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Performance of SNP in exercising devolved powers.


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The "SNP MPs in Westminster" thread is tending to get a bit side tracked by Holyrood issues - and more so as the crisis involving the SNP's handling of devolved matters continues to deepen. It therefore seems to make sense to split these two distinct areas.

This should mean that we can use the "Westminster" thread for things like these unanimous, tokenistic block votes for lost causes relating to nuclear disarmament and bombing ISIS, embarrassing the Scottish people by way of collective behaviour as a feral mob and ongoing efforts to drive a wedge between Scotland and the rest of the UK.

Oh yes.... and for ever lengthening choruses of "56 little nationalists....."

Then we can use this new thread to highlight the chaotic implementation of the curriculum for Excellence, the deepening crisis within NHS Scotland, the complete shambles which has led to plummeting public confidence in Police Scotland and the complete disarray imposed on local authorities by the pig headed Council Tax freeze.

And all of that before we even think about the fact that after more than 8 years of the SNP being ultimately responsible for the Forth Bridge (which means they can't even try to blame Labour or Westminster) this strategic element of Scotland's transport system suddenly had to close for a duration where guesses begin at four weeks. The amazing thing so far is that the SNP Transport Minister has got off so lightly and there have, to date, been so few fingers pointed regarding a failure which has thrown much of central Scotland into chaos with knock-on effects far beyond and loss to the economy which may well exceed the combined value of the oil and Grand Theft Auto.

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Charles you really are becoming very boring in your Nat bashing attempts. My brother is a bridge inspector for north of Scotland which includes Kessock and Skye bridges and he assures me that this crack could not have possibly been detected other than by constant radiography and non destructive testing on daily basis. I've witnessed a similar thing happen to structure of a north sea platform. Metal fatigue resulting from overloading is the real cause here. The bridge was not designed for 10,000 forty tonne trucks a day + however many cars, vans and buses. Thats one helluva strain on the steelwork. To try and blame the SNP for this problem is, in my mind, cheap and childish.

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8 hours ago, Alex MacLeod said:

Charles you really are becoming very boring in your Nat bashing attempts. My brother is a bridge inspector for north of Scotland which includes Kessock and Skye bridges and he assures me that this crack could not have possibly been detected other than by constant radiography and non destructive testing on daily basis. I've witnessed a similar thing happen to structure of a north sea platform. Metal fatigue resulting from overloading is the real cause here. The bridge was not designed for 10,000 forty tonne trucks a day + however many cars, vans and buses. Thats one helluva strain on the steelwork. To try and blame the SNP for this problem is, in my mind, cheap and childish.

When the bridge was designed the maximum weight for lorries was 24 tons, the year the bridge was opened it was increased to 32 tons and is now at 44 tons.  With the huge increase in traffic as volumes as well is the main reason that the SNP pushed ahead with the building of the new crossing which all the other parties were against at the time, lucky they have a majority! 

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15 minutes ago, IBM said:

When the bridge was designed the maximum weight for lorries was 24 tons, the year the bridge was opened it was increased to 32 tons and is now at 44 tons.  With the huge increase in traffic as volumes as well is the main reason that the SNP pushed ahead with the building of the new crossing which all the other parties were against at the time, lucky they have a majority! 

You miss the point. The new crossing is irrelevant to this discussion. What is causing indefinite mayhem throughout central Scotland and beyond is the non-functionality of the current crossing which, under the stewardship of the SNP, has been the subject of a number of warnings and recommendations which have been ignored. The result is that we now have this catastrophic event which only became identifiable once the condition of the bridge had been allowed to get so bad that a visible fault emerged.

The problem probably has financial origins, but not from the source the Nats would predictably claim. It was, for instance, the SNP's decision to dispense with £12 million a year in toll revenues. This joins the list of other crowdpleasing measures such as free tuition and presriptions for all where the SNP clearly decided that hey could get the best resulting return at the ballot box rather than invest in maintenance of the Forth Bridge.

So the reality is that the Transport Minister's problem with his stiffening truss end is the product of the neglect of his own party on their watch. Father Jack was sacked for far less.

"Is that a stiffening truss end you've got in your pocket Derek - or are you just pleased to see your First Minister?"

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21 minutes ago, Charles Bannerman said:

You miss the point. The new crossing is irrelevant to this discussion. What is causing indefinite mayhem throughout central Scotland and beyond is the non-functionality of the current crossing which, under the stewardship of the SNP, has been the subject of a number of warnings and recommendations which have been ignored. The result is that we now have this catastrophic event which only became identifiable once the condition of the bridge had been allowed to get so bad that a visible fault emerged.

The problem probably has financial origins, but not from the source the Nats would predictably claim. It was, for instance, the SNP's decision to dispense with £12 million a year in toll revenues. This joins the list of other crowdpleasing measures such as free tuition and presriptions for all where the SNP clearly decided that hey could get the best resulting return at the ballot box rather than invest in maintenance of the Forth Bridge.

So the reality is that the Transport Minister's problem with his stiffening truss end is the product of the neglect of his own party on their watch. Father Jack was sacked for far less.

"Is that a stiffening truss end you've got in your pocket Derek - or are you just pleased to see your First Minister?"

Can you provide some proof of these "warnings and recommendations which have been ignored"? It would also be nice if you'd tone down the hyperbole. Commuters being inconvenienced is not my idea of a "catastrophic event". I think you may have a "stiffening truss end" for winding people up. 

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9 hours ago, Alex MacLeod said:

 10,000 forty tonne trucks a day

And how many of these were packed with of copies of GTA, because the above claim that "10,000 forty tonne trucks a day" cross the bridge is - if such a thing were possible - even more fantastic than the previous one about GTA being worth more than the oil!

This link - http://www.transportscotland.gov.uk/report/j8512a-07.htm  will confirm in Section 6.2.2./Fig 1 that 12,000,000 vehicles a year cross the bridge.

This link - http://www.starconference.org.uk/star/2006/Neil_Cree.pdf  will confirm in Section 3.4 that 6% of vehicles crossing the bridge are HGVs.

This link - http://www.hgvlicence.org/ defines an HGV as being over 3.5 tonnes in weight.

6% of 12,000,000 vehicles gives us 720,000 HGVs a YEAR. Divide by 365 and you get 1973 HGVs a DAY. That's 1973 vehicles weighing 3.5 tonnes or more per day.... so how many of these 1973 will be weigh FORTY tonnes or more? (Unless they're all secretly packed with barrels of oil selling at $103 each)

Really, the most superficial critical examination of the quoted claim should instantly make it painfully obvious that there is nothing remotely approaching a 40 tonne truck crossing the Forth Road Bridge every 8.6 seconds!!!

When will the Nationalists learn that there is a section of the population which, unlike many of their supporters, simply doesn't naively buy wild unsubstantiated assertions?

Edited by Charles Bannerman
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39 minutes ago, robbylad said:

Can you provide some proof of these "warnings and recommendations which have been ignored"? It would also be nice if you'd tone down the hyperbole. Commuters being inconvenienced is not my idea of a "catastrophic event". I think you may have a "stiffening truss end" for winding people up. 

We could start with the links below, most of which originate from the Minister himself, with whom the buck stops. On the other hand this - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-35054144 - does make you wonder whether we're talking about the version he gave to the BBC or the one he gave to Holyrood. Anyway, here is just a small sample of the requested citations.....

http://www.scottishconstructionnow.com/9747/forth-road-bridge-work-was-cancelled-5-years-ago/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-35050251

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/news/scotland/forth-road-bridge-steel-replacement-considered-and-abandoned-in-2010-transport-minister-reveals-1.914666

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/forth-road-bridge-fault-could-6980296

http://www.sundaypost.com/why-wasn-t-this-fixed-five-years-ago-experts-blast-forth-road-bridge-chaos-1.914297

Winding people up? MOI?!!! (Well maybe just softer targets like Nats and Old Firm fans just a little bit!!!!)

Edited by Charles Bannerman
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You miss the point. The new crossing is irrelevant to this discussion. Charles, I am not missing the point, you re getting yourself all in a muddle!  :lol: You started a thread called  "Performance of SNP in exercising devolved powers" so what I said is relevant to the discussion. What is causing indefinite mayhem throughout central Scotland and beyond is the non-functionality of the current crossing which, under the stewardship of the SNP, has been the subject of a number of warnings and recommendations which have been ignored. The result is that we now have this catastrophic event which only became identifiable once the condition of the bridge had been allowed to get so bad that a visible fault emerged.

The problem probably has financial origins, but not from the source the Nats would predictably claim. It was, for instance, the SNP's decision to dispense with £12 million a year in toll revenues. The good people of Fife and the surrounding area have wecomed the tolls being taken of this bridge as have the people in Skye.  It is not just the financial side but the time wasted in the queues waiting to pay the tolls which in some cases it  was up to an hour!  This joins the list of other crowdpleasing measures such as free tuition and presriptions for all where the SNP clearly decided that hey could get the best resulting return at the ballot box rather than invest in maintenance of the Forth Bridge.

So the reality is that the Transport Minister's problem with his stiffening truss end is the product of the neglect of his own party on their watch. Father Jack was sacked for far less.

"Is that a stiffening truss end you've got in your pocket Derek - or are you just pleased to see your First Minister?"

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4 minutes ago, IBM said:

 I am not missing the point, you re getting yourself all in a muddle!  :lol: You started a thread called  "Performance of SNP in exercising devolved powers" so what I said is relevant to the discussion. 

 

The good people of Fife and the surrounding area have wecomed the tolls being taken of this bridge as have the people in Skye.  It is not just the financial side but the time wasted in the queues waiting to pay the tolls which in some cases it  was up to an hour! 

 

As a defence of the mess we are currently in, which this clearly was, the new Forth crossing, although being built under devolved powers, is a complete red herring.

I'm not sure the people of Fife would have welcomed the removal of the tolls if they thought that they could have contributed to better maintenance of the bridge, hence avoiding the current difficulties. And if Scotland isn't capable of devising an efficient system of toll collection (which is going to become ever more common), it need look no further south of the border than the Tyne Tunnel to get some ideas.

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Charles I took the 10,000 a day as being roughly the number of HGV's. Figure from BBC article as quoted by road hauliers association is 11,500. Having used that bridge on average at least once a week in the last twenty years I can well believe these figures.

Heres a more recent report than one you have linked which suggests total vehicles crossing is 66,000 a day  http://freespace.virgin.net/wilcox.john/samweb/Forth_Road_Bridge.pdf

Thats one every 1.3 seconds

On your comment about tolls. It was the labour/lib administration who started the ball rolling on the abolishment of first Skye bridge tolls closely followed by Erskine. The SNP, as a minority government, continued this to include Forth and Tay bridges.

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Having moved the discussion to a new and rather more appropriately titled thread, we seem to have moved away from the original point which was the inappropriate credit being given to the SNP for pressing ahead with the 2nd crossing.  As I stated in the other thread, the process to explore the options was initiated before the SNP came into power following a report which made it clear that the bridge would not be able to cope with current, let along increased traffic flows.

Since then we have had claims that the SNP could not have progressed it sooner because their first administration was a minority government and all the other parties opposed the idea.  The fact is that the crossing had the support from all except the Greens.  Nor is it true that the SNP had to wait till they had a majority Government to get parliamentary approval.  Final approval was given following a debate on 15th Dec 2010 (before the 2011 election) when MSPs voted 108 - 3 in favour!  There is simply no justification for the SNP to claim credit for implementing something which everybody recognised was an essential project.

 

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Final approval was given in 2010 as you state DD but actual planning started in May 2008  following a 2007 study commissioned by Transport Scotland. There were a number of MSP's, including Green's and City of Edinburgh Council, initially against this going ahead but most changed to supporting it after study of existing bridge highlighted its cable problems and that repair would require it be closed for at least three months.

Link to timeline http://www.cbrd.co.uk/road-schemes/forth-road-bridge-replacement

Considering that timeline I dont think the SNP could have commenced any earlier.

To be fair to Labour though, after the initial report came out on state of cables in 2005 I think Jack McConnell pledged to the building of a new crossing. Way back before Scottish Devo problems were highlighted with the bridge not being able to cope with traffic increases and the sitting Labour party at WM looked into plans for a new crossing but then shelved them.

Edited by Alex MacLeod
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I'm not saying it should have been started earlier.  I'm simply saying that the timeline and the circumstances are such that the decision would have been the same regardless of which party was in power.  It is simply not something that the SNP can justifiably use a positive example of their performance in Holyrood.

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On 12/7/2015 at 8:11 PM, DoofersDad said:

Well, the Scottish Government has to do something with the extra money they get through the Barnet formula.  But what is all that about floods in South Africa?  I'm in Africa at the moment and there are water restrictions in places.  In fact it is so bad I'm having to drink wine instead.

DD you can read the BBC article on the link below which will give you some more information and facts on the First Ministers trip.  We take our water for granted up here and even south of the border I would prefer a glass of wine instead, enjoy your trip.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-35020463

 

 

The above was posted by IBM on the other thread.  It illustrates the propensity for SNP supporters to simply give a link to something on the assumption nobody will bother reading it and instead assume their point is proved.  What the article actually demonstrates is that this contribution to "Global Climate Change Justice" is simply political opportunism.  Sturgeon herself actually admits that in the grand scale of things £12million is not much but it gives her the opportunity to claim that Scotland is "leading by example".

The article goes on to quote opposition criticism of the SNP Government stating that they have missed their targets every year since the Climate Change Act came into force and that their plans to reduce passenger duty on flights would be likely to increase emissions by around 50,000 tonnes a year.

Instead of focusing on these populist headlining gestures, it would be better if the SNP did a bit more in a practical sense to reduce emissions closer to home.  

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19 minutes ago, Alex MacLeod said:

As added to my last comment Labour had the chance to do something but chose not to.

Apart from the fact that this thread is all about the SNP's performance and not that of previous administrations, it is simply not true to say that Labour did nothing.  As stated previously, it was the previous administration which commissioned an option appraisal in response to the survey showing the bridge's problems and put the process for replacement in motion.  The SNP simply had to follow that through when they came into power.

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5 hours ago, Alex MacLeod said:

Charles I took the 10,000 a day as being roughly the number of HGV's. Figure from BBC article as quoted by road hauliers association is 11,500. Having used that bridge on average at least once a week in the last twenty years I can well believe these figures.

Heres a more recent report than one you have linked which suggests total vehicles crossing is 66,000 a day  http://freespace.virgin.net/wilcox.john/samweb/Forth_Road_Bridge.pdf

Thats one every 1.3 seconds

On your comment about tolls. It was the labour/lib administration who started the ball rolling on the abolishment of first Skye bridge tolls closely followed by Erskine. The SNP, as a minority government, continued this to include Forth and Tay bridges.

No Alex, you said specifically "10,000 forty tonne trucks a day". But I'll happily take your figure of 66,000 total vehicles per day and then 6% of that comes to 3960 HGVs of all kinds. Please remember that a 40 TONNE truck is a vertiable whopper which didn't even used to be allowed on British roads and the numbers of these will therefore only be a small fraction of the 3960 HGVs a day which cross the bridge. Since you use the bridge once a week, I would have thought that it would have been pretty obvious that there's not one of these 40 tonne monsters going over it every 8.6 seconds. It makes $103 a barrel seem conservative!

Regarding the abolition of tolls, a Fife councillor who also sat on the Bridge authority is among those quoted today as criticising the decision. I will post a link if I can find it.

Meanwhile the political fallout over the Transport Minister's stiffening truss end member intensifies.....

http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/fmqs-nicola-sturgeon-under-fire-over-forth-road-bridge-1-3972122

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6 hours ago, DoofersDad said:

DD you can read the BBC article on the link below which will give you some more information and facts on the First Ministers trip.  We take our water for granted up here and even south of the border I would prefer a glass of wine instead, enjoy your trip.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-35020463

The above was posted by IBM on the other thread.  It illustrates the propensity for SNP supporters to simply give a link to something on the assumption nobody will bother reading it and instead assume their point is proved.  What the article actually demonstrates is that this contribution to "Global Climate Change Justice" is simply political opportunism.  Sturgeon herself actually admits that in the grand scale of things £12million is not much but it gives her the opportunity to claim that Scotland is "leading by example".

The article goes on to quote opposition criticism of the SNP Government stating that they have missed their targets every year since the Climate Change Act came into force and that their plans to reduce passenger duty on flights would be likely to increase emissions by around 50,000 tonnes a year.

Instead of focusing on these populist headlining gestures, it would be better if the SNP did a bit more in a practical sense to reduce emissions closer to home.  

DD I posted the link knowing you would read it as I had not seen anything about floods in Africa.............too much wine perhaps :wink:

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3 hours ago, Alex MacLeod said:

Charles a forty tonne truck is your average Tesco truck

OK so 40 tonnes is "average"? Alex, for goodness sake.... stop digging!! (And maybe you should take yourself off that mailing list from the SNP's Baseless Assertions Department?)

So let's refocus on what this thread was set up to do - keep a running audit of the SNP's catastrophic stewardship of the powers which they now have the hard neck to ask for more of, despite making a complete donkey's bum of the ones they already have. For a start, once they realised in 2011 that they could call a referendum, every picojoule of energy they possessed was thrown into that. The other bonus for them in the 2011-14 period was that everybody was obsessing so much about the referendum that scrutiny and evaluation of executive functions was reduced to a minimum. But since the referendum passed into history, there has been far more of this scrutiny and the dreadful extent to which the whole devolved administration has been allowed to unravel has become increasingly and brutally apparent. There is, of course, the additional factor that SNP types are not natural administrative thinkers since their tunnel-vision mindset is focused entirely on a single regressive and destructive agenda. They are totally programmed to try to acquire powers and hence have to concept of actually exercising them for the public good. Add in the consideration that Party Central demands that no SNP politician makes any administrative decision without it passing the "What implications does this have for the cause of Separation?" test and you get to a place where the exercise of devolved powers degenerates into a horrible mixture of incompetence and inefficiency hamstrung by Party dogma.

I know it's the pantomime season but, despite the Comic Cuts nature of it all, we really shouldn't be laughing at what's happening because these serial follies are progressively destroying our law and order, health service, kids' education etc..... and now our transport system.

I would imagine that by now, SNP Central is pure dead bricking it. With the windfall of a dysfunctional Labour Party rendered even more chaotic by Jeremy Corbyn, they have managed to delude and bribe enough people with "$103 a barrel" type assertions and promises that they will still get there by the May elections. However the SNP bubble is beginning to leak gas faster than a cow on a diet of baked beans. As a result, as each crisis like the Ministerial Truss End Member rolls up, that bubble looks progressively less likely to remain inflated through until they can get to an excuse to hold anther referendum.

Edited by Charles Bannerman
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No Charles this thread was set upby you so you can exercise your 'little man syndrome' behind a computer screen and constantly nitpick and nat bash. Nothing in your words displays any positivety. You dont provide an opposition arguement. All you do is rant for the sake of it.

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