ianssmart

Default won't do

2012-02-26T15:55:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a quiet week, so much so that, on Friday, I half wrote a blog about having a hole in my jeans. (Don't worry reader, it will never see the light of day.)

Today, the bizarre alliance between the SNP and Rupert Murdoch might have been worthy of my attention but, to be honest, Kenny Farquharson got things exactly right when he commented last week that the National Question was already really only about the degree of devolution. Giving the Murdoch press a (wrong) steer on the date for a referendum that most probably will never take place at all might be regarded by somebody as a way to curry favour but I'm a bit bemused as to why anybody thought it would sell newspapers. Still, what do I know about favours needing returned for stories not published. Odd, mind you, that of all the politicians who have litigated over phone hacking not one has ever been from the SNP.

When I first started writing this blog however my principal target was never the Nationalists. Their house of cards was always going to collapse at some point of its own accord. Lunchtime today's performance by Stuart Hosie on the Politics Show when he announced that the SNP believed in a single UK energy market, just not in a single UK, was only the most recent example of this slow disintegration. All credit to Tom Greatrex for his speaking more and more slowly in the hope that Mr Hosie might eventually, if dimly, perceive the absurdity of his own proposition.

My principal blog concern however has always been that the collapse of Independence as a serious proposition would not, as it appears many in our own ranks assumed, lead inevitably to Labour's return to dominance of Scottish politics. And that some actual (what's the word?) thinking might be needed in that regard.

So I turn to the matter which first distracted me from the perishability of denim.

I received a communication from the Party at the end of last week which informed me that we are engaged in a consultation about how we might select more women, BAME or disabled Scottish Parliamentary candidates.

They really, really do not get this. It simply does not matter what the sex, ethnicity or physical ability of Labour Candidates might be if they are not elected. Unless of course you hold some perverse view of equal opportunity which believes that it is important that there requires to be equal opportunity to participate in failure.

But of course that's not the underlying assumption here. The underlying assumption is that "We'll be back". And the more worrying assumption is that "We'll be back" no matter who our candidates might be. So there is no reason that we can't also engage in some social engineering in the process.

Now, I am not opposed to there being more diversity in our candidates. Indeed, if the current Group of 37 MSPs was sufficiently diverse to contain within its ranks a single credible candidate for First Minister that could only be a good thing.

But, instead, we all know that our only hope lies with the Deputy Leader who does not even sit in the Scottish Parliament.

Now, I am a great partisan of Anas Sarwar but, had he not sought the Deputy Leadership position, we had at least half a dozen new Westminster MPs who could have done so with equal credibility. We had however not a single new MSP intendedly elected who could as much as run for a bus, never mind run, ever, for that position. (Sure, the list, by virtue of our own disaster, brought in a few bright sparks but, ironically, the Labour Party did not actually intend these people to be elected).

And in the meantime, let's look as who has gone. Donald by fate but Jack, Henry, Wendy, Susan, Peter and Sam entirely voluntarily. Angus McKay and Brian Fitzpatrick by the decision of the electorate but with no wish to return. Margaret and Cathy to move on to "more important" things.

And in the search for their replacements the Labour Party viewed the Scottish Parliament as a "big Cooncil" and thus concluded that if anybody was up to the task of serving at Council level then that, in itself, qualified them to serve in the Parliament. Only it didn't. And the electorate knew that it didn't.

But since the current Leadership operates on the basis of appeasing every internal interest group and since there is no bigger interest group than the councillors, we are consulting about different selection criteria solely with regard to diversity. Regrettably however, until we recognise that ability might also be a factor, candidature, rather than actual election, is likely to remain the only position on offer.

And is there likely to be any movement on this at next week's Conference?

You might as well hope to hear something important about where we now stand on the powers of the Scottish Parliament.

The exchange of ideas

2012-02-19T15:51:00.000-08:00

Twitter is interesting.

People who do not share your politics pick up on things you've written and, having commented on it, commend their own thoughts to you.

Various nationalists engage with me on that basis.

Generally they are not the much derided "Cybernats". Their discourse is civilised and measured, even if the younger of them harbour a naive belief that they might yet persuade me of the merits of Independence by the passion of their argument alone.

There is less likelihood of that than of Craig Whyte being invited to join the Celtic Board.

In looking at what is commended to you however does give something of an insight into the mentality of even the more intellectually engaged sections of the SNP.

You do obviously only engage with those prepared to come out to play but even that makes you feel slightly sorry for these individuals, because they are being treated as mugs by their own, more realistic, leadership.

There are lots of (UK) Labour commentators out there in the blogosphere. They break down into essentially two groups: those who defend what the Leadership propose as being as much as might reasonably be achieved and those who attack the leadership for being too cautious. For what it's worth, I'm in the second category.

There are none however who believe that any conceivable leadership is about to bring about the socialist transformation of society.

However, many, although to be fair, by no means all, of the SNP bloggers labour under the misapprehension that Scotland is about to be led to independence by Eck. So, I am asked to comment on how the Labour Party might conduct itself "after independence"; invited to resign myself to the inevitability of independence; even, curiously, offered gratuitous advice as to what Labour must do if we want to prevent Independence.

These poor souls are encouraged in this by the unwillingness of their own leadership to bite the bullet of telling them that they only won the election by not mentioning independence; that there has never been any reputable survey suggesting the Scottish people will vote for Independence and that the reason the SNP Government want to delay the referendum is that, if it ever held, they will lose. As Alistair Darling observes in today's Scotland on Sunday, nobody has ever chanted on a demonstration "What do we want?" [whatever] "When do we want it?" [In a few years time]. Lenin did not get off the train at the Finland Station and announce that he proposed to give the Tsarists three and a half years to consider their response.

Now, that's not to say that the SNP Victory last May was unimportant. It has taught my Party that you can't insult the electorate with either your candidates or your platform and it has created space for a more powerful devolution settlement. It has also provided us with a perfectly competent technocratic government in the meantime. We even have the consolation that the task of trying to hold on to the Labour votes they won will stop that Government veering too far to the right.

So, as they say, every cloud has a silver lining.

But, to be frank, I'd rather people stopped bothering me with suggestions as to what Labour might do "after Independence". They might as well ask me what Labour proposes to do after the socialist transformation of society.

Cameron in Scotland

2012-02-16T13:30:00.000-08:00

One of the things you realise with an unfortunate flash when the likes of David Cameron makes a speech to a Scottish audience is how poor is the stodge that is served up by day to day Scottish politicians.

Now that's not to be "anti-Scottish". I have previously conceded that Eck is a politician of the first rank but, to be honest, he stands out in domestic Scottish politics like Henrik Larsson once stood out in domestic Scottish football. Unlike Henrik however, you never wonder why Eck is content to display his talents to such a small audience. Political Parties don't have transfer windows, at least at their higher levels.

But just like the glory years in Europe, when the visit of Real Madrid or AC Milan might have forced even the most diehard Old Firm Fan to acknowledge that their were (at least) opponents in town worthy of their best efforts, Cameron's visit today was a major occasion and his speech, while not quite Barcelona (an accolade surely reserved for Obama alone) was certainly up there in the Manchester United or Bayern Munich class.

And he didn't just bring with him the name or the reputation, he also produced the performance on the park. Although he did give away one stupid late goal.

Cameron's speech was about as good a defence of the Union as could be produced by a Tory Prime Minister in current circumstance. It was self-deprecating when required, non-hectoring throughout, but unapologetic at the same time. It did not put, up front, warnings of doom and disaster but rather in its few notes of caution, planted sufficient seeds of doubt for others to nurture, in time, into abundant growth.

Far from his reference to Scottish antecedents being the cringe-fest it can often be from any "foreign" dignitary, rather, by placing it in the context of a multi-culturalism that can't stop at a land border, he begged significant questions of the underlying mentality not of Scottish nationalism but of any nationalism. The suggestion that such attachments as essential to your politics is an idea which is not quite "modern". (Dare one say it, it would be welcome if he could make such a speech with "Scotland" and "The United Kingdom", substituted by "The United Kingdom" and "The European Union".)

Now obviously, there were bits that I spluttered at. Had I been in the hall I would have been difficult to restrain when he referred to "generous welfare for the poorest" in light of the current Welfare Reform Bill, for example. But he is, in the end a Tory and it is good that he is looking forward. It is simply absurd to dismiss all the good the United Kingdom has done in the past, above all the common struggle to defeat Nazism, as "history" while insisting that the Tories previous sins alone "must never be forgotten".

Above all however this was not a patronising speech. Clearly somebody had done much more than a quick Wikipedia job on the number of historical and cultural references it contained but it also contained a real attempt to grapple with the "why" of a continued Union in precisely the postive terms some have demanded.

That however brings me to the silly late goal given away.

Devolution is a process, not an event, as Ron Davies famously said. But it is a process that needs set out in terms beyond vague aspiration. That's why it took us so long to achieve devolution in the first place. It is not enough for the Prime Minister to say:

"When the referendum on independence is over, I am open to looking at how the devolved settlement can be improved further.

And yes, that means considering what further powers could be devolved."

It is worse still for him to follow it with.

But that must be a question for after the referendum, when Scotland has made its choice about the fundamental question of independence."

These three sentences could so much better have been expressed:

"Now obviously, if Scotland votes for separation, then Devolution will become irrelevant. All that will be left is to manage that separation as amicably as possible.

However, if, as I hope, separation is rejected, that will not mean an end to Devolution. That process will go on, in terms mutually negotiated across our continued United Kingdom.

In particular, it must be worth looking again at how Scotland might be responsible for directly raising more of the money spent in Scotland and, indeed, whether Scotland might also have direct control over more of that expenditure as well"

That then becomes a promise in specific terms and not, as it has been portrayed, a mere temporary concession to get through the Referendum.

I suppose, when you are 3-0 up and playing additional time, there might be some excuse for taking your eye off the ball. That is, however, foolish when you are only playing the first leg.

Politics, religion, football and Government

2012-02-14T15:11:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I tried multi-multi-tasking.

First, and undoubtedly most aesthetically pleasing, I set off to watch Barcelona. Played at its very best, nothing, nothing is more beautiful than football. Faced with the imminent end of the World and with but a few hours to go, who would swap listening to La Traviata, reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles or watching The Godfather for the chance to see, one last time, the 1970 World Cup Final. Or France against Portugal in '84 or indeed this Barcelona team at any time. A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Secondly however, I tried to follow events in Dingwall where Saints were playing Ross County in the Cup. I suspect the football did not quite match up in quality to that produced by the Catalans and it's a hell of a long way to Dingwall at any time, let alone midweek in February, but 169 dedicated Buds did so nonetheless. I am now ashamed not to be in the company of that band of brothers (some women among them). I salute their courage, their fortitude, their indefatigability. Safe journey home.

It is impossible to explain why this is, even when it's ugly, the beautiful game, but it is. And yet there is little more ugly than the rivalry between Rangers and Celtic.

It would be great if Scottish Football was like all-Ireland Hurling or English Cricket; organised on a County basis, with your loyalty predetermined by the place of your birth, or at least the place of your residence. And, indeed, for many of us, from Paisley, or Motherwell, or Dunfermline or even Dingwall, Scottish Football is.

But, for good or ill, well actually overwhelmingly for ill, Scottish football also has a tribal element.

Now, entire books have been written on how that has come about. I do not propose to attempt to precis them here.

And that tribalism pervades almost every aspect of Scottish life, not least politics. Historically, my Party has been associated with Celtic, despite notable exceptions like Andy Kerr or Brian Donohoe. And the Parties of the Right, despite equally notable exceptions like Roseanna Cunningham or.......(I'm struggling here), have been associated with Rangers.

Now, when one or other of these institutions gets into difficulty about which politicians might have a legitimate view, that causes difficulty.

When Rab C Nesbitt famously described Jim Sillars as "the Hun in the Sun", everybody understood the joke. But when Nicola Sturgeon issues a mealy mouthed regret about the potential demise of a major employer in her constituency everybody also understands her difficulty.

Particularly if that demise is as a result of failure to meet the tax obligations incumbent, personally and sportingly, on the rest of us.

BUT. Senior Scottish Football is kept (just) alive by television money. Much as we all would wish that there was a worldwide television audience for St Mirren v Motherwell, there simply is not. There is not even much of an audience for St Mirren v Rangers or indeed Motherwell v Celtic. The interest, and the money, is in Rangers v Celtic.

And that money ends up in all of our pockets; St Mirren and Motherwell not least. And Celtic above all.

So, tonight, Margaret Curran can appeal to HMRC to have an eye to the wider picture. But the First Minister is on the horns of a dilemma. And silent.

Express support for Rangers and he not only places himself on the side of tax dodging wide boys but he also risks the loss of the long solicited "Celtic" vote. But wash his hands of Rangers and he concedes that never mind Scotland being able to run an Independent economy, we can't even run a viable Football League.

To govern is to choose. Time for Eck to make that choice. And for the press not to allow him to avoid the difficult answer with a chuckle.

Wish I'd said that at the time

2012-02-12T08:39:00.000-08:00

I never mind losing to the Welsh at rugby. Starting this blog at 2.45, I already suspect this afternoon that's just as well.

I was on the telly earlier on.

Kate Higgins and I are developing a bit of a double act as semi-detached members of our respective Political parties. Being freed of the responsibility of being invariably on message provides the opportunity to concede that not all of one's political opponents are embodiments of incompetent perfidy, and indeed removes the necessity of maintaining that all of one's own elected representatives are models of moral virtue and strategic clear sightedness.

You do however always depart from such a media appearance regretting a point not made.

In the usual Groundhog Day manner, with admittedly an apology from Isabel Fraser, we were invited first to discuss the recent twists and turns in the never ending what/when/how Independence Referendum. Believe me, if this is boring Kate, Isabel and, indeed, me, then it is fair to assume there are few in Scotland now desperate for more discussion. Not that this will stop the politicians.

It wasn't that therefore on which I wished I had said more, nor indeed the subject of the Glasgow City Council Labour Group, on which subject, even as a semi-detached Labour comment ator, the preference would be not to be required to say anything at all.

No. oddly, the point on which I would have liked to have discoursed at greater length was the case for negative campaigning in the context of the (eventual) Referendum campaign.

In a General Election context, voters are invited to vote for one Government or another. It is therefor illusory to seek victory entirely by default. you need to give people a reason to vote for you, not just not to vote for them. Dare I say it, in an admittedly different political context, that is why Romney is having so much difficulty closing the deal.

(NOTE At this point (20.33) the triumph of hope over experience requires me to discontinue to give the rugby my undivided attention.)

46.28 Normal service resumed.

So anyway, there is a world of difference between a General Election and a Referendum. Quite expressly, in a Referendum, the Electorate are being asked to vote for or against a specific proposition. That changes the terms of the discourse. Indeed almost by definition you cannot mount a positive campaign for a negative proposition.

There is no need to make a "positive case for the Union". We know, for good or ill, what the Union entails. There is simply the need to make a case against "Independence".

And Independence .................

53.07 Time for a drink.

And independence has any number of easily exploitable negatives.That's why the SNP are trying so hard to ditch those that, they believe, it is possible to ditch: The Future of the Monarchy; Sterling; NATO; the BBC. Regrettably for them, it will take more than exhortations for my side to be more positive, even from the articulate Ms Higgins, before we'll be inclined to let them off so easily.

In praise of Rob Murray

2012-02-09T13:19:00.000-08:00

I am a great twitterer.

I know that will, in itself, cause a sigh among some readers but, actually, the twitter community (ugh!) among Scottish politicos is a great entertainment.

It would be fair to say that it contains few "don't knows" but, generally the terms of discourse are civilised, intelligent, and often very funny.

Nobody, well nobody outside some in the SNP, claims a monopoly of virtue or wisdom. Indeed many of the most telling points are scored against one's own side.

And, although it is, of course, all publicly conducted, it nonetheless contrasts favourably with what passes for political dialogue among our elected representatives.

So it is in that spirit that I write in praise of Rob Murray, Tory bastard though he undoubtedly is.

Why? Because yesterday he contributed a single tweet suggesting that one aspect of the Scottish Government expenditure programme might have been better spent.

His target was "active transport", that's cycle routes and walkways to you and me.

Now, I don't agree with him. He is after all a Tory. Even though, personally, I would only ever walk if I had run out of petrol, or roads, and although I cannot conceive of getting on a bike under any circumstance, nonetheless I am persuaded that it is a worthy objective to encourage others to do as I say, not as I do.

But, the crucial thing about Rob's intervention is that unique among this micro community, he was prepared to say where money might be saved to be spent elsewhere. Or, he being a Tory, not spent at all.

And that is an almost unknown experience amongst Scottish political commentators.

Labour, convinced that the Tories are cutting "too fast, too deep", hide behind that sentiment to identify every single cut as one which is either "too fast" or "too deep".

The SNP, hiding behind their own assertion that Scotland's deficit is not quite as serious as that of the United Kingdom as a whole, then use that as an excuse to proceed as if an Independent Scotland wouldn't have a deficit at all.

The Greens argue for a no growth strategy while floating various new projects, such as, dare I suggest, more cycle routes and walkways, which, in the absence of growth must surely be funded somehow.

Even the Tories, generally, keep insisting on the magic bean of greater "efficiency".

As for the Libs, well anything would be possible for them, apparently, if they were not held back by their Tory allies.

Actually, as err...........Mrs T.......... famously said, to govern is to choose.

I'm for a much greater degree of financial accountability for both Holyrood and local government. It should be possible at both levels of Government to have the ability to propose the raising of more revenue and to take your chances with the electorate on such a proposition.

But, for what it is worth, I do not for a moment then think that the voters would be content that every current penny is well spent and that the only issue would be how to fund the additional "essential" public expenditure out of their pockets.

So let's have an honest discourse. If, as Labour suggests, and I agree, more money should be spent on colleges, let's say where less money should be spent (useless degrees), or could be raised. (a Graduate Endowment). If, as Labour again suggests, and I agree, local government needs greater resource. let's see where that might be reallocated (to fewer Councils) or levied (in higher Council Tax). If. as Labour suggests and I agree, the living wage is a worthwhile aspiration, let's accept that it might mean a longer pay freeze (at least) for those higher up the tree, even if they are members of affiliated Trade Unions.

These are only challenges for my own Party but there are equal challenges for the other Parties, above all for the SNP, who have singularly failed to realise that the assertion that an independent Scotland will be a land of unlimited milk and honey, is not only untrue but, strategically, not even in their own interest should independence ever be accomplished.

We need a much greater degree of honesty in Scottish public discourse. So, the next time a politician of any Party appears on a public platform to denounce a particular cut or propose a particular initiative, let's insist that their interlocutor(s) demand of them that they explain where they would propose to find the money. And not move on until that question has been answered.

There is. in the end, no such thing as a free lunch. Even if it need not be paid for by sacrificing active transport. Only a Tory would ever argue that.

Just some whimsical observations on bookshops

2012-02-04T17:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes amid the dross that makes up so much of the internet somebody writes something that makes you grateful for the age of worldwide instant communication in which we live. So it was this week when someone by the name of Emily Temple, who I will almost certainly never meet, published this: her suggestions for the twenty most beautiful bookstores (sic) in the world.

Intellectual ambrosia, then picked up upon and subject to alternative proposals by, amongst others, our own Kenny Farquharson.

I can't aspire to that catholicity of experience. In the end, much as I love bookshops, I am not entirely at ease abroad.

Physically, I like where I am familiar. The West of Scotland. Even Edinburgh makes me slightly uneasy. I often think, temperamentally, I should be in the SNP. Or possibly even in the EEPNP (East end of Paisley National Party).

So you would suppose my own favourite bookshop would be Waterstone's in Sauchiehall Street. And it is certainly up there.

But although I am slightly ill at ease where I am unfamiliar with my physical location, I am never lost when I am in the realm of ideas. So, my favourite bookshop in the whole world is not just my favourite bookshop, it is my favourite place.

And its address is largo Torre Argentina 11, Rome.

Now first a few words about the largo Torre Argentina. It is a square situated on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. It houses the tram terminus in the centre of Rome, a famous Theatre and, I suppose not unimportantly, the location where Julius Caesar was murdered. If you walk left from the bookshop along the Corso you encounter the Jesuit mother Church, where the spectacular marble tombs of St Ignatius Loyola and St Francis Xavier face each other in a baroque affirmation of the triumph of the counter-reformation. Walking on (avoiding an excellent Guinness Italia establishment where I have, from time to time been shamefully diverted) you come to the Piazza Venezia, where Mussolini cast his spell over a willing populous and, beyond that, the Victor Emanuel monument to Italian Unity which, with a suitable degree both of scepticism and admiration, the locals refer to as "The Wedding Cake".

Back to the bookshop and turn right and you quickly encounter the Church of Sant Andrea del Valle, where Puccini set the first Act of Tosca; carry on and you eventually reach the Ponte Sant'Angelo and over that San Pietro. Walk instead directly ahead from the bookshop and to the left lies the ghetto where, if you can ignore the rather tragic security presence you can eat spectacularly well; to the right San Carlo and then the Campo di Fiori. Student Bars, a flea market and great freshwater fish restaurants.

And all this within ten minutes walk.

But that's only part of the reason I love this bookshop. It has a coffee bar. Now, for all the fixed beauty of Italy: The natural wonder of the rolling countryside and the azure of the Mare Adriatico; the constructed beauty of the hill top towns, the art and the sculpture and the thousands of years of architecture; the olfactory beauty of the food and wine. For all of that, the real beauty of Italy is the people. And nowhere do you see that to better advantage than in a fahionable cafe or coffee bar.

I am assured this is truly observed to best advantage in "really fashionable" Italy, which apparently exists only from Bologna northwards. My experience is not yet sufficiently comprehensive to comment on that. I can only say that if one wishes to observe the interaction of those who combine the world of the intellect with a residual and unquestioning acceptance of the need to present una bella figura, then, in my experience, you could do no better than to find a quiet corner in this particular coffee bar. Bury yourself in the European Edition of the Guardian and none of the beautiful people will even pay you the slightest attention. Or at least that's my experience.

But even then. that's not really why this is my favourite place in the whole world of my experience. This man (please, please click on the link) founded Feltrinelli, initially a publishing house, latterly a chain of bookshops. No harm to Tim Waterstone but I bet he can't boast a CV like that.

That's why I love Feltrinelli bookshops. The location is a bonus. The Coffee Bar a further bonus still.

And that's why the realm of ideas will always hold more attraction for me than any mere location on a map. And less uncertainty.

See, I said we couldn't discuss nothing but independence for the next two and a half years.

Moral judgements

2012-02-01T15:18:00.000-08:00

In the course of a discussion about something else entirely over the last twenty four hours one of my correspondents referred to the "non working, working class".

This took place in the shorthand of twitter so I excuse the author who I know at greater liberty of expression would have put matters in more sophisticated terms.

Nonetheless the discourse of liberally minded Labour politicians over the Welfare Reform proposals does, it seems to me, betray a degree of miscomprehension (a word I have chosen with considerable thought) of the attitudes and principles our own supporters.

Not all of those at the base of the economic pyramid are the same and they deserve better than to be treated (even) the same in terms of economic well being.

There is, in so many ways, a difference between, on the one hand, the man or woman in marginal employment, at the victim of economic events beyond their control but nonetheless trying their best to contribute to society and, on the other, those who are content to make no contribution at all, ever.

I see no reason at all why the latter group should be worthy of any sympathy but that's not really important. What's important is that neither do those who are trying their best. And, in utterly cynical electoral terms, it makes no sense for the Left to argue otherwise.

I worked for many years beside a colleague in a support role whose whole life revolved around her children. She wasn't particularly well paid nor, I suspect, was her husband, who worked in a manual public sector job. Any overtime on offer and she would volunteer but you could always see where the money went. To the best of Christmas presents for her kids; for state of the art computers; to regular family holidays.

Once, at a Christmas Party, drink having been taken, I asked her why she had never had more than two children. Her answer was simple: "We couldn't afford it".

Now, this was before 1997 and Child Tax Credits but I have, nonetheless, found myself thinking over the last few weeks what she would make of those complaining that, having never worked, they will find it impossible to bring up seven children if a benefit cap of £500 per week (net) is applied. Or indeed of those Labour politicians, listening only to the loud voices of those directly affected, who have confused that with the opinion of the overwhelming majority.

It is wholly wrong that those at the top of the tree are rewarded disproportionately but it is equally wrong that those making the effort to struggle at the bottom are not rewarded at all.

Now there are counter arguments, I know them all.

Firstly, that this is nothing compared to the differential between the super rich and the working poor. True, but the numbers of the super rich are remarkably small. Tax them (much) more, certainly, but don't pretend that will by itself make any of this unimportant.

Secondly, that this is irrelevant given the levels of mass unemployment caused by the depression. But it's not. As those wanting work compare their efforts with those of the disinterested it only makes them more furious, particularly if the recently unemployed find themselves not personally entitled to means tested benefits because of modest savings or a working spouse.

Thirdly, that this is not about supporting the feckless but rather only the children of the feckless. This is where a degree of morality must enter the argument. Is it really our position that everyone is entitled to have as many children as they like on the basis that the rest of us will pick up the tab? Certainly there might be nothing that can be done over past events but do we really want to send the signal that this can continue indefinitely? Or to rule out financial sticks in relation to future behaviour. This is, I appreciate, difficult territory in relation to individual "mistakes" but we also have to be frank about this. If it is likely to have a financial consequence then such mistakes are less likely, not because it will financially disadvantage the "child" but rather because it will financially disadvantage the parent.

Fourthly, that cuts in housing benefit might require people to live only where they can afford to live. This is, apparently a choice completely beyond the experience of the Labour front bench. They should inquire of their voters. Thanks to the economic collapse the housing market has virtually ground to a halt but the one bit still, just, functioning, is in relation to those having to sell as they can no longer afford to pay their mortgages. Try telling them that some of their taxes should be going to those relieved of that choice.

And then, finally, there is the question of incapacity and disability benefits. Now, some of the changes the Tories are making are outrageous, particularly the means testing of ESA. And the implementation of some of the changes Labour brought in, particularly the ineptitude of the ATOS assessments, are equally outrageous. But it was Labour in previous opposition who argued that much "incapacity" was in fact disguised unemployment. We were right then and no amount of individual hard luck stories should deflect us from that. By doing so we not only insult both those capable of work, by encouraging them to exaggerate their own "incapacity", but also those who are genuinely not capable of work but who find themselves accused of malingering by association.

Let us not for a moment underestimate the current disastrous state of the jobs market. But, equally, let us not pretend that there was not a hard core, never anticipated by Beveridge, who, even through the long New Labour boom, mysteriously found themselves unable ever to find any work of any sort.

And let us not just shrug our shoulders and pretend that this doesn't matter. It might not to us in the comfortable middle class but it certainly matters to an awful lot of Labour voters. Even before they were struggling themselves.

This is boring

2012-01-29T09:10:00.000-08:00

No matter what one thinks of the decision not to hold an Independence Referendum until the Autumn of 2014, one thing is clear. We can't discuss nothing else until the event. There is simply not enough to be said.

The Sunday papers have a decent go. The Sunday Times has Michelle Moan threatening to relocate her business if Scotland becomes Independent. SoS has an interesting piece by Eddie Barnes on the Tories attitude to more powers, rather undermined however by Ruth Davidson's subsequent appearance on the Telly. The Herald has one of Eck's own economic advisers pouring scorn on his Corporation Tax plans.

Then we had the electronic media. While I continued to slumber, Eck on Andrew Marr and then The Politics show featuring the aforementioned Ms Davidson, somebody from the Civic Society Party and a particularly incoherent performance by Nicola in which she unsuccesfully attempted to maintain that in relation to "fiscal autonomy" within a Sterling zone, black could indeed be white.

Now I'm interested in this stuff yet even I am getting bored. And yet there are something like another 130 Sundays until the vote.

The really concerning thing here is not just that even Groundhog Day did not attempt to maintain the joke that long but that Scotland simply cannot afford the abandonment of all other politics in the meantime.

Even if you take the most optimistic nationalist view, even a decisive Yes vote in 2014 will not see Scotland actually "Independent" within the next FIVE YEARS.

That's five more Christmases and Summer Holidays, Children not yet conceived almost at the point of going to school. Marriages not yet celebrated having ended in Divorce.

And the way the world is changing continuing to change. The relentless expansion of the internet with all that means for traditional means of communication. The strategic changes to the European Union prompted by the Euro crisis. A possible explosion of some sort in the tinderbox which is the Middle East. The continued rise of the BRICS. Above all perhaps, an eventual resolution of the current economic crisis that leaves the First World either once again striving confidently forward or, almost as likely, resigned to, hopefully managed, decline.

Every Country, large and small, will be affected by these matters and will have to develop its own strategy for dealing with them. Even if Independence was the magic bullet, I repeat, even the Nationalists do not think we will be independent for at least five years.

So we can't spend the time between then and now simply contemplating our own constitutional navel.

Now that puts a particular obligation on my own Party.

During the last Parliament we had virtually nothing to say about policy. Wendy's plan for a left leaning think tank was one of the initiatives squashed by the arrival of her successor.

I hold out no real hope that the current leadership will take any direct initiative of this nature. Even the plan for the recruitment of a "Shadow Shadow Cabinet" of technocrats to advise the various Shadow Ministers in their policy areas appears to have already sunk without trace.

But there are those out there on the centre left who would be prepared to contribute to the development of policy and there are certainly, among some of our younger MPs and MSPs, those who see the neccessity of having something new to say. I suspect that they would not even have to look too far to find some funding.

So come on comrades, get on with it! Fortune favours the brave!

An expected response

2012-01-25T13:41:00.000-08:00

I've been working all day. Proper honest toil: a Child Welfare Hearing; a First Appearance on a serious assault; a new divorce client and quite a complicated legal riddle about the defaulting tenant of a chippy.

So, unlike some others, I have not had time to hang on every word of the First Minister.

Even on my return home, I was sorely tempted to watch the State of the Union before turning my attention to today's events. I have resisted that temptation but not that of first watching the news.

Much, I am sure, to Eck's annoyance, the Big Announcement, did not lead the BBC News. "Unionist conspiracy" theories about this "calculated insult to Scotland" (Eck and Scotland being interchangeable in that particular lexicon) will have however been rather undermined by the fact that it didn't lead the Channel 4 News either.

The most important news today was the appalling fourth quarter growth figures but, even then, if anything really important had been announced by the Scottish Government, there might have been something of a dilemma for those editors charged with working out a running order. But nothing very important was announced today; just a lot of hot air.

I'd tried to read the consultation paper on my phone during the day but abandoned this as perilous to my eyesight. However, on my return home I googled "Scottish Referendum White Paper" and got four different previous events. An August 2007 Announcement; a November 2009 Announcement; a May 2011 Announcement and a November 2011 Announcement. We might not have had an actual referendum but we've certainly have lots of referendum announcements!

Having found the correct document, I've still not had as much time as I'd have liked to digest it, so I reserve the right to notice, tomorrow or wherever that I've missed something. Anyway, I'm always happier with working with a hard copy.

But, that having been said, are we any further forward? Not really.

We've got a different question and we appear to have moved in principle from claiming we'll ask a second question only if somebody else actually asks for it, to essentially saying we'll ask such a question if we can get away with it. But, devo max remains as obscure as ever, as does, other than the SNP itself , who exactly are the partisans of such a question being asked. Equally, Independence remains no more defined than it ever was.

And that's about it.

There remain directly contradictory statements which characterise so much SNP propoganda although it is disappointing that the civil sevice has allowed their inclusion in an official government document. For example the introduction contains this curious formulation

"Eligibility to vote will be the same as for Scottish Parliament and local government elections and for the 1997 referendum on devolution. The Scottish Government also proposes to extend the franchise to include those 16 and 17 year olds who are on the electoral register on the day of the poll."

Patently, irrespective of the merits of the proposition of the second sentence, it contradicts that contained in its immediate predecessor.

Equally, the proposition

Under independence, Scotland would have the rights and responsibilities of a normal, sovereign state and continue its membership in the European Union

Contains a contradiction within the same sentence!

The First section about legal powers is also full of unsubstantiated assertions as to the law, some of which e.g.

"What is not in question is the competence of the Scottish Parliament to legislate for a referendum about changes to the powers of the Scottish Parliament within the framework of devolution."

are patently untrue. Hopefully somebody someone will ask the First Minister tomorrow whether the Government Legal Service agree with the legal opinions expressed in the introduction and Part One of the document. Indeed I will by working the phones tonight to that effect.

Once you get past the Introduction and Part One, the rest of the document is less contentious and generally comes across as written by officials rather than politicians. Obviously this includes the welcome back down on the involvement of the Electoral Commission. There is however one very interesting section on funding. PPERA is to apply restricting political parties to spending £250,000 each. That at first blush looks to favour the "Unionist" Parties, since they are more numerous. But, excepting that expenditure, the opposing camps are to be dragooned by law into two opposing Yes and No campaigns and then to have their expenditure capped at £750,000.

Now, it is the SNP themselves who are crowing that it would be a mistake for Labour to campaign alongside the Tories but it would now appear that it is the SNP are trying to insist, by law, on that outcome.

I'm not yet persuaded that there is anything sinister in this. To be fair, it does not allow the SNP themselves to spend all the money they have available. Nonetheless, it will have to change. I will return to this.

Overall however I come back to where I started. Little has changed today. We might know one question but we still don't know the proposition upon which it is asked. We still don't know if it will be the only question. We don't know if the question(s) will be within the competence of the Scottish Parliament and, if they are not, whether the Nationalists will compromise to allow a referendum to take place or use legal difficulties as an excuse not to have one.

Presumably, for any of that to be clearer we will have to await another "historic" announcement. Roll on St Andrew's Day.

Home Rule All Round!

2012-01-22T10:09:00.000-08:00

Foreword

You can’t write a piece like this without influences. It is underpinned by knowledge gleaned from everybody from Karl Marx in 1848 to Brian Ashcroft last week. (The latter article interestingly is followed in the comment section by one Nationalist comment that this is “drivel, unionist lies and statistics”!) It would be invidious to single any one text or person out as particularly influential to my thinking but it is equally inappropriate to claim it all as my own. At best I have simply tried to bring together that part of the thinking of others with which I most agree.

In the end however all conclusions are my own. I am not cover for some prodigal son or daughter who will return to lead Labour in Scotland at the appropriate time; less so still for any Demosthenes I anticipate arising from the ranks of the School of Athens which is the Labour Holyrood Group. And if there is a King or Queen over the water they have not made themselves known to me, let alone contributed to what follows.

I am sufficiently conceited nonetheless to think there might be some wider dissemination and discussion of what I have to say. Just remember when doing so that the one guarantee that this will never become the policy of the Labour Party is the fact that I have said it!

But in one crucial way this document is the responsibility of the Scottish Labour Leadership. I am a real partisan of the Labour Party and would normally do nothing to provide any succour to the SNP. I appreciate however that some will spin this contribution as doing just that.

Last Thursday however the exchange at First Minister's questions consisted of Johann demanding to know what the SNP Administration proposed to do about rising unemployment. Eck replied repeatedly that he was doing all he could within the Parliament's existing powers. He's not, even remotely, indeed he's making things significantly worse.

But "Scottish Labour's" Five Point Plan for Jobs produced in the aftermath of this depressing exchange consisted of proposals which are outwith the competence of the Parliament and a fifth which the SNP are doing already and which, when they put it in their budget, we opposed. I am simply at a loss as to what to make of this.

The immediate initiative of the new leadership has been to smother any possible policy initiative against meaningless promises of Party Reform, which, based on past experience, will themselves come to nothing in due course. To be fair, that was the platform on which Johann was elected.

So, I might as well get on with it myself. I'm not getting any younger. I neither have the time nor the patience to wait another five years and it might shame them into doing something. I won't however be holding my breath.

A Proposal to improve the Devolution Settlement

Constitutional reform is not easy. That’s the reality of reform within the United Kingdom but it is equally true of whatever is now meant by Independence.

When the SNP was founded there was a recent example of a Country leaving the United Kingdom, in the form of the Irish Free State. It was clear what that meant then. One’s own currency (at least in appearance), tariffs against English goods, a cultural boycott of England, a belief in the innate value of “going your own way” even at a very considerable economic price.

Most of those who founded the SNP were essentially attracted by a Presbyterian version of that model.

There are however and of course huge differences between, on the one hand, the historic relationship of England and Scotland and, on the other, the relationship between England (let’s be honest, mainland Britain) and Ireland. That was one of many reasons that Scottish nationalism never flourished on the De Valera model (except perhaps in the field of poetry!) but even in the 1920s the separation of the integrated economies of Scotland and England (never mind the Empire we were then running together) would have been a much more complex issue than the separation of the British economy from the much less developed, essentially agrarian, economy of Southern Ireland.

But nationalisms change. “Ourselves Alone” failed as an economic and cultural model. The only thing Ireland found itself exporting was people; its only growth in misery. Sean Lemass and then much more significantly with accession to the European Union, Garret Fitzgerald, realised that to prosper in the modern world you had to engage with the modern world.

There was and is however a certain legacy left. Certain symbols of the past that, once heroic, then quaint, slowly began to look anachronistic. It would be interesting to consider when the Queen visited Dublin last year whether it was not she, the 84 year old hereditary monarch, who actually looked a more modern figure than President Mary McAleese.

The same developments can be traced within the ranks of Scottish Nationalism. It is, of course, a much more modern and inclusive party than it once was. Excepting the national question, most of its younger activists hold political views indistinguishable from the younger members of my own Party.

But the SNP also has a legacy. It is readily remembered that De Valera infamously signed the book of condolence at the German Embassy following the death of Hitler. Such had the doctrine that “England’s enemy is my friend” become distorted. It is more readily forgotten (indeed when I referred to it once on Twitter it was clear many in the modern SNP had no idea what I was talking about) that during that epic struggle to defeat Nazism, much of the leadership of the SNP took a similar view. Not that they were Nazis themselves, but that such was their tunnel vision commitment to the “cause of Scotland” that even the defeat of Hitler was to take second place.

It is inconceivable the majority of the modern SNP would now take that view. However, although Eck must know this wartime stance was fundamentally wrong, he has never found it within him to condemn it and apologise for what happened as he knows that there remain some in the SNP who hold to such priorities today (and who incidentally think Arthur Donaldson and Douglas Young were victims of an English conspiracy to blacken the SNP; just watch, the comment section to this blog will bring them out).

The other legacy the modern SNP have inherited is a more problematical one.

At least since they embraced “Independence in Europe” and recognised that an “Independent” Scotland and England would remain not only in a common economic area but within a framework, albeit with others, of common decision making, the SNP have not really been in favour of Independence in the way Independence was envisaged by their founders. You can still see some dim and resentful appreciation of this in the views of some of their older members muttering that we’ll only be in the EU as long as we want to be. There of course also remains the bizarre suggestion at the top of the SNP that we’ll be in the EU but not in the Common Fisheries Policy. This is surely no longer a question of base politics fishing for votes on the NE seaboard. It involves an unwillingness to confront no reluctant constituency other than some of the membership of the SNP itself that true “Independence” is no longer what the Party stands for. The same applies to the continued unwillingness to reverse policy on withdrawal from NATO. NATO membership is a recognition that Britain cannot guarantee her own defence, never mind Scotland. Continued commitment to withdrawal from NATO can only be rationalised on the basis that there remains a part of the SNP membership, too large to confront, who do still believe that Independence means cutting ourselves off from the world.

So, this mindset is more, much more, of a real factor in Scottish politics than is realised, not least by the bright young things so themselves caught up with modern, inclusive, civic nationalism.

I tried to illustrate this dilemma when I wrote about how Salmond had clearly cut his own cut his own 2011 Conference Speech because even he, the great leader at the height of his triumph, hesitated to speak the truth to his own Party.

It is most obvious however in the continued commitment to an Independence Referendum. It is farcical that the SNP themselves still can’t define Independence but then again it is also farcical that the Labour Party can’t define socialism. That’s politics.

What is more absurd is the suggestion that we’ll have a referendum for or against this nebulous concept even as we’re successively assured only what it won’t involve: a closed border; a different Head of State; a different currency; even a different national broadcaster.

Nonetheless to be against this, whatever it is, is to be “anti-Scottish”. Further, while for those in favour of Independence (quote/endquote), Independence can be what you want it to be, somehow it is to deemed illegitimate to suggest that Independence might turn out to be the stuff of your worst nightmares. Endless Neil Oliver kailyard documentaries interspersed with re-runs of old Alexander Brothers Concerts.

I continue to doubt that this “Independence” will ever be put to a vote but if it is it will be decisively defeated, not least because it is opposed by a very considerable part of the SNP’s electoral support and even, whisper it, by a significant part of the SNP’s own membership. In any event, if you’re voting for something you can’t define...............?

What is indisputable (and definable) however is that the SNP are unanimously in favour of (at least) the maximum possible freedom of action in the economic sphere which is possible without having your own currency and while remaining party to the treaty regime of the European Union.

What might surprise them is that so are many of us in the Labour Party. Now that doesn’t mean we are in favour of Independence. I’m happy to put my record on the Party’s Home Rule wing up against anybody. I am proud that I was once asked by the NEC where I would stand if the interests of Scotland conflicted with the interests of the Labour Party and denied the chance to be a Labour MP as a result of my answer. I have however never met a member of the Labour Party who is in favour of Independence. There are any number of reasons for that beyond the nebulousness of the concept. It simply starts from the wrong place: that different means better. And if you believe you are better then somebody else is logically worse. That’s just not our thing.

Accordingly, sheer partisanship makes it attractive to contemplate sticking to what we’ve got constitutionally. To encourage the SNP to bring the fight on in the knowledge that they will be “crushed under the wheels of our tanks” (current official Scottish Labour Party policy), or, more likely, be seen to be obviously running away and mocked, albeit it to no particular purpose, in the process.

I am aware that Labour is anxious not to create the impression that the SNP are somehow the midwives of an improved devolution scheme but I have concluded in the end that short term political considerations cannot be allowed to prevent us saying what we stand for (or at least would stand for if I had any influence........which I don’t). Anyway, if we are being honest, support for the Nationalists has always been a factor in creating space for the devolutionists. Wendy Alexander conceded as much in her, unwisely neglected, 2007 St Andrew's Day speech. That was among the reasons her leadership was sabotaged from within.

Anyway, it's easy to be a critic.

Since I've started on this blogging lark, from time to time people have challenged me with the question: "What would you do?"

And I myself have also in the past commented on the inadequacy of "Something different" as an answer to that question.

The most insistent question has come on the question of my own preferred devolution scheme and I've finally been sufficiently embarrassed to attempt to answer that.

Before I continue, a number of caveats.

I am assuming that the vast majority of my readers are steeped in the statistics of Scotland's relative public expenditure spend and fiscal contribution. We all know where we agree and we'll know where we'll disagree. I'm attempting to win no arguments in that sphere here, so I've not gone to the bother of quoting sources for any of what I say. Suffice to say, I believe they are available and if I'm mistaken I'm mistaken in good faith.

Secondly, although to some extent I come to bury Calman not to praise him, my actual task becomes as complex as that quotation is within its context. The fiscal powers section of Calman is well worth reading again. Although the dead hand of the Treasury lies across its entire provisions with unexplained technical or administrative difficulties relied upon time and time again as an excuse for inaction, it sets out some of the genuinely problematical issues that arise in relation to devolved and assigned taxation within the context of a unitary state but also within the constraints of the European Single Market. Obviously I think Calman was too conservative in its conclusions but nobody disputes this technical analysis. At best critics just put their fingers in their ears and start humming Flower of Scotland, or deride it as “drivel, unionist lies and statistics”.

Thirdly, I remain of the view that the reason the SNP won as big in May had very little to do directly with a demand for constitutional change. It had much more to do with a desire for a competent government, which only the SNP truly had on offer, and a desire for the Scottish Government to do more (to be fair, perhaps to be able to do more) to address the condition of Scotland. If that required constitutional change then the electorate was content with that but a desire for constitutional change per se was not the reason for their vote.

Finally, and most importantly, Devolution is an agreed settlement between Scotland and the rest of the UK. I blogged months ago about the application of Trotskyist transitional demand theory to some of the SNP's politics. The sort of deal that involves us having all the advantages of boom years in oil revenues (classic devo max) but still being able to fall back on the UK if it all goes horribly wrong; or indeed which allows us to share an army while having a veto on its deployment(Indy-lite) has little to commend it to the rest of the UK. It might just be sellable as compromise through the pages of Newsnet. It won't wash in the real world.

So, Devo plus has no place in a referendum. It cannot be demanded unilaterally and if it is an agreed deal it need not require a vote. Nor need it be framed so as to defeat a yes vote to independence. Every reputable poll ever published confirms there is not going to be a yes vote to independence. Indeed, because nobody knows the truth of that better than the SNP, if there is even a vote on the issue at all called by the current SNP administration I will remain considerably surprised. Only the fact that they have boxed themselves into a corner by naming a date gives me any cause to doubt that. To that extent, well done David Cameron. My worry is however that by putting all their eggs in the one basket, the SNP will leave us with nothing, except egg not still in the basket but rather all over our face. They, the Government of Scotland, need to negotiate with Westminster over what might reasonably be available by agreement. No amount of appealing to others for a different receptacle for some of their eggs excuses their own inaction on that front.

So, what do we want by devo plus? I've already answered that question. We want to be able to address the condition of Scotland. And in what ways does the current devolution scheme preclude that? It does not preclude it as comprehensively as past Labour Administrations, anxious not to differ themselves unduly from parallel Westminster Labour Governments made out. Nor indeed as SNP administrations, anxious to blame the constitutional settlement for their own timidity, would have you believe.

But

There are three central flaws in the current settlement. Firstly there is no proper accountability. "We don't have the money" is an easy complaint when (even before John Swinney gratuitously gave it away) a variation on (only) the basic rate of income tax or a misuse of local government taxation for other ends were the only true revenue raising opportunities available.

Secondly, there is no reward. If the Scottish Government made sacrifices in other areas of public expenditure in order to pursue an immensely successful industrial strategy they would have taken all the pain without a single extra penny of the gain excepting any fraction they might inherit through Barnett formula of an overall increase in UK GDP. That's not what devolution was meant to be about.

Thirdly, real public expenditure in Scotland is invested hugely in the benefits system. Any real control on the supply side requires us to be able to tap into that.

I want to illustrate this with two hypothetical (and exaggerated) examples. First, the left example. FDR becomes leader of a Labour administration at Holyrood and decides to embark on a "massive programme of public works". Using the existing borrowing powers of local authorities, hundreds (well, tens) of new schools and community facilities are created. Thousands of new jobs are created. Unemployment benefits are greatly reduced and income tax receipts soar. At the end of this however the Councils still have the debt and not a penny of the additional revenue to help them pay it. Then the right example. IDS is leading a Scottish Tory administration. They decide that some idleness at least is willing idleness so they (never borrowing) create a system of workfare paid for by re-introducing tuition fees. Nobody however turns up for this work as they're all quite happy watching Jeremy Kyle. The Scottish Government has spent the money (and lost the student vote) but any effective sanction lies with Westminster.

It is regrettable that state Benefits form such an important part of Scottish public life but they do. So, as a starter, benefits need to be devolved. By that I mean all benefits except, as much for practical reasons as anything else, accrued but unfunded retirement pension obligations, whether they are in respect of the basic state pension or, indeed, those of the NHS and Civil Service Pension scheme. Pension credits could however be devolved.

This all however remains, ultimately, in the sphere of expenditure. What, I hear those of you still awake crying, about income?

Well here, again, I need to go off on a bit of a diversion.

I believe in social solidarity. Nothing annoys me more than those who boast, within London, as to how much of the UK tax take derives from the City of London, and should therefore be spent there. Why then should I be any happier with a similar argument about North Sea Oil?

You might as well say that since I, touch wood, keep, reasonably good health, why should my taxes be paying for my next door neighbour who's never out the hospital? I've got no kids so why should I be paying for anybody's education? I don’t live in the far Highlands so why should I be subsidising their postal charges?

The answer is of course not socialism but simply civilisation. Certainly there is a hypocrisy in this or none of us in the rich west would be enjoying the lifestyles we do, but in the end we form a far from scientific view about those who are our neighbours and those who are not.. For all the verbiage that surrounds "post nationalism" the essential divide comes down to that. Not between those who believe we'd be better off without England & Wales and those who do not; rather between those who believe we'd be better off without England & Wales and those who do not think that should be the question in the first place.

So, anyway, back to the big issue.

Scotland needs a revenue solution that enables us to reflect the priorities of the domestic government we have elected; that rewards that government for its success but also punishes it for its failure. That recognises also however that we have chosen to remain part of a United Kingdom and accept the responsibilities that go with that. The right to be different does not equate to the right to an unfair advantage or to behave like the proverbial tail wagging the dog.

Here, I think, is where Reform Scotland go wrong. Devolved Government needs a revenue mix but so does Central Government. The idea that all income tax should stay in Scotland but all VAT at Westminster restricts the revenue raising powers of both administrations.

Income Tax was first introduced in response to the external threat of Napoleon. We are for the moment exempt from such threat but it would be wholly unacceptable that a modern required response of that nature affected only England & Wales. Or indeed that, even if Scotland was inclined to chip in, we couldn't raise the money through Inheritance Tax instead, if we believed that to be fairer.

The solution I propose is complex, I accept. But any solution, even Independence in Europe is complicated. You don’t need to have a view on whether an Independent Scotland would automatically be a member of the EU to recognise that the (continued) terms of that membership would require negotiation over the exact number of votes we’d have in the Council and Parliament or over the extent of our contribution to European central funds. Even if we keep the pound sterling, this will require negotiation on how we physically lay our hands on the currency. And if there’s still to be the BBC we’ll nonetheless need negotiation on exactly how much Neil Oliver we really want. (Perhaps we could have a separate referendum on that.)

And that’s before you even start on how you entrench a hereditary Monarchy within a written constitution.

So when I say my scheme is complicated, it is no more complicated than any other and, I believe, in a digital, internet age, it is far from unworkable.

It proceeds from the central principle that most major taxes collected in Scotland should be assigned to Scotland and then apportioned between Scotland and the United Kingdom much as Calman proposes for Income Tax rates alone. Tax rates and allowances in respect of the assigned portion should then be devolved when possible. Assignation based on receipts was dismissed by Calman in a single sentence as "administratively burdensome". No evidence was adduced for this but, even if it is, well that will just have to be how it is.

There is an important difference however between assignation and devolution of taxation.

You have to accept that within a unitary state not all taxes are appropriate for devolution. Some cannot be internally varied within member states under European Union Law. Most obviously that includes VAT and, according to Calman, it also includes fuel duties.

Other taxes are legally devolvable but inappropriate for devolution. Those which are not devolvable are essentially those which leave themselves open to a choice over where they are paid. These include, regrettably, excise duty. Drink and cigarettes would simply be bought on whichever side of an open border they proved to be cheaper, perhaps even over the internet. They also include Vehicle Excise Duty which would otherwise lead to it being paid on fleet cars and hire cars wherever it attracted the lower rate. The Vehicle excise example also applies to Corporation tax. Ideally it would be paid where it is earned but in practice it is paid where it is declared. The SNP model of Gretna becoming some sort of new Bahamas, where Companies trading overwhelmingly in England declare their profits under a lower Scottish Corporation Tax regime is not only morally offensive, it is incompatible with a unitary state, as the Nationalists well know. At the danger of descending into minutiae there would in principle be no objection to a variable Corporation Tax rate applying to businesses trading exclusively in Scotland, as applies in the Basque Country, but I do wonder if that’s worth the bother. All of these taxes however, although not devolved, would nonetheless be identified at the point of payment and then assigned in a, permanently legislated for, proportion to the Scottish Government.

In doing so, you need to recognise that in respect of some smaller but very geographically specific taxes e.g. Inheritance Tax; Stamp Duty Land Tax; perhaps Air Passenger Duty, these could be assigned and devolved but that “split” apportionment is probably not worth the bother. These could simply be apportioned to Scotland at a level of 100%.

That however leaves you with the big players (in apportionment) devolved. Income Tax (and CGT); National Insurance; Petroleum Extraction taxes.

Now here is where I depart big time from Calman. This basket of taxes, once hypothetically assigned should then be apportioned to Scotland in such a way as gives us a starting point of producing equivalent revenue as is required to match the current expenditure of devolved government (together with the additional responsibilities I have outlined above). (For the avoidance of doubt that might, probably does, involve variable rates of apportionment of individual taxes). That might be a crude starting point but if it locks in unfair advantage to Scotland at its starting point (as some critics would claim) then at least what we made of that legacy would be for us alone. The block grant would be no more and there would be no renegotiation based only on a “needs based” appeal. Having made our bed we would need to lie in it. We are told that’s what people want.

I’m by no means convinced of the technical difficulties that Calman identifies in either the devolution of income tax rules or allowances. That seems to me to be no more than a matter of tax codes. I’m also not clear that the potentially variable taxation of unearned income is as difficult as is suggested by Calman but, I accept, some further technical assessment might be required here.

Scotland would also be given the express right to levy completely new taxes if an an electoral mandate could be secured. In this area I have regard particularly to possible behavioural taxes and/or green taxes.

But back to my main thesis. There would need to be a shadow, possibly transitional, regime to ensure that advance estimates of current take had not been miscalculated, much in the way that the current Scotland Bill anticipates operating for Income Tax, but that should not be technically beyond HMRC’s super computers.

There would also need to be one very important dispute resolution mechanism set out in legislation.

Westminster would in future be setting (e.g.) two income taxes. A UK tax and a peculiarly English & Welsh Tax. There would have to be an agreement that, for example, an increase in English & Welsh disability benefits would only be funded from English & Welsh taxes. Such a crude example is unlikely to arise but the ability to characterise, particularly, infrastructure investment in London as being “National” expenditure has a long and dishonourable past. If there was a dispute resolution mechanism with the ability to highlight that I suspect it would be as welcome in Cornwall and Durham as it would be necessary to Scotland. We need however to be careful with our rhetoric here. It has cost a very great deal of money to keep RBS on the road. If that money was spent for the benefit of the whole UK then it would still have been spent in the interests of the whole UK even if the Bank had been based in Eastbourne rather than Edinburgh. And while HS2 from London to Birmingham might bring little benefit to Scotland, if it doesn’t get to Birmingham it will never get to Manchester. And it never gets to Manchester it will, most certainly, never get to Scotland. That’s all I’m saying.

There is however one final point before I leave this issue. It is common territory across political and economic opinion that we have a crisis over the current fiscal deficit. It goes without saying that under my scheme the handling of that deficit would remain within the province of the British Government and that both the paying down of that debt and the servicing of the interest pro tem would be British expenditure paid for out of British taxation. The reality is however that paying the income and capital on that debt is, in itself, a significant element of current public expenditure. On the happy day the deficit is eliminated (I am writing hypothetically here) not all the savings made will be passed back to taxpayers in the form of tax cuts, even by a Tory Government.

In the process however there is likely to be a switch, under my model, from “British” expenditure to expenditure solely in England & Wales. That will need a transparency in the public finances that neither the Treasury or the politicians will like, particularly if one “bit” of (e.g.) Income Tax is actually going up as the other “bit” goes down. Tough.

As for borrowing powers, Calman’s OK in my opinion. It is simply unrealistic in this day and age to operate “Keynesianism in one country”, even (as Mitterand found) in a much bigger country than Scotland and particularly without access to interest rate, exchange rate or money supply levers. If we wish to remain part of the UK we need to accept that macro-economic policy is for the British Government and hopefully increasingly for the European Union. If we in Scotland are going to influence our economic performance that influence needs to be on the supply side. We need borrowing powers to smooth infrastructure investment but to engage in strategic demand management in isolation from our single biggest markets? Don’t be silly.

Finally, we should complete the devolution of private and criminal law. It is a disgrace that all of our politicians conspire to avoid difficult decisions on abortion by conspiring in its continued reservation. The same applies to the Misuse of Drugs Act and the Road Traffic Acts.

So, that’s it. My scheme. Not simple to understand or, I suspect, to easily sell on a public platform. But, as I said at the very start, constitutional reform is complicated. “Independence” would be complicated as the SNP themselves are slowly realising or, to their own backwoodsmen at least, disclosing. That’s both the beauty and the triumph of the constitutional architecture of the 1998 Act. It not only provides a solid structure, it provides one which can be built upon. It would be an act of vandalism to knock that down and start again.

My own proposal contains nothing however that could reasonably be regarded by “Unionist” opinion as incompatible with continued membership of the United Kingdom, except in one final aspect. Can we continue to have Scottish MPs voting on exclusively English & Welsh tax rates and benefits? We’ve survived that anomaly in relation to health and education since 1999 but that, in the end, has to be a matter for the English and Welsh themselves.

Finally, I accept my scheme is not Independence, at least in the eyes of some. But then I don’t believe in Independence. I’m a devolutionist. Always have been. But I’m also a bit unhappy with the term “Devolution”, technically correct though it is. One of the welcome and irreversible achievements of the SNP has been to transform the appellation of the political administration at Holyrood from “Scottish Executive” to “Scottish Government.”

Perhaps its time for those of us anxious to promote a strong Scottish Government within a continued United Kingdom to reclaim another too seldom used term for what we propose.

Perhaps, once again, it is time for Home Rule.

For which first Labour politician wanted that? James Keir Hardie.

In The Huff

2012-01-21T06:32:00.000-08:00

I've not been blogging as I'm working on my magnum opus Devo Max Scheme. Watch this Space.

I went however to the Jim Wallace Speech yesterday. Free CPD (lawyer's joke). The Herald asked me to blog on the event but then didn't publish it. So I'm in the huff. Here it is anyway. My first ever attempt at reportage. Eat your heart out Woodward and Bernstein.

At the Ancient University of Glasgow this evening, gathered a stellar audience anxious to feast on the pearls of wisdom and insight likely to be offered by that almost legendary figure, Lord Wallace of Thankerness, Advocate General of (all) Scotland.

Top lawyers; not quite such top lawyers, and would be top lawyers of the future assembled in the company of a few miserable specimens of humanity who were not lawyers at all, to hear a definitive assessment of whether the Parliament of one of our (not quite so) ancient nations could legitimately block the Parliament of our other, even more ancient nation, from conducting a popular plebiscite on what is quaintly known as “Independence”.

I am sure I speak for many of the assembled company when I say that it would be altogether preferable if these matters were left entirely to the lawyers. Regrettably, modern mores demands a wider accountability, or so we’re told.

Nonetheless, the event itself did not disappoint, excepting the interventions of some of the top lawyers of the future who appeared to be unaware of the distinction between the sovereignty of the Scottish people and the sovereignty of the Scottish Parliament. Or, indeed, who in one case, seemed ignorant of the provisions of the Peace of Westphalia. As for the interventions of the laity, the less said the better.

Lord Wallace covered familiar territory: Whaley v Watson; AXA Insurance v The Scottish Ministers; Martin and Miller v HMA . Only someone unfamiliar with modern Supreme Court Jurisprudence would have learned anything new. And few in the room fell into that category.

Nonetheless, the real interest lay not with those who spoke from the floor but those present who kept their own counsel but who furiously took notes in anticipation of their potential role as actual, rather than academic or (worse still) internet gladiators in the fight that might yet be to come. For, if you knew the audience, the gladiators were all in this preliminary arena.

And yet the most interesting contribution from the floor? From Alan Dewar QC: “This should not be decided by the Courts, the politicians need to sort it out.

What kind of talk is that! Some of us have a living to make.

A great woman passeth

2012-01-16T13:25:00.000-08:00

Janey Buchan is dead

Norman Buchan once said to me that you can't be sure that you are an atheist unless you have survived seeing Orvieto Cathedral.

Janey shared that scepticism about religion. Lots and lots of time I thought she was wrong: about the European Union; about devolution; about the unchallenged virtue of the State of Israel. Tonight, however, on that biggest question of all, I hope she was most wrong of all.

Although if she is sitting now in the company of St Mungo, St Patrick and St Vincent de Paul I'm sure she will be asserting almost immediately that they are a crowd of right wing bastards.

It is almost impossible to value the contribution of Janey and Norman Buchan to the Scottish Left. No, it is impossible to value.

Those of us who were fortunate enough to enjoy their hospitality remember a home.............I was going to say a home of whatever, but actually a home is enough in itself.

I have never seen a house with more books. Or experienced a place with more diverse company. And the only risk of being thrown out would have come with the assertion that "I don't want an argument".

It was a place of argument, as much as it was a place of food and drink and music and of, yes, sanctuary.

Wee Norrie was, at least, a bit cogniscant of the compromises supposedly neccessary to make your way in modern politics but Janey never was.

The dialectic was everything. Marx, Engels. Lenin, Trotsky, Luxembourg, Leibnicht, Gramsci but never, ever Stalin echoed across the West End into the small hours. Night, after night, after night.

And the music. Folk music, the workers music. Not just Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger; Scottish Ballads and songs about the struggles of working people of diverse type; international songs about freedom from oppression in Countries (shame on us) we had barely heard of. And, just occasionally, Verdi or Bellini to remind you that sometimes everyone was due a moment's release from the struggle.

Grief has two dimensions. Who you have lost but also what you have lost.

So I finish with a quotation and a song. No, two songs.

Here's the quotation

http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Poetry/Psalm.htm

And here are the two songs

First for this time

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5KnYADCSms

Then for all time

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7PrVtZAG4M&feature=related

Who are Himsworth and O'Neill?

2012-01-15T17:16:00.000-08:00

There had seemed to be a consensus at the beginning of last week that whether the Scottish Parliament could competently call an Independence Referendum involved a divide between constitutionalists (i.e. lawyers) and the insurrectionists (i.e. the SNP).

Nothing wrong with being an insurrectionist. Most of my heroes: Danton, Garibaldi, Lenin, Mandela belonged to their ranks. But it has to be conceded that they were in insurrection against regimes that were not, exactly, representative of popular opinion in the first place.

However, let’s be honest, Scotland is not in an insurrectionist mood.

If you travel in central Italy, you encounter from town to town, plaques which announce the result, locally, of the various referenda that took place around 1860 as to whether the local citizens wished to be part of a united Italy.

Such votes must have involved the expenditure of both time and money by those involved in their organisation. And the local bureaucrats, who organised them, with the occasional exception, must have done so in the knowledge that they were acting contrary to the wishes of those who paid their wages. They didn’t care however for they were seized with the cause of Italy. As were the citizens who then chose, voluntarily, to participate in these votes.

Nobody is seized with the cause of Scotland to that extent. If told by a Court, never mind threatened with military force, that they were not to proceed, not just some, but all, of Scotland’s Returning Officers would obey that injunction. And, that aside, no body would turn up to such a poll.

So Eck and his troops, no matter in what they might be inclined think after four pints of lager, a late night showing of Braveheart and a collective, pre retiral, singalong of Scots Wha Hae, realise that they have to accept the rules of normal, 21^st Century, democratic, discourse.

The vote can only take place if it’s legal and it is only legal if the Courts say it is. Not, for the avoidance of any doubt, the Supreme Court. Simply the Scottish Courts, a point on which our media are so hypnotised by Eck, they have failed to notice.

Now, at this point various Nationalist partisans will emerge out of the cybersphere to assert the sovereignty of the Scottish People. They are right, of course, both in theory and in ultimate practice. If the SNP somehow managed to organise a referendum in which a clear majority of the Scottish people turned up and expressed a desire for independence, then that would have to follow.

Only they can’t. Not just secure such a majority. Even organise such a Referendum in the first place.

And nobody, and here I mean nobody other than 4 a.m. correspondents on the Scotsman Web page, thinks that sovereignty of the Scottish People and sovereignty of the Scottish Parliament in any way equate.

So Eck needs legal clearance for his Referendum, assuming of course he ever wants it to take place, (This, regular readers will know, is something I more than doubt.)

The legal opinion, on the record and publicly, that holding an Independence Referendum is outwith the legal competence of the Scottish Parliament is overwhelming. It now includes even me, who for a long time held out on the other side in loyalty to a misplaced faith in McCormick v The Lord Advocate.

The best Eck has been able to do in response is to assert that there (remain) any numbers of lawyers on his side. Asked to name them he has failed to come up with a single one, not excluding his own Law Officers and the two eminent lawyers in his own Cabinet.

So he has been left relying on unnamed supporters and a textbook. Himsworth and O’Neill: Scotland’s Constitution Law and Practice.

Now here I must depart on a number of confessions.

One.

Constitutional Law is not how I make a living. I possess any number of books on personal injury law; family law; criminal law. Even a number of more or less current editions. Himsworth and O’Neill is not however a textbook I have in my possession. When I was at University the standard textbook was S.A. De Smith’s Constitutional and Administrative Law. Written in the most wonderful English, it was like Paradise Lost, only for lawyers. It is, nonetheless, I accept, now more than thirty years old. So, I suppose, it is no surprise there is a more modern text. And Himsworth and O’Neill is, apparently, it.

Two.

Even after I was aware of their publication, I thought I had absolutely no idea who Himsworth and O’Neill actually were. A bit like Renton and Brown. (lawyers’ joke). But actually I do know who O’Neill is.

Three.

All the really clever women in Scotland are wee. Wee Nicola. Wee Wendy. Wee Lucy Adams. Wee Christine O’Neill. For it is the latter who is the O’Neill. And she is probably the cleverest of the lot.

Now, all lawyers trade on the basis that they personally are the absolutely best lawyer in Scotland and, indeed, I would happily maintain that if you were on a JP Court Breach of the Peace, you’d be much better with me than any of the Big Firm lawyers. If however you had a public law point to be argued in the Supreme Court, and I was unavailable, then you could not do better than wee Christine. In any legal firm in Scotland.

So, if Christine O’Neill thought that Eck’s Referendum was clearly within the competence of the Scottish Parliament that might give even me cause for reflection.

Only she doesn’t.

That's all. Happy new week.

Advice Rejected

2012-01-12T15:20:00.000-08:00

I have bought an awful lot of Council Houses. And I’ve wound a lot of modest estates that include British Telecom or British Gas or Scottish Power Shares.

Being a solicitor involves a variety of different activities. Some worthy but poorly rewarded, such as fighting repossessions or defending the innocent, others reasonably lucrative but, frankly, boring, like buying houses or administering executries.

The one thing this diverse experience does give you however is a view of the world.

It is simply nonsense that Scotland rejected Thatcherism in its entirety. Like we do in respect of so many other parts of British life, we bought into the bits we liked while claiming we wanted nothing to do with, indeed deplored, the rest of the package.

Ten days after Labour’s triumph in 1997 I wrote in Tribune about where the Scottish Tories had gone wrong under Thatcherism. Interestingly, it was this emphasis on the need to recognise the national dimension in Scottish politics that cursed my ambition in Labour politics before and since. But that is, nonetheless, where the Scottish Tories went wrong then and, among other ways, where Labour has gone wrong since.

It had little or nothing to do with the naked class politics that led them to be equally hated in working class communities from South Yorkshire to South Wales to South Lanarkshire. These people, my people, were never going to vote for them. We hadn’t had any more time for Ted Heath!

No, the Tories, despite heroic effort from the likes of George Younger, simply didn’t realise that Scotland needed to be respected and recognised as a bit different. And, above all, paid attention to.

Well, now they are paying attention. Good.

There is a stupidity in allowing your opponents to frame the terms of political discourse. Over the recent period we are constantly bombarded by SNP warnings that if Labour campaigns alongside the Tories for a No vote, we will be making a serious error. Most recently by the First Minister today.

Well, firstly, if I, as a life long Labour man thought the SNP, or indeed the Tories, were about to make a serious error, then the last thing I would do would be to rush out to warn them off it. More importantly however such “advice” seeks, with a certain constituency, to frame the Independence debate in left/right terms.

This simply won’t wash. For the avoidance of any doubt, while George Osborne is in favour of lower corporate taxation rates than I would like, he’s still for considerably higher rates than John Swinney or Alex Salmond. While the initial Tory proposals on public sector pensions were deplorable, they were on any view more progressive than any of the four options offered by the SNP. While the Tories were too lax (as Labour was) on pre-crash Bank regulation, they were still for greater regulation than that proposed by wee Eck for his former employers at RBS.

Sure, on other issues, the SNP have a more progressive aspect. Indeed on criminal justice policy, at least, they are to the left of Labour. The point is that you cannot frame the question of Scottish Independence in left/right terms.

And the other point is that by somehow equating permanent Independence with temporary Tory Government and spurning both equally we, the Labour Party, risk a very long term error. We can always vote the Tories out.

So, whether we campaign alongside the Tories becomes simply a question of what gains us best tactical advantage.

And the obvious answer is that of course it does.

Division is the mother of confusion.

There is no confusion among the devolutionist forces. Independence would be a disaster for Scotland. That is a united opinion so why should it not be the basis for a united campaign?

And, more importantly still, if we can frame the debate as being between, on the one hand, all reasonable opinion, left and right and, on the other, those who have perhaps seen Braveheart once too often, then that, surely, can only be in our own interests.

So, Eck, thanks for the advice, but I don’t think we’ll be taking it.

Anyway, we need to develop a working relationship with the Tories. Assuming the Referendum does take place, after the next Scottish Election, they are likely to be our Official Opposition.

It's not rocket science

2012-01-11T14:42:00.000-08:00

One of the things you learn as a lawyer is that some cross examinations need to be planned.

Mibbee it’s because I’ve been doing this for a long time but it doesn’t seem to me to be difficult.

You also need to get to make sure the initial premises to the question are agreed with the witness but then get to the pay off answer (or refusal to answer) that you are seeking as quickly as possible. You also need to ask closed questions in a way that prevents a different question being answered or a clarification being sought to distract attention from the fact the question has not been answered.

So, with that in mind here are a couple of more effective questions that our televisual interrogators might want to put to SNP spokesmen over the next few days during which, I confidently predict, the real territory of dispute will appear. For the avoidance of doubt, that will not be when the Referendum happens, or whether the electoral commission is involved, or (most ludicrously) whether 16 year olds should vote. The real issue will be whether there should be more than one question.

Now, before moving on here, I just want to remind some of the more naive souls who are circling this issue of one very important fact. The SNP don’t believe in Devolution, Max or otherwise. The SNP believe in Independence. Everything they do is aimed at that objective. That’s why they didn’t participate in either the Constitutional Convention or the Calman Commission.

On any view, you would think, giving people a third choice between Independence and the status quo would reduce the chance of Independence triumphing. In betting terms, the odds go from evens to 2-1 against but in reality, if that became the real choice, the natural inclination to “compromise”would increase the odds against by a much larger margin. It is therefore initially unclear as to why any Party seeking to win an Independence Referendum would seek to ask such a question.

There is a simple answer to that. They don’t, or at least they don’t in a meaningful way.

So, setting aside my other observations about whether the real aim is to create a legal quagmire preventing a Referendum happening at all, what else might the SNP want to achieve by encouraging the development of a Devo-Max scheme? Let us be in no doubt, it is not Devo-Max.

I would like to make of unchallengeable propositions.

1. If it’s a scheme the SNP don’t like it won’t appear at all. That’s not speculation, that’s what has happened to Calman. It will only appear at all if the SNP can vote yes/yes.

2. If it’s a scheme acceptable to Holyrood and Westminster, you don’t need a Referendum. What would we be voting on?

3. Any scheme that involves variable corporate taxes or excise duties across open boundaries is incompatible with a unitary state and will therefore never be acceptable to Westminster.

4. You can’t have a unilateral declaration of devolution. So, unlike Independence, what’s the point of voting for it?

5. If there is a second question, the SNP will encourage a Yes/Yes but, perfectly reasonably, point out that only a Yes to Independence gets a result.

6. A second question will prevent a united No Campaign.

7. A yes/no vote on a scheme unacceptable to Westminster achieves nothing and resolves nothing.

8. There is no mention at all of a second question in the SNP Manifesto.

So, back to the start. Here’s the simple line of questioning the Nats can’t answer.

Q: Are you confident Scotland will vote for Independence?

A: (presumably) Yes

Q: Why then might you ask a second question

A: Because there is a demand etc etc

Q: But you remain confident that people will vote for Independence?

A: (presumably) Yes

Q: So, what’s the purpose to the second question?

Repeat as required.

As Sheriff Montgomery is wont to say to incompetent lawyers “It’s not rocket science.”

Tomorrow, some thoughts on the demography of Scotland and a bit more about why the Nats will get gubbed if they ever actually have a straight vote. Here's a taster from an earlier blog

Clearer but not yet clear

2012-01-10T14:14:00.000-08:00

If I understand the different announcements made by the British and Scottish Governments tonight, within a month we will know whether or not there is going to be an Independence Referendum.

Starting firstly with Michael Moore, it is, to say the least, a pity that what he said in the Commons today was not what David Cameron said on the Telly at the weekend. Moore’s proposals are the soul of reason. The Sovereign Westminster Parliament, to avoid any possible legal dubiety, proposes to devolve to the Scottish Government the right to hold a referendum on Independence. There is to be no time limit on when that might be, simply an expressed desire that it be sooner rather than later.

There are conditions but these are essentially only that the electorate be the same electorate that vote in Scottish Parliament Elections; that the Referendum be subject to supervision by the independent Electoral Commission and that it have one question. The possibility is even left open that a different question could be asked on a different date.

It is difficult to see any good faith objection that could be raised to any of these conditions. The Nationalists seek to extend the franchise to 16 and 17 year olds but they must, in their hearts know that once you start mucking about with who can vote legitimately other issues arise: why shouldn’t Scottish Military Personnel, based in England, have a vote? Why should the Captain of our National Football team not have a vote while a management trainee from Poland, working for 12 months at an Edinburgh Hotel, (because that’s where they were sent as their own fifth choice) does get a say? The simple solution has always been that, accepting these anomalies, those who vote are those who can vote at a General Election. Once you start interfering with that then everything is back on the table.

And why shouldn’t the Electoral Commission have an oversight? The Scottish Government’s position to date has been because they (the Electoral Commission) don’t have legal authority to act in that capacity. Well, Mr Moore’s legislation gives them that authority, so what’s the problem now? Is it suggested that the Commission, whose members include George Reid, is a less than impartial body? That’s not suggested so this isn’t really a ground for objection at all.

Finally, the Question. A one question referendum is what the SNP proposed in their Manifesto. It has the support (now) of all other three major Parties. Insofar as can be determined from the same opinion polls Eck used to quote as showing a demand for a question to be asked, that one question is what the people desire.

So, what’s the problem?

That then leads us to the Scottish Government’s announcement.

This was a slightly odd creature. It was obviously a last minute decision to name the date, not least because no actual date was named! That is confirmed by the way it was announced by the FM on an unpreplanned TV interview and by the Cabinet on Twitter(!), together with the fact that four hours later the announcement features on neither the Scottish Government or SNP Website. The lack of detail of what exactly was being announced is the most curious aspect of all.

Now, charitably, it might be that Eck just wanted to put his beach towel on the lounger, defying anyone to move it. For what it’s worth, I’d be surprised if anyone does. What the (Scottish) opposition Parties want is a definite vote before May 2016. On the face of it, we’ve got it. But have we?

As I say, there appears to be no written statement from the Holyrood Administration to clarify what they are proposing. BUT if it is a simple yes/no held in October 2014 then, in light of Michael Moore’s concessions, that will be legally unchallengeable and politically acceptable to the Opposition. If that is what is announced then we will know the Nationalists genuinely want a vote.

If however they announce something else, particularly if they announce the intention to hold a multi-option referendum, or even that this remains a possibility, then what I have been saying all along will have been vindicated. That they want to be prevented, by law, from proceeding. And if they announce that the paving legislation is not to be published and enacted imminently, we will also know that they want the time necessary to unravel any successful challenge to spin matters out to the far side of May 2016.

So, as I say, within a month or so we will know if there is going to be a Referendum. Or at least know whether there is going to be one called by the SNP.

For I think in naming the day (more or less) they may have made a fatal error. Their Manifesto said they wanted a yes/no. They now say their preferred timing is Autumn 2014. If their proposed legislation got into a legal quagmire then, with cross Party Westminster support, UK legislation could secure that objective in a matter of a few months. Even the Nationalists would struggle to describe that as dictation to the people of Scotland.

For once, Eck might not have been as clever as he thinks.

The Cat among the pigeons?

2012-01-08T11:50:00.000-08:00

In a rather odd development today, the Prime Minister decided to wade into the Scottish Constitutional Debate. I have absolutely no idea why.

In an article I wrote for Scotland on Sunday today I pointed out how Scotland was hardly in a ferment over this matter.

The SNP can’t quite get their own line agreed. On the one hand they have to assert that victory is inevitable but that rather begs the question as to why they don’t get on with it. The best they can come up in response to that is that during the election campaign the First Minister said that the Referendum would be in the second half of this Parliamentary term. He did, to be fair, albeit for the first time four days before polling

Their only, very thin, argument is that while there is a majority for Independence, some people would vote against it because they’ve been asked too soon!

This is indeed the nonsense that it appears to be.

I am, nonetheless, concerned about the Prime Minister’s Intervention.

The one thing that can be fairly said about Scottish Nationalism is that it has been an overwhelmingly peaceful movement. Certainly, from time to time historically, there has been a lunatic fringe but they have been as much repudiated by modern nationalists as they have been by the rest of the population. Central to that consensus has been recognition on both the Nationalist and Unionist side that if Scotland expressed a clear desire to leave the United Kingdom, that would be allowed to happen.

If a referendum was to be denied by apparent jiggery-pokery, regrettably, that peaceful aspect to the discourse could not be guaranteed.

So, we need to be careful here.

No-one doubts the moral mandate of the SNP to hold a referendum during this Parliament at a time of their choosing. If that proves to be during the second half of the Parliament then that’s a matter for them.

There is however a legal problem about the vires of such a poll. I have previously speculated that this might actually form part of Salmond’s calculations to avoid a vote he will inevitably lose. That needs to be sorted, either in the current Scotland Bill or by an Order under s.30 of the 1998 Scotland Act.

The tactics here need to be more carefully considered than they appear to have been by the PM this morning. Lawyers, even nationalist lawyers, might recognise that there is a legal issue about the legitimacy of a referendum. That is not however the view of the general public, who see no reason that the Scottish Government shouldn’t call such a ballot. That view is shared even by a lot of people who would intend to vote emphatically No.

The danger therefore of the Westminster Government giving the Scottish Parliament express permission to hold a Referendum but then time-limiting that power is that this will be seen not as a power being given but rather one being taken away.

And the danger of that in turn is not so much that it will give Salmond precisely what he wants, an excuse not to have a Referendum. That would, at worst, have adverse electoral consequences for the Devolutionist Parties. No, the real danger is that it might legitimise, in their own heads at least, those who might seek to proceed by other than democratic means.

So let’s encourage Westminster to give the Scottish Parliament the right to hold a Referendum whenever they want.

That nonetheless leaves one other question which needs to be addressed. I’m not persuaded that the “uncertainty” over Scottish Independence is having any affect, short term, at all on the Scottish Economy. That is because nobody who looks at the issue in any detail believes it to be even a remote possibility.

The “uncertainty” is however distorting our politics and, longer term, that will have an adverse impact.

There is therefore an argument for not allowing the SNP to find reasons never to ask the question That however needs a democratic mandate.

We are led to believe that the next UK General Election in May 2015. Why then shouldn’t all of the UK wide Parties enter that election with a commitment that, if it hasn’t already happened, there will be an Independence Referendum to follow in June of that year? And say now that this will be their position.

Doesn’t stop the Nationalists going sooner and can’t happen unless Scotland has voted for it (unless the SNP sweep the Country on a commitment to the Union!)

I can’t see how even the Nationalists could find an objection to that. Then again, I’m not holding my breath.

A New Year Prediction. A return to reality.

2011-12-31T16:07:00.000-08:00

International football analogies are not of my making, they belong more to those interested largely only in flags and anthems.

But, since these are the terms of those within we are in current discourse...........

On 12^th October 1977, Scotland beat Wales 2-0 to qualify for the 1978 World Cup.

Three days later, in Turin, Italy beat Finland 6-1, making it almost impossible for England to join us in Argentina.

And Scotland went mad. Not wholly irrationally mad. The Scotland team in Liverpool read: Rough; Jardine; Donachie; Masson; McQueen; Forsyth; Dalglish; Hartford; Jordan; Macari; Johnston. On any view, a somewhat superior line-up to those currently available to Craig Levein.

Nonetheless, in our heart of hearts, a team that we knew was unlikely to be quite good enough to win the World Cup.

But we didn’t allow such considerations to colour our public attitude at the time.

“We’re on the march with Ally’s Army

We’re going to the Argentine

And we’ll really shake them up

When we win the World Cup

‘Cause Scotland are the greatest football team”

The really embarrassing thing with the benefit of hindsight however was not our madness but the extent to which we accepted the patronage of the English.

England has won the World Cup once, with the assistance of every game played at home and even then some pretty dubious refereeing, culminating in the world’s only two goal hat-trick. We know however that, as a large footballing nation, one year, they at least have the possibility of doing so again. That’s why we can’t enjoy any World Cup or European Championship until they have been eliminated, no matter how much we are intellectually convinced they have no real chance. They should be more credible contenders than they ever prove to be. And one, nightmare, day that might just change. That’s football.

In 1978 however we in Scotland suddenly purported to become England in our over confidence (or, if you prefer, arrogance). Instead however of responding with reciprocal cynicism, English football opinion, seeing us being set up for a fall, was only too happy to go on for the ride. If we were daft enough to think we might win the World Cup, then why did they need to be so un-neighbourly as to celebrate our coming misfortune? Why not go along with the advance euphoria, particularly if you knew that you would have no need to deal with the aftermath? Or no need ever to truly worry that the achievements of Moore, Charlton and Hurst might be about to be overshadowed.

I was reminded of these events with the news that The Times had declared Alex Salmond to be the Briton of the year.

There are two Scottish interpretations of British (English) establishment opinion in relation to Scottish Independence. Those Scots of a broadly unionist perspective stand beside the Queen. That, for sentimental reasons, the establishment believes that such a development would be regrettable, even though they would surely get over it. Those of a more fundamentally Nationalist bent assert that it would be, for England, an economic catastrophe, such is the extent to which they are subsidised by the exploitation of Scotland’s natural resources. Neither perspective however would expect the man allegedly leading Scotland down a separatist road to be seen as a figure to be smothered in affection South of the Border. And yet we are to believe that he is.

True threats to the established order are not indulged by that same establishment, at least not until their threat has passed. Keir Hardie wasn’t. Nor were Tony Benn, or Ken Livingston or even Peter Tatchell. And, for the avoidance of any doubt, this has got nothing to do with any kind of different approach to a National Question. Few figures have been more vilified in the newspapers now lauding Eck than Mahatma Ghandi. He was a real threat.

No, wee Eck is patronised in the way that Ally Macleod was patronised (and Parnell never was). He is built up to be an apparently unstoppable force in the comfortable knowledge that he will eventually crash and fail. Like Scotland in 1978. And, when he does, the Establishment will respond: “How sad, have a hug”, like Jimmy Hill infamously wearing a Scotland scarf at, admittedly, a different World Cup. And the Nationalists will fall out among themselves as to whether to accept the embrace.

The problem with this is the aftermath for Scotland more generally.

The impact of the 1978 World Cup debacle didn’t just affect football. It caused a genuine collapse in national confidence. It was surely a significant factor in the inconclusive result of the following year’s referendum and of the decision taken by the SNP to commit political suicide in that events aftermath.

How much more so would be the debacle of a decisively lost Independence Referendum?

Here, I must diverge slightly to explain why such a referendum would be decisively lost. I know this is an argument I have made before but it cannot be made too often.

It is difficult to see political circumstances getting any better for the SNP than they are at the moment. Not only do they have as their leader a politician who towers in stature over his opponents; they have a Government of manifest competence and confidence; they are blessed with a stellar array of younger members and thinkers with a zealous commitment to their cause and in financial terms they have recently, quite literally, won the lottery.

Meanwhile, their domestic political opponents are inadequately led and erratically followed and funded; derided in the press and Civic Society and almost unrecognised by the general public; even their bigger hitters at Westminster are temporarily divided over strategy, although it says a lot about their assessment of the likelihood of Independence that they regard countering it as less than a primary consideration.

In wider political terms, the UK Government is one that Scotland did not vote for and is currently pursuing policies with which the vast majority of Scottish public opinion violently disagrees; yet, which shows every sign of being re-elected, possibly in an even more right wing, eurosceptical form.

Economic times are tough but the one reassuring asset in a time of global uncertainty is access to natural resources and Scotland appears, by accident of history and climate, to be particularly well placed in that regard.

How then, conceivably, are things going to be any better placed for the Nationalists in a couple of years’ time? Is more oil to be found, or more wind to blow, or the seas to become more stormy?

Yet, despite all of these manifest current advantages, the polls which give the SNP more than 50% electoral support, continue to show nothing approaching a majority for Independence. And that’s before there is any coherent opposition campaign.

Again, I want to repeat myself about the nature of that campaign. It will be red in tooth and claw. Anyone expecting a civilised discourse around concepts of sovereignty and modern nationality is in for a very rude awakening. The combined devolutionist/unionist camp need not prove that people will be worse off; it need only raise a reasonable doubt that they might. And that's a scoosh.

I want to choose a few (OK, lots of) examples.

On 30^th November past we saw a significant public sector strike against perceived threats to pension rights. A lot of people directly concerned got, understandably, exceptionally animated. How much more so will they be when the same Unions who led them out target them directly with material suggesting that if Independence goes wrong, their pensions might not be payable at all? Not won’t be, just might not be. How reassuring will a counter argument based on a promise prove against a status quo argument based on empirical evidence of past performance?

The same goes for State Benefits of any sort, possibly in spades, because benefit recipients are particularly prone to differential turn out. You can focus group this with frightening effectiveness.

Then we have Edinburgh’s financial services industry. Who can say how long they would wish to continue to be based in a different country from their largest market? Again, it is not necessary to conclusively win the argument, it is sufficient to raise the uncertainty to send the Capital’s property prices into a tailspin .

And then there is the military. It is understandable that North East Nationalist MPs go on these marches to keep the various bases there open. They are vitally important to the local economy. Point made in some ways but there is, beyond that, a more empirical example. On any view the national swing in May should have delivered Jackie Baillie’s Dumbarton seat to the SNP. It didn’t for one very clear reason. The simple targeting of swing voters with material pointing out the local consequence of the withdrawal of the British submarine base. How many submarines would an independent Scotland propose to deploy?

And that’s without even considering the residual loyalty of those proud to have once served in the Royal Navy, Royal Air Force or British Army. Not to mention the potentially limited career prospects of those wishing to continue to serve.

And while we are in this area, and since it is New Year, what about the honours system? It’s all very well to maintain that “The Rank is but the Guinea stamp” but that’s clearly not the view of those aspiring to such recognition, never mind those facing it being taken away. I’m a pretty convinced (British) republican but I’ve met both the Queen and the First Minister and I’m in no doubt which was the more memorable event.

And, finally, there is the central economic argument. Truly, most informed opinion here concludes that a snapshot comparison of the revenue/expenditure performance of the British and Scottish economies turns on the price of oil in any given year. But there is no way the actual argument will be conducted in that way. Under the status quo, your taxes are what they are; public services are what they are; the welfare state is what it is. Sure, under Independence they might be better, but they are generally, currently, regarded as adequate (at least by the vast majority of the public). Faced with a choice of them perhaps being a bit better against siren voices asserting that they could be a great deal worse, there is only one rational conclusion.

There is however one absolutely clinching argument in this area. Asked if they would favour Independence even if Scotland were to be, short term, worse off as a result, most Nationalists would reply in the affirmative. That very answer however fundamentally undermines any attempt to make an apparently considered argument to reassure the undecided.

Now, the Nationalists will say “But we’ll have another three years to make our argument”. This however simply won’t wash. They are already very good at making the argument. There are big holes in it: over currency, Europe, the Monarchy, national institutions like the BBC or the DVLA, even, it appears from the report on the Scotland Bill, an ignorance over how much income tax is actually paid in Scotland. These holes are, however, in the argument itself, not in its articulation. Time, in this case, will not be a healer.

More importantly however, delay will allow the Devolutionist camp to get organised. No objective observer would doubt that, relatively, there is much more scope for improvement on that side. Indeed, while for the SNP it is difficult to see how much better things might conceivably be, organisationally, financially or politically in three years time, for their opponents it is difficult to conceive how they might be worse.

So why the delay? I won’t repeat my previous remarks on why it’s got nothing to do with the SNP Manifesto, It’s simply that they have concluded that, as they can’t conceivably win today, they logically have no less chance of success in three years time. Their fatal error however is to allow their tummies to be tickled by the establishment in the meantime.

For the problem for the SNP is that the game is increasingly likely to have to be played at some point. Here some credit is due to the internet! It was @peatworrier and @loveandgarbage on Twitter who first raised the issue of the dubious vires of the Scottish Parliament to hold an Independence Referendum, even a merely advisory one. I then shamefully plagiarised that initial argument before suggesting that it might in fact be Salmond’s strategy to hope that his Referendum was blocked in the Courts, using that as his excuse 2011-16 as he had used the “Unionist Block” in 2007-11. Westminster however appears live to this and might be about to close the loophole by giving this power expressly to the Scottish Parliament, albeit to be exercised by a given date. I see no reason that date should be any earlier than Spring 2016. All possible objections from the Nationalists would then be headed off.

So, will Salmond, all hoped for obstacle removed, then act?

This is a question of considerable complexity but before attempting to answer it I need to deal with one other matter. There can only be one Referendum question. I say that not as a demand on the Scottish Government but as a statement of political reality. The SNP believe in Independence. There is no logic to them therefore asking any other question on their own initiative. Never mind the absurdities of unilateral declarations of devolution, even asking, unprompted, such a second question would imply pre-acceptance of defeat on the first.

They could however spin asking a second question if somebody else came up with it. But they won’t. Johann won’t; Ruth Davidson won’t; Willie Rennie couldn’t with any credibility and some sort of civic Scotland group set up for the purpose of its devising would just look like the Nationalist patsies that they would be likely to be. Anyway, in this Country, important politics is surely for elected politicians. That was the fatal flaw with Calman gaining public attention.

So, without the need for circumscription from Westminster, there will be only one question.

The issue then therefore becomes, will Salmond ask it? There is an apposite proverb “He who fights then runs away, lives to fight another day.”

You have to consider the options here. My own view has always been that after a proper campaign and on a clear question support for Independence will come out at between a quarter and a third of the electorate. Probably nearer the bottom end of that scale. Possibly below it (think Cubillas at this point).

Oddly I do not think that result would be a good thing. It would, rather, be in the nature of a national humiliation. During the campaign itself any number of blowhards will have been put up to maintain that “Freedom” is only days away. They’ll end up look like idiots but so will the rest of us for appearing to have paid them any attention in the first place. Just like those of us who, knowing better, allowed ourselves to be caught up in the hysteria of 1978.

Obviously, a referendum loss, or, in our case, victory, would suit the partisan interests of the Labour Party as it would probably lead to the fragmentation of the SNP. It would also, presumably, end the career of Alex Salmond who (and here I let you into a secret) we really, really don’t like. It is difficult however to see how it would otherwise serve the interests of Scotland.

For the problem is that the threat of Independence has always been an important card for those of us who believe in a strong(er) Scottish Parliament. Once it’s played and lost, it’s played and lost. What leverage then has further Home Rule opinion with Westminster? Little or nothing. The only remaining viable route would come from a Labour (or Lab/Lib) Westminster Government legislating on a voluntary basis. We’ve seen too often in the past the limitations of such an approach but how much more would these difficulties be if, for all practical purposes, the SNP, the supposedly most Home Rule Party, had voluntarily given up any influence of their own on the matter supposedly most important to them.

Now the common assumption is that the internal dynamic of the SNP would make it impossible for Salmond not to hold a Referendum. I’m however not so sure about that.

The SNP not only are good at running Scotland, they enjoy it. Not just the Ministers taking important, day to day, decisions but the grass roots activists who can bask in the knowledge that, if required, they could telephone the Education Secretary; email the Health Secretary on first name terms; dare I say it, enjoy a pint with the Justice Secretary. Their Councillors, and their friends, family and supporters enjoy their control of the local state apparatus, particularly, in many cases, having been previously treated contemptuously by Labour for many years.

I don’t doubt for a moment that they would all like “Independence” even if not entirely united on what that means. If however they could be confronted, by a united leadership, with the conclusion, that Independence was not (currently) achievable, (“Much as we might win, we might, just, possibly, lose”)would they really insist on imperilling everything they have for an impossible (“Risky”) objective? And presumably, in the process, have to dump the leadership that had brought them to this point in the first place? After all, the Party has been remarkably sanguine about Independence being “postponed” from 2011 to 2014 or 2015, despite an outright majority at Holyrood. What’s another few years’ delay?

Nor is it clear why “Scotland” would object to not being asked a question they were patently primed to answer in the negative anyway. Labour will shout about broken promises but, to be honest, shouting hasn’t proved a very effective opposition strategy for us to date.

Sure, it would be embarrassing for Salmond, but not as embarrassing as a decisive Referendum defeat. And it would surely pave the way for continued domestic dominance at Holyrood at least until Labour got its own house more comprehensively in order. It might even give us a dilemma as to whether we were now obliged to take some sort of constitutional initiative of our own.

The Constitution of the SNP provides the Party with two objectives, firstly, certainly, Independence but, secondly, “The furtherance of all Scottish interests”.

Is it inconceivable that the long term pursuit of the first objective might be sold to the membership by the suggestion of the temporary prioritisation of the second?

Anyway, this is going to be the underlying theme of 2012. I encourage you to read the runes as it develops. As the Bard says of that moment “It’s coming yet for a’ that”.

Happy, happy New Year, for this is going to be fun to watch.

(for want of a better title) My Christmas Blog

2011-12-28T15:08:00.000-08:00

The Christmas season is an odd time.

Particularly since it has become, for many, a ten day holiday, it is approached in anticipation that there will be more than enough time to do everything. Once the immediate frantic activity around the Day itself is out of the way, sleep will be caught up on; literary presents read; old films watched; old friends visited and obligations to relatives discharged. And, in this modern age, the back catalogue of half watched TV series will also be finally retrieved and digested from the Sky Player or equivalent. Alongside a box set or two.

Then there are the things you don’t normally have the time for: a bit of (proper) cooking; the occasional long walk; some serious music listened to; perhaps a “major” novel (or two) re-read, together with the year end magazines and Christmas special Sunday supplements saved up in case you get bored.

And then there’s the Christmas telly to be watched, no longer on a “see it when it’s on or miss it forever” basis; a bit of shopping to be done; all that eating and drinking (home and away); and of course football, even a concert or two, to be attended, not least to have something to do.

Oh and there’s also the New Year to be prepared for. House tidied; black bun ordered in; all the food bought for Christmas and somehow since disappeared replaced in almost equal quantities if slightly different combination.

And then suddenly that box of work you brought home on 23^rd December, confident of doing it at some time over the long holiday, is wailing at you from the boot of the car with the ominous chorus that in twelve hours or so you’ll be back in the office and it will remain unattended to (unless it can be accommodated alongside the last four episodes of the box set; the last 100 pages of the Christmas present page turner............. and the New Statesman Christmas special. And that’s already having admitted defeat over the remaining 350 pages of The Charterhouse of Parma.

Ideally therefore a year end political taking stock could be undertaken at a different time. Perhaps early February.

Normally such an exercise involves three obvious elements; a review of the year past; a prediction of the year ahead and an attempt to show at least some continuity at work.

That won’t really work however in the context of current Scottish politics: the year past was exciting; there was an election and that election produced, on any view, a significant long term development in the form of the SNP landslide. It can be concluded with some probability that that result will not be reversed easily; with equal probability that it will not be done until the opposition Parties come to terms with the National question but, most significantly of all, it can be concluded with absolute certainty that there will be no change in the Holyrood administration until May 2016 at the earliest. And May 2016 is a long time away.

So, for those who like excitement in their Scottish politics, I regret to say that the initial assumption about 2012 is that it will be a lot less exciting than 2011. There won’t even be the “excitement” of any internal leadership contests. It will mainly just be grind. There won’t be a Referendum, or even legislation for a Referendum but the Administration will want to do as little as possible to rock the boat, just in case they do ever decide to hold one, so there won’t be any bold policy initiatives either.

There will be a continued bit of background noise over the legalities of an advisory referendum and a bit of unequal sniping between Salmond and Michael Moore over the Scotland Bill but, even if the Bill passes it wont come into force immediately; indeed if the SNP are to be believed it won’t ever come into force because, before it does, Scotland will be independent, which rather makes you wonder why they are so concerned as to what is in it.

There will of course be local government elections (snore) but the long term significance of these will, I predict, prove to be much less significant than anticipated. The results will simply confirm that the Nationalists currently have the big mo and the opposition are in disarray. Even if Labour holds on to Glasgow, which, incidentally, I think we will, it will be difficult to spin as a real tide turning event that we are still in power where we’ve been in power all of my adult life.

And that’s about it.

If I was writing a 2012 year end review now, and domestic Scottish politics were all that mattered, I suspect I could now invest in the opening line “Scottish politics in December 2012 look much like they did in December 2011.”

But of course, domestic Scottish politics are not all that matters.

It is tempting to think that after the debacle of the Brussels summit, nothing will detach the Libs from the coalition but I’m not convinced. Europe does, I think, matter to them and there will be big choices to be made over Europe in the coming year. I think almost all British politicians misunderstand the strategic commitment to the European idea in the core countries in particular. I think they will all be astonished at the economic pain Italy will be prepared to go through to stay in the Euro. Don’t be fooled by the size of the demonstrations, Italians like that sort of thing, look instead at the approval ratings for Monti and Napolitano.

And the response to crisis in Europe has not been a move towards the looser Union of Tory back-bench fantasy but rather the ever closer union anticipated by the Community’s founders. Along that path there will be any number of forks but there will inevitably be a point when the Libs can no longer simply get huffy over the road not taken. Possibly sooner rather than later.

And since Scotland is (still) part of Britain, perhaps the political year here will prove as exciting as 2011 after all.

Anyway, that’s all, I suspect, from me this year. If it is then I trust that the economic outlook for 2012 will prove to be not as bleak as it currently appears and that my happy band of followers enjoy a peaceful and happy New Year.

I’m off to watch five catch up episodes of Romanzo Criminale and then, if I can find a torch, to go for a long walk.

San Francesco della Vigna

2011-12-20T13:06:00.000-08:00

My favourite Church in Venice is San Francesco della Vigna.

A bit out the way but once you’ve either enjoyed the long round trip by Vaporetto around Castello or negotiated the labyrinthine trek from the centre, you will find, behind the Palladian facade a perfect interior, by Sansavino, which would be much more at home in Southern Tuscany or Umbria.

In Vienna, I was horrified to find a Franciscan Church which even outdid the Jesuits in Baroquery, and elsewhere, there are any number of large preaching barns, but, generally, if you are marooned and in need of a place for quiet contemplation, then it never does any harm to seek out the parish Church of St Francis. You will seldom be disappointed; that is certainly the case in Venice.

But Venice is really about facades. If I have a favourite Venetian Church, then how much more so do I have a favourite Venetian walk. Behind the Salute and along the the bank of the Guidecca. Il Redentore; Le Zitelle; above all San Giorgio Maggiore each standing in array on the far side. The best time to enjoy it is undoubtedly on a diamond clear Winter day, when the low sun ripples across the water, but my most memorable negotiation was in deepest Autumn fog, when you couldn’t even see the further bank. On the No.5 back to San Marco, the individual church facades at each stop loomed out of the fog like monuments in a Dickensian graveyard and any potential step ashore was discouraged by the thought that Daphne Du Maurier’s red coated dwarf was almost certainly lurking down a Calle the minute you stepped away from the crowd.

So, anyway, you might say, what has any of this got to do with the usual topics of my blog? Nothing and everything is the answer.

Since the Scottish Labour Party has clearly to immerse itself in self indulgence for the next four and a half years, with no interest in returning to power, I have decided that I might as well do so as well. And to have more fun in the process.

So, this week, Venice. Next week, the delights of Puglia: Romanesque Cathedrals and heavenly seafood. Only 233 weeks, and 12 first the post seats still to lose, until normal service is resumed.

'Twas the Night before the Election

2011-12-15T17:07:00.000-08:00

So, tomorrow, we will know. Not care, just know.

There has been virtually nothing interesting about the Labour Leadership contest. That in itself is however interesting.

Nobody. and I mean literally nobody, thinks that who emerges as the winner from the contest tomorrow will ever be First Minister of Scotland. Including, in their heart of hearts, the potential victors themselves.

Now, and here I genuinely mean this as no insult, the same, in terms of potential First Ministerial Office, could equally have been said of the recent Tory contest. But that is the limit of my patronising. Because the Tory contest was still interesting. Murdo had a Big Idea. And that Ruth Davidson, as a gay woman, could get elected says a huge number of positive things not just about how Scotland has changed but, much as I hate to admit it, about how the Tories have shown a willingness to move with the times.

But the Scottish Tories, in terms of historic electoral support, are not the Scottish Labour Party, at least in my lifetime.

Until six months ago, Labour had been the dominant political force in Scotland for...........ever. Let us not forget, when Wendy was elected in Autumn 2007, the consensus, and by no means solely among the ranks of the faithful, was that the position she had assumed was that of First Minister in waiting.

But let us not also forget that, even then, Wendy recognised that to return to power, Labour had to modernise. More innovative policy, greater focus on Scottish elections on their own merits, better candidates.

With her fall, all of that was abandoned as unnecessary, or at least too difficult. And in May 2011 the electorate passed its verdict on that assessment.

The really shocking thing about this year's contest is two things. I will come to the second. The First however is that, of the front runners, even the more contemporary candidate, Ken, is about ten years behind Wendy in his thinking, while the other, Johann, is about six months behind Michael Foot. Pledge Cards, PLEDGE CARDS!!!!, are regarded as state of the art campaigning by the latter's camp only to be dismissed as anachronistic by their opponents who have discovered the wonders of robo calls. ROBO CALLS!!!

The second thing is however the more contemptible. Essentially both of the leading candidates start with the admission that they are no match for Alex Salmond. And so, to excuse their own inadequacies, they invest the First Minister with super-human properties.

I do not underestimate the First Minister. He is a politician of the first rank. Scotland. my Country, deserves no less for its First Minister. But big Donald gave him a doing in 1999. Jack McConnell, four years later, drove him out of the contest altogether. Jim Murphy, as Secretary of State, ran rings round him in the run up to the 2010 General Election. Each were, in their own way, able politicians but none of them would even claim to have been wholly exceptional or unreplaceable Labour leaders. I refuse to accept that we must now simply accept that we have no-one available of equal talent just because no suvh person exists in the current Holyrood Labour Group..

So, no matter who wins tomorrow, let those of who want Labour to win in 2016 wake up on Sunday with the resolve that, no matter who Labour puts forward for First Minister at that election, it cannot conceivably be either of these people.

I Was Wrong

2011-12-12T15:51:00.000-08:00

I am, as my regular reader will know, exceptionally annoyed about the Coalition Government's decision to withdraw from the European Union. They have, however, clearly got a Commons majority for whatever they want to do. We can only hope they don't next decide to bring back hanging, since, as Nick Clegg assures us "The Coalition Government is here to stay." No matter what.

And, while it will be fun seeing the destruction of the Liberal Democrats at the next election, there is no reason to think we will be any greater gainers than the Tories. So, if that's all that happens, we will likely just end up with (another) right wing Tory Government. Just with different personnel.

Bernard Jenkin entertained the airways this morning with his observations that the French have never liked us while the smaller countries won't support us because they are all scared of the Germans. When Vince Cable loses his seat, perhaps Mr Jenkin will be promoted to the Cabinet. To be honest, given the events of the last few days, it will make no practical difference.

But, if I am annoyed with the Libs, I am almost as annoyed at the mealy mouthed response of my own Party "Leadership".

I know that London does not pay much attention to the "micro-politics" of Scotland but there is surely one lesson of the three years leading up to the May 2011 elections. There is a world of difference between being an effective opposition leader and being a credible alternative First Minister or Prime Minister.

The first depends merely on an ability to say what the Government has done wrong; the second on an ability to articulate credibly what you would have done instead.

It is said that the best opposition leader of recent times was William Hague. And he nearly was. You can still find you tube clips of his Commons' performances. Hugely entertaining and, on occasions, quite brilliant. But he was so hampered by his own Party's internal disarray he never had a credible alternative programme.

I say however that Hague was "nearly" the best opposition leader because he has one superior, who operated de facto if not de jure in the capacity of "Leader of the Opposition" for five years: Gordon Brown.

Any time Blair did anything really unpopular "Gordon's people" would let it be known that he would have done things differently. They were careful never to say what they would actually have done, just that it would have been something different. Thus, that "something different" could be whatever you wanted it to be. And since, unlike Hague, Gordon's road to power ran through the byzantine internal politics of the Labour Party, rather than through the ballot box, in the end he succeeded.

The problem was that he had spent so much time positioning himself to secure the top job that, by the time he achieved it, he had forgotten why he wanted it in the first place. The rest is history.

But, for the moment at least, if the Leader of the Labour Party wants to become Prime Minister then he or she will require to win a General Election. And that requires an ability to answer the question "What would you do?" with something more than "something different".

I have simply not the remotest idea what Ed was up to today. Having attacked Cameron for his European policy he offered no alternative and then, outside the Chamber, presumably out of residual fear of the Murdoch Press, authorised his press team to brief that he wouldn't have signed the Treaty either! That is not alternative government, it is simply opposition.

There were absolutely no implications for Britain, outside the Eurozone, in allowing the others to proceed as they wished. Even to take Cameron at his word and that there is a need to protect the City of London from European Regulation (a very big "even"), there was not a word about that in the Treaty proposed. It was simply not the business in hand.

So, accepting for the moment the "even", when asked if he would have signed, Ed should have replied with the simple one word answer "Yes". That would not have prevented him then briefing that he would nonetheless have raised the issue of City regulation on a future and more propitious occasion.

That would have been leadership.

But, referring back to the title of this article, why was I wrong?

I really didn't want David Miliband to become leader of the Labour Party. I felt he was simply insufficiently apologetic for the errors of Blair's time in office, most obviously over Iraq. I voted therefore for Ed Balls. But I then fatally then cast my second preference for Miliband (E) in much the same way as many of my political soulmates are now voting (at least with their second preference), for McIntosh (K). Albeit in a different political context, not for who he is but for who he isn't.

In my UK Leadership vote, I was wrong. If the only other credible alternative Prime Minister standing was David Miliband then I should have given him my support.

I'd still, right enough, rather have had Yvette Cooper than any of them.

A big week

2011-12-11T07:47:00.000-08:00

I was at my Office Christmas night on Friday and accordingly was in no real fit state to blog yesterday.

With the benefit of hindsight that is just as well because had I done so it is likely the blog would have been composed entirely of vitriol about the Liberal Democrats. I've calmed down a bit now but I'm also heartened by the fact that there seems to be some dawning realisation on their part that they can't simply go along with Cameron on Europe.

It is said that Winston Churchill's favourite Film was Alexander Korda's Lady Hamilton.

Now, for all the beauty of Vivien Leigh, or the melodrama of the plot, no-one is in any real doubt that the reason the great man was drawn to the film is in its finale when the Royal Navy forms its line at the Battle of Trafalgar and, to a score based around a chorus of Hearts of Oak, Nelson orders his famous "England Expects" signal and prepares to meet his destiny.

That is one view of our history and I defy the hardest and most cynical lefist not to be temporarily moved by it.

But it has always seemed to me that the pro-European liberal left has a moment to at least equal that in another film made the following year; Michael Curtiz' Casablanca. Pure fiction (even more than Lady Hamilton!) but powerful fiction nonetheless.

In some ways, the real hero of that film is none of the principal players but the cause they each, in their own way, choose to serve. Among the principals however is Victor Laszlo, described as a Czech Resistance Leader. At no point is Laszlo held out to be a fighter, in the physical meaning of that word. He is a democratic politician; a representative not of how things are but of how they ought to be. His work is not to fight totalitarianism with bullets but to fight it with ideas. Yet when he instructs the band in Rick's Cafe to drown out The Watch on the Rhine with The Marseillaise, even Hearts of Oak must take second place in the goosepimple stakes.

The European Union is the creation of hundreds, thousands of real life Victor Laszlos. Determined never to return to either 1942 or 1805. And among them are an awful lot of Liberal Democrats, in Britain and beyond.

British withdrawal from the European Union, or, better still, the destruction of the Union itself, is clearly a course on which a significant part of the Conservative Party is set. Whether David Cameron is among them or is simply unable to resist them, need not detain us here. There are people who do have the power to prevent that course being set and to do so with immediate effect.

It is easy to say that all Liberal Democrats have no principles but that would not just be unfair, it would be untrue. To choose to participate in politics without joining either of the big parties is surely a sign of people motivated by more than mere personal ambition.

They made a serious error in May 2010 but it was surely motivated by a belief, firstly, and correctly, that the Country needed a Government of some sort but, secondly and fatally, that the Tories could be trusted to recognise that they were simply the largest minority in a parliament of minorities and to govern accordingly. Patently, they are not. Europe is not however just one issue like, for example, tuition fees. That involved only a stupid manifesto commitment and an opportunist campaign. Words could be eaten.

Words surely however cannot be eaten on Europe. The reason the Liberal Democrats are the Liberal Democrats, and not just the Liberals, is because a significant section of their founding membership left the Labour Party over its one time anti-Europeanism. And the reason they, in turn, chose to join up with the pre-existing Liberals was because they had so much in common on, above all, Europe.

It cannot surely be the case that for an unwillingness to admit an error, less still for a ribboned coat, that they are now prepared to sail in the company of John Redwood and Trevor Kavanagh.

The Tories seem for the moment to be consoling themselves that the one thing, above all others, the Lib Dems won't want is an Election. I have already pointed out however that the collapse of the Coalition will not mean an Election if an alternative Government can be formed.

There has been some criticism of the low profile Ed Miliband has been keeping since Friday. I wonder if it's because he has been working the phones? I sincerely hope it is.

General Elections are Important

2011-12-07T14:52:00.000-08:00

On the Friday after the 2007 Scottish Parliament Elections, wee Eck delivered a memorable speech in which he declared that "While it might not be clear who has won this election, it is clear who has lost."

That speech was written in anticipation that the SNP had denied the Labour/Lib Coalition an absolute majority but also in the belief that Labour had, nonetheless, secured one more seat than the SNP in the Parliament.

At the last minute however it was determined that the result in the Highland list was not as had been anticipated and that it was the SNP who had a one seat plurality.

That one seat was nonetheless critical in giving the SNP a moral mandate to form a minority Government and essential to the survival of that minority administration over the next four years. For all the bravado of the First Minister at Prestonfield House, it is difficult to see how that could have been carried off with but a single seat less.

One of the things you learn as you get more experience of politics is that Parliamentary arithmetic is very important. Demonstrations, public outrage, universal newspaper condemnation, opinion polling, by-elections or whatever count for nothing so long as the Government enjoys a majority in Parliament. That is, in the proper sense, democracy.

Now in this context it is important to remember the result of the 2010 UK Election.

The British figures are these. Tories 306 Seats; Labour 258; Lib Dems 57; SNP 6; Green 1; Plaid 3; Speaker 1.

And the Northern Irish: DUP 8; Sinn Fein 5; SDLP 3; Alliance 1; Independent Unionist 1.

So, 650 Seats, with the neutral Speaker, 649.

So, in theory, that means that to have a Commons Majority you need 325 votes. And the Coalition has 363.

But.

Well, first of all you do not need 325 votes for a Commons majority, because the Shinners don't vote.

So there are only 644 MPs who actually vote. 323 for a majority.

And, secondly, this is a coalition with three elements. There are the Libs; the Tories and the Loonies.

And as has been clear over the last 24 hours, you can't ignore the Loonies.

It is apparent to the world that sorting out the crisis in the Euro is essential to the future well-being of this Country.And that sorting the Euro crisis will require a new Treaty. And that thanks to the loonies, the Coalition does not have a Commons majority for that Treaty.

So what does that mean for the Labour Party?

I am in no doubt that if "The Tories" had an absolute majority in the Commons, but a Loony fringe denying them that majority on this one issue, it would mean that, in the National interest, Labour should lend our votes to the the Government to enable them to get the legislation through the Commons. That's what some, at least, of our most distinguished parliamentarians did in 1971.

But the Tories do not have an absolute Commons majority.

And thus, crucially, in a way which most commentators have chosen to ignore, they do not have the right to a dissolution of Parliament.

Lets just walk through what happens when Cameron returns next week. Either there will be no deal because of his fear of his own back benchers, in which case it is difficult to see the Libs staying in the Government. Or there will be a deal but patently no Government majority for its ratification.

So what happens then?

Cameron goes to the Queen and tenders his resignation (Maybe not next week, but eventually). HMQ however would, in accordance with constitutional principle, refuse him a dissolution until it was clear that no-one else could command a Commons majority.

And suddenly, all the focus will be on the Libs. The one certainty of an early Election is that they would be annihilated. But even then it is difficult to see them being prepared to stand aside and watch Britain, effectively, leave the European Union. We've had a lot of anger towards them, and fun at their expense, since May 2010 but they do have some principles and surely Europe is near the top of these. That leads to one obvious conclusion.

So, what if Labour says it will deliver the Treaty Cameron has rejected? Or, at a price, construct a majority for the Treaty he can't get through?

Let's look back at the numbers, for suddenly they are very important. The Left Parties: Lab 258 + 3 (SDLP) + 3 (Plaid) +1 (Green) together with the 57 Libs and the one Alliance vote gets you to that 323.

And then there is the SNP.

There is no need to get involved in an argument where their heart might lie; they would surely vote with their heads. It took them twenty years to recover from the error of 1979 and they can see what happened to the Libs in May 2011.

So, if they sit on their hands, suddenly there are only 638 votes in play. And 323 is a more substantial majority.

But, finally, it might not be as simple as that. You can't ignore the personalities.

Nick Clegg would clearly have no place in any Labour Coalition Government, nor would Danny Alexander. And, to be honest, Chris Huhne should not have a place in any Government, or even in public life. But Ming, Charlie Kennedy, Tim Farron and others would surely be in happier company than at present. As would Vince with a briefly mumbled apology.

Labour also however might have to face up to the fact that such a coalition, in such circumstance, would need a politician of the first rank at its head. And ask itself honestly whether Ed really fits that bill.

So that is why I might be tempted with a flutter on David Miliband being Prime Minister by the First of February.

It's a funny old world.

Lost forever

2011-12-06T15:11:00.000-08:00

So, I’d spent the night watching Valencia being eliminated from the Champions League while I shopped online for women’s clothing.

That might have made a good tweet, as I had, I suppose, intended it to be, until the phone rang and I was informed that my neighbour, Dave, had died.

You joke about withholding full names to avoid identifying people but I genuinely do not know his full name. He was “just” my neighbour. Dave to me as I was Ian to him.

I suppose I knew, or at least suspected, he wasn’t well. I’d see him about more often than usual, although I knew he was a man who loved his work, even if it did bring him long hours. And I was aware he was losing weight in a not entirely reassuring manner all the time while the enquiry “How are you?” would be answered by the standard Scottish response “Fine”.

Part of what I do for a living is advising people about how to deal with difficult neighbours. Noisy neighbours, neighbours who dispute property boundaries, sometimes neighbours who are simply un-neighbourly.

But there are 80.000 people in Cumbernauld and Kilsyth and only a handful who find themselves unfortunate enough to have to consult me or my professional colleagues because of their neighbours. The real lesson comes from the experience of the rest.

It is said that you can choose your friends but you cannot choose your relatives. Ha ha. But equally, you cannot choose your neighbours.

But, for so many of us, our neighbours, despite the fact that we are initially thrown together by nothing more than random circumstance, become our friends. And in the way we are thrown together so many prejudices are cast aside.

“They are really nice, although they are not married, you know” becomes “They are really nice, although they are Pakistanis” or even “They are really nice, although I suspect they may be homosexuals”. And in time the “although” disappears. As does the rest of the sentence.

Do you know what, that is because most people are “Really nice”.

So, Dave, at your funeral I will finally, presumably, learn your second name. And that knowledge will not be important. But my loss at your passing will. You were really nice.

Blogging on a Sunday Afternoon

2011-12-04T09:37:00.000-08:00

Unlike, it appears, every single other person in Scotland this Sunday, I am bored.

Every second Saturday at St Mirren Park for as long as I can remember it has been possible to see at least one and sometimes two pandas. Indeed on occasions there was also Junior P, so presumably they bred at some point.

I can't therefor see what all these Edinburgh folk are getting all excited about. Even more excited than the Chinese appear to be at the distinction of a visit from the First Minister. I hope the Chinese at least take the opportunity to raise their concerns with him at the proposed abolition of corroboration.

(Diversion 1. Rumours are that Eck's trade delegation was accompanied by representatives of Greggs the Bakers but that their samples had to travel separately to ensure they weren't consumed on route.)

And another thing about Paisley Panda, he did stunts. Bet the Edinburgh pandas won't do that. On the occasion of one Renfrewshire Derby he even approached the Morton support bearing a large scrubbing brush and a gigantic bar of soap. The soapdodgers then reciprocated by hanging a miniature Panda from the crossbar at the return game. Just as well the new football legislation wasn't in force then, since, as everybody had offended everybody else, the whole County would have had to have been transformed into a giant prison.

(Diversion 2. In Italy, supporters of Hellas Verona refer to supporters of, their rivals, Vicenza as "Mangi Gatti", (cat eaters) in reference to some otherwise long forgotten 16th Century siege. That makes even the Battle of the Boyne look like a relatively recent event.)

So, anyway, is this blog going anywhere?

Well, not really, because there's not much happening in Scotland other than Panda Mania.

Except that there was an incredibly insightful article by Kenny Farquharson in Today's Scotland on Sunday on the subject of the SNP and Europe. Which touches more generally on why there's not much happening in Scotland.

For all the political sound and fury around last week's Pre-Budget report there was a consensus across the UK Parties about the potentially disastrous consequences of the collapse of the Euro. Douglas Alexander popped up on the UK section of the Politics Show to comment on this very subject and even the most Eurosceptic of Tories are being a bit more judicious in their schadenfreude.

Now, for the moment at least "this Country" includes Scotland, at least the last I time checked. And, for all the long term importance of opening up new markets, such as China,, "Continental Europe" is likely to remain Scotland's most important trading market (apart obviously from No Longer So Great Britain). The events in Europe are obviously the cause of great domestic political difficulty for David Cameron but nobody would expect him to remain completely immobile simply to "avoid" that difficulty. As, to be fair, he realises.

So one might expect that the Scottish Government, which supposedly trades on a greater European enthusiasm than the Tories, to have something to say on the subject. Certainly something more than "Ooh! Look at the Pandas!".

I bang on and on about the distoring effect that the Constitutional question is having on Scottish politics as the Government concludes that silence can be interpreted in the otherwise silent ear of the listener. Thus you can support Independence from the belief that it will lead to anything from (a) The return of the Stewarts; a separate Scottish Pound and membership not of the EU but of EFTA or, for all I know, the Holy Roman Empire; (b) A Republic; early entry to the Euro and full participation in a fiscal Union; (c) Retention of the Queen; the Pound Sterling and very little current day to day difference (Flags and Anthems aside); (d) a Socialist state on the Cuban model, including the weather; or even (e) who cares what kind of State so long as we're not in the Common Fisheries Policy; since we all know, then, fish stocks would magically become inexhaustible.

This silence on the part of the SNP as a Political Party on the European crisis is therefor understandable. Whatever they said they'd offend somebody, even if Independence somehow achieved by this sort of route is going to leave an awful lot of these people disappointed if we were ever to get there.

The SNP are not now however just a political Party, they are the Government of Scotland, or so they like to claim, when it does suit them. The Government of Scotland must (in both senses of that word) have a view of the way forward for the European Union it is still their intention, one day, to join as a "full" member. It is time we heard what that view is.

Presumably even they, maintainers though they are that all Scotland's problems would be miraculously solved by Independence, wouldn't have the cheek to suggest that Scottish Independence would also solve all Europe's problems. Even if it would bring back the fish.

Upon the Feast Day of St Andrew

2011-11-30T14:56:00.000-08:00

Unlike the English, Welsh or Irish, we've got a proper Saint. Mentioned in the Bible. No harm to the Welsh and the Irish but although their patron Saints were clearly real, and Godly, people, their Sanctitude clearly depends on the endorsement of the Church of Rome. As for the English: well, let's be honest, who has ever actually seen a dragon?

But St Andrew is a proper Saint. Undisputed before or after 1560. Brother of St Peter (and although no doubt Eck would assert the more distinguished brother, most of us would settle for simply brother). One of the Disciples. As I say, a proper Saint.

I do, however, accept that he may not actually have been born on 30th November. Good though the Romans were at record keeping it is probably unrealistic to hope that this could ever be conclusively be established.

I'm also reasonably certain that he never set foot on Scottish soil. Having been born in the Mediterranean, and benefiting from Divine Guidance, for him to have ended up in Fife would have marked Him out not as a Saint but as an idiot.

Now, how can I write all of the above, I hope at least, reasonably wittily.

Because personal history is important. What you learn through it, but also how you learn from it. So. as someone brought up (baptised but not confirmed) in the Church of Scotland, I can pick up the distinction between undisputed Saints and.......others. Pick that up even while I recognise that the most Presbyterian of Ministers will never have referred to (merely) Francis of Assisi.

Religion remains important in much more significant and potentially embarrassing terms than we care to acknowledge.

When I first set up my own business my relationship manager at the Royal Bank (whom henceforward I will call "Shug" provided me with a great deal of assistance. I'd never really worked for myself; being a partner in a larger Firm didn't really count. So. getting the balance right between an initial, and repayable, capital loan and a working overdraft was uncharted territory and Shug undoubtedly helped me to negotiate my way through it.

So, when five years later, Shug told me he was leaving the Bank to set up his own business and asked for my help with the legal work I was only too happy to assist.

Until Christmas.

At Christmas each year my Firm sends, I suppose somewhat cynically, Christmas Cards to our most valued clients. Or at least to those not currently in Barlinnie.

But there was a problem with Shug. Because that wasn't (as you'll already have guessed) his real name. It was, and even now I hesitate to confess this, possible to conclude from his real name (and more reprehensibly still, his skin colour) that he was unlikely to be of a Christian confession. Almost as certainly as it was possible to conclude that Patrick O'Donnell from Croy was unlikely to be unhappy when his Christmas card dropped through the door. Particularly if Our Lady featured prominently.

So, shame on me, Shug's contentious card sat on my desk until Christmas Eve. When we received one from him.

Now, in the West of Scotland, the word "bastard" has a much more complex entymology than a mere reference to the legitimacy of one's parentage. Or even to an actual insult. And it was in that context that I looked at this particular Christmas card. Thinking that I had no opportunity to reciprocrate. Bastard.

So today is Scotland's day. St Andrew's day. And you don't have to a believer to think that. But you also don't need to dismiss the sentiment/history/theology behind it.

So, as a self professed agnostic....

God bless Scotland.

And God bless St Andrew, our Patron Saint.

The Strike

2011-11-27T15:18:00.000-08:00

I was brought up and lived the first thirty years of my life in Paisley, Renfrewshire.

Now Paisley has a proud Labour Movement history. It elected it's first Labour MP in 1924; Willie Gallacher, Scotland's first Communist MP was born there; in the late thirties its textile workers gave substantial voluntary support to the textile workers of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. In 1945 we elected Oliver Baldwin, Stanley Baldwin's radical son as our Labour representative and his enforced and protesting departure to the Lords on the death of his father paved the way for Tony Benn twenty years later.

Even as I tentatively entered the political scene in the Seventies, its most important local Union remained the National Union of Dyers, Bleachers and Textile Workers, the organised embodiment of the 30,000 who once worked at the Anchor and Ferguslie Mills.

But, for reasons buried in pre-history geology, Paisley, indeed Renfrewshire was never a mining area.

So when, for work reasons, I moved home to Kilsyth in 1991, I was immediately struck by the extent to which people would talk about "the" strike. Events would be dated as happening before or after the strike. Local Labour politicians judged in relation to their activities during the strike. Above all, there was a sense that, in the aftermath of the strike, a world had been lost forever.

I read recently a well argued blog, with which I personally agree, suggesting that the Left would do well not to be seen to rejoice in the demise of Margaret Thatcher, but I am only too conscious that there are people in this community who, frail old lady that she now is, would happily still strangle her with their own hands.

Why do I say all of this?

On the 30th November we are invited to accept we are to witness an event of similar importance. Only we are not.

The miners strike was about defending a way of life. It was, even in its time, complicated because it was a way of life, working all day in perilous conditions underground, that the miners (and, for once without any sexist connotation, their wives) did not wish for their own children but which was still better than nothing at all. And the alternative offered by the Tories in 1984, was, as it has since proved so often proved to be, nothing at all.

Now the leaders of next week's strike are men of place and time. For all they enjoy the same first decade of the twenty-first century comforts as the rest of us, they would much rather, in their imagination at least, be organising alongside Lenin at the Smolny Institute; or at least Hugh Scanlon and Jack Jones confronting the Motor Companies of the sixties at Halewood and Dagenham; or, best of all, A.J. Cook and Herbert Smith on 1st May 1926.

Only they are not. The majority, probably the overwhelming majority, of white collar managerial workers striking on Wednesday will actually be striking against the Government they voted for, even if their leaders didn't. Voted for in the knowledge that would bring a lot of misery to a lot of people but who wish, nonetheless, to be personally exempted from the consequences of their own actions. And they will be striking to defend pension rights that the remainder of the workforce could only dream about. (Senior Civil servants pensions involve a 24% contribution, on top of income, from ordinary taxpayers, many of whom will not earn £74,000 in five years, let alone one.)

Now, that does not mean they do not mean they are wrong to strike. If I was being threatened with a 3% pay cut and thought I could enlist enough support then I'd be on strike as well. Nor does it mean that they do not have the right to strike, of course they do.

But, for the avoidance of any doubt, the lowest paid in the public sector are unaffected by these changes. So are all those within ten years of retirement.

And if Labour had won in 2010, even the most evil Tory spinmeister would not suggest people would have started dying earlier, which is the real cause of the "problem". Or other than the most dishonest Labour Politician assert that change, of some sort, to public sector pension provision would have been unneccessary.

So let us defend the right of the Unions to get the best deal possible for their members. But let's not pretend their is some sort of "class struggle" going on here. Unless it is a struggle between those in the secure salarariat and the rest of us.

An Endorsement

2011-11-22T11:33:00.000-08:00

I need to start with an explanation.

I was asked to write a guest blog for A Burdz Eye View on the merits of Tom Harris as leader of the Scottish Labour Party and I duly obliged.

In the aftermath of the event, the Burd asked for volunteers to advance the cause of the deputy leadership candidates and, emboldened by the excitement of a much wider audience (Her blog's got SEVENTY SEVEN followers; I didn't know there were that many people in the whole internet) I immediately rushed forward to offer to champion Anas Sarwar, the guy whose clearly going to win anyway. And not just because I didn't want to entirely burn my boats with the future party leadership.

Ah but, implied Ms Higgins, for by now we were on Surname terms, I don't want the world to think that I've only got a few friends in the Labour Party (true though that might be).

I therefor came up with the idea of adopting a pseudonym. Of pretending to be other than I was. I'm surprised none of these other interneters have ever thought of such an idea.

(I know a lot of people think Stephen Noon is Alex Salmond but I've seen them both in the same room. He might however be Kevin Pringle, I haven't ruled that out.)

Anyway, the Burd was obviously outraged at such a suggestion, because I haven't heard a peep from her since.

In the meantime however, I wrote the appropriate enconium. So, here it is.

I chose as my nom de plume Anna Kulischov, who, I am sure you are all aware, was one of the founders of the Italian Socialist Party Not being dead, a woman, Jewish, Russian, adopted Italian, or medically qualified in any way, I thought this was a pretty deep cover. Obviously not deep enough for the Burd (not that I'm bitter in any way).

In my initial draft I thought that might give me licence to comment on what an attractive young man Comrade Sarwar is but I've taken that out as unworthy of the learned Doctor. I'm sure it would have formed no part of her considerations as it most certainly forms no part of mine.

So, here we go.

"Sorelle D’Italia,

Le mie scuse per la scrittura in Inglese.

Sometimes, just sometimes, you are persuaded that all of this is not a waste of time.

With the exception of the handful who might join our Party in anticipation that being un membro laboristo del comune (a Labour Cooncillor?) might be the one and only employment for which they are actually qualified, the rest of us join, at least initially, fired with a desire to change society for the better. And join in the hope that we might find leaders to steer us in that direction.

Now, experience is inclined to grind us down. Too many of our would be leaders are much less well equipped to lead than we are inclined to follow. And too many of us come to accept that this is..... meglio che possiamo sperare (the best we can hope for?).

So we end up with either a hopeless commitment to a leadership we can’t quite work out how we ever elected, or a forlorn attachment to a choice taken with no regard to electability in any forum external to the Party itself.

But then, just very occasionally, (e chiedo scusa se il mio inglese e inadeguato) somebody comes along who makes us understand why we joined this Party in the first place.

Anas Sarwar was, with the greatest of respect to him, before the Special Conference on 29^th October perceived in the wider Party as essentially little more than Mohammed Sarwar’s boy. But in four minutes on that day he transformed that impression.

But, and here I acknowledge il riferimento americano , in that hall, and on that October day, we realised that change might just have come to Scotland.

We’ve had twelve years of Devolution. But in those twelve years no one has been put forward to lead the nation, from either of our leading Parties, other than the traditional political class. Not just white, or male, or protestant but essentially mired in the machine politics through which one rises to prominence in Scottish elected office.

That is good enough for our opponents but in our hearts it will never be good enough for us. Labour, sopratutto, is the Party of those who do not care where people come from, only on where they want to go. And of all the candidates for the leadership and deputy leadership only one person embodies that. As he did to the spontaneous enthusiasm of all of those present in that hall.

Non allontano (I don’t dismiss?) either the reassuring partisanship of Iain Davidson, or the manifest competence of Lewis McDonald. Such talents have their role to play. Sono entrambi i camerati degni.

Ma (mi dispiace) but if anybody thought for a moment who might draw a crowd from other than among the ranks of those already converted; who might carry forward to a new century the legacy of those who had gone before; who might say that Labour was not just the Party of a noble past but of an even more heroic future........

Sincero, this is a no contest for the deputy leadership. The only disappointment is that the word deputy appears at all before his nomination.

Rimando la vostra sorella ed la vostra Camerata

Anna Kulischov "

It's an Outrage!

2011-11-20T14:06:00.000-08:00

It is a long time since I was young.

But, when I was, youth involved a vista of limitless opportunity.

When I graduated in the Law, after three years at University, then the norm, it was not a matter of whether I might get a legal apprenticeship, but rather only where.

Today however it routinely takes five years to get even to that starting point and even then this does not actually lead to a job in the law, or at least a job as a lawyer, for almost half of those appropriately qualified.

Now, there is an argument that the Universities are producing too many Law Graduates, and, particularly, far too many holders of the nominally vocational postgraduate Diploma in Legal Practice. I agree with that argument but that still does not explain everything that is going on. Nor does, simply, the recession. Times have been hard (really) for a lot of legal firms, particularly those doing mainly property work, but the "Roll" of those holding practising certificates continues to rise, albeit incrementally.

No, in the legal profession, as in many other professions, there is something more cynical going on.

There is a bubble of the population who have been exceptionally fortunate in their history.

Born in the fifties and early sixties, we escaped the hardships of the immediate post-war years. We benefited in spades however from the long post war boom built on the efforts of our own immediate elders.

In particular, we enjoyed free higher education and easy entry to professions anxious for new recruits to service the requirements of an ever expanding propertied class.

And we then planned, on the back of ever expanding economies, to take what was on offer and then to retire from our labours at the earliest opportunity. We therefore encouraged the recruitment and training of a new generation to replace us at a time of our choosing. We even avoided, as far as possible, having to finance the training of that replacement class. But we also hedged our bets in the freedom to choose the time that we ourselves would depart the stage, entrenching security of public, then private, sector employment and, latterly, even establishing "age discrimination" in Statute.

Now, all of this would have been fine (probably) had it not been for the recession. White collar workers would all happily have gone at some point between 55 and 60, looking forward to a (very) long and contented retirement.

The recession however changed all of that. Suddenly our own pensions were some considerable way short of what we had anticipated, whether in private funds of potential public enhancements. And, in the private sector, our capital accounts not quite the nest-egg we had once hoped. So, regrettably, if we wanted to retire in comfort, we would have to work a few years longer. Poor us.

Except we were/are not the real victims here. The real victims were largely people we had never met; those whose training to succeed us we had encouraged but whose services we no longer immediately required.

There is a serious generational issue arising from this recession. Obviously, the recession does not affect all classes equally, but, similarly, it does not affect all ages equally.

One of the things that strikes you about the Occupy protests is the extent to which they are the domain of the young. Now that's not just because its a lot less traumatic to sleep in a tent at 21 than it is at 51. For one of the other things that strikes you is the lack of political focus to the protests . This is not 1968, where ideologues of an older generation sought to channel the anger of youth against the system in some defined way, and, even if rejected, were listened to with respect, while picking up a few individual disciples on the way. For the Occupiers, almost all "middle-aged" opinion is equally dismissed, whether it be the stuffed shirts suggesting they be threatened with soap and water, or the Michael Moore's of this world trying to show much they are "down with the kids".

What the protesters want is fairness, and that fairness is as much from their own elders as it is from "the system".

What the no compulsory redundancy policy in the public sector means, in practice, is that, for a period, under employment will be subsidised. More significantly however, when things do eventually pick up, the first consequence will not be fresh employment but rather the fuller utilisation of those already "on the books".

What opposition to the liberalisation of professional services means is a continued regulatory protection of those already in the fortuitous inside.

Now, I can see the arguments for such an approach. Those already employed will have commitments and obligations arising from that employment. But I can also see how things might look very different if I had never had the benefit of that secure employment in the first place.

The most striking example of all is in the question of the state retirement age. There are apparently so many of us impending retirees that the state can't afford to pay everyone a decent pension at 65. So we'll all have to work till we're 67 or 68. That's all very well, except it is no real saving at all if the price comes as a generation fifty years younger unable to enter the job market in the first place.

So maybe the baby boomers have to face up to the fact that they may have to make some personal sacrifice after all.

A wee bit follow up

2011-11-14T11:21:00.000-08:00

I wrote yesterday for Scotland on Sunday about the legislative competence of an Independence referendum being legislated for in the Scottish Parliament.here.

I just want to follow that up a little but first to acknowledge the debt I owe to (or intellectual theft I ought to admit from) Love & Garbage here and here and the Peat Worrier here .

There is a commentary on the piece on the Scotland on Sunday site which I want to comment on as it helps me develop my own argument, so I set the comment itself out in full.

One of the advantages of this being my blog is that I can choose to insert my comments to my own best advantage. A bit like St Jerome in another context

"So Ian Smart advised Wendy to "bring it on" even though a referendum was illegal". I didn't say it was illegal. I would never advise anybody to do anything illegal. I'm a lawyer! I said that we were aware of the vires issues but had our own strategy to deal with that if required. The whole point is that apparently the Scottish Government do not have a fall back strategy and don't apparently care. "He and the team around him was unsure that such a move was within the legislative competence of the devolved parliament. But surely he knew that in 1994 Labour-run Strathclyde Region held a referendum into water privatisation - a policy being put forward by the Tory government of the day at Westminster. This referendum delivered a massive NO vote to the Tory policy and so it was not brought forward in Scotland. A local authority, it seems, has greater power than our current parliament. An opposition party was able to hold a referendum on a specific issue of Government policy and affect change". This was, until recently my own, legal view. I've changed my opinion because of the contrary weight of much more eminent legal views. I can't just ignore that. Neither can the SNP. "You know when a lifelong Labour supporter starts upholding the rule of the Crown in Parliament that something has gone wrong in Labour's ranks. A party that once thought of themselves as socialists are now giving a good impression of being Unionists and Royalists". I wrote this article wearing two hats. I'm not defending the concept of the ultimate authority of the Crown in Parliament, I'm simply pointing out that it will be the Law applied by the Courts, whether I like it or not. "And this before they even choose their leader and their future strategy. Or has it already been chosen for the future incumbent? The notion that the people are sovereign was, of course, brought up by Labour and the Lib Dems in the 1980s in the Claim of Right. It claimed: "We, gathered as the Constitutional Convention, do hereby acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of government best suited to their needs, and do hereby declare that in all our actions and deliberations their interests shall be paramount." Labour signed up to that. The Lib Dems signed up to that. It seems still a good democratic basis for modern Parliament - that the people are sovereign, not the crown". I agree! The point is not my view but that of Lord Hope and the late Lord Rodger. In my opinion, Whaley v Watson was a huge missed opportunity but one of the reasons it was missed was because Roseanna, then the SNP Justice spokesman welcomed the decision on the basis that she was opposed to any absolute parliamentary sovereignty, Scottish or British. You can't have your cake and eat it "Ian Smart now wants us to believe that Labour have abandoned their principled stance on the sovereignty of the people because that particular democratic stance is a "reserved issue". We've not abandoned it, we just recognise that it is not the view of the Courts and that this won't change without a revolution. And we have never been very keen on revolutions."No more are Labour the party of democratic struggle but are instead an agent of the establishment at Westminster. There must be many in their ranks who find this galling. If the Labour-run Strathclyde region could hold a referendum against the sitting Westminster government's policy on water privatisation; if the Labour party and Lib Dems could sign up to a Claim of Right that said the people were sovereign; then I'm sure we can carry on with our indicative referendum on independence. And the only schism that I see at present is the one the Labour party are feverishly trying to keep down. How long will the supporters of devo-max toe the Unionist line?" This issue has got nothing to do with Devo-Max. Devo-Max would still be Devo; an agreed division of powers between Holyrrood and Westminster. That's one of the reasons why there is no point in having a Devo Max question. It cannot be acheived unilaterally. Unlike, dare I concede it, Independence.

Why however is any of this important?

The SNP are not an insurrectionist Party, any more than is the Labour Party. They choose to operate within the rule of law. There is therefor no question of them simply firing ahead with a referendum if such an initiative is declared ultra vires. In the absence of proper legal authority they would anyway be unable to instruct or secure the voluntary co-operation of the thousands of returning officers, polling and counting staff or police officers required to conduct a referendum.

So, if there is no power under the Scotland Act to hold a Referendum. And to be no request to Westminster to amend the 1998 Act or to legislate for a Referendum directly, then there is going to be no Referendum. I think the Scottish Government know that. I repeat, as I have been for months, that this is deliberate.

If they would just concede that publicly: that they can't, no matter how regrettably for them, win an Independence vote or, better still, concede that, as they clearly almost did when flirting with Independence-lite, that full "Independence" is an illusory concept anyway then maybe we could all sit down and discuss possible improvements to Calman. A start might involve the concession by them that you can assign but not devolve VAT under European Union Law and that, in a unitary State,differential Corporation Tax is a non-starter. A starting point for us that a devolved benefits system, on the other hand, would be a meaningful tool of meso-economic policy and has got to be worth looking at.

Both sides are however trapped by their history so I accept that none of that is going to happen.

Ordine and Ordini

2011-11-09T09:13:00.000-08:00

My hobby is Italian politics.

In the Autumn of 1990, wee Mo and I were on holiday in Piacenza, where she had taught English for two years before we met. There was, at the time, a by-election pending in Paisley, my home town, and I was, in a very machiavellian way, trying to be the Labour Candidate without appearing to be interested in the post. As it transpired, I was not Machiavelli.

I was nonetheless amazed by the reaction of our Italian friends to the possibility that I might become a "Deputato". Hands were shaken, and congratulations offered on my anticipated future. For, to be an elected politician was welcomed by them not as an opportunity to bring about political change but rather as a certain guarantee of my own personal financial good fortune.

This was of course before the "Mani Puliti" outrage that for, just a moment, seemed to promise a better and cleaner politics. What emerged however was "Forza Italia", under the dominating figure of Silvio Berlusconi, and the offer of the illusion of change.

Since that time however I have taken a recreational interest in Italian Politics. Its more interesting than train-spotting, at least to me.

Italy loves illusion. Berlusconi held himself out as an Italian Thatcher, relentlessly moderrnising the sclerotic Italian Public Sector. In fact he behaved in office as a man as immersed in clientism as any of the worst of the Christian Democrats. The only changes that he would accomplish were those in the interests of his own business interests and those of his closest personal and political allies.

But he carried this off nonetheless not truly because of the ineptitude of the left opposition, or even because of his dominance of the Media, but rather because the Italians bought into the illusion in a sort of mass hysteria or group think that simply did not want to hear the increasing voices inside and outside Italy, insisting that this could not go on forever.

It is regarded as bad taste to make reference to Mussolini when discussing modern Italy. Mussolini was however a much more complex figure than one to be forever condemned (as he ought to be) by the Pact of Steel. But he was always also a master of illusion, indeed self-delusion.

The crowds who mobbed the Piazza Venezia to hail the declaration of war on France in Britain, did so in the genuine but wholly erroneous belief that Italy was equipped to fight that war BECAUSE IT LOOKED LIKE IT WAS.

And, indeed, amongst other things, Italy at the declaration of war boasted a quite beautiful array of capital warships. The problem was that that was all they were; beautiful. There armour plating was wholly inadequate; their crews, although magnificently attired, hopelessly undertrained and undersupplied; and the plan for their strategic deployment totally non-existent. Within 18 months almost all of this fleet lay on the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Italy had been there before of course, throughout the debacle of 1848 and the collapse of 1917. Regrettably no lessons had been learned.

Now we live today in Europe in much more fortunate times. Italian illusions today are exposed not with death but with financial disaster.

It has been clear for as long as anyone can remember that the related factors of a declining birth rate and an ageing population demanded serious reform of the notoriously generous Italian Pension system. Berlusconi himself acknowledged that. But he offered not real change but only the illusion of change. It was also clear for a similar period that a major advanced economy could not tolerate the proportion of economic activity conducted without any form of state supervision or tax collection. Again however, Berlusconi only really even pretended to be doing anything about this, largely for external consumption, while nodding and winking to his many domestic supporters steeped in such activity. And it was clear that the restrictive practices of the "Ordini" were wholly incompatible with either the meritocratic society or the open European Economy that Berlusconi purported to support. But real reform was always just beyond his grasp, postponed "a domani".

This was always, one day, going to end in tears and the Euro was ultimately only the catalyst in that process. But the Euro is also mechanism which will guarantee that the Italian Economy cannot be refloated on a sea of illusion, any more than the Warships on the seabed of the bay of Taranto.

The Italians are in the end serious Europeans. The idea that they will leave the Euro is inconceivable. In the end the neccessary sacrifices will be made as they were in the late Forties and Fifties, leading to the Italian growth rate being the best in Europe in the 1960s.

The irony is that this will almost certainly only be possible under a Government of Technocrats, immune to illusion but believed by the people. The Left is simply in no condition to fulfil that role and, in respect of a significant minority, not even greatly interested in doing so. It is sometimes joked that the British Labour Party prefers opposition to government. In Italy for a significant part of the PD and all of the Rifondazione, that genuinely appears to be the case. It is bizarre however that the Italian people will only be prepared to believe in, and accept, the need for action if they are told it by someone other than politicians. And that the Left would be happier to protest against that action, whatever it is, rather than to have some role in shaping it.

There is at least economic material to work with. Italian private personal debt is much lower than that of the UK and personal savings much higher (an important factor when considering the weathering of of austerity and the ability to raise domestic capital). In value added products such as fashion and design, Italy remains a world leader. The Transport infrastructure is magnificent and even the climate a significant God given economic benefit.

The real tragedy of this is that not that the Italians wont sort all of this; they will and the good times will return. No, the tragedy is that, unless there is a change in the national character, at some point in the future, in some way as yet unforseen, it will all happen again.

That's the consequence of obsession with the bella figura.

AMONG THE ALIEN CORN

2011-11-06T11:01:00.000-08:00

I blogged a bit back about how speechwriting was a transferrable skill between Parties.

I’m today going to try and see if the same applies to policymaking.

Ruth Davidson has just won a notable victory in the Tory Leadership election but even her supporters concede that her central message was that of a new image for the Tories in Scotland and that her campaign was a bit policy light.

On the back of that I dared myself on Twitter to come up with ten new policy ideas for the Scottish Tories.

Initially I anticipated undertaking this as a bit of a joke: Insisting that a picture of the Queen be displayed in every classroom; offering a state guarantee to Rangers finances; making the speaking of French in public a criminal offence.............that sort of thing.

But actually, as I set about the task, I realised that Scotland needs some new thinking on the right. A clash of ideas is essential in a democracy. And, anyway, there are precious few ideas coming from either the Scottish Government or my own Party.

I start with a number of caveats.

Firstly, I should make clear that most of the policy proposals I make are ones which I personally would vehemently oppose. I don’t therefor urge them on the Tories; indeed I would urge the Country not to vote for them if offered. They are mainly evil Tory policies. That’s the point really.

Secondly, I have ranted a bit about the SNP presuming to dictate what the policy of the Scottish Labour Party “ought to be” on the Constitution. So, for the avoidance of any doubt, this is just a bit of whimsy. Parties have the right to decide their own policies.

Thirdly, I have ignored things which any proper Tory Administration would presumably do anyway, such as privatise Scottish Water or reform the NHS on the Lansley Model.

Fourthly, although I tried to stick to devolved matters, there has, I acknowledge, been a little drift.

So, here we go.

1. Scotland has too many politicians. The Scottish Parliament’s 129 was based on there being 72 UK parliamentary Constituencies and enough list members to achieve proportionality. There will soon be 51 UK Constituencies so the numbers at Holyrood should come down to 90 or so. The workload could easily be undertaken by the Parliament sitting more than two and a half days a week and beyond 5 pm when required.

2. Scotland has too many Councils and Councillors. Local Government should be re-organised on broadly a County (or combination of Counties) basis. The exceptions would be Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. They should be “City Counties”, with directly elected Provosts. The target should be to halve the number of Councils and Councillors in the process.

3. The Council Tax national freeze should be ended. Rather, each four years coinciding with the Council elections in each Local Authority area there should be a local referendum on whether the elected Council could vary the current Council Tax during its four year term.

4. The integrity of the Scottish Education system should be restored. Pass rates at each given grade should be a percentage of those sitting the exam. That’s what employers and Universities want to know. How good the pupil is, not how good their teacher was in passing a bar set by other teachers.

5. The minimum wage should be abolished for graduates. The minimum wage is there to protect the vulnerable from being exploited, not to prevent the well informed from making a “well- informed” decision as to how they might best forward their career.

6. Voluntary redundancy should be made illegal in the public sector. If redundancies are required the public is entitled to keep the most talented and not put up with those who won’t volunteer as they are largely unemployable elsewhere. Employers must be forced to select on the basis of getting rid of those of least use to the public.

7. Free Broadband should be immediately installed on all Scotrail Inter-City services. Short term this should be paid for by abolishing free bus travel for over sixties still in the Labour Market. Long term it should go on ticket prices.

8. Parents should automatically lose all parental rights in respect of a child who has been in the continuous residential care of a local authority for more than twelve months. Any court proceedings thereafter should start with a strong presumption against the child ever being returned to the Parent.

9. It should be possible for Local Authorities, with the agreement of Government to abolish all planning controls over large geographical areas. Planning delays are inimical to enterprise and an unaffordable luxury in current economic circumstances.

10. The prescription of medicinal heroin should be introduced and become a principal tool in drugs sentencing policy.

So, there we are. Small Government, libertarian, business friendly, guaranteed to give large parts of the Scottish establishment heart-failure. I enjoyed that.

Currency is Important

2011-11-03T13:04:00.000-07:00

I was for the Euro. By that I mean for British participation. Oddly, in light of subsequent events, one of the main reasons I was for it was because I believed that it might, in time, allow Scotland, in the Euro, to advance a differential taxation and spending approach from that pervailing in England and Wales.

I believed then, as I do now, that an "Independent" Scotland, still tried to a Sterling Currency zone in the control of our much larger neighbour, would be no Independence at all, within or outwith the Union.

And that even a much more fiscally devolved Scotland would have the same basic problem.

If ever however it was ever demonstrated that for the SNP, "Independence" is really only about flags and anthems, then it must be their attitude to the currency. Having been for the Euro, when that was popular, they now have decided that their preferred currency would be Sterling. They seem to have no conception that a Country trading in the currency of the "Bank of England", would not be an "Independent" Country at all. Indeed, as the Greeks are discovering in a different context, it might not even be a true democracy.

But the most revealing aspect of this at all is the reason that the SNP regard continued participation in Sterling as being important. Sterling remains a major trading currency. It therefore remains unlikely that it would go down the tubes overnight. And allows those who control it at least some freedom of action.

At the moment we, the Scots, do not control Sterling, but we have some degree of limited influence over it. Logically however, if it was not our currency, but only one we were borrowing, then it would not be for us to have even that degree of limited influence. The illusory "English bastards" might decide to be actual "English bastards". After all, what duty would they then owe to us?

So, if we do not have that influence over the currency, what is the point in having the currency at all?

There was a time when the SNP advanced the idea of a return to the Pound Scots. Indeed, I am old enough to remember when their main alleged reservation about such a currency was that, such would be the oil riches of an Independent Scotland, the value of this currency would make our other exports uncompetitive.

People however didn't believe them. They worried that, if the Nats were wrong in this analysis, then the result would involve the cost of a fortnight's holiday in Benidorm being suddenly transformed into the price of a single Cerveza. And raise major questions as to why any "foreigner" would want to invest their private pension fund with a Life Company trading in that currency.

So we now have an SNP Policy that would, in their own argument, tie a rich and prosperous Scotland to Sterling, the currency of a foreign country at a time when that foreign country was being rendered almost bankrupt by the removal of the riches of "Scotland's Oil" which they've been stealing from us all these years. Yet despite that shock to the English system they will remain willing to assist in this process. You could not make this up. Even if the SNP have.

It's not how you start its how you finish

2011-11-01T17:02:00.000-07:00

One of the things about this blogging is that it can go to your head.

After I posted my blog "I Despair" all sorts of people weighed in to say what an insightful (cough, cough) piece it was. The problem was that they weren't my people. My people are still living in the fantasy land where either Johann or the other excellent candidate will, given better organisation, sweep Alex Salmond aside in four and a half years time. It appears, in their analysis, that despite Johann and Ken being respectively the No Change Candidate and the No Hope Candidate, both would nonetheless be more than adequate to that task when the time comes. Time will tell.

In the meantime, I really, really don't like the underlying philosophy of the SNP.

There is probably no Labour figure with whom I have disagreed more, over the years, than Brian Wilson.

But in the new chapters of David Torrance's biography of Alex Salmond there is a quite brilliant insight by Brian.

The consequence of a Scottish Parliament dominated by the SNP has not been radical change but rather no change at all.

Brian makes the telling comparison with Fianna Fail. In pastiche "Until we have a United Ireland then nothing must delay its achievement"

Any since any bold policy initiative is controversial, then, to avoid controversy, avoid any bold policy. More so still if you start off in a minority.

We are all familiar with the sort of newspaper letter that starts "I have always been a supporter of Party A, but because of policy B, I will never vote for them again."

So are the SNP.

Consequently, for the next four years, there will not be a policy B, or indeed a policy C, D or E. Or indeed a policy F, G, H or.................continue to the end of the alphabet and beyond. Because if to advance any one of these hypothetical bold policies might lose a single vote from the cause of "Independence" then it is not worth the risk.

The press reaction to the SNP's first post election legislative programme was a snore fest. But the Scottish Government's response was not to address this on its merits but rather to try to move the agenda back on to the national question. Because, for them, that is the only question which is really important.

Now at this point I could happily set off on a list of things which ought actually to be important to the Scottish Government, starting with the poverty of opportunity which afflicts so many of our young people. But that would require me to have opinions and make judgements. And, regretttably, neither opinions or judgements
are the way to prosper in current Scottish politics. As I fear either Johann or the other excellent candidate might be about to demonstrate to their temporary advantage.

2011-10-30T17:02:00.000-07:00

There is an advert at the moment for Jamie Oliver's new series "Tasty Britannia". The Nats should watch these adverts for they demonstrate how easy it would be for the "unionists" to win an Independence Referendum. As Jamie boasts that he will go round the country sampling regional and national cuisine, we, in Scotland all sit and watch this silently insisting that when he comes here he will find our curries are a match for anybody's. Nobody for a moment thinks we should tell him to f off to his own country.

For we don't for even five seconds think of Jamie Oliver, cheeky Essex chappie that he undoubtedly is,.... we do not for five seconds think of him as an evil English oppressor.

There has been a lot of talk as to who might lead the "No" campaign. Various cosmopolitan Scotsmen are suggested: Billy Connolly; Lorraine Kelly; Euan McGregor. That would be daft. Popular sentiment insists that "proper" Scottish people would live here and be as miserable as the rest of us.

No, the No campaign should be led by an English person. Obviously not just any English person. The likes of Sir Clive Woodward or Nick Faldo would clearly be a mistake. As would, I regret to inform my Tory readers, either Nick Clegg or David Cameron.

I myself quite fancy Alesha Dixon.

Anyway, getting back to the politics, my number one choice would be Peter Kay. Let's see even Eck try to persuade us that we are living under his yoke, or indeed the yoke of anybody he's ever met. Or that we should look forward to regarding him as a foreigner.

Now, I'm just an amateur, with no access to current private polling or focus group work. Yet even I can put this idea together since the end of tonight's Downton Abbey, (A programme which, being about English Toffs, the STV hierarchy once thought would be of no interest to Scots).

The problem about the current political situation in Scotland is that the SNP, in a desperate attempt to keep together the coalition that delivers even a 34% vote for Independence can't do anything bold at all. And yet aware that this sort of vote is the best they can do without any sort of coherent opposition, they can't even move forward on the National question.

So the result is atrophy. Not atrophy on the constitution. Atrophy on any sort of public policy initiative.

I keep banging on that there is not going to be a referendum. I simply cannot conceive of the circumstance in which it would advantage the governing Party to hold one they would lose.

But something has to happen. An unelectable opposition facing a stalemated Government is a recipe for disaster. That's not my opinion as a member of the Labour Party. It is my opinion as a resident of Scotland.

I Despair

2011-10-30T05:55:00.000-07:00

If the French Bourbons had been partial to Party Conferences and had decided to hold a 1790 event in response to the events of the previous year it would still have struggled to match yesterday's Labour Party event in its combination of complacency and misplaced sense of injustice.

The problem with the Scottish Labour Party is that it is the Scottish Labour Party. Like the Bourbons, it believes in Divine right and it simply cannot come to terms with the fact that others do not share that view. If the people no longer support Divine Right then it must be because they do not understand it; it is simply inconceivable that they might actually disagree with it.

I will illustrate this with reference to the questions put to the leadership candidates.

Asked why they wished to be First Minister, all three candidates replied essentially that if they were First Minister then patently Alex Salmond would not be First Minister. That was more than enough answer for the people in the hall and therefor evidently would be enough for the people of Scotland.

Asked where they stood on "Devo Max" all three dismissed it for no other reason than that it was being proposed by the SNP. Not one commented at all on their view of what powers the Scottish Parliament should actually have. After all, who is interested in that?

Asked where they stood on Gender balance in candidate selection not one even paused to observe for a moment that the principal problem with our candidates was not their gender but the fact that they weren't getting elected.

Asked what they would do about youth unemployment, all three assured us that they would oppose it! Honestly, that was their answer, as if it was obvious that Alex Salmond, or even Ruth Davidson/Murdo Fraser was actually in favour of youth unemployment. Or that anybody outwith the hall believed them to be.

Most bizarre of all one of the other questions amounted to "Do you think Social Justice is important?" One can only assume this was to give the candidates the opportunity to commit public political suicide.

And as for the Council Tax Freeze question. No answer even started to acknowledge that this had been such an unpopular SNP Policy that we, in a panic move, had adopted it! Or why anybody might have thought, even wrongly, that it was a neccessary move? Even the Deputy Leader who had, presumably, approved it!

And then their was the final staged question on disability rights. Even the question was not: "what would you commit Labour to doing on this subject?" but rather "Would you repeat the experience of 2011 by having a Manifesto on the subject?" All gave the obvious affirmative answer. Not one observed that Labour having a Manifesto on this or any other subject would achieve f..k all for the disabled or anybody else if we weren't the actual Government.

Yesterday we didn't try to work out why we lost. We just chose to pretend it hadn't happened. Margaret Curran's earlier speech summed it up perfectly. Having started saying that we had to face up to some harsh truths, she then mentioned not a single one and proceeded to attack the Coalition, roping the SNP in with their actions without a single even attempted justification for doing so. If the SNP were not Labour then they must be Tories. Simples.

And despite the quiet private recognition that part of our problem is that we are associated with being the solely the Party of the feckless, the public sector and of local government bureaucracy and inefficiency; far from confronting this, all three, indeed all seven, candidates chose to give all three groups their enthusiastic pledge of further unconditional support. And to offer not a hint of a policy offer to anybody else.

There might just have been some tendentious basis to proceed after 2007 on the basis that if people hadn't heard us properly, we simply needed to raise our voices. Surely now somebody standing for the Leadership must have the courage to recognise that it is not that people don't hear the message. It is that they don't like what they are hearing.

There were two good speeches yesterday. Iain McNicol, the new General Secretary, gently pointed out that in organisational terms, we needed to start living in the 21st century and, more significantly, Gordon Matheson gave an excellent combination of a defence of our record in Glasgow and a series of positive reasons for a renewed mandate.

Unfortunately neither of them would even be eligible to stand for the leadership.

In praise of the Cavaliere

2011-10-26T15:43:00.000-07:00

I've said before that one of the advantages of having abandoned the ambition to elected office is that I can say what I think.

So, I can understand why people vote for Silvio Berlusconi. I accept that to advance this view you have to "get" Italy. It is, South of Bologna/Florence/Rome (delete to taste) not an entirely serious Country. By that I mean that it does not enjoy the understanding that loyalty to the state is anything other than a voluntary sentiment. You can pay your taxes, if you want, but, in the end, it's up to you. What matters is not order but "life!" And life can be sweet or beautiful or both according to your taste. Whatever, it is never entirely serious.

Who would not wish to live comfortably and contentedly from day to day, paying little attention to what might come tomorrow? And who would not vote for a man who assures them that this can go on forever? Is that not why we so enjoy holidaying there?

Of course, we holidaymakers know that at some point we will require to return to the real world: the world of jobs and mortgages and sleet in October. But why, if you are assured that this need never be the case, should you not vote for the man who provides that assurance? Vote for him even if you do have some reservations about his personal conduct, which, regrettably, many men of a certain age do not? Vote for him if only because he has an undoubted personal charm?

I felt for Italy this past week when Sarkozy and Merkel engaged in their body language dismissal of the Presidente del Consiglio. It spoke of a certain northern European superiority that I found distasteful. But, more significantly, I was aware that Italian Civil Society, even Italian Civil Society of the Left, recognised that there was simply nobody else. That they had made their bed and now had to lie in it.

The key thing is however that there is nobody else. I cannot start to express my irritation at the Rifondazione, who continue to proceed on the basis that a government of the Right is no worse than that of the Centre/Left, but I cannot wish them away. Any more than I can wish away the history that prevents the only potentially stable Government in this time of crisis, an alliance between Fini and the PD.

In the end I come back to the main argument of Berlusconi's people. There is no alternative. He might be living in a fantasy world of low taxes and high public expenditure, and somebody else picking up the bill, but there is simply nobody else. And he does have a certain degree of personal charm.

Now, what has any of this to do with Scotland? I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Wee Eck has a heart

2011-10-23T02:46:00.000-07:00

I've got a fair bit of speechwriting experience.

Its partly my job "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, would you wish to be sent to prison on the word of this drunken man?" etc..etc; but it is also a political task with which I have been tasked, on others behalf, from time to time.

Since that speechwriting has been in the cause of progress, I have undertaken these tasks for love not money but, to be honest, if paid enough, it is probably a task I could undertake for any cause or any political Party because, as you learn it, you become aware that there are certain set formulae for platform speeches.

Generally, opposition politicians are for change, for who could be against that? That however allows them greater liberty of discourse.

For Governing politicians the task is both more difficult and the form more restricted. You always have the occasional other example: continuing to run running as an outsider while actually in power or, in extreme circumstance, appealing for popular absolution as the victim of events but these are not the norm. The norm, has five elements: 1, A topical introduction of some sort related to the place or time; 2. an attack, ideally involving humour, on the opposition; 3. a list of your achievements in Office; 4. what is, or at least purports to be a new initiative of some sort and 5.an inspirational peroration. It is possible to reverse elements 2 and 3 but only at the price of restricting the humour to the introduction. You can also "baroque" it a bit by putting in trills from different bits out of sequence as you go along or even, if your really on the ball, have a recurring leitmotif but the basic structure might as well have been set out by Isaac Newton.

So, paid enough, I could have written such a speech for David Cameron or Danny Alexander,or, as somebody else clearly did, for Alex Salmond. The point is however that in the speech delivered, if not the speech written, for the First Minister, the fourth part was missing.

If you know the trade its actually quite easy to spot the cut. It's here, three quarters of the way through:

"If Murdo Fraser thought such a notion was conceivable then he would’t be trying to disband the Party!

In contrast fiscal responsibility, financial freedom, real economic powers is a legitimate proposal. It could allow us to control our own resources, introduce competitive business tax, and fair personal taxation.

All good, all necessary but not good enough."

The cut is almost certainly before the middle para but just conceivably immediately after it.

And it's a last minute cut. I say that because speeches are written for two audiences. Those who hear it and those (opposition politicians and journos) who only read it. For the latter it must make narrative sense so an early rewrite is gone over to ensure that the speech still "flows". Here however the FM offers no previous or subsequent reference to "financial freedom, real economic powers....". There is accordingly no narrative sense; the sure sign of a last minute cut.

But you also don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out what has been cut. The Papers were clearly heavily briefed in advance that the First Minister would be committing the SNP to a second question in their legendary Referendum. Indeed, they were clearly so heavily briefed that a lot of the immediate press reaction declared that to be what the speech was about. In fact, it is not even mentioned! That is clearly what was cut.

Now, as all readers of crime literature will know, the real question is not what happened, but why.

The SNP are entitled to have a triumphant conference. Most of their senior activists have spent their whole lives being kicked to (the point of) death by the Labour Party. In May they had their revenge.

So they've all turned up in Inverness in Party mood. I suspect very few of them will have surfaced as I am writing this. I hesitate to be a party (should that be Party) pooper but the problem is that they, if not, to be fair, their leadership, are labouring under the misapprehension that they are on their way to Independence.

The leadership however know that they won for any number of reasons but, regrettably for them, a popular desire for independence was not among them. Had it not been so, Independence would have taken up more than one page of their sixty-two page Manifesto and indeed they would be hurrying now to accomplish it.

Now, I don't like Eck, but he is not a heartless man.

What had been written in the original version of the speech was that there was to be a second question in the referendum. And even if he wasn't to state it expressly, the subtext of that statement was that he had concluded that they couldn't win the first (previously only) question. The question whose asking, in unequivocal terms, was the one towards which most of these people had devoted their lives.

So that part of the speech was cut. At a human level, I applaud him for that. Unfortunately for him however, the shattering of dreams will have to come some time. As a consolation, unless we get our act together, there is no reason the SNP will not be able to continue as the Goverrnment of Scotland and have another great day out while persuading themselves Independence is imminent when they gather for their 2016 Conference.

Process, process, process.

2011-10-18T11:43:00.000-07:00

What is the point of the second question?

If the second question involves an improved devolution scheme which Westminster is content with, what's the point of asking the question? So we can vote it down anyway out of sheer thrawnness?

If it involves an improved devolution scheme which Westminster won't concede what's the point of asking it then? Nothing will happen even if we cast a hypothetical yes vote.

Power devolved is power retained. You can't have a unilateral declaration of devolution. Within the last ten years nobody made that point with more force than the SNP.

You could of course then threaten the nuclear option of Independence referendum, but you can't do that if you've already asked the Independence question in the same referendum and got a negative answer.

And if you've asked the Independence question and got a positive response?

What's the point of the second question?

Ach, I've said all this already. There's not going to be a Referendum. If there was then those proposing to hold it would be being more serious.

Debate

2011-10-17T12:57:00.000-07:00

I am grateful to Angus McLellan for his comment/correction on my last blog. Alex Salmond did indeed, belatedly, say just before the election that the Referendum would not be held until the second half of the term of the Scottish Parliament. He did so in the final leaders debate, four days before polling, and he said it then, as Angus's own cited press report confirms "for the first time".

I am therefore wrong in my previous assertion that it was never said at all, although not wrong in my assertion that it is not what was in the SNP Manifesto; or as wrong as SNP blogger, Laurence McHale who claims that this is not what the SNP ever said prior to the vote, then or now http://thebunnet.com/?p=878 or indeed SNP twitterer @AlisdairStephen who challenges me to " Provide proof Salmond ever said it was in manifesto. He said we campaigned on second half referendum, which is true."

Only it's not true one way or another. Even if I ever made the first assertion, which I didn't. Anyway, Angus McLellan is good enough to concede that it is an assertion which I might have made legitimately about others in the SNP.

The central claim which I make is that the Referendum taking place "in the second half of the Parliament" is not only not what is in the SNP Manifesto, it it is not, until the very last minute, what anybody in the SNP even actually said during the campaign. I do not have the time to trail every possible internet source but here's Eck himself on Newsnight on 20th April, thanks to SNP partisan Moridura.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxoIVQAHtQw

(For those of you without the time to watch the whole thing (or even the 2 Minutes from 1.57) Eck is repeatedly asked when the Referendum takes place and repeatedly answers "(With)in the Five Year term".)

Now, as Angus McLellan corrects me, at the very last minute, four days before polling, this was changed by Eck himself at least, to a commitment to hold a Referendum (only) in the second half of the Parliament. With respect to Mr Stephen, that hardly consists of a campaign.

Here I want to say two complimentary things about the SNP.

Firstly, that it is actually quite a democratic party, certainly more democratic than the Labour Party (although that may be damning with faint praise). I blogged on LabourHame some time ago about an Independence referendum being, in the words of the First Minister, a once in a generation event. I was pulled up immediately, by various SNP internet commentators, that while this might be Eck's personal view it was no more than that. The members made SNP Policy and Eck did not overrule them. If I accept that however, which I do, then surely I, and more importantly the public, must accept SNP policy to be what's in their manifesto rather than an unauthorised concession made (even) by the candidate for First Minister in the course of a last minute TV Debate.

Secondly, and here I side with Mr McHale, I concede it is entirely a matter for the Government as to when we have an Independence Referendum. That's what their Manifesto said and that's the basis on which they were elected. So if they want to have a Referendum a week before the 2016 Elections, they have broken no Manifesto promises to anybody. I don't like the SNP but even I concede they are not Liberal Democrats.

I'm not going to played for a mug here however. Why did Eck's position on the timing of a Referendum change between the Gordon Brewer interview on 20th April and the TV debate on 1st May?

Because on 20th April the best outcome for the SNP was perceived to be returned as a minority administration with no majority for a Referendum in the Parliament; by 1st May however an absolute majority, or at least a majority with the assistance of the Greens, was being perceived as a possibility. So between 20th April and 1st May, an Independence Referendum moved from being an aspiration to being an actual possibility.

And the First Minister was then faced with an "Oh F**k" moment.

I'm a great believer in honesty in politics. The SNP can't win a referendum on Independence but they are quite good at being the Government of Scotland and they'd quite like to continue in that capacity. The former however mitigates against the latter.

They depend for their electoral success on a coalition between, on the one hand, those who like their technocratic competence within a devolved settlement but who would fear for their personal prosperity under Independence and, on the other hand, those who would be happy to peril everything in the cause of "Freedum!"

Holding that coalition together in the context of a Referendum that would inevitably consign these two wings into opposite camps is an impossible task in a way that would be difficult to mend. There is however a solution and that is not to actually have a Referendum at all; better still, not to have a Referendum while claiming to the "Freedum" lovers to have been frustrated by others (ideally English others; absolutely ideally posh English Lawyer others) in pursuit of that never intended goal.

We all know that's what going on here but politics is politics. You can't ignore your base. Our base insists on proceeding on the assumption that either Johann or the other excellent candidate are remotely fit to be First Minister because to recognise otherwise would lead to Party Reform in a way too upsetting to vested interest. Equally, (an important section at least of) the SNP's base must be deceived into trusting that the leadership remain remotely interested in risking their Ministerial Offices, and their quiet but effective stewardship of Scotland, in the cause of that self same "Freedum".

I am appreciative of the interest my most recent blog has provoked but I'd like to refer to an earlier missive.

I accept entirely that the timing of a Referendum is a matter for those who won the election but, given the likely legal challenge to the competence of any Referendum, why have the Government not introduced the paving legislation in this session of Parliament, enabling that challenge to be disposed of well before 2016?

Think on that Freedum lovers.

A Surprise Discovery

2011-10-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

I set off earlier today to write a blog about Same Sex Marriage. It occurred to me that it would be helpful to have a wee look at what the SNP Manifesto had to say on the subject.

The answer is not a sausage. I have no criticism of that except to note that it is surprising to note that a Party holding itself out as being to the left of David Cameron finds itself now running so hard to catch up. Still, I suppose, they did need Brian Souter's money

However that is not to say that I did not make a surprise discovery in the process.

It was of course the Queen of Hearts who famously observed that "What I tell you three times is true".

Since the Election in May, I have seen the First Minister questioned on numerous occasions as to why the SNP are not immediately proceeding to hold an Independence Referendum. On each occasion, he has assured his interlocutor that this was because the SNP said in advance of the election that the Referendum would take place "In the Second half of this Parliament.".

Now, I have heard this so often that I assumed that I believed it to be true. Only it's er........................not.

The SNP Manifesto has remarkably little to say about Independence or an Independence Referendum. Indeed, it has less to say on the latter subject than it has on the topic of the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

What it does say is this (at page 28 of a 42 Page Document.)

I have consciously provided every word so that there is no prospect of being accused of selective quotation. Those able to negotiate the inspirational prose, let alone the contribution of Angela Constance, who, being an SNP backbencher, is, unsurprisingly in favour of Independence, will have noticed that there is no mention of the second half of the Parliament as being the anticipated timing of this event. Nonetheless, since the election, the First Minister has repeatedly made this assertion in a series of interviews and been accepted at his word by journalists of different political perspective, indeed nationality, presumably on the basis that, no matter what their personal scepticism about the SNP, they did not believe the First Minister would be telling them a bare faced lie.

(By way of diversion at this point I urge you to consider the commitment to cutting excise duty on whisky in an Independent Scotland which sits oddly with the minimum pricing commitment elsewhere in the document but which taken alongside the commitment to the European Union, also elsewhere, would involve a commitment to an Independent Scotland cutting excise duty on all spirits. You obviously don't win a landslide without being all things to all men.)

Anyway, to move on. The suggestion that the referendum was never intended to take place until the second half of the Parliament is, quite literally, made up. I trust that someone else, charged with the task of interrogating the First Minister around his conference this week might actually put that to him.

Now I'm on the trail, I'll return to the issue about there being questions in the Referendum relating to different matters entirely and what, if any, mandate exists for that. As you will have seen for yourselves, it certainly doesn't exist in the SNP Manifesto.

Before I was Distracted

2011-10-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

I set off to write a blog about Gay Marriage. In the process I made a surprise discovery so I might blog about that later. But first, my originally intended discourse.

I was led to this subject by the fact that two of our most senior political commentators cover this territory in their columns today. While I agree with their ultimate conclusions, that Same Sex Marriage should be allowed in Scotland, I feel both are not sufficiently sensitive to the Scottish tradition of the separation of Church and State.

For all practical reality we already have Same Sex Marriage in Scotland since the introduction of Civil Partnerships. It is not simply that Civil partners have exactly the same legal status vis a vis each other as is enjoyed by traditional husbands and wives. I don't know anybody who has ever referred to going to a gay "Civil Parnership Ceremony." The common usage is a gay wedding, or even to a wedding with the gay added as an afterthought. Equally, after the event, most gay people, of my acquaintance at least, refer, not to their "Civil Partner" but rather to their husband or their wife or occasionally, their spouse. I recently even had a fellow family lawyer referring to dealing with their first gay divorce. It wouldnt have crossed their mind to have cited the matter as relating to the dissolution of a Civil Partnership. That sounds more like a job for a commercial lawyer!

But the word marriage has two different meanings. One, the one at use in civil society, refers to an exclusive commitment by two people one to each other, with certain legal consequences. For that purpose it does not matter whether the actual establishment of that status takes place in a Church, a Registry Office or even a garage in Las Vegas. And, in relation to that civil understanding of the word, the married state, while intended to be permanent on its foundation, can nonetheless be brought to an end if the wishes of one or other participant changes. These circumstances in Scotland being as simple, in certain circumstances, as one year's voluntary non cohabitation.

The second meaning however has a religious significance. In this context, the married state is of a more permanent nature and is at least intended primarily for the procreation of children within a particular family environment. (I pause only to observe that even the most strict of religions departs in practice from this when it approves marriages involving those long past child bearing age or deathbed ceremonies). I am no theologian but I accept that for those of certain religious belief, such Unions are nonetheless peculiarly blessed by God.

The problem with the religious opposition to Gay Marriage is that by the same logic one should be opposed to those current marriages solemnified in a Registry Office and one should certainly be opposed to divorce. Now, I accept, some of those opposed to gay marriage are consistent in their views in that regard but they've come to live with the inconsistency between their own religious views and the Law of the Land.

But, and there is a but, why then is the current proposal from the Scottish (and, incidentally, British) Government causing such outrage? Partly, and cynically, as I say, because some of the opponents would probably be opposed to civil marriage and/or divorce were the Government proposing to introduce these one time innovations for the first time. But also because some on my side of the argument have failed to make it clear that they respect religious space.

If the Catholic Church is free to refuse to remarry divorcees in Church, then surely they are free to maintain a similar opposition to same sex unions? I might not agree with them but then I don't agree with the Catholic Church about a lot of things. That's why I'm not a Catholic.

This is, of course, the position of the Governments both sides of the border and it is a position supported by the European Convention on Human Rights. Its enemies, who may, in reality be more illusory than real, are those who are assumed at least to seek to impose supposed civil rights on the territory of legitimate religious dogma.

It would be a fatal error for either the First Minister or the Prime Minister to retreat in the face of a vocal minority to the Same Sex Marriage proposals. It might however do no harm for them to make it clear that they are concerned with civil rights rather than state intereference with religion. A resistance to the latter is, in Scottish History at least, just as important as the promotion of the former.

Second go

2011-10-09T16:00:00.000-07:00

I wrote half a blog earlier on today, pressed the wrong button and consigned it to the dustbin of history.

It's been a pretty boring weekend. Saints didn't play; England got beat but so early in the morning that it felt inappropriate to be unduly ecstatic; Scotland won, but even the most blinkered patriot would find it difficult to be overenthusiastic about scraping a result against Lichtenstein.

And as for politics............................

The Sunday Herald ran a "story" about Christine Grahame. Apparently, somebody she has sacked has made complaints to the Police, The Corporate Body, The Standards Committee, and.....................failing anybody else paying the slightest bit of attention, the Sunday Herald.

Now, I don't particularly like Christine Grahame. She is an SNP politician of long standing and she is, in my opinion, a bit of a crank. But I have no reason to think she is a crook. She's just somebody I disagree with politically.

The Herald however seems to be seized of the idea that all politicians are bent. Two or so weeks ago it was a disgruntled employee of Frank McAveety who had made a complaint to the Police, via the Sunday Herald. Further back still, it was David McLetchie who had, we were told, questions to answer.

All of these stories, of course, actually come to nothing. Indeed, in a much less prominent way the Herald reported on Saturday that the Police have absolutely no interest in Frank, as they didn't have in Mr McLetchie, and as I'm sure they will in due course indicate that they have nothing to investigate regarding Ms Grahame.

The problem however is that our political class haven't worked out that in feeding these stories (and I use the word story deliberately) they damage not just their political opponents but democracy itself. Some, unnamed, "Labour Party Spokesman" is quoted as demanding answers from Ms Grahame, just as some unnamed SNP Spokesman was alleged to have demanded answers of Frank and, no doubt at some point in the past, unnamed spokesmen for one or other Party (or both) demanded answers of Mr McLetchie. Answers to what? Unspecified allegations from people who have lost their jobs as a result of their own alleged inadequate performance would appear to be the only conclusion.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will rule on the legality of Damages (Asbestos Related Conditions) (Scotland) Act 2009. There is a widespread view that this legislation will be struck down as incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. This will be a big story. It would, if Scotland was a remotely sentient democracy, lead to questions as to why nobody in the Parliament raised the question of this being retrospective legislation at the time. More probably, it will lead to another spat between Salmond and the Supreme Court and a somewhat awkward tutorial being required for those Labour MSPs who should not have allowed their hearts, and, regrettably, their election expenses wallets, to rule their heads when they supported the legislation in the first place. On any view it will have major implications for whether the SNP can actually conduct their much trumpeted Referendum within the current constitutional settlement. Given the amount of ink already expended on this latter subject, and the fact we are assured it is the only real issue in current Scottish politics, one might have thought that the same journalists who have written so much of this might have been paying attention.

That's not, however, really my point. This was not the story that the "political" desk on the Herald chose to run today. To do so might have involved some actual research, indeed some actual journalism. Why bother with that when a disgruntled employee of a minor politician provided them with so much easier copy?

And who the f... authorised an "Labour Spokesman" to legitimise that?

A Few Points of Clarification

2011-10-05T17:02:00.000-07:00

Usually, I like my blogs to follow a certain pattern.

I start with a anecdote or at least a reminiscence. I then ask, rhetorically, what the possible relevance of this anecdote/reminiscence might be? I answer my own question and then move on to develop an argument based on that answer. And then I reach a (by now) obvious conclusion.

Now, I would like to claim this to be a unique form of discourse but I suspect that all three of my followers have already long since that it is worked out from lessons (of a different sort than those intended) learned through a youth spent listening to sermons preached in the established Church; the only difference being that the starting point there was/is not a personal reflection but rather a Biblical Text.

In the USA, where religious affiliation is not a heritage to be disowned but rather an essential precondition to elected office, they merge these influences brilliantly. The President most brilliantly of all.

Tonight however I do not have time for such devices.

My blog, yesterday appears to have stirred up a (very minor) internet storm.

Brevity has never been a fault of mine so I hesitate to admit that I may have unduly restricted my previous remarks for lack of space.Nonetheless, it appears that I may have left scope for misinterpretation of my earlier hypothesis regarding there actually being an Independence Referendum.

I am in no doubt, both morally and legally, that the Scottish Parliament can call and indeed conduct, in terms of financial appropriation, an advisory referendum on any subject it likes. The moral right is simply a matter of politics but the legal right does, in the end, turn on whether one accepts that Whalley v Watson represents the decided law of Scotland and thus supersedes McCormick v The Lord Advocate. I don't, even if, somewhat bizarrely the SNP do, at least in terms of their last public utterance on the subject.

I've already commented on that anomaly however so that is not my objective tonight.

Suffice to say, not every lawyer shares my opinion on the legality of a referendum. Any legislation "enabling" an Independence Referendum is thus likely to be subject to legal challenge and that challenge will take, at least, months, more likely years, to grind itself through the judicial system.

If then one was a First Minister with a solid Parliamentary Majority determined to hold such a Referendum in 2015 or 2016, would not the sensible course be to introduce the enabling legislation now? Of course it would. Any legal challenge would then be well out of the way before the actual intended event. And, assuming the legal challenge was seen off, there would then be legislation permitting the referendum sitting on the Statute Book, simply awaiting a Statutory Instrument being made by Ministers fixing the actual date.

Why, indeed, would any calculating individual, determined on Independence, choose to proceed otherwise? Unless of course their calculation was aimed not at having a Referendum but rather in not having one. Aimed at not asking the question because one already knew (and didn't like) the answer.Aimed at finding an excuse to avoid a humiliation.

So, let me ask a simple question. If the SNP are determined to have a Referendum, at any point in this Parliament, why haven't they introduced enabling legislation?

A strategy for Labour whether led by Tom, Johann or the other excellent candidate

2011-10-04T15:31:00.000-07:00

Tony Benn used to repeat ad nauseam that it is not about the personalities, its about the issues.

And somebody else, I can never remember if it was Marx himself or only, much later, Eric Hobsbawn, observed that all history is economic history.

It was certainly Marx who, in the "18th Brumaire" most decisively turned the left against the "great man" theory of history, while at the same time, and more tellingly, warning against its dangers.

Nonetheless, the best observation in this sphere belongs not to any political theorist but to the Bard:

"There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune."

Sometimes a set of circumstance, economic or otherwise, conspires to provide a situation conducive to decisive leadership: Lenin at the Smolny Institute; Napoleon on joining the Army of Italy; dare one say it, Caesar himself on crossing the Rubicon. Sometimes circumstance is not enough, leadership is required for real change.

I am an amateur student of the Risorgimento. I even once spent an entire holiday in Marsala partly so that I could see the very point where the Thousand first stepped ashore.

But for all the efforts of the Red shirts, that delirium of the brave; for all the life work of Mazzini; the brilliant manouvering of Cavour or even the stoic determination of Victor Emmanuel, it is impossible to imagine the unification of Italy, even at 150 years distance without the contribution of that singular heroic figure, Giuseppe Garibaldi.

He didn't create the idea of unification but he embodied it.

The idea of leadership is not a bad thing in itself; the evil is when it leads in the wrong direction as it would subsequently be by Garibaldi's mini-me, Mussolini.

So, for not the first time, I disagree with Marx. Gramsci gets it much better but that's for another time.

But what, if anything, you might ask, have any of these ramblings got to do with current Scottish politics?

Is this lunatic about to compare Tom Harris to a latter day Garibaldi? Not, I reassure you in any sense.I doubt he has ever owned a red shirt, although I don't rule out the possibility that, like Garibaldi, he might at some time be shot by his own side.

No, rather I want to talk about the First Minister. He is a would be great man of history and, frankly, he is up to that task.

People talk about Labour bringing in a "big beast" to take him on but, to be honest, even our current big beasts are pretty small in comparison. Donald could and did; so could John Smith; so could have Robin Cook or, had he not broken himself on the wheel of higher ambition still, so could Gordon. But they've all got one thing in common: they're all deid, except the last, who I fear is fatally wounded. Those who are left will, at best, have to follow the strategy of another hero of antiquity, Quintus Fabius Maximus, and await the all conqueror overstretching himself.

The problem is that I don't know if this latter day Hannibal is going to overstretch himself in the way we currently expect. I return to my starting point and to my Gramsci if not my Marx.

There are circumstances in which other incohate forces are susceptible to decisive leadership. These incohate forces have however to exist in the first place.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, seriously thinks Scotland would vote for independence in a properly held and clearly worded referendum. Not a single serious activist privy to the private polling in the higher reaches of any of the political Parties; not a single opinion former among the intellectual class; not a single newspaper; nobody. Not even the cybernats who keep insisting that such an eventuality is imminent while defending the decision not to hold such a vote "quite yet",

There is however an assumption nonetheless that such a referendum will take place.

So let me into a secret.

Alex Salmond has no intention of holding a single question referendum for, if he can't win the actual vote, what could he possibly gain from such an exercise?

It's aftermath would almost certainly split his Party between the realists and the irreconcilables; any cards those still in the game might once have held in their game of bluff with Westminster would have been shown to be a busted flush; most importantly of all, the First Minister's own career would be over. There might still be some honour in departing the stage as a tragic hero but, somehow, I don't see Eck as personally wanting to play that role.

Clearly his original strategy was to use minority government as the excuse for being unable to stage such a vote.

That obstacle having been removed, there now appears no doubt that his first fall back plan was to trick the devolutionist forces into coming up with some sort of second option (any second option) which might have allowed the SNP to claim some sort of partial achievement (any sort of partial achievement). Unfortunately for him, even our leadership, such as it is, have not proved to be quite so naive (although what Willie Rennie might yet do is anybody's guess).

I suspect therefor that the SNP's revised fallback plan is for late legislation introduced in the reasonably certain knowledge that a legal challenge will prevent the actual vote taking place before the 2016, at which election the SNP's backwoodsmen will be kept happy by blaming the Judges or at least those shortsighted enough to have brought the challenge.

So here's therefore what I suggest we do. Ignore them. Let's say to the Nats that we take them at their word. If they think there is no need to discuss Independence before 2015, or 2016 or whenever, then let's tell them we're quite happy to agree.

And let's get on with scrutinising the day to day government of Scotland while we wait.......................and wait...............and wait. Like Quintus Fabius Maximus.

Well here we are

2011-09-30T12:51:00.000-07:00

I now, somewhat spookily, am being followed on twitter by Nicola Sturgeon, Deputy First Minister.

I don't know if this is in the hope of some insight into the future of the Scottish Labour Party; if it is I urge her not to waste her time. The Labour Party has never listened to me; quite right too given the unparalleled progress they have made in Scotland since 1997 without the benefit of my counsel.

Unless I am misjudging matters, this may be a curse that I am about to bestow on Tom Harris. He is a terrible right winger; he even voted for the Iraq war! When the Party this last week booed Tony Blair, I sighed at the own goal being scored but I still booed along silently inside. Tom, on the other hand, might well have hit somebody. (For the avoidance of any doubt, cybernats, I mean this metaphorically and not as a suggestion that Tom might actually be given to physical violence. Outwith the Labour party, at least.) He's even in the Herald today suggesting tuition fees are inevitable in Scotland. He's right, of course, but he didn't need to gloat about it.

I'll come back to Tom. First a bit more about Nicola.

I am so old I remember Nicola before she was famous. I ran across her as a lawyer when she worked at the Drumchapel Law Centre. Having passed some vaguely favourable remark to my pals at the time about her legal ability, I remember being pulled up by the question "Did I know she was in the SNP?"

Now there were a number of subtexts to this remark but they amounted to essentially this:

Could I possibly be saying something positive about anyone's legal ability despite the fact that their Party affiliation established them, by definition, as a bit of a lunatic?

That mindset has too long beset the Scottish Labour Party. Essentially, "These people are not quite the full shilling."

Well, as we prepare to choose between Johann and "the other excellent candidate", I increasingly worry about who are the idiots here.

I joined the Labour Party between the February and October General Elections in 1974.

It was, how shall I put it, an institution not without faults. Nonetheless, it was an institution with an agreed direction of travel: not on the route; not on the pace; not even on the ultimate destination but, nonetheless an agreed general direction. And that was a general direction agreed upon with the people of Scotland.

Towards an end to the Scotland where neither the Sunday Post nor the Scottish Sunday Express was the voice of the nation; to a Scotland where "what school did you go to?" was not a loaded question at any interview; to a Scotland where things would be "fairer" (which none of us would know until we saw it, and some of us even not then).

It was a pretty odd journey with a pretty odd group of companions: John Wheatley; Leon Trotsky; Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Antonio Gramsci; Robert Burns; St Ignatius Loyola; Marshall Zhukov; Martin Luther King; above all perhaps Clement Attlee, all joining the route at one point or another.

And in the current struggle: Communist Miners; west end intellectuals; reactionary bishops; Tamany Hall Councillors; careerist Trade Union officials; any number of other participants. All with virtually nothing good to say about each other but all nonetheless engaged in the same project and convinced by the secret companion, Joseph Stalin, lurking well back in the shadows, that if you were not with us you were against us.

So that was the mindset with which we first met the modern SNP. Either they were actual Tories, engaged in a machiavellian plot to split the working class vote, or they were willing dupes, unaware of the extent to which their naive beliefs were being manipulated by the forces of reaction to serve reaction's objectives in the wider class struggle.

Oddly enough I still have some time for the first assumption; not that they are secret partisans of David Cameron but that rather that no Party defined by loyalty to a flag has ever been a force for progress. It is however the latter assumption which is, for progressive opinion, the more dangerous one. These people are not, for the avoidance of any doubt, idiots. The extent to which they have forced a concept, Independence, to the forefront of public discourse while being unable, even themselves, to define what Independence actually means is not a mark of their idiocy, it is a mark of their genius. That they might seriously suggest that Scotland and England might, as sovereign states, maintain joint armed forces over whose deployment each might have a veto is a construction of such intellectual lunacy that only the truly brilliant could have persuaded anyone to consider it without bursting out laughing. That......................I'm sorry, at this point I was intending to say something about their position on an Independent Scotland's currency but every time I start to type I end up rolling about the floor.

But this brings me back to the Labour Party. It also takes a different sort of genius to have lost to these people. Or a ridiculous degree of hubris. But, like the Bourbons, it appears we have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

"The SNP are idiots; we only need to get our act together and they will be blown away. Indeed, they are such idiots that we don't even need to get our act together; half our act will do.....................no, never mind half.................a quarter!"

Either Johann or even the other excellent candidate will be more than up to such a simple task.

Clearly they can't be held responsible for last May's debacle, they weren't involved!

(Well, mibbee as Deputy Leader Johann was a bit involved, but experience is a great teacher; and mibbee nobody asked the other excellent candidate for his opinion because......................better not say any more than that).

I keep coming back to Tom Harris. The extent to which it has become common media parlance that he is obviously the best candidate is becoming a bit embarrasing, not for him but for the Labour Party who would appear to have little intention of electing him.

He gets the SNP. They are not Tories but they are nonetheless our political enemies. They are not lunatics but they are most certainly dangerous, to us and ultimately to Scotland. And they are not going to go away voluntarily no matter how much we would like them to. They require to be driven from the field.

I wish he was a bit more left-wing but you can't have everything. He is that greatest of all attributes, a Labour Man. And he could actually get elected as First Minister. That will do me.

It's many a mile from here to there

2011-09-25T08:59:00.000-07:00

There is a very wise observation that a four day golf tournament can't be won on day one, but it most certainly can be lost.

The same in many ways applies to Party Conferences in the early days of a new Parliamentary Term.

Labour could have a model conference this week. Enlightened and perceptive discussion on the fringe if not in the hall (no Party offers that nowadays, its too dangerous); Great speeches from our major players; a mesmerising address from Ed and a general atmosphere of fraternal bonhomie and common purpose.

And do you know what? It wouldn't matter a jot come the next election. Other than Ed getting elected I can't remember a single thing that happened at last year's Labour Party Conference and I am, how might I put it, more interested in the internal politics of the Labour Party than most people.

But Conferences, even at this distance from the polls can certainly make a major contribution to defeat.

Since I started with a sporting cliche I make no apology for repeating the political cliche that oppositions don't win elections, Governments lose them. That is true but it is equally true that most Governments have the additional advantage that they are the Government. Other than in the most extreme of circumstances that has at least proved that under their existing stewardship the Country functions on some basis. Accordingly, even when the Country is not functioning very well, seldom are the other side swept into power unless they have demonstrated to the satisfaction of the Country that they are capable of doing a better job.

That's why the elections of 1974 and 2010 proved so indecisive and why that of 1992, for us, proved such a disappointment. The Country wanted something better but they were not convinced that was on offer. To that extent, Party Conferences are important. They put the alternative under the spotlight and, if it holds up, invite the electorate to return to it when the time is right.

But a good conference this year counts for nothing if next year's is a disaster. On the other hand, if this year's is a disaster then the danger is that minds are set against paying future attention. That's why the disastrous Conferences of the eighties took so long for Labour to recover from.

Conferences are however important in another less public way. They make the Party rules and the effect of that can have a slow burn for good or ill. The farcical compromise reached on the electoral college is just another fix to put off the eventual decision that the only viable way for any party to elect its leader is by one member one vote. The very, very small toe dipped in the water of registered supporters the start of a long process that will eventually, one day, lead to a Primary system to elect our candidates. The frustrating thing is that both moves are so.......................conservative and the need for something bolder so obvious to everyone except the Party itself. If fortune favours the brave then it looks like we can look forward to a fair amount of bad luck.

The general public don't pay any attention to such matters but they do to the results they produce. "How did he/she end up as Leader?" they will ask in time. Or "How could you possibly expect people to vote for........?" in a Constituency context. If the only answer is that this was in accordance with our rules they are unlikely to be mollified. Much more likely they will conclude that if these are your rules then it's no wonder nobody votes for you.

There is however a very imporant and enlightened change likely to go through the Conference this week and that is the rule change which will, at a different Conference in late October, allow the Scottish Party to make its own rules. Unfortunately there is a strong body of opinion that sees this simply as an opportunity for us to decide to have the same rules as the Party in England. It would however be a serious error for that to be what happens.

Sometimes, just sometimes, having a row at a Party Conference, is actually the best thing to do. It was when Kinnock denounced the Militant or Blair announced the revision of Clause 4. Such rows are only justified when the status quo isn't working and that a row is the only way to show people that some, at least, realise that.

This October, it's time for a row. For the May 2016 Election can't be won in October 2011 but it can certainly be lost.

Budget Day

2011-09-21T13:11:00.000-07:00

I didn't envy Richard Baker's task today.

Labour has to get its head round the fact that no matter what we think of the SNP's position on the constitution, in day to day Government, they are broadly social democratic. That may, I concede, be for tactical reasons; their true colours may indeed be shown by their stated desire to cut taxes on big business if given the chance or indeed their continued support for a Council Tax freeze benefiting mainly those (the rich) who pay most Council Tax.

That's not however really the point. Today, John Swinney was faced with trying to balance the books against a financial settlement from Westminster which involves significant fewer resources at his disposal. It doesn't matter that we (possibly more sincerely than him) regard the scale of these cuts as unneccessary. If, by some miracle, we had won in May we would still have faced the same challenges.

So what would we have done differently?

It must be the case that faced with a choice between freezing public sector pay and compulsory public sector redundancies we would have made the same call.

The "Tesco Tax", if it works, is surely a good idea, even if the money raised is pretty small beer (sorry).

The decision to prioritise capital expenditure is classic Keynseianism and even the decision that if the Scottish Government can't borrow then Local Authorities might do that for themselves is one that, faced with the initial premise, we would probably also have arrived at.

The commitment to the Christie report is a commitment to a report written by....................eh.............Campbell Christie, hardly a running dog of capitalism.

Even the jiggery-pokery surrounding the likes of Legal Aid or FE expenditure is only the sort of jiggery-pokery all governments engage in.

And, finally, the decision not to spend money on a Referendum on Independence is in accordance with long term Labour Party policy (even if I don't agree with that policy myself.)

No, the only real controversy is in the treatment of Local Government, and here there is a lesson for us.

There is no doubt that the budget involves very real cuts in the resources available to local councils. There is however no reason to think that this will be unpopular, even if properly understood. Just as there is no evidence that the council tax freeze is unpopular; indeed that policy is so unpopular that in a panic move Iain Gray saw fit to adopt it.

The electorate understands what local councils do. They appreciate the importance of education; roads and lighting; refuse collection; child protection; planning controls and any number of other essential functions. But the electorate believes that all of these functions could be delivered in a more cost effective and less bureaucratic way; that the purpose of local government is to provide services and to provide employment only so far as necessary to do so; and that "local" accountability, outside the cities, might just as well be provided by one Council than the two, three or four as we have at present. And the electorate is seldom wrong.

Lots of my social circle are Labour Councillors. I'm even on reasonable terms with some SNP Councillors and I once met a man at a Party who claimed to be a Tory Councillor (although, admittedly that was in Edinburgh and, even then, he may have been joking). But, even when talking with these more articulate specimens of the class, I am reminded of the story I was once told by one of the Labour Ministers trying to persuade Glasgow City Councillors to agree to stock transfer. "If the stock transferred" she was asked in all seriousness, "could the Council still have a Housing Committee?" Assured that it could, his support was secured.

There is far too much bureaucracy in Local Government: Too many Committees; too many Councillors; too many Councils; and, above all, too many employees with either undefined roles or at least too many duplicated roles.

The problem with John Swinney's settlement is that it doesn't address this at all. In consequence, the cuts will not fall on that layer of lard but rather on the food on the plate.

But while Labour won't address that we are left with the proposition that more money for Councils must mean less for Higher Education; curtailed free personal care; higher Council Tax or an end to the eye catching free bus travel or free prescription charges. In relation to the latter three, I would have other priorities, but I regret it would not be more central government money for Local Government in its present incarnation.

Thank goodness I'm no longer interested in getting a Labour Nomination. And, sympathies, once again, to Richard Baker.

A Confession

2011-09-15T12:35:00.000-07:00

I really don’t like Tony Blair (that’s not the confession, that’s common knowledge).

No, here is the confession. In 1994, I voted for him to become leader of the Labour Party. I did so, as the phrase has it, “with no illusions”. Nothing he then did disappointed me, because I had “no illusions”, although even I was a little surprised by his slavish subservience to George W Bush. I couldn’t wait for him to go. If I had any criticisms of the various plots to get rid of him once we were in power, my only criticism would be that they were not more successful at an earlier stage.

So why did I initially give him my support? Because if Labour hadn’t won in 1997 there would still have been an increased gap between rich and poor (New Labour’s central failure); there would still have been a new generation of British nuclear weapons; there would still have been a free rein for corporate banking leading ultimately to the biggest slump since the 1930s; there would still have been PFI; there would still have been an Iraq War with UK support.

But there wouldn’t have been the Working Families Tax Credit; or Civil Partnerships; or the Human Rights Act; or the minimum wage; or, probably, a Scottish Parliament. These required a Labour Government and, if Blair was the price, it was one I was willing to pay.

By themselves, the policies of the Labour Party are utterly unimportant. And, by itself, the position of Leader of the Labour Party is utterly insignificant. If it were otherwise, in 1994, in a contest with three candidates, Blair would have been my fourth preference. But the only important policies are the policies of the Government. And the only important leader is the leader of a government. And to be in government requires the winning of elections. That’s democracy.

I voted for Blair in 1994 because, as I saw it, of those actually standing, only he could win a General Election. Because I’d been there, in 1980, with a man I really loved as Labour Leader and policies that had, mostly, my unconditional support. But to paraphrase the saying of a defeated US politician, the people had then spoken..............the bastards.

It appears in 2011, Labour in Scotland still hasn’t got this. Neither Johann Lamont nor Ken McIntosh are remotely electable as First Minister. Neither was Iain Gray. Actually we all know this. The Labour Party knows this, the media know this but, most importantly of all, the people of Scotland know this. It appears however that the Labour Party proposes simply to proceed to elect one or other of them and proceed to ignore the people.

The only certainty of such an approach is that the people are likely to reciprocate.

Now this is not an encomium for Tom Harris. I’ve already said that of the declared candidates he is the one who will have my support but he is hardly Barack Obama. To be fair, even he wouldn’t claim that he is. He is simply the only the Candidate who has even the remotest chance of actually returning Labour to power. Indeed he seems to be the only one whose supporters are actually interested in their candidate being elected as First Minister, as opposed simply to being elected as leader of the Scottish Labour Party, (Although I accept one of the other candidates might not be bright enough to have worked that out for himself).

Ken’s supporters are united only by the fact that he is not Johann (and that there is nobody else). Johann’s by the belief that there is nobody else (and that she is not Ken).

In the eyes of both camps, Alex Salmond is an irrelevant bystander. Although neither camp would be able to explain why.

Now, and I’ve said this to Tom himself, if a candidate with a better chance of securing the position of First Minister came forward, then I’d wish Tom goodbye and good luck. Only I suspect I wouldn’t need to, because I believe that Tom would be right beside me in switching his allegiance. Even if that person was a bit of a Leftie.

There is a convention in internal Labour politics that, no matter what your private feelings, if, in advance of the contest you have expressed a preference for an unsuccessful candidate, in the aftermath of that contest you acknowledge the successful candidate to be the obvious and manifestly best qualified choice.

I said in one of my earliest blogs that I no longer had any aspiration to elected office. I therefore have no reason to abide by such conventions. If either Johann or Ken become leader of the Scottish Labour Party we can write off the 2016 election now and look forward to four years of hiding behind the settee whenever they appear head to head with Salmond. How did it come to this?

Expel me if you like.

What really needed done by Ian Smart aged 53 and one day.

2011-09-11T11:10:00.000-07:00

So the Scottish Executive have laboured mightily and laid a curate’s egg.

There are some really good things in the report. Contrary to reports they do not include devolution of domestic policy, for we’ve got that already, but they do include devolution of Scottish Party rules; changing the basic unit of party organisation to Scottish Parliamentary Constituencies and moving the Party HQ to Edinburgh. All good, although I doubt any of these previous failings had anything other than the most marginal effect in our catastrophic defeat.

There are other proposals for better training and support for candidates which may be more significant . This however only hints at the real problem which is that, while competent candidates will always benefit from better training and support, the precondition is in the adjective competent. You simply can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear and that applies not only to candidates for individual constituencies but also to our potential candidate for First Minister.

And on this the report ducks all the important issues, not because they weren’t identified but because the need to juggle the various conflicting interest groups in the Party: The MPs; the MSPs; the Councillors; the Unions and the feared knock on to English Party rules and practice simply made it impossible to do what was necessary.

Well, let me spell this out. There is only one acceptable vested interest for the Scottish Labour Party; the vested interest in getting elected. In getting elected to govern Scotland, not simply to the sinecure of back bench opposition in what remains of our safe seats.

So let’s start at the very beginning: the membership.

680,000 people still voted Labour in May. This is the real core vote. Nonetheless, of even those prepared to vote for us in the most adverse of circumstance, less than 1% were eligible to participate in the selection of our candidates. So is it any surprise that so many of our candidates were not representative of Labour voters but rather only of 1% of Labour voters, heavily skewed in favour of councillors; would be councillors; full time public service trade union officials and the families of all three groups? Now, I’ve got nothing against any of these people but it is hardly surprising that, in expressing their own preference for who should represent them, they favour those with similar backgrounds. The problem is that the electorate doesn’t share that prejudice. It wasn’t always like this. Look at Donald’s first cabinet. Before Wendy, Susan, Sarah and Sam took office they all had had varied careers and lives outwith the Labour Party. Certainly Henry and Jack had Local Government experience but they had done other things, other major things, as well. That diversity of experience not only served to increase the competence of the Administration it also contributed to getting it elected.

Since 1999 however almost every vacancy that arose was filled by a serving councillor, the exceptions being people elected off the list only because Labour had done badly at the polls (ironically often because the electorate was unwilling to thole the undistinguished councillors that the Party wished upon them with their constituency vote).

What can be done about this? We can widen the selectorate for our candidates. We had a lot more members in 1999 and a lot better candidates as a result.

Why shouldn’t people identified by the Party as solid Labour supporters be entitled to a say in who should represent them? In this age of ever more sophisticated canvas techniques we know who these people are and in this internet age it is not even expensive to communicate with them. And far from disenfranchising the Unions, levy payers could automatically entitled to have a direct vote if only the unions would tell us who they were.

There is no downside to this: We get candidates chosen by a more representative group; we give Labour voters more reason to feel ownership of “their” candidate and thus to promote and actually go out and vote for them; we have some right to call on the selectorate to actually work on the campaign; we even have the opportunity to solicit financial support.

I say there is no downside, but of course there is. Such a change would significantly reduce the prospects of some people of ever becoming a Labour candidate. Unfortunately these “some people” are disproportionately represented in the Party’s current hierarchy, locally and nationally.

Then there is the issue of our candidate for First Minister. Elections are now essentially Presidential contests. I might not like that but I can’t turn back the clock. No Party could be elected to majority power without a credible candidate for the top job. But there is simply no reason that a credible candidate needs to be in the Scottish Parliament before the election as a necessary pre-requisite for First Ministerial Office.

Donald wasn’t. Nor was Alex Salmond. Jack did the job for five years not on the basis of his couple of years experience of the Scottish Parliament chamber beforehand but rather of his diverse experience in teaching; in local government in Party position and in Ministerial Office that all preceded his election as FM. Why has any of that changed? Various names have been floated as potential Labour First Ministers since the election but the present rules prevent many of them from even standing. Jack or Wendy couldn’t come back, because they’re not currently in the Parliament; John Reid or Des Browne because they don’t currently hold elected office. Most bizarrely of all, if Alistair Darling, or Jim Murphy or Douglas Alexander or, dare I say it, Tom Harris was to win the post and left Westminster before the election to concentrate on winning here they would automatically disqualify themselves from the position, even if already selected for the safest of Scottish Parliamentary seats!

Four and a half years before his election, Barack Obama was a State Senator in Illinois. Essentially a Turbo Regional Councillor. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, before his fall, was front runner to be President of France without even living in France! The credibility of a candidate for First Minister depends on their perceived ability to do the job. Certainly that credibility could be achieved in the Holyrood Chamber but it could just as easily come from having served (not necessarily currently) at Westminster; or at the top of a public company; or at the leadership of a major local authority; or even in the media.

And the candidate does not need to be chosen now. Fixed term Parliaments mean that we know when the next election will be. The next US Presidential Elections are in November 2012 and yet the Republicans are still months away from having a candidate. If someone had suggested it would have been advantageous to have had that person in place in the Spring of 2009 they would have been regarded (quite rightly) as off their head. Even more so if it was put to the Democrats that the best time to choose their candidate for November 2016 was in April 2012.

Obviously there is a need for day to day opposition but the person who does that does not need to be the candidate in four and a half years time. One Nicola Sturgeon performed perfectly competently in that very opposition role. Iain Gray is doing it now. And, and I repeat, fixed term Parliaments mean that May 2016 can only ever be the date on which Labour will require a candidate for First Minister. It goes without saying that the position at Westminster is quite different when the Government of the day can (normally) opt to call an election at any time.

So, again, why doesn’t the Party get this? Well, once again vested interest is at work. The proposal for an immediate election serves the interests of those currently eligible to stand and, once again, they have a disproportionate influence in the Party’s deliberations.

And the final vested interest standing before electoral success? The method of selecting the leader.

The electoral college is a disaster waiting to happen. Ed Miliband was not the choice of either the membership or of the Parliamentarians as leader of the Labour Party . We (just) got away with this because the front runner had, depite manifest initial advantages, so obviously stumbled; because Ed came very close (particularly) among the membership but mainly because of the bizarre family circumstance of the election itself.

We won’t always be so lucky. There is every prospect of the winner of a contest to be leader of the Scottish Labour Party being won by someone declared and revealed publicly by the Party itself to have been rejected for the role by a clear majority of the membership or (despite being from the Holyrood Group) a clear majority of the Holyrood Group. In certain circumstances, if the Westminster MPs and the Unions line up behind the same candidate, we could see someone being chosen without the majority support of either the membership or the Holyrood group!

What possible credibility could such a candidate have?

And anyway, the Scottish Electoral college is a farce. Why do elected members have a disproportionate vote? In theory because they have been elected and have more knowledge of the candidates. But, first of all, some of the list MSPs haven’t been elected other than by accident of Labour’s catastrophic loss. For some at least their only merit is that they were prepared to put their names forward for the thankless position of list candidate at a time when no one believed that to be a matter of any importance in Labour’s departed heartlands. Secondly, how does someone who has been in the Parliament for a couple of months have a better view of the candidates than those who lost their seats in May having worked with these people for twelve years? Thirdly, how much more do Westminster MPs really know about the Holyrood group members than is known by committed Party activists and Councillors (or even people who just read the newspapers regularly)?

But since everybody is aware of these anomalies and even those with a self interest in them have some sense of the absurd, that’s not the real reason we are persisting with the college. The real reason is that it gives the Unions the illusion of power. I say, quite consciously, the illusion because in reality they could only ever really use that power at the price of bringing down the whole institution.

Either we will get a result where all three sections vote the same way, or at least in which the winner carries the membership, or we will end up, in reality, with a contest without a meaningful result in terms of producing a credible leader of anything. Even of the opposition.

But the Unions fear the end of the college will signal a decline in their influence and ultimately bring about a similar change for the UK leadership. So again that means no change. Even if the obvious change might simply be to give all levy players a vote alongside members in one big “one supporter one vote” contest. That however, while it might just be acceptable to the Unions, would not be acceptable to the potential candidates among the MSPs or to some of the existing Party members as they give the same vote to everyone irrespective of the level of their contribution of effort or cash. I needn’t point out that the logic of this would currently give activists more votes than simple card carriers and those who give additional financial donations more votes than those simply paying the basic sub.

You couldn’t make the level of obduracy here. WE GOT GUBBED! This is not the time for the defence of vested interest or it will simply be a vested interest in a worthless institution.

I finish (more or less) where I started. The only acceptable vested interest the Scottish Labour Party has is the vested interest in getting elected. Regrettably yesterday’s report makes only a marginal contribution to that prospect being realised.

Thoughts after the Last Night of the Proms and before the triumph of Andy Murray

2011-09-10T15:55:00.000-07:00

I'm a devolutionist. I accept that this may be a minority opinion. Many of these who have supported devolution over the years have done so only as a stepping stone to something further while others have done so only in an attempt to head off something, in their opinion, much worse.

That's never been my view. Oddly enough there was a time when I thought that there might be an opportunity for the minimalist wing of the SNP and the maximalist wing of the Labour Party to meet somewhere in the middle. If the UK had joined the Euro and engaged wholeheartedly with European integration, then I could certainly have forseen a situation where the importance of "British" government would wither away, a bit like the state under primitive communism. But events elsewhere make that increasingly unlikely. I might be tempted to suggest to say by virtue of the cowardice of Blair but, to be honest, at least as much by virtue of the lack of vision of Brown.

So we have to accept where we are. A Scotland with a (UK) Government we didn't vote for (yet again), and a Scottish Government with little they can do about it.

So why don't I think we should bail out? Well partly because we can't bail out.

I disagree fundamentally with the economic policy of the coalition. Nonetheless, I recognise that the economic policy even of a “second division” member of the G8 can’t be isolated from world events. If the USA goes back into recession, so, inevitably, will the UK. And that would be the case even if Labour had been returned with a landslide in 2010 and Ed Balls had been given absolutely free reign ever since.

So even a big nation, like the UK, has limited control over economic events. So much more would a small country like Scotland.

But that’s never been my major objection to “Independence” (whatever that is).

I don’t like the idea of wee Countries. They are inclined to be too full of people determined to prove their own importance and to hide behind perceived grievance with others to explain or excuse their own inadequacies. I am slightly reluctant to engage in football analogies but, no matter what the shortcomings of the referee a week past on Saturday, in the end Scotland failed because they were, at the very best, no better than a team who had lost at home to Lithuania. That was no doing of the referee. But who in Scotland was prepared to say that? Once again, all the commentary was of the “We were robbed!” variety.

No great harm in that if it’s restricted to the field of sport but a rather dangerous basis for a view of the real world.

And big countries inevitably allow more diversity. No wee Country could contemplate the diversity of output we enjoy from the BBC. Or the influence in the world enjoyed by the British Council or, yes, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I’ve certainly had my disagreements with British Foreign policy over the years but I am uneasy with the idea that it would be better for us to ignore the rest of the world altogether or at least to be no more than a spectator.

So, in the end, I’m quite happy being British. But I’m Scottish as well. There’s no real rationality to this but on the few occasions I’ve driven abroad on holiday, I’ve not felt “home” at Dover. Home is the “Welcome to Scotland” sign on the M74. Whenever, in my almost second home of Italy, attempts have been made to describe me, officially or otherwise, as “Inglese”, my otherwise wholly inadequate Italian has always, somehow, risen to the task of assuring my accuser that I am anything but the sort.

The Union was a long time ago, but it is still a Union, not a merger, nor even less a takeover. Although it was more than three hundred years ago, I’ve never doubted that the population of Scotland, however constituted at the time, had and has the right to dissolve it on request. I’ve just never wanted to dissolve it.

But I have wanted to recognise, and protect, Scottish particularism.

I’ve never been a huge 1314 man. To be honest, one group of Normans, calling themselves Scots (or possibly Ecossais), defeating a different group of Normans, calling themselves something else, always seemed to me to have likely to have been, even at the time, a matter of huge indifference to the vast majority of the population, particularly because, no matter what Nigel Tranter says,those who ended up on which side at the showdown was largely a matter of historical accident or personal opportunism.

On the other hand, I’ve always regarded 1560 as a hugely important date. After 1517, religion engaged popular opinion in a way that nationalism never had (to date). And in 1560, Scotland took a very different religious route from England. Which led to a very different attitude to education as the embryonic modern nation state began to emerge and also led to Scotland, by 1707, being a significantly different Country from England. This time not in the calculations of its ruling classes, but in the day to day lives of its people. We were not Catholics (most definitely not!) but we weren’t Lutherans or Anabaptists either. We were Presbyterians. That might not have been an entirely happy inheritance but it was indubitably where we stood. For predestination but for popular Church governance and the universal right to be able to read the Bible as well.

So, when the Treaty of Union was drawn up, what was the Scots bottom line? That this religious difference be protected, as it was; with the protection of an independent legal system as a necessary adjunct.

And, on the one occasion this was seriously challenged it brought about the Disruption, a much more important and popular movement than the 1821 martyrs or, I concede, Thomas Muir of Huntershill ever represented.

But progress in other spheres, welcome progress, together with the decline of religion in public life threatened that diversity and led to demands for Scottish distinctiveness to be protected. The National Health Service, no matter how welcome, was about a different “Nation” from Scotland; universal education meant something different across the Border if it encompassed a burden rather than an opportunity; British Rail, British Steel, the “National” Coal Board all had a dangerously sounding homogeneity.

So, particularly if Scottish people stopped going to the Church of Scotland, but still wished to be Scottish, then they needed to be able to assert their nationality in another way. And that’s where I come from; for the benefits of the Union but also for the protection of that distinctiveness. For Devolution. And that’s where I believe most Scottish people stand.

Now in the last weeks we have been told that the SNP’s victory in May allows them to define (subject to a Referendum) not only the terms of “Independence” but also the terms of devolution.

I’ve always believed devolution might be improved. Within the context of a hostile Prime Minister, the original Scotland Bill was a masterful achievement but on the day it was published I emailed Wendy querying where the borrowing powers were. That wrong has been righted by the current legislation but there remains no reason Drugs legislation remains undevolved; or any number of other specific examples. Equally, some would say more importantly, it seems to me that the taxation powers of the Parliament could be strengthened in a number of ways not inconsistent with continued membership of a unitary state.

But defining devolution is for the devolutionists. Having seen off the Unionists on one flank there is no reason we should cede ground to the nationalists on the other. I am more than a little irritated by the demands of the SNP that we need to develop a different devolved settlement to enable them to put it as a fall back option in their legendary referendum.

No matter what devolved scheme is developed it will never be acceptable to Nationalists. Quite right too. If you believe in an “independent” Scotland then why should you settle for something less? If I was of that persuasion, I certainly wouldn’t. I don’t however go about insisting the ways in which the Tories should organise their affairs; any more than I would demand of Methodists that they abandon their aversion to strong liquor or aspire to select the team at Greenock Morton. I’m not a Tory or a Methodist or (thank the Lord) a supporter of the Morton so while I might have an opinion about how they conduct their affairs I recognise that, in the end that’s a matter for them.

However no such stricture applies to the SNP. They complain, if we don’t come up with a different devolved scheme we’ll end up with the status quo. Well, firstly, that’s got nothing to do with them, because they’re not in favour devolution at all and, secondly, and in any event, maybe we devolutionists are more or less happy with the status quo.

I had some part in the thinking behind the Calman Commission but I always thought it was too “Grandee” a project, particularly after Wendy’s fall detached it significantly from those practising day to day politics in Scotland. It nonetheless is a well argued document. If you wish to exist within one nation state (Calman’s essential premise) then its constituent parts must have a modus vivendi and that has to be on some basis other than trying to fight each other for competitive advantage. If, on the other hand, you want to make devolution meaningful, then it requires not just to be about how money is spent but also about how it is raised. And not just year to year. Calman makes a fair stab at coming up with a solution.

But the SNP didn’t win in May, or Labour lose, because people were unhappy with the current devolution settlement. They won, and we lost, because their people were perceived as competent to govern Scotland, and our’s, correctly, weren’t. Because they were perceived to have some idea where they were going, and we, correctly, weren’t. Because while they might have few ideas other than independence, we were perceived, correctly, to have no ideas at all.

But the SNP’s Achilles heel lies in that last sentence. The Government programme published this past week is, bluntly, boring. The SNP is a coalition held together by a common belief in Independence. But real politics is about choice and that choice is measured on a left/right spectrum. Across the world, the Left is for higher taxes and collective provision while the Right for lower taxes and individual initiative. The Left is for personal liberty while the Right is for the maintenance of order; the Left stands for the essential goodness of creation while the Right persists with original sin.

But to hold their coalition together, the SNP can’t address these universal choices. So the only solution is to choose to do nothing at all.

As a result, Scotland will stand still for the next three years. Nothing wrong with that if we were already a happy and contented Nation. But we’re not. Our health statistics are appalling; our proud education tradition is being bypassed by the rest of Europe; we are developing a permanent underclass and such indigenous industry as we have left has neither support nor even a clear future.

What has the Government programme to say about any of this? Nothing at all, except that we might save a bit of money by having a National Police Service. An initiative so exciting that it was in the Scottish Labour Manifesto.

Now there are lessons about opposition and the first is that you are the opposition. You can’t legislate for anything. But there is also a danger about opposition. Not just that you fall into the trap of opposing measures that are patently sensible (because “that’s your job”) but also because it frees you from the responsibility of saying what you would do yourselves.

With the exception of no-one (my own candidate Tom Harris not excluded) no potential candidate for the Labour leadership has had anything to say about the platform on which we should have fought the last election, let alone the programme on which we should fight the next one. It has, so far, been about how the winner might reform and then run the Labour Party.

And, for what its worth, the same might as easily be said about the Tories and their own contest.

Scotland needs change. And bluntly one of the major obstacles to that change has been the Labour Party itself.

So, c’mon Tom. Let’s have a bit of New Labour thinking about Scottish public services; or institutional poverty; or chronic ill health. I reserve the right to denounce your ideas but I promise an alternative proposal. I hold out no hope of any ideas of any sort from any of the other potential candidates.

Everybody needs to keep the heid.

2011-09-04T10:06:00.000-07:00

Look, we lost. I accept that. And they won. I accept that too. I don’t like it but I accept it.

Obviously we presented the victory to them on a plate. We didn’t take the election seriously; we had no proper policy platform of our own; some of our candidates could only be voted for by people who were completely ignorant of them personally; no-one had heard of our candidate for First Minister; and those who had didn’t believe him to be up to the job.

So we lost. But they still won.

But there are turning points in politics.

1945 was a turning point and so, I regret to concede it, was 1979. And, and here I suspect I will fall out with some of my co-contributors, there are also false dawns. 1970 was for the Tories and 1997 was for us.

Sometimes you don’t have a real mandate for change; you are simply not the other side, like Wilson in 74. And sometimes you do but have a leadership who are simply not that interested in doing much to disturb the status quo, like Blair in 97.

I genuinely don’t believe 2011 was a turning point election. In the aftermath there was little said about why the SNP won. Instead almost all the attention was on why Labour lost.

Now Labour lost big and consequently the Nats won big. But let’s not let them rewrite history about why they won.

The constitutional issue simply was not a major issue during the Scottish election. That’s not to say the SNP wouldn’t have liked it to be: they would have much preferred to have been swept to power on a mandate for Independence but, even at the height of Labour’s incompetence, they knew that would be a mandate they couldn’t procure. So they didn’t seek it. They said there would be a referendum on Independence at some indeterminate point in the next Parliament and they hid behind the subtext that since they were not anticipating an overall majority even that was unlikely to happen.

But they clearly did not anticipate the magnitude of Labour’s ineptitude and in consequence they did win on a scale even they had not predicted. So, one might expect, no matter how they came about it, they are surely entitled to say with some justification, we do now have a mandate for a referendum on Independence. But, although to some extent they do say that, on the other hand they don’t.

It’s not just that they show no immediate signs of holding a referendum, or even introducing the paving legislation to permit one; or even that they appear to be having doubts about exactly what “kind” of independence they want; it is also that it now appears that they want to put other questions to that referendum.

Now this is not the action of a Party confident of victory.

Surely the best hope of victory in an Independence Referendum is on a straight choice between Independence and the status quo? That is only common sense. Given a third option at least some of those drawn to it must be doing so at the expense of choosing not to go the whole way. And given Salmond’s position that an Independence Referendum would be a once in a generation event, (which, as far as I am aware, remains SNP policy) why do anything at all to hamper the chance of victory?

Unless of course, in your heart of hearts, you know there is no chance of victory but still hope that you might be seen to have achieved something.

The difficulty with this strategy is in defining the nature of the questions.

It’s difficult to see these being organised with Independence being the first option.

That would inevitably lead to a second question being predicated on the failure of the first; something along the lines of:-

Even if you do not want full Independence would you like the Scottish Parliament to have the following [specified] additional powers?

But equally its difficult to see Devo Max (or whatever you want to call it) being the first option, not just because it is not (presumably) the preferred option of the Government but again because the second question put would have to be with a predicate:-

Even if the Scottish Parliament receives the powers above would you still prefer Scotland to be fully independent?

Indeed, the more you consider it, the more you see the difficulty in putting two different, and ultimately inconsistent, propositions on the same ballot paper.

But that’s not the only problem. It’s difficult to see who is going to frame the non-independence option. Presumably, the SNP Government, even though it’s not their desired outcome. The problem with this is that any settlement short of full independence is not a matter for the Scottish people alone. So what happens, in advance of a referendum, if the rest of the UK says that what the SNP want (as their fall back position) is not on offer? That it's independence or bust. What’s the point of then asking the “other” question? The question becomes redundant whether or not the full independence question is won or lost. If the referendum produces a yes vote to independence the “other” question is redundant per se and if the Scots have rejected the nuclear option of “full” independence then why should the rest of the UK make any further constitutional concessions in the aftermath of that. After all, the SNP could hardly hold another Independence Referendum but this time with a single question. That would be silly.

And just for the sake of completing the logic of my argument, what if, in advance of the referendum, the rest of the UK says that Scotland is welcome to what it seeks by way of additional powers for the Parliament while within the UK? Again what’s then the point in an SNP Government risking the people rejecting powers the SNP Government themselves want and which are freely on offer, particularly given the political embarrassment which would follow if that happened?

Now, there would be some sense in having two separate referendums: the first on additional powers and, if that was won, the second some time later on, having factored in the rest of the UK’s response to the first result. But, again, that logic is predicated on not wishing to maximise the chance of winning the “full independence” referendum. You might lose the first referendum, or win it by so slight a margin that attempting a second referendum became impossible. Or you might win the first referendum decisively, only to prompt UK concessions which significantly reduced your chances in the second vote.

So, in summary, if we accept that the SNP genuinely do want “full” independence, the only possible reason they are unwilling to put that to a simple test is because they know they couldn’t win a referendum. That’s what every reputable opinion poll has always said and I’m sure that’s also what the SNP’s own private polling and focus groups will be saying.

So let’s consider where that leaves the Labour Party in relation to the issue of the Constitution? It leaves us where we always should have been. We need to develop a policy towards the powers of the Scottish Parliament based on what we believe these powers should be, not on what we fear they must be to defeat an independence vote. If the SNP themselves have concluded such a vote can’t be won, why should we be intimidated by what amounts to little more than chutzpah on their behalf? And anyway, if we believe that some of the “solutions” on offer are likely to be nearly as damaging as independence itself, are we not obliged to say so?

Scottish Labour Action looked at length at what is now described as “full fiscal freedom”, indeed for a time we advocated it under the different nomenclature of the “Reverse Block Grant”. In the end however we rejected it chiefly because it was dependent unduly on the variability of the price of one commodity, oil. That remains the case, as indeed it remains the major economic argument against Independence itself.

Contrary to popular myth, it was not big Donald, but rather the less fondly remembered Ron Davies, who first said that Devolution was not an event but a process. It was however that belief that prompted Wendy to initiate the Calman Review which forms the basis for the current Scotland Bill. There will, undoubtedly, be future changes to be made to the Scotland Bill settlement but these changes should be justified on their on merits at the time of their proposing, not thought up in haste and in panic for fear of something else .

So, let’s get on with what we need to change in order to win in 2016: The fundamental Party structure; the quality and selection mechanism for our candidates; the imagination of our policies and the credibility and authority of our leadership.

But let’s not let others direct us down a path we do not need nor have any desire to follow.

Let’s leave that to the Tories.

Home thoughts from Abroad (until recently)

2011-08-30T13:42:00.000-07:00

“Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honeydew hath fed

And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

Italy remains the beautiful, prosperous, contented and yet anarchic country it always was. And the Italian Left remain as inept as ever. Anybody who thinks we get a hard time from the Guardian should try reading La Repubblica although La Repubblica at least, has more justification.

Thanks to the wonders of modern communication, I have not been entirely isolated from events during my absence, or returned with a confused version of what has happened: e.g. “Tom Harris announced he would stand for the Labour Leadership to prevent rioting spreading to Scotland” or “Following the fall of Colonel Gadaffi it has been discovered that he was secretly on the payroll of News International”

Nonetheless, the best thing about a holiday (apart from the art, the sunshine, the food, the scenery and the fact that you’re off your work without being sick) is that you are a bit cut off from the urgency of day to day events and thus have time to read, and to think.

One of the books I read this Summer was “And the Land Lay Still” by James Robertson, which, although I didn’t know this in advance, I was informed by the cover had been chosen as Alex Salmond’s book of the year. I’m not surprised.

I, had to be fair, been driven to read the book by a very close friend who exhorted me that it represented “What these people really believe”! That there was astonishment in her voice at the time was, I regret to say, not unusual, but this time she was right; for Mr Robertson’s book does, I believe, disclose the world view of those who, since 2007, have been the political masters of Scotland. And, since the life of the central character runs, chronologically, with my own; since many of the political causes it references are ones with which I was also engaged and since it is largely set in a Scotland, urban but not metropolitan, with which I am also familiar it is a book with which, if nothing else, I should have had a certain familiarity, as I did. And yet, as I will go on to explain, it was like reading one of those “alternative history” books set in a world where the USA had lost the War of Independence or Hitler been successful at Stalingrad. For Mr Robertson’s book is about a Scotland I recognise only so well, and yet a Scotland I do not recognise at all.

Now hear I want to digress very slightly. “And the Land Lay Still” is a major work of modern Scottish literature. It is beautifully written, there are strong and memorable characters and the intertwining of their meetings, sometimes significant while on other occasions merely incidental, is worthy of Balzac. That achievement has to be recognised, not simply in justice, but also to head off the suggestion that the criticism which follows can be deflected by the “it’s more than you could do” school of response. It is more than I could have done and I will now certainly seek out and read Mr Robertson’s earlier work (although not probably till my holiday next year!)

But back to the critique. Mr Robertson’s book purports to be a history of Scotland since the 1950’s, albeit through the mechanism of fiction. It portrays a country ill at ease with itself; denied its proper place in the world through the devices of the English and unable to recognise its true destiny until these issues are resolved.

Now here I require to diverge again with a bit of personal narrative. I’ve got a fair bit of history with the Home Rule movement. Unlike Jack McConnell, I can’t claim that a Yes vote in the 1979 referendum was my first ever vote (that was for a deadbeat Labour Councillor in 1977) but I was a consistent advocate of Devolution from the moment I joined the Labour Party in 1974. When Mr Robertson writes of the hostile climate that surrounded Home Rule in the early eighties and of the assortment of pamphleteers in and around the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly who swam against that tide, I am one of those of whom he writes and, I say with due modesty (although this is unacknowledged by Mr Robertson) it was my initiative, with others, that, through Scottish Labour Action, led first to Labour’s participation in the Constitutional Convention and then to the development of the revised scheme and to its adoption as Party policy and legislative fact.

Yet there is so much of Mr Robertson’s narrative which clashes with my own recollection of events. The fall of the Labour Government in 1979 was not an act of God, as he might as well portray it; the “true” SNP did not ever (even today) consist entirely of well meaning lefties who happened to believe in Independence; and while the Tartan terrorists of the sixties and seventies did undoubtedly set back the cause of Home Rule there is no evidence at all that they did so as agents provocateurs put up to it by the British State. That they are no longer a factor today is not because the British State lost interest but rather because the SNP themselves realised that tolerating these nutters was counterproductive.

That however is not the ultimate reason I find myself so disengaged with Mr Robertson’s book. That reason is that for me the political history of Scotland, during the period of which he writes, was about so much more than Scotland. The central character of the book goes to Edinburgh University in 1972 yet the only mention of Vietnam is to compare its struggle to that of Scotland (truly!); Allende’s overthrow is worthy of a single (and background) pub exchange; the struggle against apartheid which, while I was contemporaneously at University, albeit in Glasgow, united students of any sort of progressive opinion doesn’t rate a single mention. To read this book, insofar as it purports to be a fictional political history of Scotland, you’d have thought that all that was going on consisted of people sitting about bemoaning the constitution. It most certainly was not.

And then there are the cultural references. I’m not a great folk music devotee but no-one on the left is immune from the influence of folk music and Scotland has some great folk music. But so has England, and most politically influential (even in Scotland!) of all, so has the United States. But not for Mr Robertson. It’s all plaintive ballads about a lost Scotland which, if only people would listen, would alert them to their national destiny.

And finally there is the day to day politics themselves. A lot of important things happened in the seventies and eighties. We joined, and decided to remain, in the European Union; syndicalism was flirted with and then rejected and in its aftermath, Thatcherism changed the whole terms of the political and economic debate, laying waste, as it did so, to working class communities the length and breadth of the UK. All of this, Mr Robertson would have us believe, was however largely secondary to Scotland’s struggle for its own Parliament. It wasn’t. I’ve been on too many demonstrations over the years to remember them all but while I marched against mass unemployment; in support of the miners; for the freedom of Mandela and, in something of an epiphany, declined to march against the the first Iraq war. (Although I certainly marched against the second!)

I can only however remember one significant Home Rule Demo, when John Major held the G8 in Edinburgh. That’s a pretty good indication of where the priorities of the left have lain over that period and it is dishonest for Mr Robertson to suggest otherwise. There were certainly people who obsessed about home rule to the exclusion of just about everything else, but equally certainly they weren’t on the left.

Now, I accept the virtue of Michael Corleone‘s advice that it is a mistake to hate your enemies, because it clouds your judgement; nonetheless, I hate Mr Robertson’s history of Scotland. And I worry about it become common currency.

My Scotland is a country engaged with the world, not constantly engaged in contemplating its own navel; which engages with England in an equal and voluntary partnership, punching well above its weight in the process; where a location that is my home doesn’t in the process become superior to the home of anybody else.

But some issues are simply irreconcilable with some with an opposing view. It is impossible to win an argument over regulated abortion with someone who believes that life begins at the moment of conception; or an argument over animal use in scientific testing with someone who believes mice have the same rights as human beings. Equally, it is impossible to win an argument with someone who believes the single most important priority facing this country: above the success of the economy, the eradication of poverty or even the preservation of democracy itself is in fact the cause of independence.

That’s why it would be a strategic error for Labour to engage in a Dutch Auction with the SNP over what degree of Home Rule might buy them off. This, Mr Robertson’s view of the world, is what these people really believe; that Scotland is under the English yoke and that, at least until that is cast off, everything else is secondary.

As such, this is an argument which it is simply impossible to defeat by rational argument because it proceeds not from logic but from belief.

So in constructing the basis of our counter-argument, let’s start by refusing to accept the right of the nationalists to frame the terms of the debate. They did not win in May by securing the support of of a huge tranche of the population who also supported that belief in either the past or of the future of Scotland. Rather, they won by securing the support of those who believed no other Party had any alternative vision at all, a conclusion in which they were broadly correct.

Yet our Party at least did once have a more clearly expressed alternative vision. A vision of greater social equality and personal opportunity; a vision not of a nebulous “better” Scotland but rather of a very real fairer Scotland; a vision which saw Home Rule not as an end in itself but as simply a means to an end.We may have temporarily lost our way but I am in no doubt that is still the direction in which we wish to travel and we should be confident enough in ourselves, supported by the facts rather than the fiction, that that is a journey on which it is possible to persuade the Scottish people to travel with us, as we have done to our mutual benefit in the past.

But the victory of ideas must be organised so, for starters, we need leadership committed not simply to occupying office but to securing and exercising power.

History is not unimportant and there is a fair bit of history between me and Tom Harris. Nonetheless, I was surprised at the extent to which in the aftermath of the great defeat, how much his thoughts independently coincided with my own. We need to be proudly, and on occasions assertively Scottish but equally every Labour figure committed to Home Rule for Scotland, from Keir Hardie to Donald Dewar, has always understood that Constitutional reform, of any sort, was never, for socialists, any more than a tactic. The importance of flags and songs was always an attribute of the opposition. Our view was, and remains, to recognise that, in Tawney's words, if there is a golden age it will lie not in the past but in the future.

So, I’ve said, and I don’t retract it for a moment, that I believe the best way forward for the Labour Party would be an interim leadership to be cast off as we approach the actual 2016 Election. If however the Party is determined that we must in 2011 decide who is to lead us into that far off event then I’m happy to stand beside the one person to date who seems to have the remotest idea how to reverse our fortunes and the courage to have put his head above the parapet. I’ll be voting for Tom Harris.

2011-08-04T16:03:00.000-07:00

Watching the news is not a lot of fun. Glad to be going on holiday.

Four random thoughts.

The bloody obvious reason for the current danger of a double dip recession was the result of the mid terms in November 2010 which stopped the Obama stimulus in its tracks. That’s what the Americans voted for, so that was their right, but lets not kid on there is any other reason. Or that many Americans are other than incredibly stupid.

It is not necessarily a good thing that lots of men with beards are running about Syria, shouting “God is Great” and condemning the Assad regime for being insufficiently hostile to Israel. No matter what the BBC says, it is difficult to see this ending in a triumph for liberal democracy.

Italian taxation is a mess. I love that Country; I’ll be there in 48 hours. But, as I plan ahead, I am struck by the repeated requirements, in imperfect English, that payment should be, for whatever service, “in cash”. If they don’t address this then one can’t help feeling that, sooner rather than later, the cash involved will, once again, be in Lira and paid in multiples of 1000.

The first step to Scotland acquiring a better government would be for it to acquire a better opposition.

I’m off, definitely and finally, on holiday. I promised on Tuesday that you had already read my last words before departure. My apologies to those who took me at my word

2011-08-01T16:21:00.000-07:00

I want to start with a confession. On Saturday, as has been our custom for many years, Mo and I will depart for three weeks holiday in Umbria. We’ve got a house, with a pool, and have arranged for various friends and family to join us over our three week absence. We will, I confidently predict, have a great time. And we will spend a fortune.

I say all of that, not to boast but to acknowledge in advance the easy route to criticise what I say below. I am a middle class bleeding heart liberal; a champagne, or at least prosecco, socialist. I have never been poor, or unemployed, for a single day of my adult life, and hopefully I never will be. I say only in my own defence that in choosing to practice in the Legal Aid field for the whole of my professional career, I have made that choice in the knowledge that while I will always be comfortably off (Legal Aid Cuts permitting!), I will never be stinking rich.

My day to day practice involves, always, ordinary people; almost invariably, ordinary people at points of crisis in their own lives, but I regret to say that these ordinary people increasingly divide themselves into two divisions: those who fear lapsing into poverty and those simply interested in making the most of their self acceptance of that state.

I’m going to gone to say a fair amount of controversial things about the current Benefit system but I want to start with a brief diversion into a different group of people altogether: bogus asylum seekers.

Now the Left doesn’t like the term “bogus”. I’ve never quite understood why. A large number of people do enter this Country making false claims of political persecution elsewhere and they do undermine public sympathy for those with a valid claim for asylum. If they do not have a valid claim, what are they other than bogus? But the bogus asylum seekers (excepting a very few genuine criminal elements) are not themselves bad people. They do not come here to exploit our welfare state, for they have little or no understanding of how they might access it, and they are probably unable to do so anyway. They come here because they believe that here they will be able to find work. And, bogus or otherwise, they do. Just as have done the hundreds of thousands of Poles, Slovakians, Portuguese and other nationalities who have taken legitimate advantage of the EU Rules on the free movement of Labour.

But, despite this, even at the height of the New Labour boom, this Country had a stubborn figure of more than one million people allegedly actively seeking work but unable to find it. And as many as three million allegedly medically unfit to undertake work of any sort.

Again, at this point, I need to depart on a caveat, or maybe two caveats. No, three caveats.

1. My office deals with a large number of ESA appeals and some of the decision making is absurd. I hesitate to choose the most ludicrous example but, if forced to do so it would probably be the man who was awaiting a surgical operation to repair the trauma preventing him from using his left arm, and keen for it to be undertaken, who was nonetheless assessed as being fit to work in the meantime. What kind of job is open to a man with (effectively) one arm? And who, anyway, would employ someone imminently awaiting a major operation followed by a six to eight week recuperation? Needless to say, he won his appeal, but what kind of idiot made this decision in the first place?

2. Depression is a terrible illness but, bluntly, depression is a word with two meanings: a clinical illness and, regrettably, a simple state of mind. The second of these, that I’m depressed because I sit about the house all day doing nothing, is not an excuse to qualify for additional Benefit but rather a perfect example of why you should be encouraged back to work for your benefit as well as that of everyone else. That does not mean however that those with a genuine mental illness are not as deserving as those with a broken leg.

3. Some people “earned the right” to be unemployed. That still unduly colours the thinking of the Labour Party. Fifty year old men, made redundant, having worked all their days in the pits or the steelworks did not deserve to be driven into call centres or check outs at Tesco. If that could be disguised behind the veil of incapacity (and Incapacity Benefit) then I was as up for that as anybody. But that generation has largely now passed into retirement and the rest of the world goes on.

I express these opinions not to curry favour from those intent in cutting the benefit system but rather in pursuit of a more equitable distribution of its.........err..........benefits.

Someone who has worked for twenty years and who is then made redundant is entitled to Job Seekers Allowance of £67.50 per week. And at the end of six months they get nothing, unless they can pass a means test. This is a ridiculously low figure when set even against the median national wage of £499. On the other hand, someone who hasn’t worked for twenty years but who can pass (or fail) the medical test for Employment Support Allowance, perhaps qualifying on the basis of their alcoholism or drug addiction, after an initial thirteen weeks, gets £94.25, hardly a devil’s ransom, but still a nice wee £20 bonus if you had no intention of working anyway. I can’t be alone in believing there is something wrong here.

And then there are means tested benefits. The vast majority of benefit claimants never see these. They are unemployed, or unfit, for a short period and then they go back to work. When the Tories proposed to cap Housing Benefit at £400 my immediate reaction was that this seemed a bit draconian. After all, anyone with a big family would find it difficult, particularly in the South of England, to find decent accommodation for £400 a month. Then I realised it wasn’t £400 a month, it was £400 a week!

Now, the average weekly wage in this Country is, as I say, £499 a week (before tax). Nobody, and I mean nobody, earning the national average wage, or even significantly above it, is living in accommodation costing £400 a week. “But”, some complain,”because of this cap, we’ll be unable to continue to live in the centre of London”. Well, I’m a lawyer and I couldn’t afford to live there. All working people face up to that reality. I pay my taxes and, indeed, would be content to pay a bit more, but not to subsidise the lifestyle choices that I couldn’t possibly choose for myself. If you can’t afford to stay in a particular house, move. Even as to where I live now, that’s what I’d have to do if they abolished the Legal Aid Scheme tomorrow.

I could go on but I am in danger of turning into James Purnell.

The real point however is not to engage in a right wing rant but to engage in a left wing rant. For in addition to the client group who wish simply to make the best of a life chosen to live on benefits, I deal with an awful lot of ordinary working people who are being screwed by the current economic situation. People on compulsorily shortened hours; arbitrarily renewed or not renewed employment contracts; suddenly displacement from secure and well paid employment through no fault of their own; working week to week as opportunity presents itself.

Never mind those whose lives are suddenly transformed by unforeseen illness.

And, it is they, not me, with my comfortable lifestyle, who are most resentful of those who play the system and most resentful of Labour’s support of that choice.

Yet these people, not the chancers, are those for whom the welfare state was originally created: those who have contributed to “National Insurance” but who hoped personally never to have to call upon it. And yet they are the group who increasingly feel Labour, the creator of the Welfare State, has forgotten them.

So, let’s be more judgemental. Let’s not be afraid to say those who can work are expected to work and, if they choose not to do so, should be entitled to nothing more than the most basic level of subsistence until they change their minds. And if that means they can’t “afford” their chosen place of residence without working, then they have the simple solution of finding work, not in every part of the Country but certainly in those parts where work is patently available.

I suppose in the end I should own up to the origin of this rant: The London Olympics. I am simply fed up with the number of “Eastenders” complaining that there are no jobs for them from this project. They don’t mean that. They mean actually that there are no jobs that they can be bothered to do. As I write this there will be people in North Africa and Near Asia prepared to risk their lives to travel half way across the world to find work at the Olympics. And people from Eastern Europe prepared to be separated from their nearest and dearest for the same opportunity. And yet, all the while, my taxes and yours will be paying for people across the road from the stadium to exercise their “right” to stay in bed until the start of the Jeremy Kyle show.

So here’s a proposal for Ed. Between now and the end of the Olympics no one in East London , fit for work and without family obligations, should be entitled to any form of state benefit (including housing benefit) for more than thirteen weeks unless they are working at least sixteen hours a week. Not only would that recoup some of the public money thrown at this project, it would be incredibly popular with voters: Labour voters. Particularly those here in Scotland, and Newcastle, and Manchester, and Birmingham, who only wished they had such an employment opportunity on their own doorstep.

And, just in case this appears unduly London phobic, when it’s over, let’s go to the East End of Glasgow and do the same with the Commonwealth Games.

A sense of perspective

2011-07-24T17:53:00.000-07:00

On Thursday night, Tom Harris emailed me to ask if I had any material for LabourHame. Not before the weekend, I replied. I’m too busy. And on Friday, the world changed.

The politics of Scotland had seemed a minor matter for the last fortnight. The lies and deceit surrounding the phone hacking scandal, slowly smouldering for the last five years, burst spectacularly into flame. For all the attempts to find a Scottish angle, relating to the SNP’s equal (to our own) past obeisance at the altar of the Murdochs, this has been a British event. The only real Scottish relevance is the background realisation that it is absurd to suggest that this is happening in what some would have as a foreign country.

But even that seems trivial compared to the events in Norway.

No country is immune from nutters. Norway is the Country our Nationalist rivals most commonly quote when searching for an example as to how an independent Scotland might conduct its affairs. That’s not a criticism of them, for Norway is an admirable example: liberal in its social policy; egalitarian in its economic policy; engaged progressively in world affairs. If Scotland were to become independent, there are a lot of worse examples, not least in the nasty wee fascist apologist regimes in the Baltic Republics, with which the Nats also, from time to time, seek to associate themselves.

We are exceptionally lucky to live in an age and in a place where random acts of political violence are confined to nutters. No one on the left is entitled to self-satisfaction in this regard, for, while in relation to individual violent acts we are, probably, less guilty than others, when it comes to state violence, we can compete with the best.

But the lesson which emerges from the events of Utoya is a lesson for all of us, or at least all of us who believe politics should only be conducted through civilised debate. We need to be careful.

One of the Sunday papers (a British one, not a Scottish one) writes today about the violent rhetoric which hides behind the anonymity enjoyed by those posting on the internet. Its observations are all too familiar to those acquainted with Scottish cybernationalism.. Almost all of the cybernats wouldn’t hurt a fly. They must however have regard to the terms of their dialogue; not in respect of the offence they cause to their opponents but rather to the danger that there might be the occasional nutter, on their own side, inclined to take them seriously. Just as any number of Rangers fans expressing their semi-ironic hatred of Neil Lennon appear to have lead to someone deciding to send him a bomb; just as legitimate (if misconceived) opposition to multiculturalism, expressed in intemperate terms, appears to have inspired Breivik. There is nothing wrong with robust debate but those who hide behind internet anonymity to express caricatured and extreme versions of their own views need to be careful that all of those who read them realise that this is all they are expressing, a caricatured and extreme view, rather than, instead, a coded “call to action”.

Certainly, we can’t let nutters constrain the terms of our debate but, equally, we shouldn’t forget that there are, regrettably, plenty of nutters out there. And that, nutters or not, the enemies of democracy are the enemies of us all.

Not good news.

2011-07-18T14:50:00.000-07:00

This is at least my third attempt at this blog. Such is the speed of developments over the last week that blogs left half finished overnight have been completely overtaken and rendered redundant by the time it comes to finish them the next day.

So, at the point of writing this sentence I have no idea whether it will ever appear publicly. No doubt some of you who might, or might not, end up reading it will have your own views as to whether that would have been a welcome development.

Its topic is unnatural allies and their consequences.

At the point of writing (conscious repetition here) the assumption that the big losers from the eventual fall out from the News international scandal will be the Tories. That won’t necessarily be the case.

The Tories and the Murdoch press are natural allies. Since they are both free market; anti-European, indeed anti foreigner of any sort; jingoistic in their foreign policy and draconian in their approach to domestic policy, it is no wonder if the Murdoch press would encourage their readers to support the Party which most closely reflected the views of their owner. And it was therefore no surprise that David Cameron would hire a press spokesman from that stable, any more than it would be if a Labour leader hired a press spokesman from the Daily Mirror or the Guardian, a point to which I will return in spades. No, the scandal is the basis on which Murdoch offered his support to a completely different political party and what was offered in return.

When did the phone hacking scandal start? Milly Dowler was murdered in 2002 and in the immediate aftermath of her death we now know the Police knew her phone was being hacked and at least at some level, decided not to investigate. The unrelated Devon and Cornwall investigation into the News of the World’s illegal access to the Police National Computer took place between 2003-05 when, I have already pointed out, the charges brought were discontinued by a judge in the most curious of circumstances. The Metropolitan Police seized Glen Mulcaire’s notebooks in 2006, the same year the Sun, having obtained the details in what as yet remain unexplained circumstances, decided that the serious illness of Gordon Brown’s son was a legitimate story. Any one of these events might have given rise to an independent investigation of the activities of the Murdoch press. None did. The Prime Minister at the time? Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. And the Commissioner? His namesake, Sir Iain, that most politically sensitive of all senior Police Officers.

At the highest level, the Police are not immune to the signals they receive from politicians. Policing has to have priorities like any other profession and senior Policemen know that there is unlikely to be much support in political circles for investigating those with a close relationship to the Governing party. And let us be in no doubt that when the inquiry into this gets under way, we are likely to hear a great deal about the signals they received to that effect.

I find it simply inconceivable that the Police were directly bought off by News International. But I do think that if they decided that they could give the investigation little or no priority, as this coincided with the wishes of the Government of the day, they would have been entirely justified in their conclusions.

The most distressing but unavoidable conclusion of all this is that if Tony Blair hadn’t fallen, even now, it is highly unlikely any of this would ever have seen the light of day. For while the Tories and Murdoch might have had ideological reasons to travel together, the only basis for our dealings with him could be on the basis of mutual self interest. Our interest was in the endorsement of his papers; his in ensuring we didn’t interfere with him making money in whatever way he saw fit. And if the Dowler’s of this world got hurt in the process, who cared? We certainly didn’t.

Gordon didn’t do himself any favours in his speech last week by failing to acknowledge any personal responsibilty. There is no doubt that his administration did not serve the Murdoch’s interests as slavishly as did Blair but equally it cannot be avoided that they continued to seek Murdoch’s support and that until the 2009 Party Conference they perceived that the price of that support was that they would fail to act against their excesses. That was a failure of morality which, if only to expected of Blair, was unworthy of Brown. While the quite shocking specific detail of the deletion of Milly Dowler’s phone messages might have been new and while there might even have been a “Hell mend them” attitude to the invasion of the privacy of so called celebrities, every Constituency MP knew of the appalling treatment the Murdoch Press routinely visited upon entirely innocent members of the public, often for having been no more than the victims of crime. And every person in public life knew that the Press Complaints Commission was an utterly useless safeguard against these excesses. Yet nothing was done because of the Faustian Pact Blair had struck with Murdoch and which, to his eternal shame, Gordon would have continued given the chance.

But, do you know, I don’t think anybody believed that extended to the tolerance of active criminality and that’s where, I think, Cameron may himself prove to have been a victim. When he employed Coulson, surely he was entitled to assume that, if what was being said about this man was true, something would have been done about it by the Government: not acting as a Labour Government but simply as the type of Government expected to put the law of the land above any Party advantage as, notwithstanding the political damage, Cameron is doing now. He was deceived not only, allegedly, by Coulson but by the naive belief that New Labour was a creation operating within the basic rules of morality. That doesn’t excuse his recklessness in making the appointment, a recklessness that might yet cost him his own job but, to be fair, in this mis-assessment of New Labour, he was not the first to make that mistake.

That even at the height of this row, Ed Miliband’s more Blairite advisers cautioned against speaking out in the hope that silence might, in time, allow the return to the status quo ante in Labour’s relations with Murdoch says just about everything. It is to Ed’s eternal credit that he saw clearly that this was not something which could be framed in the parameters of right versus left; it was rather, instead, a matter of right versus wrong.

But when the immediate furore subsides, as it inevitably will, and the detailed evidence gathering starts, regrettably the general public are unlikely to reward our Party with support for two weeks of action when it is seen to be weighed against thirteen years of inaction, and possibly worse.

So, it is good that Murdoch’s power has been broken but let’s not assume the examination of the wreckage will play out to the advantage of the Labour Party. Blair’s legacy can’t be so easily renounced.