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There can be no doubt that the talents of the people of Scotland have strengthened Scottish culture, from Edwin Morgan’s fascinating “Sonnets of Scotland” to the bizarre imaginative world of lain Banks’s “The Wasp Factory” and the humour and desperation of Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting”.
Of these, all are on track to deliver by the stated dates with the exception of proposed national HR system where it has been decided that end 2008 is a more appropriate target date.
It shows all the benefits to communities of the forests, and luckily it does not look like the Commission is proposing to sell off any of the forest estates to banks, which is reassuring. The comments about Iceland are very interesting, not to say significant.
The Government is already on the case, because the matter was flagged up to me by Stephen Pearson, the head of legal services at the Royal Bank of Scotland, which, after all, is our single largest institution here in Scotland.
The businesses that seem to have benefited most are those with diverse, disparate sites—those with lots of small shops, pubs, bank branches and stuff like that. Most encouragingly—I speak as a taxpayer—the public sector in Scotland has taken advantage of the competition.