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SNP to call for Holyrood control over defence, security and foreign policy at 2012 Autumn Conference

Jul 16

Posted by Jeff in Defence | 24 Comments

I have been thinking for a while that the SNP needed to seize the initiative to get their not-quite-floundering-but-not-quite-fizzing independence referendum campaign off the ground. Thoughts that I personally have had included announcing that an independent Scotland would disband all private schools and/or would renationalise the railways. Something that would put clear blue water between an independent Scotland’s future and that of the United Kingdom’s.

Well, the SNP has made their move, though it’s not anything that I had seen coming…

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has confirmed that delegates attending its Annual Conference in October 2012 will debate an updated defence policy presented by Westminster SNP Leader and defence spokesman Angus Robertson. The resolution proposed by the Moray MP and seconded by Angus MacNeil MP follows a detailed review process which has included input from throughout the SNP, involved external experts and has been informed by discussions in neighbouring countries.

Amongst the key elements of the policy proposals are:

That the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government should determine defence, security and foreign policy.

An SNP government should allocate an increased budget to conventional defence in Scotland compared to the UK but will make substantial savings by ending support for nuclear weapons which will be withdrawn from Scotland.

A professional defence force of 15,000 regular and 5,000 reserve personnel, including restored Scottish infantry regiments will increase the current conventional footprint in Scotland. All military bases will remain in operation with Faslane becoming a major conventional naval base and home to Joint Forces Headquarters. Lossiemouth and Leuchars will both operate air force capabilities.

Scotland will inherit its international treaty obligations including those with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and will remain a member, subject to agreement on withdrawal of Trident from Scotland.

Gentlemen, start your engines. If this isn’t upping the ante in the stakes for independence then I don’t know what is and it will guarantee that the momentum and the impetus swings back into the SNP’s favour. Debating whether the fossil fuel levy and control over air guns should come to Scotland was all well and good but this is big game hunting that Angus Robertson and Angus MacNeil are going for at (and in the run up to) the SNP’s Autumn Conference (Perth, Oct 18th-21st). The Scottish public, I reckon, will be sympathetic to the arguments being made as it would allow greater control over the location of Trident, greater control over the forces under threat within Scotland, greater scope to make savings that are foregone at Westminster and provide the opportunity to swell the powers at Holyrood and test the Scottish Parliament one level further.

The official confirmation that the SNP will seek to remain a part of Nato under independence is no less significant despite how expected it has come to be these past months. The opposition will try to poke fun at this u-turn and suggest generously that SNP members should be outraged, but it was always a sensible step towards the civic (as opposed to radical) nationalism that Alex Salmond has pushed for in his long tenure as leader.

The specific wording of the resolution being proposed can be read on the Moray SNP website.

Keep church and state separate on equal marriage

Jul 16

Posted by Jeff in Equality | 33 Comments

In many ways any blog post on Cardinal O’Brien’s calls for a referendum on the legalisation of same-sex marriage should be a short one. There are few good reasons, if any, for such a plebiscite to take place.

Granted, there were 80,000 responses to the legislation consultation; more than triple the number for the independence referendum’s equivalent, but if that was the model for such decisions then we’d be having referendums on the death penalty and other frivolous matters every other year. If any group of people feel strongly enough about this particular issue, stand for election and let democracy run its course.

That said, I have strong misgivings about the lack of a mandate that existing parties have to bulldoze through legislation that wasn’t in manifestoes: the increasing privatisation of the NHS and the increase in tuition fees (both rUK) to name but two examples. However, I have no such qualms when a Government is doing the right thing and making the nation a fairer place to live. If there’s enough disagreement across Scotland against this, let the streets be filled with it. Speak now or forever hold your peace, if you will.

Cardinal O’Brien on his own has as much right to a leading opinion in this debate as a bishop has to a seat in the House of Lords. It is a legal matter and not for the church to involve themselves in.

Not that I’m the happiest, let alone the clappiest, of people on the wider issue of gay rights. The ‘real’ debate, and controversy, for me is around the issue of families with same-sex parents. If I was to be born again and was given the choice of having same-sex parents or the more ‘normal’ mother-father situation, I would without a doubt choose the latter, all other things being equal. That, in turn, must mean I have reservations around surrogacy and adoption from same-sex parents, though I shan’t try articulating them here as, mercifully, the issue at hand is simply the question of marriage.

The SNP, and all parties of the Scottish Parliament, need to stay the course and not be swayed by the unpopularity the correct decision in this matter will attract from some quarters. Needless to say, this is a test of Salmond’s strategy of ‘big tent’ nationalism as the SNP pushing through equal marriage at Holyrood will no doubt see many small-c religious conservatives be less disposed to voting Yes in 2014. That, for me, is an immaterial number and anyway, not every decision between now and Autumn 2014 need be viewed through the distorting prism of Scottish independence.

This is one such decision. Indeed, it’s a no-brainer.

Here’s a tip for you. Not really, give it back…

Jul 14

Posted by Jeff in Culture | 9 Comments

I bought the Telegraph the other day for £1 and, you know what, it was such a rip-roaring read, such a rewarding experience, that I rushed back to the newsagent an hour later and gave the man 15p as a thank you.

I am, of course, joking. I wouldn’t read the Telegraph if you paid me. I also wouldn’t pay more than charged for a newspaper, a book, a house, a haircut, a taxi ride or a meal. And yet, the latter three tend to incur an extra charge over and above the agreed price as standard in the UK. Why?

Most of us are not accountants, most of us do not know the fixed and variable costs of a hairdressers or a taxi firm or a restaurant and are consequently not able to ascertain whether the mullet chop, meter charge or menu price need topped up by 10% or 15% to ensure that the staff get a decent wage and the business can break even. That job, surely, lies with the owner or the manager of the company. Set your prices high enough to make a decent profit and everybody’s happy.

And yet, here I am feeling forced by British society to round up or add on 15% (when did it go up from 10%?) to various bills in order to avoid being a selfish oaf. Indeed, it’s not even society, tips are now added onto bills as standard. Oh, sure, there’s the whole ‘discretionary’ get-out clause that people use but who is going to make a scene and request that the waiter or waitress only puts through the cost of the food and drinks and leaves the tip out…

Me, that’s who!

I’m not ashamed, I’m really not. Be the change you want to see in the world they say? Well, I don’t want the gun of a 15% mark-up put to my head on the rare occasion that I feel flush enough to go out for a pricey meal.

Maybe this is how it starts, the seeping of Tory values into a vulnerable ageing wannabe lefty. It’s the working classes who are counter-intuitively more generous with tipping and buying the Big Issue etc after all. They have a better sense of what it’s like to be in one of life’s trenches I suppose.

If that’s the first thing to go blue then so be it but for as long as I think the NHS should stay public, we should stay in the EU and that income taxes should go up, I ain’t tipping nobody unless they deserve it.

Alex won’t make it to Wonderland unless he finds his porpoise

Jul 11

Posted by Jeff in Constitution | 35 Comments

“No good fish goes anywhere without a porpoise”.

So said Lewis Carroll in the marvellous Alice in Wonderland and it’s a lesson, fishy puns to one side, that Salmond and Sturgeon should take on board.

I would wager that the Scottish public are open to being convinced by the merits of independence and its superiority as a constitutional option over Scotland remaining part of the United Kingdom but convinced they need to be, and with a burden of proof that requires to be overwhelming. The current apparent purposelessness of the SNP is particularly unappealing and is at best preventing support for independence to increase, at worst it is leaking it. Whether full independence in a matter of years is even where the First Minister is looking to lead us has been questioned. I suppose there is comfort to be found that if you don’t know where you’re going, then any road will get you there.

This inert waywardness is the SNP’s primary problem right now. The party’s reason to be has been hamstrung by Alex Salmond’s smart, quite possibly too smart, push for a Devo Max fallback option behind full independence. The big-tent politics of old is riddling with cracks from republicans vs royalists, fundamentalists vs gradualists and Europhiles vs Sterlingistas vs Scottish poundheads. If the SNP isn’t careful, it’s going to have to resort to Lib Demmy, wishy-washy statements like ‘we’re for fairness for everyone’ in order to sound like it has a single objective. Of course, if you’re for everything and everyone, then you’re really for nothing and no one.

Margo MacDonald wasn’t shy this week to call the SNP out on these very weaknesses, citing “a lack of preparedness and a lack of planning” as part of the reason for her own frustration at the lack of progress Yes Scotland has made. The unnecessary muddying of the independence waters with Devo Max was another bugbear, as too was the “noise” that exists rather than a proper debate. Her advice to the pro-independence campaign was to “stop talking about winning or losing and start talking about what they would like to do” (with independence).

Indeed, the SNP frantically going nowhere reminds me of the Caucus Race, again from Lewis Carroll. Everyone starts from different positions, everyone starts and stops the race whenever they like, the race ends at an arbitrary time, everyone thinks they’ve won and everyone gets a prize.

The ongoing, circular dialogue between unionist and nationalist has grown tiring for those that can still bear to listen in, but still they run and still they tell themselves they’re winning. I would have hoped by now that the SNP would have struck out in a different direction and taken the initiative with a clear, stripped down (and preferably bullet-pointed) x-point, bite-sized plan for why and how Scotland would be independent. They’ve had 75 years to come up with one, it shouldn’t be too difficult. However, with polls last night showing in inglorious regional detail the extent to which support for independence is falling way back, the SNP can’t stay in the starting blocks of a race that’s going nowhere for too much longer. They won’t even win a prize at that rate.

The bottom line of the recent past is this, Alex won’t make it to Wonderland unless he finds his porpoise.

In praise (mostly) of the Scottish Socialist Party

Jul 10

Posted by James in Parties | 7 Comments

It’s more than five years since Holyrood was last graced by any SSP MSPs, and Parliament is the worse for the absence of any representatives of the traditional left. A distinct if small section of the electorate isn’t represented nationally, and the terms of debate are narrower, despite the presence of other principled left voices: the Greens and a few others from the Labour and SNP benches.

The reasons for the SSP’s absence are well-understood, of course, with the saga of Tommy overwhelming all. Without wishing to rake over that in detail, the fact remains that one side of that dispute were broadly either perjurers or supporters of perjurers (trading as Solidarity) and the other side were essentially maligned and and innocent (the continuing SSP).

Of all the unfair things that happen in politics, being damned for your enemies’ shortcomings would have to rank pretty highly, despite the caveat that the party was forged in large part around Tommy’s ego, and many of those who did the right thing in the end did always know he was too flawed to be a stable foundation.

Before the split, they also did themselves no favours when the choice was between grandstanding or being parliamentarians. The Gleneagles farce and its consequences for Hep C campaigners is the most obvious example, where a photo op trumped both democracy and the needs of some very vulnerable people, and Rosie’s wee submarine did look a bit daft. And colleagues in Glasgow certainly found their campaigning style abrasive and beyond what parties should expect from each other.

But equally, Tommy’s achievement on warrants and poindings in the first session was a true left victory, and it would be hard to doubt their intention to speak up for Scotland’s working class. Even when they were wrong, it was sometimes useful. Their “free public transport for everyone” pledge was seductive, even though the reality would have been overburdened networks unable to expand without truly eyewatering additional expenditure from taxpayers. But extending free passes to the unemployed, to students and to those on low incomes: their campaign made that seem obvious even if you don’t see it as a step towards a truly free system.

And there were plenty of points of agreement with the Greens, over issues like bringing rail back into public ownership, opposition to vandalism like the M74 Northern Extension, protecting taxpayers’ interests by ending PFI and related schemes, and many more. Despite those points of overlap, the two parties brought largely different demographics to the ballot box, ensuring that the breadth of radical Scotland was properly represented at Holyrood, during the “rainbow Parliament” at least.

Good minds and good people were tied up in the disastrous split, too, people like Carolyn Leckie and Alan McCombes. Many more fiercely principled and intelligent campaigners were totally burnt out by that episode (or series of episodes), and have been lost to politics, some probably permanently. Whether or not you agree with them, that disengagement is surely to be regretted.

I don’t want to see an independent Scotland carrying on with business as usual, just a smaller nation still venerating egomaniac billionaires, cleaving to the House of Windsor, building endless uneconomic and unsustainable new motorways, or launching a damaging race to the bottom on corporation tax. To stop all that, radical Scotland will need all the strength it can muster, which probably includes the SSP getting its act back together and getting back into Parliament.