Thursday 4 September 2008

Jack suffering "Summit Separation" anxiety

You don't get your photo taken anymore, no one asked you for a quote and you don't get to spend days without number sitting around in meetings. Yes, it's tough being the ex-ex- leader of Labour in Scotland.

In an attempt to while away the months until he can don a pith helmet and piss off out of it to Malawi, Jack McConnell managed to get himself back in the news this week. On the back of a rather troubled aftermath to the Old Firm game, Jack's demanding that Alex Salmond re-institute Jack's sectarianism summits. You know the ones where the Proddie and Tim organisations piously pointed fingers at the other lot. Great those summits were. Very productive. Got a lot done.
Anyway, I'm sure that just before Neil Lennon passed out during his West-End kicking the last thing that went through his head was "This wouldn't be happening if only Alex Salmond had carried on Jack's visionary process to deal with Scotland's secret shame! Oh bollocks, everything going wavy..."

Alex has responded, sort of, saying that the SNP will be looking at broader issues of discrimination which is code for "If you think we're going to re-open the issue of separate education with our new best friends over in the Diocese then you must be even stupider than you look."

Indeed, The SNP will be studiously ignoring all that God stuff while addressing the key discriminatory issue facing Scottish society: gingers versus normal people.

In all of this, it's far too easy to forget about the people who really suffer when their supply of free conferences is cut off. I'm thinking here of Jack's old bag-carrier-in-chief, Frank MacAveety.
My spies at Holyrood tell me that, in the good old days, Frank could clear a buffet table in nothing flat, provided the spread met his key criteria: it wis free.

Sadly now Frank must queue up at Greggs with the rest of us where he was recently heard to remark: " £1.50 for a ham roll? Fuck me."


Inside: Catholic Church welcome "rational argument" on anything but separate schools. Orange Lodge wants to know what a "rational argument" is.

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