And another thing…

IN THE past few days I’ve written a few posts on the SNP, and I want to apologise for that. Most regular readers of this blog tend to live in areas of our country outside Scotland and have no direct interest in the SNP’s various constitutional obsessions.

This is a blog which focuses mainly on national issues, and I want it to remain that way. Occasionally, as in the SNP Government’s decision to make Al-Megrahi the centrepiece of Homecoming 2009, or when they casually cancel a vital airport link on the basis that it’s in Glasgow, then of course I’ll comment. But there are a good many Scottish blogs which deal with Holyrood matters far better than I could. You’ll find some of them in my blogroll, and they’re not all Labour ones.

The truth is that I’ve never been as interested in the constitution as some. Whether it’s independence versus devolution, or reform of the House of Lords or voting reform… as Pete Wishart MP might say: yawn!

For me, politics is about fighting poverty, here and internationally. It’s about creating jobs and growing the economy, about fighting poverty of aspiration. And it’s about working for those day-to-day things that others might find a bit dull but which are crucial to most people’s quality of life – transport, for instance.

But for me, at least, politics has never been about interminable navel gazing about constitutional change. And, being the egotistical, self-obsessed type, I tend to believe that Scottish politics would be immeasurably healthier if more politicians took the same view.

MY LAST post drew the inevitable amounts of vitriol and pretendy indignation, but this comment from “obangobang” (at least he’s courageous enough to use his own name, I suppose) pretty much proves my point:

SOME people seem to have got quite annoyed at my description (in a comment, not the main post) of the SNP annual conference as a “hate fest”.

Having religiously avoided coverage of this year’s conference on account of my embarrassment threshold being too low, I’m quite willing to accept that perhaps the SNP have changed. Perhaps the bile and contempt that was their default position with regard to Labour for many years has now receded and they have finally become what they always wanted to be – a modern, progressive scial democratic party.

But I have a long memory. I remember Labour’s victorious two candidates in the Paisley by-elections (and yes, I know that was nearly 20 years ago) having to be escorted out of Paisley Town Hall by the police who told us they could not guarantee their safety, given the baying mob of young naionalists who had gathered outside to chant and to intimidate us.

And I remember when Mike Watson, having won the Glasgow Central by-election in 1989, returned to the victory party after the count with the saliva of protesting nats still fresh and wet on the back of his jacket.

And more recently, I remember the chuckle of mirth in Alex Salmond’s voice as he interrupted his party’s conference in 2005 in order gleefully to announce that the same Mike Watson had been sentenced to 16 months in prison for fire raising. Alex’s delight in someone else’s misery was obviously catching, for the delegates in the hall responded with a triumphant cheer and a prolonged round of applause. I knew, as did the media present at the time, that this was nothing to do with celebrating justice; it was sheer delight at a Labour representative’s public humiliation.

What a great pity that Scottish Unionist has given up his blog, for he did a tremendous job is exposing the poisonous hatred that drips from the keyboards of the many cybernats who comment on Scottish newspapers’ websites.

The nasty party indeed.

I’M A POLITICAL traditionalist, but there are some rituals that have had their day, particularly when it comes to by-elections.

In Scotland, for example, there’s a tradition that the weekend before polling day in any by-election, the Sunday Herald publishes an “exclusive” about a “leak” from the SNP headquarters revealing that the nats had far more activists out on the street that weekend (a figure usually arrived at by plucking a random figure out of the air and adding a zero to the end) than any other party and that they are definitey the best party and everything.

Well, these pictures will make it just a tad more difficult for the nats to perpetuate this myth, even with the help of a friendly media. The young man on the left is Liviu and as you can see from the picture on the right, he’s an employee of Unlimited Distribution, which have been hired by the SNP to deliver their leaflets in the Glasgow North East by-election.

Undoubtedly there’s a reason for this: maybe nat activists are just so gosh darned certain of victory that they’ve found better things to do with their time (like alphabeticising their grievances, for example). But if they have to use a private firm to deliver leaflets in an important by-election, they can hardly claim to be attracting even their own footsoldiers.

AT PRIMARY school, my class was invited by our teacher to act out the battle of Stirling Bridge, at which Sir William Wallace defeated the English army in 1297. Quite an ambitious task for seven-year-olds, you might think. But I think we made a decent fist of it.

I still recall the lesson: of being taught how the powerful and evil English overlords were beaten back by the brave Scottish infantry, a David and Goliath fable for the middle ages. As an adult, I can view most (though admittedly, not all) of such historical clashes for what they were: feudal rivalries acted out by rich noblemen who used ordinary uneducated men as arrow fodder in order to secure their personal wealth and privileges. But as a child, I was swept up in the nationalist fervour that was, presumably, my teacher’s intention.

Mention the word “Culloden” and many a Scot will get all misty-eyed for the victims of that terrible battle (and subsequent massacre), almost always failing to recognise that Scotland was on the winning side (if by “Scotland” we mean the side containing the larger number of Scots). Even fewer will bother to register the fact that the 1745 Jacobite uprising was essentially an attempt to restore a feudal system of government on the United Kingdom and to reverse whatever modest (but crucial) democratic advances had been made under the Hanoverian monarchy.

All fascinating stuff, no doubt, but hardly relevant to the current debate about Scotland’s future (unless you’re an SNP member, of course, in which case Banockburn is as relevant today as it was in 1314).

For all the superficial and contrived economic and social arguments used in favour of the case for Scottish independence, there’s no getting away from the fact that the case for independence is not economic or social – it’s emotional.

It’s much more difficult to get similarly emotional in defence of the Union. But that doesn’t mean that the arguments are any weaker – they’re far stronger. And just because the case for the United Kingdom doesn’t involve tugging at anyone’s heartstrings or singing maudlin folk songs, doesn’t mean we can’t make the case anyway. We can – albeit on the less attractive basis of fact and logic.

But at the end of the day, and at the end of the debate, Scottish nationalism is, and will always remain, less a political philosophy than an emotional response.

OUR Dave has said Alex Salmond should not take part in any televised leaders’ debate during the election campaign, and of course he’s dead right.

Having representatives of the opinion polls’ “others” category would make the whole exercise pointless (and yes, I count the LibDems among the “others”). A head-to-head between Gordon and Cameron would make sense and would be worth watching. Bring in all the others – SNP, UKIP, BNP, LibDems, Cornish Nationalists, etc – and you might hear from Brown or Cameron once or twice in the entire debate, while we’ll be privy to what British foreign policy might be under a UK government led by Alex Salmond or Nigel Farage…

Perhaps the nats are being goaded into taking legal action against the broadcasters by those who don’t want the debates to ahead at all.

PS: Good luck with trying to stop Scottish viewers tune into Sky or BBC North East on their Sky boxes, by the way. Thanks to STV’s ludicrous decision not to buy the latest series of Agatha Christie’s Marple (in order, apparently, to show rubbish American films – not Scottish-made programmes – in its place) we’ve been setting the old Sky-Plus box to record BBC ITV London every Sunday at nine for the past few weeks. It’s called progress.

YOU can see why the people and government of Nigeria might be a tad hacked off at Scotland at the moment.

Glasgow’s bid for the 2014 Commonwealth games contained an unambiguous commitment to the building of a railway link between Glasgow city centre and Glasgow International Airport. Anticipating a successful bid on which the city council, not the Scottish Government, had done all the running, First Minister Alex Salmond and his deputy flew to Sri Lanka (well, you would, wouldn’t you) in order to give the (entirely false) impression that his administration had contributed in some way to Glasgow’s bid.

Perhaps that’s a little unfair, for Salmond had, in fact, given a cast iron guarantee that his predecessor’s commitment to the airport link would be honoured. And on that basis, Glasgow had submitted its bid to host the games.

And we won. Hooray! Salmond could be seen at the celebratory party, waving a saltire and mouthing the words “What is it we’ve won, exactly?” to Nicola Sturgeon.

And then… the SNP cancelled the airport link.

How do the Commonwealth Games authorities feel about that, I wonder? Do they now reckon that Glasgow’s victory was built on a false promise? That we won by sleight of hand? I certainly wouldn’t blame the Nigerians for thinking that.

It’s the equivalent of the UK government winning the bid for the 2012 Olympics, then scrapping its commitment to the high-speed “Javelin” service to the Olympic site.

Now, when we welcome athletes to Scotland’s first city in five years’ time, we’ll feel like someone who’s arranged a party in the expectation that his outdoor loo would be replaced in time but who instead can only offer to switch the backyard light on so his guests won’t trip over anything.

Thanks, Alex. No, really…

I WAS about to write a post about the inadvisability of the Scottish Government’s proposals to force cyclists to pay road tax. The details are in their consultation document, Cycling Action Plan for Scotland. I was fair waxing lyrical about disincentives to cyclists and how road tax is supposed to help pay for the wear and tear inflicted on the road surface by a vehicle, which is hardly an issue for bikes.

And then, as I was scrolling through the document in question, I came across this:

In most Western European countries, the liability in any collision involving a motor vehicle and a cycle (or a pedestrian) lies with the driver of the vehicle, other than in the case of an adult cyclist who is shown to have been responsible for the accident.  In the UK, this is not the case.  As the majority of cycling accidents involve a motor vehicle, and given the vulnerability of cyclists and pedestrians, the Scottish Government will undertake to explore a “Hierarchy of Care for Road Users”.  This consultation document is asking whether the liability should always lie with the vehicle driver, until proven otherwise.

I vivdly recall the former Reading Labour MP, Jane Griffiths, who at the time was the chair of the All-Party Cycling Group, being interviewed about such a proposal on Radio 4, not long before I entered parliament. She was a staunch advocate of such nonsense and I recall thinking, “I hope the government doesn’t go down this road.”

Well, it didn’t, and while I was the minister with responsibility for cycling, I made damn sure we didn’t, despite lobbying by cycling groups. It’s just such a bonkers idea – that the driver of a car will always be assumed to be liable for an accident.

But maybe I should cross my fingers and hope that the SNP Government are daft enough to implement it here; the electoral consequences for them would be grave indeed. Unfortunately, they will be protected from their own stupidity by the Government, since matters of liability and insurance are reserved, and the SNP only undertake to “write” to the Government if the consultation responses show strong support for the measure. Damn.

The consultation document was drawn to my attention by Two Doctors, who happens to work for the two Green MSPs at Holyrood. He was spot-on in his criticism of the road tax for cyclists idea, which he understandably refers to as a “poll tax on wheels”. But he was strangely silent on the (even) more bonkers suggestion of assumed liability for car drivers.

CONSTITUTIONALISTS might well argue that if a legislature votes specifically on whether or not the executive handled a particular case competently, and that if the votes go against the executive, then the minister responsible for that decision should resign.

If Kenny MacAskill hands in his notice on Thursday, he will have the respect of the Scottish Parliament and many beyond it. But if he doesn’t, isn’t he (and Alex Salmond) showing no respect for a body he claims represents the true voice of the people of Scotland?

I’m just asking.

WELL, of course it wasn’t — what a bloody stupid question!

The conspiracy theories go something like this: senior members of the government (the PM and Mandelson) give a nod and a wink to various members of the Gaddafi clan that they’ll guarantee Al-Megrahi’s release provided some lucrative Libyan contracts come in the UK’s direction. Then Brown phones Salmond and/or MacAskill and gives them their orders. In response, the First Minister and his justice minister tug their forelocks and tell Gordon and Peter: “Of course, boss — anything you say.”

Now, who among those of you who know anything at all about Scottish politics can tell me what’s wrong with this scenario?

Got it in one: however low one’s opinion is of the SNP and the administration they run from Edinburgh, Salmond and his gang are as likely to take orders from Labour as Guido is to take instructions from Sunny Hundal.

And on this point alone, all the silly season speculation surely founders. It is based on the notion that the SNP and MacAskill specifically, are taking a shed load of abuse in order to protect their bitterest political opponents.

But maybe I’m wrong. In which case: come on, Kenny, fess up! Did you genuinely take this decision on your own or are you merely doing what you Labour Party masters tell you?

I think we should be told.