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Time to help Scotland’s male politicians with their election problems

May 19

Posted by Guest Blog in Gender, Holyrood, Parties | 5 Comments

A very welcome guest post today from Lena Wångren and Dominic Hinde. Dominic is a Scots Green activist and doctoral student in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Lena is a post-doctoral researcher at the department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is originally from Stockholm and has been active in feminist campaigning in both Sweden and Scotland.

Looking back at the Scottish local elections, it is appalling to see just how male-dominated Scottish politics (and public life) is. There was husting upon husting without a single female candidate from any of Scotland’s more established political parties, and the SNP in particular were frustratingly male. In hindsight this is hardly surprising given the macho personality politics upon which Alex Salmond has built the SNP.

Then, the week after the election, people in social media (women included) were casually tossing around phrases such as ‘unionist witch’ to describe Johann Lamont and Margaret Curran. Just imagine if those words hadn’t been aimed at women but at someone from an ethnic minority. South of the border, and in a different context, backbench Tory MP Louise Mensch suffered even more violent sexist abuse via Twitter because of her defence of Rupert Murdoch. She may support an enemy of a free press, but the people who ganged up on her from the safety of their smartphones should not be welcome in any political forum. Now we’re fans of neither the Scottish Labour Party nor the SNP, just before we get accused of being partisan, in part because neither party seem aware that Scotland needs a new and proactive feminism in order to break down barriers for women, increase opportunities in some areas for men, and to generally move on to create the ‘beacon of progressiveness’ which the First Minister claims it is our manifest destiny to become.

When was the last time anyone stood up in the chamber at Holyrood and declared that they were a feminist? Who is brave enough to say that feminism is not a historical phenomenon but more current than ever in its potential to change society for the better? Not big Eck for sure.

Domestic violence, shared maternity and paternity leave, sexual assault, academic and employment opportunities, sexual and family health and economic performance are all areas in which a robust and progressive feminist politics can help to make Scotland a better place. And implicitly grounded in all these issues is a potential destabilising of the rigid gender roles that restrict us as individuals. Politics is about policy, but it is also about creating the social debates which allow those policies to succeed. It is about changing the mindset of the establishment to the extent that feminism is seen as a public good and not just a fringe interest. In the same way that the growth of the Greens has brought environmentalism in from the fringes to the centre, we hope that they might do the same with gender politics.

The Greens would appear ready-made for taking a more central stage in discussions regarding gender equality in Scotland, with their policy of having a male and a female co-convenor. Something which we would like to see more of is both Patrick Harvie and Martha Wardrop appearing and debating together, as is the case with their counterparts in Sweden.

Likewise, if Cameronite Swedish conservative leader Fredrik Reinfeldt, along with many leaders of the other main parties, can stand up in Parliament and feel obliged to at least pay lip service to the movement, then so can Holyrood.

The Greens do however face a great challenge in bringing gender equality on top of the agenda as the situation here is rather different than in Sweden. Both countries have long histories of labour and women’s movements, but the focus on gender has been left behind in the UK. There is a significant difference in how the public discourse approaches feminism. In the UK, the term ‘feminist’ is often considered a derogatory label, falsely seen as implying an ideology in which women should be posited above men. (We have yet to meet one single feminist who identifies their politics in terms of women’s supposed superiority.) In Sweden however, the term feminist is taken for what it is – a struggle for gender equality, through which people of all genders will benefit.

Furthermore, while in the UK we sometimes see a biologically essentialist claim to feminism -the idea that ‘only women can be feminists’-, in Sweden there is no requirement to identifying as a feminist beyond a support for the aims of the same rights for all, male or female.  And feminism is indeed for everyone. In Sweden, a robust feminist politics has created equal parental leave (one and a half years in total, to be divided between the parents irrespective of their sex), affordable and pedagogical nurseries with highly educated staff, political representation of women which has steadily increased since the early twentieth century (the ratio in the Swedish Parliament is currently 45 percent women and 55 percent men). Rather than having to defend your feminism, in Sweden you might have to defend why you do not identify as one.

There is major potential for a Green feminist politics in Scotland. Presently, there is not one single party in Holyrood that explicitly espouses feminist policies, or even has a particular section of their politics based around gender equality. There may exist a ‘Labour Women’ group, but the party itself has not lately been speaking up for gender equality. The progressive libertarians in the Lib Dems aren’t exactly chomping at the bit to take a stand either, and even though the Greens have ‘equality’ as one of their main focuses – gender equality seems to have gone missing of late.In the latest Green manifesto, the term ‘gender’ was used only once .The term ‘feminist’ was entirely absent.

We want to create a Scotland which is more equal, democratic and environmentally responsible. An innovative feminist agenda is an important component in this, and the Greens should be the party to take it forward. They have time and time again proven themselves to be capable of innovation and ideas far and above their resources and representation, and we sincerely hope that the growth of the Greens coincides with a sea change in our country’s appreciation of feminist politics.

The Problem with Political Jokes

May 16

Posted by Kirsty in Democracy, Parties | 1 Comment

The peril of every politician is the heckler. Despite the security of spin, handpicked television audiences and packing the front rows of your conference with student politicos primed to applaud like performing seals, stick a politician out in public, and someone’s bound to shout something, at some point, that sticks.

Poor Theresa May, heckled and jeered during this week’s Police Federation Conference in Bournemouth. Her speech, defending 20% cuts, ended in silence. Awkward.

Pity too Andrew Lansley, who was also heckled this week, not his first time, thanks to Mrs Hautot, but this time at the Royal College of Nurses conference as he struggled to state the correct number of nurses cut from the NHS frontline by the coalition. And it’s not just Tories who generate the nurses’ ire – Patricia Hewitt was notably heckled twice in one week by healthcare workers when Health Secretary back in 2006.

Trade union conferences do seem the domain of the heckler. Less to do with the origins of the word ‘heckler’ from some stroppy jute workers in Dundee. More probably thanks to an audience freer from the controls which can be exerted by political parties at their own respective conferences. Vince Cable was booed at last year’s GMB conference. Nick Gibb was too at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ conference in 2011.

And it’s not just the coalition – Ed Miliband’s first address as Labour leader to the TUC saw heckles shouted and hackles raised after he called public sector pension strikes ‘a mistake’. Luckily for Ed, the same RCN conference that jeered at Lansley this week granted him a standing ovation.

In his brief history of heckling, Michael White bemoans that the art of political heckling has all but disappeared, with what is described as heckling of politicans today really being “more of an organised verbal assault: anger, not wit; abuse, not tempered outrage; a blunt instrument, not a rapier.”

Indeed, in all the examples above, there’s not a single witty one liner of the type a decent stand-up can transform from bellow to banter. Even Walter Wolfgang, disgustingly manhandled and evicted from Labour Party Conference in 2005, merely had the gumption to shout “nonsense” at Jack Straw.

I suspect today that the Statlers and Waldorfs are all too busy being clever on Twitter. But no matter. Even if heckling isn’t the fine witty art it once was in the days of public meetings (and do go back to White’s brief history for some cracking examples), it can still have an impact.

Nobody’s career has ever been destroyed by a heckler (no doubt someone will prove me wrong in the comments but it’s worth remembering if you’re a candidate and have a sticky moment); incidents do however serve as an audio litmus test of how a politician is being received.

Any hopes Tony Blair might have of returning to a more active role in British politics should be humbled by the boos of his own party to mention of his name. I would suspect, should Cameron’s much-anticipated reshuffle be shuffled along soon, May and Lansley will be among those being slow-clapped off the stage.

P.S. The punchline to the title is, of course, that they get elected.

Labour, tuition fees and all that hard to listen to acid jazz

May 15

Posted by Aidan in Holyrood | 74 Comments

So, leaving aside the fact that Johann Lamont didn’t actually change policy at the Fabians on Saturday, something the SNP; Newsnet and others seem to be willfully ignoring in their haste to get back on the attack, is even looking at how education funding works in the round a heretical betrayal of some deeply held core principles? I’m going to finish of my degree with a return to philosophy so I thought I’d take what I covered about ethics previously and apply it here but tldr: QTWAIN

Let’s start with some premises:

P1. Education is a public good – society as a whole benefits from an educated populace.

P2. Education is a right – everybody has a right to an appropriate level of education (this is currently universal, compulsory and free up to 16).

Given P1 and P2 it seems both sensible and ethically correct that there should be state funding for further and higher education. In fact, given those, it seems the logical position is to provide as much education as possible for everybody for as long as they want.

Sadly, we must also live with a further premise:

P3. Being in full time education limits current earning potential

One of the reasons I’m studying at the OU is because it means I don’t have to compromise work – there isn’t a great deal of part time work out there for computer programmers. For other people, in other circumstances to me, it makes sense for them to study full-time.

P4. Some people do not have sufficient support to study on part-time earnings

Being at university incurs living costs such as rent, food, clothes, transport as well as books and other materials. While some people may receive support from family, partners etc this is not always possible or sufficient.

Given premises P1-4 we should offer free education to all along with sufficient support to ensure people have a decent standard of living while doing so, perhaps topped up with the sort of part-time, insecure, low wage work generally available to them.

Speaking of money, let’s add a final premise to make this more realistic:

P5. Education budgets are tightly constrained.

This reflects the reality there there is not, unfortunately, an especially large pot of money available. Personally, I’d love to bring back the grant and offer free PhDs to everyone who wanted to do one and was deemed capable. That isn’t on offer from anyone AFAIK, not Labour, not the SNP, not even the Greens.

Given those premises, how can we judge education funding policy? I would argue that P1 and P2 taken together suggest the following corollary:

C1. the greatest number of people who are able to benefit from education are able to do so.

Since education is a public good society benefits and since education is a right society has an obligation to provide it as best it can (rights often come into conflict, so this is often a less than straightforward issue).

Given C1, let us consider some possible schemes that divvy up £1,000,000 (P5) in the budget different ways, with each course costing £10k to deliver £5k of living costs (P3 and P4) and a population of eligible students who would benefit from education and want to do so. 20 will go to university even if they have to pay full fees and full costs (eg. the rich), 100 will go to university if they can get loans to defer fees and costs and 100 will only go to university if they can pay no fees and get help with costs.

S1. No state funding for university education.

This is an extreme example of the situation in the US where everything is paid for the by student through loans or philanthropic grants, bursaries, scholarships etc. Quite clearly violates P1 and P2, let’s move on.

S2. Subsidised loans for fees and living costs costing govt 2% per annum

This is analogous to the situation in England & Wales at the moment. Students on the vast majority of courses pay for the whole of their tuition and are given access to subsidised loans and some bursaries to help defer living costs.  It doesn’t quite violate P1 or P2 as there is some attempt at helping, there’s enough money to provide 3333 places but on this model only 120 people want to go. The other 100 are priced out by the system

S3. State funding for course fees, loans for living costs at 2% per annum

This is close to the situation in Scotland. Scottish students do not pay tuition fees and are given subsidised loans to help defer living costs. On this model there are 99 places available, so 31 people who want to go to university are excluded and 100 who would benefit think it’s “not for them”.

S4. Fees for those willing to pay them, subsidised loans living costs for the rest

This is an optimised version of the above – the 20 students who would be willing & able to pay for their education in totality fund another 20 places for a total of 118 and so only 12 who want to take out loans to go to university are excluded and the other 100 are still left out in the cold on princple. Better, but obviously room for improvement.

S5. Full fees and costs for those willing to pay them, subsidised loans for fees and support for those who will go if they can get them and full support for the others on a round robin basis.

This is a perfectly spherical education system operating in a frictionless vacuum with an omniscient and omni-benevolent God means testing system. 20 people go to university and cost the state nothing. There’s £1,000,000 to divvy up between the 100 who require loans and 100 who require full support. Apportioning the funding on a round robin basis to one member of each support-requiring group results in there being 78 places. This is fewer than the 119 above however everybody who could benefit from education wants to.

S6. Full fees and costs for those willing to pay them, subsidised loans for all who would take them and the rest of the budget allocated to full support.

Adjusting S5 to provide the maximum number of places by apportioning funding first to those who only require loans and then to those who require full support yields 184 places with nobody deterred from going on the basis of cost but some of those who most require support excluded due to insufficient funds. That’s harsh, and I’d stress I’m not advocating this or any of the other schemes as an actual policy, but it does provide the greatest number of places and illustrate my fundamental point: an appropriately formulated policy can meet premises P1 and P2 given the constraints of P3 and P4.

Rather than having a free for all accusing me of being a member of the Labour party (hiya R.G) I’d ask folk to limit themselves to challenging the premises, the corollary I assert flows from them and the way they’re applied to the scenarios presented. Egregious errors in my calculations will also be accepted, albeit grudgingly.

That’s really all a long winded way of saying that education funding is a complex, nuanced area with a lot of things to consider when formulating policy. A simplistic stance of “no tuition fees” without considering the affect that has on access and inclusion is not really a principle unless you’re prepared to prioritise platonic characteristics of your system over those characteristics as the inevitably imperfect education system is actually implemented.

The spreadsheet used to calculate the above examples is available here (Edit: now in Excel format). Please download it, it will mean you’re even more tedious than I am and I’d really appreciate that.

No up-front tuition fee principles with Labour, only back-end u-turns

May 13

Posted by Jeff in Education | 33 Comments

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) is a multilateral treaty adopted by the UN and has been in force from 3 January 1976. Amongst its stated commitments are a right to free education which, more specifically, relates to the following (from Wikipedia):

“Article 13 of the Covenant recognises the right of everyone to free education (free for the primary level and “the progressive introduction of free education” for the secondary and higher levels). This is to be directed towards “the full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity”,[14] and enable all persons to participate effectively in society. Education is seen both as a human right and as “an indispensable means of realizing other human rights”, and so this is one of the longest and most important articles of the Covenant.”

The United Kingdom was signed up to this in the Harold MacMillan era, or as many in Labour would probably say ‘the good old days’.

Despite having a good 35 years to make good on this commitment, including 13 years of unbroken Labour rule, we have ‘ganged agley’ on many an occasion, not least the recent move by the coalition Government to open the door to fees of up to £9,000 a year for students. Even the righter wing parties in social democratic Sweden know to not charge tuition fees, front end or back. It’s a shame that the Lib Dems see things differently.

Well, despite the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and via The Telegraph, today marks the day that Labour swung back to being a pro-fees party in Scotland. The SNP has gleefully called it Johann Lamont’s Nick Clegg moment. And well they should.

At the last Scottish Parliament elections, only a year ago, Scottish Labour’s position of “No price tag for Scottish students” was as follows (taken from the party’s very own website):

“a Labour government will not introduce any up-front fees or graduate contribution for access to higher education in the lifetime of the next Parliament. There will be no price tag on education. Bringing in a graduate contribution would not resolve the present financial difficulties of the universities which are the responsibility of the current SNP government. Experts figures show that the gap is significantly less than some had predicted and can and will be met.”

The initial conclusion to draw from this decision is that it is opposition for opposition’s sake and tuition fees can be added to minimum pricing, council tax and votes at 16 where Labour contort their positions, despite their better senses, in order to ensure that their party is not on the same page as Salmond’s mob, come what may.

The argument that Scottish universities can’t offer more places to bright Scottish kids while fees are covered by the Scottish Government seems to be irrelevant here. If a fixed number of Scottish students have their fees paid for and a fixed number of English students have to pay their fees, then the problem of funding for one tranche of students in Scotland cannot and will not impact on the other. There is no incentive, despite what Johann Lamont claims, to have more English students than Scottish because the same money is paid into the university either way, just from a different source.

The main risk that I can see is that this equilibrium is broken through too many English students claiming to be Scottish via a distant Scottish, Welsh or Irish grandparent, as has already been reported. This really would be a nonsense and certainly not in the spirit of the democratic will of the constituent parts of the UK.

England had an election and clearly voted for parties that, with their combined majority, are in favour of tuition fees. Scotland had an election and voted overwhelmingly for parties that want to keep tuition free, or at least said they wanted to at the time before this flip-flopping began. We might as well scrap the Scottish Parliament if we are not going to tolerate and respect devolved differences within the UK. Financing university education shouldn’t be sullied by the same bastardisation of common sense rules as happens when picking a Scotland XV at rugby. Not that it’s easy to prove you are Scottish, English, Welsh or Northern Irish when we only have British passports and British driver’s licenses to identify us. There’s a simple solution to that of course…

So, much like the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Labour signed the United Kingdom up to move the country towards free university education but is pulling us in a different direction with its reactionary policies.

What will it take for Labour to move away from opposition for opposition’s sake and realise that we already have a graduate tax in operation to fund free tuition and ensure our universities remain world class. It’s called income tax.

Diageo – What a bunch of bar stewards

May 12

Posted by Jeff in Holyrood | 23 Comments

I don’t know if any readers have had similarly embarrassing moments but on several occasions a friend from abroad has asked for ‘something Scottish’ to go with their dinner in a restaurant when visiting. The startled response of ‘we don’t have any Scottish beers’ is always met with surprised dismay.

There is light at the end of the tunnel of course thanks to a surge in popularity for Scots products, with even my local pub/restaurant down here in London stocking the glorious Innes & Gun.

The reason Scottish drinks have been held back for too long may be glimpsed by reading this compelling story of Diageo threatening to pull sponsorship of a drinks award if the independent awards for Bar of the Year wasn’t changed:

Diageo screws Brewdog:
However we (Brewdog) were not announced as winners of the award. This disappointment was further compounded when one of the judges (seated at our table) told us in disbelief ‘this simply cannot be, the independent judging panel voted for BrewDog as clear winners of the award’. Events took a further twist when the people who got given the award refused to accept it as it clearly had ‘BrewDog’ engraved on the trophy as winners.

It’s not the first time Diageo has screwed over Scotland of course, ruthlessly pulling Johnnie Walker out of Kilmarnock leaving hundreds unemployed and reorganising the group to not only avoid tax but receive a £76m credit.

Boycott is a strong word, but consumer power is important. So, maybe next time it’s worth switching that Diageo Guinness for a Trashy Blonde, if where you are stocks it, of course.