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However, people have to accept that they will not always win. Many people support football teams that do their best but do not win every Saturday.I want to deal with two aspects: first, the merits of the argument and, secondly, the planning issues.
We are approaching the matter from the wrong perspective if we feel that we need to go cap in hand to the EU to ask its permission to do something else. That is a bit like a football manager asking a referee whether it is all right for him to play a 4-4-2 formation.
I was a regular attender in casualty departments when I played football and, by and large, it was the Royal Alexandra hospital that put me back together again.
If we can inject that note into the debate, I hope that it would not become just a part of the pretty crude political football that is the Sewel motion debate.
It covers every piece of green ground in Glasgow that our department maintains, which involves grass cutting and so on. We maintain football pitches, although we do not allocate the bookings.
We cannot make comparisons over time; we can make only bland comment on which councils are and are not doing well.We try desperately to avoid making the obvious judgment that there is a straight league table of 32 authorities and that they should be ranked as if they were part of a football league. Going beyond that requires several years of consistency.
A set of indicators could be identified which, while not presenting a complete picture, would signify the type of behaviour an organisation would be expected to exhibit if it was delivering high quality provision.
I hope that the minister will explain to our Norwegian friends that, in the modern global economy, predatory monopolistic behaviour brings with it some very material downsides and risks.