Particle physics and white knights

By John Knox
Political reporter, BBC Scotland

Two white knights have jumped onto the Holyrood stage this week.

Sir Angus Grossart has been brought in to chair the SNP's Scottish Futures Trust.

And Sir Kenneth Calman has been taking evidence for his commission into the future of devolution.

But what the politicians may not realise is that knights can jump sideways as well as forwards.

So the future could be more exciting than they anticipate.

The new leader of the Labour Party, for instance, may have to accept that Sir Angus can make the new government building programme work.

And the SNP may have to accept that Sir Kenneth could come up with some good ideas to strengthen the powers of the Scottish Parliament.

The Scottish Futures Trust has been widely ridiculed as little more than a reannounced Private Finance Initiative (PFI).

But John Swinney told MSPs on Wednesday that it would "release £150m each year for investment in Scotland's vital public infrastructure".

It will be based on the non-profit distributing model of public finance pioneered in Argyll and Bute, Falkirk and Aberdeen.

It's still a strange new Macanno set for the financial markets to deal with but the hope is that Sir Angus, one of Scotland's great bank managers, can persuade investors to trust it.

Sir Kenneth, meanwhile, has been breathing life into the commission set up by the opposition parties at Holyrood to plan the next phase of devolution.

On Wednesday at the Trades Hall in Glasgow he held the first of six public meetings.

On Friday he met the Institute of Chartered Accountants here at Holyrood.

He hopes to take his 15-member commission to the north of England in the near future to hear what Yorkshire critics think of the Scottish Parliament.

"So far, we've had 130 submissions," said Sir Kenneth.

"All of them are positive about devolution and most of the them are in favour of more powers for the Scottish Parliament.

"But we haven't reached any conclusions yet."

An interim report is due early next year.

The commission is running in parallel with the SNP's "national conversation" on independence.

And, interestingly, both are covering much the same ground ... taxation powers, tax collection systems, inter-governmental relations, the European dimension, the environment and the economy.

There's even been an exchange of correspondence. And no-one quite knows where it will end.

"We don't want to blame anyone - that's for the courts - but we want to see lessons learned"
Relatives of C.diff victims

Back on solid ground, MSPs voted on Thursday in favour of a public inquiry into the Clostridium difficile outbreak at the Vale of Leven hospital in Dunbartonshire.

It was a narrow vote, 64 to 63.

The health secretary, Nicola Sturgeon, took the defeat gracefully, promising to come back to parliament once it was clear whether there would be criminal proceedings or not.

"Ministers cannot pre-empt those proceedings by deciding on a public inquiry at this stage," she explained.

Reading between the lines, it looks like there will be a public inquiry and that there is much more to learn about the way the outbreak was handled.

A total of 55 patients were infected, 18 of them died.

Labour MSPs said that neither the hospital nor the health board appeared to notice the trend until it was pointed out to them by a local newspaper.

Relatives watching the debate from the public gallery said: "We don't want to blame anyone - that's for the courts - but we want to see lessons learned."

Main splash

We've had debates on teacher numbers, on ferry services, family law and prisons.

But, as ever, the main splash of the week has been question time.

Everyone was watching how Cathy Jamieson would tackle the first minister in her last innings before the result of the Labour leadership election.

She reached for her Kalashnikov, or rather the rifle toted by Jahangir Hanif in Pakistan before he became an SNP councillor.

It all got rather confusing.

Alex Salmond was unsettled at first but soon made the point that the SNP condemned Mr Hanif's actions and had suspended him from the party for two months.

The Conservative leader, Annabel Goldie, meanwhile had been busy with her calculator and had worked out that: "If the SNP can find the £281m promised in their local income tax plans, we can cut the council tax by £150 for everyone without changing the entire system."

The Liberal Democrat leader, Tavish Scott, asked what the Scottish Government was doing about fuel poverty in light of the UK Government's £1bn scheme to help householders insulate their homes.

Mr Salmond said the scheme, largely funded by the energy companies, would apply "pro-rata" in Scotland and the Scottish Government was spending an additional £135m over the next three years on energy efficiency measures in areas of fuel poverty.

Finally to Professor Peter Higgs.

He visited the Scottish Parliament this week for talks with the education secretary, Fiona Hyslop, on particle physics.

This may seem light years away from our day-to-day politics until you realise that this is the same Professor Higgs who inspired this week's "big bang experiment" in Switzerland.

Forty years ago, here in Edinburgh, he developed the theory of how the tiny particles inside the atom gained their mass.

His theory is being tested, literally to destruction, in a tunnel 27km long underneath a Swiss mountain. So far we have not been sucked into a black hole.

Though, don't be surprised if none of us is here next week, not even Professor Higgs and the two white knights.