Get real
One week we are told that SIC councillors are taking on board the criticisms of the Accounts Commission and the next week they seem to be trying to tell us – and maybe themselves – that the Accounts Commission does not understand the SIC accounts.
So it begins and that did not take long. A generation after everyone else woke up to it, SIC councillors still seem to believe, among everything else, that a week is long enough in politics.
I can only hope, and maybe just as optimistically, that SIC councillors will finally get this: the Accounts Commission understands them only too well – and so do the rest of us.
And maybe also that about the last thing a decent SIC official needs is a vote of confidence from the recidivists who put him in an untenable position in the first place and then set him to try to justify qualified accounts for year after year.
Would they please understand that if you are kidding nobody else then it might just be time to stop kidding yourself and that just before it all ends in tears there might be time to fix their relationship with the Shetland Charitable Trust. And that this time they really have to do it.
Gordon Dargie
Brough,
Hamnavoe,
Burra.
Ted Knight
Whether it matters or not, Shetland folk may rest assured that Holyrood will, within the next two years I surmise, abolish automonous SIC governance of the islands, and with it the wealth it disburses/controls eg: the oil money and the £200 million currently under the stewardship of the Shetland Charitable Trust; at which point, all interested parties may gaze in disbelief (or joy) as two white elephants – Mareel and the new Museum and Archive – are closed due to lack of subsidy funding.
But what to put in place of the inglorious SIC? A panjamdrum who goes by the name of ???? (answers/suggestions please on a postcard to the Editor of the Shetland Times)