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Date: 21 November 2006
Critics jump on SNP hint of tax rises The Scotsman
http://news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=1722192006
Hamish MacDonell

SNP leaders appeared to concede yesterday that taxes would rise in an independent Scotland - but not "significantly". The Nationalists' political opponents seized on the admission by Angus Robertson, an SNP MP. Labour and the Tories claimed that Mr Robertson had revealed that taxes would rise in an independent Scotland, while the SNP hit back by insisting that Scotland could be as prosperous as its European neighbours, if only it adopted the right policies.

The row was sparked by Mr Robertson's statement on the BBC Good Morning Scotland radio programme yesterday morning. He was on a visit to Norway with party leader Alex Salmond to find out why the country's economy is doing so well and what lessons Scotland can learn from it. Mr Robertson said Norway was one of the most economically successful countries in the world and the nationalists were looking at the reasons for this as well as why it is a healthier and a fairer society than Scotland.
"I think every country has to pay for the services that it aspires to have," he said.
"I don't think that the tax burden in Scotland needs to be raised significantly, but I think what we can do is learn.”

[...]

Nationalists want to see Scotland mirror the economic success of Norway, which, like Scotland, also has substantial North Sea oil and gas income and they believe that Scotland could invest a portion of its oil wealth in a fund to benefit future generations. But they have picked a European example where taxation is also higher than in Scotland, particularly VAT which is generally about 25 per cent - 7.5 per cent more than in Britain.

Mr Robertson's remarks delighted Labour figures, who claimed it was an admission that taxes would need to rise under SNP plans to match Norway's economic success.
"Norway uses none of its oil to balance their books," said the vice-chair of Labour's election campaign, George Foulkes.

"Breaking up Britain would remove billions of pounds from the public service budget in Scotland. The only way the SNP could pay for this shortfall would be to either raise taxes or make drastic cuts to schools and hospitals. It is time for the SNP to move on from the same tired old arguments and answer the question of how they are going balance the books after separation."

Murdo Fraser MSP, the Scottish Conservative deputy leader and enterprise spokesman, said Mr Robertson's comments exposed the SNP's plans to increase taxes.
"The cat is out of the bag," he said. "Whilst people like Jim Mather [the SNP economics spokesman] talk about creating a low-tax environment, we have the SNP's campaign manager for next year's elections exposing the real tax agenda. Oh dear.
"The only questions that remain are: which taxes, and by how much?"

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Date: 11 July 2007
Change in law urged to cure organs shortage
Edinburgh Evening News
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1079842007
Ian Swanson

Labour MSP George Foulkes is to ask the Scottish Parliament to change the law on organ donations as the waiting list for transplants continues to grow.

The Lothians backbencher wants to introduce an "opt out" system so medical staff can assume a dead person's organs are available to save other people's lives unless the individual has expressly said otherwise.

MSPs rejected such a move in the last session of parliament. But Mr Foulkes said he believed it was worth trying again.

The number of people on the transplant waiting list in Scotland stands at 818, compared with 695 in September 2005. In Lothian, 135 people are waiting for an organ transplant. The most common organ requirements are kidneys, liver and lungs.

Mr Foulkes said: "Organ or tissue transplants help save and dramatically improve thousands of Scottish lives every year, but unfortunately, there is still a shortage of organs. Each year, hundreds of people die waiting for heart, lung, liver and kidney transplants."

This week is National Transplant Week, designed to raise awareness of the issue. Last week Mr Foulkes registered as a donor as he helped launch the British Transplant Games, due to take place at Meadowbank Stadium from July 26-29.

But he claimed changing the system to one of "presumed consent" would give more people the chance of survival.

He said: "I don't think there is any danger of a Burke and Hare situation where people go round looking for bodies to get their organs. We can make sure there are enough safeguards."

Mr Foulkes said he would look to see if there was any appropriate legislation coming forward that he could amend. Otherwise, he would consider a Member's Bill on the subject. But he acknowledged there was a finely balanced argument on the "opt out" idea.

"There is a fairly big debate going on within the medical profession," he said. "The proponents of the current situation like the idea of people being donors, and the organ being a gift.
"They argue we should keep the status quo, but encourage more people to sign forms and go on the register and carry cards.

"Others say that will never produce enough organs - and I fall on that side of the argument." He said relatives would still be consulted, but under the "opt out" system it would only be a case of asking if they objected.

The British Medical Association backs the idea of "presumed consent" and has called for a public debate on the issue.
Dr George Fernie, a member of the BMA's Scottish Council, said surveys showed 90 per cent of the population supported organ donation, yet only 23 per cent had registered as donors, and when families were asked for permission to use the organs of their dead or dying relatives for transplant, 40 per cent objected.

He said the BMA was calling on the Scottish Executive to assess the level of support for such a policy. "It is not acceptable to reject presumed consent without at least making a clear effort to determine what the public's opinion is on this matter," he said.

But Edinburgh Pentlands Tory MSP David McLetchie said there had been great distress caused in the past when organs had been used for research without consent from the family.
"Presumed consent is going to make that problem worse rather than better," he said.

An attempt last year to amend the Human Tissue (Scotland) Bill to introduce the principle of presumed consent was defeated by 87 votes to 18.

Minister for Public Health Shona Robison said the system of opting-in had been strengthened by giving more weight to the wishes of the deceased.

She said: "Extensive consultation was carried out at the time and little support was demonstrated for a system of presumed consent.

"A time might come when it will be possible to move to a system of presumed consent, but that time is not now."

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Date: 21 October 2006
Clare Short says threats led her to quit Labour whip
The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/story/0,,1928024,00.html
Patrick Wintour

Clare Short's 23-year parliamentary career reached its apparently inevitable denouement yesterday when she resigned the Labour whip, denouncing Tony Blair's "half-truths" and his "arrogant, error-prone government".

She said she wanted to use her remaining years in parliament as an independent MP, free to campaign for a hung parliament, a check on the executive and an end to presidential government.

Ms Short may now be expelled from the party, although she said she wanted to remain a party member. She had been repeatedly warned that her support for a hung parliament meant she was opposed to the election of some Labour MPs.
Her resignation yesterday came as she faced the risk of formal censure by Labour's chief whip, Jacqui Smith, over her support for a hung parliament and her failure to attend key Commons votes.

Plans to ask the national executive to expel Ms Short from the party were shelved just before the Labour conference for fear they would overshadow what was likely to be an anyway highly charged gathering.

Ms Short said she had decided to leave the parliamentary party after being constantly "threatened" by the chief whip. "This is a sad, big thing for me. I just want to be free to say what I think to be true. I can't go on being rebuked every week by the chief whip," she said.

Her resignation led to a bout of recriminations yesterday, with the whips' office accusing her of leaking the news to the media, and Ms Short blaming the whips' office.

It is possible the news leaked after the Liberal Democrats tried to persuade her to follow the leftwing former Labour MP Brian Sedgemore and join them. She said pointedly in her resignation letter that she would remain a social democrat.

Her increasingly strident attacks on the government, and allegations of lying by colleagues, lost her support across the parliamentary party, even though she is admired for her personal warmth and record as international development secretary.

Her former ministerial colleague Lord Foulkes described her resignation of the Labour whip as "the equivalent of the final chapter of a modern Greek tragedy", adding: "Her career had been going down and down and down for months and months."

He said her fortunes turned when she voted for the Iraq war and subsequently resigned from the cabinet in May 2003. She had openly voiced her criticisms of the war, but Mr Blair persuaded her that she had a vital role to play as international development secretary in the reconstruction of Iraq. He also insisted he was using his influence to persuade the US to resolve the Palestinian issue.

Lord Foulkes said Mr Blair had given her a uniquely free rein and twice saved Ms Short from deselection by her constituency.

The anti-war MP Peter Kilfoyle described her decision to resign the Labour whip as a mistake, saying: "It is better always fight your corner from within."

Ms Short enjoyed a sometimes impish love-hate relationship with Mr Blair in the first term of the Labour government, but gradually her disillusionment tipped over into contempt and finally near hatred.

Unlike Robin Cook, who resigned as House of Commons leader before the war started, she openly accused Mr Blair of lying over the Iraq war in an attempt to win public backing.

In her autobiography, An Honourable Deception, she rejected the findings of the Butler inquiry that the prime minister acted in good faith over the war: "I am afraid it is clear that the prime minister did knowingly mislead." She also claimed that the then head of the civil service, Lord Turnbull, told her that Mr Blair had committed himself irrevocably in August 2002 to go to war as an ally of the US.

Like former home secretary David Blunkett in his memoirs published this month, she claimed that Gordon Brown supported the war only because he feared that otherwise he would be sacked as chancellor.

Ms Short was first elected MP for Birmingham Ladywood in 1983. She came to prominence with a campaign against the Sun newspaper's page three girls and her bill to ban them. In 1996 she stunned Westminster when she was reunited with her son Toby, who she had given up for adoption when she was 18.
Recently she expressed her opposition to the replacement of Trident, Blairite reform of the public services and what she described as government by diktat. She also campaigned for a law requiring a Commons vote before British troops go to war, and backed calls to impeach Mr Blair over the war. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon this year she accused the government of being complicit in war crimes.

As international development secretary, she fought to increase vastly the department's funding and in particular boosted aid for Africa.

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Date: 24 September 2006
Brown a complex leader from the start
Sunday Times
FEATURES; News; pg. 20

IN Tory boy, News Review, last week Simon Jenkins writes: "Cabinet secretary Lord Wilson blurted out "(Gordon) Brown had barely chaired a committee, let alone handled a complex hierarchy of clever and cultured people as was the Treasury."In 1972, aged 21, Brown was elected rector of Edinburgh university and became chairman of the Court, which is responsible for finances, properties and management. Brown was no titular chairman. Despite the open hostility of both the university and wider Edinburgh establishments, he proved well able to handle a hierarchy of clever and complex people. These included Principal Michael Swann, later chairman of the BBC, and Lord "Jock" Cameron, one of Scotland's two top judges.

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Maybole, South Ayrshire

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Date: 16 September 2006
Cameron says sorry over using Scots to test poll tax
The Scotsman
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1369062006

James Kirkup and Louise Gray

DAVID Cameron yesterday apologised to Scots for the last Conservative government's decision to impose the poll tax on them before it was applied to the rest of Britain, admitting that his party had used Scotland as a political "laboratory".

The "clumsy and unjust" move is one reason for the Conservatives' "dismal" position in Scotland, Mr Cameron said in a strikingly humble speech that his aides hope will help ease lingering bitterness over his party's attitude to Scotland.

The apology came 17 years after the community charge was introduced in Scotland in 1989. It was not levied south of the Border until a year later. Anger at the tax sparked riots in London and eventually helped force Margaret Thatcher from office.

While other former members of the Thatcher Cabinet, including Michael Howard and Malcolm Rifkind, have admitted that the tax itself was wrong, Mr Cameron is the first senior Tory to issue a such a specific apology for "testing" the policy on Scots.

"A series of blunders were committed in the 1980s and 90s, of which the imposition of the poll tax was the most egregious," he said. "The decision to treat Scotland as a laboratory for experimentation in new methods of local-government finance was clumsy and unjust."

Mr Cameron's speech marks the end of a prolonged debate in the party's London leadership about Scotland. With the Scottish Tories at barely 12 per cent in the polls, Mr Cameron has now decided that the party north of the Border must adopt his modernising agenda, which has seen the UK party overtake Labour in national opinion polls.

Speaking in Glasgow, he also made clear yesterday he will reject the calls of some English Tories for the party to adopt an anti-Scottish position at the next general election. While Mr Cameron said he stood by his plan to ban Scots MPs from voting on English legislation, he defended the Barnett Formula that sets Scotland's public spending.

The Tory leader, whose father is from Aberdeenshire, also lamented what he called examples of "English cultural insensitivity" to Scotland.

"Why is it that Scottish sportsmen and women who win are habitually claimed by English media commentators as 'British' only to be promptly redesignated as 'Scottish' the moment they lose?"
He continued: "Scottish banknotes are every bit as good as those issued by the Bank of England, yet Scots often have to endure the indignity of having their money examined by suspicious staff south of the Border as if it has come straight out of a Monopoly box."

Alex Salmond, the Scottish National Party leader, dismissed Mr Cameron's attempt to woo Scotland, insisting that voters will not be convinced.

"Mr Cameron will find out next May at the polls that Scots have long memories and no amount of rebranding can disguise the fact that he is an anti-Scottish Tory," he said.

Labour's George Foulkes said: "David Cameron may think the English are ignorant of the Scots, but his fundamental problem is that the Scots are perfectly well aware of the Tories. That is why the Conservatives have been thumped in the polls at the last three elections and show no signs of progress."

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Date: 13 September 2006
British Army chief 'not breaking ranks' over Iraq comments
24Dash
http://www.24dash.com/centralgovernment/11554.htm
Jon Land

The head of the British Army insisted today that he was not breaking ranks with the Government over his call for British troops to be withdrawn from Iraq "sometime soon".

General Sir Richard Dannatt denied that he was at odds with the Prime Minister and argued that his comments about Iraq were neither "substantially new or substantially newsworthy".
Sir Richard, who became Chief of the General Staff in August, was speaking after warning in an interview with the Daily Mail that we should "get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems".

He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "It was never my intention to have this hoo-ha which people have thoroughly enjoyed overnight in trying to suggest there is a chasm between myself as head of the Army and the Prime Minister or between myself as head of the Army and the Secretary of State for Defence.

"My intention is particularly to speak up for what is right for the Army. That is my job. That is my constituency.
"If some people have chosen to pick up one or two of the comments I have made and tried to make frankly quite a large mountain or chasm out of that then so be it.

"But I think a lot of this comment has just grown comment on comment and some of it has got a bit fanciful."
[…]
And he clarified his comments about UK troops needing to withdraw "sometime soon".

"I mean that when the mission that we have gone to do is substantially complete we should be leaving," he told Today.
"And given that we have been in Iraq for some three and a half years now, quite a long length of time, and that's put a fair pressure on ourselves - as indeed it's putting a pressure on our coalition partners - that when the mission is substantially done we should leave."

He added: "We don't want to be there another two, three, four, five years. We've got to think about this is terms of a reasonable length of time."
[…]
Meanwhile, a Labour peer and former Minister, Lord Foulkes, claimed that the general had been "hung out to dry" by some sections of the media.

Lord Foulkes, a former Labour Party front-bench defence spokesman, told the Press Association: "Having heard the Chief of the General Staff being interviewed on radio this morning, it is clear that he has been both misinterpreted and hung out to dry by the Daily Mail and the BBC in his comments on Iraq.

"I can understand why the Daily Mail, with its anti-Government agenda, has taken his few remarks out of a long background interview and turned them into headlines.

"But there seems to have been collusion between the Daily Mail and the BBC who had this on the 10pm News last night from the first edition of the Daily Mail and have been running with it all last night and this morning."

Lord Foulkes went on: "The BBC has a duty to be fair and impartial which seems to be questionable in this particular instance. The CGS made it absolutely clear on the radio that his views do not differ from those of the Defence Secretary and the Prime Minister.

"And yet the BBC on the Today programme continued to try to infer that the general's comments were a criticism of the Government."

He added: "The continuing attempts to undermine the Government by some sections of the media are merely serving to undermine the position of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and are irresponsible and prejudicial to what our forces have been asked to undertake."
[…]
Military Families Against War's Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed while serving in Iraq, said: "I'm just really delighted that Sir Richard Dannatt has stood up and spoken out. He is protecting our boys. We have been saying for two years this needed to happen and I think military families have done a good bit."

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Date: 7 July 2006
Foulkes in line for a return to political front
Edinburgh Evening News
http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=993512006


LABOUR peer George Foulkes is set to return to frontline politics after coming top of one of the party's regional lists for next year's Holyrood elections.

He is expected to become an MSP if Labour loses any directly-elected seats in Lothian, where at least two members are regarded as vulnerable.

Former Hearts chairman Foulkes will also play an active role by leading the party's campaign in Lothian.

The regional lists are due to be ratified at Labour's national executive committee meeting tomorrow.

Sarah Boyack, the Edinburgh Central MSP, and Malcolm Chisholm, the MSP for North Edinburgh and Leith, now hold the most vulnerable Labour seats in the city.

Lord Foulkes was reported as saying today: "I want Labour to do well in Lothian, an area I know well through my days on the council, and my association with Hearts. I am enthusiastic about the Scottish Parliament."