Following on from James calling attention to the plight of National Collective and the need for diverse media voices, a link to a post by myself on the Edinburgh based Green media project POST, and a possible solution to Scotland’s democratic deficit.
I am National Collective
Apr 10
Today sees the first threatened legal actions of the independence referendum campaign, with the following notice going up on National Collective’s Facebook page – their main site being down altogether. Update: you can donate to them here.
On the 9th April 2013, Lawyers-Collyer & Bristow acting on behalf of Vitol and multimillionaire and principal donor to ‘Better Together’ – Ian Taylor threatened legal action against the ‘National Collective’ claiming that it was grossly defamatory.
Aamer Anwar, Solicitor acting on our behalf stated:
“National Collective have instructed my firm to act on their behalf, they state that they will not be bullied or silenced and state that their website is offline only as a temporary measure for a few days. A detailed and robust response will be issued early next week along with further questions for the ‘Better Together Campaign’ .”
There will be no further comment until early next week.
If you wish to be advised of any further updates please contact our solicitors Aamer Anwar & Co., on 0141 429 7090 or at office@aameranwar.com www.glasgow-lawyer.co.uk
This follows the breaking by National Collective of the story of Mr Taylor’s previous entanglements, as reported by the Guardian here and the Record here.
This is a major mistake by Mr Taylor, and, if they supported his action, by Better Together. First, all National Collective appear to have done is compiled publicly available information to paint a picture of his interests. I am obviously not a lawyer, but good luck with basing a court case on that.
Second, as one wag put it on Twitter, here’s the McStreisand Effect. However much an airing this dirty laundry has already had, it’s going to get ten times more if this legal action is real (and at least a couple of times more even if they decide not to proceed).
Third, when you’re trying to win hearts and minds, as I assume the Yoonyonisht Conshpirashy still are, then clamping down on free speech is probably not the right way to go about it. It’s like a TV or radio debate – if one side starts shouting, the neutrals will assume they’ve lost the argument as well as their rag. Doubly so with what looks like attempted censorship on this scale. Incidentally, there are rumours of equivalent legal action against both Wings Scotland and “Berthan Pete” – although I believe their shared bullying manner undermines the Yes campaign, that same right of free speech applies to them.
So…
Shetland phoney.
Apr 6
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.
In praise of Damian McBride
Mar 28
The Telegraph is reporting that former Gordon Brown special advisor Damian McBride is about to publish a memoir. Going by his blog, this is likely to be the best warts-and-all peek behind the New Labour curtain to date.
He’s got plenty of warts himself, of course, and I’m certainly not praising his character (especially his “Admiral Byng” technique set out below, plus the Red Rag stuff) or his policies, merely his writing.
Anyone who has any interest in how Westminster works should read the blog (assuming it doesn’t get taken down) and the book, no doubt. Some highlights from the last twelve months or so follow:
How the Budget is scored: written in the aftermath of Osborne’s caravan and pasty tax fiasco, and surely rapidly forwarded around the Treasury.
Anyone can come up with an idea for the Budget: members of the public who write in; NGOs and Business groups; other government departments; officials in HMRC; Treasury staff, special advisers and ministers; and of course the Chancellor himself. It would be nice to say they are all given equal weight and consideration, but the order I’ve put them in usually corresponds to the amount of effort the Treasury will put into developing their ideas.
Five Years On….The day GB became PM
In hushed tones, I was shown the ‘stand-alone computer’ through which No10 staff could use personal email accounts which were otherwise blocked by the Downing Street servers. “We don’t discuss this publicly,” I was told, “we don’t want people going on about ‘second Downing Street email systems’”
5 Years On: 24 Hours of Crisis Micro-Management: on the start of the foot and mouth outbreak.
GB gestured me in, hand over the mouthpiece on the phone: ‘Foot & Mouth. Bloody Foot & Mouth’. ‘Fuck me’, I said helpfully.
The Seven Year Hitch: being with Gordon when Tony Blair announced he’d serve a full third term.
[Number 11’s discipline] was also due – and I take full credit/responsibility for this – to my Admiral Byng approach to leaks. If anything did appear in the papers that was not from X, Y or Z, I would instantly name a culprit. I’d try and choose someone who was a decent suspect, but their guilt didn’t really matter – it was the assertion of their guilt that mattered. They would be cut out of meetings, removed from the circulation list for emails, and wherever they walked in the Treasury, people would mutter about their demise. The effect of this was to make the actual guilty party feel guilty as hell, and put the fear of God into everyone else in the Treasury about doing any leaking themselves. As for the poor Admiral Byngs, they’d usually recover after a while, and some of them were probably guilty anyway.
5 Years On: The Election That Never Was
I asked him who he wanted me to talk up as potential future leaders when I briefed this out to the media. His eyes narrowed again, and he reeled off surnames like a football manager naming his First XI: “Purnell. Miliband. Kelly. Burnham. Cooper. Balls. Miliband.” I replied: “You’ve already said Miliband” GB: “Both of them.” Me: “Really? You want me to say Ed Miliband?” He looked surprised: “You need to watch Ed Miliband, he’s the one to watch.”
Whither the Grid and then Why Did The Grid Wither?
And the reality is, for all its success as an organisational tool under New Labour, the grid and the ‘Upcoming Business’ document were the source of many a leak. A whole journalistic phrasebook exists because of it: “busting the grid” or “a bit of gridology”, all code for using the headlines in the grid to decipher an upcoming announcement.
Going To The Mattresses: the art of surviving a coup*
Britain’s modern party leaders are not ousted by stalking horses; they are dragged from their beds in the dead of night, and shot in the courtyard with a Sky News helicopter overhead. So it would be extremely foolish for anyone in No10 to take the complex rules required to mount a leadership challenge as a reason to relax.
This will be my last post as a co-editor at Better Nation. I did my best to keep myself (and hopefully others) entertained with random scribblings on Scottish Politics not to mention the distant, and occasionally dim, referendum. It is now, alas, time to pack up and move on to pastures no doubt less green and for perfectly healthy offline reasons, I may add.
I won’t be leaving any rules or regulations behind that current and future editors will have to abide by.
I can’t help be struck however that, on that last point, my view of how to leave the past behind is at odds with many within Yes Scotland. Everyone wants to leave a legacy behind them wherever they go, be it big or small, but an eternal written constitution is something else entirely. First Minister Alex Salmond is often disparagingly referred to as the ‘dear Leader’ in the North Korean mould, but setting his and his party’s views in stone for future generations is, for me, a troubling prospect. The First Minister stated back in January that he wanted the right to a house, a ban on nuclear weapons and free education to be included in a written constitution, which looks eerily like a party manifesto rather than a wider, balanced document.
There’s enough partisan bickering at the Parliament without the need for scrabbling over the chisel of a national tablet of stone. The current, lamentable SNP vs Labour bunfight over how Scotland should mitigate the Bedroom Tax should help highlight how any constitutional debate would go. Best to just not go there.
Looking at constitutions around the world they seem to be millstones around a nation’s neck or a handy way to muddy the waters of a given argument, rather than a guarantee of equality and statehood. Crazed gun nuts hide behind the U.S. Constitution to defend their supposed right to carry deadly weapons while the eye-watering death toll in that corner of the world mounts higher by the day. That same constitution, in its original form, measured a black person as equal to three fifths of a white person and, more recently, ensured Barack Obama’s healthcare proposals was one Supreme Court vote away from being against the law, despite an electoral mandate. In France, Hollande’s wildly popular 75% tax on the rich was struck down as being unconstitutional.
Scotland would not necessarily create these same elephant traps and roadblocks for itself if the wording of any such constitution was sufficiently obtuse, but then one has to ask what the point of it would be. Surely the Government and law courts of the day should be able to manage the country in line with the views of the public at that time, without the need for a constitution, or a revising Chamber or a House of Lords for that matter.
After all, what is so fantastic about our current crop of MSPs and civic leaders that require their views to be enshrined in statute for ever more?
We need to trust future generations to improve upon the current, be that on written constitutions, climate change or blogs. For the latter, I have no fears that the media (via the dead tree press or otherwise), and Better Nation in particular, has the potential to constantly improve and be even better than it has been in the recent past, whoever may be writing the content or providing the guest posts.
(Yes, that was one final hint to you, yes you dear reader, to send something in to the rest of the team for consideration).
Good luck comrades!