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Romney vs Obama – a little short of drama

Nov 6

Posted by Jeff in Elections | 3 Comments

Obama vs Romney, the multi-billion dollar, largely insipid snooze fest of an election is almost over and the political infighting and domestic instability can continue apace again soon, whoever emerges victorious. 

I am currently in DC, on my honeymoon no less (nothing says romance like Mitt Romney) and I had the great, great fortune to see Barack Obama and Bill Clinton stumping in the flesh at a Virginia rally the other day. 

Shameless name dropping out of the way, here are some thoughts gleaned from the press, papers and people out here in the States in advance of later today:

The issues are very much secondary, tertiary or whatever the fancy word for 4th is. I’ve watched CNN, ABC, NBC and even Fox and there has been zero discussion surrounding the candidates’ policies and any differences therein. Zero. It’s all about polls, process and personalities to the extent that one can’t help but believe that intellectual bankruptcy will be the undoing of the US. Scotland and the UK looks veritably professorial by comparison.

Obama apparently has 186 electoral college votes in the bag, Romney has 170. These are from states that realistically are predictable before a vote is even cast. This increases to 243 vs 206 when ‘leaning’ states are included. Only the genuine toss ups of Colorado (9 elec college votes), Virginia (13), Ohio (18), Florida (29), Wisconsin (10), Iowa (6) and New Hampshire (4) are where the Presidency will be won and lost. Recent polling suggests that Florida is at least leaning Republican.

Romney really is a shambles. His oft-repeated stump speech is a desperate, disparate collection of one liners, shameless platitudes and rambling stories. One second he was talking about the American flag when he was a boy scout leader and the next he was asking the crowd to applaud the armed forces. Romneyshambles, but within the margin of error. 

The level of mendacity in this election really is incredible, with the Republican camp largely responsible. Examples abound from Chrysler moving jobs to China (they aren’t), abortion (Roe vs Wade), planned parenthood and levels of education funding. Lies have poisoned this election process. It is, or at least should be, criminal. 

The rest of the world is pretty much irrelevant to Americans at the moment. Fair enough in a way, it’s their election, but one would think that self-proclaimed leaders of the free world would want to consider external relations a bit more. Pro-Israel Americans will vote Romney who has occasionally mentioned China, but that’s it. Special relationship? Forget it.

A tie is not impossible, 269 college votes each. Two ways for this to happen are as follows:
– Obama wins Nevada, Virginia, New Hampshire and Colorado, with Romney taking Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin
– Romney to win Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada and Virginia, and Obama to capture Ohio, Wisconsin and New Hampshire.

At the end of the day, with a House widely expected to be Republican controlled and the Senate Democrat controlled, the next President will be severely hamstrung at least in the first couple of years so one has to wonder what all the fuss is about.

Aside from elections being the greatest spectator sport in the world, of course.

But most of all, I’m with this girl.

Why George Monbiot is wrong about party funding

Nov 5

Posted by James in Parties | 14 Comments

Dollar bill into a ballot boxI’m over my nuclear-powered loss of confidence in George Monbiot now: he’s right about too much else, and there are too few other people in the mainstream media making those arguments. But last week’s piece by him on party funding was well-intentioned but seriously off-beam.

He was responding to a 2011 report by the Committee on Standards in Public Life which (Monbiot’s summary) recommended that “donations should be capped at an annual £10,000, the limits on campaign spending should be reduced, and public funding for political parties should be raised” – the last of which should be “a state subsidy based on the size of their vote at the last election”.

Instead, Monbiot argues, the only source of income a party could have would be membership fees and public matched funding for those. All parties would have to charge the same for membership, and he suggests £50 per annum. I’m a supporter of some form of state funding (of course, it already happens, largely in the form of Short Money: it’s just not transparent), but this model wouldn’t work.

As an incidental loophole, is he really suggesting that parties couldn’t charge for things like fringe sponsorship at conferences or even stalls? You might find sponsored fringe events distasteful, but charging for stalls surely isn’t unreasonable. And what about merchandise? I used to love buy Scottish Green Party umbrellas all the time, given that I seemed incapable of retaining one for more than a month. Would you ban that? How much is a fair markup on merch before it’s a bannable donation?

Then there’s the £50 rate. Again, looking at the Green position, we tier our membership fees: from £5 for students and the under-18s, then from £12 to £72 by income. Everyone with an income under £40,000 pays less than Monbiot’s figure. Should we be required to scrap that system? I quite like it. Or should we get less state support when a person on a low income joins the party?

Finally, such a system puts a big boundary around parties. You can be as enthusiastic a supporter as you like, but if you’re not also the kind of person who joins, you can’t give financial support. You can deliver leaflets for a party but you can’t chip in £100 to get more leaflets printed. It would even more clearly emphasise that politics belongs to the most committed.

The Committee’s original idea strikes me as a bit closer to an ideal model. In addition to caps on donations and reduced expenditure limits, they talk about a cost of 50p per elector per year, or a taxpayer contribution equivalent to between £1.50 and £3 per vote (the lower level for devolved institutions: the higher for Westminster, and the difference with the 50p figure is turnout), made in line with actual votes.

The problem with this is it does continue to divide parties by existing income. If you can’t afford the deposits it takes to stand in constituencies, either for Holyrood or Westminster, you can’t get any matched funding. That assumes the devolved figure would be for constituency votes rather than regional votes – you can be damn sure the rotating parties of government would argue for that approach. Also, for as long as we have any first-past-the-post element, a direct per-vote donation would contaminate people’s democratic choices. If I lived in a Tory/SNP or a Tory/Labour marginal where Greens couldn’t afford to stand, I’d be definitely want to cast an anti-Tory constituency vote. But then, despite being a Green member, I’d be funding one of two parties who are already massively well-funded. That’d stick in the throat, and it’d probably tempt me to abstain.

Personally, I’d still allow donations but with a low cap, perhaps £500 per annum, and I back some of the other changes proposed last year. But on the specific question of state funding, why not let the people decide directly? When you vote, you get a second sheet: who do you want to “donate” your public funds to? Show a list of all parties elected at any level in your area, and let the people decide who deserves a hand.

After The Thick of It – what are your favourite British political programmes?

Oct 29

Posted by James in Culture, Media | 10 Comments

Like political obsessives across the country, I grieved this weekend as The Thick of It came to an end. Being misquoted so it sounds like English isn’t my first language in a newspaper article about it was hardly a consolation.

I actually think it got better and better, with the Lib Dems in the final series being particularly well observed. But (no spoilers) it would be hard to do more after that finale.

So what are your other favourite British political dramas/comedies etc? My top four consists of these three plus TToI:

  1. Yes Minister & Yes Prime Minister. No explanation required. Nukes, the media, national service.
  2. A Very British Coup. Chris Mullin’s glorious fantasy of a proper Labour leader winning where Kinnock failed. Channel 4, 1988 – whole thing here.
  3. House of Cards etc. Owned entirely by Ian Richardson’s wonderfully vicious Francis Urquhart (pictured above), even more than Capaldi’s Tucker owned TToI. Sample monologue.

Go on – what should I add to that list? One thing that’s definitely missing is anything by way of Scottish political drama or comedy. Come on BBC/STV, let’s be having something: a dramatisation of Brookmyre’s Boiling A Frog at least.

What we learned this week (or, rather, didn’t)

Oct 28

Posted by Aidan in Holyrood | 36 Comments

Apologies for the question-to-which-the-answer-is-no title.

It’s been a tumultuous week in Scottish politics, just for a change. Starting with the NATO debate at the SNP conference, via a couple of resignations, we got to a fairly badly handled climb down on the ugly and futile secrecy which exacerbated a bad problem largely of the SNPs own making but which is likely to be problematic for Yes as a whole.

Those issues have been covered in depth elsewhere, what I want to look at is what it tells us about how things are working just now.

The NATO decision at SNP conference was interesting for a few reasons. As Jonathan Mackie pointed out internally this marked the SNP becoming a party where the leadership and the professional part of the party asserted it’s ability to carry motions over rank & file membership. Listening to the debate, the main thrust of the argument in favour of the policy change was one of political expediency regarding the referendum, with the fabled 75% Sandra White railed against featuring quite heavily. Given that, it seems unlikely that that was proposed without at least considering the likelihood of some MSPs deeming it a bridge too far and resigning the party whip as Jean Urquhart and John Finnie did.

The calculation, presumably, was that the inevitable narrowing of the SNP broad independence-above-all-else church in the lead up to the referendum was going to come at a price but that could be mitigated by doing it early and, in any case, MSPs would continue to vote with the party on key issues. If talk of a technical group comprising them, the Greens and Margo McDonald comes to pass then it may change FMQs but it seems unlikely there’d be an extra question, just a re-allocation of the current number away from the Yoonyonisht Conspiracy parties to committed Yes supporters.

Some people might even call that a win.

The legal advice regarding a newly independent Scotland’s status and obligations within the European Union , however, seems like an increasingly ill judged catastrophe.

We’ve discussed this a few times on BetterNation, possibly most pertinantly here with a countervailing view here but perhaps worth checking out the whole tag here. However, given the revelations in the independent today, it seems the view expressed by Neil Walker here and discussed by Lalland’s here is the correct one. Nobody knows.

That’s not surprising. The European Union is a highly political beast with little case law to set precedent. In what would essentially be a novel situation to deal with it’s not surprising the legal position is unclear. As Ian Smart argues Scotland’s status post-independence would need to be negotiated. The Scottish Government will now seek legal advice on this issue but will never reveal does not, surprisingly, fill one with confidence that we will have a clear basis on which to make a decision come 2014. of what

What is surprising is that was ever allowed to get this far. Catherine Stihler’s FoI was fought tooth and nail, impressions were created regarding the supposed certainty of Scotland’s status within the EU regardless of independence and the appearances of Nicola Sturgeon and Jamie Hepburn (who was presumably being punished for his No to NATO stance) in TV studios midweek to argue semantic differences in written transcripts versus the widely available video was not entirely sure footed.

Nobody would call that a win.

Oddly the defence of the Yes campaign, and not just the SNP here, has been to attack the other parties as having been insufficiently combative or competent enough in holding what has been suddenly redefined as the executive of the Scottish Government to account on the issue. We were treated, apparently more in sadness than anger (a form of argument which should be banned with immediate effect from Scottish politics on account of overuse) to criticisms of Johann Lamont for being insufficiently forensic, Ruth Davidson for out of date comedy references and Willie Rennie for being a Tory collaborator. All or none of which may be true but which deliberately and blatantly ignores the point in hand.

Some people might call that a tactical victory. The electorate, one might argue, will become bored of the argument over uncertainty about the terms of EU membership (nobody is suggesting Scotland will be summarily expelled and refused entry), the terms of the proposed currency union with the Bank of England or the terms of our proposed continued membership of NATO.

In short, we haven’t learned a lot but the shape of the next few years has clearly outlined. The major Yes parties – the SNP and the Greens – will contrast an independent Scotland with a Tory government and present contradictory views of what the Scotland would look like. The major No parties – Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems – will contrast and independent Scotland with the status quo, emphasising our loss of positive freedom over our gain of negative freedom

It will be very, very boring and apparently nobody will talk about either the pragmatic or theoretical distribution of power until the posturing is done.

I’m going for a Twix.

(I’m not really, Twixes are a product of the capitalist hegemony I’m trying to opt out of while maintaining a middle class standard of living)

 

We’ve all been Trumped – new petition to be lodged

Oct 26

Posted by James in Holyrood | 3 Comments

You’ve got until Monday night to watch Anthony Baxter’s epic film You’ve Been Trumped on iPlayer, but last Sunday night, when it aired, it seemed as if everyone was watching it.

Although the film does not actually cover the Scottish Government’s shenanigans over the project in that much detail, Twitter was full of supporters of all parties aggrieved that SNP Ministers had put Mr Trump’s profit ahead of this community and their irreplaceable environment.

True, they did, but so too did their Labour predecessors, who investigated themselves and let themselves off – which appears to be the only function of the Ministerial code. I’d like to know what this letter says, for instance. The SNP knew all about this in 2007 (the recipient there is now the First Minister’s chief of staff). And it’s not just Scottish Ministers and their predecessors who’ve got questions to answer. So too do Grampian Police and Aberdeenshire Council.

Which is why David Milne is in the process of filing a petition to Holyrood’s Public Petitions Committee calling for a full public inquiry going back to day one, to find out exactly who made what commitments to Mr Trump and when, whether any laws or planning rules were broken, and how, above all, we can ensure no community has to go through what the Menie residents have had to put up with.

I warned years ago that politicians and officials should watch themselves when dealing with him, and that Scottish Ministers, who called the plan in after it had been rejected, rather than waiting for a Trump appeal, should worry about what happens when it all starts to unravel. Let’s find out. When the petition has been finalised with the Clerks it’ll go round for signature. Please support it. Heaven help any politicians who think this process isn’t worthy of proper investigation after all this.

Declaration: I’ve been working with David on this petition in a voluntary capacity.