From PPP to the Tartan Army

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/scotland/6617415.stm

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Iain MacDonald BBC Scotland

Back in 2003, Good Morning Scotland sent reporter Iain MacDonald off round the highways and byways of the country to document the Scottish parliamentary election campaign.

Now, four years on, he is doing it again. Older - but not wiser - this is his weblog of the 2007 Tour of Scotland.

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And now, the end is near. And so I face the final curtain.

All right, it's not actually THAT terminal. But the road IS reaching its end. I'm back in Glasgow, debating with various people how you build a school in the 21st century. And no, it's not hire a builder and stick some bricks together.

People I know argue that the approved method - PFI, alias PPP - will not last us that much longer. If you've missed it, here's how it goes.

Dozens of new schools are being built using PPP money

You are the government. You need some new schools to replace the prefab rubbish that were foisted on the next generation in the sad sixties.

A time when architecture and design were based on pouring some concrete, getting some pre fab slabs and reading the ideas of Le Corbusier.

The end result usually consisted of throwing up a machine for living in, aka a flat-roofed (for God's sake, this is Scotland, and it rains here) carbuncle (by Royal Appointment), guaranteed to rot within twenty five years.

What you do instead, because it doesn't appear in the double entry ledgers as spend today, is draw up a contract with some sort of private consortium: you get them to build it, and possibly design it: you sign a contract which means they're in charge for 25 years - again - and they maintain it: while you keep paying up in instalments.

It's school building by credit card at the same sort of outrageous interest levels.

And that communities who once used schools for activities can no longer get access unless they pay outrageous sums of money.

At the end of the process you get a school for which you and the next generation have paid way over the odds for. BUT YOU HAVEN'T HAD TO PAY IT ALL AT ONCE.

And at the end of that process, you own a fully maintained school. And the argument is there's not enough money to do it any other way.

But the critics say it means you saddle your children with an ever expanding debt. That many of the PPP schools are simply not designed with the job of teaching - or learning - in mind.

And that communities who once used schools for activities can no longer get access unless they pay outrageous sums of money.

So I talk to some people, asking the question: how do you build a school for the 21st Century?

If you ask Malcolm Fraser, maybe you don't. He's an architect. He used to be the Scottish Executive's adviser on the built environment. He resigned over the issue.

He says there are loads of Victorian and Edwardian schools which just need modernised and upgraded and they will do a better job - and last a lot longer - than many of the buildings being thrown up now.

Everybody in his line of work knows that PPP schools are mostly not up to the job, he says. The only people not saying so are those bosses of big architecture companies, who're producing schools for the Executive.

Judith Gillespie, of Scotland's Parent Teacher Council, says the whole argument about PPP: the SNP's trust alternative and other methods is so much smoke and mirrors.

Advantageous rates

It's just a question of how you choose to pay for your schools, she says. It used to be local authorities who did it. They went out to the market, borrowed the money to do it at reasonably advantageous rates, and got on with it. Like Malcolm, she wants to go back to the future and do that again.

The problem with the contracts, she says, is the contract.

Civil servants forget to put in community access: communities discover they don't have any: then the private owners charge them an arm and a leg to use their school.

THAT's where the problem is, she says - and anyone like me, who watched the desperate debacle of the Skye Bridge unravel, will recognise what she's taking about.

Edinburgh New Club versus Bank of America - guess who wins every time. And guess who pays. Yep. You.

But there's another problem. Andy Anderson, who used to be chairman of Highland Council's Education Committee, is out on the road lobbying for former council colleagues when I catch up with him in Contin in Ross-shire. We don't have the expertise to build 21st century sustainable schools, he says.

We CAN pinch successful ideas from Scandinavia or Austria - where council officials had to go recently to work out how to build an all-singing all-dancing green establishment in Ardnmamurchan - but we can't have the usual bureaucratic situation where we have to prove these ideas will work in this country, when they already have elsewhere.

No more red tape, let's get on with it, he says. Hmmmmm - we'll see.

I've lived a life that's full. I've travelled each and every highway

Today it's just about over. I have been on lots and lots of roads and in lots and lots of communities. I have drowned a pair of socks in Uist. I have watched a football team on Ceefax in a Glasgow bar.

Glasgow's underground features an inspiring poem dedicated to fans

I've wrestled with recalcitrant recorders: sworn at satellite phones and spent a day - unsuccessfully - trying to phone a man whose mobile had been lost overboard in a sea loch, while he was hauling mussels.

I've written a script for one of Scotland's most successful comedians and speculated on air about what's going to happen to local authorities now they've got party political systems.

I've sat and looked at a silent Clyde and wondered whether this riverside is going to be a gentrified urban desert forever. In the same city, I've had a brisk debate with people in hoodies who think I'm Irish and want to know which kind of Irish I am.

I've stood on the silver sands of Morar, and transported some of them back to Glasgow in the footwell, where a wind blew cherry blossoms through the open windows of my car to mix with the white sand.

I've waved at police speed cameras and I've fumed gently behind caravans and whisky tankers. I even met two houses being driven up the A9. I've been around. But more, much more than this I did it my way.

Sometime in the last couple of days, I travelled on Glasgow's Underground which - so far as I can tell - has NEVER been called the Clockwork Orange, whatever people may tell you.

Tartan Army

I spent my time not meeting people's eyes as you tend to do. So I stared at posters advertising massage: mortgages and music bars.

But one took my attention. It was published by the Scotland football team's sponsors and was dedicated to the Tartan Army and - understandably - to Hope.

I didn't write it down, so I'm paraphrasing. Hope, it suggests, is knowing you need six points from your last two games to qualify - providing the Faroe Islands can hold Italy and Ukraine and beat France by at least two goals. And booking accommodation in Zurich, just in case.

It's brilliantly written and I detect traces of my friend, Tartan Army foot soldier and laureate Ian Black. Bizarrely,

I come out of the subway station and run slap bang into the self same Ian Black. We agree it's very good, but no, he didn't write it. Though he says he wishes he had.

It occurs to me it would serve as a very useful mission statement for many of our politicians. I'm tempted to dispatch it to several that I know.

Regrets, I've had a few. But then again, too few to mention.

Spare pair of shoes

I wish that I'd gone to see Loudon Wainwright in Glasgow. I don't suppose he'd really have sung "Be Careful, There's A Baby In The House". But I'm sure he'd have sung "April Fool's Day".

Still, I went out for dinner with my son in a restaurant I saw recommended by Tom Shields instead - and I enjoyed that in a big way.

I wish that I'd had a full day in Uist when the sun shone. And that I'd brought a spare pair of shoes.

I wish that I'd had an excuse to go to one of Scotland's hidden treasures, the beautiful South West. But I didn't come up with one and neither did anyone else. Which may be the South West's problem.

I wish that Ross County hadn't got relegated.

I wish I hadn't broken my headphones by flinging them in the back seat while in a hurry between interviews.

I'm sorry I read the guidelines for how the forthcoming council vote will work. The Weighted Inclusive Gregory still haunts my dreams. You don't need to know, believe me.

And I wish that I could get somebody to clear out the bomb site that used to be my gallant wee car of all the assembled garbage that's gathered in it over the past few weeks.

But has it been fun? You bet it has.

I did what I had to do. And saw it through without exemption.

I shake hands in the building that will soon cease to be BBC Scotland's headquarters at Queen Margaret Drive and we all promise to meet up for a post-election drink somewhere.

But we'll all agree that we quite like using the whole teuchtar thing to get away with stuff

I leave Glasgow on a stunning afternoon, heading north once more. I hate the A9 and its "guess where you are now" switches between dual carriageway and single strands.

Of course it's time to bring it into the 21st century. But this time, at least it's the road home.

Ahead of me, I have a radio programme to do, where I'll be swapping Highland stereotypes with a lecturer from Lewis who went to Oxford University and now teaches at Edinburgh, and a young native of Barra.

We'll talk about Whisky Galore and JohnJo will reveal the astonishment people expressed when he went to Aberdeen and drank vodka instead of whisky.

But we'll all agree that we quite like using the whole teuchtar thing to get away with stuff.

There'll be music from a band called Queen Anne's Revenge, and one of those who coined their name will refuse to tell me where it came from.

No, it's not named after a night on noxious substances: nor a collision with an inconveniently tall piece of furniture. Nobody will tell me on air, but an impeccable source confides that it was actually the name of Bluebeard's boat. That could be true.

But they're very good which is not bad for an outfit originally set up to write songs for other people.

I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway

I drive north thinking about a long Thursday night in Inverness's aquadome, where they will count votes electronically for the first time, and returning officer Arthur McCourt will officiate for the last time, while praying for no recounts.

The road pretty much flies by, with a last call at Balinluig to get some petrol for the wee blue car, while the sun continues to blaze down. I'm almost out of Perthshire and on the last lap.

Then, just south of Inverness, climbing up to a shelf of mountain called the Slochd, everything changes. A great raft of mountain fog lies across the road, wiping out everything beyond the hill.

Everything goes spooky

I drive into it and everything goes spooky. And dark. It must be what it's like driving into a forest fire. Except the temperature drops a clear five points. Welcome to the Highlands.

I navigate the last miles with my lights on, looking all the time for the sun to shine again. And it doesn't. And no, I don't think it's a metaphor for this election. But it's tempting.

But more much more than this. I did it my way.

So, now, just an election to look forward to. According to the polls, the gap is narrowing. Who knows how it will turn out.

My esteemed colleague, political editor Brian Taylor, says it's not been big for funny moments, this time it's been far too serious. But me, I've had a few laughs along the way.

I'll treasure the memory of Margaret and her pal in Castlemilk, flaying the politicians for cutting cash for communities and not coming down there to get their come-uppance.

And the man from the bread company trying to figure out how to get several trays of loaves up the Royal Concert Hall steps in the very early morning when there's nobody around to take delivery of them.

The opera fan who joined me in the bar during the break to talk nostalgically about the teams he used to support in England.

And the whole succession of Glasgow taxi drivers who ALL seemed to know after I'd spoken two words that I came from Stornoway. Though I left there about forty years ago.

It's Scotland. A wee country full of contrasts and surprises. And it's an amazing place, whether you're on a Highland beach or in a rubbish-strewn slum.

Friday morning we'll wake up to whatever Scotland has decided. Be sure you have your say, as the Electoral Commission would tell you. And they're right.

This is Scotland. Treasure it. Then maybe the politicians will do the same.