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Time to help Scotland’s male politicians with their election problems

May 19

Posted by Guest Blog in Gender, Holyrood, Parties | 11 Comments

A very welcome guest post today from Lena Wångren and Dominic Hinde. Dominic is a Scots Green activist and doctoral student in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Lena is a post-doctoral researcher at the department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is originally from Stockholm and has been active in feminist campaigning in both Sweden and Scotland.

Looking back at the Scottish local elections, it is appalling to see just how male-dominated Scottish politics (and public life) is. There was husting upon husting without a single female candidate from any of Scotland’s more established political parties, and the SNP in particular were frustratingly male. In hindsight this is hardly surprising given the macho personality politics upon which Alex Salmond has built the SNP.

Then, the week after the election, people in social media (women included) were casually tossing around phrases such as ‘unionist witch’ to describe Johann Lamont and Margaret Curran. Just imagine if those words hadn’t been aimed at women but at someone from an ethnic minority. South of the border, and in a different context, backbench Tory MP Louise Mensch suffered even more violent sexist abuse via Twitter because of her defence of Rupert Murdoch. She may support an enemy of a free press, but the people who ganged up on her from the safety of their smartphones should not be welcome in any political forum. Now we’re fans of neither the Scottish Labour Party nor the SNP, just before we get accused of being partisan, in part because neither party seem aware that Scotland needs a new and proactive feminism in order to break down barriers for women, increase opportunities in some areas for men, and to generally move on to create the ‘beacon of progressiveness’ which the First Minister claims it is our manifest destiny to become.

When was the last time anyone stood up in the chamber at Holyrood and declared that they were a feminist? Who is brave enough to say that feminism is not a historical phenomenon but more current than ever in its potential to change society for the better? Not big Eck for sure.

Domestic violence, shared maternity and paternity leave, sexual assault, academic and employment opportunities, sexual and family health and economic performance are all areas in which a robust and progressive feminist politics can help to make Scotland a better place. And implicitly grounded in all these issues is a potential destabilising of the rigid gender roles that restrict us as individuals. Politics is about policy, but it is also about creating the social debates which allow those policies to succeed. It is about changing the mindset of the establishment to the extent that feminism is seen as a public good and not just a fringe interest. In the same way that the growth of the Greens has brought environmentalism in from the fringes to the centre, we hope that they might do the same with gender politics.

The Greens would appear ready-made for taking a more central stage in discussions regarding gender equality in Scotland, with their policy of having a male and a female co-convenor. Something which we would like to see more of is both Patrick Harvie and Martha Wardrop appearing and debating together, as is the case with their counterparts in Sweden.

Likewise, if Cameronite Swedish conservative leader Fredrik Reinfeldt, along with many leaders of the other main parties, can stand up in Parliament and feel obliged to at least pay lip service to the movement, then so can Holyrood.

The Greens do however face a great challenge in bringing gender equality on top of the agenda as the situation here is rather different than in Sweden. Both countries have long histories of labour and women’s movements, but the focus on gender has been left behind in the UK. There is a significant difference in how the public discourse approaches feminism. In the UK, the term ‘feminist’ is often considered a derogatory label, falsely seen as implying an ideology in which women should be posited above men. (We have yet to meet one single feminist who identifies their politics in terms of women’s supposed superiority.) In Sweden however, the term feminist is taken for what it is – a struggle for gender equality, through which people of all genders will benefit.

Furthermore, while in the UK we sometimes see a biologically essentialist claim to feminism -the idea that ‘only women can be feminists’-, in Sweden there is no requirement to identifying as a feminist beyond a support for the aims of the same rights for all, male or female.  And feminism is indeed for everyone. In Sweden, a robust feminist politics has created equal parental leave (one and a half years in total, to be divided between the parents irrespective of their sex), affordable and pedagogical nurseries with highly educated staff, political representation of women which has steadily increased since the early twentieth century (the ratio in the Swedish Parliament is currently 45 percent women and 55 percent men). Rather than having to defend your feminism, in Sweden you might have to defend why you do not identify as one.

There is major potential for a Green feminist politics in Scotland. Presently, there is not one single party in Holyrood that explicitly espouses feminist policies, or even has a particular section of their politics based around gender equality. There may exist a ‘Labour Women’ group, but the party itself has not lately been speaking up for gender equality. The progressive libertarians in the Lib Dems aren’t exactly chomping at the bit to take a stand either, and even though the Greens have ‘equality’ as one of their main focuses – gender equality seems to have gone missing of late.In the latest Green manifesto, the term ‘gender’ was used only once .The term ‘feminist’ was entirely absent.

We want to create a Scotland which is more equal, democratic and environmentally responsible. An innovative feminist agenda is an important component in this, and the Greens should be the party to take it forward. They have time and time again proven themselves to be capable of innovation and ideas far and above their resources and representation, and we sincerely hope that the growth of the Greens coincides with a sea change in our country’s appreciation of feminist politics.

The Problem with Political Jokes

May 16

Posted by Kirsty in Democracy, Parties | 1 Comment

The peril of every politician is the heckler. Despite the security of spin, handpicked television audiences and packing the front rows of your conference with student politicos primed to applaud like performing seals, stick a politician out in public, and someone’s bound to shout something, at some point, that sticks.

Poor Theresa May, heckled and jeered during this week’s Police Federation Conference in Bournemouth. Her speech, defending 20% cuts, ended in silence. Awkward.

Pity too Andrew Lansley, who was also heckled this week, not his first time, thanks to Mrs Hautot, but this time at the Royal College of Nurses conference as he struggled to state the correct number of nurses cut from the NHS frontline by the coalition. And it’s not just Tories who generate the nurses’ ire – Patricia Hewitt was notably heckled twice in one week by healthcare workers when Health Secretary back in 2006.

Trade union conferences do seem the domain of the heckler. Less to do with the origins of the word ‘heckler’ from some stroppy jute workers in Dundee. More probably thanks to an audience freer from the controls which can be exerted by political parties at their own respective conferences. Vince Cable was booed at last year’s GMB conference. Nick Gibb was too at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ conference in 2011.

And it’s not just the coalition – Ed Miliband’s first address as Labour leader to the TUC saw heckles shouted and hackles raised after he called public sector pension strikes ‘a mistake’. Luckily for Ed, the same RCN conference that jeered at Lansley this week granted him a standing ovation.

In his brief history of heckling, Michael White bemoans that the art of political heckling has all but disappeared, with what is described as heckling of politicans today really being “more of an organised verbal assault: anger, not wit; abuse, not tempered outrage; a blunt instrument, not a rapier.”

Indeed, in all the examples above, there’s not a single witty one liner of the type a decent stand-up can transform from bellow to banter. Even Walter Wolfgang, disgustingly manhandled and evicted from Labour Party Conference in 2005, merely had the gumption to shout “nonsense” at Jack Straw.

I suspect today that the Statlers and Waldorfs are all too busy being clever on Twitter. But no matter. Even if heckling isn’t the fine witty art it once was in the days of public meetings (and do go back to White’s brief history for some cracking examples), it can still have an impact.

Nobody’s career has ever been destroyed by a heckler (no doubt someone will prove me wrong in the comments but it’s worth remembering if you’re a candidate and have a sticky moment); incidents do however serve as an audio litmus test of how a politician is being received.

Any hopes Tony Blair might have of returning to a more active role in British politics should be humbled by the boos of his own party to mention of his name. I would suspect, should Cameron’s much-anticipated reshuffle be shuffled along soon, May and Lansley will be among those being slow-clapped off the stage.

P.S. The punchline to the title is, of course, that they get elected.

Should the handmaiden of independence not be a woman?

May 10

Posted by Jeff in Constitution, Parties | 63 Comments

The Greek and French elections have served to remind us that change remains the norm across Europe during these tough economic times. The majority of change across Scotland at last week’s council elections typically went from SNP to Labour, despite the winning tallies being in the Nats’ favour: Labour calling the shots at Edinburgh Council, Labour making council formation difficult in Aberdeenshire and Labour preventing change at Glasgow Council.

And, with the SNP losing a quarter of their voters from last year’s Scottish Parliament elections, Scots are certainly at least changeable.

With two and a bit long years until the referendum on independence, and mid-term European elections to be held between now and then, there are good reasons why the SNP should pre-empt change before the electorate rejects out of hand the constitutional change that a male and potentially stale SNP leadership is offering:

Salmond’s tenure
– It was David Torrance’s Sunday Mail article that provided the eye-popping statistic. I knew that Salmond had served the SNP considerably longer than the five years that he has been First Minister but 18 years as the leader of a party is a remarkable length of time. Putting it into perspective, that is as many years as John Smith, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown led the Labour party put together. Many years at the top does not, in itself, mean that it is time to go, but it does significantly increase the chances that people have stopped listening to what you have to say. We’re not at that stage yet of course with a majority Government still fresh in the memory, but did Salmond win that election or did Subway-sheltering Iain Gray lose it? And can the SNP really take a chance that a party leader of twenty years can still sound fresh and inspiring with so much at stake?

Reaching out to West coast Scotland
– Linked to the above point, and the council election results bear this out, there are parts of Scotland that the SNP still can’t reach as convincingly as they would like to. Swathes of Glasgow and the West of Scotland voting No to independence in their droves leaves a relatively small part of Scotland that would need a good 70%+ Yes result, or higher, to see the SNP over the line. With an adopted home of Banff & Buchan for so long in his career, Salmond could not be perceived to be much further from the old Strathclyde region that Labour has done well to wrap its arms around. Nicola Sturgeon studied at Glasgow University, worked in Drumchapel Law Centre and is the MSP for Govan. The DFM could win more of Labour’s heartlands into considering independence while still keeping the existing Yes camp intact.

Father of the Nation
– Freeing Alex Salmond from the binds of being First Minister would allow the SNP’s greatest asset to take on a more avuncular, roving role. This would effectively elevate each senior SNP Minister up one position while still keeping the presence and gravity of Salmond himself. This softening of Salmond has been attempted with varying degrees of success before but, while the man has pulled the SNP up into the 30%-45% electoral mark, his marmite tendencies may well be the single reason why the pro-union voteshare will always be 50%+ if left unattended. Many Scots intend to vote No because they don’t take to or trust FM Salmond. There’s an easy way to rectify that, while still keeping Alex in the game.

Gender balance
– The gender of a political leader shouldn’t be an issue but if the SNP wants to paint itself as far removed from the London coalition, having a female leader would be an easy way to do that. Theresa May is the only high-profile female member of the UK Government and if recent form continues apace, she may have joined Liam Fox on the backbenches by the time 2014 comes around. Rich Oxbridge English men directing Scotland’s future and controlling Scotland’s wellbeing provides political leverage for the SNP and the unsatisfactory gender balance across both Parliaments could make Nicola’s position as party leader particularly, persuasively, propitiously progressive.

More open leadership
– Alex Salmond does well to hide his temper, he is a bit like Sir Alex Ferguson that way. His style of leadership has gradually permeated down and throughout the SNP such that even MSPs can be knee-knocking lambs refusing to step out of line for fear of incurring the FM’s considerable wrath. Nicola Sturgeon’s style of leadership is known to be more open, more consensual and considerably less intense. Creating a new country is much more enticing with such a person at the helm, creating a participative environment rather than an obedient one.

All of the above isn’t to say that Salmond is, nor should be, under any pressure to be leaving Bute House today, tomorrow, this year or next, but it won’t be long before he has to pull rabbits from hats in order to keep his leadership fresh and vigorous. Obstinate poll ratings on independence may lead to difficult decisions, including stepping aside to allow internal renewal.

While the SNP has successfully avoided the ‘game of drones’ leadership changes that Labour and the Lib Dems have endured of late, there is as much risk in a successful leader staying on too long as leaving too early. There may come a point where the SNP will need to speak up against an increasingly underdressed Emperor Salmond and bring forward change.

And no-one embodies change amongst the party’s leadership contenders more than Nicola Sturgeon.

Paranoid SNP should welcome scrutiny

May 1

Posted by Jeff in Parties | 72 Comments

Alex Salmond’s unfortunate late pull out from BBC Question Time last week was a missed opportunity for the party. A series of soft blows over the past few weeks for the SNP culminated in what was arguably Johann Lamont’s best performance at First Minister’s Questions since she became Labour leader.

Granted, it was an open goal with the First Minister himself credited with an unwitting assist but a public pulpit from which to come out loudly fighting on Murdoch questions would have done the SNP the world of good in terms of building some momentum and dampening down the distant disquiet that could yet spill over within the party. It’s little wonder that Alex Salmond chose to make a rare mea culpa over Murdoch in the week before the important May elections. The FM has gone from having done nothing wrong to learning lessons which, to me, doesn’t entirely make logical sense.

There’s been more than a little hubris at play recently, not just from the perennially self-satisfied Salmond though. On Twitter the other day, this remarkable exchange involving the SNP’s former Chief of Staff Luke Skipper suggests that some in the party believe that the media shouldn’t be asking questions of the Government at all. I’m sure there’s a term for such an approach but I hesitate to repeat it:

@BBCDouglasFraser Why does #scotgov have to back News Corp owning all of BSkyB to protect Sky jobs in Scotland? It failed, so are jobs at risk?

@BBCJamesCOOK It’s an excellent question for #FMQs: How many Scottish jobs have been lost as a result of the BSkyB deal’s failure?

@LJ_Skipper I think it’s the opposition’s job to come up with the questions. Good ol’unbiased #BBC #FMQs #listeningric

@BBCJamesCOOK Asking questions isn’t biased. It’s journalism. Disturbing if reporters stopped from questioning.

It takes quite a leap of mental gymnastics to disagree with the BBC’s James Cook here. We should all embrace an open, free, rigorous media asking uncomfortable questions of the Government, on whatever topic they feel the public will be interested in. Whether those questions are posed directly or rhetorically as a would-be FMQ is neither here nor there.

Even the usually sure-footed Burd had the touch of the paranoia around a recent post when she rallied around Geoff Aberdein after those ‘nasty media types’ ganged up on the Special Adviser.

“Scottish Labour thinks it has a cunning plan to wound Alex Salmond over the Murdoch stuff by gunning for his Special Advisor, Geoff Aberdein. It worked at Westminster, after all. Following revelations at the Leveson inquiry about the extent of contact between Jeremy Hunt’s Special Advisor and the Murdoch Empire’s man over the BSkyB takeover bid, the poor wee SpAD was thrown to the political and media wolves in the hope that some fresh meat would sate their appetites. Not a chance, it simply whets them.

But the circumstances are different in Scotland. The reason Hunt is in the firing line, and the reason his special advisor had to go, is because he was supposed to be acting in a quasi-judicial capacity on this takeover bid.”

Conflating Hunt’s quasi-judicial role with the quite separate issues that Salmond faces is a bit sneaky and is certainly weak. Opting not to tackle an issue head on is a typical second option behind pretending there isn’t an issue in the first place, which is all the more bizarre as Kate freely acknowledged that Salmond is getting too close to Murdoch.

As for the “poor wee Spad”, I really don’t think you can have it both ways. You can’t be a special adviser to the Scottish Government without a certain degree of scrutiny, particularly when the BBC reports, not unreasonably, that a dubious deal appears to have been done with News international.

The potentially damning quote, “I met with Alex Salmond’s adviser today. He will call Hunt whenever we need him to.”, could mean anything of course but it would be a dereliction of duty on the part of investigative journalists and the political opposition alike to not explore a potential abuse of power, lobbying of the UK Government by the Scottish Government at a time of Rupert Murdoch’s choosing. Who voted for that?

Not that this sensitivity isn’t understandable. I guess it must be easier to be on the backfoot when you’re Labour or Tory because you know you’ll be back up riding high in a term or two. It’s taken the SNP 70 years to get to where they are. Who is to say that this Nationalist surge won’t deflate as quickly as it was built up, and stay there?

One year in, it seems a parliamentary majority doesn’t sit well with the SNP. A victim mentality built up over decades coupled with not being able to point the finger of blame elsewhere is hard to reconcile on the face of it. The majority may have delivered the referendum but it’s proving to be am increasingly difficult challenge to hold everything together against the relentless march of time.

One can only hope that the party can ditch the paranoia, get back to basics on the devolved powers that they do hold, accept that criticism, questions and scrutiny are part of the job and kick on from there.

One step backwards over the past few weeks won’t be so bad if the weeks ahead bring a few steps forwards.

An SNP-Labour coalition for Edinburgh?

Apr 29

Posted by Guest Blog in Elections, Local government, Parties | 13 Comments

A guest this lovely Sunday from Rory Scothorne. Rory is an Edinburgh University student, political blogger and part-time music writer who once had a tweet quoted in the Scotsman and won’t let anyone forget it, although he can’t remember what it actually said. He blogs about Scottish and UK politics at Scotland Thinks, where his writing has been generously described as ‘swivel-eyed’ and ‘a load of codswallop’.

There are few certainties in Scottish politics, but you can always be fairly sure that Labour and the Scottish National Party won’t get on. Since devolution, the enmity between Scotland’s two biggest parties has sizzled with the mix of hatred and grudging respect that characterises the most established of foes.

There are obvious reasons for such a gulf. In the high-school playground of Scottish politics, the SNP are the exciting new kid in town, arriving with a style, self-confidence and controversial past that catches everyone’s eye, allowing them to usurp the established authority that Labour’s long-serving head prefect has begun to take for granted. No wonder they’re upset.

To the SNP, Labour’s dogged loyalty to the union and all its perceived inequities is a betrayal of the Scottish people, abandoning us to distant Tory governments in exchange for a few jobs for life on the green benches in London.

Since Willie Wolfe pulled the SNP over to the left, both parties have been competing for dominance of a similar ideological territory, but their inability to separate on policy leads them both down a spiral of personality politics and cheap sniping.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

It’s precisely that ideological similarity that makes the animosity so frustrating. It turns it into an almost fraternal conflict, a tragic spectacle where we’re all secretly rooting for them to put their differences aside and remember their love for each other. Jimmy Reid, Alex Neil and Jim Sillars all started out in Labour and ended up with the SNP, and the transition for them was not about some tectonic shift in values – merely a realisation that the kind of society they hoped for could best be achieved outside of the United Kingdom.

Of course, nobody really expects Labour and the SNP in Holyrood to put that single, profound difference aside and join forces for social justice. The constitution is far too important an issue in this country to be sidelined.

But what about local government? There’s no doubt that the parties instinctively dislike each other just as much at a local level as they do nationally, but there’s not really much sense to that. After all, SNP councillors can’t legislate for a referendum. Nor can Labour councillors vote against one. That central issue that pushes the two parties apart is completely irrelevant at a council level.

That’s why it makes a great deal of sense for the SNP to consider the Labour Party as coalition partners. The voting system means it’s going to be hard for either to get many majorities without coalition, but if they refuse to try working together that will be a struggle. In many local authorities it’s unlikely that the Liberal Democrats or the Greens will manage to get enough of the vote to top up either Labour or the SNP and take them past the halfway mark, while both will be deeply reluctant to join an unholy union with the Tories while that party leads such an unpopular administration in Westminster.

Edinburgh is a prime example of where this can happen. The capital’s Lib Dems will suffer heavily from the compounding effects of leading an unpopular local administration and joining an even more unpopular UK one, and may well be unable to take Labour or the SNP up to the 29 seats needed to form an administration. The Greens won’t win enough either. There could be an SNP minority with a Conservative confidence and supply deal, but that’s a huge political risk considering the Tories’ unpopularity.

If the SNP become the largest party, Tom Buchanan’s recovery from surgery places Steve Cardownie as the obvious choice for the city’s next leader. He defected from Labour to the SNP in 2005, claiming conversion to independence and stressing his frustration with New Labour. I suspect that’s a frustration shared by many of his former colleagues across Scotland, who might just take a certain subversive glee in pairing up with the Nats.

It was, after all, a makeshift coalition of SNP, Labour and Greens that brought down the Lib Dem/Tory proposals for ‘Alternative Business Models’. They’ve demonstrated a willingness to work together on centre-left goals, and coalition would be an opportunity to demonstrate that they can both put their shared social-democratic vision for Scotland ahead of the cheap party politics that demeans public debate in this country. The symbolism of such unprecedented co-operation taking place in Scotland’s capital would be a breath of fresh air in a city that sorely needs it.