iea ::: From romantic to realist, one man's journey toward council reform

re: July 3, from an article by John Blundell in The Scotsman: "HERE is a wildly unlikely sentence. Interesting ideas are emerging in a Scottish local authority. Municipal matters are just so staggeringly dull. How can ordinary mortals get to understand the labyrinthine ways of civic finance let alone the special dialects of local bureaucracy? Yet I think I can detect the ghost of Sir Walter Scott in events beginning to stir in the Scottish Borders Council (SBC). / We have a new political entity - the Borders Party. It won only two seats in June but they are resolved to take every seat one day. The founder, Nicholas Watson, was awoken from his political slumbers when SBC announced they were going to engulf the countryside around Abbotsford, the temple of Scottish romanticism, with hundreds of noddy homes..."...