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Better Nation

3rd placed Greens scoop potential gold in Swedish two-horse race

Sep 20

Posted by Jeff in Europe | 8 Comments

The headlines from this evening’s Swedish election result will no doubt involve claims that the far-right Swedish Democrat party holds the balance of power. Such circulation-boosting sensationalism from news outlets is something we in the UK should be used to from the experience of a BNP that gained more exposure than its lowly position ever deserved.

It is infact the Green Party that holds the balance of power in Sweden with the result expected to be:

Alliance – 49.3%
Social Democrats/Left – 36.5%
Greens – 7.2%
Swedish Democrats – 5.7%

The ruling Alliance has a couple of options without the support of the Greens of course. It could rule as a minority Government and ‘dare’ the red-Green coalition to vote with the toxic Swedish Democrats to deliver its agenda. The unlikelihood of such an approach is matched by the improbability of the Alliance’s second option – dealing with the racists directly themselves.

So contact with the Greens by the Alliance has been made as Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt would clearly rather work with a stable majority than a vulnerable minority.

Having Ministerial positions would be a massive promotion for the Swedish Greens (who were the 7th largest party in 2006-10) but their leader has already said publicly that they’d struggle to look their voters in the eye if a deal was done. Again, we in the UK can understand this logic as we have seen Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems plummet in the polls since they sold out many of their voters back in May.

However, the Swedish Greens have a wider chasm to cross as they actively campaigned alongside the red Social Democrats for a left coalition.

One extra aspect of this already complicated drama is that the Greens could use the presence of the widely detested, far-right Swedish Democrats as political cover for dealing with the Alliance, assuming the rationale of combatting Climate Change is somehow insufficient for the Swedes, of course.

So an intriguing evening and more twists to come but if the Greens can go from 7th to 3rd and then on to a Government role then there would be one clear winner from Valet 2010.

What would Labour leader Ed Miliband mean for Scotland?

Sep 17

Posted by Jeff in Parties | 4 Comments

The Labour leadership contest is finally coming to an end with speculation growing that Ed Miliband may pull off a surprising win.

I’d personally be content with this result as, although David Miliband would be an effective opposition leader and encourage me to vote Labour, Ed Miliband has a vision and set of policies that, as leader, would encourage me to join the party. An encouragement that I am confident I would resist, I hasten to add. A pale Green Labour party would always be secondary to the vibrant Greens on environmental affairs.

Anyway, despite the strong regard that proper lefties have for Ed, the Labour party is primarily in the business of winning elections, not beefing up its membership, (though of course the two enjoy a considerable, causal overlap). The pragmatic choice of the elder brother vs the idealistic choice of the younger brother has already been discussed at length (mostly in The Guardian) so there is little point in rehashing those arguments here.

However, an interesting aspect of this brewing drama is that most Scottish MPs voted for David Miliband while it is Ed Miliband who is allegedly on course to win the nomination (according to recent polling and admittedly only by a tiny 1%). What would this mean for those north of the border? We are talking about a potential future Prime Minister, as early as 2015. Would party leader Ed command Scottish MPs’ full support? Are we set for another power struggle within Labour, destabilising the leader and dangerously undermining the arguments against the coalition’s cuts? I hope not, but I cannot see Ed Balls and David Miliband serving peacefully under young Ed for four and a half long years of Opposition.

Furthermore, what is Ed’s views on independence, has anyone checked? Is this one reason why the Scottish Labour MPs largely refused to back him?

It is perhaps too early to guess what impact the regular sight of Ed Miliband with his hand on Iain Gray’s shoulder could do for the Holyrood elections. My own view is that both men do not instil confidence and rather exude a certain nervousness, something that would sit awkwardly against the cocksure Alex Salmond and/or the steely resolve of Nicola Sturgeon. Of course, a more humbler approach to politics may be what the country is looking for after the four years of the bombast and ballast from the current First Minister.

Without wanting to go off on tangents, another aspect of the coming election campaign, with either of the Milibands as leader, is that it will be unmistakably male. Annabel Goldie and Nicola Sturgeon will be rare female voices in a contest that will heavily involve Salmond, Gray, Scott, Moore, Miliband, Murphy, Mundell, Swinney, Robertson, Carmichael and, well, I could go on and on and on. What happened to that springboard of equality in the late 1990s? Have political parties taken their eye off the gender split ball?

So, the big question is – would Ed Miliband as PM-in-waiting make Scotland a Better Nation?

That is a big question, and probably too early to say, but the early signs are encouraging as his anti-War and anti-nuclear-power stances should dovetail nicely with large swathes of the Scottish public’s views. He is amiable and inspiring and seemingly capable of working consensually and constructively. The biggest question mark for me is whether Labour can hold themselves together with such a surprise winner at the helm, despite the shared focus of beating the Tories.

Is the SNP a ‘post-nationalist’ party?

Sep 16

Posted by Malc in Constitution, Parties | 68 Comments

The question above is inspired by the following quote from Iain Macwhirter’s Sunday Herald column last week:

But then I’ve never really understood the point of having a referendum on independence anyway because no-one really knows what independence means any more. Flags and armies? Hardly. Border posts and a separate currency? Definitely not. The minimalist definition of independence would be the Scottish Parliament plus tax powers – and that’s likely to happen anyway. Scotland already is a nation. It is a question of acquiring the lost accoutrements of a state, and that process is already under way.

Conspiracy theorists suspect that this is what Salmond has been up to all along: muddying the pure waters of nationhood by adulterating it with devolution while distracting the SNP membership with an over-the-rainbow referendum that is never going to happen. The fact that we didn’t hear any accusations of this last week suggests that the SNP may already be on the way to becoming a post-nationalist party, accepting that independence is a process not an event. (I’d better say here that nothing Salmond has ever said publicly or privately suggests that this is his view. He insists that independence remains his only ambition and that he really wants a referendum, even though the polls indicate he would lose it).

Now, I don’t agree with his title – “They shelved independence and got away with it. Nice work, Alex”, nor do I agree that there were “precious few mourners” regarding the decision.  The SNP members that I’ve spoken too – and some of them are elected members – cannot fathom the strategy.  Yet I do take his point – whatever the SNP are saying in private, they are not saying it in public if it contradicts the Maximum Eck’s diktat.  But that’s an aside.  What this post is really about is Iain Macwhirter’s conception of independence “as a process not an event” and the SNP as a “post-nationalist party”.  Both deserve further study.

When I started the proposal for my PhD thesis, my original research question asked what it meant to be a nationalist in the twenty-first century.  So I have given some thought to this previously.  But the question Macwhirter asks – what does independence actually mean – is an important one for the SNP.  But like the previous question I asked for the Greens, it is probably one they would prefer not to answer.  Muddying the terminology of independence, thinking about the movement towards some form of fiscal autonomy for the Scottish Parliament – that may well constitute independence in all but name.  And indeed, in the modern world, that may well be what is meant by independence – though there would be plenty dissent within the SNP’s membership if that became an accepted version of what the party saw as its ultimate goal.

Nevertheless, I come back to his conceptualisation of the SNP as a ‘post-nationalist party’.  Whenever I hear something described using the prefix ‘post’ I do have concerns – namely that whatever it is they are supposed to have become is nothing like what they were previously (see ‘post-feminist, post-structuralist’).  The fact is, the terminology is used badly – generally speaking what has happened is a party or person has been a feminist (for example) in the past but has found some things with that ideology that they disagree with and doesn’t quite fit in the bracket, and so they are described as ‘post-feminist’.  And so, the ‘post-‘ prefix should be understood with caution.

And yet, for some reason, I think the post-nationalist terminology works for the SNP – especially is you accept the Macwhirter conceptualisation of independence.  Obviously, the traditional view of independence is one of borders, sovereignty and control of currency.  Now those three things would not be fully under the control of the Scottish Parliament under this new conceptualisation, especially when you consider the interdependency of the EU and the fact that Scottish currency would either continue to be Pound Sterling or the Euro, neither of which would be controlled by Edinburgh.  And yet other, larger, European nations (Germany, Belgium, Malta) work within this contstricted view of independence, this post-post-Westphalian understanding of sovereignty.  So while the SNP still stand for independence, what independence itself stands for has changed.  And that is key to understanding the SNP in government.

Last week I think we talked enough about the SNP’s dropping of the referendum bill, but this conception of the SNP and independence is something to think about further.  I’d be interested (I guess, from an academic perspective as much as anything) in people’s thoughts on this.

Give Pope a chance / Pope go home

Sep 15

Posted by Jeff in International | 62 Comments

In our first dual-author post, Jeff argues that the Pope should be welcomed with open arms while Malc… well, let’s just say he doesn’t agree.

Jeff: Has our Godless society sunk so low that we no longer wish to welcome the Pope to our shores?

It seems to be so with a palpable distaste for next week’s papal event throughout the media and the blogosphere.

With his state visit (which he was invited on we should remember) Pope Benedict has attracted more disdain and outrage than recent guests including Jacob Zuma, that thrice-married imbecile from South Africa, and King Abdullah II, overseer of human rights abuses in Saudia Arabia. ‘Not in my name’ they cry, ‘not with my tax money’ they jeer, as if the Devil himself will be touching down in Edinburgh this Thursday. He may wear Prada, but surely we can count the Pope as one of the good guys?

Do we not need a little perspective here? The Dalai Lama looked like he was having a hoot when he came to the UK a year ago and he is nothing more than a thoroughly likeable hereditary deity so perhaps we should be making more of a song and a dance for the Pope rather than nailing him to the proverbial cross.

The Catholic church has, of course, many crosses to bear, not least of which is the child abuse scandal that has rocked not just Ireland but many a European country in the past few years. The tremors even reached as far as the Pope himself, one aspect of the affair highlighting an alarming lack of judgement from the man.

While this issue of course deserves as close a scrutiny as possible, it should not be fixated upon. It certainly should not dominate the much wider question of faith’s place in society, particularly when that lack of grounding in a person’s life, for better or worse, is causing the greatest inter-generational change to society since, well, possibly ever. Many a family’s lineage will have seen a dramatic shift in attitudes, not to mention geography, since the middle of the last century.

To go forwards, perhaps we have to look backwards and, for several hundreds of thousands of Scots, that involves reconsidering a Catholic heritage that to a significant extent has helped shape who we are as a people and, consequently, as a nation.

Many people are complaining that not being Catholic is some sort of reason for not inviting the Pope here. One has to only note that being neither French nor American would keep neither Sarkozy nor Obama at bay.

The Pope may be a flawed leader of a flawed religion and there is of course no convincing reason for anyone to necessarily take his word as Bible but, amid the hustle and bustle of our post-recession lives, amid the attention-shortening gogglebox garbage that we all guiltily tune in to week after week and amid the community-loosening dispersal of increasingly individual lives, there is value in reflecting on what a man steeped in faith and well versed in Scripture has to say to us.

All I am saying is, give Pope a chance.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Malc: From the off, I’ll point out I have no Catholic family connection other than being a Celtic fan, and unlike most, I don’t conflate the concepts of football and religion.  Nor does my religious background (Church of Scotland, since you ask, although not slavish about it) inform my political views to any real degree.  This is by means of pointing out that I have no religious motive for the views I am about to espouse.

I think the Pope’s visit is an outrage.

First up, I recognise that the Pope is the key figure for the world’s Catholics.  And that his coming to visit is a big deal – for them.  But for me the importance of the position he holds is secondary to the views he holds – and in those views he can be viewed as bigoted at best, dangerous at worst.  He’s treated as a religious figure – and that’s right, to an extent.  But the position he holds is as political as it is religious.  And when someone who arrives on our shores with a political view that people strongly disagree with, they protest vociferously about it (witness – George W. Bush).  And its right that they do – it is a free society after all.  But the idea that we should all welcome the Pope with open arms is as naive as it is ridiculous.

Jeff raised the visit of King Abdullah II, citing his record as an ‘overseer of human rights abuses’ as evidence that we should be complicit in the visit of the Pope.  Now, Jeff pretty much covered the issue of child abuse – which I think comes under the purview of ‘human rights abuses’ – but in my view, just because we’re letting one man in whom we have identified as overlooking Western ideals of human rights doesn’t mean we should let in another.

And while I’m on it, let’s have a look at the Pope’s views shall we?  He preached a sermon that told the world he thought Islam was dangerous (which is basically the same thing Geert Wilders did, and we decided to ban him from coming).  He preaches against homosexuality and gay marriage which, while in line with Catholic dogma, hardly sits well with our anti-discrimination laws.  And he tells a continent ravaged with AIDS not to use condoms which, in my mind, is tantamount to encouraging the genocide of an entire continent.  Now that is an overstatement of my case, but think about it for a second.  Preaching against the use of contraceptives is a sure fire way of encouraging unsafe sex – and thus the spread of the disease.  Now obviously people are responsible for their own actions (the Nuremberg trials taught us that) but when a figure as powerful as the Pope is advocating unsafe sex, he is at the very least complicit in the suffering of an entire continent.

I haven’t mentioned the cost of his visit, but I have two problems with that too – the amount this trip is costing us (and for a country with a deficit of £158BN that is not insignificant) and the fact that WE are paying for it.  I disagree with the guy’s politics but surely if he’s coming to visit, he can pay for the bloody trip himself (maybe sell off some of that gold in the Vatican – something that I can honestly say turned my stomach when I visited).

So there we go – I’m on the same side of this debate as Ian Paisley and most of the left (and on how many occasions can you say they are on the same page?!) and disagreeing with my colleague and probably incurring the wrath of Catholics everywhere.  Jeff asks us to ‘Give Pope a chance’.  I’d ask the Pope to give anti-discrimination a chance.  Not as catchy, I’ll give you – but, in my view, apt.  Controversial?  Absolutely.

Anti-flag

Sep 14

Posted by James in Media | 6 Comments

The Jolly Roger flyingAnother round of flag fuss has kicked off, and as usual, it’s lowered the tone and brought politics, especially nationalist politics, into disrepute. When I say nationalist, I of course include the British or Unionist variety as well as the Scottish variety: both sides are susceptible to the kind of totemism and time-wasting that accompanies flag-centric news stories.

Yesterday it was the classic version of the argument – which flag should fly at Edinburgh Castle, an issue which was done to death a mere nine years ago. Petitions Committee discussed it again, and one MSP present at the meeting told me that “it’s rather sad how this posturing and competition goes on about the two national flags”. Yes indeed.

There are endless variants, none of them with an ounce of real news to them and all taken as deadly serious by those involved. When I first started working for Parliament’s own press office in 2002, I took a media inquiry about a flag story. I think the question was this: which flag would fly higher at the new Holyrood building? I came off the phone and light-heartedly told a colleague about the call. His face dropped and he advised me that this issue would be likely to occupy our time for much of the week *, and so it did.

Another such round was the previously unconsidered question of the proper colour of the Saltire. Parliament was asked, and Pantone 300 was the answer. Not a partisan example, but it’s hard to justify that discussion as a good use of MSPs’ or civil servants’ time. On another occasion a member of the National Library staff had apparently wasted hours of work time covering their desk in endless Saltires and Lions Rampant. When they were told to get them down and just do their job, it was regular flag-lover Christine Grahame who stepped in for a Saltire-draped photo-op.

Before that we had the unedifying sight of Labour moaning about how the trains were painted. It’s got to be painted somehow, and they chose a Saltire: who cares? The shocking inconsistency of the Labour spokesperson in that last story is something else: “People care about whether their train runs on time, not what colour it is painted.” So why did you spend thirteen years in office in London and eight in Edinburgh without ending the Tories’ failed privatisation experiment? Too busy checking there weren’t the wrong kind of saltires on the line?

The former blogger Scottish Unionist, much missed by me, used to do a great job excoriating the Nationalist side of this. But both sides are as bad as each other. When Salmond picked a dreich Christmas card of a lassie dragging a Saltire around we could have done without the frothing on all sides, including the Lib Dems and the Tories. When the SNP administration, perhaps ill-advisedly, spent £23,000 on flags, did we then need another round of Rent-A-Foulkes?

I’m not a nationalist, although my preference is for Scottish independence, a distinction which some either cannot or will not understand. I also make the traditional exception when Scotland are playing. But I am anti-flag. They’re a waste of valuable mental space, of Parliamentary resources, of newsprint and pixels. It’s time the nationalists on both sides stopped pretending it’s for the tourists, too.

Fly what you like on your own property, unless it’s got a really bad history. But the nonsense has to stop somehow. Perhaps each time an MSP issues a press release urging the use of one flag over another, their preferred flag itself could be banned from public buildings for a month. Perhaps we could consider alternatives for the castle, like the Edinburgh flag or the one above (which the tourists would clearly prefer). Or perhaps we could just cut down every last public flagpole and save ourselves a lot of bother, including blog posts like this.

* Edit: I’ve been reminded that the response was actually “tricky fellows, flags”.

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