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Bill Aitken should resign

Feb 20

Posted by Jeff in Crime | 11 Comments

Whenever someone starts a sentence with “I’m not a racist/homophobe but…” there is typically a torrent of racist or homophobic abuse that follows that opening, despite the limp protest. Nonetheless, I shall open this blogging journal with the following….

I’m not in favour of witchhunts but….

…. Bill Aitken really does need to resign as Convener of the Justice Committee in light of his comments regarding a recent spate of rapes in Glasgow city centre. If there wasn’t a transcript available the quotes would defy belief.

When it comes to the calling of a politician’s head I am usually more on the lenient, forgiving and/or understandable side. I didn’t believe that Peter Mandelson had to resign in either of the pickles he found himself in, I didn’t believe that Nicola Sturgeon or John Swinney had any reason to resign over the past year and I never even believed that Wendy Alexander had good reason to step down as leader of the Labour group in the Scottish Parliament. Indeed, I wouldn’t even have minded if that couple who faked the husband’s death in the canoeing insurance scam had been let off by a chuckling judge whose only reprimand was to call them a pair of cheeky scamps. Life’s complicated after all and almost anything goes as far as I tend to stand.

This situation with Bill Aitken is different. In suggesting there is a difference between the rape of a woman who is not a prostitue and and one that is, he has compromised beyond reparation his standing as the Convener of the Justice Committee and, if he was to be standing in the 2011 election, his standing as an MSP would be similarly impossible. A journalist was recently killed in Egypt while covering the riots in protest against Hosni Mubarak. I wonder how many people would accept the sentiment that he/she ‘had it coming’ given their line of work? Not many I reckon but, for me, there is little difference between that opinion and the opinion so freely offered by the Conservative MSP.

So, Bill has to go. However, it is not clear what job(s) the numerous calls for ‘resignation’ are specifically in relation to. There is surely little to be gained from the Glasgow regional MSP standing down from the Scottish Parliament altogether as a result of his comments, just over two months shy of an election. Leaving the Justice Committee is punishment enough and a sufficient example being made of the prehistoric mindset that any nation’s Parliament shouldn’t tolerate.

I have recently been of the view that politicians need to say what they think deep down more often, to not live in fear or favour of the media and to not tread a converging path to middle-of-the-road insipid vapidity, but that was with a mind to Conservatives or Lib Dems speaking out against coalition policy or any politician bravely starting an unpopular but ultimately worthy campaign. With these comments, delivered quite unbelievably direct to a journalist, Bill Aitken has shone a light into his innermost thoughts, not just on women but also on race, and has badly let himself and his party down. This is not a whoopsy, this is not a foot in mouth moment or a misspeaking. Indeed, it is not even clear what Bill is ‘unreservedly apologising’ for as the words are so plainly his views on the matter. With regards to the rhetoric, he even offered to “toughen it up”. Heaven knows what that would have involved. And how Annabel Goldie hasn’t already forced his hand is anyone’s guess.

There are too many bloggers who have already written on this to mention and the Facebook page calling for a resignation is approaching 1,000 members. Furthermore, Patrick Harvie will be raising a motion in the Scottish Parliament tomorrow calling for a resignation, a motion that Bill surely cannot survive beyond if it goes against him.

It is important that these efforts are successful and, for once, it is important that the resignation-callers get their man.

Polls apart

Feb 19

Posted by Jeff in Elections, Holyrood | 16 Comments

First Minister Alex Salmond has made it clear that he is open to the idea of the 2015 election being pushed back by a year to avoid a clash with Westminster. One could argue that he has the small matter of a 2011 election to get out of the way before contemplating four years hence but it is a fine opportunity, well
taken, to look First Ministerial as this election period rolls on.

There is of course a second solution to the problem of a UK election being held on the same day as a Scottish election – holding the UK one earlier.

Five year terms were in neither the Conservative nor the Liberal Democrat manifesto and the UK is a country that is used to four year terms. Why should changes to our democracy only ever emanate from tawdry convenience rather than the strength of an argument, backed by a public mandate? AV is not the only ‘miserable little compromise’ that the coalition is suddenly in favour of and the only discernible mandate is the shuffling silence from a disengaged public.

The Liberal Democrats wanted fixed terms to rid Prime Minister’s of the power to call a General Election whenever he/she liked but David Cameron preferred five years in the top job rather than four so that we had more time to grudgingly accept the cuts before the next election so here we are, five year fixed terms and everyone has to adjust accordingly.

The simple problem is that five years is too long for the public not to
have a say, particularly as we are movin towards a system where Governments are judged on their past term rather than deliver on promises made during the campaign. 2005-10 term saw changes in leader for all of the main parties, a financial crisis and a rapid demotion of the defining issue of 2005 – the Iraq War.

There was a tangible need for an election in Brown’s dithering fifth and final year and it’s not easy to imagine the same being the case in 2014, 2019 and beyond but the problem of course is that the people don’t care either way. You don’t win votes by talking about how long Parliaments should be and you clearly won’t face protests for selfishly tinkering with the constitutional status quo, so why not act in naked self-interest if you can get away with it?

It would be crude to prolong Malc’s comparison and suggest that the UK’s diminishing democracy coupled with Egypt & co’s capturing of it includes our move from four year terms to five year terms but there is a public carelessness at play here that is, if not dangerous, at least irresponsible.

Clegg and Cameron got their way, Holyrood and Wales are having to adjust accordingly and noone else seems to really care. I guess for those of us who still hanker for four year terms and can’t bring themselves to vote No to AV we’ll just have to hope that the coalition comes unstuck in another way – a Lib Dem wipeout in May perhaps.

Straw men and political opponents

Feb 18

Posted by Guest Blog in Democracy, Elections | 12 Comments

We have a few guests lined up at the moment, and here’s one of them.  We’re chuffed to welcome back Marcus Warner, a frequent contributor to Wales Home, who agrees with Malc’s thoughts about democracy.  But that’s not the only reason we’re publishing it, honest.  Think of this post as part of the ‘mini-series’ on democracy we’ve accidentally ended up doing…

I had planned to do this piece prior, but Malc’s post yesterday made me nod in agreement and spur me on some more. The issue I wanted to add is one of straw men and the tendency for us all to imagine cartoonish cardboard cut outs of our political opponents.

I have been a member of two political parties, a social democrat always and a nationalist as I got further into my political journey. It was surprising, but had I not made a journey from one party to the other, I would have probably would still have the cartoon version Plaid Cymru as standard. I encounter less, but still visible occasions when my Plaid comrades do the same towards Labour. I have noticed as well that often the people with the closest viewpoints on the political compass as it were are the most likely to paint these caricatures of each other.

But more widely than that, would we all not benefit from being a bit more gracious about the other side’s motives, strengths and weaknesses?

From a purely tactical point of view, knowing your enemy is often central to defeating them. Understanding them is crucial in seeking to beat them, but this takes a certain healthy respect and not to indulge in straw men versions of them.

I sit rather clearly and strong on the left of politics, but I  think as I have got older I feel that I have got to understand the right’s motivations more. Too many of us on the left refuse to accept that many on the right believe in lower taxes because they believe people should have more money to spend on how they want to.

They believe in a smaller state because they don’t feel the state can solve everything. They believe in personal responsibility around getting a job or choosing private sector services because they believe people themselves can do it better than the man in Whitehall.

Do I agree with the right’s ideas on how to organise society? No. But one thing we all need to start looking to do is making this about a battle of ideas and about creating a better society, not painting the other side as baby eaters who only have evil motives for putting forward their ideas. It takes certain aloofness to believe that and I point the finger at us all. We might believe we have better ideas on the issues that matter, but no one party, group or wing has the moral high ground from the get-go.

Too much of the political debate focuses on the person suggesting it, rather than the idea itself. Too often ideas are owned by the left/right/nationalists (Welsh, Scots or British) and then they shout ‘bagsy’.

The thing is and I accept this is my anecdotally evidence opinion, but most ordinary punters don’t think like those of us who read this website. They don’t think left, right, nationalist, trot, Friedman etc, they see an idea in the context it is presented to them (context is vital too) and take it at face value. Of course the context may present it falsely – in the positive or the negative – but the point is that voters don’t necessarily have a default setting that many of us in politics do.

This is not some paean to mushy consensus politics. I believe in my ideas and want to test them against other ideas in a vibrant democracy. But I think it would benefit politics, the strength and depth of all our ideas and the public at large if we were willing to understand the counter argument better. Let us not just assume that we only have our ideas out of deep thinking and genuinely held purpose, while everybody else is just a cynical, evil carpetbagger who just wants to lie their way to absolute power before bringing forth the apocalypse.

Next time you see your political foe, perhaps the time has come to buy him or her a pint. Let’s understand more and judge less.

Change the record

Feb 17

Posted by Malc in Governance, Media, Westminster | 14 Comments

I get pretty fed up of listening to opposition to governments – of whatever hue – moanin’ about policy A, greetin’ about policy B and whinin’ about policy C, only for when the government decides to listen to the will of the public on each of the policies, for them then to claim “embarrassing climbdown” or “U-turn” at every opportunity.

For goodness sake, this is the outcome you wanted!

Look, I get there’s a political agenda, I really do.  And I get that people hate the government, and will take any opportunity to kick them.  But can’t we be a little bit more graceful in how we do it?  Have we forgotten entirely the manners taught to us when we were young?  I’m sure I remember something about being polite when asking for something, and then when it was given to me I was supposed to say “thank you”.  Yeah, that sounds familiar.  So why does politics exist outwith the boundaries of these well-mannered social conventions?

Well, first thought is the depth of feeling.  You really despise party A (the governing party) so asking them for anything is a challenge in itself.  They’ve been a rival for such a long time that you can’t really remember a time that you liked them or worked together to achieve something.  But this is really a repeat of your childhood.  “Mum – brother/sister won’t let me have X”… “Ask them nicely – make sure you say please”.  Sound familiar?  I remember fighting with my wee brother (a lot) and even when we were forced to be polite, we still didn’t like it.  So that could be part of it.  But doesn’t there come a point when you stop being so immature?  You stop despising each other and learn to work together.  At least, that’s how I remember it.

Secondly, what about the idea that politics itself is essentially a zero-sum game – if they are doing well, you are doing badly and you want them to do badly so you can do well.  So if you ask them for something and they say yes, you want to treat it as you doing well and them doing badly, not both of you working together to improve the situation for everyone.  That’s logical because (coalition situations excepted) only one of you can govern at any one time, and you want it to be you so you make your party look better than the party in government.

But what partisan politics oftentimes forgets is that governing is not actually a competition.  Its about setting and collecting taxes and spending that money in a variety of ways in order to best serve the public.  Now you may have ideas as to how better do this than the other party, and you may want the public to know how much better your ideas are than the government’s so that next time they have the opportunity to vote they will remember your ideas and vote for you instead of the government.  But sometimes, when you have an idea that you think the government should pursue, and they do in fact pursue it, changing their own position in the process, it should be celebrated as good for the country, not good for the party.

Of course this post is inspired by the debate over plans to sell off state-owned forestry land in England.  But it is more inspired by the media reaction which calls the government’s change of heart on the issue “an instant, screeching u-turn“.  Because, as with most things in politics, you can’t do something without the media.  Media shapes the debate and how particular issues are viewed depends very much how they are reported.  So for the opposition to the government plans, while in reality this was a victory for them, they – and the media – have to spin it as a defeat for the government in order for it to be worthy of top news-billing.

So once again my naive hope that politics can be conducted in a more positive and civilised manner is likely to be thwarted because we can’t handle a situation where government and opposition can work together without one party having to outscore the other. Yawn.  And we wonder why people are turned off politics.

Treatise on Democracy (Vol. 1)

Feb 15

Posted by Malc in Democracy, International | 31 Comments

Watching the Egyptian Revolution (has anyone started calling it that yet?  BBC slowly moved from “Egypt unrest” to “Egypt crisis” but I don’t remember seeing “revolution…) got me thinking a bit about democracy.  Sure, we take it for granted here, but in recent weeks we’ve seen the South Sudanese vote for independence from the north in a referendum and protests in Tunisia, Egypt itself, Algeria, Iran and Yemen aimed at toppling regimes and installing democracy.

Thing is… aren’t they twenty years too late?

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama published a much-debated paper entitled “The End of History”, which, three years later was expanded into a book titled “The End of History and the Last Man”.  Fukuyama’s central argument was that, with the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, liberal democracy had won and established itself as the central principle which would inform how all states would be run.  Now, of course there are plenty criticisms of Fukuyama, and I myself have always been more oriented towards Huntington’s “Clash of Civilisations” theory (without the inherent racism apparent in some sections) but the point I’d make is that, at the time of Fukuyama’s writing, he did have some evidence for his thesis.

That’s not to say that “we’re all liberal democrats now” (note the lower case) in any form – and I don’t think that he’d argue that we would be, just that we are all on that trajectory.  But in the 1980s and 1990s we did see a major shift towards liberal democracy (predominantly in Eastern Europe) in line with Fukuyama’s theory.  States who had never seen democracy began to embrace the concept, replacing totalitarian communist states with varying degrees of democratic institutions.

But while these new democracies began to, if not love the concept then at least learn to live with it, modern western democracies began to fall out of love with democracy – or at least in the way they themselves practised it.  Witness falling election turnouts in Britain (1992 onwards), US Presidential (1960-2008) and Federal (1962-2006), French Parliamentary (1945-2007) and the general malaise about political representatives and apathy about our political systems.  Okay, I’m using figures which emphasise my point (and you can find states which will contradict me – Italy’s turnout has increased, though you’d hardly call that a model western democracy) but you see what I’m saying.  We’re getting to be fed up with democracy just as these states are understanding why we loved it in the first place

But maybe its not democracy that we’re fed up with, but how we practise it.  Maybe representative democracy has had its day, and we need to move to more direct or deliberative democracy.  Yeah, I know – trying to get a chamber of 129 MSPs or 650 MPs to decide agree on anything, how do you get a population of 5 million or 60 million to make decisions?  But it doesn’t need to go that far.

In case you couldn’t tell, this is feeding into some of my research at the moment.  I’ve been reading more about deliberative democracy – Habermas,  Rawls, Fishkin and Dryzek mostly, since you ask – but it is mostly a theoretical concept, with no real practical application for political systems, except for a handful of ideas, which include ideas like deliberative polling and citizen’s juries.  But the principle is, I think, something we should be looking at – more public engagement in democracy through some of these innovations, and focusing more on the deliberative aspect of decision-making, on letting the arguments convince more than the political up or downside.

Of course I realise this is naive.  We can’t do politics without the politicians (or can we?).  But we’re losing our will to love our own democracies, which if we don’t remedy, may endanger the new democratic projects in the Middle East and Africa.  Perhaps we need to be less apathetic not for our own sake, but for the sake of global stability?  That’s a big, pretentious bull-s*** thought to finish on.

Vote in the AV referendum to save the democratic world?  As a campaign slogan, it’s got its merits…