In the run up to the Edinburgh City Council by-election tomorrow (Thursday 18th August) there have been three main hustings events. The last two, one on Monday night at the City Chambers was sponsored by UNISON and the one held at the French Institute on Tuesday, was for residents of the New Town.
The meetings were attended by the candidates or their representatives; those attending on both nights were John Carson (Independent), Melanie Main (Green Party), Ian McGill (Conservative) and Alasdair Rankin (SNP). Alistair Hodgson (LibDem) attended on the Tuesday but was represented by Charles Dundas on the Monday. Karen Doran (Labour) broke her ankle canvassing and was represented by Councillor Ricki Henderson on Monday and Councillor Lesley Hinds on Tuesday.
At both meetings there was strong condemnation of the way that the Council has handled the Edinburgh trams project and a degree of public anger not normally seen at public meetings. Everyone expressed their astonishment that the Council should be even contemplating borrowing a further £270 million for the trams when they were in the process of cutting services and examining whether privatisation might save money from the budget.
Accusations were made that Lothian Buses might suffer and that any bus profit might be syphoned off to help pay for the trams. There was widespread support for the services provided by Lothian Buses and no one wanted to see their position being undermined by the trams.
There was also considerable resentment against the main parties that the tram project had been allowed to proceed with only 27% of the vote in favour, because no two parties would support an amendment from another party allowing the LibDem group to win the vote. With the finely balanced party numbers it became clear that many were in favour of John Carson as an Independent and an engineer who might be able to get the true facts about the trams out into the open.
The SNP/LibDem coalition was accused of secrecy, failure to give voters the facts and deliberately hiding key information about the ill-fated tram project. The Green Party seemed caught out by their abject failure to support the residents who were suffering greatly increased pollution which endangered health. Promises to look into this went down badly as the Greens have ignored representations on this matter for years and years.
The Conservative, Ian McGill, who apart from supporting the move to privatisation (which did not go down well) outlined very few policies and simply asked people to vote for the candidate, did not make a strong showing. Labour, as the instigators of the tram project were on shaky ground and their proposal to stop the tram at Haymarket seemed naive as there would be a constant need to subsidise the service which could never be expected to pay.
The SNP candidate floundered under UNISON attack on Monday, but made a slightly better showing on Tuesday. He tried to claim that he was anti-tram, but could not explain why his party had not stopped the project in the Council or in the Scottish Parliament over the past four years.
So all in all the only candidate with a positive and constructive position was John Carson as an Independent who would not be tied to any party whip. Carson came out with a clear and direct approach and he was far more aware of the position with the contractors than any other candidate. Carson gave the strongest impression of being able to handle the problems that the project has created for the city. He will certainly be the best chance of stopping the Council from embarking on a disastrous borrowing spree of £270 million which will effectively bankrupt the city.
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What if Carson loses?
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By-Election
We have 58 party political candidates who have, between them, managed to make a complete and utter balls-up of the tram project and the Council's financial position over a period of years. If ever the city needed to have even just one person on the Council with some financial judgement and unfettered by party political compromise then it is now.
I sincerely hope the voters of the City Centre Ward do the entire city a favour and break the Lib-Dem/SNP coalition - preferably by voting for John Carson.
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Decay of public service
The final question of the final campaign hustings debate captured the nub of the problem and that was about the soviet style way in which council officials, the paid people who used to be called Public Servants, had mentioned two possibilities for the Haymarket opion...
One, that there would be an acriminious legal battle with every contractual dispute going to the courts, and the other that this would not happen and things might b settled happily.
IN the event they priced ony the acriminious possibility, at £700M, and that figure was close to the £770M figure to push on to St Andrews Square thus making Haymarket seem utterly pointless of course.
However as John Carson has revealed in this campaign the council already knew that the Contractors had offered to complete to Haymarket with a guarantee that in doing so they would not exceed the presently funded £600M, which to be fair has been their position for quite a while, but it has been a position not revealed even to councillors by the 'public servants' actually dealing face to face with the contractors.
The questioner at the hustings in the French Institute asked why only one price had been put before councillors.
The plain fact is that the councillors and the democratic process is being treated with contempt by the people supposedly employed to offer impartial advice. There is an enormous bias within the bureaucracy of the council to continue with the project in order simply to bask in the glory of 'building something' and they have long realised that the council, distracted by pointless political games, won't understand their evasions and partial reports, or that if they do, will be incapable of bringing them to account because of the ongoing confusions of political jockeying in which every vote is set in the context, not of just doing the right thing, but some wider idea of what will be best for 'us' in the long run.
The tram project is just the most obvious and egregious example of the situation in which the councillors are being led by the nose towards the decisions wanted by non elected committees and working groups because they lack the will, or the knowledge, to stand up and do anything about it.
Not one of the 58 councillors knew what their 'impartial advisors' knew very well...that at £600M even accepting a possible £4M loss (possibly not on past form) each year, the Haymarket option, still works out at hundreds of millions of pounds cheaper both in the first year and £100s of million pounds centuries from now because of the Greek Style interest charges on the Greek style debt.
That's why today the council need at least one independent voice willing to speak out honestly with the knowledge to be able to hold unelected officials to account.
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Council By-election - hold your breath!
Interestingly there seems to be good support for John Carson at the Polling Stations this morning but the other main line candidates may just have enough to force him out at the first hurdle. Let us hope that this does not happen. If John Carson can survive the first count then he must be in with a good chance as most other parties do not see him as a great threat to their mainstream programmes - except the LibDems of course!
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As you point out, all the parties have been tainted by the toxic mess of the trams. To me, the biggest mistake has been the "commercial confidentiality" clause that keeps getting pulled out whenever members of the public - quite rightly - seek proper answers to the current situation. The Edinburgh trams website very rarely offers candid responses to public enquiries, puts out only the occasional terse press release (is it afraid of giving away too much) and it's been suggested that even the business case updates that council staff have cobbled together - complete with typos - as 3 options - are flawed.
I havent completely given up on the possiblity of the trams being completed to St Andrew Square, and I don't mind the fact that this is light rail rather than a smaller tram service. But for another 500 pounds per resident, on top of everything already spent, I'd like a more cast iron assurance that the thing will be completed at NO EXTRA COST and that concerns about pollution from rerouted traffic are properly addressed.
I imagine that Carson's independent stance will work to his favour for what is a deeply unpopular project - the major issue of the moment. But if Carson doesn't win on his Stop the Trams stance, it will look like a vote for the winning candidate's plans for the project.