Scotland has been on fire this week. The new unified fire service – in its first week of existence – has dealt with some 200 heather and woodland fires which have broken out across the Highlands. It’s a sign that the dry spring is here, though you wouldn’t know it by the temperatures. They’ve hovered around 3 degrees Celsius in the day time and reached minus 12 in Braemar one chilly night.
Ben Nevis from Glencoe
So over the Easter weekend, while I was crunching through the snow on the Pentland ridge overlooking Edinburgh, a skier was swept away by an avalanche in Glencoe and another adventurer died when he fell through the ice on a loch in the Cleish Hills in Perthshire. Luckily no one died in the moorland fires but estate owners have been asked to suspend “muir burning” operations until there is some rainfall or the strong east winds subside.
The first of April was thus a baptism of fire and ice for the new Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. It brings together the eight regional services under one fire chief Alasdair Hay who is now is charge of one of largest fire brigades in Europe, with 8,300 staff, 388 fire stations and nearly 600 fire engines.
The same re-organisation of the police service, again on April the first, has been much more controversial. Critics have been asking awkward questions. Will the 17,400 strong new police force lose touch with local communities? Will it remain operationally independent from the government in how it handles demonstrations, strikes, football violence, phone hacking or other politically sensitive cases? Can it resolve its computer problems? Or resolve the already strained relationship between the new single chief constable Stephen House and the new Scottish Police Authority?
The justice secretary Kenny MacAskill has made no secret of the fact that the centralisation of the police and fire services is driven by the need to make savings in their budgets. Over the next 15 years he hopes to save £1.3bn, largely by shedding backroom staff. The alternative, he says, is cuts in the number of front line police officers and fire-fighters.
The first of April also brought in changes to the Westminster-controlled welfare system, in particular the “bedroom tax” which cuts housing benefit by between 14 and 25 per cent for tenants in social housing who have spare rooms. The SNP and the Labour Party have been saying it’s the biggest mistake the Conservatives have made in Scotland since the fateful poll tax of 1989. They estimate that 78,000 households will be expected to move into one-bedroom homes ( but only 20,000 are available) or lose on average £624 a year in housing benefit. Labour have challenged the SNP government to make good the loss. The SNP say no local council they control will evict tenants and they’ve challenged Labour councils to promise the same.
The hard economic times have claimed another victim this week. The Caerlee Mill in the village of Innerleithen (left) in the Borders has closed down after 225 years. It was the oldest continually operating textile mill in Scotland. Its remaining 33 workers – out of 400 in its heyday – were making luxury cashmere garments, but alas no one was prepared to take on the mill as a going concern.
Scotland’s whisky exports have also suffered because of the recession. The number of bottles sold fell by 5 per cent last year – with the biggest fall, 25 per cent, in the largest export market, France. But is the industry downhearted? Apparently not. They point to long-term growth of 87 per cent in the last ten years and to growing exports in Asia, Russia and America. Diageo this week announced plans for a £50m expansion of its distillery at Teaninich on Speyside.
One firm which won’t be having a celebratory drink this weekend is SSE, Scottish and Southern Energy. It’s been fined £10.5m for misleading customers over the savings they might expect on switching from a rival energy supplier. The company says it’s learnt its lesson . The regulator Ofgem is now investigating three other power suppliers who may have been up to the same game.
Oban Sperm What
Picture by Chris Jackson of Chalice Charters
Finally, I’m sure we all felt sorry for the mighty sperm whale which found itself floundering in Oban Bay this week. The experts say he was ill or disorientated and I hope he didn’t bump into the Prime Minister who was on board a Trident submarine off the west coast at the time. Mr Cameron was keen to argue a point with the SNP that Scotland needed the strength of the British nuclear deterrent around it in case crackpot countries like North Korea were planning a nuclear strike.
It seems the Westminster Conservatives are determined to face the Scottish nationalists head on with a policy of rough wooing…..over Trident, welfare, the austerity measures, oil, the economy and the rules of next year’s referendum. But their recent electoral history in Scotland should really have taught them that they are playing with fire. And it may take more than a single fire brigade to put it out.