David Maddox: Why politicians should learn to play chess

Some of you may remember the debate I started with "Green" James Mackenzie (of Two Doctors and now Steamie blog fame). Sadly I was unable to persuade him that chess is by far a superior game and test of skill and intelligence than backgammon.
The Green party's spindoctor, chief strategist and general dogsbody still seems to believe that the random throw of the dice is of more value.
The advantage of chess is that it forces a player to think at least several moves ahead, look at the consequences of an action and the possible counter moves by his or her opponent.
And a story cropped up yesterday which again shows that politicians really need think more than one move ahead and not rely on random events.
In this case the "game" was MSPs vs the children of Scotland - the Schools (Health Promotion and Nutrition) Act 2007 which was purely a piece of social engineering aimed at trying to force children from to not eat chocolate, sweets and other unhealthy food by banning their sale on school premises.
But because MSPs (and civil servants) didn't look ahead this had an unintended consequence. The story from yesterday was pupils from Dyce Academy in Aberdeen presenting a petition to have the law looked at again. Their fair trade tuck shop had been forced to shut down because the new law had banned most of their products.
Of course, the youngsters at the school generally had not been affected by the law at all in their eating habits, simply taking the two second walk to Asda to stock up on sweets, chocolates and all the other banned food.
So the only effect of this new law in terms of this school was to prevent teenagers from learning about running a business successfully and promoting ethical standards, instead their fellow pupils were driven into the welcoming arms of a commercial giant and health standards remain unaffected.
If more MSPs played chess they might have realised that social engineering is much harder to achieve than they seem to have thought in 2007.
Here's a prediction on another piece of social engineering. The SNP, Lib Dems and Greens are getting together in the upcoming criminal law act to have a presumption against short sentences of six months or less in favour of community sentences. What's the bet that we see a huge increase in the number of seven month sentences handed out by Sheriffs afterwards?

David Maddox: Don't scare the children

A source at Holyrood who enjoys scouring the local papers has passed me a very funny tale from the Paisley Daily Express.
It seems that a year on from resigning as Scottish Labour leader over what she did or did not declare in her donations, Wendy Alexander (pictured right) has upset some local parents by allegedly canvassing the support of their children at the school gate.
As the MSP for Paisley North it is of course perfectly normal for her to visit local schools, as do most of her Holyrood colleagues across parties.
What "parents" or one parent at least - one Roseanne McKeown - reportedly found objectionable was Ms Alexander allegedly handing out postcards protesting against the Lib Dem/ SNP led Renfrewshire Council's education cuts.
This means the school in question, Ralston Primary, will lose £17,600 from its budget.
“I definitely wasn’t happy about it," said Ms Keown, apparently talking about Ms Alexander's canvassing of her child rather than the school's budget cut (odd priorities perhaps).
The really interesting question, though, is why children were being canvassed for support. it will, after all, be seven years before the oldest of these youngsters gets a chance to vote.
One suggestion that came my way was that Labour are in such a dire hole at the moment, not least because of Ms Alexander's unfortunate period of leadership, that they have given up on this generation of voters and have decided to started building up support for the future.
Even more strangely Ms Alexander seems to think that her actions as a politician were not political.
She told the Paisley Daily Express: “It wasn’t political, it was about cuts in the school budget.”
Which begs the question: What on earth is political then?

David Maddox: She's back! - Fiona Hyslop breaks her silence

After a couple of weeks of speculation on her future Fiona Hyslop, the beleaguered education secretary, has decided to come out fighting.
The rumour mill began in earnest a fortnight ago when she seemed to be sidelined in a debate on teachers with her deputy, schools minister Keith Brown, opening and closing. And there had been a little quiet speculation that Mr Brown was being groomed for Ms Hyslop's job after she had struggled to defend failed pledges on building schools, maintaining teacher numbers, reducing P1 to P3 class sizes to 18 and paying off student debt.
She was described as "silent and wretched" by Annabel Goldie in FMQs two weeks ago after her no-show in the debate and the main target again for Labour and the Tories in last week's FMQs.
But tomorrow's debate on the school building programme will have Ms Hyslop opening for the defence and finance secretary John Swinney closing.
And for good measure she is quoted in the Scottish Government press release defending the government's record as a preview for the debate.
"This government inherited a legacy of 260,000 pupils in poor or bad condition schools. In just two and a half years that number has dropped by 100,000," she said.
I guess we may hear some replies to that tomorrow.

David Maddox: Who is best to teach the youth of Scotland about financial prudence?

Obviously Gordon Brown would not be top of the list these days to talk about "prudence", a word he seems to have become less fond of since we found out that boom and bust had not really been finished.
But it turns out that SNP education secretary Fiona Hyslop has an interesting advisor for the "credit crunch" lessons for school children being proposed by the Scottish Government, as covered in today's Scotsman.
Labour's Bill Butler has uncovered that the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is to be her main advisor.
Yes that is the same RBS which went on a spending spree of world banks, bringing down the once great institution with purchase of Dutch bank ABN Amro. The very same bank that was bailed out by the tax payer and is now mostly owned by the UK Government because of its erm.. expertise in financial prudence.
There was a suggestion that bankers should retrain as teachers. Maybe Ms Hyslop has a plan to supplement former RBS chief Sir Fred Goodwin's massive £342,500 a year pension (reduced after he took a £2.7 million lump sum) with a job in the classroom.

David Maddox: Do the Lib Dems have anything to say?

Apparently not. It seems they turned down their chance to have a subject debate on Thursday, allegedly because they had nothing to table.

Labour have stepped into the breach with another planned stooshie on building schools and the Scottish Futures Trust. It will be interesting if education secretary Fiona Hyslop turns up to defend her record this time having ducked the last education debate. Needless to say Labour are already challenging her to come out of hiding.

But perhaps, she will take the line of the Lib Dems and decide again that the least said the better.

In fairness to the Lib Dems, I have at least received an explanation from them for their reticence.

The party's ever cheery spindoctor in parliament Jenny Stanning told me: "I've also checked about the party business debates - we only get four a year, not as many as Labour - so it's not really a case of taking turns. The Government offers slots to parties as part of the business programme and we decided that we'd prefer one of our four debate mornings to be later on in the session. Hope this clears up any mystery!"

David Maddox: Remembers the future

I spent part of my morning talking to a group of P7 primary school children (10 and 11-year-olds), about the Scottish Parliament and working here. They were members of a class who were visiting on the Holyrood education programme and it was good to see that the experience of being in the parliament and sitting through 30 minutes of debate had not been an endurance but an interesting experience for them.

I gather some of the class have even expressed an interest in becoming politicians and two of the pupils I spoke to want to be journalists. Another couldn't make up his mind if he wanted to be a policeman or a television journalist and another, who was impressed with the parliament building (until I told him about the leaks and cost), wanted to be an architect.

What it goes to show is that, contrary to popular opinion, it is not the intention of all our youngsters to become footballers, models or reality TV stars. And it should be said that these were not privileged children from a private school, but a pupils from good state primary in Edinburgh.

The experience of visiting the parliament then was a very positive one for them and could help to shape their dreams and aspirations.

The excellent Holyrood education programme which allows for hundreds of school pupils to have this experience each year is unfortunately over subscribed and schools have to book early or not at all more often than not.

Which put a whole new perspective for me on the rather unseemly row yesterday over whether it was right to suspend FMQs or indeed whether the whole day's business should have been cancelled.

Had the SNP got their way (although they claim it was the Presiding Officer Alex Fergusson's idea) and cancelled all parliamentary business yesterday then there would have been nothing but a tour of the building with an empty chamber (pictured above) for those primary school children to experience.

For many that may be their one chance to have that sort of valuable experience and it would have been a shame if they had lost out for want of politicians wanting to make a short sighted decision, which I am sorry to say, seemed to have more to do with headlines than actual sorrow.

As sad as the helicopter tragedy was, people's lives are unfortunately curtailed in accidents almost everyday, yet their deaths are not taken as a reason to bring the business of democracy to a halt.

So while it was appropriate to mark the sad deaths of those 16 men, politicians should remember that life has to go on and that they should remember the living, in particular the children who are our future.