Letters / Disingenuous and misleading
Alistair Carmichael MP is looking increasingly like the cat that got the cream on television interviews as he confidently tells us that home rule has been delivered through Smith.
The thing is, he must know within himself that he is being disingenuous and misleading.
His renowned predecessor Jo Grimond was a staunch advocate of home rule, but his ambition was far removed from the Carmichael version.
Grimond, in his book A Personal Manifesto, champions home rule as a situation where Scots “have all the normal powers of government except for those that they [the Scottish Parliament] delegate back to the UK”.
A far cry from the insipid reinvention of one of the party’s historic core principles, which Carmichael peddles to try to consolidate the necro-vote.
It saddens me to watch on TV our Secretary of State for Scotland run like an errand boy between the most recent crisis and his Tory masters.
It saddens me to watch him there on the green benches besides the likes of William Hague, and nod, and ‘hear hear’, as Scotland is run down and belittled.
How much better it would be if the Scottish Parliament could have control, first hand, of issues such as revising the tax regime for the oil industry, which it would undoubtedly do now rather than maybe after the budget in March.
How much better it would be if control of energy policy and regulation lay in Scotland. Perhaps then we would benefit from the facilitation from government to encourage private investment to bolster our grid connection capabilities, a goal Carmichael has failed to achieve despite five years in government office.
So, when heading out for a bit of necro-voting in May, remember, rather than casting your vote in respect of the honourable dead, perhaps it would be better placed to aim to improve the prospects of the living.
Ian Watt
Stromness
Orkney
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