When coronavirus passes, Marketing Edinburgh will be needed– John McLellan

The coronavirus pandemic is so all-consuming that there is a danger that other developments which would have been significant news might be taken with little scrutiny. So too do decisions taken a few months ago now seem hopelessly out of date.

Edinburgh Council’s collapsing of Marketing Edinburgh was on the basis that tourism would grow by three per cent even if the city was not marketed at all. Edinburgh was moving from encouraging tourism growth to managing it, was the argument.

Now the airport, pubs and restaurants are dead, the International Festival has postponed the launch of its 2020 programme and the chances of the Festival season taking place are diminishing by the day. Hotels which three weeks ago could guarantee over 80 per cent occupancy are now running at 15 per cent and falling.

The tourism tax is dead for now but when the crisis passes, as it eventually will, Edinburgh will be going head-to-head with every other major premium tourism destination to rebuild business which, despite what its detractors might say, is a vital element of the local economy.

But it will be the only major city without a destination bureau, unless the Marketing Edinburgh decision is reversed in some way because there is no way the city council is capable of running such an organisation from within.

The short-term let market has been smashed and that could have benefits, but in a matter of weeks this is no longer an argument about whether Edinburgh has too much tourism, but whether it will have a tourism industry at all.

Lothian Buses facing a cataclysm

With bus passenger numbers disappearing, who knows what impact this will have on the longer-term future of Lothian Buses, but the chances of the company being able to pay an extra £7m dividend to the city council this year to fund the tram completion must be minimal.

Like other companies facing a cataclysmic loss of custom, Lothian Buses might be in line for Scottish Government emergency funding and if the £250m tram project is to stay on track, as it were, then it might be thanks to what would effectively be a Scottish Government subsidy, which is how it should have been funded in the first place.

It is also an opportunity to look again at the rationalisation of the network and find ways to pay for essential but loss-making services like the threatened 69 in Willowbrae.

Nausea-inducing panic

Imagine the colour-draining nausea-inducing panic felt by Edinburgh education chief Alistair Gaw as he texted “Alison on a dreadful rant” about Cllr Alison Dickie’s full council speech on school cost cuts. To Cllr Dickie.“Oh, no, no, no….” you almost can hear him saying as he frantically searched the internet for “How to recall text messages” before getting a reply along the lines of, “Was this meant for me?”

Cllr Dickie has demanded to know the identity of the intended recipient, and we are all agog.

But with developments looming in the long-running investigations into the ex-head teacher of Castlebrae High Derek Curran and the appalling harassment of community education officer John Travers for whistle-blowing, a misdirected text from its chief might be the least of the education department’s worries.