Get off the gravy train

ALL ABOARD for the exclusive Gravy Express, leaving your town or city every day.

We pay for this luxury service but there's not a snowball's chance of getting a ticket.

You see, the Gravy Express is strictly for a certain sort. You'll remember them. The ones you voted for at the elections.

Their earnest faces stared at you from the leaflets stuffed through your letterbox. They promised a brave new world - better schools, health service, plans to tackle everything from drugs to poverty, with a better class wheelie bin thrown in.

If you're quick you can make it to the platform to wave off the politicians on their latest junket at your expense.

To be fair, most of them put in the hours working for each and every one of us.

But do they have to do it with such breathtaking extravagance?

Do they have to jump on every junket train from here to Bombay at huge expense to us?

I nearly had to be given sweet tea with the news of the staggering pounds 60,000 racked up by Glasgow Lord Provost Liz Cameron in just nine months for foreign trips. Why on earth should we have to pay to wine and dine Liz and her entourage in all the best spots, from New York to China, fly business class and stay in fancy hotels?

It's not the fact that Liz's spending was 11 times higher than Edinburgh's provost that got me.

I agree she has to travel to promote Glasgow because the city doesn't have the natural historic tourist attractions the capital has. But blowing pounds 12,000 on a trip to Sri Lanka to see how the aid to tsunami victims was spent just takes the biscuit.

If I were Lord Provost, and worse things than that could happen, I would make my name by being the provost who travelled with the people: the provost who moved among the poor of all the lands I visited.

I know I'm beginning to sound like Gandhi, but if I went to Sri Lanka to see how the money the Scots raised was being spent, I would not be booking into the best hotels at great cost.

What better way to meet the people and get an insight into their plight than by staying in a village hotel or hostel?

Rough it a bit. See how it feels, then you get an inkling how they feel. You can come home with a better story.

And the same goes for Liz and her entourage's visit to New York and Chicago for the Tartan Day celebrations. They would guarantee prime time TV coverage if she were the provost who was not just lunching on the rubber chicken circuit, but was actually seeing how the other half lived.

Take the subway. Take the bus. Be seen doing it. It would make great telly in the US. The civic leader who doesn't want to be like the rest of them. Who knows, others might follow suit.

And perhaps Richard Holloway, chairman of the cash-strapped Scottish Arts Council, might think twice about his pounds 10,000 trip to see street kids playing the fiddle in Caracas, Venezuela.

If Richard wants to see how the kids are living down there, book into a hostel alongside them and eat in the local restaurants. Let him take his own toilet roll. His trip will cost half, and he'll be all the richer, in more ways than one.

I'm sure a few of my mates out there are sniggering over my rant, considering as a globetrotting reporter I didn't exactly rough it. Though sometimes I did.

But there were other reasons for that - communications, as well (I admit) as a clean bed and some decent food. But then that wasn't public money. This is.

I'm serious about the likes of Liz and First Minister Jack Mc- Connell getting off the Gravy Express. I just wonder how many of their entourage would join them?

Copyright 2006 MGN LTD
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