110: Footies #4: Duel Narratives

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Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello and welcome back to page 94.

My name, as always, is Andrew Hunter Murray and here we are in the fourth of our special mini-series of shortlisted entries for the Paul Foot Awards.

We're building up, it's now only a few days away, to the awards themselves, which are going to be dished out at a glittering ceremony with the magazine's editor, with all the judges, with all the shortlisted entrants.

And each day over these six days, we are talking to one of the brilliant shortlisted hacks or teams of hacks.

So, without further ado, here is number four.

So, my name is Lewis McBlain, and I write for the Northern Scott and Sister Papers up in Murray, sandwiched between Inverness and Aberdeen.

Okay, and what is the story that has brought you to the Pulford Awards this year?

Basically, the Scottish Government's pledge to dual the A96 by 2030,

the A96 being the sort of trunk road between Aberdeen and Inverness.

So it's almost entirely single carriageway.

The pledge to get that duelled by 2030 was scrapped more than three years ago.

And

yeah, they've neglected to tell anybody.

Okay.

And just to

give a bit of journalistic colour about the A96, because, you know, it's it's a road that a lot of listeners may not have driven along.

They may, you know, they may not be up on their A roads.

They They may not know much about it at all.

But linking Inverness and Aberdeen, quite an important road, but clearly also relatively small at the moment.

Is that a fair summation of what it's like?

The Northern Scotland, the title that I write for, has been campaigning on the A96 for over 20 years, and

there's been calls for it to

bypass at least the major towns.

to at least bypass the major towns along the way.

Because it goes through every single one?

Yes.

Aye.

Well, near enough.

But it certainly goes through the, if you like, the third city of the north of Scotland, Elgin.

It goes right through the heart of it.

And there's been calls to get that bypassed for more than 80 years by this point.

I'm sorry, did you say 80 years?

Yes.

Aye.

Now, this is the kind of story that we like at Private Eye.

We like a long-running campaign.

And

anything that's been going...

I mean, 80 years is longer than Private Eye has been going.

So this is clearly a well-established campaign.

Enter Lewis McBlain.

This was a pledge made by the Scottish Government.

In which year did you say?

It was back in 2011.

That's when it made it into, I think, the plan for Scotland cities to link all of them together by dual carriageway.

Presumably a welcome pledge.

You know, probably a bit of planning to complete.

Then you get spades in the ground, all of that.

What happens next?

Well, very little.

Very, very little.

Certainly

for the first part, it was easy enough to get the tenders out for design contracts to get people hired, get initial routes, then preferred routes, then final routes.

But when it came to transitioning that to actually getting the spades in the ground, everything kind of

seemed to go awry.

So

the obvious question is: why hasn't it happened?

Yeah.

If there was Will, Will, and you know, and it was popular, what went wrong?

Well, money.

If you ask the Scottish Government now, and if you ask the Scottish Government over the last three years as as I have and the the same answer you'll get back is that okay we are doing a we're doing a climate-based compatibility assessment a review of the whole the whole idea of dueling it because I don't want to encourage XX car use and all of that that

really wasn't that because the pledge was scrapped before the review was launched.

Right.

And so this and this is the the the thing which I suppose makes it a a Paul Foot Award story is that they didn't tell anyone about this.

And that's, I imagine, where your reporting comes into it.

Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Everybody's talking about it, but the Scottish Government hadn't said anything about the twenty thirty deadline since like twenty nineteen

or earlier.

It was like just this big shadow that was cast over all the discussions discussions of the A ninety-six, which is

very important to people up here.

And yeah, I mean, it's a dangerous road, and the deaths, the number of deaths on the road are like I did some FOIs to get into the statistics of that.

And it is pretty shocking the amount of fatalities that

occur on that.

So what was the result when you finally bundled together all of the information from all of those different FOIs you'd made?

So yeah, kind of tucked away, tucked away in the dusty half of one of the chains of emails was

an email from Michael Matheson's permanent secretary while he was transport minister just saying that, yeah, he signs off with a particular word in that just happened to not include the 2030 pledge.

And that was the point at which it disappeared right there.

So just in that in that one bit of correspondence, the pledge made to dual this road, which lots of people want, which is really important, which is really popular, and crucially which the government's actually committed to.

In that one bit of correspondence, it's just not mentioned, and that means the whole thing slides out of the list of things that are going to be done.

Is that right?

Pretty much.

I mean, there's been absolutely no, absolutely no commitment about that actually happening by 2030 at any point afterwards.

And so, did you then follow up and say, look, is this now not happening?

What came after that?

I mean,

I've asked for the Scottish Government's comment on a lot of A96 stories, and you get the same thing back every time, which is

we are committed to the dueling of the A96,

but they won't repeat the word 2030, they won't say anything about time, it's we are committed to do it, but basically the review is ongoing, so we can't do it.

I see the new climate-based review that they hadn't mentioned, but you're saying the point at which it drops out of official correspondence, where it sort of vanishes from a 2030 pledge, was before that review was even announced.

Yes, exactly.

This is all very reminiscent of, Lewis, I don't know if you've read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The very opening scene is about the construction of a bypass.

Right.

And it's Arthur trying to find out

that his house is going to be knocked down, the main character of the book.

And it's kept in a local council office, which is locked at the bottom of a flight of stairs in a disused basement, in an old, like a loo closet, in a filing cabinet with a sign on the front saying, beware of the leopard.

That is about the same level of transparency that we've got here that you have been having to track down to find out whether this is actually going to happen.

It's remarkable.

And I mean, it just gets more and more absurd as well because the sister road to the A96, the A9, between Inverness and Perth, that's kind of halfway duelled, and that was promised to be done by 2035.

And that pledge was publicly scrapped a year after they secretly scrapped the A96 one.

Right.

So it's like they really have.

Like if that's the precedent about when you, yeah, when you say you're not going to manage to do this, it's like

they know they're not going to be able to do it by 2030 on that basis.

So

where does it go from here?

That's kind of the thing is it's hard to know where it goes because like the first part I ended up taking the shape of a three-part series because that just kind of leapt out as the sensible way of doing it.

But it was...

The first part was that they've dropped the pledge.

The second part was

even if they hadn't dropped the pledge, they wouldn't have the money to do it anyway.

They've I think they've spent something like 0.5 percent of the kind of price tag and they've got, what, six years to go.

It's not looking good, I'll say that much.

Yeah, I mean it's going to be a lot of money coming from somewhere at a time where they're pausing uh yeah, capital projects and hospitals and building of new wings.

Even the climate review, they don't have any money set aside to do anything that comes out of that anyway.

I see.

So anything that survives this process isn't going to get done.

So it's like kind of every step in the road.

They can't do it.

I've got to say, Lewis, you're not sounding optimistic about this road getting dueled anytime soon.

Yeah, no, not really.

But you are a young man.

You may well live another 80 years.

Do you think it's likely to be done within the first 160 years of the pledge first being made?

Or the campaign being started?

Oh, well, I don't know.

I mean, capital budgets are extremely constrained, and it'd be hard to make a commitment at this point.

I think that's what's probably better you get back.

It's a fantastic story, Lewis.

And it's, again, your reporting on it has been, has had to be so determined to track down the correspondence.

Good luck with wherever it goes next,

even if you think that might not be very far.

I'm hoping for a miracle.

At least I'd kind of be able to

get around a wee bit faster and

make a lot of people happy, but it's not going to happen.

That is exactly in the uh, that's exactly in the spirit of a lot of the long-running campaigns.

Um, but they often do tend to yield results, so you never know.

Thank you so much, and congratulations to getting me a nomination.

Thank you so much.

Cheers for that.

There you have it.

Thank you so much for listening.

We hope you've enjoyed that little insight into the world of investigative journalism.

There will be another one of these tomorrow.

If you just can't wait for that, then feel free to subscribe to the magazine instead, private-eye.co.uk.

Thanks for listening.

We'll be back again shortly with another one.

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You're juggling a lot.

Full-time job, side hustle, maybe a family, and now you're thinking about grad school?

That's not crazy.

That's ambitious.

At American Public University, we respect the hustle and we're built for it.

Our flexible online master's programs are made for real life because big dreams deserve a real path.

At APU, the bigger your ambition, the better we fit.

Learn more about our 40-plus career-relevant master's degrees and certificates at apu.apus.edu.