The Wardman Wire

Welcome to the second Holyrood Herald. This week:

• Plans to give different MSPs different expense rules cause a stooshie
• The SNP is still being nice to Councillors
• Why Alex Salmond has a better figure than Wendy Alexander
• And what have MSPs done to annoy Jack Vettriano?

More on Holyrood expense rules

Last week, the Holyrood Herald flagged up the rule on Holyrood expense rules, and proposals to change them. The most controversial aspect of the plan involved giving Constituency MSPs more money to hire staff than their Regional counterparts. Former Tory MSP James Douglas-Hamilton, who took part in the review, has dissented from the proposals, arguing that too little evidence was collected beforehand and that this would widen an already unfortunate gap between the 73 MSPs elected by First Past the Post and the 56 elected on Regional lists. SNP MSP Christine Grahame agrees, arguing that it was unfair to measure a Regional MSP (in a region where his party only got 15% of the vote) who had only been elected in May against one constituency MSP who had been in her post since 1999, along with another who’d held the Holyrood seat since then AND been a Westminster MP from 1987 to 2001, after having been one of the SNP’s ‘First Eleven’ MPs in the 1970s. To really stir things up, Parliamentary researchers have themselves intervened, with staffers from all parties (and one working for an Independent MSP) have joined together in protest at the plans.

The Council-Government love-in continues

Elsewhere, the Government has announced its intention to give local Councillors (who, as we noticed last week, are getting friendly with the SNP) an extra year in office. This comes as part of plans to ‘de-couple’ the Scottish and Local Elections, whose combined polling day caused a lot of organisational headaches in last year’s vote. After the combination of a new-look ballot paper for Holyrood and a new voting system for Councillors conspired with other factors to cause chaos on Election night, the SNP announced that they intended to separate the two polls, and Parliamentary Business Minister Bruce Crawford confirmed the Government’s intentions on Sunday. Councillors will, if the plan goes ahead, not face the electorate until 2012.

Wendy Alexander has a rubbish figure

Meanwhile an opinion poll gives Alex Salmond an approval rating of +53%, while Wendy Alexander is saddled with a score of -22%. The forthcoming Scottish Labour Conference at Aviemore won’t be a barrel of laughs, I suspect.

Antagonising artists

And finally, artist Jack Vettriano has taken the huff at suggestions that MSPs might want to borrow his paintings. He wants them to buy his works instead. Clearly neither side in this argument has heard of that stereotype of the Scots at a tight-fisted people. If they have, they’re trying to live down to it.

The expense row rumbles on

As predicted, the proposal by Sir Alan Langlands to establish different staffing allowances for Constituency and Regional MSPs has kicked off and the lines taken are not at all surprising. Two politicians were on the review panel that considered the thorny issue of MSPs’ expenses: Tom McCabe, a former Finance Minister and still the MSP for Hamilton South - so a Constituency MSP - backed the idea, but Conservative peer and former Lothians MSP Lord James Douglas-Hamilton (or, if you prefer, Baron Selkirk of Douglas) has come out against the plan. The Lord - a Regional MSP from 1999 to 2007 - made his position clear:

“One of the reasons I was so determined to dissent was that I believed the evidence before us was extremely limited,” said Lord Selkirk. “We only had a very limited sample to work on and my view was that this was just too small to make a judgment. I could see there was some evidence that more constituents tend to go to their constituency MSP than to a list member with a problem, but the allowances at the outset were not identical between the two categories of MSP and I objected in principle to them widening the gap further.”

Indeed there is a distinction between the two types of MSP: Constituency MSPs each get paid expenses individually for their Constituency offices - one office budget, one MSP. Regional MSPs elected in the same party and region only get one set of office expenses. They can (and do) run satellite offices if the budget allows, but it will be tight. So in Central Scotland, one Constituency MSP gets the same entitlement as five SNP Regional MSPs. And because the entitlement is according to both Region AND Party, the Region’s sole Conservative MSP, Margaret Mitchell, is entitled to the same cash as the five SNP Regional Members. The difference is that she is the sole Tory representative at Holyrood for an area stretching from Falkirk to Kilmarnock, while the SNP MSPs can divvy the region up between them.

Comparing like with like

And Lord Selkirk’s belief that not enough evidence was gathered is seconded by Christine Grahame, an SNP MSP for the South of Scotland (so a Regional MSP). She pointed out that the shadowing exercise undertaken to look at the differing workload of the two types of MSP was flawed on account of which MSPs they looked at. They followed Sarah Boyack - the MSP for Edinburgh Central since 1999 - and Andrew Welsh - not only the MSP for Angus since 1999, but also the MP for the area from 1987 to 2001, as well as from 1974 to 1979, when he was one of the SNP’s ‘First Eleven’ MPs. The review compared them against Jackson Carlaw, a West of Scotland Regional MSP for the Conservatives, elected in May 2007. Now, Carlaw’s region might contain some Tory bases (they do still exist in Scotland) such as the more rural parts of Renfrewshire (West and East), and the resolutely middle-class Bearsden, not to mention Faslane, which will no doubt have its fair share of forces families. However, this is grossly outweighed by the presence of Paisley, Greenock, Barrhead, Ardrossan, Saltcoats, Irvine, Dumbarton and Clydebank, where the left-wing is the norm. These have been (until recent SNP inroads, including the gain of Cunninghame North) Labour fortresses, the Scottish Socialist Party did well here, and the local SNP has an unashamedly left-wing outlook. Indeed, the Conservatives came third in the West of Scotland, with only 15.15% of the vote, compared to an SNP share of 28.32% and a Labour share of 34.2%, so on that basis alone, Carlaw is not going to be people’s first port of call when they’re lobbying their MSP. Boyack and Welsh are established figures whose party has a strong base in the areas they represent. Christine Grahame’s point - that measuring Carlaw up against Boyack and Welsh is unfair - does seem valid.

The staff have their say

This means that so far, only Labour’s McCabe has backed the plan. But political unity has come from what, on reflection, is an obvious source: the staff members themselves. A letter protesting against the proposal has been sent to Paul Grice, the Chief Executive of the Parliament, signed by 13 researches from the SNP, nine from Labour, three from the LibDems and three from the Greens, two from the Tories and one working with Margo MacDonald, the Independent MSP for the Lothians.

This is a good time to be a Councillor

This week has seen good news for Scottish Local Councillors: their terms are to be extended by one year in a bid to ‘de-couple’ the Council elections from the polls for Holyrood. This became an issue last May, when voters faced two different voting systems: the Additional Member System for the Scottish Parliament, and the Single Transferrable Vote for local government. Before 2007, there were of course still two voting systems - AMS for Holyrood, but First Past The Post for Councils. The difference was that in the past, all three ballot papers (Parliamentary Constituency, Parliamentary Region, Council Ward) featured one X in one box.

Thanks to the new voting system and a change in the Parliament Ballot paper, one paper required two Xs - one in each column - while another required voters to rank candidates in order of preference. This threw people somewhat, and caused a lot of spoiled ballot papers. The problems were exacerbated by the new counting machines - designed to speed up the STV counting process and get results in quickly. The problem was that the same setup was used on the Parliamentary ballot, which could have been counted manually quickly enough. Of course, the software went wrong on the night (it also went wrong at a recent Council By-Election) and the rest, as they say, is history.

Separating two elections

As a result of the fiasco that was May 3, the new Government supported moves to separate the two polls, and we now have an idea of what the SNP want to do: they want to move the next set of Council elections back from 2011 to 2012. The following set would move back even further from 2016 to 2017. After that, Councils would refer to four-year terms, and there would be Holyrood and Council elections on alternate odd-numbered years.

This plan is almost certain to have Tory backing: David Mundell (now the Tories’ sole Scottish MP at Westminster) proposed this move in a Members’ Bill just before he was elected to represent the people of Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale in the Commons. I suppose that Labour would not be too eager: after all, Labour Ministers were the ones who altered Councillors’ terms of office from three years to four, with a specific view to holding the two polls at the same time.

This is not a good time to be Wendy Alexander

This week, the Sunday Herald unveiled results of an MRUK opinion poll, which compared the approval ratings of Alex Salmond and Wendy Alexander. The First Minsiter has a net approval rating of +53%. The Leader of the Labour Group in Holyrood, however, has a net rating of -22%.

Now, it has to be pointed out that MRUK results are usually ignored - they aren’t members of the British Polling Council and their polls are incredibly volatile. However, the SNP will take this as a morale booster, and it will make the Scottish Labour Conference in Aviemore later this month that little bit more awkward.

And finally…

One person who favours greater Parliamentary expenses is artist Jack Vettriano. The painter has taken the huff at the notion that MSPs would like to borrow some of his works for display around the building. According to the Scotsman, Vettriano complained:

“The Scottish Parliament… how much did it cost? I don’t know how much they spent on art, but they didn’t spend any on my art, when they could have. This has happened twice with MSPs – they’ve asked to borrow, and I think, ‘No, this is about you more than me.’”

A Parliamentary spokesperson responded by saying that MSPs had toyed with the idea of approaching the artist, but hadn’t made any formal request to borrow any of his works. Vettriano’s teddies, however, remain out of the pram.

Tags: holyrood herald, will patterson, scottish government, wendy alexander, alex salmond, jack vettriano, lord selkirk