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Dead Set

Oct 27

Posted by James in Health, Holyrood | 17 Comments

Margo Macdonald’s current proposals on assisted suicide go by the hard-to-argue with name of the End of Life Assistance (Scotland) Bill. Who wouldn’t want to be assisted at the end of their life? I know nothing scares me more than the thought of non-existence, nothing that is except inescapable pain or the loss of function in my body or my mind. Some assistance would be appreciated, thanks society.

Of course, it’s an ambiguous name, and what it’s really about is assisting people to end their lives. No doubt the decision was taken to find a less controversial name than the Euthanasia (Scotland) Bill or the Assisted Suicide (Scotland) Bill.

This is an issue normally phrased as a challenging moral debate, with newspapers feeling obliged to locate quotes for and against, the latter normally from the Catholic Church or similar. Sometimes it’s the supporters who don’t get a look in. For instance, the Daily Mail recently ran a virulently negative piece which suggested such legislation would lead, UK-wide, to 1,000 deaths.

I don’t get it. It’s a pure freedom issue to me, I have nothing but respect for Margo’s decision to bring the legislation forward, and I agree with her that there needs to be a set of robust safeguards. Personally, I cannot imagine what it would be like to suffer interminable pain and to be denied the choice to end it. If you’re against it, religious readers, simply don’t do it. Don’t take part. It’s absolutely your freedom, should you find yourself in the situation the Bill is intended to cover, to suffer on as long as you wish.

There’s a theme here we see in other areas: people seeking to project their own individual moral preferences onto society and make universal laws accordingly. It’s like the debate over decriminalising gay sex in the 60s. Just because you don’t want to do it yourself, fine, but that’s no reason why you should be allowed to limit the freedom of others to do so. I also wonder whether any of the small number of vociferous opponents ever find themselves in the situation they’ve speculated about later in life, and if that new feeling of powerlessness occasionally changes their mind.

That Daily Mail article can be read completely differently. The figure seems high, but if they’re right about it, there are 1,000 people in this country suffering unbearably and being denied the final relief, people whose freedoms must not be denied in their time of extraordinary need. Some of those thousand people would decide to ask for help to end their life, others may decide otherwise. Whatever the numbers, the choice should be theirs, and Scotland would surely be a better place if Margo’s Bill passes.

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Christian Socialist or Socialist Christian?

Oct 25

Posted by Guest Blog in Ideology | 31 Comments

This guest post was written by Rev Shuna Dicks of Aberlour Parish Church in Moray (who also blogs here). We’ll let Shuna introduce herself and her politics below but, for the benefit of doubt, the views expressed below are hers and not ours (especially the party affiliation!).

I am a Christian and I am a socialist. A minister in the Church of Scotland and a card carrying member of the Labour Party (and seriously considering expanding this by affiliating to the Co-operative Party). But which of these important values based sets has the greatest influence on the decisions I make? Which came first? Ideology or theology?

I am the product of a long and happy marriage of two Christian parents – one a socialist for all her life – the other a more recent convert to socialism after decades of liberal leanings. The recent in this is not post May 2010 BTW – more a post 1997 gradual swing.

I have been in and around the Church of Scotland all my life. My earliest political thought was during the 1979 referendum – when I was pro-devolution. At the grand old age of 10 I made my first political statement when tasked with marking the school playground with arrows pointing the way to the class room being used as a polling station. I added a few ‘yes’ and ‘no’s to the arrows – the final arrow having a yes above it! Can you imagine getting away with that these days? Another anecdote worth sharing is that at one time I had political aspirations and wanted to be on the Labour Party list of approved candidates for the first Scottish Parliamentary elections – my dad at that point suggested I give that up and go into the pulpit instead. Little did he or I know that a decade later that is exactly where I would be.

I do not know the answer to the question I posed in the title of this post. I am not even sure it is that important. But church and politics do collide. They can and do work together. And I believe the church does have something to say on how our country is governed and what the priorities should be. I wrote this pre-defence review announcement and pre-spending review – quite deliberately because I have the sinking feeling had I written this afterwards I would really not know where to begin. But I wrote this with the consultation document for possible/proposed cuts to be made to services by The Moray Council by my side. This document went with me to the meeting of Moray Presbytery’s Church and Community sub-committee, which I convene. We discussed it and (I hope) proposed some ‘deliverances’ to go before the next Presbytery meeting asking Kirk Sessions to fully engage with the consultation process – there are things in there that will greatly impact on the lives of our parishioners.

Despite what many people might think, the church still represents a significant number of people and in my induction to my parish I made vows to serve the whole parish not just those on the roll (i.e. members). The Church of Scotland still exercises a parish ministry – every part of Scotland is in a Church of Scotland parish. I take the parish seriously – I want to be involved in as much of it as I can. I am a member of the local Community Association in one of my villages and have attended the village council in the other; I am on the board of a community hall, a public park and soon a Parent Teacher Association. None of them compulsory for the local minister but for me key to playing a full role in my community and making me a better, more effective minister. I am also going represent the Presbytery on The Moray Council’s Children and Young People Committee. All of these involvements are politics with a small ‘p’ and all very local.

But should I mix politics with a big ‘P’ with my role as minister? Have I the right to use my pulpit for political purposes? No and I refuse to do so. That to me is an abuse of my position. I am happy to let my political affiliation be known (a quick Google of my name tells anyone that – a reminder of my failure to be elected as a local councillor!) but I will not make any party political pronouncements from the pulpit. I may comment on the impact of what we face this week – but only by way of illustrating its compatibility or not with what I think the Scriptures teach.

This is where both my ideology and theology collide: I believe in a loving God, who teaches justice and fairness through all of Scripture. I believe in Jesus Christ who taught us to love your neighbour as yourself.

And in the spirit of loving my neighbour I respect the right of others to disagree with me – whether that’s my faith or my politics.

Green double philosophy on GDP

Oct 24

Posted by Jeff in Economy | 9 Comments

Back in the day when I was an SNP member, I must admit that I took a certain joy from blogging a position that was contrary to the remarkably well disciplined view across the party members as a whole. As generally ornery as I am, I like to think that I actually believed what I was writing so I have thought through the below post more than I ordinarily would to ensure that I am not being unfair on my beliked Greens.

The world is a complicated place and one way that power-brokers make sense of it all is to calculate the GDP of the ‘countries’ that exist either side of the arbitrary borders that history, war, imperial ambition and no end of murder has helped to create.

A common riposte from those less than impressed with GDP as the apparent be-all and end-all of our daily 9-5,(6,7) lives is that if everyone paid for their partner to sleep with their neighbour then GDP would go through the roof. It wouldn’t make us a better off country. Indeed, the main proponents of this view seem to be the Green Party (yep, here I go) many of whose members are in favour of replacing GDP with some sort of ‘happpiness index’ that reflects quality of life.

I am not against the idea of a more appropriate, fuzzier economic index and would even say that I am, on balance, in favour of it. I certainly agree that an increase in a country’s GDP is not always necessarily a good thing. However, the flip side of that argument, and one that the aforementioned Greens should accept, is that GDP decreasing is not necessarily a bad thing.

Therefore, I raised an eyebrow with interest when I saw that leader of the Green Party in England & Wales, Caroline Lucas, was arguing passionately that George Osborne’s cuts may result in a double dip recession. After all, why should she care? The converse of what Caroline is proposing is not related to the GDP index and is not even affected by a double-dip recession, not directly anyway. I just suspect that the Green leader is picking the convenient response and easily sellable soundbites over the more relevant line of argument.

One tweet from the GPEW leader is that we “need investment, not cuts, or we risk a double dip recession”. Granted there’s only so much one can squeeze into 140 characters but that’s a skin deep response to an issue that is cutting to the very bone.

I understand that the minority must, at times, operate and argue within the parameters set down by the majority but it’s not enough to cry foul at a double dip recession that might (might!) be necessary and it’s not even enough to put forward the Gordon Brown-esque no-brainer option of ‘investment vs cuts’.

What is required is an explanation as to why investment, a costly increase in GDP and a Green revolution is a better option for the country than cutting bloated spending, the risk of a double dip recession and avoiding crippling interest payments.

I am already sold on the former but if the leaders proposing it are stopping short of deepening the argument and appear to artificially make it a black & white, good & evil issue, then one can’t help but wonder about the latter and the intellectual rigour that may be holding it up behind the scenes.

The Greens may be playing on the Capitalist court but that doesn’t mean that they have to play by their rules. Throwing GDP in the garbage bin must surely also mean resisting using its accompanying lingo.

Or maybe I’m just a wind-up merchant.

Neo-nazis: ignore them and they’ll go away?

Oct 23

Posted by James in Parties | 4 Comments

Jeff recently wrote about the Swedish experience with the so-called rise of the far right, when the media made it look like boyish Jimmie Akesson’s party won outright. Yesterday these anti-foreigner parties met each other in Austria to pontificate primarily about the “Islamisation” of Europe (for instance, 4.2% of Austrians are Muslims). It’s not just a one-off meeting: they sit together in the European Parliament as the “Alliance of European Nationalist Movements”. Curiously, foreigners who hate the foreigners who come to their countries are OK.

The extent of their rise can be debated. In Sweden, just just one voter in 18 backed them, and if they’ve “risen”, the Greens and others “rose” further. In Scotland, they got less than the pensioners, the Tommy-fragment of the SSP, and one of the two evangelical parties. Even their 2009 Euro success was on a reduced vote but with a lower turnout overall, effectively driven by the abstention of former Labour voters.

Nevertheless, how should the non-fascist majority respond to these parties, before, during and after elections? In general should we boycott them, confront them, ignore them, or even try to reach out specifically to their voters?

The day after the Swedish elections, the Guardian contained another of those regular broadsides against the complacent liberal elites who ignored the Sweden Democrats under the seductive headline “We should have argued Sweden Democrats to oblivion”. When you get into the detail, some of Mankell’s criticisms seem reasonable – does it help to refuse to have your makeup done alongside a fascist before a TV debate? There are arguments for being there and taking part, and there are for “no-platforming” them, but that’s just silly. Conversely, not letting them distribute racist material to schools seems pretty reasonable to me.

The same debates took place here during the Euro elections, and it’s easy to see why. As is regularly observed, free speech only means anything when it applies to people whose opinions you abhor, people exactly like Nick Griffin. Yet does their right to freedom of speech mean he has to get rushed an invitation to the BBC’s Question Time less than six months after becoming an MEP? There have been Greens in the Scottish Parliament for eleven years, but not one has been invited onto this flagship programme.

The other instinct is the one expressed by Mankell – the far-right’s arguments are specious and flimsy as well as hateful, and a good debate with them shows that off. Griffin is almost a parody of himself (see how easy it was for Cassetteboy). The Scottish Greens debated a “no platform” policy some conferences ago, and a passionate version of this argument from a Highlands member won the day. It’s also fun to shout at them. It gives all good lefties that warm fuzzy feeling – we may disagree about the detail, but look how virtuous we all look next to these bastards. I’ve done it myself.

But what actually works? Is there a tactic to adopt which is consistent both with the morality of free speech and the tactics of stopping them? Bonnie Meguid did some research that might be useful for her book Party Competition Between Unequals (pdf), which looks at the tactical decisions made by larger parties to respond to newer entrants: the far right, the “ethnoterritorials” like the SNP (a description I’m sure they love), and the Greens.

Her theory focuses on the three issues of Position, Salience, and Ownership. When a new party appears with a single key policy (e.g anti-immigration, devolution/independence, the environment) other parties can amend their position on that issue, they can increase or decrease the extent to which that single issue is regarded as salient, and they can boost or reduce that new party’s ownership of the issue.

She considers three responses older parties can make to these new entrants. First, they can ignore them and ignore their issue. This helps reduce the importance with which the issue is regarded (salience), and, all other factors being equal, reduces the smaller party’s vote. For an example, the response of mainstream parties to the evangelicals’ call for an explicitly Christian politics gets almost totally ignored. Even the devout like Blair get told “we don’t do God”. Although Scottish politics used to have a stronger sectarian aspect, it’s now largely accepted that one’s faith or absence thereof simply isn’t salient to your politics.

Second, the existing parties can accommodate the newcomer’s issue and develop somewhat similar policy themselves: the Tories moved right on immigration when the National Front first appeared, for instance. This will again tend to depress the smaller party’s vote by reducing their ownership of their key issue. Meguid describes the successful ways first the Tories then Labour sought to accommodate environmentalism after the Green Party’s 1989 false dawn, an accommodation she believes was the main factor behind the decade of Green weakness before the election of first Robin to Holyrood then Jean and Caroline to the European Parliament.

Finally, the existing parties can take an adversarial approach (think the French Socialists attacking Le Pen). Counter-intuitively, this boosts smaller party votes by raising the profile of their issue and ensuring they own it in the public mind. Cynical use of this strategy is best done by parties at the opposite end of the spectrum, where they believe their mainstream opponents will suffer most, and they will gain, relatively. While she downplays the ideological satisfaction of this kind of combative approach, there are clearly examples where cynicism was the motivation. She describes one shocking incident in France where the Socialists persuaded their friends in broadcasting to invite Le Pen into a debate, a debate they then boycotted with a great fanfare.

There are some weaknesses in the theory, or at least incompletenesses – is each party’s internal coherence and organisational ability really not a significant factor? – but it suggests a way forward. Don’t ban them, don’t no-platform them, don’t egg them, don’t try to curtail their free speech and feed their victim mentality, but don’t rail against them or run specifically anti-Nazi campaigns. It’s tempting, it’s fun, but it’s strengthening them. The other parties should just work hard and get their own vote out. When you are in debates with them, just stay calm and stick to the issues (interestingly, this is the approach our Dutch colleagues have already adopted with Geert Wilders, I’m told).

And when you see someone running a campaign centred on them, perhaps it’s innocent, perhaps it’s cynical, but it seems pretty likely they’re also picking an easy way to cover up for their own shortage of ideas.

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Two Treatises of Sport and Identity

Oct 23

Posted by Malc in Culture, Sport | 5 Comments

When you reference John Locke in a blog title, you give the reader an expectation on quality which you are never likely to live up to.  Nevertheless, I’ve done it anyway – mainly because it worked as a title but partly as a device to emphasise my point.  So now, as you read on, expectations are raised as to the quality of prose – but I’ll leave you as the judge of whether the result is an almighty effort which results in heroic failure or produces a positive result only to be hampered by the sizeable expectations laid upon it to begin with.

Anyway, the reason I’ve regarded this as “Two Treatises” is that I’ve already seen a first (though not written by me).  Read it here.  It is written by the enlightened (well, for a No.8 at any rate) John Beattie, a former Scottish rugby international, whose son is a current Scotland back-rower and his daughter is a Scottish football international.  I guess if there’s a family who know a little bit about sport and representing your nation, it could be Mr Beattie’s.  So when he asks: “how Scottish people beat the Australians, New Zealanders, and indeed the English, at anything?” I feel we need to explore the question a little.

His post is a summary of Scottish success (oh yes – there was some of that!) at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi (9 golds, 10 silvers and 7 bronzes – 26 medals in total).  He points out the huge disparity in population between Scotland and Australia (we’re 25% of them) and the fact that they have more swimming pools in Melbourne than we have in total as emphasis that we shouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in… erm, an Australian summer of beating them in the pool.  And yet it happened.

But I don’t buy that.  I was going to use this post to emphasise the same point – that for a nation of just 5 million Scotland punches above its weight.  But then I looked at the new FIFA World Rankings.  We’re now #57= in the world, and started counting the countries above us with a population smaller than ours. I gave up at 10, but there are more.  So that can’t solely be it.  Similarly in rugby – New Zealand are the best team in the world and arguably have been for some time (Rugby World Cup competitions notwithstanding) yet their population is less than ours (and indeed, they have more – 13 times more – sheep than people… just saying).

So if its not how many people we have – as John Beattie suggests – that impacts upon sporting success, then what is it?  Well, pick any number of factors – government funding for sport, sport in schools (PE), lack of decent facilities, the invention of computers and computer games.  But if those are actually good excuses for us, then surely the rest of the world should be suffering the same?  Well, perhaps they are – and the quality of sport has taken a dive in recent times.  I’m not really talking about elite sports level (world class pro footballers are probably more skilled –  but less smart with it – than previous generations; rugby internationals are massive) but the depth of talent is probably less than it has been.  And having a smaller population will inevitably impact upon this.

John Beattie also points to us being pessimistic, to us talking Scotland down and being negative, as a national trait.  I have to be honest – I’m as guilty as the next at that, particularly when it comes to sport.  But just as sport is part of our identity, so is, I think is this pessimism.  Not a healthy aspect of identity – and one which rightly sees politicians taken to task when they imply we’re too wee, daft or poor to survive on our own (a caricature of a unionist position to be sure, but perhaps a fair criticism).  But I’m not convinced it is this attitude that is holding us back.

Honestly (and here’s a surprise for Jeff and James who have me down as a sporting pessimist) I think Scotland are as good as we can be at the moment in sporting terms.  Sure we can only marginally beat Liechtenstein and draw with Lithuania, but that is perhaps our level.  It is only because our expectations are so high – because we’ve historically been spoiled by the over-achievement of our small nation – that we see these results as poor.  And this is where I have one-up on my co-authors.

I’ve watched Scotland performances with them in the past (Netherlands in the last qualifying campaign stands out) and both hoped (expected?) us to win.  I think James even had us, optimistically, to beat World and European Champions Spain last week!  I, on the other hand, am much more pessimistic.  But I find that a good thing – it makes for less heartache in the long run.  You see, if you expect Scotland to be good and we’re not, you get incredibly frustrated when we struggle against minnows of world football.  If you are more pessimistic (some may say “realistic”!) then when victory comes, it is perhaps all the sweeter for its surprising nature.

So I think what I’m saying is this – by all means be ambitious.  But temper it with some realism.  Raising expectations is only going to disappoint.  Be a little more pessimistic, a little less expectant, and we, as fans, will enjoy the experience more.