What Price the "Nationalist Conversation"?

The Herald has a report today on the cost of the so-called "National" conversation. It appears that you and me have been charged £500,000 by Alex Salmond so that he can travel around Scotland on an SNP publicity campaign.

If the national conversation was truly national it would be between all the politicians and the people. The SNP version, surprise surprise, consists of SNP politicians travelling round the country speaking to small groups in church halls and community centres. Nothing wrong with that, you might say: political parties should take their message to the public. And you would be right, but the corollary is that political parties should use their own money to spread their own message, they should not use taxpayers money to spread party political propaganda.

Think of the uproar from the SNP if the other parties were spending taxpayers millions having rallies in support of the union of the UK. The volume of the whinging would be deafening....

Of course this SNP administration has a history of using public money for party political ends: think of the re-branding of the Scottish Executive (the legal entity) as the "Scottish Government". There is no such formal or legal body as the Scottish Government, but it cost us £100,000 just to change the headed notepaper at Holyroood so SNP Ministers could use the word "government".

Or the so-called "Homecoming", the centrepiece of which was an advert, made at a cost of £200,000, which has been shown more often in Scotland than anywhere abroad. Indeed it was only shown on the American Public Broadcast Channel after it was revealed that there had been no plans whatsoever to show it at all in the USA.

It is interesting that the SNP can fail to build even one school in two years, fail to deliver its SFT and its LIT, and all the other policies it has failed to deliver, but yet be so efficient at spending our money to subsidise its own party political campaigns.

Isn't that type of behaviour, in honesty and when done in other countries, called political corruption?