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Timing is everything

Jun 5

Posted by The Burd in Holyrood, Media | 33 Comments

Knowing when to pick a fight is one of the first rules in politics and you’d think Scotland’s esteemed political press pack might have learned that by now.

Since First Minister Questions on Thursday – the first of the new Parliament – commentators, have been lining up to lambast the performance *of Holyrood’s new and first female Presiding Officer and lament the possibility of a supposed elected dictatorship, caused by the First Minister apparently grandstanding, speechifying and generally, failing to answer questions put to him.

Well, haud the front page.  Tell me, when did we ever have a Question Time here or in that other place down there that actually involved a proper discourse of issues and questions and answers?

In particular, the Scotsman has ramped up the volume with a lengthy piece liberally sprinkled with comment from Hugh Henry and michty me, a leader column!

Is there nothing happening slightly more portentous and deserving of such weighty treatment?  Actually no, at least not in the Holyrood bubble.  And if the vacuum created by easing itself back into parliamentary politics is enabling mischief-making political correspondents to go away and puff up stories, thereby creating bad press for the SNP Government, then it only has itself to blame.

But to start questioning the ability or appropriateness of Tricia Marwick for the role of Presiding Officer after only one performance is precipitate and indicative of one of the pack’s less fragrant inclinations.

A good manager doesn’t roll into her first meeting and park her tanks on people’s lawns.  No, she watches behaviours unfold and takes notes.  If necessary, she has a quiet, informal word behind the scenes and suggests helpful ways of improving performance.  If that doesn’t work, then she picks her moment to stamp her authority on the miscreants.  The best way of doing this of course is to deflate the behaviour with humour – something Betty Boothroyd was particularly good at as Speaker of the House of Commons.

But if necessary, she does it by clamping down hard.  The point is though she does it when it’s important to do so.

Was there anything at the first First Minister’s Question Time of any real import?  No.  Was there any point in her picking a fight with the First Minister?  No.

A point sadly missing from certain correspondents’ demolition job on her abilities, though at least Hugh Henry MSP has the good grace to acknowledge that there is a settling-in period for people in new positions.

Scotland’s political press pack has form here when it comes to its treatment of women politicians.  I don’t recall David Steele, George Reid or Alex Fergusson getting a doing after their initial performances convening Holyrood setpieces. Rightly, they were taken to task further down the line when, with a bit of experience under their belt, they were seen to be messing up.

But then they were blokes and entitled to a honeymoon period.  Not something ever readily afforded to women politicians.

The first female Ministers during devolution got similar rough treatment.  Sarah Boyack, in particular, was pilloried for being the bicycling Transport Minister with a nasty undercurrent suggesting she was not up to the job.  Wendy Alexander contended throughout her career with a focus on her personality traits rather than her abilities.  But worst of all, was the doing Susan Deacon got on the front page of the Daily Record at the height of the section 2a furore when she was “outed” as an unmarried mother and questions were raised – seriously – about her fitness then to be in charge of the welfare of the nation’s children.

In chamber sketches, other women MSPs found themselves caricatured: Karen Gillon’s Tizer habit, Karen Whitefield – and others’ – weight and voice, Nicola Sturgeon’s being a nippy sweetie (until she effectively lanced this pejorative handle by giving journalists sweeties at a press conference).

Did male Ministers or MSPs come in for such attention? Dinnae be daft.  Except perhaps for Jack McConnell’s fashion kilt faux pas at Tartan Week, few men in our Parliament have come under such scrutiny or had their performance linked subtly or otherwise to their gender or personality.

It would be nice to think that like everyone else, the political press pack has matured since the early, heady days of devolution. On the evidence of some of Friday’s sketches and weekend follow up *in-depth* analysis, it seems not.

But while they might not yet have learned the wisdom of knowing when to pick a fight, I’m quietly confident that Holyrood’s Presiding Officer will know exactly when to do so.  Not just with the First Minister but with the serried ranks of political correspondents.

*the link is only to a search list for the Times Scotland – for those of you who wish to go behind the paywall

 

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A short guide to beating the Bookies

Jun 4

Posted by Guest Blog in Parties, Westminster | 11 Comments

A very welcome guest post from Ross McCafferty who, much to his annoyance, you will probably know better as @HolyroodPatter. Ross is a former blogger and parliamentary worker who recently mothballed his much loved blog and instead has opted for just incessant tweeting on Scottish and sometimes UK Politics. A current political history student, he can normally be found analysing, arguing and annoying on twitter, because anything beats studying.

Following Jeff’s recent post, I was delighted to be offered the chance to have my tuppence worth on whether money can really be made betting on politics. The short answer, of course, is yes.

Those who took a punt on the SNP winning most seats at 3, 5, even 7 to 1 are no doubt leafing through their winnings happily by now. But it is in a UK context that the bookmakers continue to seem to defy conventional wisdom so you can, with a fair amount of guesswork and a half decent political analysis, make money on politics.

Take the next Permanent Tory Leader. I should say from the off that a certain amount of patience is required in this tricky field. No one expects a vacancy any time soon, but let us imagine that the Conservatives contrive to lose the General Election of 2015, Ed Milliband is swept to power and David Cameron is facing the job club. No leader could survive such a defeat.

Now, to the options to replace him; the Bookmakers offer odds of 4, 5, and 6 to one respectively on the three favourites. And they are? Boris Johnson, William Hague and George Osborne. No, really. Despite his designs on the top job (that is allowing for the rather generous assumption that Boris has designs on anything) there is absolutely no way someone as divisive, chequered, and frankly dim would be elected to lead HM opposition. Hague couldn’t get the Tories any advance on the electoral demolition of 1997, he is not a viable candidate. And Osborne? I would make him at least a twenty to one outsider. Should the Tories be booted from office, presumably because of losing a spending cuts argument, why would anyone in their right mind vote for the Lieutenant of that Cutters Army to lead the party and the country? And I see very little evidence of  a Granita esque handover. Mr Cameron, if he is allowed, is in this for the long haul.

So to my advice. Avoid ludicrous 200/1 shots like Guido Fawkes or Nadine Dorries. One’s a rabid right wing blogger with a suspicious agenda, and the other is Guido Fawkes. It is in the middle of the pack where the real value lies. Greg Clarke 18/1, Ed Vaisey, 25/1 Nick Herbert and Zac Goldsmith both at 33!

It is the same with the Labour Party. Despite Yvette Cooper being an 11/4 favourite, parliamentary experience is essential and Yvette, for all her demonstrable skills, has barely landed a blow on Theresa May, hardly the most combative of political operators.

Frankly, if some bookmakers are still daft enough to be giving you 25/1 on Jim Murphy, I would jump all over it. He has built a good profile down south, as evidenced by his seeming reluctance to touch the poisonous wreckage of the Scottish campaign with a barge pole.

There is a similar message in the shadow cabinet. Should Labour be trounced in 2015, the economic message having fallen flat, why would you elect the man responsible for articulating it? Step forward Mr E Balls, 8/1 third favourite. I am entirely ignoring David Milliband because being beaten was most probably an equally chastening, but massively financially rewarding set of circumstances for him.

Chukka Umuna is my tip (Google Umuna Obama for all the evidence you need to see he is winning over the intellectual base of the party) and he is good value at 12/1, although he has to show just a smidge more personality than was evident from his eerily polished recent Question Time appearance. It’d be cruel not to mention the Lib Dems, but can anyone see past Tim Farron? 3/1 on him remains good value though I am pleased to see Charlie Kennedy’s odds come in to almost 10/1, I backed him at 20/1 last year.

Rounding up with a few other matters, William Hill are offering the ludicrously generous odds of 2/1 that the next general election will be in 2015. The coalition has already shown that it can survive most strife and scandal with its belief in the greater good and all that business; although you will have to spend a fair chunk to see any return.

These bets can almost slip under the radar: despite myself and Jeff ranting about it. The odds offered by Ladbrokes of 3/1 on between 0 and 2 Scots Tory MPs were very generous and I wasn’t the only one who backed it. For a very long term bet, why not take the offer of 10/1 that Ed Milliband will be in post longer than Tony Blair? It’s not entirely inconceivable; if Ed wins in 2015, sees out 2.5 parliamentary terms then he has done the job! 13/2 on a Labour/Lib Dem Coalition in 2015 isn’t a bad bet either, and I would be failing in party duty if I didn’t tell you all to back the 5/4 option that Scotland will vote Yes in the upcoming independence referendum.

So there we have it, all that’s required is a bit of political nous, the bravery to trust your instincts, a lot of luck and plenty of patience. They don’t call it “taking a punt” for nothing!

Holyrood’s musical chairs

Jun 3

Posted by The Burd in Holyrood | 43 Comments

Committee in session“So when the music stops, you all rush round to a committee room and grab a chair. First to the convenor’s gets it.”

Well, it might have made the appointment of committee convenors a bit more exciting, and much as there are some good folk appointed, Margo Macdonald has a point. Why should these parliamentary appointments be decided by party leaders and not by MSPs? Even Westminister does it this way now and it seems to make for a better system in which everyone can trust.

Not that there is anything untrustworthy in any of the convenors appointed yesterday, it’s just that the immediate reaction to them is to try and work out why the First Minister, the LOLITSP and leader of the Tories chose that particular person for that particular berth. We start to look for conspiracy theories when there aren’t any. Probably.

Anyone or anything notable then?

The apportionment of committee convenors doesn’t half show up the size and scale of the SNP victory in all its glory. They got nine convenorships, Labour four and the Conservatives one. Wow.

And in a wholly unconsensual move, they bagged all the biggies and potentially controversial ones for themselves – finance, education, justice and local government. But nice of them to be magnanimous enough to offer health to Labour. To be honest, if it was me, I’d have done the same. Nicola Sturgeon is teflon-coated and it will be hard for the opposition to land a blow but the other areas do require some degree of protection.

But what goes on in committees is not just down to their convenors – if Labour places the right people in the right seats then they could still have some fun unpicking the budget, the McCormac review, the anti-sectarianism bill and public sector reform.

Moreover, Christine Grahame in the justice hot seat has proven herself independent enough in the past to marshall an effective and troublesome committee. Her legal knowledge will stand her in good stead here too.

Kenneth Gibson is also a wily character and while he will ensure there are no public fall-outs, expect him to be spending a lot of time behind closed doors making plain his committee’s views on things. Stewart Maxwell had a junior ministerial brief for a time so has plenty of experience, though not much of it on education matters. He will be a safe pair of hands for what is likely to be a big and at times controversial policy area. Reflecting the creation of a new ministerial portfolio, we now have a committee for infrastructure and capital investment. And I’m liking Maureen Watt’s ying to Alex Neil’s yang.

As for the Labour appointments, Duncan McNeil, who did a very good job at local government last time, is rumoured to be headed to health. Let’s just say that I hope his views on parental substance misuse have mellowed so that we get some sensible policy deliberations on this very important area and not just salacious headlines.

Otherwise Labour is left with what is seen by many as the rump of mandatory committee chairs to choose from. Though audit and equal opportunities, in particular, can cause a lot of problems if handled in the right way, as Hugh Henry demonstrated ably in the last parliamentary session. Either Claudia Beamish or Siobhan McMahon at the helm of equal opportunities could do a good job: the wide-ranging remit of equalities legislation allows this committee to poke its nose into a whole host of issues. For example, the recent spate of care scandals has both an age and a disability related link.

A key thing this committee could do immediately is get its remit widened to include a human rights brief. Enacted after the structure of the Parliament was set up, there is no one committee with an overarching brief here, and the law is now beginning to have a tumultuous impact on other policy areas.

The role of the committees has never really developed as was originally intended, particularly in relation to their powers to act as an effective revising body for previous legislation. Few committees have had the time nor the inclination to rake over previous stuff but it is needed. Such has been the Parliament’s rush to legislate in previous sessions that we have laws that contradict, powers that everyone has forgotten now exist, incompatability across a number of areas, unintended consequences and some that simply have not worked the way they were intended to. Others represented a compromise at the time because parliamentary arithmetic did not allow for the original intention to be enacted. Spending a bit of time sorting some of these issues out would be a good thing.

Committees too have powers to introduce their own legislation and while it is unlikely that SNP Convenors will want to cut across their ain Programme for Government, again this is where a bit of common sense and wily tactics from the opposition could prevail, particularly for the small groups of Liberal Democrats, Greens and of course, Margo. The committees (and members’ bills) represent their best opportunity to influence the parliamentary agenda.

But for the most part, the committees will not offer up that much excitement, especially for any newbies keen to make their mark. To do so, they should look outwith the official furniture of the Parliament and find themselves an issue, that with the right approach, could attract headlines and resonate with the wider public. More on that in the next post….

SNP in the dock over contempt for UK court

Jun 2

Posted by Jeff in Constitution | 176 Comments

After the 2007 election, the SNP enjoyed a honeymoon period that arguably stretched out for two years. In 2011, despite a stunning majority-winning election, that honeymoon period is in danger of being less than a month.

The only court that I plan on attending in London is of the tennis-variety at Wimbledon so there is only so excited that I can be at the protracted wrangling between the SNP and seemingly the rest of the world over which courts should and should not hear Scottish cases in the United Kingdom.

However, the SNP’s continued insistence to chip, chip, chip away at the question of what role the UK Supreme Court should have in Scots Law has forced my hand, not least due to Kenny MacAskill’s ante-upping threat to pull Scotland’s £500k funding of said Court with the rather bizarre justification that ‘he who pays the piper, as they say, calls the tune’.

I suspect that this worrying rhetoric is just the Justice Secretary once again unintentionally fudging his meaning and Kenny is simply seeking to raise the question of what jurisdiction courts should and shouldn’t have. It is too crass to say, as many already have, that we have separation of powers in this country and politicians should not get involved with what the legal process is. That is true for specific cases but in terms of a structural process, it is only Governments that can effect change so the objections raised by MacAskill and the SNP at large are perfectly valid, if perhaps ill-timed and ill-conceived.

As to the question itself, on the face of it, a London court reviewing and overturning the decision of a Scottish court when Scots Law and English Law are two separate kettles of fish seems wrong. However, even just a little bit of digging into the precedents and rules that are in place show that the UK Supreme Court is absolutely the appropriate place for certain cases to be heard. My understanding is that the Privy Council had formerly been a body of appeal for Scots Law cases related to the European Convention of Human Rights and the UK Supreme Court has now superseded that. No objections from me then; the SNP do seem to be guilty of having a solution that is looking for a problem.

Do I like the idea of Scotland’s legal appeal route bodyswerving London and leading direct to the heart of Brussels/Strasbourg helping to ensure that our nation is a full and equitable partner of the European Union? Yes, I do. Do I think the SNP is making that case in a mature and dignified manner? No, I don’t. Do I think that this is a particularly pressing issue for Scotland at this time? Absolutely not, given the pitiful few cases that this would have affected in the past few years and, no doubt, would affect in the years to come.

For me, the SNP is picking the wrong battle, at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. A situation has presented itself which offered the possibility of exacerbating an apparent imbalance in our constitutional arrangement and the SNP could not resist leveraging the opportunity for its own ends as much as it possibly could. The whole issue does smack of a bit of a practice for independence arguments that will be fully flexed in a few years time as the referendum approaches but with an election just completed and all Scots eager to learn what the SNP’s domestic agenda will be for the year(s) ahead, this sends out a disappointingly partisan message with an abysmal sense of timing.

I do not get the impression that the SNP has researched this area a great deal but simply jumped on a moving train that it hoped would soon turn into a bandwagon. A panel of experts assessing this potential issue in a sober, controlled manner and putting forward recommendations would have been a much more approriate way to suggest changes to a hitherto largely undiscussed and uncared for aspect of Scottish civic life, not springing this upon our collective consciences via Gordon Brewer and the Newsnight Scotland channels. We spook easily don’t you know.

So, given the staunch resistance to the SNP’s calls for ‘London to butt out’, it looks like this is one issue the Nats should have left well alone or it’ll be left shaking its head in dismay at how it fought the law, and the unionists won.

Can the UK Greens win any more seats?

May 31

Posted by Guest Blog in Elections, Westminster | 37 Comments

This is a cross-post from the excellent Climate Sock. Thanks to Leo for giving permission to put it up here.

Now UK electoral reform for the Commons has been defeated, First Past the Post (FPTP) is with us for the foreseeable future. I was never convinced that Alternative Vote (AV) would be a game changer for smaller parties like the Greens, but FPTP is particularly bad for them.

There’s no doubt that FPTP exaggerates results. Below a certain share of the national vote, parties get fewer seats than they would under a PR system. Above that level, they get more.

Yet the UK Greens do have one MP, and they are in fact less hard done by under FPTP than the other UK-wide parties of similar size: the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the British National Party (BNP).

In the 2010 election, the Greens nationally won 286k votes (1.0%); UKIP won 920k (3.1%); and the BNP 564k (1.9%). Yet of the three, the Greens were the only party to win a seat, despite receiving the fewest votes (although this one seat was itself equivalent to only about one sixth of the seats they would have won under a fully proportionate system with that share of the vote).

So, why was this the case, and what does it say about the Greens’ prospects under FPTP?

To win a seat in a multi-way marginal, a party typically needs at least 30%. Caroline Lucas won Brighton Pavilion with 31% of the vote; the next target for the Greens, Norwich South, was won by the Lib Dems with 29%. Other Green targets were won with slightly higher proportions.

Yet, with a lower national share than UKIP and the BNP, explanation is needed for why the Greens were able to mobilise 31% in a particular constituency, while the others were not able to do so.

At least part of the answer is suggested by the huge poll conducted by Michael Ashcroft for the Tories.

A key source for this debate is the question on how likely respondents are to vote for particular parties. A response of 1 signifies that they will definitely not vote for that party, and 10 means that they will definitely vote for that party.

The proportions who say they are extremely likely (let’s say 9 or 10) to vote for each of the three parties is roughly what we’d expect: small, and similar to one another.

But the differences are very interesting when we look lower down the scale:

UKIP support

BNP support

Green support

So both the BNP and UKIP have much more of the electorate fixed against them: 84% and 68% respectively, compared with 55% for the Greens.

If we return to a figure of around 30% needed to win a multi-way marginal constituency, it is clear why this is so hard for the BNP. On a national level, 84% have said they wouldn’t consider voting BNP, leaving very little to play for.

Even for UKIP, to reach 30% of the electorate, the party would need to go all the way down the scale to people who say they are just 3/10 likely to vote UKIP.

Yet for the Greens, winning 30% requires going down only as far as those who are 5/10 likely to vote Green: a much less daunting prospect and a result that suggests that future seats may well be winnable for the Greens.

Just a couple of caveats. Firstly, this makes an assumption of uniform national distributions. Clearly that isn’t the case: it’s an approximate model. Yet, the size of the differences between the parties suggests that it is useful.

Secondly, I’ve treated each party’s scores on these scales in isolation, when that isn’t quite right. A respondent could have said they were 10/10 likely to vote for several parties. What this shows is potential support, not guaranteed support.

For the Greens to win more Westminster seats they would need to take support from the major parties. Given their relatively wide level of latent support, this may be within reach, even under the current electoral rules.