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Eddie does gallus

Oct 29

Posted by Jeff in Holyrood, Westminster | 5 Comments

Labour’s Ed Miliband will deliver his first speech in Scotland as party leader today and if The Scotsman’s sneak preview is anything to go by then the fire and ire will be turned on the SNP and First Minister Salmond will be called a big liar.

The snippet includes the line:

“Let’s face it, across the world, the debate has changed since the financial crisis. Who is left behind? The Scottish National Party.”

I have to admit I find it an odd choice of narrative, an unnervingly pessimistic tone from the ‘new generation’ in Labour’s ranks.

With this rhetoric, Ed will invite Scots to think back to 2007/2008, when Scottish politics felt exciting, when the Scottish Government could seemingly do no wrong and the Scottish people flirted seriously with the idea of independence. Harking back to those times when Labour didn’t have too many ideas is a dangerous thing to do for a party that, north of the border, still doesn’t have too many ideas.

After all, first impressions count. Ed is setting his stall out for the Scottish Labour party and the Scottish people as a whole so he surely wants to get off on the correct tone. Iain Gray moodily bashed the SNP in his acceptance speech and he has barely looked up since. Let’s hope Ed decides to raise the bar a little bit higher than that.

So this all begs the question, what should Ed Miliband say?

Well, I rather hope that we are being fed the meanest lines of today’s speech and Ed will strike a more upbeat, optimistic tone. I do hope there is, as promised, some agreement with the cuts that the coalition are bringing in and I hope Ed is specific about what areas he disagrees with Cameron and Clegg the most. There may not be an election around the corner but it is important to have clear dividing lines amongst your leading politicians rather than just broad bickering back and forth.

I hope to hear more about Ed’s thoughts on Trident replacement and on the Calman proposals, getting into the specifics a bit more. The former Enivornment Secretary’s views on the fight against Climate Change and how Scotland is placed to both contribute to and capitalise from it. I would also like to hear about how he plans to propose amending the coalition’s housing policy, particularly after Nicola Sturgeon’s revelation on BBC Question Time last night that 97% of Scots who currently claim will be £10 a week worse off, money many of them can ill-afford to lose.

I rather suspect listeners will get to tick off the tired lines of ‘an independent Scotland couldn’t have saved the banks’ and ‘Ireland and Iceland? some arc of prosperity’ but I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

We are surely past the time when a leader of any party can trot up to the lectern, bash every other party and then trot offstage again thinking that was a job well done. We in turn should be ready to reward a political leader who dares to look beyond the horizon of the next headline.

Preaching to the converted Ed Miliband may well be in Scotland today but he still has a big job on his hands.

Scotland’s newest ghost town

Oct 22

Posted by Malc in Defence, Economy, Westminster | 4 Comments

The CSR and the SDSR have provided bad news for Moray. RAF Kinloss, which employs anything between two and five thousand people depending on your source, is to close. Those jobs were directly linked to the RAF, but beyond that, the town of Kinloss itself will effectively collapse. Added to that, the future of RAF Lossiemouth remains uncertain. Moray has taken a huge hit from these spending reviews and, even if RAF Lossiemouth remains open, the effect of cutting RAF Kinloss will be felt for years to come.

At this point, I’ll declare an interest – my parents live in Moray (though about as far away from Lossie and Kinloss as you can be yet still be in Moray!) and I know a couple of folk who work(ed) at Kinloss, as well as local elected representatives in the area. So this case of cuts, more than many of the others, seems a lot more real to me, and I’m perhaps a little more circumspect when it comes to discussing them.

Of course, losing one and possibly two RAF bases in the area is an absolute disaster for local people, the local community and the local economy. Jobs will go, there will be mass migration from the area, shops will be forced to close through lack of business leading to further job losses and a prolonged period of pain for those in the area trying to escape the economic downturn.

The UK Government established RAF Kinloss for use in the Second World War and have held squadrons based there since 1939. For 70 years the government has made use of the permanent facility there, sending Nimrods from Kinloss to numerous conflicts, including the Persian Gulf in the early 1990s and Iraq and Afghanistan more recently. Around the Air Force Station, the local community grew, with much business based upon their continued presence in the area. In short, the local community relied upon the base for its economy to survive – which meant that the government was effectively responsible for protecting the local economy. This isn’t the same as a car plant or whisky bottling plant closing for business reasons. This is a government deciding to cut the heart out of a local community. I don’t see how this will help the economy here at all, which is the main reason the government has given for the cuts.

On the other hand, look at this from the government’s perspective for a moment. You have a £150+ BILLION deficit to get under control. First on your list of things to do is identify things which are necessary and ring-fence spending on them. Then trim the fat – which means that everything which is not necessary is expendable. You then examine your needs, work out what may be needed for particular policies – in this case, for the defence of our borders – and again, ring-fence spending in these areas. Everything else… well, you cut, or get rid of entirely. You can’t be sentimental when there’s a huge debt to recover. And so RAF Kinloss and its Nimrods were deemed expendable, unnecessary for the future of Britain’s defence.

From this perspective, it makes some sense. We’d be hugely pissed if they’d turned around and said “look, we’ve decided that defence is our priority, so we’re going to keep RAF Kinloss, order more Nimrods and spend much more on air defence. To do that, I’m afraid we have to make cuts elsewhere – which means the NHS will no longer be free and we’re doing away with all welfare spending”. Obviously, that’s an overstatement. But can you imagine what the left would have said – particularly those who are also anti-war types – if that had been the case? The bottom line is, the government has identified that RAF Kinloss no longer fits with Britain’s defence and will no longer fund it. If they’d kept it open and not used the personnel, they’d be decried as wasting taxpayers money simply to maintain the local economy in Moray.

So yes. There are good reasons for closing the base, and I understand the thinking to an extent. But I don’t like it.

What would it take before you protested in anger?

Oct 21

Posted by Jeff in Europe, Westminster | 11 Comments

Westminster was besieged by Green activists this week, apparently promoting the need for a Green Investment Bank and reminding George Osborne that such a bank would provide jobs. I know this happened, not just because it garnered some press, but because some friends texted me to pass on the fun they were witnessing.

To me, this helped to confirm the notion that striking or protesting in this country is something of a novelty, a tabloid-friendly story involving people dressed as Batman or ripping off Father Ted quotes for comedy slogans. It seems to be a very British response to a very natural endeavour.

In France and Greece, to name but two placard-decked countries out there, you get the real deal. The French have gone berserk at the prospect of the retirement age going above 60 (ours is moving to 66) and the Greeks are steadfastly opposed to the poor having to bail out its stricken economy (their cuts pale in comparison to Osborne’s slashing of welfare yesterday).

So are Brits lazy? Right-wing? Sanguine? Feart? Why don’t we hit the streets with the same ferocity and passion that our continental neighbours do?

A simple question – what would have to happen before you would choose to protest or strike?

For me, I’m almost ashamed to say that I don’t really know what my tipping point would be. My only protest was on the lovely day out at the Make Poverty History march in Edinburgh but I couldn’t tell you what we were aiming to achieve, let alone if the march was successful. I do remember having a very nice ice cream though.

There is much at stake of course, jobs needlessly lost, a limp response to Climate Change and welfare snatched away for ideological rather than for manifestly practical purposes. Furthermore, much of what has been proposed and implemented on has no mandate (Seamus Milne has a great article on this in today’s Guardian). One could say we cannot go on like this.

I know it’s getting colder out there, the nights are fair drawing in and ice creams won’t be served, but will there come a time that we must man, woman and child the barricades?

Spending Review – A Scottish Perspective

Oct 20

Posted by Jeff in Economy, Holyrood, Westminster | 8 Comments

Well, the Comprehensive Spending Review has finally been delivered. There were no showstoppers today as most of the bad news had been drip-fed out to the public over the past few weeks. Half a million people losing their jobs, a slashing of welfare and a drastic cut to Social Housing were the biggest bouts of bad news for me, particularly as charging claimants near market rates surely takes the ‘social’ aspect out of it. I will be looking on in interest as this Green Investment Bank gets up and running but I suspect it is a new name for old money as the “up to £1bn” funding was half of what was expected and way short of the hoped for £6bn. There is certainly little evidence that the Chancellor is making good on the “greenest Government ever” boast.

From a Scottish perspective, this is all largely irrelevant of course. Osborne’s decisions on health, education and justice spending won’t make a difference to what money is spent by Holyrood. The big figure is how much the devolved budget would be cut by.

The expectation from the Scottish Government was that there would be a £4bn cut in the devolved budget over the next four years, starting with a £1.2bn cut from next year. My suspicion of an element of expectations management and low-balling from the First Minister on this one was pleasantly unfounded as there will be below-inflation cash rises for each of the devolved regions as a result of increased spending in health and education. Cameron’s ‘respect’ agenda in operation or just a lucky corollary of decisions taken elsewhere?

However, Scotland is nonetheless now at a double risk of having a welfare state culture without the welfare and a public sector reliant economy without a sufficiently sizeable public sector. Whether Osborne will be phasing (some could say weaning) claimants off their cheques remains to be seen but we are now living the doomsday scenario of the almighty clash of an ardent capitalist Tory Government in London and an unapologetic socialist Government in Scotland.

The unavoidable fissures that this creates around the geographical differences in political philosophy and squeezed debits and credits of a shrinking Scottish budget may make life significantly more painful north of the border than it will be in the south.

The word fairness has been hammered into the British public by the coalition leaders but it seems to have been merely sledge-hammered into the CSR as a presentational bolt-on.

One could argue that Scotland is dealt with fairly through the strict Barnett formula. If England and Wales see spending decrease, then so too will Scotland and in equal measure (more or less). However, that is to perhaps overlook any disproportionate effect of Defence cuts north of the border, on the increased cost of fuel north of the border, on the punitive Grid charges holding back Scotland’s renewable revolution and on the lack of Barnett consequentials from the Olympics to Crossrail.

They are all separate battles for separate occasions though. The real unavoidable challenge lies at John Swinney’s door and the Scottish Parliament’s as a whle as they must now implement a Scottish Spending Review and budget with the figures that can now be punched into a calculator to find how much is at our disposal.

Osborne has done what he thinks is his best, the baton has been passed to the Scottish Government so, to amend an old phrase, pain devolved is pain delayed.

Put another way – the worst is yet to come.

Cameron finally accepts that Trident shouldn’t cost a bomb

Oct 19

Posted by Jeff in Economy, Parties, Westminster | 2 Comments

There is something of a boating theme to today’s posts on here as the latest news in the drip-drip-drip of announcements before George Osborne’s CSR speech is that David Cameron has decided to delay the the replacement of Trident until at least beyond 2015.

Given the choice between Trident being replaced from tomorrow and Trident being replaced after the next parliamentary term, anyone against nuclear weapons would opt for the latter so in that respect today’s news is to be welcomed. However, given the choice between deciding once and for all that we will not renew our nuclear weapons and postponing the decision until later, the former is by far preferable. So, in short, good news but the fight goes on.

In political terms, the Conservatives are at risk of leaving themselves exposed by attempting an understandable compromise. The hawkish right wing of the Tory party will be deeply dismayed that they will have to wait longer for new toys in the arsenal and the left-wing anti-nuclear camp may be concerned that this was their best chance to put Trident to bed forever and that opportunity has been missed.

For the Lib Dems, while they have been criticised for reneging on some of their principles on here before, they should only be applauded when they make good on their objective to ‘leftify’ how a Conservative majority Government would have operated. It looks like this is one area where Clegg, Alexander, Huhne and Cable can be satisfied with their contribution.

For Labour, I have been unable to find a response from Jim Murphy on the Trident issue as it seems Jim’s deputy Kevan Jones has taken the lead on this one. I rather suspect that the coalition postponing the Trident decision will push Labour into being more ardent defenders of the (literally) indefensible and I equally suspect that Jim Murphy will step back from the headlines, for fear of painting Labour as the sole defenders of Trident which may not play well at the Scottish Parliament elections.

All in all though, this is surely a good day for the Greens, for the SNP and a for a significant tranche of the Lib Dems who have all argued that building Cold War bombs is a hideous waste of money.