Work as if you live in the early days of a

Better Nation

Consulting Detective

Apr 2

Posted by Kirsty in Constitution, Democracy, Holyrood | 96 Comments

Over the weekend the Scottish Government has been under accusation of attempting to rig its independence referendum consultation through accepting anonymous submissions, with Labour demanding a “proper” consultation.

According to Scottish Labour Deputy Leader Anas Sarwar, “Everyone knows that Alex Salmond desperately wants a second question on the ballot and now he has left the door open for his army of Cyber-Nats [sic] to deliver the response he wants.”

The Scottish Government has now announced that anonymous submissions towards the independence ballot rules will be excluded. But this rules out only 414 anonymous responses out of the total of 11,986. I suspect it’s very unlikely this 3.5% has in any way been transformative of the consultation findings through some sinister cybernat diktat.

James Maxwell has an excellent piece up on today’s Staggers, discussing the fallacy of the unionist parties continuing to accuse the SNP of “civic chauvinism”. But the tendency to denigrate the nationalists as foaming-mouthed, petty-minded little Scotlanders, not worthy of higher political debate amongst the elite, is not only a mistake in terms of perception of the SNP’s identity. It is also symptomatic of the laziness in which the other political parties, but especially Labour, constantly attack the Scottish Government on the first sliver of a perceived wrong, instead of providing a proper opposition.

Instead of trying to work out exactly what failings in ideology, message, narrative and policy have led Labour to be at this abysmal state in Scottish politics, it’s far easier to attack the SNP for being anti-English, neo-fascist, crazy… Absolutely none of these accusations tally with the party and people that make up Scotland’s party of government, but it’s too simple and straightforward a soundbite for Labour politicians to resist. Too stupid as well.

I don’t think anonymous submissions to consultations are a great idea. But by attacking the SNP on this Labour have again focused on the facile, and not the fundamentals. Dissing how the consultation is run is far easier than engaging with a consultation with a sizeable number of respondents. And again Labour have attacked on the first sliver of perceived wrongness. To jump up and down demanding parliamentary recall on an issue resolved by one simple decision by the Scottish Government again makes the SNP look measured and in control, and Labour hysterical.

One simple change to the acceptance of consultation responses turns Labour’s agitation into tomorrow’s chip paper, and reinforces the SNP’s strength and competency on the Scottish political sphere.

Why I’m (re)joining the SNP

Apr 2

Posted by Jeff in Parties | 28 Comments

Democracy doesn’t run itself. There’s a reason why political donations, like charitable giving, are tax deductible. The public has a vested interest in political parties being well populated and well funded. The more average Joe’s that sign up with direct debits, the less the Souters’ will be required to play a part.

So I’ve never understood how so many people can be fleetingly interested in politics once every four years while still resentful that those very few that are constantly, consistently involved don’t just fix everything for them, the way they want. My preferred vision of an ideal country is for political parties to be chock full of engaged individuals, branch meetings to be lively affairs and candidate selections to be thorough and exciting. We are, sadly, a long way off and we shouldn’t need George Galloway to remind us of this.

I took the principle down to London of choosing a party from the local options and joining it although, in the same way that I don’t really believe I’m a Londoner, I never really felt a proper member of GPEW, even one at the outer fringes (which is all I ever was, and all I ever intend to be, irrespective of the party I’m a member of). So, now that a return to Scotland is looming, if not quite imminent, sticking to that principle but jumping ship seemed like a good idea, and there was really only one option.

The SNP is taking the debate, constitutional and otherwise, wider and deeper than any other party. While I rail against the idea that a Scot can’t be ambivalent about independence, so regularly touted by the more fundamentalist Nationalists out there, there is no avoiding the intertwining of the SNP and independence, irrespective of the fact that independence alone will neither improve nor worsen the lives of any Scot. Politically I may be pale green but the Scottish Green Party is only advancing the independence debate on its backfoot, and that lacks a certain appeal, despite being justifiable, as we enter an historic period that needs to be grasped with all fingers and all toes, whichever side of the argument one is on.

In terms of political debate, independence is the only show in town, and Scotland shouldn’t be ashamed of that.

And, well, it might be the paltry departures boards at Scottish airports, it might be voting for 1 Tory MP but still being stuck with a Tory Chancellor, it might be the growing desire to hear a distinctly Scottish voice on a global stage, it might be the creeping belief that Scotland would be a fairer place if it left parts of the UK behind, it might be a selfish desire surrounding who would more usefully spend Scotland’s considerable energy revenues or it might simply be the unsustainable tug-of-war of a coalition Government taking the UK one way and a Scottish Government taking Scotland another, but it’ll most likely be a Yes vote in 2014 from me.

To be the best you’ve got to beat the best, and I don’t see the UK taking on Finland in education, France in egalitarianism and Sweden in Social Democracy any time soon. Scotland could, given the chance.

How can you get excited about a Russian doll that sits inside another Russian doll? The same way that you can’t get excited about a country that sits inside another country. You can’t see something if you don’t know it’s there and you don’t know something’s there if you can’t see it. It’s time Scotland stepped out of the shadows.

And joining the party that is doing its utmost to make that Yes victory a reality seems appropriate if I am to make good on my personal principle of being a member of a party and assisting in the (very) low level funding of politics that greases the wheels of democracy.

This is not to say that I ever want to be a Convener of this or a Councillor of there, the sooner Scotland moves away from the notion that to be a member of a political party means holding some wonkish desire to hold some sort of office the better. And anyway, another reason the SNP is an appealing party to join at the very fringes is because it is abundantly clear that the party is fizzing with healthy energy, positive ideas and young, fresh talent ready to shore up any MP, MSP, MEP or councillor gaps that may arise, as I suspect we shall no doubt see in May.

It’s worth noting that running a blog and being the member of a political party, particularly the SNP, is an occupational hazard to be risked at one’s peril. It’s no accident that I cancelled my first bout of SNP membership in less than glorious circumstances, but I don’t intend to make the same mistake twice. I maintain that there’s no good reason why an ordinary person can’t write about politics as a hobby without fear of being a fish in a barrel that will inevitably be shot at. (It does help that a particular bane of my own blogging life recently ran into pleasingly emasculating professional difficulties, even if indulging in such schadenfreude probably makes me a slightly lesser person).

Not that the SNP is perfect of course. There are good reasons beyond Malcolm Chisholm MSP why the area I will be moving to is the only constituency in Scotland not represented by the SNP at Holyrood. Complacency is surely not an option for a party a couple of years out from the biggest date in its history. All negative associations, from Rupert Murdoch down to Joan McAlpine, should be objectively considered. Not that one should join a party only to take pot shots at it.

Many Scots have joined the SNP in 2012. The party, and by extension Scotland itself, has a seductive momentum and is clearly going places. In the spirit of being the change that one wants to see in the world, from greater public participation in political parties through to Scotland having a voice on the world stage, it is very pleasing indeed to be back onboard.

Nietzsche nailed it

Mar 29

Posted by Aidan in Holyrood | 8 Comments

President Bush was right. Not something you’ll often hear me say even in relation to Bush Sr rather than Shrubbery Jr. But when he spoke to the US military in Pearl Harbor in October 1990 he said “What we are looking at here is good and evil, right and wrong”. Now, in retrospect, it seems like the incident he was referring too wasn’t actually true, but it does illustrate the fundamental point of politics.

Politics isn’t just the intricacies of voting systems, constitutional arrangements and foreign policy. Nor is it just law and order and ‘elf n safety. It’s definitely not the brutal partisanship of my team versus your team; shoving our leaflets through your door and pocketing the stack of their leaflets left on the close stair. Not that that happens, obviously.

Politics is ultimately about morality, about who lives and who dies now and in the future. It’s about choices which materially affect the lives of people like the Rowleys in ways which the people legislating for them, like Dan Poulter, are often quite detached from.

That’s not to say that we should be dogmatic about politics – quite the reverse. As Mill argued, dead dogma leads to stagnation, ill considered positions and incorrect thought. Rather politics is so profoundly important, so visceral, so vital that it is only through healthy, open discourse that we can hope to improve the positions we hold.

Similarly ideology is something which shapes how we think and how we interpret the world but it’s not something which should be clung to in the face of empirical evidence. However we frame things there is an objective reality which remains regardless of interpretation, at least that’s ones of the things I take from Popper.

Recently weeks Glasgow’s hosted Aye Write and I’ve been lucky enough to make it to a few events, one of which was Paul “goggles and a cycling mask soaked in Maalox” Mason, Newsnight economics editor / riot correspondent which seem to be increasingly related roles. His current book, “Why it’s kicking off everywhere” is a good overview of the different British, American, Greek,  Libyan and Egyptian revolutions that happened last year (and I’d also highly recommend Live Working or Die Fighting for people wondering how we got here). I also got to see Gabrielle Walker (“Antartica: An Intimate Portrait“) and Doug Allen talk about their varied experiences at the poles.

For all of Paul Mason’s energy and erudition, I thought it was the latter of those two talks that had the more important political messsage. By burning fossil fuels at a faster rate than they are being produced we’re warming the planet at a faster rate than it’s ever warmed before. The description of glaciers retreating visibly striking distances in short time periods was worrying enough but I was genuinely frightened by the description of what was happening to the relatively understudied, but most vulnerable, parts of the Antarctic ice shelf. If that ice shelf collapses there’s a real risk that, in the space of a short few years, sea levels might rise by a metre or so with utterly catastrophic consequences for the millions of people who live on the coast, let alone the rest of us.

Any answer to this has to be a political one. It’s the only way we can possibly hope to mitigate the most severe consequences of the climate changes that our species have committed ourselves to out of ignorance and prevent those turning from unspeakably awful for some to catastrophic for all. That’s the choice we’re face with. As part of that we need to build a fairer, more equitable, sustainable society however all of that will be for naught if we don’t address the existential crises facing us.

We live in an age where politics is not about class struggle, when it’s not about a clash of ideologies or utopian visions. As the pictured German said, we’re beyond good and evil. It’s about continued existence of our civilisation and possibly our species. The earth has been hot before all the carbon we’re releasing was in the atmosphere for millions of years before plant and animal life absorbed it, died, was buried and locked it up as coal and oil over millions of years. We don’t need to save our planet, we need to save ourselves.

The vaulting ambition of Edinburgh SNP

Mar 27

Posted by Guest Blog in Elections, Local government | 32 Comments

A guest today from Dan Phillips. Dan’s a press photographer by trade but a political obsessive at heart. A small ‘l’ liberal, he blogs at liberalsellout.wordpress.com. The blog has taken to dissecting the local elections in Edinburgh of late and this is his latest post in this vein.

If you had ‘broken’ an electoral system thanks to your unprecedented popularity, you’d have a spring in your step too. Just as in the rest of the country, the SNP have high expectations in Edinburgh.

The overflowing confidence brought by May 2011 has led the SNP to field more candidates than any other party in Edinburgh – 26 in all. That may also be why their leader Steve Cardownie felt he could declare that “the Greens are submitting this motion now because they won’t be here after May” as he and the Lib Dems slapped down their motion for a public petitions system.

You cannot blame the Nats for this confidence. And having been cautious in 2007 by only standing one candidate in each ward, net gains are the only probable outcome. In fact the Lib Dems owe many of their seats in Edinburgh to nationalist hesitancy in 2007: in Portobello the SNP’s Bridgman was elected in the first round with 1000 votes spare, whilst the Lib Dems scraped in on the fourteenth round, not even making the quota.

But there’s an interesting characteristic to the SNP vote. Those 1,000 votes in Portobello largely didn’t transfer, and that pattern is repeated across Edinburgh. If you take the four wards where the SNP and the SNP alone won in the first round it’s possible to determine the political peccadillos of the nationalist voter. There’s over 10,000 in the sample, not a bad survey:

With over half not transferring this confirms what is known from the “both votes SNP” Parliament campaign. Those that vote with the cause are really quite attached. And with the Nats standing two candidates in nine wards this will further choke the transfers other parties may hope for.

And by translating those May 2011 parliament gains whilst also using 2007 as a measure for their safest seats, the SNP have, in Cardownie’s words, ‘used an almost scientific’ approach. They won’t get both elected in all of these wards, but they don’t in my view also risk electing none in Leith, Leith Walk, Craigentinny, Portobello, Liberton, Sighthill or Forth. Where this strategy does make some risks is in both Inverleith and Drum Brae/Gyle. They may have won Edinburgh Western last year, but only just.

But as we all know, people vote differently in different elections. And with a low turnout expected, it could even be different people voting entirely. There’s also very different factors at play. It’s not ‘Salmond for First Minister’, it’s ‘Cardownie for Council’. That soft Lib Dem vote that fell into the warm cuddly Alex embrace doesn’t have the same incentive to vote for them this time as the council has been ‘run’ by a Lib Dem-SNP Coalition. Will they even vote at all?

Of course 26 does not a majority make. If they elected all of them they’d still be 4 short. And given that many of those gains will be made at the expense of the Lib Dems, will the unhappy relationship at the heart of the current coalition really stand the strain?

Therein lies the problem for our nationalist pals. If the Lib Dems shrivel to a shell of councillors they won’t be able to bridge the majority gap even if they wanted to. The mocking of the Greens appear to make them a no-go for the Edinburgh SNP, leaving them with either the Tories or Labour. Having only just backed the living wage getting into bed with the only party definitely opposed to it would be perverse when Labour are there. Perhaps that is why Cardownie said to the Edinburgh Evening News that “the other [option] is to operate as a minority administration and proceed policy by policy with the support of different parties at different times”. Should a victorious SNP be able to repeat Salmond’s 07-11 government and navigate minority adminstration via concession this could be more stable than a hopelessly divided coalition. If, however, they don’t prove to be as shrewd as their Holyrood counterparts, they may find themselves in office but not in power.

“All parties are to blame here..”

Mar 26

Posted by James in Elections, Parties | 48 Comments

It’s the standard cry of flacks for the larger and more tarnished parties. Every time a secret dining club with the PM is revealed, every time a millionaire donor turns out to have come by his money through fraud, every time a PM is questioned over cash for peerages, every time a half a million pounds arrives just before policies the donor doesn’t like are dropped.

And of course it’s not true.

Every recent party of government is at it or has been at it or looks like they’ve been at it, but those of us who work for or volunteer for shoe-string operation parties like the Greens get seriously tired of hearing we’re just as bad. Tired as in, in my case, a strong desire to throw the radio out of the window. It suits the corrupted class to swirl their hands in the sewage floating up around their midriffs and pretend that all parties are in just as deep. If all politics is equally corrupt, they imply, why stop voting for us just because we are? No-one else is any better. We’re all in the sewer together.

Seriously, it’s not true.

Sure, Greens have had larger donations in the past, although I can’t remember anything above £20k. Sure, I hoped we’d find a rich donor in good time before the 2011 election to compete with the Soutar warchest and the unions’ money and all the rest. Perhaps we just haven’t had a chance to be corrupted yet. But I don’t think so.

So what can be done about this party funding mess? Leave it as it is and hope the fear of being caught will reduce the likelihood of it being repeated? The evidence is against that. Soutar gave the same amount of money again to the SNP last year despite the 2007 outcry over their abandonment of bus re-regulation, which remains comfortably abandoned. Neither Blair nor any of his associates ever faced trial over cash for honours. The Lib Dems never even gave Brown’s donation back to the people he’d defrauded it from (I regard this as the most egregious on this list, incidentally).

The current wrangle over donations founders on two things. First, parity – will the Tories take enough from Labour through capping union donations or fragmenting them and, conversely, will Labour block enough of the funnel that leads from big business to the Tories?

The “fairness” battle between Labour and the Tories is an odd one, but pragmatically I accept they both need to be happy with the outcome. Personally I’d ban all collective donations to political parties – corporations and unions (collectively) unbalance politics with large donations and are in that way undemocratic, although unions’ other activities remain vital. So by all means make it easy for individual Labour-supporting trade unionists to give to their party, or indeed trade unionists who support any other party to give as they wish. Similarly, individual shareholders are people too, and if they want to give to the Tories or to any other party, fine, so be it.

Second, what about state funding? The public won’t wear state funding, we’re told, although the return on investment would be substantial if the quid pro quid was a system capable of ending the money-go-round. And the large parties won’t wear living on the small and capped donations of their members. So where else could the money come from for state funding?

Well, here’s a crazy interim idea. Donations. Eh? What? Here’s the idea. Take 50% of every donation to every political party and redistribute it according to the votes cast at the last election (or a rolling average across types of election). A hypothecated tax, if you will. A big donor would know that his or her preferred party will benefit most from their donation, but their donation would also be supporting fair funding for other parties too. Yes, it’s crazy. Other suggestions welcome. We can’t go on like this.