September Column 2

Written by Malcolm Bruce MP and published in Online Diary on Mon 18th Sep 2006

• Uncertain future for Swallow Hotels

News that Swallow Hotels had gone into administration must have caused anxiety to the staff and customers of three hotels in Gordon - the Kintore Arms, Thainstone House Hotel in Inverurie and the Udny Arms Hotel in Newburgh.

These are three popular and long established hotels which I hope means that they are included in the hotels that have been bought by Flodrive which acquired most of the group within 24 hours.

Hopefully this will mean minimum loss of business and security to the staff. I trust that in the near future we will hear details of the hotels future prospects and that they will continue to be promoted and developed as the important local resource they are.

• Millions pray for peace in Uganda

Ugandan flag

Last week I revisited Northern Uganda where I went last February with the International Development Committee which I chair. This has been referred to as a frozen and forgotten conflict which has raged for 20 years and left nearly 2 million people internally displaced into overcrowded camps totally dependent on aid for survival.

The irrational Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) led by Joseph Kony has killed, raped, mutilated and abducted thousands of people, brutalising children into becoming slaves and soldiers in the rebel cause.

In February I witnessed poverty and squalor in the camps. Little has changed in this respect in the ensuing months. Oxfam, with whom I travelled, have, along with other agencies been supplying clean water have struggled to meet more than half the daily need because of the density of population in the camps relative to the available water.

Food is minimal although is now being supplement from crops and a few animals raised on land within a 7 or 8 kilometre security zone from the camps.

Surprisingly, however, peace talks are in progress which could end the 20 year insurgency and allow the local people to return to their well watered and fertile land.

The UK is a major donor in Uganda where the international community are providing $200 million of aid this year. If peace arrives then this money could be diverted to development and long term poverty reduction.

One complication is that a factor in bringing pressure to bear for peace talks has been the issue of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court for five of the LRA leaders, who are now making the lifting of the indictments as a condition for peace.

This is a dilemma for the ICC which cannot easily rescind warrants for war crimes with impunity. It will require a real measure of justice as well as the forgiveness most of the victims express willingness to offer.

Nevertheless, it cannot be in the interests of the ICC for the only obstacle to concluding a lasting peace settlement to be the strict application of international law.

Re-unification of Uganda could make a major contribution to reducing poverty for the whole country and creating stability in a volatile region that includes post genocide Rwanda, strife ridden and ironically named Democratic Republic of Congo and civil war torn Sudan with the blight of Darfur.

• Crichie Centre award

Congratulations to Enterprise Grampian for the design award for the Crichie Business Centre at Thainstone incorporating the former mill house home of the Tait family.

I was fortunate to attend the opening and was impressed at how the new and the old leaded together. As a long time champion of alternative energy I was particularly interested in the wood fuelled heating system which I believe Government policy should do more to foster in Scotland where heating is as much or more of an energy need as electricity.

• Conference season kicks off

Brighton Conference Centre - Where the 2006 Conference season kicked off!

This week kicks off the conference season with my own Liberal Democrats opening the batting in Brighton.

As always a businesslike agenda is boiled down by the media to rows, thrills and spills.

It is true that our tax reform proposals are radical and imaginative and will, I believe offer a real thought through challenge to the other parties. Under Gordon Brown tax has become impenetrably complex and the Tories continue to struggle as to whether or not they want to cut taxes and how they would reform it.

As Treasury spokesman for the party over the five years that spanned the end of Tory rule and the start if New Labour, I promoted our policy of 1p on income tax for education and a 50 per cent tax on earnings over £100,000 - although I always believed that the latter should be used to fund tax reductions on lower earners who continue to pay a much bigger percentage of their income in tax than the better off.

The party's tax commission has I believe addressed this issue and come up with proposals to make taxes clear, fairer and greener - an approach I championed during my tenure.

Any party that aspires to Government, and increasingly the Liberal Democrats do, needs to reassure the middle income backbone of the economy as well as transferring some income and wealth from the very richest to the poorest in ways that do not undermine enterprise.

That is exactly what we have tried to do as well as changing our taxes to discourage damage to the environment and encourage more sustainable ways of doing things.

• Three way fight for First Minister role

Nicol Stephen

The Scottish Liberal Democrats were also given prominence at Brighton with a presentation led by Nicol Stephen, our leader in Scotland and Deputy First Minister with aspirations to the top job.

The media in Scotland seem determined to ignore the realities on the ground in Scotland - namely that there are three parties challenging to be the largest and three serious contenders for the role of First Minister.

The Liberal Democrats were second in terms of votes and seats at last year's general election. Since then we have won a spectacular parliamentary by-election in Dunfermline, dramatically increased our vote in Moray made gains in council seats - not least in Inverness and Glasgow and are higher in the polls than at any time since the Scottish Parliament was established.

Both Labour and the SNP are down on their previous support. In this situation the Liberal Democrats are a party with momentum. Our leader is less well known than the other two but that makes him fresher and more attractive.

He is an very able minister committed to helping Scottish business compete and give Scottish citizens the skills they need for the future. He worked to abolish tuition fees and is setting out the way to make Scotland a leader in renewable energy.

I think he would make an excellent First Minister, refreshingly in touch with modern Scotland in a way that I think the other leaders are not.