ONCE upon a time, and this is no fairy story, I once knew a lot of very decent and hard-working councillors.

 

I am biased about one of them because he was my father Jim, who was a councillor on the former Dumbarton District Council back in the 1980s. He represented the old Liberal Party but he made up for that blot on the family escutcheon by converting to the cause of independence long before he died in 2001.

In almost 40 years of involvement with local government either as a council correspondent or working for Edinburgh Council as a press officer, I met many councillors who just wanted to do a good job for their constituents and their parties. Yes, some of them were careerists making their way up the slippery pole of politics, while others were just happy to attend at the minimum of meetings and take their dosh home, but I remember many councillors across Scotland who struck me as hard-working men and women with the public good at heart.

I have to say that the present generation of councillors and candidates is not exactly inspiring a great deal of admiration in me, but then when Theresa May and Boris Johnson can reach such giddy heights, you can only presume that politics is a world gone mad.

The SNP has by and large been able to recruit a better class of candidate at every level of politics, but as a party member you would expect me to say that and yes, I would admit that the party has been let down by a couple of people who should never have tried to gain office in the first place.

What does sadden me is the lack of interest that many council candidates are currently showing about sporting and recreational issues.

When we go to the polls on Thursday we will be voting for people who have the responsibility of deciding on vast amounts of expenditure to deal with recreation and sport, especially that which is delivered in schools and through youth clubs.

Try as I have done, I have found no candidate of any party prepared to put sport and recreation top of their list of priorities for the next five years. I accept that health and social care, housing and transport are the big issues which councils have to face, but I would have thought that somewhere in the big debate there would have been discussion of what we need to do as a nation to improve their health of everyone in the country, and sport and recreation have a huge part to play in that process. There are times when I just wish I could bang together the heads of everyone involved in the NHS and local authorities and show them how health and recreation must be totally integrated if we are to have any chance of preventing the levels of disease and ill-health which bedevil Scotland at present.

I find it ludicrous that people on low wages or no wages at all still have to pay punitive prices to go for a swim at their local pool, while far too many school facilities across Scotland are still being denied to their communities, despite sterling work being done to create sports and coaching hubs.

We really need to get councillors to do some joined-up thinking about facilities, prices, coaching, encouragement and all-round provision for sport and recreation for all sectors of society and all ages.

We have plenty of good professional people involved in the provision of sport and recreation and we need more of them. We need councillors to set positive policies, reduce prices, find funds to make up shortfalls and let the professionals get on with it.

What we don’t need is councillors meddling in the management of facilities. There are plenty of councillors who always think they know more than their officials – trust me, they absolutely do not.

That is why the case of Musselburgh racecourse is so worrying. It is clear that there has been a complete breakdown of relationships between the East Lothian councillors – make that one councillor – and the racing industry professionals and officials who run the course.

From my investigation into the matter, it is abundantly clear that the Musselburgh Joint Racing Committee consisting of one independent councillor, chairman John Caldwell, three Labour councillors and three members of the Lothian Racing Syndicate is not fit for purpose and there really is an existential threat to Musselburgh’s continued operations.

That is why I am delighted to report that the current SNP Group leader on East Lothian Council, Stuart Currie, is promising reform if he is returned to office and the SNP forms part of the administration.

He has said, and I quote, that he will “do all I can to ensure a swift, robust and independent review of governance is undertaken, the outcomes published an recommendation implemented within months at the latest.”

He also undertakes to “ensure the clear roles are respected in terms of strategic decisions being made by the board, on the recommendations of officials, and the operational imperatives that must be the preserve of those officials to carry out the day to day running of the course and business.”

That is the type of intervention we need from councillors as they look at sports and recreation provision across Scotland.