Food for Thought
By George it looks like they’ve got it at last! Edinburgh's plans for European-style boulevard on George Street could create something special, says
The Kraken wakes. At long last the slumbering giant that is Edinburgh City Council seems to have emerged from it’s isolation hibernation to consider what happens after Covid.
While other major cities have been coming up with ambitious plans to kickstart business and retail, Edinburgh put out some cones to stop people parking and issued a three-year business plan focusing on becoming a net-zero city that is fairer and greener.
That might be an admirable aim for a third-year town planning student working on a dissertation but in the real world, where more than 25 city centre properties lie empty, the old problem of generating tax income from businesses and workers to pay for it continues to raise its pesky old head.
But let’s come back to that because this week Edinburgh City Council did unveil a big initiative. The plan is to ban cars from George Street as part of a radical transformation to open up the space for pedestrians, bikes and outdoor seating areas.
Transport convener Lesley Macinnes said: “George Street has essentially become a car park. And we have this phenomenal street, of immense beauty, that has become obscured.”
The aim instead is to create a European-style boulevard and an oasis of calm in the city centre.
The proposal is bold and ambitious but more than that, it’s exactly what Edinburgh needs moving forward.
Thanks to the original planning of James Craig, George Street should be one of Europe’s great urban thoroughfares but it has always played second fiddle as a mere car park for Princes Street. At one stage, there was even a crazy plan for more parking spaces underground.
In recent years, the street has switched from shops and offices to bars and restaurants and that change is likely to be exacerbated when the new St James development opens.
So now is the opportunity to open up this street a create an environment where people can enjoy the wonderful buildings and fabulous views instead of complaining about the extortionate cost of parking.
The artist’s impressions of what it might look like are stunning with wide pavements, lots of greenery and benches to sit and pass the time of day. It could be a grand boulevard in any great European city except for the distinctive dome of West Register House, rising in the distance.
If Edinburgh has been slow to open up outside space for business during the Covid crisis it is making up for it now. Under the plan, the new 6.5-metre-wide pavements include a café culture zone for outside drinking and dining in a welcome nod to hospitality and walking space which we are promised will be “clutter free”.
For the City of Edinburgh Council, that will be a real test. In recent years, the amount of street furniture in the city has boomed. Sometimes it looks like an unofficial festival of poles and railings is taking place in the capital but if planners can resist the temptation to have signs warning us about signs, the new George Street could look really special.
And if at the same time it can support businesses and create jobs then that could just be the boost the city centre badly needs.
It is no exaggeration, not even the slightest hyperbole, to suggest that the future of two of Scotland’s main political parties will be decided this weekend.
The new leader of Scottish Labour will be announced today. My money is on Anas Sarwar, the young Glasgow MSP whose campaign has been a masterclass in leadership. He has focused on the issues that matter to people – jobs, the state of our National Health Service and the inequality that still scars Scottish society.
And he has been honest about the state of the Labour Party which, not that long ago, dominated Scotland. “We’d walked off the pitch,” Sarwar admits on his campaign website, employing an unusually understated football metaphor to describe Scottish Labour’s fall from popularity.
In 1999, when the Scottish Parliament was established, Labour’s leader Donald Dewar was described by everyone as the Father of the Nation. By 2020, the party’s last leader, Richard Leonard, was barely recognised by anyone outside Labour’s HQ and the people’s party languished third behind the Tories. Will Sarwar be able to drag Scottish Labour back into second place, then into power? Who knows? But with him in charge and a new generation of MSPS after May, the party has a fighting chance.
Scottish Labour’s electoral prospects have received a boost from a most unlikely source – the very heart of the SNP. Even those of us who have given up watching the news in favour of re-runs of Frasier have been unable to avoid the unholy row that has broken out between Alex Salmond, former First Minister, and Nicola Sturgeon, the self-styled Mother of the Nation. In a very public display of disaffection, the two former friends have set about destroying each other. As in most acrimonious splits, the original reasons for the break-up are forgotten as white-hot hatred and an unquenchable thirst for revenge take hold.
His ego will destroy the country, shouted Sturgeon in parliament on Thursday. Sturgeon’s husband (the SNP’S chief executive) plotted to put me in prison, thundered Salmond earlier in the week.
And his appearance yesterday at the Holyrood committee set up to investigate the government’s handling of the original allegations against him (sexual assault in case you had forgotten) suggests that this row will run and run. There can only be one winner, and it may well turn out to be Anas Sarwar.
The Salmond-sturgeon feud has exposed not just the monstrous ego of both protagonists, but the fragile state of Scotland’s governance. We are now effectively a one-party state, where a husband-and-wife team control the ruling party and the government from an executive home in Uddingston. The affair has also revealed that two other arms of Scotland’s governance system – the Crown Office and our parliament – are in thrall to government ministers, so hampering effective scrutiny.
This sorry state of affairs has allowed leading commentators, such as The Scotsman’s former political editor, Fraser Nelson, to argue that devolution has failed Scotland and for former Scottish Labour MP Tom Harris to suggest that Holyrood should be put under “special measures” by Westminster.
As someone who had the privilege of working for the Scottish government in its early years, I know firsthand the progress that a well-run administration can achieve. Under successive Labour First Ministers, Scotland enjoyed the benefits of fundamental land reform, the biggestever investment in college education, free personal care for our frail elders, a ban on smoking in public places and many more improvements.
There were scandals, of course. The urbane, universally liked Tory leader David Mcletchie was forced to resign because he wrongly claimed a few taxi fares on expenses. First Minister Henry Mcleish left office because of a “muddle, not a fiddle”. And a former Labour minister, Mike Watson, set fire to hotel curtains after a few too many bottles of wine.
But these were personal lapses, and they did not undermine our new parliament’s democracy. Until recent events, devolution has been good for Scotland – it is the SNP that is proving to be bad for devolution.
That is not to say there should not be improvements to how Holyrood works. A report on the future of devolution, published yesterday by the Scottish Fabians, argues, rightly in my view, that the Scottish Parliament’s committees should be strengthened. Their role, as it is in Westminster, should be to scrutinise the work of government, not to be the First Minister’s cheerleaders.
It suggests that councils – once the powerful engine of Scotland’s local democracy – need to be given more powers to shape and deliver services that meet the needs of their communities without first seeking permission from Bute House.
And it proposes a new role – or perhaps a return to its original purpose
– for the Scottish Parliament. “Poverty and inequality are the persistent and deep-rooted ‘wicked problems’ in Scotland that the Parliament must tackle,” writes Professor James Mitchell of Edinburgh University.
“If we are serious about dealing with persistent inequalities, then we will need more than the symbolic gestures and very modest initiatives
that we have seen emerge from Holyrood in the past.”
And we need to see far less of the amateur dramatics that have dominated our public discourse in the last few months. Nicola Sturgeon is a servant of the people, not the Mother of the Nation. Her focus should be on rebuilding Scotland after the pandemic, not feuding with her former mentor or appeasing her party members with loose talk about leaving the UK.
Perhaps it is also time she started planning her life after government. Every politician, every government, has a shelf life. Only dictators dream of lifetime rule. And despite recent events, Nicola Sturgeon is no Vladimir Putin… is she?