRSA? A police force so derailed in its direction that it doesn’t know how to stop down an emerging riot? A fire and rescue service that lets a woman die in a drain because it might be dangerous to try to get her out? A total failure to address the systemic problems in the NHS?
It just goes on.
So if we continually hammer the UK Government, it may be a one note samba but it is this for good reason – there are no other notes to use. We need better.
And yes, we are aware that while we are critical – as we are, on an issue by issue basis – we are more often supportive of the Scottish Government. But this is not on the basis of politics but in recognition of what, so far, has been responsible government with the imagination and the opportunism that says it’s doing all it can.
We say, in our expression of what we do, that ‘we only sit on the fence when there is nowhere better to go’. All contrary and varying views have free expression here – we openly learn from many of them – and together there’s not much we miss.
But we welcome the sort of scrutiny you offer. We’ll account for our position where we can and take the point where we must.
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I agree with much of what you say, but to say the least your presentation could be better as to date you have despite having a nationalistic focus (nowt wrong with that) you have been inclusive in your healthy debates. Sometime (my opinion) you leave yourself open to attack, though your passion is admirable.
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It is perhaps understandable that the most vociferous Unionist apologists who post on this site choose to remain anonymous. There is little point though in protesting that you are not puppets when that is the way that you consistently behave.
It is a fact that the proposal to restrict the employnent of Filipino fishermen -men who are paid the full rate for a difficult and demanding job and fill a gap in the industry that cannot be filled locally and by doing that are safeguarding the work of a vital fishery for the west Coast of Scotland – threatened the future of a vital strand of our industry.
If the intervention of MPs and MSPs of any party assisted in persuading the intransigent UK government from slamming that door shut even in the short term that action is surely to be welcomed. I know that Jim Mather was closely involved in this prior to May 2011 and that Michael Russell has continued in that work alongside Angus MacNeil who has practical experience in the business.
Sniping from a concealed position behind a high wall is hardly adult politics and should be treated accordingly.
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Ken, please get real and retain the previous replies re you fixation with you view that posters unable to give names are irrelevant as are their views.
You need to change the record sir.
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Phill: Those anonymous folk who work in the public sector might have good cause to conceal their identities, but I would like to know why others do – not only does it encourage boorishness (Kintyre1, for example) it tends to devalue their opinions, and damage those of people who have genuine reasons for witholding their identities.
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That will be the British Parliament, who under Blair, but with cross party support, gave us the Iraq war, which Blair said would be ‘without a bloodbath’, but which left behind, according to scholarly estimates, more than a million people dead, a majority of stricken, sick children, a contaminated water supply, a crippled energy grid and four million refugees.
That great British Parliament who’s members, including Government ministers stole public money, has given Britons a rare glimpse inside the tent of power and privilege. It is rare because not one political reporter or commentator, those who fill our newspapers and dominate broadcast journalism, revealed a shred of this scandal. It was left to a PR man to blow the whistle.
Don’t let the monotonous slant and tone of some of your correspondents undermine your talented operation.
Keep up the good work!
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Yes, our Ken does have a rather monotonous slant and tone dave but nevertheless all opinions are just that. One could go on all day about the constitutional debate, and you appear to be an expert. I would hazzard a guess that you are an old style nationalist yet to move to the slick position that Alex salmond has dragged the party into and he (A S) must take credit for that.
Unfortunately the smug tone of some of your comrades will turn many neutrals away. No doubt you will have a frilly answer dave.
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Phill.
I rather like Ken’s thoughtful contributions, but then you would have guessed that, since you have sussed me out as old style nationalist, whatever that might be. Fundamentalist nationalist are an invention of the very political journalists I refer to above. Most of us just want our own government here in Scotland, even if only to rid us of the obscenity of Trident
And BTW Alex Salmond’s position exactly reflects mine. He would not have a position, had we not put him there. I hope my answer is not too smug. It’s only an opinion after all.
Frilly enough?
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What i tend to do if i don’t like the slant someone is taking in a piece of writing is to stop reading it. Simple and easy.
I’d much rather read a site like this that clearly has an opinion on the issues over some of the dross down our way. At least For Argyll puts the sories out there for people to see.
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I may be a masochist, as i do enjoy responding to the one sided banter on here, and that is of course peoples right to opinions. Anything else would be unthinkable.
Fa#ting against thunder maybe but up until now ive tried to hold my own.
May be time for me to move on though as seem to be rattling too many feathers! Wife wants to go shopping etc…… wee jobs in the garden….
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Not a lot to do with the filipino fishermen either.
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Exactly Phil, what we have in this case is another example of a goverment agency, UKBA, at Westminster’s behest, formulating a policy which is not advantagous for business in Scotland but which is popular down in the Tory heartlands, that is to curtail immigration into England, not the UK but England. One only needs to look at the HooHaa the Tories made of Polish immigration into the SE of England after Poland joined the EU.
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Getting back to the issue of the Filipino fishermen , it is clear that SNP politicians are only interested in them as a means of furthering their own poisonous nationalist agenda .
Instead of picking fights with Westminster , why have the SNP administration failed to use the powers they have and in consultation with the fishing industry in Scotland , put together a package to train some of the large number of unemployed people in our coastal communities to do the work ?
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Well Kintyre1.
Yet again you lead us down your crazy path!
How exactly could large numbers of unemployed be “persuaded” to join the fishing industry? Please enthrall us with your knowledge.Or do you envisage some sort of conscription would work?
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Are you suggesting, Morag that no one from these shores would be interested in working on a fishing boat earning a decent wage after having been offered the very nescessary formal training in this industry.
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Exactly my thoughts Phil.
Jobs have been filled by Filipino fishermen coz no-one would do the jobs.What has changed?
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For Morag
According to ForArgyll , we are talking about 40 jobs here.
Were Scottish Government Ministers doing their jobs properly it should be possible to train some of our young people to do this work .
Perhaps Michael Russell MSP on a basic salary of £93,000 plus travel ,plus office expenses ,plus pension ,plus Edinburgh allowance, instead of grandstanding ,could talk to his former assistant Alasdair Allan MSP for the Western Isles and Minister for Lifelong Learning and Skills to find out how he justifies his high basic salary of £72,000 ,plus travel ,plus office expenses, plus pension ,plus Edinburgh allowance , when he has done nothing to sort out this situation .
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Kintyre 1 has a point as i cant believe that not a soul in this part of Scotland wants an opportunity for a good wage if given adequate assistance. this has not happened overnight.
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Let us return to the core issue here. The settlement that re-established a Scottish parliament reserved Immigration as a UK matter. As an observable consequence, the UK Border Agency formulates and applies policy that is largely driven by circumstances in England. That is an inevitability given that England makes up by far the largest part of the UK union.
However, the economic and social situation in Scotland is at times very different, and at times the strict application of policies and procedures that are geared to the objectives of Westminster and the sensitivities of England produce outcomes which in the Scottish context contribute nothing to Westminster’s objectives and which can have a serious negative impact. We are, here, talking about situations that current UK immigration policy was never designed to face, and of which it cannot take account because the system requires it to be blind to local circumstances.
As a result of the actions of the Westminster parliament in the 1990s, Scotland has its own devolved government that has responsibility for economic and social issues. There is thus a linear logic in Michael Russell’s position that Holyrood should at the very least have a shared role in the application of immigration policy within Scotland, with the capacity to pick up on local situations and argue for local solutions.
The essence of the debate here should not be about the rights and wrongs of the union, or even of the immigration policies that Westminster feels to be appropriate for England. It should be about the challenge represented by the ceding of responsibility without the necessary accompanying authority – the situation in which Holyrood finds itself in relation to immigration. Across Scotland, very much including Argyll, there are local circumstances where the resident labour market cannot respond to employer needs, and where the obvious and immediate solution is to allow overseas workers to take jobs that otherwise could not be filled. It is only right for our Scottish Government, which has so much responsibility for so many areas of our lives, to argue that it should be able to permit this when it feels appropriate rather than finding that the necessary decisions lie outwith its powers and in the hands of an agency that is essentially not permitted to listen to its arguments.
It would maybe be different if the position of the Westminster government was that immigration policy concessions to Scotland represented a dangerous back-door to the UK through which could flow thousands of culturally and economically dangerous immigrants, threatening our way of life and prosperity (!), but we all know that isn’t the case. The real issue here, one may suggest, is that in the area of immigration policy the UK Government has been driven more by public prejudice and perceptions than good sense, and has got itself onto a hook. The danger to it in granting concessions to Scotland because there they are necessary and reasonable is that this would represent the thin end of the wedge in demonstrating that similar concessions might actually be the right way forward in some cases in England. And that, of course, would undermine the whole policy and thus cannot be sanctioned.
The outcome, arguably, is that in order for the Westminster Government to be able to sustain its policy position in England, the devolved Scottish Government it created is denied the opportunity to take the decisions it believes to be right for and within its area of jurisdiction.
This is the old “West Lothian Question” turned on its head. It is not, this time, about the perceived illogicality of Scottish MPs taking decisions about English matters that do not affect them and which lie outside their governance, but about English MPs taking decisions that affect the devolved nation of Scotland and which cut across the capacity of that nation’s government to manage the economy and society for which it is responsible.
You do not need to agree or disagree with the principle of devolved government for Scotland to see that this is a manifest nonsense. You do not need to agree or disagree with Westminster’s current policy on immigration to understand that it is a very blunt instrument which lacks the capacity to respond adequately to local circumstances where its application sometimes has horrendously negative consequences.
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Were Westminster as blind to Scottish concerns as Bob Clark suggests , we would not have secured a concession to allow Filipino fishermen to continue to work not once but twice .
This issue as nationalists fail to grasp affects more than Scotland , hence the lead taken on it by Jim Shannon MP for Strangford Northern Ireland .
Scotland has devolved power over training and the issue for the SNP Government to answer is why they have failed to use the many powers they have to set in place training schemes for local people often with generations of fishing experience to take on the jobs .
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I do not suggest that Westminster is blind to Scottish concerns, or indeed to equivalent concerns from other devolved administrations. Clearly the politicians are not, which is why a result could in the end be obtained for the Filipinos.
The issue here is that the Westminster government has created a very blunt instrument of a broad-brush policy, which – we all know – is based on preconceptions and prejudices that are not present in Scottish society to anything like the same extent as they are in England. It has then handed over the implementation of that policy to an agency, UKBA, which as is the nature of such bodies then rigidly applies a “one size fits all” approach.
One of the fundamental problems of that approach is that the procedures simply do not permit information about local circumstances to be submitted by employers seeking the allocation of Certificates of Sponsorship for overseas workers. Decisions are taken in line with a very limited range of tightly-defined criteria, with what might potentially be a mass of other very relevant information simply being excluded from consideration. Arguably, the position of the Scottish Government is that it would lie and should have the capacity to review and take into account special circumstances of which UKBA is actually wholly unaware because they don’t ask questions or allow supplementary information to be submitted.
Most of the time, the outcome of UKBA’s actions is as Government would wish – which is a separate issue to whether or not one agrees with government policy in the first place. Sometimes, however, UKBA systems and procedures, followed with enthusiasm and rigidity, produce results that are so much NOT what government would wish that politicians have to intervene.
Mike Russell’s point here is not, it seems to me, anything to do with nationalism, but a simple issue of authority needing to be tied to responsibility. Why should a Scottish government which is sovereign in so many respects need to send its senior politicians cap-in-hand to Westminster to seek concessions they arguably ought to be able to grant themselves, and to run the risk of being told “no” because of the threat that concessions might represent to the policy as a whole?
If there is a case for Scotland’s devolved government, a matter on which I offer no comment, it HAS to involve a sufficient degree of control over all relevant matters.
The question of training is, here and now, a red herring. An examination of the entrails of what might or might not have been done in one area in the past does not address the central issue that having identified both a problem and a solution, the total reservation of powers over immigration to Westminster leaves Holyrood without the teeth to crack the nut. I cannot comment on whether or not your statement about training is true: all I can say is that whether true or not, it is not relevant to the debate about the scope of devolved powers.
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I don’t really want to keep rattling Kintyre 1′s cage here but I have to ask – why are all these local people with ‘generations of fishing experience’ waiting about for someone to train them? Why aren’t they getting on with it and taking the jobs? Fishing is hard, dangerous and often unpleasant work – maybe they’d just rather not?
A good dose of common sense from Bob Clark – thanks Bob.
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