Work as if you live in the early days of a

Better Nation

Faster, higher, stronger, Britisher

Jul 29

Posted by Jeff in Constitution, Sport | 45 Comments

You can’t win these days if you’re a Scottish Nationalist trying to get through these British Olympics unscathed. On the one hand, you have the Telegraph arguably overreaching in its criticism of Salmond’s support for ‘Scolympians’ and then on the other you have the Scotland on Sunday claiming that Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony “will drive support away from Scottish independence”.

The attempts to politicise sport in Scotland have grown increasingly weary since the SNP, albeit tongue in cheek, laid claim to McFadden’s wonder goal against France and the Scottish press, like a pack of wolves, tore into Sir Chris Hoy and Andy Murray at press conferences just to generate a puff piece for their papers.

Let’s be clear, the Opening Ceremony was wonderful and Danny Boyle is clearly blessed with some sort of genius to achieve what he did, but the overblown rhetoric regarding its impact on independence doesn’t really match reality.

First of all, a cosy celebration of a very public 60s-esque NHS did not encapsulate the sneaking privatisation and broken promises of the past few years. The public health services is already cracking at the borders. Dancing nurses and a giant baby won’t change that reality over the next few years. An argument that a Scottish NHS is the only way to ensure a public NHS will be more persuasive than Friday night’s TV.

My favourite bit of the ceremony was probably the Industrial Revolution segment, with the sublime Kennth Brannagh as Isambard Kingdom Brunel leading the celebration of that part of Britain’s history. It didn’t have any impact on my intention to vote Yes in 2014 though as the Industrial Revolution will still be part of Scotland’s history come what may. We’re changing the future with this referendum, not the past.

The Scotland on Sunday also talks of “the love of a shared culture” as a reason why people will flock towards voting No after the opening ceremony. Perhaps, but people wildly texting and dancing to 70s, 80s and 90s music doesn’t seem very central to the independence debate from where I’m sitting, and I’m sure that happens all across Europe anyway, even if that particular segment of Friday smacked of a lamentable The Only Way is Essex generation rather than some sort of glorious British culture that we all share.

The strongest argument that Better Together have with regard to the Opening Ceremony is Sir Chris Hoy holding the flag aloft with Team GB parading in behind him. Big, powerful, successful but nice as pie, Sir Chris is that rare A-list personality that comes with a unmistakable Scottish stamp and an unmistakable British stamp on him. Alan Cumming and Alex Ferguson making their feelings about independence known doesn’t really add up to much, Sir Chris Hoy would be a different kettle of fish altogether, and the visuals from Friday won’t have gladdened many Nationalist hearts, from a strictly political perspective at least.

But overall, I’m not really buying the significance. I mean, Murdo Fraser is welcome to place his confidence that a 5 second snippet of Gregory’s Girl on prime time TV will keep Scots in line with the unionists, but I reckon he’ll end up having to work a bit harder than that as 2014 approaches and the debate reaches crunch point.

Of course, even if these Olympics give the No vote a boost, this is to ignore one equally crucial but more timely factor: Scotland will host the Commonweatlh Games in 2014, with a Scottish opening ceremony and Scottish athletes. Who would dare bet that they won’t have a distinctly political edge to them?

As for the next few weeks, there is nothing wrong with supporting British athletes, there is nothing wrong with supporting only Scottish athletes and there is nothing wrong with supporting everyone and just enjoying the show. Maybe politics should take a backseat during the greatest show on earth.

Two Scotlands

Jul 25

Posted by Guest Blog in Holyrood | 43 Comments

Oliver Milne is a freelance journalist and editor of the Glasgow Guardian,the University of Glasgow’s Student Newspaper. He tweets nonsense as @OliverMilne.

Photograph by glasgowamateur

Today we saw two Scotlands. Through twin media narratives we saw to the heart of what is a deeply fractured society; at once progressive and deeply conservative. For Scotland, within the United Kingdom or without, to fulfil its true potential for its citizens we need to forcefully challenge bigotry in our civil society.

Tartaglia’s hateful and ignorant tirade on the death of the much respected David Cairns MP presents a much bigger problem for Scotland than the political struggle which will accompany any equal marriage bill. Religious observance, or at least organised religious observance, is experiencing a dramatic decline in Scotland today. Despite only 1 in 10 Scots attending religious services we are still the the most religious of the nations that make up Great Britain and the social and political influences of our religious organisations are not to be ignored.

The bill will pass, and most likely with a comfortable majority, even if Cardinal Keith O’Brian lives up to his promise of pouring £100 million into lobbying and campaigning against it. The success of the law,however, is greatly diminished when the religious organisations which make up a huge section of our civil society preach intolerance and hatred, and disguise it as morality. As citizens, religious or otherwise, we have a duty to our polity to ensure equal protection for all members of our society. This means when necessary denouncing entrenched religious groups who wield their considerable influence – directly through lobbying or indirectly from the pulpit – not to enrich our society or protect their practitioners but to demonize and harass.

My relationship with religion is a deeply contradictory one but I could be described as a lapsed Catholic. The Catholic church has a simultaneously horrendous and honourable history. It has ruined lives and oppressed those it considered different leaving painful and visible scars on our social fabric. But it is also responsible for the largest non-government directed foreign aid program and the education of children in parts of the world where few NGOs dare venture. One does not cancel out the other, like most institutions it exists in shades of grey.

When in the 11th century the Catholic Church clamped down on the ability of priests to buy positions of power (simony) or to marry (nicolaitism) they did so largely because it reflected not only scripture but a sense of a deep injustice felt by the people of Europe. In short, the church has always adapted to reflect the injustices confirmed to them by their congregations and wider society.

With this in mind we must not let this opportunity pass. I will be writing to Archbishop-Elect Tartaglia to express my horror at his sentiments and to ask that in light of seeing the hurt his comments have caused that he considers his own unjustifiable prejudices and the unjustifiable prejudices of the Catholic Church in Scotland.

This battle isn’t limited to Catholics. As ordinary Scottish Muslims observe Ramadan they too should reflect on the hate expressed on their behalf by their Imams and speak out against intolerance. The Kirk has argued that the Scottish Government has moved ahead of the will of ordinary people of Scotland. I think that’s nonsense and that we should tell them so.

Today we saw two Scotlands but both need not survive. If ensuring a bright future for the progressive Scotland after the equal marriage bill means forcing a frank but respectful debate about equality with the other Scotland then I’ll see you early Sunday morning.

The latest Holyrood poll from the Sunday Times

Jul 23

Posted by James in Holyrood, Parties | 38 Comments

I missed yesterday’s Sunday Times, which is easy to do when it’s behind a paywall. Anyway, this afternoon (why not yesterday?) the SNP news released the following results from a poll the paper ran at the weekend with Real Radio, conducted by Panelbase. Incidentally, they’re new to me but look like they might understand the internet a little better than certain other pollsters.

First vote
SNP: 47% (+2%)
Labour: 32% (±0)
Conservative: 12% (-2%)
LibDem: 6% (-2%)

Second vote
SNP: 46% (+2%)
Labour: 28% (+2%)
Conservative: 11% (-1%)
Greens: 6% (+2%)
LibDem: 4% (-1%)

Here’s what the Scotland Votes site makes of that (click the wee image above for a graphic thereof):

MSPs
SNP: 68 (-1)
Labour: 41 (+4)
Conservative: 11 (-4)
Green: 5 (+3)
LibDem: 3 (-2)
Ind: 1 (1)

(Changes are from May 2011)

Leaving aside the big picture for a second, the SNP’s predictions in their news release were totally different. They awarded themselves four more seats than Scotland Votes did, took five off Labour, and gave the Tories two more than predicted. The Nats also kept the Lib Dems on five despite a continued decline in their ratings, two more than Scotland Votes had for them, and had the Greens unchanged on two, three fewer than predicted despite a wee Green bump.

That kind of statistical fiddling isn’t just odd, unless they’ve got a better predictor that they’ve declined to identify, it’s unnecessary. The poll shows the Nats 2% up from their 2011 triumph on both votes, despite the shambles over equal marriage and an independence campaign so watered down that it’d be hard to see the difference if they won it. Being up still further now is an excellent story to tell. The fact that Labour have had a mini bounce too and would be making small wins, including a net of just one at the SNP’s expense, is pretty minor, overall, but it looks like someone in the SNP press office got a bit over-excited about this one. Keep the head, chaps!

Work as child’s play

Jul 18

Posted by Kirsty in Society | 13 Comments

At the start of the week BBC Two documented in ‘Babies in the Office’ how Addison Lee, London’s biggest cab hire firm, became the first company in the UK to allow staff to care for their babies while working in the office.

With childcare costs at an all time high such schemes appear to promise salvation for hard-pressed parents.

Just think; you could continue to come into work and keep earning, without having to spend any of that hard earned cash on paying for someone else to look after Junior. After all, they’d be parked in the buggy next to your desk. Sure, with the crying and feeding and burping your productivity might suffer, and your BlackBerry probably isn’t going to survive dousing in baby sick. But your work-life balance is going to be in perfect harmony.

Except it isn’t. Childcare in Britain is in crisis, and the solution isn’t compelling people to cart their babies into the office.

According to the Daycare Trust, only 21% of councils in Scotland provide enough state-funded childcare to enable parents to work full-time – the figures are 46% in England and 17% in Wales. The average cost of part-time childcare for a toddler now exceeds £100 per week – £5,000 per year – in many parts of Britain, meaning parents spend an average of a third of their income on private childcare, in comparison to 10% of income in Denmark.

Parents have the primary responsibility for meeting the needs of their children, but that doesn’t mean they hold the sole responsibility. ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ is a good proverb for good reason: children’s care, welfare and education is a public good, conferring externalities beyond the direct beneficiaries of toddlers and parents.

I don’t have children, but I know I benefit from the population being healthy, literate and good citizens, and that’s a process that starts from the earliest years. It’s therefore a process I’m happy to pay for through taxation.

People should be able to enjoy becoming and being parents, without the pressure of returning to work too soon. That needs extended parental leave for both parents, shared equally or divided in favour of whoever wishes to be the primary caregiver. People should also be able to return to work, instead of being compelled through economics to stay at home to care for their children, or to give up most of their earnings to pay for someone else to care for them. That means flexible, family-friendly working and decent state funded childcare beyond the hours of 9 to 5.

None of these things are beyond grasp. Many employers offer flexible parental leave and working hours and there is an infrastructure for council-delivered daycare. There’s more scope for companies to get involved too, in offering crèches to help reduce costs for staff.

Addison Lee and the 170 firms in the United States (where there is no statutory right to maternity pay) that allow staff to bring their babies to work might think they are being family-friendly. But properly enabling parents to separate work and life, through flexibility on the part of the employer and funding on the part of government would be even family-friendlier.

The Rainbow Road is Long And Winding

Jul 17

Posted by Aidan in Holyrood | 45 Comments


The Scottish Cabinet met today to discuss the long awaited Equal Marriage proposals and then promptly cancelled the 4pm press conference that had been scheduled to discuss the results of that discussion. Instead we got this press release, which seems to say a few things:

  1. There won’t be a referendum on it.
  2. There will still be a decision on the legislation announced by the end of the month.
  3. There’s a subcommittee chaired by Nicola Sturgeon discussing “particular details”.
  4. There will be a free vote on the resulting Bill.

The referendum was fairly obviously never going to happen and rightly so – in a democracy basic rights must be guaranteed by the government and not subjected to the will of the majority or they aren’t basic rights.

The delay in the actual announcement is a bit depressing given that this decision has been delayed repeatedly already and, for many people, it’s a bit of a slam-dunk in principle.

The subcommittee is interesting because while the principle that consenting adults should be able to be married by who they want to whom they want, It’s A Bit More Complicated than that given the rich variety of human sexuality, gender identity and relationship forms. It’s probably a bit too much to hope we’ll allow mixed gender civil partnerships and non-monogamous relationships, but there’s non-trivial issues around changes in gender identity or status (such as those outlined by Peatworrier here) which should be considered closely and compassionately. Perhaps something best done by Parliament in detail but let’s hope the sub-committee is considering how to frame the principles in such a way as to get the desired outcome.

The final part of this is the free vote. Now, I might have missed something but I’d expected this to be whipped. Fortunately there’s a majority in Parliament for it so it should get through anyway. It does rather suggest that the Cabinet is not as one on this to such an extent that some would feel compelled to resign over it otherwise. Which isn’t a huge surprise given some of their prior statements.

So, disappointed as I am that there wasn’t an announcement today I’m not disheartened. It looks to me like a hash job of the PR and a hefty dose of fudge to deal with internal dynamics. If a clear timetable for the Bill isn’t announced by the end of the month though I’m going to be much more concerned.

(Apologies if I’ve messed up with the language etc. here, please let me know and I’ll fix it)