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Man paid to write article setting out his true beliefs – shock!

Aug 22

Posted by James in Constitution, Media | 24 Comments

How the media really worksIn the latest round of silly season frothing for the Holyrood bubble, the No campaign and others have gotten their knickers in a twist about this – an article written by Elliot Bulmer for the Herald. Their beef with it, apparently, is that the Yes campaign paid him for his time and didn’t say so. Except they did say so when asked. So here are some of the problems with this confected argument.

1. Mr Bulmer (pictured left, as I imagine him) has been writing about these same issues for years and making a consistent argument for a written Scottish constitution. The opinions he set out in that Herald article are the same as he set out in the Guardian earlier this year, in the Scotsman in 2011, and in a whole damn book he wrote in 2012. He’s not spouting a campaign line because he’s been paid to, nor does this piece appear to diverge at all from his earlier views. He’s being paid for his time because Yes thought it would be good for his views to get another outing in the media. And, apart from the slightly weaker interim constitution stuff in the article, I agree with them and him. No-one is being deceived – those are his views. He’s not Groucho Marx.

2. All sorts of articles in the media are written for money. I’ve done PR for years, and like everyone in PR, I’ve written articles which have been published in the papers, sometimes under my own name, sometimes drafted for a client. And even where I’ve just written a press release (for which I was paid), sometimes articles that get published bear a close resemblance to it without an attached notice explaining that “this cracking story was derived from a press release that James Mackenzie wrote for money and sent to us”. I really don’t believe any journalist who claims not to know that people regularly get paid by third parties to write articles that are then submitted for publication. And that applies to academics, staff at representative bodies, and (although we can call it hospitality or media passes or whatever) journalists too. Actually, that last one does bother me a bit.

3. Relatedly, articles in newspapers never show an audited trail of who got paid how much and by whom to get them to the page. Perhaps they should, but given they don’t normally, why is this one any different? Ah yes, because it’s about the partisan issue which both sides get overwrought about, desperate to pin anything at all on each other in case anything sticks.

4. Writers should be paid for their work like everyone else. Journalists normally argue for this. If the Herald didn’t pay Mr Bulmer to set out his views this time, and Yes were prepared to do so, then that’s how some of his rent got paid that month. I’m glad to hear it. I despise the Huffington Post model which assumes writers don’t need to eat. It’s work like anything else, much as everyone likes seeing their views appearing in the media, and smart people should be paid for their time.

5. You can’t buy a respected academic’s opinions for £100, but you can buy an hour or two of his time. I got asked by a media friend if I would be equally relaxed about the nuclear industry paying an academic to write a pro-nuclear piece for the media. Yes – although I’d still disagree with them, but it’s only OK if it’s that academic’s actual opinion as previously expressed. And I bet you a five tier wedding cake to a stale digestive biscuit exactly that happens all the time, with the only difference being that whoever pays them doesn’t say “sure, of course we paid him/her” when asked about it.

6. Without wishing to sound paranoid, the only reason this story is going anywhere is because the emails that led to the Yes campaign being asked about it appear to have been accessed illegally by a third party. If those allegations are true, that’s a lot more serious, so you can see why the No campaign might want to go into a frenzy of bogus outrage about another issue to muddy the waters on that story. Cynically, it’s very professional diversionary media work, chaps. Well done.

7. This is the weakest attempt to find a scandal where there simply isn’t one in many years, and will have as much traction outside the bubble as a chihuahua in high heels trying to run on a perfectly polished sheet of glass.

8. My pieces on this blog express my views on all sorts of subjects, and I’ve not been paid for any of them, which is unfortunate for me. If anyone, literally anyone, wants to pay me an agreed sum to write a piece that’s 100% consistent with my views as previously set out here so I can see if any of the media will print it, drop me a line and I’ll tell you where to send the cheque.

This is what fear looks like

Aug 7

Posted by James in Constitution, Holyrood, Parties, Westminster | 30 Comments

EXIT LABOURThere’s been a lot of Holyrood-bubble drama around LabourForIndy recently. Who’s that in their photos? When did you join Labour? Is it even real? It might seem like the phoniest of wars, but it’s happening for a reason.

Fear. Specifically Labour fear.

As I’ve said before, if the referendum is to be won, it’ll be won from the left and centre-left. By next September let’s assume 75% of 2011 SNP voters will probably back independence. Die-hard capital-N nationalists, some fairly left-wing, some to the right. They make up about 30-33% of the electorate, and therefore 60-66% of the Yes vote required.

Add in a good slice of Greens and Socialists – not a huge number, although some SNP folk say Patrick Harvie’s messages are persuading voters who are neither nationalist nor Green – plus a fragment of Lib Dems frustrated by the absence of federalism from the ballot, and Yes is still short about a sixth of the vote. That sixth can only come from Labour voters plus increased turnout from the working class ex-Labour abstainers (or lifetime abstainers), the very people for whom Westminster has done next to nothing for generations.

Hence the fuss. LabourForIndy as an organisation may not (yet?) be that substantial, but Labour voters for independence are where the referendum can be won. And there are lots of them already. Take the May Panelbase poll for the Sunday Times, the most recent one up on UK Polling Report, which gives crossbreaks on voting intention and referendum intention.

The results for Q3 there (which should say “constituency”, not region) show that 41% of the undecided are Labour voters. Fewer than 50% of Labour’s supporters from 2011 backed Westminster rule, and 14% are voting Yes. If representative, that’s almost 90,000 people, perhaps seven or eight percent of the total Yes vote required (assuming a turnout of between 2.25m and 2.5m next year). And the Labour-backing referendum-undecideds are twice as many again.

If those undecided Labour voters break for Yes, they can ensure the referendum is won – probably no-one else can – and Labour is right to be afraid of this situation, because it threatens their position in three ways.

First, independence, and the Labour voters supporting it, jeopardises their chances of getting back into power at a UK level. Although Westminster elections aren’t commonly close enough for the Scottish block to make any difference (other than imposing Blairite reforms on the rest of the UK), it might well happen next time given the state of the polls. They want the buffer provided by right-wing MPs like Tom Harris. Pure self interest: they want him and his ilk to keep being sent to Westminster to help prop up future Labour administrations there.

Second, and this is where they should see opportunities rather than threats, it makes a return to office at Holyrood even less likely. Losing a referendum on which they have staked everything would be a massive blow to their institutional power and their credibility, especially when it’ll be clear so many of their own supporters have ignored their advice in favour of, ironically, the prospect of a Labour-led government for an independent Scotland. It’s not just their supporters and members, either. Why wouldn’t some potential Scottish Labour Ministers feel the same? One former senior Labour Minister told a friend he was privately in favour of independence so long as “the bloody Nats don’t get to run it” (no, it wasn’t Henry).

Finally, and perhaps most intriguingly, it’s an ideological threat. Labour have redefined their primary purpose as defence of the Union, in large part as self-interest. Like Scottish Lib Dem MPs, they’re amongst its main institutional beneficiaries. It’s also partly because they haven’t any other ideas. Ask yourself: what else do Labour at Holyrood want to achieve? Can you name a single radical thing? I can’t, and I follow politics pretty closely.

There’s no principled basis for boxing themselves in like this. Unless a party is established with a constitutional purpose at its heart, like the SNP, their supporters are likely to disagree on whether Holyrood or Westminster is best able to get them to their other political objectives. A third of Greens at conference regularly vote against independence, although none yet seem to want to work with the Tories as part of Better Together. It’s normal. I’m not scared by it, in the way Labour are terrified of Labour voters for independence. Rather than social justice or even Blairite aspiration, Labour have become obsessed with one arbitrary answer to this tactical question – will our objectives be better met at Westminster or at Holyrood? It’s a fragile new base to have chosen.

Their response to this trend not only threatens Labour’s future shots at governance, therefore, it also weakens their power over their voters too. That Labour Yes vote is likely to be centre-left types who find the SNP too economically right-wing, people who’ve stuck with Labour so far but who are increasingly desperate to be shot of a Tory-led Westminster. When they watch the Labour leadership line up with Tories and Lib Dems over the next year to ensure Scotland remains run by the bedroom taxing, fracking, poor-hating, immigrant-abusing Westminster they increasingly loathe, the risk has to be that that sight will put them off Labour too, and that those Labour voters for Yes will become SNP, Green or Socialist voters for Yes. I can’t be the only person who’s gone off Labour and off Westminster essentially in parallel.

It’s too late for them ever to win me back, but Labour didn’t need to be in this mess, especially if they’d put forward a credible “more powers” offer. Now, though, even as someone who still wants to see a better Labour Party, I now can’t see a way out of the uncomfortable corner they’ve painted themselves into. The harder they try to retain their grip, the weaker their position becomes. No wonder they’re afraid.

What it would have taken for me to be against independence.

Aug 1

Posted by James in Constitution, Parties | 25 Comments

Neil KinnockI keep telling people I’m a non-nationalist for independence, but they don’t believe me. It’s true, though. I never grew up dreaming of independence, nor was it something that I particularly thought about when I first started getting into politics.

My political obsessions were much as they are now: social and economic justice, civil liberties, decarbonising our economy and protecting biodiversity, plus radical political reform.

Over the period I’ve been politically aware, I’ve lived under two eye-wateringly hard-right Tory administrations, one with Lib Dem help, separated by a period of centre-right New Labour rule (your definition of left and right may vary from mine, of course). Each of these governments was unpleasant at its core, although each one achieved at least one good thing. No, really.

Thatcher set up Channel Four: I do think that’s it for her merit column. Tony Blair brought in devolution, a limited minimum wage, and Freedom of Information. Cameron abolished Labour’s plans for ID cards and for a third runway at Heathrow. Major and Blair should share credit for moves to peace in Northern Ireland. Beyond that I’m drawing a blank. You can add you “what have the Romans ever done for us?” comments below.

Anyway, before 1994 my party politics were pretty simple, if naive. You could choose Labour or the Tories, so I thought, and that was an easy choice. Years of Tory rule would come to an end one day, and then it’d all be okay. My Labour vote in 1992 was therefore uncritical and optimistic, and I even remember exactly how depressed Basildon made me. Then the election of Tony Blair as Labour leader in 1994 radicalised me, electorally. It was obvious from the leadership campaign that he was not going to lead a Labour Party of the sort I’d waited for. I also remember being baffled by those who got disappointed after 1997: he did what he said he would do, broadly, and it bore little relation to the Labour values I remembered. I got my disappointment in early.

So over my political life I’ve seen the three largest parties at Westminster all have a go at power. They’ve left us with hereditary peers still in place, and hardly a whisper of opposition to the idea of a hereditary head of state. Fair voting is further off than ever, largely thanks to the Lib Dems’ unforgivable decision to push for a referendum on a non-proportional voting system. The economy is still built on exploitation and increasing inequality, and it’s still reliant on gas and coal and nukes. Endless road-building and airport expansion are supported by all three parties too (with the Tories desperately looking for a way to do a u-turn on Heathrow). Tuition fees get raised, asylum seekers get demonised, nuclear weapons get retained, and stuff gets privatised: these things are true whichever one of the three wins. All three parties claim the mantle of civil liberties in opposition, and all three have assaulted civil liberties in office like a pack of thugs in a back street. About the only place where Westminster has led at all, relative to Holyrood, is on LGBT rights.

They’ve all three failed, and there’s no-one left to wait for. No knight on a white charger, no principled and admirable opposition. Not even Neil Kinnock. Miliband and Balls are signed up to the “there are problems with immigration” agenda, to austerity, and to the current electoral pseudo-democracy. The left in most parts of the UK is stuck with Labour as merely the lesser evil, playing their part in a depressing politics-as-showbiz charade, where the voters who get pandered to by all three are the editors of the middle-market papers and those in swing seats who read them and fear foreigners: hence Ministers sending vans emblazoned with the old NF slogan “Go Home” to drive around ethnic minority areas. It’s fusty, archaic, unreformable, corrupt, racist, nepotistic, and cynical.

This experience gradually ground down my faith that Westminster could be somewhere things changed. Sure, the Greens got Caroline Lucas elected, which is a massive breakthrough, but I’m too impatient to wait a generation for change.

And that’s when I realised I wanted shot of it all. I knew that there wasn’t a single decision on any issue I cared about that I trusted that hulking façade of democracy to make. And I became absolutely certain that independence was necessary. It was the only way to get Westminster out of my life forever. Not for some great love of the SNP (they share some of the policies objected to above) or because independence will be perfect – although Holyrood’s procedures and elections are centuries ahead of Westminster practice.

If nothing else, because it’ll be a shakeup, a chance to bring power closer to the people and a chance to break the corrupt links between the UK parties and big business. And because there’s no alternative waiting in the wings, no real Labour government of the sort I dreamt about in the early 1990s. If Neil Kinnock had won, I might never have even considered wanting Scottish independence.

Why are Unite (the union) so determined to ignore their members and unite the Union?

Jul 5

Posted by James in Activism, Constitution | 14 Comments

Yesterday, in the heat of the Falkirk row, Lord Ashcroft  published a leaked Unite strategy paper, written by the union’s political director Steve Hart. The main thrust is a discussion about how Unite are frustrated with Labour’s timidity on policy (quite right), how they wish Labour was more inclined to select working class candidates (entirely reasonably), how they’re organising to get their own people selected (which sounds worse than it is), and how they still have faith in Labour as a party of the left (bafflingly).

Tucked away on the penultimate page, though, is a short section on Scotland which has been largely ignored, but which is certainly telling.

Unite paper

 

It’s consistent with the lines given to the Record here, but does indicate the limited extent to which the Unite leadership is prepared to listen to their members. The Scottish membership, Steve reports, “doesn’t want to be rushed to a decision” – but the Unite response certainly wasn’t to avoid taking sides.

Instead they pressed the Labour leadership to set up their own partisan Devolution Commission, which “attempts to address one overriding question: how can we meet the aspirations of the Scottish people for fuller devolution while maintaining the integrity of the UK which we know they value strongly“. Neither Labour nor Unite are prepared even to ask the question here: do Scots, whether Labour members or trade unionists or not, really think Westminster is serving their best interests?

Unite then went on to press Labour to go further and establish their own pro-Westminster campaign, which was amusingly called United With Labour – perhaps as a consequence of the same psychological process I imagine lies behind the choice of name for the Ford Focus. Preserving the Union may be Labour policy, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t campaign to support it, but why are those efforts actually being led by Unite, given the more neutral position their members appear to have taken.

Through these two decisions, the open-minded and questioning uncertainty the Unite leadership found amongst their membership has been ignored and worked around in favour of a determined unionism of the other sort. Their position will develop, they say, not as led by the membership, but led by the Scottish Committee.

I’m a huge supporter of the principle of labour organising itself, and we know how much worse the workforce gets treated where they’re not organised. I have been in trade unions, too – not currently, given I’m self-employed – but I look at Westminster and do not see a political system which supports working people, let alone those unfortunate enough to be looking for work in a climate of intentional austerity, austerity supported by Labour from the opposition benches.

It reminds me of an anecdote of George Orwell’s. He was no supporter of nationalism, of course, and his essay “Notes on Nationalism” has this to say about “Celtic nationalism”:

One symptom of it is the delusion that Eire, Scotland or even Wales could preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British protection.

Despite the difficulties Ireland’s going through, few would argue now that their independence relies on British protection. To be fair, in the same essay he also includes “old-fashioned British jingoism” in his definition of nationalism, something still found within parts of the Labour Party as well as the Tories or UKIP.

 

But the anecdote is this. When he was young he kept noticing streets called Union Street. As a good socialist, he assumed it was in honour of the struggles of the trade union movement, but was then bitterly disappointed when he realised it was in honour of something entirely unrelated: the Act of Union. Whatever your views on independence, there should be no automatic link between unions and the Union. Inside the unions as inside Scotland, the people should decide.

Would we rather the SNP be sensible or knee-jerk nationalist on welfare?

Jun 12

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Defence, Democracy, Economy, Governance, Society | Comments off

I do sometimes feel sorry for the SNP. They spend all their time being pilloried by the Scotsman and the opposition benches about not having any vision of how an independent Scotland would work, and when they do try and give a practical answer it is so willfully misconstrued that they probably wish they had done the easy thing and not bothered coming up with a more detailed insight.

The idea that Scotland and the United Kingdom might share welfare administration for a period after independence makes perfect sense. In fact, to the credit of the sections of the SNP who can be fairly absolutist about such things, it is an extremely sensible step.

Independence inevitably means the establishment of separate Scottish structures for the provision of public services in the same way that the country already enjoys control of the healthcare and education systsems. Nobody has suggested that that will not ultimately be the case.

What the Scottish Government have suggested is that welfare administration should be shared until a point is reached at which both the United Kingdom and Scottish Governments feel they can manage their own domestic affairs on home soil. So far, so sensible.

It would be the reverse of the process of German reunification, whereby an initially measured timescale was steamrollered for political reasons with unintended consequences. Whereas the integration of systems in Germany was done far too speedily, the division of something as complex as welfare in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom on the same timescale as the assumption of statehood would be irresponsible for any government to take.

But this does not change the principle of full autonomy for Scotland in the long term. The discussions of aspects such as pensions are often used as a stick to beat the very idea of an independent state, including some mischief making from the Better Together campaign about Scotland’s status as a subsidy junky, but it is at the end of the day a practical detail to be worked out.

The Forces Together campaign launched by Alistair Darling at The Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party’s conference in Stirling goes to town on this, asking how our brave troops would be paid their defence pensions if they were living in a foreign country, and whether Scotland could afford to pay them. Britain has years of experience paying military personnel resident in foreign countries for years at a time and living abroad does not exclude former personnel from being the responsibility of the British military pensions scheme, as shown by the Irish citizens who choose to fight in the British army even today.

There is a fair deal the SNP are wrong about in terms of the details of independence, but for once let us congratulate them for actually being honest and practical about how Scotland would best engineer a smooth transition which made sure that all of its citizens were well looked after.