“…The Saint took up the pace,
And drove it clean to the putting green and trumped it there with an ace.”
– from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Famous Ballad Of The Jubilee Cup
As reported here some months ago, there’s been a petition in the offing to Holyrood’s Public Petitions Committee, one covering the Trump affair and calling for a public inquiry into the way relations with the Trump Organisation were handled by local and national government.
The petition has finally been posted today on the 38 Degrees site, and you can sign it here. The Parliament’s rules say all valid petitions will be considered, even ones with just one name on them, but a few hundred signatures here would certainly help.
One of the virtues everyone should be able to expect from government at all levels is fairness and equal treatment. You should be entitled to expect that everyone is playing by the same rules, and that those rules should be consistently enforced. Since the Trump saga began in 2005, as covered in Ant Baxter’s film You’ve Been Trumped, local residents in Menie do not appear to have received this kind of fairness from Scottish Ministers or Aberdeenshire Council. And as Quiller-Couch’s Jubilee Cup illustrates, things quickly get out of hand if the rules for a single game are not followed.
The residents, Councillor Ford’s committee, the environmental objectors: they were playing “Planning” according to the official rules as published. Mr Trump and Scottish officialdom, on the other hand, appear to have been playing some other game behind the scenes: perhaps “Beggar Thy Neighbour”, or “Rich Man, Poor Man“. Either way, it’s just not cricket. Please do sign here. Disclaimer: I helped David Milne with the petition text.