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.

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.

“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.

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.

We here at Better Nation do appreciate the importance of keeping it local, but we do so tire of our elected members in Scotland remaining parochial, nowhere more so than in the motions placed at Holyrood. Motions should be a little flag, hoisted by the MSP, to wave attention to something worthy to the rest of Scotland that’s happening in their local patch.

Motions should be more than sticking one’s political tongue out, which is why we accord WMOTW One (for there are two WMOTW this week) to Jackie Baillie, for this unnecessary crowing:

Motion S4M-02783: Jackie Baillie, Dumbarton, Scottish Labour, Date Lodged: 08/05/2012

Victory in West Dunbartonshire 

That the Parliament congratulates all of the candidates who stood for election in West Dunbartonshire on 3 May 2012; commends everyone who voted, and recognises what it considers to be the stunning victory for Labour in gaining control of West Dunbartonshire Council.

Supported by: James Kelly, Neil Findlay, Neil Bibby, Anne McTaggart, Margaret McCulloch, Drew Smith, Richard Simpson, Hanzala Malik, Patricia Ferguson, Mary Fee, Margaret McDougall

There’s no mitigation for trying to be nice by saying “all of the candidates” either.

Nor should motions welcome something which we already have 147 other editions of, according to Amazon.co.uk. Thus, the second WMOTW is awarded to *gasp* Jackie Baillie again.

Motion S4M-02841: Jackie Baillie, Dumbarton, Scottish Labour, Date Lodged: 10/05/2012

Loch Lomond Tourist Guide Launched 

That the Parliament welcomes the launch of a new mini guide and map of Loch Lomond attractions to the world’s travel trade at the VisitScotland Expo by Love Loch Lomond; notes that the new information leaflet features the top 50 things to see and do in the Loch Lomond and Clyde Sea lochs area; further notes that the map was specially commissioned to help visitors get the most out of their visit to one of Scotland’s most popular destinations in Scotland’s first National Park, and encourages everyone to come and visit Loch Lomond and the surrounding area.

Tsk tsk.

So it’s a poor showing for West Dumbartonshire in this week’s WMOTW. But fear not, for its geographical rival East Dunbartonshire is here to show how it’s done.

BMOTW celebrates vision. Ambition. Keeping it local, but making it innovative. And this week the award goes to Gil Paterson, for celebrating Scotland’s newest venture to the final frontiers:

Motion S4M-02809: Gil Paterson, Clydebank and Milngavie, Scottish National Party, Date Lodged: 08/05/2012

To Europe and Beyond 

That the Parliament congratulates Bearsden Academy on winning the European Cansat Competition in Norway against teams from 13 other European nations; notes that the competition was promoted by the European Space Agency with the aim of building a satellite within the confines of a soft drink can, conducting a launch of a rocket up to an altitude of 1km, conducting their missions and landing safely; understands that the pupils were chosen as winners based on their performance throughout the project as well as the final flight operations and results, and considers that this is not only a fantastic achievement for the pupils but also brings great recognition for their school and, indeed, Scotland.

Supported by: David Torrance, Richard Lyle, Margaret Burgess, Mike MacKenzie, Colin Beattie, Angus MacDonald, Humza Yousaf, Bob Doris, Joan McAlpine, Fiona McLeod, Annabelle Ewing, Rob Gibson, Dennis Robertson, Mary Fee, Kenneth Gibson, Jamie Hepburn, Neil Bibby, Adam Ingram

Live long and prosper, gentle readers.

Photo credit – Nel C

A guest post today from Dave Boyle, a writer, researcher and co-operative consultant, and author of “Good News: A co-operative solution to the media crisis“.

He has written and lectured on sport, culture, economics and co-operation, and was previously Chief Executive of Supporters Direct, the organisation that helps fans who want to take control of their clubs.

He blogs at daveboyle.net and tweets as @theboyler.

In 2009, the West Highland Free Press was sold. The new owners – one of the big 4 groups who dominate local media – made lots of promises upon acquisition, but they soon fell by the wayside in the face of their need to make a profit of 30% to service their group debts. Journalists were sacked, and then the offices were closed, with production moving to Oban (it was close enough, the senior managers felt). Sales and advertising slumped, as people saw coverage shrink, and what remained was churnalistic cutting and pasting of press releases. The community goodwill which sustained it disappeared, and the cost of delivering it to the further flung parts of the paper’s patch couldn’t be sustained. After 40 years, the paper closed in 2012, with the owners blaming a shift in reading and advertising habits as a result of the internet.

* * *

Of course, that’s not actually what happened. In 2009, the paper was bought by its employees, who all own an equal stake. The paper hasn’t been late once, and whilst it is suffering the difficulties that all businesses struggle with in recessions, its 2% margin does what it needs to do – pays the staff a decent wage to do what they do, and pays back the debts the employees took out to buy it. They’ll have paid those off in a few years and the paper will be able to think about capital investment, new staff and other happy things.

The Free Press, I was told by someone working for the BBC in the area, is at the base of the pyramid of news, keeping them honest and connected, making sure the media ecosystem is vibrant, and so having a positive impact on political performance, honesty and the rest.

When I started thinking about whether the co-operative movement had an answer to the problems of the local media, I was shocked by what I found. I’d been led to believe that dead tree media was failing in the face of the web, but in fact it looked more like a common or garden failing of the era of cheap credit. Local groups who owned papers sold them to larger groups, who started to treat them as lines on a spreadsheet, not parts of their communities. I’m absolutely convinced that better ownership models will give newspapers, and more importantly journalism, the resilience they need.

But co-operative models have other spin-offs too. They’d be accountable to their readers or their reporters (or both), depending on which type of co-op route they picked. The underpinning story of Leveson is that a news culture developed which was set at the top, with reporters powerless to stop it, aside from quitting. Readers had no means to affect change, other than registering their unhappiness by stopping reading. Which is actually what half of newspaper readers have done, but no-one ever thinks it might be because the news we have isn’t up to it; the media couldn’t be the cause of the media’s failings, could it? Better blame something epochal and impersonal like the web.

The beauty of co-operatives is that by being accountable to a wider public, they embody the public interest – the thing we want most from our media, when thinking about sustaining a civil society – far better than any privately owned concern ever could.

The final benefit is that co-ops can be understood as organisational software, which for over 150 years have been proven to unlock people’s goodwill, and their ability to take responsibility for the things that matter to them in their communities.

This speaks directly to the biggest challenge the media face, the genuine threat from the internet, which is destroying the advertising base that has subsidised news production, and so making the industry, like many others, newly precarious. Media outlets are discovering a social mission few had noted in the last 30 years of their activities, and are calling for state support and subsidy.

But the subsidy for cover price could be made good by people paying its true costs – or something more like it. That’s where co-ops come in. Paying more to make someone else richer isn’t a very sellable appeal; it works best as a by-product for owners of capital, not their sales pitch.

But people would be more interested in paying to own and run and support a paper they controlled, held to account and knew was in the heart of their communities. One which like the Free Press, wouldn’t need to make a profit per se, just enough money to cover its costs and build some reserves.

It’s an issue where the Scottish Parliament can go far beyond the timidity of Westminster. It could make local media companies into assets communities can register an interest in to buy, and provide loans to enable them to so, and give people tax incentives to use their own capital to benefit the community. It could legislate to ensure that whenever a newspaper office closed, people had the right to buy the title that used to be produced there, like the Community Reinvestment Act did in the US.

With imagination and commitment, you could do something quite extraordinary. And the beauty is that politicians should be on board. After all, who else is going to print pictures of them kissing babies?

And, with the SNP losing a quarter of their voters from last year’s Scottish Parliament elections, Scots are certainly at least changeable.

With two and a bit long years until the referendum on independence, and mid-term European elections to be held between now and then, there are good reasons why the SNP should pre-empt change before the electorate rejects out of hand the constitutional change that a male and potentially stale SNP leadership is offering:

Salmond’s tenure
- It was David Torrance’s Sunday Mail article that provided the eye-popping statistic. I knew that Salmond had served the SNP considerably longer than the five years that he has been First Minister but 18 years as the leader of a party is a remarkable length of time. Putting it into perspective, that is as many years as John Smith, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown led the Labour party put together. Many years at the top does not, in itself, mean that it is time to go, but it does significantly increase the chances that people have stopped listening to what you have to say. We’re not at that stage yet of course with a majority Government still fresh in the memory, but did Salmond win that election or did Subway-sheltering Iain Gray lose it? And can the SNP really take a chance that a party leader of twenty years can still sound fresh and inspiring with so much at stake?

Reaching out to West coast Scotland
- Linked to the above point, and the council election results bear this out, there are parts of Scotland that the SNP still can’t reach as convincingly as they would like to. Swathes of Glasgow and the West of Scotland voting No to independence in their droves leaves a relatively small part of Scotland that would need a good 70%+ Yes result, or higher, to see the SNP over the line. With an adopted home of Banff & Buchan for so long in his career, Salmond could not be perceived to be much further from the old Strathclyde region that Labour has done well to wrap its arms around. Nicola Sturgeon studied at Glasgow University, worked in Drumchapel Law Centre and is the MSP for Govan. The DFM could win more of Labour’s heartlands into considering independence while still keeping the existing Yes camp intact.

Father of the Nation
- Freeing Alex Salmond from the binds of being First Minister would allow the SNP’s greatest asset to take on a more avuncular, roving role. This would effectively elevate each senior SNP Minister up one position while still keeping the presence and gravity of Salmond himself. This softening of Salmond has been attempted with varying degrees of success before but, while the man has pulled the SNP up into the 30%-45% electoral mark, his marmite tendencies may well be the single reason why the pro-union voteshare will always be 50%+ if left unattended. Many Scots intend to vote No because they don’t take to or trust FM Salmond. There’s an easy way to rectify that, while still keeping Alex in the game.

Gender balance
- The gender of a political leader shouldn’t be an issue but if the SNP wants to paint itself as far removed from the London coalition, having a female leader would be an easy way to do that. Theresa May is the only high-profile female member of the UK Government and if recent form continues apace, she may have joined Liam Fox on the backbenches by the time 2014 comes around. Rich Oxbridge English men directing Scotland’s future and controlling Scotland’s wellbeing provides political leverage for the SNP and the unsatisfactory gender balance across both Parliaments could make Nicola’s position as party leader particularly, persuasively, propitiously progressive.

More open leadership
- Alex Salmond does well to hide his temper, he is a bit like Sir Alex Ferguson that way. His style of leadership has gradually permeated down and throughout the SNP such that even MSPs can be knee-knocking lambs refusing to step out of line for fear of incurring the FM’s considerable wrath. Nicola Sturgeon’s style of leadership is known to be more open, more consensual and considerably less intense. Creating a new country is much more enticing with such a person at the helm, creating a participative environment rather than an obedient one.

All of the above isn’t to say that Salmond is, nor should be, under any pressure to be leaving Bute House today, tomorrow, this year or next, but it won’t be long before he has to pull rabbits from hats in order to keep his leadership fresh and vigorous. Obstinate poll ratings on independence may lead to difficult decisions, including stepping aside to allow internal renewal.

While the SNP has successfully avoided the ‘game of drones’ leadership changes that Labour and the Lib Dems have endured of late, there is as much risk in a successful leader staying on too long as leaving too early. There may come a point where the SNP will need to speak up against an increasingly underdressed Emperor Salmond and bring forward change.

And no-one embodies change amongst the party’s leadership contenders more than Nicola Sturgeon.

And yet there are issues where this notionally weaker body has forged ahead of the Scottish Government. In 2000 a Lab/Lib Dem coalition banned GM crops, but two years later a Scottish Executive of the same colour ignored a vote at Lib Dem conference and went ahead with plantings.

Today sees the now Labour-only Welsh Government take another step ahead of Scotland with what looks potentially like a massive switch in transport policy in favour of walking and cycling, just as Scottish Ministers plan to head in the opposite direction by spending billions on duplicate road capacity.

As a supporter of independence I’d like to see Scottish Ministers flexing every muscle they have to improve this country using the powers devolved already: that’s the best way to demonstrate the need for the full powers of an independent nation. So why are Welsh Ministers better at doing that than Scottish ones?

What drama? What conspiracy? What intrigue, hey? But in the end the most obvious result came to fruition. Only a mile up the road from the partisan backbiting of Holyrood, Labour and SNP are in coalition.

I cannot condemn that result. Two parties, largely agreeing on the direction of Edinburgh, forming a coalition with a stable majority. Why wasn’t it so obvious? How much hatred can there be between these two parties that a constitutional divide – whilst real on the national level is illusory on the local – remains a sticking point.

My own suggestion of the Traffic Light 29, whilst mathematically possible, was politically impractical. With the SNP wooing the Tories heavily we could have a neatly divided council, not with one potential administration but two. Red/Green/Yellow vs Tartan and Blue. An entire election and the fate of Scotland’s capital coming down to the cut of the deck. Exciting drama, but such antics are best left to the telly. You could argue that Labour had a moral right to form such a group, but one thing politics is not about is putting your opponent into power if you have a realistic stab at it yourself. Plus with the election leaving Edinburgh littered with Lib Dem bodies, they didn’t want to join, or supply confidence. Not that the possibility was discussed.

The curious attempt to skewer the Greens, with opposing parties’ activists condemning their refusal to join a Lab/Tory/Green mash up is also nonsensical. As soon as Lab and the Tories disagreed with their Green fig-leaf there would be nothing to stop them jettisoning their junior partner. Such realpolitik would leave the Greens open to use, then abuse.

Similarly Labour’s hopes of an ‘all talents’ coalition with all five parties foundered on such stony ground. The only example of such a coalition existing is in Northern Ireland’s Assembly. It only works there because the parties are compelled to do it and legislation can only be passed if a majority within both the unionist and nationalist bloc assent. Here there is no such structural guarantees. Indeed there are arguments in Stormont that it barely works there, with a ‘government within the government’ emerging as the DUP and Sinn Fein find out that they have a little more in common than they ever expected.

So Labour, fearing the most almighty of backlashes from bedding the Tories suddenly saw those personal differences, the historical division and Cardownie’s defection as not that insurmountable at all. How grown-up of our political chums. Long may it continue.

A guest post from Mary Fee MSP who is Convenor of the Scottish Parliament Cross Party Group on M.E. and will be chairing the ‘It’s All About Me’ event which aims to bring MSPs together with health professionals, M.E. charities and sufferers of M.E. to share knowledge and information. Mary Fee is a list MSP for the West of Scotland and was elected in the 2011 Scottish Elections.

It was with great sadness that I read about the passing of M.E. activist Emily Collingridge in March of this year. That someone so young was taken by an illness that many today still refuse to acknowledge should have sent shockwaves around the country. Yet there was almost no coverage of her death, I only became aware of it through reading an article on Comment is Free.

Whilst Ms Collingridge may be gone her work does not have to pass with her, her death and her suffering must not be in vain, not just for the sake of Emily but also for the sake of those suffering from M.E. across the country. Sufferers and their carers are being deafened each and every day from their own silent screams, ignored by the government, ignored by the welfare system and ignored by the very doctors and health service that should be helping them.

Those who suffer from M.E. are tragically not getting the support and care they need and are under constant threat of losing their benefits due to ignorance surrounding the illness. Action for M.E. believes that more than half of those who suffer from M.E. will end up losing their jobs due to the illness. Whilst scientific research has advanced in leaps and bounds in other areas, due in part to large funding from Governments, M.E. is being ignored. We still don’t know what causes Myalgic Encephalomyelitis nor how to cure it.

The World Health Organisation recognise M.E. as a neurological condition that results in muscle pain with intense physical or mental exhaustion, relapses and specific cognitive disabilities. Taking this definition of the condition one cannot help but come to the conclusion that to simply classify the condition as ‘fatigue,’ whether chronic precedes it and syndrome follows or not, is to trivialise the pain and suffering felt. Mental health campaigners, for example, whilst still facing a battle against stigma have thankfully passed the stage where sufferers are told to ‘pull themselves together,’ yet for campaigners for M.E. awareness a feeling of isolation still persists, stuck at a crossing waiting for the rest of the country to catch up.

Estimates put the total number of people in the United Kingdom suffering from M.E. at over 250,000. It is more common in women than in men and although it is more common with those aged between 25 and 45 it can affect people of any age, when she was first diagnosed Emily was six.

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis is a subject close to me personally and I am convenor of the Cross Party Group on M.E. at the Scottish Parliament. The CPG helps bring both sufferers and those with an interest in Myalgic Encephalopathy together to provide MSPs from all parties with information and expertise on issues affecting M.E. sufferers, their families and carers. At the last count the Cross Party Group on M.E. had 9 MSPs, over 50 individuals including sufferers, carers, professors and doctors, and a handful of organisations including Action for M.E., M.E. Research UK and M.E. Association.

M.E. Awareness Week will take place at the start of May and the Cross Party Group is hosting a M.E Awareness Event. There is still a lot of misconception surrounding the illness in Britain today making it imperative that supporters stand up and help counter this. I hope that the event will help raise awareness in Scotland and lead to serious questions being asked by politicians and health organisations. I ask Scottish readers to get in touch with their local MSPs to ask them to support the awareness week.

Unfortunately there is still a lot of misconception surrounding M.E. in Britain today and we are hopeful that this event, and the awareness week in general, will help to counter these. Misconceptions can be changed, not overnight and not without effort. M.E. Awareness Week is a great opportunity to begin these changes