Ex-Edinburgh Council leader Donald Anderson tells Herald columnist John McLellan that Edinburgh’s success was hard won and can’t be taken for granted as competition from English cities intensifies.

Holding a referendum doesn’t have to be divisive, if you know the outcome in advance. Devolution was a slam dunk in 1997 – the only doubt was over strength of support for tax raising powers – and so too could David Cameron relax after calling the voting reform poll in 2011.

Maybe that’s one reason he fooled himself that the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum would be a breeze, and then was even more foolish to think he could pull off the same stunt over EU membership in 2016.

But it takes a special kind of bravery to ask voters a yes-no question when the birds in the trees know you’re on a loser, but that’s what Edinburgh Council did in 2005 when residents were asked to approve a congestion charge scheme which, among many anomalies, would have forced Juniper Green and Currie folk to stump up if they drove across the City Bypass.

The late Sir Tom Farmer famously asked why his wife should pay just for driving him home to Barnton from the airport. We lived in Liberton at the time and would have been stung just nipping to the supermarket at Straiton or the vet in Loanhead. Most people, apart from public transport zealots, had their own reasons for objecting, and I still wonder what I was doing when, as editor of the Edinburgh Evening News, I gave the scheme  conditional approval at the last minute.

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