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Walk The Solidarity Talk

Feb 21

Posted by Natalie in Constitution, Democracy, Equality, Europe, Governance, Holyrood, Westminster | 5 Comments

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At Glasgow City Council Full Council today one of the issues debated- and finding a rare moment of relative harmony between bitter Labour and SNP factions – was that of the Bedroom Tax;  with the Labour Party and the SNP agreeing to an amendment asking Nicola Sturgeon to consider using Scottish Government powers to offset the worst effects of it.

All admirable sentiments, and worthwhile doing – after all it is the role of the Scottish Government to act in the best interests of the Scottish people – but can the Scottish Government always be expected to legislate to mitigate the worst effects of policy decisions taken at Westminster?

Evidently I am absolutely in favour of the Scottish Government intervening to protect the most vulnerable in Scottish society, and in fact I have some suggestions based on a huge amount of research I have been taking on the Bedroom Tax in my employed capacity. There are actions that the Scottish Government can take, and I am sure that all SNP MSPs and councillors will be pressing them to explore any and all suggested options.

In the first instance, Govan Law Centre has made suggestions about the reclassification of housing debt as a civil debt and treated as such in the same manner as any other civil debt; like council tax arrears, or utilities debt meaning that courts will not be forced to evict for non-payment as a first option. There are a number of problems with this suggestion; indeed as there are with many others, not least the fact that the most vulnerable in society will still be accumulating unmanageable debts, and that Housing Associations, and Councils as Social Landlords will be subject to huge gaps in funding and revenue stream. It is simply unacceptable to pass the problem on to Housing Associations and Councils without trying too to mitigate their funding gaps too.

That said, it is a mitigation which requires due consideration. Perhaps there are ways in which to make it workable with agreement between the Scottish Government, Councils and Housing Associations. It is only one of a few suggested options.

So whilst I fundamentally agree and urge the Scottish Government to do all it can, and further, I am not averse to utilising some existing but unused powers to do so, I have my concerns about the expectation that the Scottish Government is the line of last defence when the UK Government takes decisions which we deem unpopular, socially unjust or morally reprehensible.

That the Welfare Reform Act fits all of the above descriptions, and more, does not offset the fact that the Westminster Government is a democratically elected beast. We can quibble about the Tories going in to coalition with the Liberal Democrats not being the settled will of the United Kingdom voters until the cows come home, but, in my opinion, that is wholly disingenuous. Allow me the right to despise the Liberal Democrats the choice to enter a coalition which contravenes so many values which Liberal Democrats should hold dear whilst respecting their right to do so.

I support a reform of the First Past the Post system, and by dint, support a form of proportional representation. By their very definition, PR elections create the need for parties to negotiate coalitions.  This means compromise; and yes, if chosen, some parties will sell their souls to do so.  The Liberal Democrats did in the first Scottish Parliament where they abandoned their principles on free tuition fees – sound familiar? – To enter coalition with the Labour Party. However, many of those same voices clamouring for the same electoral change that I desire are prepared to criticise a coalition formed to govern because they dislike the hue of the parties who entered it. That, to me, is hypocrisy at best.  We either support coalition government as a compromise which is more inclusive of societal views, or we don’t. Perhaps I over simplify, but there it is.  This is a blog post, not a thesis.

The UK government has taken on the mantle of welfare reform which began under the previous Labour administration and is taking the decision to implement changes which, again in my opinion, undermine enshrined ECHR Article 8 on right to family life. Clearly by implementing the Bedroom Tax, the state is interfering with this right by preventing respite for carers, overnight access for parents with shared custody rights etc. But The United Kingdom electorate gave them the power to do so.

I have been to a number of the University of Glasgow Independence debates, and I obviously pay attention to social media and messaging which is coming from the “Better Together” camp and its partners in the Labour Party. A now constant refrain seems to be that asserting the right to independence is a betrayal of solidarity with fellow Brits in Salford, or Brixton, or Bradford who are also suffering from austerity measures. Indeed, as I sit here typing at the last of the University of Glasgow independence debates, I am listening to Willie Bain attempt to articulate the same point – very confusedly, as it happens.

It is beyond me that a constitutional settlement means that we cannot share solidarity with fellow human beings across the United Kingdom as we do those fellow world citizens across the globe. A point was made by a member of the audience last night that solidarity respects no borders. Choosing independence is asserting the right to self-determination; it is not an abandonment of humanity.

Another argument seems to be predicated on the basis that by choosing independence we consign England and Wales to eternal Conservative domination. This is as ridiculous as certain factions of the Yes campaign who believe that voting Yes means no more Tories.  It could be argued that a small c conservative party would have a small renaissance in an independent country, and that is not necessarily a bad thing, as the state, and the Left, needs to have checks and balance.

These shouldn’t be arguments which are made by either side. They are lazy and crass and entirely without empirical evidence. Blair’s landslide Labour Governments would have been elected regardless of the Scottish block voting. It England wants to vote Labour, it can and will. If England wants to vote Conservative, it can and will and we do not have the right to usurp their will. Staying in a union to subvert the voting will of the English people is entirely nonsensical and presumptuous and fundamentally undemocratic.

That the Labour party is simultaneously using the issue of solidarity with fellow Brits as a reason to vote no in the referendum whilst urging the Scottish Government to act in mitigation of the choices of the United Kingdom Government to offset a degree of the worst effects for the Scottish people only, smacks of double standards. That the powers retained by the United Kingdom include all legislative powers over Welfare should not be forgotten, and whilst the Calman Commission was an opportunity for the pro-Union parties to make suggestions about this, they failed to make any substantive points which would change the impact of Welfare Reform.  That they also failed to advocate a second question on the ballot paper with powers over welfare is again indicative of their inability to practice what they preach.

The “Better Together” Campaign has made no concrete suggestions which would entrust power of welfare to the Scottish Parliament, yet they want and expect the Scottish Government to mitigate any decisions made under that retained power when they disagree with them. Surely the UK under their premise, which retains the power, should make UK wide welfare decisions, or they shouldn’t. The only way they shouldn’t or couldn’t is if welfare is devolved. And whilst the pro-Union parties hid from any concrete proposals for a second question on the Independence Referendum ballot paper, there is only one option on the table whereby Scottish voters have the opportunity to help build a welfare system that they believe in and shares their values of fairness. And that isn’t the status quo.

So, yes, the Scottish Government should take any and all actions it can to help the Scottish people it serves, but we should remember, by choosing to remain in the UK, we choose to retain UK wide welfare reform, and long-term, it is not feasible, practical or affordable for a parliament which survives on a set, and shrinking, block grant to continue to play the role of mitigator. And consequently ,Scottish tax payers taking on the burden of reduced public expenditure on other vital public services to correct the folly of the coalition.

 

 

 

Love without borders

Feb 6

Posted by James in Equality, Holyrood, Westminster | 10 Comments

YESPRIDEPleasing as it is to see last night’s vote in favour of equal marriage at Westminster, and to know that the Scottish Government’s parallel process will surely bring fruit, the SNP’s Westminster group’s decision not to vote still perplexes me. Kate’s got a fantastic post up about the implications of the Westminster proposals for Scots law, the roll-call of shame, and concerns about the SNP’s reasoning: I agree with all of that, and there’s no point replicating her arguments here.

There are other concerns, though, about the SNP abstention. The UK is, unless and until the referendum is won, a single nation-state. Until that point it’s extremely hard to identify what does not affect Scotland, and the question of whether England and Wales deliver marriage equality certainly does matter to Scots.

People live, work and love across the border largely without thinking about it. If two Coldstream residents want to marry in Berwick-upon-Tweed, should SNP MPs not speak up for their right to do so irrespective of gender? What if one partner is from Gretna and the other from Carlisle? If the vote had been narrowly lost last night, the effect of the SNP group’s decision would have been to tell that couple they could only tie the knot in Gretna, an idea which admittedly has some historic resonance.

So what if English MPs can’t vote on the equivalent Scottish proposals? It’s not the SNP’s fault that we have this halfway house which institutionalises the West Lothian Question. Equality isn’t a dull managerial England-and-Wales-only issue of the sort Scots MPs might well be justified in avoiding. It’s a question entirely of principle. As such, a supportive position from the SNP would have helped to offset the reputational downside for Scotland of hearing Labour’s west coast dinosaurs braying in their swamp of pseudo-religious bigotry.

Getting a vote on affairs in the rest of the UK is one of the few compensations for the Union. Until independence, if you have a vote, it should be used wherever there’s a point of serious principle at stake. Independence offers a trade-off I’ll be glad to take: losing the influence Scots MPs have at Westminster will be more than outweighed by shedding the influence Westminster has on Scotland.

SNP MPs voted against the Coalition’s hike in tuition fees: good. Scots students wishing to get an education in England and Wales would have been righteously angry had they not. But when the Coalition’s assault on the English and Welsh NHS came forward they sat on their hands. When those students get to university, or indeed any other Scot moves down south, do the SNP not wish them to have a decent NHS to rely upon? Is a publicly-run free universal healthcare system a point of principle or not?

Like it or not, SNP votes at Westminster matter. They may sometimes be decisive, but what’s more, when they’re not, they will be read as a statement of the Scottish Government’s intentions and position. Last night was a missed opportunity to be consistent and to support the idea that the principle of equality knows no borders, just as love does not.

A political machine that gives change

Jan 26

Posted by Dom in Culture, Democracy, Education, Equality, Europe, International, Society | 6 Comments

I’m leaving Sweden, again. It feels good to be heading back to my flat in Leith, to Stereo in Glasgow and all my friends, to the Cairngorms, to Frightened Rabbit and Easter Road, CalMac ferries and Scotrail sprinter trains. I would also have put Innis and Gunn Rum Cask on the list, but the Swedish alcohol monopoly sees fit to stock the stuff to an admirable degree.

I’ve been away for a half-year now, watching the independence referendum from afar. I’ve seen TV clips of Johann Lamont declare Scotland a something-for-nothing society before finishing my breakfast and going to work with better paid colleagues at publicly funded Swedish universities. I’ve been forced to turn down Facebook invites to a succession of Nordic Horizons events at the Scottish Parliament, but then had the pleasure of seeing the ideas they promote in action every day.

I’ve heard the Better Together campaign say that modern Scotland is as good as it gets, then walked out of my front door to see a version of urban life which is in many ways better.

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a Green party take its place as the third party in parliament and take on both left and right on the environment, on child poverty and on the terrible state of privatized railways. Every day on my way to the metro station I pass three different council-run nursery schools and men with pushchairs taking their paternity leave whilst their partners return to work.

I’ve been able to live cheaply in cooperatively run housing with district heating and communal facilities, so well insulated that I often don’t even need to have the radiator on.

I’ve met young Green activists who, unlike young people in Scotland and the rest of Britain, seem to have a genuine belief in their ability to change their country for the better.  I’ve hung out with girls from a design school who one day decided that all of the products they made should have zero environmental impact and then set about making it happen.

I’ve talked to writers and journalists who are all part of a vibrant cultural arena, and seen what proper funding can do for political diversity (all Swedish parliamentary parties are given money to stimulate debate and encourage youth politics, as well as to maintain a small staff).

I will be sad to leave Sweden, though it is not a country without its own problems (not least a worrying consumerism which accompanies being one of the world’s richest countries), but I come back over the North Sea with a sincere belief that a Scandinavian style approach in Scotland is not just desirable, but both possible and necessary. Britain today is not as good as it gets.

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Johann’s Lament

Dec 17

Posted by Dom in Education, Equality, Ideology, Parties | 7 Comments

 

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I thought the BBC News website was playing up again when ‘Johann Lamont raises questions over free tuition policy’ popped up. Surely she hadn’t decided to go further down the road taken at the infamous ‘something for nothing’ speech?
At the centre of Lamont’s critique of current education policy is something fairly irrefutable. Despite there being no tuition fees for Scots students there is still a frightening disparity in the number of rich and poor children attending university. This is simply not good enough, and with one eye on academia I must say that universities are shooting themselves in the foot by not tapping the underdeveloped potential of some children from poorer backgrounds.  I’ve seen it both as a student and latterly as a course tutor.

But Johann’s critique, instead of asking what is desirable in society and asking what the best way to get there would be, simply looks at all the bits of the train set and makes a decision on how best to put the track together. It illustrates well the managerialism which has crept into politics and the lack of real vision which has accompanied it. The ‘long term solutions’ envisaged by Lamont only reinforce the status quo which has caused so many problems. There is an implicit acceptance in the existence of rich and poor, and with it the idea that social inequality is to be tolerated so long as those at the bottom have the means to raise themselves to the sunny plains of the middle class.

This background-based approach to the provision of services also reinforces the very notion of patronage which I thought Johann’s party were supposed to dislike. By linking children to their parents we reduce them to assets. Should a mother receive less maternity pay because she has a rich husband who can keep her whilst she is off work? Removing universalism as a philosophical grounding to how we organise our society can only lead to social friction. It reduces our personal freedoms and traps us in systems of patronage which can only be broken via collective understanding of and consensus on universal rights.

If you charge for university based on the assumption that it will result in higher earnings, you reduce a degree to nothing more than a means of individual self-betterment in the narrowest and most soulless sense. If you charge because you feel that those from wealthier backgrounds should pay, why not just levy a higher rate of income tax as a general principle?

Universalism is vital to a society because it is a concrete sign of the fact that all of us, wherever we may be from, have the same basic rights and opportunities. Furthermore, to try and remove universalism from higher education is an attack on the right of all people to develop what makes us people, our minds. If Johann wants to see an end to the something for nothing culture, why not reduce subsidy for railways used predominantly by middle class commuters, or airports used by people from privileged backgrounds as they jet off on holiday?

There is an argument to be had about the appropriate subjects for a university to be teaching, and whether or not some disciplines would be better taught in a non-university environment, but universities are built on the notion of universalism – of teaching all subjects and all students equally.

A university can take no blame for what happens before students reach its gates. It can try to discern more carefully between students with an expensive education and students with a keen mind, something many are not currently very good at, but the inequalities which are inherent in society from a child’s formative years cannot be laid at the door of the university. It is a responsible government which will work to eradicate poverty which will change the kind of student entering Scotland’s numerous and generally good universities.

The narrative presented by Johann Lamont in her education vision is one of hardworking individuals working their way out of poverty. This is in some sense admirable, but it is also inherently antagonistic toward those who currently enjoy publicly funded education. It is a strange corruption of class politics which assumes both the continued existence of poverty and buys into an old fashioned concept of social climbing, rather than an aspirational vision of what an egalitarian society can look like.

This is not to say that the SNP are any better in their educational/social/economic policy (and these things are inseparable). Neither do I buy into the SNP spiel about having a social democratic vision for Scotland. Social democrats don’t freeze local tax and refuse to use the income-tax powers given to them, nor do they spend increasingly large amounts on private transport and refuse to embrace truly social urban policies. The worrying thing is that, in a country where we have two parties who call themselves social democrats, neither seem to really understand what the term means. We need to have Johann’s honest conversation, but the outcome should be a recognition of the need for greater collective resources, not the abandonment of the principle that all of us are of equal worth.

To err is Devine..

Sep 23

Posted by James in Equality | 2 Comments

The Bishop of Motherwell is at it again, firing off an intemperate salvo against the abortionists, the gays, the police, the Greens, and Patrick Harvie in particular. Last time he waded in he accused the gay rights movement of aligning themselves with Holocaust victims to project an “image of a group of people under persecution“. As everyone pointed out then, Holocaust victims did include a lot of gay men. But the Bishop isn’t one to let the facts get in the way of a little hatred.

This time, it seems he’s been to Brighton and he did not like it. Not one bit. It’s full of gays and Greens and the kind of police who object to anti-abortionists who harass the public. He started there, with abortion, objecting to the arrests of two “Christians” who waved enormous banners showing aborted foetuses at women going into a BPAS clinic in Brighton, and he compared abortion not just to the Holocaust again, but also to famine, war and the Burma Railway. His argument is actually this, and I quote: “If we cannot face the pictures, how can we conceive of endorsing the reality?”

Note that this isn’t an argument about when life begins or the relative rights of the unborn versus the mother. It’s nothing more than this: “if you’re too squeamish we might be able to put you off”, an purely aesthetic assault. Now, I’m pretty damn squeamish. I fainted the only time I gave blood and was told never to come back. When I last went in to hospital for an operation, I certainly couldn’t have faced the pictures. The factual reality of the operation, though, I absolutely endorsed.

Where would this aesthetics-based campaign approach end? Would it be OK for Jehovah’s Witnesses, who oppose blood transfusions, to stand outside blood donor centres with gory placards? Should everyone eating meat be obliged to look at massive posters of calves being shot in the head? The Catholic Church, it turns out, has had a bad habit of covering up for paedophile priests. Should the statistics about that be waved as 7-foot banners in the faces of innocent churchgoers every Sunday? I think not.

He then went on to lambast the Greens for another Brighton issue, the disciplinary measures against Cllr Christina Summers. She voted against a Labour motion on equal marriage, which is what the Bishop thinks she got done for: no, far more importantly, she broke a direct pledge to the party members who selected her and to the public who elected her. “To seek to coerce loyalty to the party above loyalty to individual conscience calls to mind the worst kind of totalitarian politics,” the Bishop said.

Hardly. She can do what she likes with her conscience – which coincidentally includes harassment outside abortion clinics. But in the Bishop’s Big Book Of Rules there are ten which are always described as pretty important. Being against gay marriage isn’t in that list, but there is one which talks about bearing false witness. Is no-one in the religious hierarchy concerned about her dishonesty? It is apparently a sin, if my reading’s correct.

We just ask for candidates to be honest with the membership and to adhere to the party’s principles. They sign up to that, as Cllr Summers did, and then they get held to it. It’s hardly the “worst kind of totalitarian politics“. Does the Bishop really think that being expelled from the Brighton and Hove Green Councillors Group (not the party, mind, nor the Council) is akin to being sent to the gulags or having an attempt made to exterminate your entire people?

Next, the truth about the Green Party. “For years it has operated under the cover of ‘saving the planet’ while publicly playing down its anti-religious faith, anti-democratic agenda.”  I wouldn’t say we’re anti-democratic. We’re not perhaps as good at winning elections as others, but that still feels a bit of an unfair characterisation. Bad at fundraising: that I’d accept. Also, we’re not anti-faith – I know many wonderful Greens who believe in God – but it’s true that we are very much against the bigoted arguments that masquerade as faith in certain quarters.

But what does marriage equality have to do with climate change? We hear that a lot. Well, enabling the first and trying to tackle the latter is consistently about building a better planet to live on. It doesn’t seem very complicated to me. But Greens should only campaign on one issue as far as the Bishop is concerned. I await his attack on the SNP, who have operated for years under the cover of the quest for independence while publicly playing down their real aim – a minimum price per unit of alcohol. The Bishop needs to understand that all political parties cover a range of policies. And that means, to paraphrase Patrick Harvie’s comments to the Sunday Herald, if he wants to vote for a party which agrees with him on really not liking the gays, it’ll be down to UKIP versus the BNP.