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If you want to know what Devo Max is, just look at the Faroe Islands

Jun 20

Posted by Guest Blog in Constitution, Governance, International | 6 Comments

Another Scandinavian-themed guest today, gratefully received from Dom Hinde, a Scots Green activist and doctoral student in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh who has blogged with us before.

When you count down the list of European colonial powers, and consider the various past misdemeanours of Britain, France, Portugal and Belgium to name but a few, it is likely that most people will miss Denmark off from the list.

Our cuddly social-democratic neighbour to the east, producer of gritty crime dramas beloved by the middle class cultural consumers who watch BBC 4 and living standards that draw loving glances across the North Sea from Holyrood and Westminster alike, is still that most outdated of institutions – a European colonial power.

They say that the sun never set on the British empire, but for six months of the year at least this was also true of the Danes, who had the North Atlantic sewn up through their dominion over the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland on the Arctic rim throughout the same period.

Iceland took the step to full independence after the second world war, in part because the conflict had cut it off from its colonial master , making it difficult for the Danes to re-establish control. The Faroe Islands however remained part of the Kingdom of Denmark, obtaining a form of self-government which gave them control over domestic affairs. The majority of foreign policy, defence and policing is reserved to Copenhagen, and the islands still collect a generous subsidy each year from Denmark, the reasons for which are open to debate depending on whether you consider yourself a Faroese unionist or a nationalist.

The other night in Thorshavn, the Faroes’ diminuitive capital with more than a shade of Lerwick about it, I ended up at a concert and poetry evening in support of independence, organised under the auspices of the Leftist Green Tjóðveldi (Republic) party. Of the four main parties in the Faroes, there are left- and right-wing versions of both the unionist and independence movements. Much as is the case in Scotland, the social-democratic and conservative parties favour staying with Denmark whilst the Green Leftists and the centre-right nationalist People’s Party Fólkaflokkurin favour dissolution of the union for democratic and nationalistic reasons respectively.

The high degree of devolution enjoyed by the Faroese means that, on the ground at least, you get the impression of being in a fully independent country, aided by the existence of a national football team and a unique language. Sound familiar? What is more complex, however, is the effect which the current devolution settlement has on the country. Unionists point to the generous government grants from Copenhagen as being vital to the nation’s survival, whilst nationalists argue that such handouts and the restrictions of economic aid mean that the islands are unable and unwilling to seize control of their own future. The Faroes are not without their problems, and there exists real poverty and stagnation in certain parts of the country.

Furthermore, the nature of the kind of specific devolution offered to Scotland and the Faroes undermines any idea of an equitable union. The other regions of Denmark enjoy nowhere near as much power as the Faroese (The Faroe Islands are part of the Kingdom of Denmark but not the Danish State). The use of the Danish Krone for example is problematic for the Faroes, it being tied to the Euro and geared toward maintaining a balance of trade between mainland Denmark and Germany, despite the Faroes themselves not being part of the EU. I have always been of the opinion that any solution which sees Scotland remaining in the UK must also involve a fundamental restructuring of British politics so as to offer the four Home Nations equal power on an equal footing for democratic reasons.

Radically deeper devolution does, however, have its advantages. It has allowed the Faroes to reach a point where they can debate independence knowing full well what it entails, rather than the Scottish model of being asked to jump from a severely limited legislative parliament to an as yet unspecified vision of independence. I was intrigued to see that Alex Salmond has committed an independent Scotland to a cut in corporation tax, something which he has no right or authority to promise given that he may not even be First Minister in four years time and cannot do it at present. As the Faroes show, devo max is not a solution to the independence debate, but it does provide an arena in which the question of self-determination does not become a referendum on the popularity and wisdom of a 57-year old white male.

Greek election – drama predicted

Apr 30

Posted by Guest Blog in Elections, International | Comments off

A guest post today from our irregular Greek correspondent, Marinos Antypas, looking ahead to this Sunday’s elections. 

So here is my Greek pre-election digest. The political landscape is very fluid. What is certain is that the two once-big parties will see a halving of their combined votes. Traditionally being able to gather between 80 and 90% of the vote between them, they are now desperate for the 35% between them that would allow them to form a coalition government.

If we are to believe the opinion polls (which must stop 2 weeks before elections, so the last one we had was one week ago), Nea Demokratia are in the lead but are struggling to gather 20%. PASOK fluctuates between 8% and 15%, under its new President, Venizelos. Both parties have made it clear they are willing to form a coalition. Still, the percentage they need to form a government is conditional on how much of the vote goes to parties that do not manage to get into parliament.

This is a tricky one: if say 20% of the vote goes to parties that do not manage to pass the national 3% necessary to get them into parliament then the coalition or the first party needs only 35% to form a government of 151/300 majority. If the percentage of such votes is small, say 1%, then the coalition or first party needs something closer to 40%, with a graded variance for the scenarios in between.

Now if ND gets 20% and PASOK get, say, 15% (35% between them) what about the other parties?

The Left: It looks like SYRIZA (the leftist coalition party) will come second or third with 12-15%. KKE (the Communist Party) will get around 11%-12% and the Democratic Left (Eurocommunists) around 10%-13%. The Greens (the Left Greens rather than the insignificant Right Greens) seem likely to get in Parliament with 3-4%. So the Left combined gets between 36-44%. Thus SYRIZA is urging post-election cooperation and the formation of a Left Front government.

The Right: It looks like the leading party to the Right of ND is a new party, the Independent Greeks, led by an ex-ND conspiracy-theorist MP. The party has a religious right profile and in the polls gets 10-15%. Scandalously, SYRIZA has announced that it would accept a vote of confidence from the Independent Greeks so as to form a government (supposedly with the General Secretary of the KKE as PM!). LAOS, the Le-Penist extreme-right, is struggling to get into Parliament with an estimated 3%. Its votes have been absorbed by the Golden Dawn (Neo-Nazis), who seem to be getting 5% of the vote (scary stuff!). So the extreme-right seems to collect between 18-21% of the vote.

Neoliberals: The two neoliberalist parties seem to be struggling to get into Parliament. They are both pro-IMF, and it seems unlikely that they can both get 3%, so a safe assumption is that one will just manage to get into Parliament. Both are led by ex-MPs, one by the defeated presidential candidate for ND, and daughter of Mitsotakis (the old ND PM), Dora Bakogianni.

So the three ‘blocks of power’ are:

Pro-IMF (ND+PASOK+Neolibs) 35-38%
Anti-IMF Left: 36-44%
Anti-IMF Right: 18-21%
Weird Left-Right Coalition (Anti-IMF Left+Independent Greeks): 46-59%

Now why does this balance of power matter? Only the leading party can normally call for a coalition, yet if this fails it is believed that the President of the Republic, if he is willing, can seek to prevent further elections and chaos by giving the coalition formation order to the second party, which might be SYRIZA.

In any case it will be extremely difficult for a pro-IMF coalition to govern if it does not have at least 165 seats in Parliament, the number necessary to elect a new President of the Republic. If their Presidential candidate is not voted in, then elections will have to be called again.

Politically speaking, it will be difficult to rule if the two pro-IMF parties do not gather something around 45-50% of the vote, for then the anti-IMF parties on the Left and Right will always be able to protest that this is a sham democratic process.

So as you can see the situation is precarious. No one knows what the results will be in an election contest which is universally recognised as the most significant of the Republic.

picture credit – teacher dude

The Fascists are not on the march

Apr 27

Posted by Malc in Elections, International | 24 Comments

We have a guest of a most special sort today. Our dear friend Malcolm Harvey, a founding editor of Better Nation and more recently an occasional Thinker of Unpopular Thoughts, considers the real meaning of the Front National’s first round poll results in France.

I don’t pretend to be an expert in French politics, but I guess I know a little more than some. I’m what you’d call an interested observer of elections (which you would never have guessed from my previous involvement with this blog). I have to say though, I was a little surprised by – what I’d characterise as the – rather hysterical reaction to Marine Le Pen’s polling 18% in the first round of the Presidential election.

The first thing which should be pointed out is that this was only the first round. The French use a run-off system to decide their President. The first round is open – and there are often as many as 10 candidates to choose from. The two candidates with the highest share of the first round vote go forward to a second (and final) round two weeks later. So voters have what you might call more freedom – they can make their first vote a vote for their clear preference, or make it a protest vote, with the knowledge that the President will not be decided until the second round.

We’re often hearing (from the likes of John Curtice) that the Scottish electorate have become much more “sophisticated” in their distinguishing between UK, Scottish, European and local authority elections and altering their votes accordingly – and it would appear the French are equally knowledgeable about how to best operate their electoral system.

The second thing I’d point out is that Marine Le Pen’s party – the Front National – are not the party of her father. Though they do maintain what would colloquially be described as a “right-wing” ideology, since she took over the presidency of the party has had much more of an economic – and dare I say it, populist – focus. A Eurosceptic, Marine Le Pen advocates French withdrawal from the Eurozone – and also opposes free trade, supporting a form of protectionism instead. In a time of economic recession, when the EU has proved unpopular and the Eurozone itself is falling apart, you can understand why this would be a popular position, and one which voters might well support.

But it isn’t only an economic position. It is a position which is consistent with what, for want of a better phrase, would pass for French nationalism. Until very recently, France was the epitome of a centralised state, to the point that regionalism was totally disallowed and the use of distinct regional languages (Breton, Basque, Occitan) was actively stamped out. There was “one France”. The point I’m emphasising here is that the French nation was above all else. And while this policy has been discontinued, the attitude – the primacy of Frenchness over others, the protection of the “one France” – remains in some places, and can go some way to explaining a vote for the Front National.

Of course, there will inevitably be those who subscribe to their anti-immigration views. But to characterise this as a “rise of fascism” is, I think, overstating the case. For the above reasons – the economic position of the Front National, and the fact that this was only the first round of the election – mean that categorising those who voted for Marine Le Pen as “extremist” or “right-wing” is somewhat simplistic. Indeed, some might even have been attracted to them for their anti-nuclear position (evidence for James that even those who would otherwise be beyond the pale can have some redeeming qualities!).

The majority of that 18% was, in my opinion, a clear protest vote. With the second round on 6 May, we’ll see what that 18% do. Perhaps some of them – those who feel that neither Sarkozy nor Hollande offer them a clear option – will stay at home. But many will choose their “least worst” option in the second round, an indication, perhaps, that while they wanted to display some kind of protest in the first round, they will return to a more moderate position in the second.

Is the SNP’s fiercest opposition coming from Northern Ireland?

Mar 24

Posted by Jeff in Constitution, International | 56 Comments

David Trimble has waded into Scotland’s constitutional discussion this weekend with an impassioned plea for Scots to reject the SNP’s “separatism” and “driving Scotland out” by remaining a part of the UK. It is possibly the boldest, most daring language we have had from the unionist side of the debate since the starting gun was unofficially fired on the campaign at the start of the year.

In seemingly barely disguised language, the winner of the Peace Prize for his work in the Northern Ireland peace process said:

“I have to say to the Scottish nationalists, by moving through a programme of separatism, by saying we want to drive Scotland out, you are doing violence to the identity of every Scot because there is a British component in the identity of every Scotsman.”

‘Doing violence’ is an interesting, and I would certainly argue misplaced, way of putting the pro-independence, civic nationalism that is at the forefront of Scottish politics. For too many, the referendum is being positioned as a question of whether you are Scottish or whether you are British, as if the two are mutually exclusive and as if either position will change after 2014. Are Swedes not both Swedish and Scandinavian? Indeed, David Cameron himself insisted that “Scotland is better off in Britain”. It is such an amateurish mistake to stupidly suggest that Scotland WON’T be inside Britain even after independence. Noone is suggesting that our nation’s geography is up for grabs here.

I am no expert on Northern Irish politics but I do wonder what the motivation for David Trimble’s strong remarks above are. There is no question that Scotland going its own way could reopen old Irish wounds, or even make it “an explosive issue once again”, so much so that I wonder if the deepest opposition to Scottish independence is actually across the Irish Sea.

After all, Crispin Black has it that Scotland is “a country (sic) revelling in the sort of menacing and rancid anti-English sentiment more suited to the H Blocks than a modern European democracy”. Em, really?

Lord Empey is similarly off-kilter, saying the following to peers during a debate over the Scotland Bill: “We (Northern Ireland) would end up like West Pakistan. We are all hewn from the same rock. Just imagine the situation we would be placed in.”

This is not simply the Union diminishing for those in Northern Ireland that happen to oppose it; it is arguably an intrinsic part of their identity that is, in their eyes, slipping away. As numerous Saltire-splattered murals in NI show, there is no doubt that a shared patriotism between Northern Ireland and Scotland within unionist quarters exists. That is not in question here. What is in question is why that shared celebration of two nations, and often one shared history, cannot continue to be celebrated if Scotland is independent?

One could argue that for certain communities in NI, Scotland is ‘the’ link to the Union, and if we left then they would really struggle to connect with the rest of the UK, bar the overt and at times worrying love for the monarchy and the armed forces. Is there the same love for Yorkshire and East Sussex? Not that I have seen.

As the quotes above suggest, to me at least, the mere consideration of Scotland leaving the UK results in a lashing out against it, and an assumption that it’s some sneaky, underhand figure doing this. Lord Empey, in the aforementioned debate, compares Alex Salmond to the leaders of Cuba and North Korea and suggests that, without Westminster approval, any referendum would simply be “the most expensive opinion poll in history”.

Of course, it is easy for me to gloss over peoples’ experiences during the Troubles, I wasn’t there for any of it and was only a child for most of it. It is not lightly though that I ask whether those experiences breed an irrational fear that an independent Scotland would begin the breakup of the rest of the UK (Welsh independence, Irish unity) and make the pain and suffering over the last 40 years for nothing.

For me, the SNP’s peaceful and peaceable slow march towards independence does not deserve to have comparisons drawn with the Irish approach to separation from the UK. That may or may not be what David Trimble was alluding to this weekend when he talked of the SNP’s “violence”, but a politician of David’s experience and standing should know to choose his words more carefully.

Northern Ireland’s hopefully historic problems are not Scotland’s problems and there is no need to commute our nation’s ambitions for fear of indirectly unsettling our neighbours.

Is independent Scotland’s foreign policy already in place?

Mar 8

Posted by Jeff in Constitution, Defence, International | 53 Comments

The Scottish Parliament is a devolved body and is answerable to the UK Parliament, a Parliament that has reserved powers over the constitution, defence, treason, the funding of political parties and international relations.

Of these reserved powers, it is Defence and International Relations that have been the focus of attention as many of the SNP’s opponents seek to suggest that foreign policy in an independent Scotland is somewhere between unworkable and unpalatable.

It’s not often that political parties communicate through actions rather than words but, if one looks around, it’s quite possible that the SNP’s view of what an independent Scotland’s foreign policy would be has already been put into practice.

There is the low hanging fruit of how an independent Scotland would look of course – Scotland inside the EU, quite possibly no nuclear weapons and we’d have the Queen as Head of State but let’s look at some examples of an existing Scottish foreign policy that many may not have noticed:

The Scottish Government is already promoting the development of a sub-sea electricity transmission super grid with Norway, Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, assisted by several visits to Norway by the First Minister. (Incidentally, no UK Prime Minister has visited Norway in 25 years)

The SNP is considering the economic and military changes that the melting ice caps bring and is seeking to work alongside the countries that have seen this challenge as a top priority for a while now – Iceland, Faroe Islands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Canada etc. This is not an area that the UK has dedicated much attention, if any.

Scotland could and should join the Nordic Council if it does become independent. The SNP regularly talk up membership, Alex Salmond mentioned it in his recent Hugo Young lecture, and Lesley Riddoch has an excellent piece exploring Scotland potentially joining.

Alex Salmond’s visits to China and Abu Dhabi bore the hallmarks of state visits and would be much the same as visits from a Scottish Prime Minister.

One issue that many claim remains outstanding is how Scotland would defend itself if independent. For me, there is an easy solution to this and we only need to look to other similarly-sized, anti-nuclear countries for it. Norway is leading calls for Nato to be nuclear-free while still enjoy the security of full membership. The SNP simply needs to change its policy on Nato, if it hasn’t already, and a clear picture of how an independent Scotland could look in an international context is locked into place. I maintain that the SNP changing tack on Nato is a no-brainer.

The image that most people have in mind when it comes to Scotland defending itself is an attack on our airpsace and how we would unilaterally action a defence. And yet, the current ‘Quick Reaction Alert‘ system (involving scrambling fighter jets to intercept unidentified aircraft) is already split into North Britain (from Leuchars) and South Britain (from Lincolnshire). Contact is then made from HQ to Nato allies, typically via Denmark. Would the system work any differently under an independent Scotland, particularly if the north-south divide already exists?

The SNP will be launching its Preparation Prospectus soon but don’t be too surprised if its contents look familiar. We are surrounded by similar-sized prosperous countries who have the means and the alliances to defend themselves. Scotland isn’t just well placed to join those same alliances and create the same means, it is doing so already.