WESTM NSTER HAUL
Page 7
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STICK YOUR NECK OUT far enough and you may get away with it as your opponents sink back, knocked out by your effrontery. Malcolm Rifkind cer tainly did. _ Mr Rifkind, Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, is, at 33, no shrinking violet even in the most adverse circumstances.
A lesser man could well have been flummoxed when, with all the Commons waiting for his reply, he was reminded that the Tories, who would not abolish toll charges on the Forth Road Bridge, had undertaken to do so when in Opposition.
The Member for Edinburgh Pentlands was not discomforted one whit.
"The honourable Gentleman is correct that in 1974 at the general election we said that we would abolish the tolls. He will recall that we lost that general election," he told his inquisitor, Labour's Dick Douglas.
"The honourable Gentleman will also recollect that in 1979 we made no such pledge and we won that election. He can draw whatever conclusions he wishes from that statement."
What conclusions Mr Douglas drew remained unvoiced — and indeed what could they be, except perhaps that the Tories were a fiendishly slippery lot, with Mr Rifkind in the front ranks?
All in all, it was a fitting end to exchanges which had an air of unreality about them. Was Willie Hamilton really serious when he suggested that removing the tolls would help the unemployment situation in Scotland?
Mr Rifkind obviously did not think so, whereupon Mr Hamilton, who fights the Royal Family and so finds junior Scottish Ministers small beer, observed that if the tolls did not cause the terrible employment, then there must be other causes. No one disagreed.
But Oor Willie was not finished —' was it not, he demanded, time that the absurdity of the tolls was ended, even if the effects of the charges were minimal as regards unemployment?
It takes more than that to throw Mr Rifkind who, as a trained advocate, believes in marshalling all relevant facts beforehand.
He had, he said, asked the Forth joint board what effect on transport would be produced by the abolition of tolls. The answer — an increase of about one per cent in traffic.
So keep your money handy for those tolls.