There were half a dozen articulate and
cogent emails which were very critical of the way I handled today’s programme
with Martin Ford -- the councillor whose veto blocked the Trump Aberdeenshire Golf
proposal until the Scottish government called in the proposal last week and
Martin was removed as head of the council’s Infrastructure Committee.
I didn’t have a problem with Martin's
concisely expressed motives for voting and acting as he did. But wanted to suggest
that his own rational/logical perception couldn’t be the whole story.
Indeed the challenging thought is that someone can act with integrity and
according to their own reasonable understanding of a structure plan and still
produce a decision that creates a furore.
And unless everyone has forgotten, there
has been a furore!
My job isn’t to support or oppose
Martin’s views. I was trying to make sure he didn’t do what all
politicians do, which is to repeat their own perception of events -- however
rationally and pleasantly -- over and over again in the face of other political
realities. Like the reality that his own Lib Dem colleagues effectively allowed
him to removed from office by abstaining and changing the rules so a committee
can never have the final say on a big planning issue again. This just doesn’t
happen when you are perceived by everyone to have got everything right!
There are other powerful dimensions to
this debate -- what best benefits the economy, how to negotiate, whether
rejection by a planning committee is universally understood to mean "try
again" by developers, why the committee wasn’t even considering
approval (it was a choice between deferring or rejecting) and how a committee would
know if it had its finger completely off the pulse of public opinion.
I guess the other thing about the format of
Riddoch Questions is that we tackle the person who is THERE not the folk who aren’t.
If Alex Salmond or George Sorial of the Trump organisation were on the programme
today (Sorial was due to come on and cancelled) questions would have focussed
on the weaknesses in THEIR arguments. But Martin WAS there, so he was under the
spotlight -- maybe that makes this format unnecessarily combative. I don’t
know.
So just to say, I have read and replied to
all the critical emails that came in during and after the programme -- and will
have a think about them and a re-listen. As ever, let me know what you think