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Beyond our Ken?

Dec 14

Posted by James in Elections, Holyrood, Parties | 27 Comments

The ballots for the protracted Labour leadership race closed this lunchtime, and the LOLITSP will be succeeded on Saturday by a Leader of Scottish Labour, in title at least.

The extent to which the new bod will get to lead does remain doubtful, though. Many of the more unreconstructed Scottish Labour MPs resented Holyrood’s very existence and still resent their own MSPs.

Even if they elect one of their own, as Jeff pointed out, will they be ruled? And will Ed Miliband really let the Scottish wing run policies that differ from his? And if the answer to both of those is yes, is there not a risk that Scottish Labour MPs would have to go into different lobbies?

As usual, with devolution, if you do things exactly the same afterwards, it’s hard to discern the point.

The additional problem revealed by the contest is that it has failed to excite even as much as that for the Scottish Tory leadership, not least because Murdo offered a relatively Big Idea. Labour remain the largest opposition party at Holyrood by a mile, yet they have managed to work themselves into a position where few people are interested in what they say.

Can a new leader turn this around? It seems unlikely, at least until Labour are prepared to fix their policy and message problems, until they’re ready to say “whatever the constitutional arrangements, these are our principles and our vision for Scottish society”, and until they realise that banging on about “separatism” or “secession” isn’t winning any hearts. But however much deeper the problem is than leadership, it remains the case that not all candidates are created equal.

Unlike Jeff, Tom Harris would get my third preference (or third preferences, were I one of those Labour members who gets endless votes for being a member of the Fabians or the Socialist Crossword Puzzle Compilers or whatever). Tom is genuinely open to debate, even if his style has too much of the internet troll about it. Last year he and I bickered about Labour’s asylum policies on Twitter, and he agreed to swap guest posts with me, which impressed me even if the content didn’t. I’m looking forward one day to a long-planned pint with him, if he forgives me for this post. But he’s a flawed candidate, and the one most likely to secure an SNP victory in 2016. He’s absurdly right-wing even by Blairite standards, prepared to lambast young mothers in the most extraordinary tones, and he’s a loose cannon. Anyone who compares the debate over Scotland’s constitutional debate to the American Civil War will give good gaffe during an election.

Johann Lamont comes next (spoilers!). She’s a dour pair of hands, another point-and-shout anti-nationalist, another exponent of the botched and timid form of social democracy undemocratically loved by the unions’ leaderships – the same union leaderships who back the ultimate dinosaur for the deputy leadership, Ian Davidson. As Kate points out, she’s also part of the authoritarian wing of Scottish Labour, the people who thought “You’ll get stabbed” was a good core message to take to a fight with the Great Puddin’, a suitable response to his empty populism and misleading talk-left-act-right politics. It’s hard to see Tom Harris becoming an MSP, something quite important for a contender for First Minister, but Lamont’s own seat is shoogly to say the least, and even if she holds it next time round she’s almost as non-credible candidate for the top job as Harris.

So yes, I’d be backing Ken Macintosh (pictured above with an unsuitable prop for #FMQ). I first tipped him in 2008, and he’s still the best candidate. On policy he’s tacked pretty hard in both directions – right, with a (now deleted from the Scotsman) plan to cut taxes, and left, with suggestions of bringing Scotrail back into public ownership – which is admittedly a bit alarming. He’s warm and personable, though, and if you squint really hard you can see him on the steps of Bute House. Or it doesn’t seem totally insane to game scenarios where that happens. He’d need to start honing better messages on independence (personally I think neutrality on it is the only plausible position for Labour eventually – focus on bread and butter issues no matter what the settlement, as above), and he’d need to step out of the angry finger-wagging mode that even he has deployed. It’s not him, and it’s not going to work. He’s also, in his own seat, a genuine winner, much as being up against the Tories is anyone else’s ideal first-past-the-post situation.

That’s a recommendation, mind, in lieu of an actual Labour left candidate, someone who could step into the yawning space to the left of this fiscally centre-right administration. It’s also a recommendation not because I want a Labour First Minister, although as a Green I would rather have a credible Labour and a credible SNP to choose from on the first vote. I really wanted John Park to stand, but he’s unfairly copping the flack for the 2011 campaign, despite the ground game (his role) being robust. It’s unfair not least because of Lamont’s key role. Parky’s normal, he’s funny, he’s organised, he picks good issues, he connects with the unions without being owned by them.

As the Iain Gray situation and the Ed Miliband situation both show, though, something has been happening to people when they take on leadership roles in Labour. They lose their fluency, they become both shoutier and more timid, and they lead like they’re following the advice of some particularly inept focus group jockey or some ex-NUS children of the Labour cocoon. All but the most blinkered Nats would accept that Iain Gray has at least partly rediscovered his voice since losing the election, and I bet some on their benches are wishing they could keep him on now, now he’s free of those shackles. Whoever wins will need to be different, though, they’ll need to be authentic, or at least fake it, as the old joke goes. And even then, if Salmond can secure his devo-max wish, who would bet on Labour to win in 2016? If I were a Labour partisan I’d pick Ken, even though I think the task is beyond him.

Quick declaration of interest: I’ll be about £150 up at the bookies if Ken wins. Although I’d have been about £500 up if Parky had gone for it. Next time mate?

Why Labour should vote for Tom Harris

Nov 4

Posted by Jeff in Elections, Holyrood, Parties | 89 Comments

There are two types of objections that political parties tend to raise against their opposition.

The first is delightful objection. This takes the form of the fake outrage, the calls for suspensions, the stormy press releases when you know your political enemies have stuffed up and you can solemnly delight in their dismay. We have seen a lot of this this week. It won’t have been enjoyable for Eilidh Whiteford to have been threatened with ‘getting a doing’, if that is even what transpired, but there is surely no doubt that central SNP will have been secretly pleased at the opportunity to publicly bash a senior MP over the head with the story. Going the other way, Labour have been busy firing out emails claiming how insulted they have been by the conduct of SNP activists (who are suddenly more senior than they’d otherwise have been if they hadn’t let a comment or two get out of hand). Gail Lythgoe and David Linden will hopefully be reminding themselves that today’s newspapers are tomorrow’s fish supper wrappers, as a wise person once said.

It’s all puff though of course, and it’s the kind of nonsense that politicos delight in even while it pushes the public further away.

The second type of objection that members of political parties tend to raise is the genuinely angry rebuttal. The hairs stand on edge, the teeth grind and the passion spills over into real rhetoric, real emotion around the whys and wherefores of where an opponent has gone wrong. The reason for this energy is typically due to the supposed wrongdoer actually having hit a nerve and that is almost always due to there being a big old grain of truth to their argument.

No-one holds more examples of eliciting this kind of reaction in Scottish Politics than Tom Harris. His blogs, his Twitter feed and even some mainstream news stories show this.

For that reason, and for several others, Tom is my suggestion for who Labour should vote for when they are deciding who to select as their next leader.

The other reasons include the following:

– In my humble opinion, Tom Harris is intellectually superior to his opponents and West Wing episodes alone shows how important such a factor is when it comes to political leadership. That’s not to disparage his opponents or MSPs in general, and it’s not Westminster-inspired snobbery above Holyrood. It’s just a straight-up compliment that it’s clear from Tom’s online presence and his book (well worth a read) that he has a big old brain in his head and he is not afraid to use it
– Tom has Cabinet experience from his time serving in Tony Blair’s top team. That blooding in of how to run an office, how to handle the media, how to work with enemies (within and without your party) must surely be a massive boost to anyone who is next in line to juggle all the different complicated tasks facing the next leader of Labour in Scotland. The inbox includes managing Labour in Scotland’s relationship with Westminster/Ed Miliband, choosing and sticking to a strategic position on the independence referendum, maintaining and building on Labour’s base in next year’s Council elections, somehow nobbling Salmond’s deserved position as the king of all that he surveys and, last but not least, reasserting what it is that Labour in Scotland is actually for (as opposed to what it is against, which seems to be lots of things!)
– Tom is steadfastly opposed to Devo Max and rightly so. This is an issue that draws that genuine anger from Nationalists because they know deep down it is the best play for Labour. The argument that further powers being passed to Holyrood should be a slow and refining process is a convincing one (and one that I have to thank Aidan for making me aware of via an earlier post). The other potential leaders look set to meekly adopt Devo Max as an option but the strategy is ill thought-through. A No result from a straight Yes-No would be a body blow for the SNP that would leave them reeling during a Salmond-less devolution defeat in 2016 and a long way beyond. Yes, there is talent in Team SNP but how can you hold the Nats together as a happy group when you know independence is not an option for another generation? Tom gets that, and could deliver it.
– Also, thinking practically, Tom Harris could in time quite easily be parachuted into Holyrood through a swap deal with a sitting MSP and it’s safe to say that the more talent that Labour can get into Holyrood the better, given that is where Scotland is looking to for political leadership.

But it is Tom’s ability to draw genuine ire from his opponents that sets him apart. A political leader that doesn’t pull his punches and commands the support of his team is a fearsome combination. Most leaders have the latter but not the former whereas Tom has things the other way around. He would say the unsayable and think the unthinkable in order to stop the SNP in its tracks and, given the softly-softly approach isn’t working so well, perhaps taking someone out of left field isn’t such a bad idea (one of the few occasions you’ll see ‘Tom’ and ‘left’ in the same sentence).

The biggest risk to Labour, a risk that we saw with Gordon Brown and Iain Gray and we are probably seeing right now with Ed Miliband, is that they may end up choosing a leader that they know deep down can’t win the next election but the party is too collectively paralysed by inertia, by ennui, to do anything about it. It’s over four long years until the next Scottish Parliament election and I suspect two of the three Labour candidates would be effectively lame ducks throughout FMQs, throughout budget debates and throughout the independence referendum, right up to Holyrood 2016.

For Labour, there’s no smoke without fire and since Ken Macintosh and Johann Lamont fail to generate light let alone any heat around their campaign, Tom Harris, love him or loathe him, is the only leadership candidate that can put some flames back into Labour’s belly.

Labour needs to shed off its deep-seated risk-averse nature and back Tom 4 Scotland’s campaign.

So, any objections?

God help Glasgow

Sep 20

Posted by The Burd in Democracy, Elections, Parties | 12 Comments

Hot on the heels of dissent in the ranks of the SNP come tales of woe from within the ruling Labour party in the City of Glasgow.

There’s a lot at stake. A resurgent SNP has taken the prized political scalp of the City Council as its number one target in next year’s local government elections. It signalled the seriousness of its attempt by appointing Cllr Alison Hunter as the opposition group leader after James Dornan won election to the Scottish Parliament in May.

Yet, there are internal problems over the campaign strategy, essentially over the number of candidates to field. One group advocates a 40 candidate approach while, it has been rumoured, a group backed by Nicola Sturgeon MSP, Depute First Minister (from whose constituency Cllr Hunter hales), want more candidates to stand. It has resulted in bad tempered city association meetings and resignations. For what it’s worth, the Burd reckons the latter strategy – of more than 40 candidates – is the right one. In some wards, a carefully targeted 1 – 2 voting scheme could pay dividends. Labour has managed to get more than one candidate from wards elected in the past. But the way the party is behaving it will be lucky to win any wards at all.

The party is undergoing a purge, removing dead wood in the form of sitting councillors to make way for fresh faces. But newspaper reports suggest the scale of the scalping is causing deep divisions with some who have been dumped threatening court action over claims of procedures not being followed properly. And worst of all, the party might find itself embroiled in financial irregularities with allegations against former Shettleston MSP Frank MacAveety, hoping to return to active politics as an elected member, currently being investigated by police. It might come to nought, but the publicity will be damaging to a party already in the doldrums and still recovering from the resignation of its energetic reformist council leader, Stephen Purcell.

God help Glasgow. For in amongst this morass, the city faces huge economic and social challenges. Even during the boom years, Glasgow featured in all the “worst of” rankings. Lower life expectancy, high levels of poverty, long term economic inactivity, huge social dislocation – these are Glasgow norms. And things are about to get worse. The city council’s budget will be hit hard by cuts coming downstream from Westminster via Holyrood. Services are bound to be affected. And measures like changes to benefits through the welfare reform bill will cause unprecendented strain on families and individuals. If folk who have not worked in 20 years are thrown off the new universal credit after 12 months, where will they turn to prevent themselves and their families becoming destitute and homeless?

The ropey economic recovery will also require careful stewardship to ensure that Glasgow, with its lower skill base and more fragile base, is not impacted disproportionately. Investment means new jobs are still being created but it is hard to tell if it amounts to growth or simply displacement. And in amongst it all is the prospect of the city showpiece of the Commonwealth Games in 2014. Glasgow has a chance to shine on the global stage and the city has to be ready for its big moment.

At a time when the city needs strong and energetic leadership, the two biggest parties, vying for the right to rule, are fighting among themselves. We are less than eight months out from the election, and neither of them have all their candidates in place nor evidence of a campaign strategy in the pipeline. To be sure, the SNP’s problems are fewer than Labour’s and it has the bounce to be expected from an outstanding performance across the city.

Perhaps the internecine troubles over candidates point to an obvious solution, that of allowing city folk to participate in candidate selection through primaries. Seeing as the parties are having a little difficulty working out how many and whom, handing the whole process over to the public might work? There have been others touting the use of primaries for candidate selection for Holyrood, mainly I think from the Labour camp. Not only would such an innovation sort a little local difficulty, it would provide a useful road test of a different way of selecting candidates that might result in quite different candidates being put forward.

And Glasgow might just get the candidates and councillors it deserves, rather than the ones the parties think it does.

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There is no “Taxpayers’ Alliance”

Sep 7

Posted by James in Elections | 15 Comments

sackboris2012Being criticised by the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance certainly reassures me I’m doing something right. I’ve come to their attention for having the temerity to oppose a second term for BoJo in London while – shockingly – continuing to live in Edinburgh. Having heard on the radio one morning that the King of Misrule was planning to run again with the help of a @backboris2012 Twitter account, I quickly jumped in and registered @sackboris2012 to give the other point of view.

I also bought the relevant domain name on a whim, and tweeted a small subset of Boris’s incompetence for a day or two. I then quickly realised I wouldn’t be able to give this enough time, so I dropped a few sensible friends in London a line offering to hand it over to them – some Greens, some not. Sian Berry, a former Green activist and former mayoral candidate herself, took it on through Common People, who I do think have done a great job with it. Their Oyster card holders with Sack Boris on them are all the rage, I understand.

Enter Mark Wallace, of anti-public service astroturf outfit the Taxpayers’ Alliance, who used the magic of the Allwhois public database to work out that Sian was involved with the Common People website, which in his mind makes it a Green front. Subsequently, Mr Wallace remembered how to use the same public database, and also established that I registered the SackBoris2012.com domain. Or he wanted to spin one small non-story out into two even smaller non-stories.

We had a little Twitter back-and-forth, in which I thanked him for describing me as exalted, and in which he claimed that the TPA have members in Dundee, although he refused to tell me how many. Any view on that yet Mark? I’d settle for a number of Scottish members of your organisation, to be honest.

So far so silly. But it’s a real question. Should I be permitted to take an interest in London’s politics, just like the TPA take an interest in Dundee’s? Is this very minor instance of involvement in London politics somehow offside?

I don’t think so. I do have a direct interest, and not just as the holder of an Oyster card. As long as Scotland is part of the UK, Scots have a legitimate interest in how the capital is run. The TPA regularly fuels the myth of English taxes being used to subsidise Scotland, when they know fine well that London is the best-funded part of the UK. I have no problem with a decent level of funding for vital public services, but the taxes paid by Scots help to pay for services in the capital and Scots taxpayers shouldn’t be expected to ignore London politics.

Also, nobody should be at all surprised that Green activists (and ex-Green activists) do what they can in their spare time to oppose Boris Johnson’s campaign and Tory politics more generally. So do activists from across the left, and I doubt there’s anyone in the party who’s uncomfortable about this kind of thing. If I’d been a London resident for the last mayoral election I’d have absolutely voted Green 1, Labour 2 – Ken’s got some spectacular personality flaws and some serious policy blindspots, but an AV choice between him and the public-transport-hating blond buffoon wouldn’t exactly have been hard.

There is also a delicious irony to being accused by the Taxpayers Alliance of setting up a front organisation. They’re widely regarded as a partisan hard-right front organisation for the Tories’ ideological assault on public services. They unashamedly represent the interests of a tiny minority of very wealthy taxpayers, people who tend to engage in tax evasion tax avoidance tax efficiency, not the interests of the great majority who rely on and value public services.

And of course, like so many of the TPA’s core arguments, I’m afraid my title here is simply a lie. There is a decent organisation of that name which stands up for the interests of taxpayers, and they’re right here.

Why the SNP should run in England

Sep 7

Posted by Guest Blog in Elections, Parties | 89 Comments

Rev. Stuart Campbell is a professional journalist and blogger who writes about politics and other trivial matters for culture journal Wings Over Sealand.

As a Scot who’s made their life in England for the last 20 years, and also as someone on the liberal half of the political spectrum with friends and acquaintances of a predominantly similar persuasion, there’s a sentence I hear more than any other with regard to politics: “I wish we could vote for the SNP too”.

But it’s not just the material things – the free tuition, the free prescriptions, the free care for the elderly (and the abundance of natural resources) – that my dear English chums envy.

Most of them DO envy those things, of course, not out of greed or a sense of entitlement but rather because they appreciate a government that prioritises the things its people want. Conduct a UK-wide survey asking voters whether, for example, they’d rather their taxes were spent on healthcare or on buying useless weapons of global destruction and sending our young men and women to get killed in their hundreds in foreign wars of dubious legality and purpose, and I suspect you’d get a pretty unequivocal answer. But incredibly, there is no electable party south of the border offering those values.

(The Liberal Democrats pretended to stand for some of them, but abandoned their principles with startling and dismaying speed at the first sign of a ministerial car. Not for nothing was the most-tweeted post-election political joke “Why did Nick Clegg cross the road? Because he said he wouldn’t.”)

There is also considerable – and entirely legitimate – anger about the West Lothian Question. Only this weekend I had to explain the WLQ to an English woman (not an avid follower of politics) who didn’t know that Scottish MPs were allowed to vote on UK Parliament matters solely concerning England and Wales, and who was quite justifiably outraged to discover that the tuition fees imposed on English students alone were only made possible by the votes of Scottish Labour MPs whose constituents were exempt.

This double democratic deficit has a simple solution, of course – the end of the Union. Scotland and England could dissolve their increasingly strained and unhappy marriage – in which the partners are held together more by force law than any common interests or goals – and either become fully separate or participants in a federal UK with largely token bonds of unity.

cuthberts

(In respect of the rest of the UK, Northern Ireland already has a very separate way of doing things, with its own distinct political parties and structures, and the Welsh can to all intents and purposes be considered a region of England, comprising mostly 80-minute/roadsign patriots with very little appetite for even fairly trivial levels of devolution when it comes to the crunch at the ballot box.)

The English would be freed of the (real) West Lothian injustice and their (perceived) subsidy of the ungrateful Scots – leaving them, they would believe, the extra billions to make their own universities and prescriptions free and so on – whereas the Scots could elect governments more suited to their different political and social culture without having their wishes invariably trampled by the numerically-superior south.

The problem is that there is no way for English voters to express support for these ideas. All three mainstream parties are fanatically pro-Union (though mostly, if pressed on the issue, for largely nebulous reasons), and the likes of the English Democrats are either nutter-fringe outfits, racists or both. Opinion polls consistently show that roughly as many (and sometimes more) English people support an end to the Union as Scots, yet there is nowhere they can put a cross in a box to say so. Which is why the SNP should put up candidates for English elections.

It’s perhaps important to note at this point that I’m serious. I genuinely believe it’s something the Nationalists should do, rather than an abstract debating point. But obviously there would have to be some qualifications. Firstly, the SNP clearly can’t afford to contest every English seat in a General Election, and nor would there be any point in them doing so. But running in a handful of carefully-chosen by-elections offers huge potential benefits, and not just for the party itself.

Picture the scenario. A formerly strong Liberal Democrat seat, somewhere in the south of England, with low support for Labour. A Lib Dem vote that is very likely hugely disaffected and angry, and looking for somewhere to go. The chances are that they voted Lib Dem in the first place to keep the Tories out (so they’re not likely to defect in that direction), and that they did so either because Labour had little to no chance of success, or because of an equal antipathy to them.

Straight away there’s plenty to play for, then. And while it might seem counter-intuitive for the SNP to stand in the south of England rather than the more left-wing north, that’s precisely why it would be a good idea. It took Scotland a generation to free itself of the reflexive instinct to turn Labour in times of austerity – even when Labour had abandoned most of the principles that bred that instinct – and northern England would be starting from cold.

According to Scottish Vote Compass, the policies of the 2010 Lib Dem manifesto are already far closer to the SNP’s than those of the Tories or Labour. The party is also already familiar and comfortable with the idea of a federal structure – that being the way in which the Liberal Democrat Party itself is organised in terms of the UK- so switching to the SNP would in many senses be the easiest ideological leap for former LD voters to make.

But the SNP would also have another, slightly less palatable, advantage in a by-election in the south. They might well also attract the votes of disgruntled Daily Mail and Express and Telegraph readers who since 2007 have been fed a constant diet of mendacious anti-Scottish propaganda. The messageboards of those publications overflow with angry readers bitterly bemoaning the “subsidy junkie” Scots and urging them to just get on with it and leave. Given the opportunity of a two-for-one protest against both the whingeing Jocks and the mainstream parties at a time when disillusionment with Westminster politics has never been higher, is it such a stretch to imagine them, too, lending the SNP their vote?

Disaffected Lib Dems allied awkwardly to the Little Englander brigade would be a formidable electoral presence. But even if we assume that actually winning the election would be a pipe-dream – and indeed even if the SNP candidate lost their deposit – the mere act of standing would bring the SNP media coverage that money couldn’t buy. The subject of the Unionwould be the hot topic of debate not merely in the wee provinces of the north, but across the national media.

It’s hard to imagine a political operator as savvy as Alex Salmond failing to grasp such a glorious opportunity, and his job would be made easier by the fact that the greater the scrutiny of the relationship between Scotland and England – whether political or economic – the better the outcome tends to be for the SNP. Scotland has the truth on its side when it comes to whether it pays its way in the UK or not, and the Nationalists also command the moral high ground when it comes to the West Lothian Question, with their MPs abstaining on England-only matters in the House Of Commons.

But it’s not only Scotland that would stand to benefit. Salmond’s much-acclaimed appearance on the BBC’s Question Time earlier this year showed that the SNP’s position on subjects like the NHS and PFI carries a lot of traction south of the border too. A more social-democratic agenda being raised and discussed at length could only be good news for those of us down here who currently have no voice in Westminster, if only to remind British people that such voices still exist and such principles are still viable. Systemically-unequal neoliberal free-market capitalism isn’t the only game in town (as nations like those ofScandinavia ably demonstrate).

English voters are currently starved of meaningful democratic choices, being plagued by three parties that are in most important and practical senses indistinguishable from each other. (All support nuclear weapons and power, all want to persecute welfare recipients, all voted for tuition fees, all are a threat to civil liberties, etc.) The SNP has plenty of cash in its war-chest to fight a by-election or two. It’s hard to see what either could have to lose.

Originally posted on Rev S Campbell’s own blog.

ADDENDUM – by Malc

Within this piece there was a reference to Wales as “to all intents and purposes a region of England” which led to a discussion about Welsh and Gaelic languages, which may have offended some readers.

My own clear view is that the suggestion that minority languages are not welcome in the UK is not just wrong, it is ignorant and has a basis in colonialist attitudes.

Better Nation was intended as a vehicle to discuss and debate views which would improve Scotland in the future. I deeply regret that we featured an author whose views are so at odds with the protection of historical and cultural values held by those who hold dear their own language.

Future guest posts will certainly get a closer examination before they go up.

MH