Thanks, Mr Wishart. I think.

Regular readers will be aware that yours truly has letters published in the Scottish press on a fairly regular basis. For an armchair activist this avenue no doubt means a lot more readers than the small numbers reading this blog. On the other hand, writing letters to the press means you're in the lap of the letter editor god - is it too long, is the subject matter too arcane, is it a couple of days too late, should I wait until a better subject comes up in case I've filled my quota (real or imagined), is the tone too polemical, is that paragraph a bit too close to the bone for publishing etc etc. Of course, subject to defamation law and the possibility that someone unpleasant will take exception to what I write, these problems are irrelevant in the blogosphere.

I suppose it's a bit like search engine optimisation - you don't know how Google ranks websites, thus it's largely a question of guessing and tailoring your site in the hope that Google looks kindly upon it. And, of course, newspaper letter editors seem as inscrutable as Google's search criteria. The Scotsman once emailed me to clarify a point I'd made. And the Courier once phoned me regarding something I can't quite remember, probably because I was asleep in bed when they phoned, and was thus trying my best to sound merely compos mentis rather than cogent, and very probably failing dismally in any case. Other than that it's total silence, and I've always suspected that if you question their editorial judgement then that might be detrimental to being published in the first place, thus best to keep quiet. And, indeed, hope that none of them are reading this(!).

Anyway, the reason for this lengthy preamble is to point out that probably the most annoying aspect of the whole letters to the editor scene is that an exchange of letters is unlikely to continue for too long, thus in view of the lack of immediacy of the medium the correspondent afforded the last word in effect wins - they can largely say what they want and few will remember what the previous correspondent had said a couple of days ago. Thus a bit like the advantage afforded to the PM and FM at PMQs and FMQs, only exacerbated by the time scale of a day or two between contributions rather than a half a minute or so.

On a couple of occasions I've felt that correspondents have relied on this curtailment of the correspondence to make slightly misleading points hoping/knowing that I'll be unable to respond. This happened a couple of weeks ago in a response by Mr Alex Orr to a letter I had sent to the Scotsman critical of earlier correspondence from Mr Orr. His response seemed to misrepresent the contents of my earlier letter, but my subsequent missive pointing this out wasn't published.

In the grand scheme of things this is neither here nor there, but for the record my unpublished letter is reproduced at the end of this post.

However, this reminded me of a similar episode from a couple of years back, with a similarly prematurely (in my opinion!) curtailed correspondence in the Scotsman, a matter that I've highlighted a couple of times on here before, and which still rankles slightly yet.

In summary, concerns had been raised about organised crime infiltrating the private hire (licensed minicabs) trade in Edinburgh. In response SNP Councillor Colin Keir raised concerns that because private hire vehicle numbers cannot be limited - unlike black taxi numbers - then organised crime could more easily infiltrate that side of the trade. However, at around the same time his SNP colleague Steve Cardownie had faced criticism regarding his involvement with a private hire firm in Edinburgh, which had been linked in the press to organised crime. Councillor Cardownie responded by saying that vehicles and drivers were all council and police vetted, hence there was no problem. Which seemed to contradict what Mr Keir - who's responsible for taxi and private hire licensing in the capital - had said; what was the problem with the lack of control over private hire vehicle numbers if police vetting was in operation, as per Mr Cardownie?

I pointed out this contradiction in a letter to the Scotsman, and in response Mr Keir used the police vetting defence, which of course fundamentally contradicted his original stance - initially there was a problem, now there wasn't - but my response pointing this out wasn't published, thus Mr Keir's face was saved, and mine had egg on it, because I should have know this, at least according to Mr Keir!

Indeed, there's a whole lot more to the matter than that, but I've spent far too much time on this post already, and anyone actually reading this far will no doubt be willing me to wind things up.

However, the reason for all this is to point out yet another contradiction from the SNP on these matters, this time in the form of MP Pete Wishart. A few weeks ago the Courier reported that Perth and Kinross Council had proposed removing the taxi monopoly which operates in the Fair City. Mr Wishart responded by claiming this would "put passengers - particularly single women - at risk". Which seems to echo Mr Keir's original claim about numerical controls on vehicle numbers, but which Mr Cardownie and Mr Keir himself subsequently contradicted - what's the problem with vehicle numbers if police vetting is in operation? And P&K's SNP licensing convenor, Councillor Peter Mulheron, doesn't mention the safety or organised crime aspects in his reported comments.

In fact, the private hire cars which take up the slack caused by restricting taxi numbers in places like Perth already operate in the "free-for-all" environment slammed by Mr Wishart, yet I can't recall him raising such concerns in the past.

Indeed, I can't recall safety being a particular issue in the numerous Scottish local authority areas which have never limited taxi numbers, not to mention those - such as Inverness, Aberdeen and Dundee - that have removed such controls.

Surely the issue of safety depends on long-standing vehicle inspection and driver vetting procedures - as per Mr Cardownie and Mr Keir (depending on which day of the week it is) - and also the more recent regulation of radio control rooms introduced by justice secretary Kenny MacAskill, thus the control of vehicle numbers is a red herring.

Anyway, this is just the tip of the iceberg on this particular issue, but if anyone is even remotely interested in further reading on the subject then they'll have to wait on that book deal ;0)

Meanwhile, it's perhaps worth noting that both Mr Orr and Mr Keir are Lothian SNP list candidates in next year's Holyrood elections, which represents a slight coincidence as far as my prematurely curtailed correspondences in the Scotsman are concerned!



Unpublished letter sent to the Scotsman:

I don't doubt Alex Orr's assertion that GDP per capita is a "common measure of economic prosperity". However, his claim that I "derided" him for using it is wide of the mark; I merely said that the concept is undermined to the extent that it fails to take into account wealth distribution within nations, an argument he ignores.

In fact my point essentially was that from the perspective of the greater good it's misleading to pick out a few small but very successful nations if most of the world's population resides within significantly larger entities which perform better than the average; a bit like using individual people who are millionaires to prove that small is beautiful. Mr Orr's regurgitation of yet more statistics demonstrating the success of a few less populous nations suggests he also prefers to ignore that argument.

He also denies "denigrating" the UK, but I would suggest that if Mr Orr compares his own comments regarding the UK to what he describes as other commentators "knocking", "talking down" and "gloating" about Scotland and other small nations, then he might find some evidence of double standards.