Edinburgh Council's failed Eurovision bid: SNP right to call for scrutiny of what may have been just a publicity stunt – John McLellan

A broken clock is right twice a day, and while Edinburgh’s SNP group was finding as many ways as possible to damage the city’s economy last week, their attempt to open the unsuccessful Eurovision final bid to scrutiny was justifiable.

Ukraine's entry Kalush Orchestra in the Eurovision song contest won this year's event (Picture: Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images)

Whatever the motivation, allowing councillors to understand why the application to stage the event failed seems entirely reasonable, and even if the bid was always doomed to failure because of the lack of a big arena, as the Lib Dems argued, the public has a right to know why time and effort was wasted in the first place.

For reasons which escape me, the Labour, Lib Dem and, yes, Conservative groups chose to keep things under wraps and voted down an SNP motion to have the application examined. Embarrassment is not a reason to keep things covered up, and if the bid was a feeble public relations stunt to be seen to be doing something, then that deserves to be exposed.

At risk of sounding like a broken record, the absence of a big, modern venue in Edinburgh has been an obvious gap for decades and there has never been a proper examination of why it hasn’t been filled, or at least to start mapping out a plan to get into this market.

Of course, the council needs every scrap of brownfield land it can get its hands on for housing, and the SNP and Green groups would probably find some pretext to oppose it anyway, but this was a missed opportunity to kick-start the discussion.