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Shetland phoney.

Apr 6

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Democracy, Equality, Governance, Holyrood, International, Parties | 1 Comment

If Tavish Scott is serious about Shetland’s Scandinavian heritage, he would do well to consider the advantages of an independent Holyrood.

Tavish Scott is a sort of self-styled Lord of the Isles. As a constituency MSP Shetland is most definitely his, and he seems to have a habit of seeing himself as its de facto president. He also loves going on about the islands’ Scandinavian heritage whenever distancing himself from any whiff of nationalism. Shetland needn’t be independent with Scotland because it has as much to do with Norway as it does with Edinburgh, he claims.

And fair enough perhaps . I was wandering around Scalloway this week and took a look at their shiny museum, opened by Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg last year. Likewise, Lerwick’s magnificent new arts centre would not be out of place on a quayside on the other side of the North Sea. You can sit on the beach and tune in to Norwegian local radio, and Lerwick is the only place in the British Isles to have tourist signage in Faeroese.

But it has even less to do with London than with Edinburgh. Tavish wants Shetland to assert its northerness, but not for Scotland to do so.  Now Scotland will never be a Scandinavian country, just as Shetland will never be entirely Scottish perhaps, but they both share a pervasive Northernness.

But does Tavish speak for Shetland, and if Shetland is serious about some sort of political autonomy, would it really want to be reduced to a Westminster territory? There is a phrase loved by certain Scottish liberals, home rule, which will always be inextricably linked to the establishment of the Irish state, and which is also about the last time liberalism was the hottest ticket in the burgh. Tavish can beat his drum, but considering that less than half of the electorate voted for him, his claims to be the voice of the islands are somewhat tenuous.

To quote a respected colleague, “The SNP are centralising f***ers.”.  There is a serious case to be made for Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles to be given far greater powers over their day to day existence. The council tax freeze which both of the big parties signed up to is an assault on the ability of communities to take charge of their own futures. What works well in Livingston or Ayr will not necessarily be right for Harris and Lewis.

If Tavish wants to have a genuine conversation about appropriate powers, local devolution and Scandinavianism, he should probably pick up the phone and give Patrick Harvie a call.

Let’s get this parity started

Mar 21

Posted by Jeff in Holyrood | 12 Comments

Circle your calendars and pencil your diaries. Now we know. The independence referendum shall take place on Thursday September 18th 2014.

This changes nothing of course and yet it changes everything, for both sides. It’s real, it’s on, be galvanised or go home.

With every passing milestone I must admit I am more and more eager for this to be a Yes victory. Long gone are the days of watching this constitutional debate unfold clothed in the comfort blanket of ambivalence.

There may be nothing like the zeal of the converted but there is simply no shaking the sense that the country I want to live in would more likely evolve from an independent Scotland than from an enduring United Kingdom. 

Good luck to England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but taking our place alongside the Denmarks, the Swedens, the Irelands and the Norways has a dizzying appeal that is too exciting not to grasp.

Genuine equality, combatting poverty and the way we treat our elderly are just a few areas ripe for reappraisal, by all Scottish political parties, if we can just wipe the slate clean and put into place easily imagined Scottish solutions for Scotland’s problems. 

Higher taxes in return for a higher quality of life and a more selfless society is my particular vision, I’m willing to take my chances with my Yes vote that that is what we’d get in the near future too.

It’s a narrower view than considering matters in a British context but that doesn’t make it narrow-minded. The negotiations after a Yes win won’t be pretty but that wouldn’t make them petty. 

Even the debate over whether we’d be richer or poorer after the ‘divorce’ from the UK misses the point. It’s who you want to fight for, what culture you want to bring your kids up in and who you want to get out of bed and contribute your little bit of GDP to that matters. 

Like so much in life, Sept 18th will no doubt come down to who wants it the most. Only 546 days to find who that will be, but I’m backing blue.

Scrapping the Bedroom Tax – scraping the barrel

Mar 20

Posted by Guest Blog in Economy, Holyrood | 21 Comments

A guest post from 3p Steve.

Whatever you choose to call it, the UK Government’s “Bedroom Tax” (/spare room subsidy / under occupancy reduction) is one of the most controversial of its welfare reforms, especially in Scotland.

I don’t know if that’s because such a large proportion (almost 80%) of affected households contain a disabled tenant, or because there are so many different examples of the injustice of the measure, from separated parents, to service personnel to foster carers. But whatever the reason, there have been protests all over the UK, and both the Labour party and the SNP have come out strongly against it.

The Scottish Government, perhaps prompted by the Govan Law Centre and others, have written to councils and social landlords encouraging them to help where they can by reclassifying bedrooms and avoiding evictions. At council level, SNP-led Dundee council and Green-led Brighton and Hove council have both promised there will not be evictions resulting from arrears accrued due to the bedroom tax.

But the despite all of this, the UK Government remains firm, and will impose the bedroom tax from next month on 105,000 households in the social rented sector in Scotland, taking around £53 million out of the pockets of some of the poorest and most vulnerable.

Some have called on the SNP Government to stop the tax, who in turn have argued that the only way this can happen is with independence – they don’t have the powers, the means, or the money to stop it.

But now, thanks in part to George Osborne’s budget today, that’s simply not true.

The Scottish Government have been given enough extra money in today’s budget to undo the bedroom tax. By coincidence, as a result of Barnett consequentials, the Scottish Government will receive an extra £55 million in the next financial year.  Now according to the Scottish Government’s own analysis, that’s almost exactly the same as the £53 million needed to reverse the bedroom tax in full. There is a technical issue around capital and revenue budgets but, without going into too much boring detail, that shouldn’t be an issue: the Scottish Government generally transfers money from their revenue budget into the capital budget so they have the wiggle room they need to transfer a bit back.

What about the powers? Benefits are mostly a reserved matter, however, as Ian Smart shows on his blog, councils have powers to help out the poorest, and what’s more there is a well known and loved precedent – free personal care for the elderly.

What about the mechanism? Well up until the introduction of universal credit (which may never happen!) housing benefit will be administered by councils. That basically means that between them, the Scottish councils have to keep a list of all the households affected by the bedroom tax – they will know exactly who is affected and by how much their housing benefit is to be cut. There is nothing to stop these councils either not applying the cut to housing benefit (and making an internal budget transfer to cover the difference), paying the amount to the relevant social landlords directly (in many cases this will be the council itself, so again simply an internal budget transfer is all that is required) or paying the money in cash to the tenants affected. All councils need from the Scottish Government is for them to pass on the Barnett consequential money.

So if we are serious about stopping the bedroom tax in Scotland it’s good to know that we have the cash, we have the power, and we have the means. The only question is, does the Scottish Government have the political will?

I have literally no idea what you’re talking about

Mar 18

Posted by Aidan in Holyrood | Comments off

The McCluskey report on press regulation in Scotland is flawed for an innumerable number of reasons, some of which have been set out by LoveandGarbage, Alex Massie, and esteemed comrade editor James amongst others. It’s a creaking pile of uninformed, unenforceable, overreaching, illiberal, misconceived nonsense that has been quickly disowned by the people who commissioned it.

What really struck me, and I confess a particular long standing interest here, was the continued utter misunderstanding of the nature of the internet.

Now, the current internet is not The Internet that I grew up on. For one thing, capitalising it looks a bit odd now, even though it’s a single, unique entity and so should be a proper noun. For another it’s vastly more centralised and that means there are clearly defined and easily accessible points of control, at least for the small walled gardens that the majority of people live on.

When I was a lad we had a truly decentralised, unstoppable, designed to keep pace with cockroaches in the event of nuclear war, discussion system called USENET. It’s a master piece of robustness in the face of attack which also means that it’s hugely difficult to design a censorship system for (although the folks on news.admin.net-abuse.* tried their best with the Breidbart Index), and that’s not taking into account the various sub-networks what would probably today be called the “dark USENET” if folk knew what USENET was.

Even the web, that bane of the Proper Internet, was pretty open. There were a multitude of places you could host things, but mostly you found someone with a box wired into some reasonably connected router with a peering agreement or too, maybe a frac-T1 if you were lucky (and your dad used to kill you before you woke up) and hey, bonsaikittendotcom.

These days… not so much. You’re an authoritarian government? You call up Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook or… you probably only need to call them actually. If something isn’t doing the rounds on the uninformed echo chamber that is Twitter  it’s probably hosted on some server sitting in the Amazon Web Service cloud and if you can’t find it via Google it may as well not exist.

McCluskey’s failure to grasp anything that’s happened in the last 20 years is depressing but pretty predictable – the Digital Economy Act with its talk of “intellectual property addresses” highlighted just how wide spread fundamental misunderstanding about the Internet still is. What worries me more is that we have essentially squandered the most important technical revolution of the last two centuries and placed it in the hands of  half a dozen companies most of whom make all of their money from advertising and who operating in a single judicial system. As we’ve seen in Egypt this makes them extraordinarily vulnerable to pressure, and there’s a risk that view of the internet held by people like him and Ted Stevens is becoming truer over time not because they are altering their views but because the way we use the internet is heading in that direction.

Some carrots and sticks for the media

Mar 18

Posted by James in Holyrood, Media, Westminster | 9 Comments

8340743611_3d8f22e6e9_zAs a society, our substantial problems with the news media include these two. For one, large chunks of them have behaved irresponsibly and illegally with regard to phone hacking and other offences.

For another, they’re dying off, especially the broadsheets. The Scotsman and the Herald and their Sunday sister titles are now not even being treated as national titles anymore, at their own request.

The year-on-year figures are atrocious: by December last the Scotsman was down to just over 32,000, and almost twelve months ago the Sunday Herald was barely at 26,000 – not even half of one percent of Scots bought a copy. Less than 5% bought the Record. I won’t be forgiven if I don’t point out that the P&J is somewhat bucking the trend (and the i), but there’s not much comfort there.

The reasons for the decline are well understood, in broad terms, and the consequences of dwindling readership are bleaker than might be assumed. Dwindling numbers of titles will be even worse, should that start happening nationally. I made some arguments about the causes and the consequences back in 2009: #1, #2.

The London tabs in particular are facing the first of two further sticks: existing court cases. That reflects the fact that newspapers are already regulated, in many senses, or at least circumscribed by law. Nothing that happens today could have stopped hacking, for instance, which entailed existing criminal acts for which jail terms are in some cases being served. Nor, as far as I can see, would it have brought longer sentences for such acts. Bribery of public officials, like the plod we also see going down in small numbers: that’s obviously also already an offence by both parties and should be enforced properly.

The second stick was actually two rods aimed at a broader target than just the miscreants: the Leveson/McCluskey proposals. To no-one’s great surprise, the latter of those rods has just been dropped by the SNP as quickly as they picked it up, not that that will resolve the political problems they face over media regulation.

As for Leveson, it’s a secondary question whether the system is voluntary or compulsory, by royal charter or statutory underpinning. The question should be will it deliver on the public interest here?

And putting the public interest first might point us in a different direction. The public have a legitimate interest in a whole number of “services” provided by newspapers, including those which provide the reasons for readers choosing to buy an individual paper (including entertainment and the reinforcement of readers’ own prejudices). Some of those interests are essentially only enough to justify individual purchases, but some of the “services” are genuinely socially beneficial, notably investigations.

Bare facts are free and easy to find. Analysis is freely available too, and sometimes better than the papers. For all that Lesley Riddoch, Iain McWhirter, Euan McColm, Alan Cochrane etc are first class, whether or not you agree with them, plenty of newspaper comment falls below the level set by bloggers like Kate Higgins, Peat Worrier or (for a bit of Westminster insight) former Labour spad Damian McBride.

But investigative work by the media generally is largely still with the papers, much as the quantity and quality could be much improved. And the benefits of the work that does get done are felt whether or not you buy a copy. You may never have bought a Telegraph in your life, but I am grateful to them for the comprehensive way they shed light on the casual greed and corruption of the MPs’ expenses system. God knows what the overall effect of Rob Edwards’ work is, closer to home, but you can bet it includes a cleaner Scottish environment and officials more afraid to act in secrecy and attempt to deceive the public. Free speech is both right in principle and an essential part of civic society’s autoimmune system.

So let’s start with a carrot. It’s not impossible to devise a kind of support system for a responsible media that might help protect both journalists’ jobs and that public interest in their work. The Norwegians have one system of both direct support and tax breaks, designed to protect their cities’ second papers from competition (h/t @thesocialforest). The French have supports too, briefly set out here.

It wouldn’t be beyond the wit of our legislators to devise a system that might work, although the Norway system costs more than £100m per annum, which would be a hard sell even with any self-interested media support that might be forthcoming.

You could set a rate for sold copies of papers plus a rate for page views – both have to be relatively accurately audited already to meet the needs of advertisers, so policing that shouldn’t be too hard. Freesheets are harder, admittedly. You could also make it proportional to each newspaper’s original non-paid-for content. You could make the funds available only for specific purposes or with specific conditions – the aim is to see journalism kept afloat, not the owner’s yacht.

It’s a big carrot, and I’d combine it with a very different and more limited stick, again guided by the public interest. There is such an interest in the good behaviour of the media, and it extends beyond that which can be constrained by the courts. Notably, we should be able to expect accuracy. Where a court (or even a semi-Leveson arbitration setup) finds that a paper has made a clear factual error to someone’s detriment, they should be required to print (and display online) the correction on the same page. Same page online means linked to just as prominently as the original piece, and for the same duration, on the front page (if appropriate) or whichever section pages the original featured on.

Another carrot to retain and enhance is the legally distinct status journalists enjoy – for example, qualified privilege, as discussed here. There are probably additional protections of this sort that could be considered, given again the public interest in papers being able to “publish and be damned” – with the caveat above about factual accuracy.

These moves might be combined in various ways: commit to correcting factual errors in that way and get the subsidy, for example. However, there is another problem of under-regulation, too, one which is being studiously ignored. Media ownership remains concentrated in the hands of a narrow elite of rich conservative men, with the odd honourable exception, and the print media continues to be used to promote the interests of rich conservative men. Even in these days of dwindling circulation, this matters. Papers do continue to set the agenda, amplified in many cases by social media.

This has to end. This form of ownership may even contribute to declining circulation – although many people enjoy reading papers which continually argue against their readers’ economic and political interests, others do not. The opportunities for that same elite to bend the laws in their favour are greater, yet the nature of the ownership class militates against their journalistic employees investigating them or their editorial employees running those stories – just think how long Robert Maxwell got away with it. What’s more, it’s the newsroom front-line that’s doing time for hacking and corruption offences: why not make owners accountable for criminal acts at their titles, too?

And it’s still extremely hard for newcomers to get into the sector. We need a return to tougher quotas for media ownership. It’s a problem that’s interrelated with hacking, as this great piece by Justin Schlosberg sets out. That won’t necessarily do more than divide the papers amongst a wider set of rich conservative men, so, more radically, Dave Boyle’s ideas on cooperative media ownership probably deserve proper consideration (declaration: he’s a mate).

So, in short, here’s a different model of media regulation and support, driven by the public’s legitimate interest in papers’ operations: support by circulation, compulsory fair corrections, protection for journalists’ legitimate investigative and reporting activities, and moves to tackle the distorting problem of papers being treated as rich men’s playthings.

Much of this, especially on ownership, would be seriously popular too, at least until the editorial special pleading began. The status quo looks like managed decline, at best, and these ideas may seem absurd. Let me have others, if you think that, or tell me why you think the survival of the papers doesn’t matter, wrong-headed as I’m convinced that is.