Optimism triumphs over experience

Calton thoroughly agrees with David Watt of the Institute of Directors in Scotland, who has said in his New Year Message that Scottish politicians are spending too much time on unnecessary legislation and debating independence instead of focusing on economic growth. Calton would include legislation on gay marriage in the category of 'unneccessary' given that civil partnerships already give homosexual couples all the legal rights of married couples. Instead, the Scottish Government have embarked on a second public consultation on the implementation of gay marriage, at a cost of goodness knows how much, when it wasn't in the SNP's manifesto and, quite frankly, the state of our economy is far more important at this moment in time. Businesses are struggling with the uncertainty produced by the prospect of independence and yet the SNP's response is to tell them to wait until November 2013 for answers to their many questions. CBI Scotland have produced an excellent paper listing all the issues which need to be considered if Scotland is to become independent, including the cost of setting up our own regulators for things like pensions, telecoms and energy and the cost in jobs of closing down Faslane, and they are hopeful that the Scottish Government's white paper will "address these questions in full and provide the necessary supporting evidence". Sounds like a triumph of optimism over experience to Calton.