Here are some stories submitted to the Scottish and international press on a freelance basis which never saw light of day. Click on theclipe in the links section to go back to the main blog page.
MSPs break finance rules
submitted to Sunday Herald and Sunday Times Scotland
AN MSP with financial links to a controversial Christian lobby group has failed to declare the interest in the official parliamentary register.
The SNP’s Gil Paterson is using the services of an intern provided by Christian Action Research and Education (Care) - an evangelical lobby group that was heavily involved in Brian Souter’s Keep The Clause campaign.
Care - which is a registered charity - pays the intern £400 a month in allowances and expenses. The MSP’s failure to declare the interest puts him in breach of the Parliament’s code of conduct and could lead to an investigation by Holyrood’s standards committee.
Last year Scottish Executive Minister Peter Peacock was criticised by the committee after he failed to declare a similar connection with Care during the heated debate over the repeal of Section 28.
At that time Mr Peacock had a Care intern working for him and fellow Labour MSPs Maureen MacMillan and Rhoda Grant. That intern has now become a full-time employee of the three MSPs, with his salary being paid for out of parliamentary expenses. Care claims that he is no longer involved in their organisation.
Mr Paterson’s intern is shared with fellow SNP Central Scotland MSP Michael Matheson. Although Mr Matheson has declared the interest, he only did so in April - seven months after the intern started work in September last year.
By contrast, Conservative rural affairs spokesman Alex Fergusson MSP - who also has a Care intern working for him - declared the connection immediately.
Care has interns working in all of the UK’s Parliaments and Assemblies as well as in the European Parliament. The charity’s website makes it clear that the interns are not used for lobbying purposes, although it admits that they all spend one day a week on a Care training course that looks at ‘Christian approaches to political thought’ and explains the importance of the charity’s lobbying work.
Scots rail passengers at risk
submitted to Sunday Herald
TWO of Britain’s biggest cross-border train companies do not sit on the industry committee that plans for major rail emergencies in Scotland.
An inspection of the British Transport Police Scottish Area, published this week, has revealed that neither Virgin Trains nor Great North Eastern Railways (GNER) are represented on the Scottish Railway Emergency Planning and Co-ordinating Committee.
And Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, which wrote the report, has now urged committee chairman, assistant chief constable Alexander Forrest, to consider getting the two companies on board.
The Planning and Co-ordinating Committee allows the rail industry to jointly decide how they and the police will deal with a major rail accident north of the Border.
Several companies are represented, including track and signal owner Railtrack, maintenance and repair firm First Engineering and Scotland’s largest train operator ScotRail.
The committee meets twice a year, with a parallel working group - made up of industry representatives who work on the ground - getting together on a quarterly basis.
The HMIC report noted that "GNER and Virgin were not represented on [the committee] and, while both run relatively few trains on the Scottish network, the Area Commander may wish to consider raising this as an issue."
The revelation comes in the same week that both companies were criticised in a report based on the rail industry’s new confidential reporting system.
The Ciras - Confidential Incident Reporting and Analysis System - was first piloted in Scotland but rolled out across the whole of the UK after the Hatfield rail crash. It allows staff working in the industry to whistleblow about problems without fear of being identified by managers.
Staff said that both GNER and Virgin were allowing drivers to work in excess of their allotted 12-hour shifts, with some Virgin drivers working more than 50 hours a week.
GNER drivers said they were concerned that they would have difficulty evacuating some trains in an emergency because they were so overcrowded.
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