tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-224039892024-03-07T09:52:01.747+00:00Iain Macwhirter Now and Then"Scotland's most distinguished political commentator" - Roy Greenslade. iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.comBlogger735125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-35567908115760580302013-10-16T17:22:00.001+01:002013-10-16T18:03:21.038+01:00Moving <b>Long suffering readers of this blog will be pleased to know that it will soon cease to be. I have gravitated to the sunlit uplands of Wordpress. Hopefully, if you click on this <a href="http://iainmacwhirter.wordpress.com/">link,</a> you will be able to find me in future. </b>iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com89tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-12370627264453736482013-10-12T15:43:00.002+01:002013-10-12T15:43:38.000+01:001984 in 2014. Have we learned nothing from George Orwell?<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">In the wake of the former CIA analyst Edward Snowden's revelations about state surveillance, I thought I'd reread George Orwell's 1984, written nearly70 years ago on the Island of Jura. I was taken aback by how prophetic it is. When I first read this novel at school, before personal computers and the internet, the idea of two-way interactive “telescreens” in every home and workplace seemed like improbable science fiction. Not today. Orwell, through an extraordinary feat of imagination, had described the internet nearly half a century before it was invented.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">But not even he could have imagined the sheer power digital technology would place in the hands of the state to record, store, search and collate information. In the Ministry of Truth they had voice recognition software – the “speakwrite” - but ultimately information was still retained on paper. Imagine Big Brother having access to Big Data , and acquiring the ability to hold and search petabytes of information, in the way GCHQ and the American National Security Agency apparently do. Or to monitor, record and search millions of telephone conversations like Verizon.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Winston Smith could still go off line, at least for short periods. But today, BB would know exactly where he was thanks to ubiquitous CCTV cameras and global positioning software on mobile phones. Then there is all that Orwellian-sounding “metadata” that can be and is mined from the net, allowing access to our very unconscious mind through algorithms that analyse what we watch, buy and read; who we meet and where we go. As for Facebook – Orwell would never have believed it. Millions of people ejaculating their private thoughts onto a public record that can never be erased.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">But Orwell got the basics right. As Winston Smith's banned book explained, what differentiated 1984 from all previous repressive regimes was that: “in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance”. Freedom has, since the dawn of civilisation, rested on our right to live our lives free from arbitrary interference and monitoring by the state. Orwell's message was that without democratic control and rigorous accountability – without a presumption of privacy and freedom of thought – the coming technology of surveillance had the capacity to extinguish most of what it means to be human.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">How little we have learned. If anyone had suggested in 1948, when Orwell was writing, that the police or security services should be allowed to copy and record all letters and telephone conversations, and keep these records indefinitely for future reference, there would have been a public outcry. Privacy was regarded as an inalienable right. The idea that a police force, however benevolent, could be allowed indiscriminately to monitor where we go, who we speak to and ransack our private diaries and notes, would have outraged a country that had just fought a war against fascism.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">And it wouldn't only have been liberal newspaper editors who would have been sounding the alarm. 1984 wasn't a piece of left-wing propaganda. The hero's namesake, Winston Churchill, opposed identity cards and mass surveillance after the Second World War precisely because they were the hallmarks of totalitarianism. Conservatives then would have been appalled at the idea of a secret policeman at the end of every telephone wire, in every post office, at the end of every street potentially monitoring everything we do.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">And if the head of M15 in 1948 had suggested, as the present director general, Andrew Parker, did last week, that such an apparatus of surveillance was necessary to combat communist terrorism, there would have been questions in the House of Commons and demands for him to resign. Justifying mass surveillance on the grounds of fighting terrorism is straight out of 1984. The apologia of the Thought Police: “If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear”.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Yet here we are, today, calmly accepting the construction of this industry of intrusion. We're told to we don't need to know about it because it is all for our protection. That if the secret services aren't given the power to record and monitor everything we do, terrorists will be free to wreak havoc, kill and destroy. A policeman needs to sit in our living rooms so that we can sleep safely in our beds at night.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Andrew Parker claims that the Guardian's recent revelations about the extent of secret and, in America at least, illegal surveillance of the internet is itself of benefit to terrorism. '<span style="color: #262626;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">It causes enormous damage', he said, “to make public the reach and limits of GCHQ techniques. Such information hands the advantage to the terrorists”.</span></span></span> Just examine that proposition. He claims that our knowing about programmes like Prism and Tempora, that can access and store our activities on the internet, will itself help the terrorist. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> I profoundly disagree. The terrorists already know they are under surveillance, and act accordingly. It is the rest of us who have been kept in the dark about the behaviour of a state that is supposed to serve us, not spy on us. Parker might as well have said: Ignorance is Strength – the mission statement of the Ministry of Truth.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Now, of course, the police and security services have to have secrets, and they have to monitor those suspected of terrorism or any other serious crime. No one is suggesting anything other than this. But it should be within the rule of law and founded on the presumption of innocence. No system of justice should allow the police, armed with search engines, to go on fishing expeditions through our private communications looking for things that might incriminate. That is the very definition of a police state.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">We know where this ends up. It is journalists held for nine hours at airports, having to give up their passwords and encryption keys, not because they are suspected of breaking any law but because they may possess information 'of interest to terrorists' - an entirely subjective charge. It justifies a degree of intrusion into our personal affairs that is not compatible with a free society. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> Perhaps we have given up on the idea of freedom, as an anachronistic, analogue hangover from the days when people still read books. </span><span style="font-size: 16pt;">Well, at least the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, has not been cowed and is promising to run further stories arising from the leaks by whistleblower, Edward Snowden. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 16pt;"> The revelations have aroused furious controversy in America and continental Europe, but here in Britain, land of Orwell, there has been very little public concern. It hasn't even been debated in parliament. This complacency about the see-through society is troubling. We seem to have forgotten how information can be used and abused by tyrants, big business, big government. Can no one imagine how this surveillance machine might be used by governments of the future?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">As I write the Privy Council – an unelected remnant of feudalism – is deciding the limits of press freedom and may be about to put the print media under a form of statutory regulation for the first time in 300 years. Perhaps the lack of proper teaching about history in schools has allowed us to forget the abiding lesson of history: that power corrupts. Well, Orwell realised that knowledge is power; and absolute knowledge is absolute power. He has much to teach us today.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com31tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-7533373335078061132013-10-08T10:05:00.000+01:002013-10-08T10:05:51.443+01:00i warn you not to be young. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Neil Kinnock made a speech before the 1983 general election in which he said: "I warn you not to be old. I warn you not to get sick. I warn you not to lose your job..." Today, he might have added a warning not to be young. This week an unprecedented assault was launched by the Conservatives on the living standards and prospects of Britain's under 25 year olds, a million of whom are unemployed.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Who would be young today? £9,000 a year fees (in |England at least) no jobs, zero hours contracts, unaffordable mortgages, ruinous rents and now you lose your benefits if you happen to lose your job. Think about it. If you are someone who left school, got an apprenticeship, worked for five years and then were made redundant, you would lose housing benefits and job seekers allowance for the crime of being under 25.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">This is so manifestly unfair, I could hardly believe that David Cameron was serious about it in his conference speech. But this is going to be a major plank of their Tory election platform in 18 months. They are already committed to cutting housing benefits for jobless under 25s, and now they plan to take away jobseekers allowance too, which at £51 is already too little to live on.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">I'm not entirely sure this is even legal. If I were a single parent, or a soldier back from Afghanistan, or a hospital worker axed in the cuts, I would be inclined to raise a court action for discrimination on grounds of age. These are adults were are talking about, not children. I feel genuinely sorry for the under 25s, setting out on lifetime of debt, their aspirations crushed by an generation of politicians who enjoyed advantages they can only dream about. </span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 21px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">When I was that age, starting a career and buying my first flat, I had no debts whatever, because a grant had seen me through university. I even qualified for social security during university vacations. My first house cost £17,000 ,which was cheap even in the 1980s, and we received grants for structural improvements like new windows and roof repairs. I cannot recall experiencing any financial insecurity, when I entered what was even then a very insecure occupation - broadcast journalism - during an economic recession. But then I had the confidence to persevere through short term contracts because I had low overheads.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It might seem hard to justify these privileges today, but they actually added value to the emerging knowledge economy. I didn't have to take up the first job that came along to service student debts or pay for exorbitant rents or lost benefits. OK, political journalists may not be the most valuable members of society, but at least my years of education studying politics didn't go entirely to waste. If I had ended up selling coffee, working in telesales or doing an internship in some PR company, they would have.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Look at graduates today. Many don't get jobs at all - for years. They find that their years of study and training are dismissed because they didn't go to the right university or college or get the right degree. They are told that in the "global race" as David Cameron calls it, they are still at the bottom. All very well for him as a product of Eton and Bullingdon - like me, he wasn't part of generation debt.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">And this doesn't just apply to graduates. The same is true for vocational workers and apprentices. What is the point of spending time and money acquiring skills if you have to take the first job that comes along to avoid destitution? No wonder British industrial productivity is going into reverse. We are creating a pool of financially desperate young people who will accept low pay and zero hours, allowing firms to resort to sweated labour rather than investment in new techniques.</span></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">I think the Conservatives have gone too far here. They think because their benefits cap was popular that people are prepared to victimise the workless, but they have underestimated the British public, who can see for themselves that their own children, 979,000 of them, are bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. In Scotland the bedroom tax has generated widespread resistance and calls for welfare to be devolved, and these benefit cuts will be resisted too. It will intensify the demands for welfare to be devolved to Holyrood whatever the result of the referendum. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 21px;"> Why do Scots seem to be more sympathetic to the workless? Well, one reason is that the experience of unemployment is seared into the national consciousness, especially in the West of Scotland. Last week, the Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, Harry Burns, confirmed that Scotland's health problems do not stem from bad diet and alcohol abuse, but from the psychological damage caused by unemployment and the destruction of the industrial communities of West Central Scotland during the recessions of the 1970s and1980s. The idea that former shipyard and engineering workers "chose" the dole is patently ludicrous. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> In England, especially in the south, these recessions had a very different impact, as skills and capital fled south to the new consumer industries based in the home counties. Most middle class Scots are not so detached from the rest of society that they believe the slanders about the unemployed. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 21px;"> Lacking shares and expensive housing assets, most Scots are only a redundancy away from economic hardship themselves. This is another indication of the social gulf between Scotland and the South East of England, where most of our national wealth is concentrated.</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">We are told repeatedly that welfare is 'out of control" in Britain and that we simply cannot afford benefits for people under 25. But the vast majority of the £155bn benefits bill goes on old age pensions and disability benefits. Jobseekers allowance accounts for only £5bn in total, and the young unemployed account for less than a billion of this. Jobseekers allowance is already the lowest unemployment benefit in any comparable developed country.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">In Germany and Denmark, people can expect to receive three or four times the British rate when they lose their jobs.. They regard young people as a valuable investment and the idea of forcing them into shelf-stacking or nonsense internships is seen as a waste of human capital. In Denmark they call it "flexicurity". 30% of the labour force change jobs every year, and firms can make employees redundant at short notice and without prejudice. Workers accept this because they know they will be supported while they find another, generally better job. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 21px;">Indeed, changing jobs and retraining is a way of life in Denmark, which is why it is often cited by the World Bank as the best country in the world to set up a business.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 21px;"> Europe is recovering, but Britain is returning to the dark ages, with an essentially punitive approach to social security and a disregard for training. Unemployed people are demeaned as "skivers" who need to be forced to work - given a "dunt" as the education secretary Michael Gove put it so inelegantly last week. David Cameron repeats the slander that people "choose" a life on benefits. But at £51 a week no one in their right minds would choose to live on benefits. The problem is lack of jobs, not lack of the will to work. Which is confirmed by the millions of working people who are accepting poverty pay.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">There is a specific problem with housing benefits. It is a grotesque misuse of public money shelling out £17bn a year, most of which goes straight into the pockets of buy-to-let landlords. But the problem here is not the unemployed, but the dysfunctional housing market, which has allowed house prices and rents to lose touch with reality. Housing benefit is a national scandal, but it is a direct consequence of the policy of council house sales and the failure of successive governments to build social housing - or any housing.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">An young family, struggling with rent and fuel bills, can only look in blank amazement at a government which uses public money to underwrite the deposits for people buying £600,000 houses. The Help to Buy scheme helps the few to acquire an immensely valuable asset thanks to up to £90,000 interest free from the state to help pay the deposit and cushion any losses. This is a blatantly political giveaway to the middle classes of the South East of England. Ask yourself: how many first time buyers do you know who are in the market for a £600,000 flat? </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 21px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 21px;">Forget Scottish independence: it's the Home Counties that are declaring UDI.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com56tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-80966760363379996002013-10-04T08:16:00.001+01:002013-10-04T08:16:29.341+01:00Land of hope is Tory. Duh.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">He may not move the voters, but Ed Miliband has certainly rattled David Cameron's cage. The PM name checked Labour no fewer than 25 times in his address to the Tory conference yesterday in Manchester. He mentioned Ukip not once and only referred to the Liberal Democrats as an albatross around the Tory neck. So, why has Ed got under Tory skins?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Well, obviously Milband's taking on the energy companies has annoyed the Tories because it is rather popular, as was a fair amount of Labour's new "red" agenda. Hitting property developers and energy monopolies and shifting taxation from small businesses to big ones is hardly striking at the roots of capitalism. This is the kind of policy agenda that some Conservatives used to rather favour - supporting the little man, the small business against powerful vested interests.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">One Nation conservatism of the type Harold MacMillan largely invented and Michael Heseltine still advocates today was all about raising the living standards of the many and curbing the privileges of the few. It was about building houses, promoting welfare and extending economic activity to the 'regions'. It wasn't about rejecting Europe, victimising the unemployed and pandering to the prejudices of voters in the South East of England.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">You only needed to look at the huge blue banners draped around the conference centre in Manchester to get the message: "Immigration Down. Crime Down. Welfare Down. Taxes Down". Mrs Thatcher would have been proud to discover that her legacy was so secure in the age of "liberal" Conservatism. Behind the emolient face of David Cameron, the Conservatives have defaulted to their true blue roots. This is a party tacking rapidly to the right.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">David Cameron, we are told, is now planning to cut housing and possibly other benefits from unemployed people under the age of 25. This is a draconian extension of the welfare cap that has proved so successful for the Conservatives. He has committed his party to an in/out referendum on membership of Europe, a "go home" policy on immigration and a form of hair shirt fiscal conservatism by promising extending public sector cuts to 2020 in order to replace the deficit with a budget surplus. If he is serious, this would involve truly heroic spending reductions, since the Coalition has already failed in its original 2010 pledge to eliminate the deficit by 2015.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">One thing we can be sure of: there won't be another Liberal-Tory coalition after the next general election on this showing. This was the week that Cameron promised to liberate his party from the Liberal Democrats by unveiling a programme that could never be adopted even by Nick Clegg. The useful idiots, as many Tories regard the Libdems, have served their purpose and can be disposed of, apparently.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Mind you, the Liberal Democrats left a poison pill at the heart of the coalition by successfully blocking boundary reform for the 2015 general election. The existing political map broadly favours Labour, and Ed Miliband only needs a little over 36% of the vote to get a parliamentary majority, while David Cameron needs to secure over 40%. This looks like very very big ask for a party that that has little representation in Scotland, the north of England or Wales.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">And this was hardly a speech that is likely to appeal to voters north of the border. It felt at times like the speech of the leader of a different country - Londonia perhaps. It was all about free schools, HS2, immigration controls, NHS reforms - the kind of issues that appeal to the home counties but are largely irrelevant in Scotland. The PM made the obligatory appeal to Scots not to leave the UK, but you got the impression that it would be no big thing if they did. It would certainly make it easier for the Tories to win elections without all those Scottish Labour MPs.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">But that is for the future, and right now, Cameron is facing an election in 18 months time 10% down in the opinion polls and with a dangerously narrow electoral base. Does the PM know something that we don't? What is the secret element in the Tory programme that will allow them to dispense with the Liberal Democrats and win an outright majority at the next general election?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Well, clearly Red Ed is part of it. 'Old Labour, New Danger', as the slogan might put it of Ed Miliband, paraphasing the 1997 slogan against Tony Blair's New Labour. Indeed, the Tories have been reminding journalists of the Sun's 1992 front page: "If Neil Kinnock wins the election, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights". This time, they say, Ed Miliband is offering to turn the lights off himself, thanks to his "socialist" energy policy.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Labour were gleeful that Ed Miliband's spat with the Daily Mail for saying that his father, Ralph "hated Britain", had stolen the front pages from David Cameron's speech and all but eclipsed the Tory conference. But the Conservatives clearly think that a price worth paying for throwing the spotlight on a Labour leader they believe has no chance of becoming prime minister. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 20px;">Their reading of the focus groups is that the British voters have already made up their minds that Ed Miliband is a goofy loser, the 'wrong' Miliband and that any focus on his personality can only benefit Cameron.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">There is something in this of course. Ed Miliband certainly hasn't 'sealed the deal' with English voters, or even Scottish voters despite promoting the kind of agenda that might be thought to appeal to Scots. His problem is that he doesn't look prime ministerial to most people. He is clearly intelligent, confident, imaginative and quite brave in taking on not only Rupert Murdoch, but also the Daily Mail, but he doesn't yet have the demeanour of a statesman.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The Tories also believe that they have successfully hung the blame for the financial crash firmly around Labour's neck. Labour's "casino economy", Cameron called it in a savage passage that we will hear again and again over the next 18 months: "The biggest budget deficit in our peacetime history", he said of Labour's legacy. "The deepest recession since the Second World War. Millions coming here from overseas while millions of British people were left on welfare. The richest paying lower tax rates than their cleaners. Unsustainable debt-fuelled banks booming - while manufacturing withered away".</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It is pretty rich for the Conservatives to blame Labour for the banking crisis, at the very moment they are trying to block banking reform in Europe and defending bank bonuses. Arguably, the casino economy dates from Margaret Thatcher's deregulation of banking in the 1980s. But there is enough truth in the charge that Gordon Brown helped let the bankers loose by his "light touch" regulation in the City of London to make it stick for many voters. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">"Land of hope is Tory" said the PM echoing the last night of the Proms. Well, not in Scotland. But at least no one can say that there is nothing to choose between the Westminster parties. And it looks like the 2015 general election campaign has begun.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-89053654408243375642013-10-02T08:28:00.000+01:002013-10-04T08:29:48.566+01:00In defence of the 1970s<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Is politics back in fashion? People like me have been moaning for years about how all the parties are the same at Westminster, crowding the centre ground and pursuing synthetic focus group policies. But after this week, just maybe, things have changed. Between Ed Miliband and David Cameron, a gulf in policy and ideology has emerged that, on the surface at least, looks as wide as anything we have seen in the last two decades</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">David Cameron attacked Ed Miliband's plans to freeze energy prices, build 200,000 houses a year and scrap the bedroom tax, as a lurch to the left. Tory ministers will accuse Labour of the politics of envy for wanting to extend the bank levy, introduce a mansion tax, axe higher rate pension tax relief and possibly restore the 50p tax. Worst of all, with Ed's threat to confiscate development land, end NHS privatisation, selectively increase the minimum wage and curb bank bonuses, the Labour leader will be accused of taking Britain back to the bad old days of the 1970s, of class war, nationalisation and state controls.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">That is far from the case. However, before deconstructing "Red Ed", a word in defence of that much-maligned decade. 1970s fashions may have been execrable and industrial confrontation was out of control. But Britain was at its most equal, in terms of income and wealth, in 1977. It was an era of genuine social security, when houses were cheap, jobs were relatively abundant, Britain was an industrial nation, and there was genuine social mobility thanks to free higher education. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Unemployment was thought to be excessive when it surpassed one million.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Countries like Germany and Norway have stuck essentially to 1970s consensus politics with great success. Britain left for the far side of Thatcherism and ended up with a dysfunctional economy dominated by a banking kleptocracy. But in our deracinated political culture, under both New Labour and the Conservative coalition, the bogey of the 70s has been used to close down political debate, in England at least.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In Scotland, the SNP adopted Labour's social democratic agenda almost wholesale - unilateralism, abolition of tuition fees, social housing - and has been successful, electorally at least. So successful that Ed Miliband wants to steal some of it back - on bedroom tax, even votes for 16 year olds. When Johann Lamont's "Cuts Commission" - launched exactly a year ago - reports on the "something for nothing society" it may find that it has caught up with New Labour just as it has been superseded by Ed Labour</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">But only up to a point. The Labour leader's radicalism is heavily circumscribed. He is not proposing a fundamental shift of wealth and power, nor will he back his conference on public ownership of rail and Royal Mail. He said nothing about nuclear weapons and isn't proposing to to redistribute wealth or restore the principle of free education. Miliband is responding to the despair of Middle England as it discovers, to its surprise, that it is no longer the poor who are being squeezed.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The general decline in earnings since 2008 has masked a profound shift in British social demography. With student debt, house prices and the collapse of the old career structure, the aspirant middle classes of the 21st Century are discovering</span> t<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">hey no longer have a foot hold on prosperity. The old distinctions between the middle class and the working class, as in that old Frost Report sketch with John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett, have eroded.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">This is why Labour is banging on about the "cost of living crisis". That is something the working poor have always suffered, but now it is spreading across the social divide, leaving a gulf between 'us' and a super rich 1% 'them'. "Red" Ed has realised that this has revived the market for elements of the old social democratic consensus. His targeting of the energy companies is no accident: high energy costs hit the middle classes disproportionately because they have larger houses. Indeed, had the SNP proposed a price freeze Ms Lamont's Cuts Commission would probably have accused it of being regressive.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Whatever you think Ed Miliband's qualities as a leader, he has an astute understanding of political dynamics. He has drawn a line under the New Labour experiment and rediscovered the rhetorical power of fairness. Getting both the profiteering energy companies and Peter Mandelson to disown him in the same week was pretty good going. And this week, the Conservatives will be left defending the indefensible - bankers, energy bosses, property developers and people who live in £2m houses.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">But what does it mean for Scotland? Well, it could mean that the SNP has a fight on its hands. It can no longer roam freely across Labour's abandoned terrain of social democracy. If there appears to be a genuinely left of centre party bidding for power in Westminster, the argument that Scotland needs independence to secure social objectives is undermined. It is much too early to tell yet because the Scottish Labour Party under Johann Lamont has moved in the opposite direction by defining her leadership through an assault on universal benefits. But the Nationalists may no longer have all the best tunes.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Voters in Scotland often despair at the tribalism of politics, where parties, Labour and SNP, berate each other instead of working together for common goals. On social housing, bedroom tax, green energy, NHS, apprenticeships, gay marriage, living wage etc Salmond and Lamont are on the same side. Much of their mutual antagonism can be put down to the fact that Scotland used to be effectively a one party state run by Labour. If you wanted to get on in Scotland, in public sector jobs, local government, quangos etc. you first had to join the Labour tribe. This power of patronage has been destroyed by two SNP governments and the destruction of Labour electoral monopoly of local government - though ironically it was a Labour FM, Jack McConnell, who sealed their fate by introducing fair voting in council elections.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Beyond that, there is the old antagonism of the Left to nationalism in all its forms, which goes back to George Orwell and socialist internationalism. Left wing intellectuals in England still instinctively recoil on any politics based on national identity, even though the SNP is a civic nationalist party that supports open borders and seeks independence for social objectives.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">I don't think Alex Salmond will be losing too much sleep over Ed Miliband's rediscovery of social democratic rhetoric. The Labour leader's ignorance of Scottish politics was revealed by his suggestion, in his speech, that the NHS might be split by independence. It is already split, thanks to the Tory reforms - and in Scotland the SNP government has defended the integrated National Health Service that Ed Miliband says he wants for the UK as a whole. His attacks on Alex Salmond for being tax-cutting Tory are similarly wide of the mark.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The SNP will only find itself challenged in Scotland if the Scottish Labour Party discovers its voice, shakes off its antagonism towards popular policies like tuition fees and stops behvaing like the party of the council bureaucrat. And there is no sign yet of that.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-14797075318141078132013-09-30T08:35:00.000+01:002013-10-04T08:35:44.755+01:00One Year to Go. It looks like No. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It's not exactly been a happy pre-anniversary for the Yes Scotland campaign. Looking at the deluge of one-year-to-go opinion polls, the only sensible conclusion is that very little has changed and independence is set to be rejected by a substantial majority. Yes, the number of don't knows has gone up and there is a degree of fluidity about the supporters of devolution max. But there is no sign of an early breakthrough. Even Alex Salmond's Aberdeenshire school students blew him a raspberry by voting against independence in mock elections by a margin of three to one.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The economic argument rages on to no particular purpose. All sides accept that Scotland could be a viable economy on its own, but the £500 question remains unanswered. An opinion poll by ICM last week suggested that 47% of Scots would vote Yes if they could be assured that independence would make them richer by this amount, while only 18% would vote for independence if they were made poorer. Nicola Sturgeon welcomed this poll and insisted that “on the basis of the current <span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: ArialMT, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland report Scotland’s finances are stronger than the UK’s as a whole to the tune of £4.4 billion – which equates to £824 per person”. Whether this fiscal arithmetic is right or not, I find it rather demeaning for the question of Scotland's national renewal to be reduced to the cost of a minibreak in Benidorm.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: ArialMT, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Anyway, the Nationalists are always going to be on the defensive with these arguments because of the uncertainty factor. It is impossible to say whether Scotland would be better off after independence, and the hard fiscal reality is that a short period of post independence austerity is likely, even with the benefit of oil revenues. The Institute for Fiscal Studies claimed last week that Scottish public spending, which it says is 17% higher per head than in England, would be squeezed in a transition period as Scotland tried to grapple with the debts inherited from the UK.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: ArialMT, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Now, the Nationalists rightly say that this is hardly their fault, and that is true. They are also right to argue that with oil and renewable resources, Scotland could be a viable and very effective economy. But it is hard to argue with the IFS calculation that there would be significant spending constraints in the short term. The IFS is the gold standard of financial accounting and its assessments have to be taken seriously, unlike the UK Treasury, which has been frankly producing propaganda in the guise of economic analysis.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: ArialMT, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Now, in any normal independence situation, such transitional costs would be seen as a price worth paying for national freedom. You didn't find the Slovakia, the Lativa, or any of the other countries which won independence in 1990s worrying over such trivial sums. In Barcelona today, Catalonian nationalists don't march in their millions demanding 500 more euros – they demand an end to domination from Madrid, cultural liberation, control of their own affairs. Scottish independence is in danger of turning into a bean-counter convention, where people are arguing over the small change in the national accounts instead of creating a vision of a better society.</span></span></span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"></span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: ArialMT, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">So, it may seem strange then that, in the week independence was widely written off, Alex Salmond remained so upbeat. His speech to parliament betrayed none of the agonising that is going on within the wider independence movement. He hardly bothered about the future of the pound, pensions or membership of the EU and devoted most of his speech to praising Donald Dewar and the achievements of devolution; insisting that "decisions taken by Scots in Scotland are invariably better decisions". That was the argument that won the 1997 devolution referendum</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: ArialMT, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The First Minister's almost Zen like calm in the face of what looks like a hurricane of bad news last week raised a number of questions. Does he know something we don't? Is the forthcoming independence White Paper going to promise to pay each voting Scot £500 a year in perpetutity if they vote yes? Hardly. Salmond's equanimity in the face of apparent defeat is, I think, because he realises that he and his party are not going down after the referendum whatever the result</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: ArialMT, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Almost seven years since it entered government, the SNP government is as popular as it has ever been. In Holyrood voting intentions the party has been scoring over 40%, and if there were an election tomorrow, the nationalists would be returned with something close to their 2011 landslide. This is quite remarkable, as is Alex Salmond's enduring popularity – he is still more popular than the opposition party leaders combined. This tells us something important about the Scottish voters. They may not be persuaded of the case for independence, but they do not criticise the SNP for advocating it – indeed, there is evidence that they rather like to have a government that so determinedly fights Scotland's corner.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: ArialMT, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Some have criticised Salmond – though not publicly – for his failure to prosecute the indepedence case with passion. Where is the anger, where is the fighting spirit? But it may be that by sticking to a decidedly non-partisan and non-adversarial approach, by praising devolution and the legacy of Donald Dewar, Salmond is positioning his party to assume moral leadership in the post referendum Scotland irrespective of the result.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: ArialMT, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Perhaps sensing this, Labour's astute shadow secretary, Douglas Alexander, repeated his plea to his party to avoid tribalism and start now to put together a road map for Scotland after September 2014. Alexander realises the danger of allowing Salmond to colonise the post-referendum moral high ground. He is calling for a cross party National Convention to move Scotland on to the next stage of home rule. But I fear Alexander may have an uphill struggle here, and not just because he is facing allegations from Gordon Brown's ex-spindoctor that he advised Brown to sack his sister Wendy as Scottish Labour leader in 2008. I detect no real enthusiasm from the unionist campaign, still less the Westminster government, for giving Scotland a consolation prize for voting No. The vague promises made by Nick Clegg, and other UK party leaders, carry little conviction among Scots who remember only too well the promises that were made before the 1979 devolution referendum and not kept. Alexander's convention will not meet unless and until there is a No vote. They are going to have to do better than that.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: ArialMT, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Now, I'm not saying that Alex Salmond has given up on winning the referendum. He is still absolutely confident that there will be a yes vote. Nevertheless, it is very significant I think that his body language is saying something slightly different: that he and his administration are in no mind to go down with the ship if he fails to persuade Scots to vote yes. Indeed, in the very long game that nationalists are playing, how they conduct themselves in adversity, and even in defeat, could lay the groundwork for a successful independence referendum some years hence. It isn't over till it's over, and the independence struggle never is. </span></span></span></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-52836810006998875362013-09-27T09:30:00.002+01:002013-09-27T09:30:39.698+01:00"Red Ed" is trying to make capitalism work. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">From Herald, 26/9/13</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Reaction to Ed Miliband's plan to freeze energy prices has been, well, electric. Energy UK warned of “black-outs”; Centrica said it might go out of business; press commentators accused “Red” Ed of taking Britain back to the bad old 1970s of price controls, shortages and nationalisation. I suspect most consumers, this one included, said: about time.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Price control is a pretty blunt instrument, but governments sometimes have to use blunt instruments to make industries behave. The energy monopolies have been racking up prices and profits in lock step for years, making a nonsense of any free market in energy. This has been noted by both the consumer rights group, Which, and the Commons Energy Committee.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Other European countries regulate prices including France, whose state-owned EDF charges lower prices to its domestic consumers than to consumers in Britain. This is why Miliband is so confident that his proposal is not going to break EU competition laws. The howls of anguish from business groups are unjustified. In 1997 Gordon Brown imposed a £5bn windfall tax on the privatised utilities – mainly energy companies again – and no one thought he was abolishing capitalism. Miliband's price freeze will cost them £4.5 billion, according to Labour. </span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The only people who didn't respond to Miliband's price freeze were the Scottish Government, who seemed curiously reluctant to comment. When UK political parties propose populist measures, the SNP generally claims to have thought of them first and/or pledges to go further after independence. But no promises to freeze energy costs in an independent Scotland emerged yesterday. Yet this country is colder than the rest of the UK and there are more people in fuel poverty. A break from the relentless inflation, which has put £300 on an average bill since 2010, might be welcome. Could it be that the SNP are just a little feart of the Big Six – EDF, Scottish Power, SSE,Centica, Eon, AWE?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Ed Miliband cited the NHS in his conference speech on Tuesday as a good reason for voting No in next year's referendum – though his suggestion that Scots might not get heart treatment in England after independence was pure scaremongering. He might have been better to cite energy. Could a Scottish government implement a unilateral price freeze in an integrated UK energy market? Would it have the power or the will to break up the vertical energy monopoly? Possibly - but it would be a big ask. The danger is that a Scottish government – of any party - could be bought and sold by the energy companies just as it was bought and sold by the big banks before 2008.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Mind you, it is not entirely clear yet that a UK government has the will and the power to regulate the international energy market. A 20 month freeze on energy prices is hardly going to reform this delinquent industry. Moreover, Miliband has - since his speech - offered a get out clause promising that, if there is some "energy shock", like a foreign war or a revolution in Saudi Arabia that affects supply, then his freeze will be broken. Moreover, since Ed Miliband is proposing to freeze prices from 2015, this gives the energy companies plenty of scope to ramp up their prices before the next election in order to allow for a temporary freeze.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">And who will get the blame for that? Well, David Cameron of course. Labour hope that Cameron will be left trying to defend the indefensible as the energy companies show just what they think of the free market by riding rough-shod all over it in the next 18 months. Indeed, cynics might argue that Miliband's entire policy is a purely presentational one - a classic manoeuvre, of the kind Gordon Brown loved designed to put the Tories and the Liberal Democrats into a corner.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It may well be that, by the time Labour comes to office, there is a consensus on replacing the toothless regulator, Ofgem. The energy companies, who are now offering what they call a “big grown up debate” about the energy market, may have moved sufficiently for Prime Minister Miliband (strange how odd that sounds) to say the freeze is no longer necessary and indeed could distort the market. After all, £110bn is said to be needed in the short term to upgrade the National Grid, build new power stations and promote renewables.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Certainly, price controls have a mixed record – a freeze on energy prices in California is said to have contributed to black outs after 2000 - though market-rigging by Enron helped. Prices do provide important information for firms to assess the demand for their products and, insensitively handled, price controls can choke off investment in infrastructure and product development. However, for the price mechanism to work, markets must be working freely, and at present in the energy industry and it is patently obvious that they aren't.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The energy companies have been raking in excess profits - £3.9bn a year according to Which – which result not from the operation of a free market, but from their own monopolistic practices. The appearance of price competition in the industry is largely illusory. Which attempted to shop around and revealed that many of the so-called “switch” deals actually increased prices rather than reduced them for the consumer.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The essential problem is that energy companies mostly generate the energy they market and can manipulate prices in all manner of ways depending on how they set the wholesale price. They also serve a captive market of consumers who have no choice but to use their products – unless you resort to wood-burning stoves and oil lamps. The Big Six are mostly foreign-owned multinational companies - and state controlled in the case of France's EDF. It is very difficult for new players to enter this business.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Ed Miliband is doing what any responsible government would do after being handed such evidence of price fixing: he has called a halt to it. Shot a warning across their bows; demonstrated that someone is actually prepared to do something about it. British voters know from their own bitter experience that these companies are not to be trusted. The UK regulator, Ofgem, has lost the confidence of the consumers and the government.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">All capitalist markets have to be regulated at some stage or else – as Adam Smith himself observed – they will form cartels to rig the market against the consumer. Miliband isn't abolishing the market – he's trying to make it work. If that's socialism, then bring it on.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-50723535218605650432013-09-06T18:23:00.000+01:002013-09-06T18:23:05.862+01:00On yer bike Chancellor. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Talk about an open goal. The most unpopular Chancellor since Nigel Lawson, George Osborne, came north again this week, bearing Treasury propaganda disguised as objective analysis - and he seemed to get away with it. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 20px;">Where's the anger?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The independence campaign has not just stalled, it is in danger of going into reverse. People who were minded to vote Yes are flummoxed by the relentless stream of negativity from Westminster which the Nationalists seem unable to counter. Neither the SNP government, nor the Yes Scotland campaign seem able to mount a coherent, imaginative case for independence in a language Scottish voters can understand. I'm not surprised support for independence is back at its bedrock 25%.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The best Alex Salmond could come up with this week was abolishing early release for sex offenders – the kind of populist policy that Labour's Jack McConnell used to reach for when he was in a hole. Month after month the Nationalists repeat the same tired slogans about “completing the powers of the Scottish parliament” whatever that means; grasping the “ economic levers”. Maintaining the “social union”, the “defence union” – hey, why not the Union union?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">There is a strategic problem with the independence case, which is that it has essentially framed the debate in its opponents terms. This is the classic mistake identified by George Lakoff in “Don't Think of an Elephant”. If you keep talking about unions then the message that will get across is is that union is rather a good idea. Better Together are much better unionists than the SNP so perhaps leave it to them.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The Yes campaign need to have aspiration, a shining city, a vision. Politics is about moral choices and this is what effective campaigns are based upon, not the dull and desiccated language of economics. Which doesn't mean that you duck economic arguments – in fact the SNP had an opportunity to do both this week, secure the moral high ground while rebutting the politics of fear.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The Chancellor, George Osborne, is responsible for policies that have left tens of thousands of Scots in insecure jobs and plunged many Scottish families into crisis through the bedroom tax, while he cut taxes on multi-millionaires. He has also sparked a mini-property boom in the South East of England by using tax-payer's money to subsidise £600,000 mortgages.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">But worse he tried to argue that an independent Scotland would be worse off it received revenues from North Sea Oil. He even put a figure on it: £2,000 per Scottish family. He said that setting up an oil fund, like Norway's, would lead to tax increases of 27%, or £8bn, or spending cuts of the equivalent. This was underpinned by a Treasury report of breathtaking sophistry, which brought to mind the 1975 McCrone Report that cynically sought to disguise the true value of North Sea oil. It should have been kicked the length of Scotland, by unionists as well as nationalists, for the contempt it showed for the intelligence the Scottish public.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">An independent Scotland would have a budget deficit of around £8bn, according to George Osborne, but it is rather less than the budget deficit being run by the UK right now which, in case you had forgotten is around £120bn. The Osborne argument is that Scotland with oil revenues of would be in a worse predicament than the UK without it. How could a numerically literate Chancellor manage to arrive at that ludicrous conclusion?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">George Osborne said that if the Scottish government put its oil revenue into an oil fund, similar to Norway's state pension scheme, this would so denude the nation's finances that welfare spending would have to be slashed, free personal care abolished, tuition fees hiked. In other words that, unlike the UK, the Scottish government would have to balance its budget in year one in order to set up an oil fund.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">In fact, the existence of oil assets estimated by the industry body, Oil and Gas UK, at £1.5 trillion would, even if it were left under the North Sea, substantially reduce Scotland's deficit by reducing borrowing costs. It is silly to base the case for or against independence on one expendable resource, but this is a legacy most countries cannot dream of, even if the value fluctuates with the oil price. Currently it is up and production is rising.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> It is reasonable to expect that Scotland would experience an 'independence boom' which is what often happens when small countries take charge of their own affairs. But even if Scotland carried on exactly as it is, with GDP per head at approximately the UK level, it would still be in a better fiscal condition than the UK, and not just because of hydrocarbons. Stormy Scotland has an abundance of green energy, and the continuing disaster at Fukushima confirms that nuclear power is not going to ride to the rescue of a warming planet.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 20px;"> The worst error the Chancellor and his predecessor, Alistair Darling, made this week was to bring Norway centre stage in the independence debate. This is a successful small country, with a very similar demographic profile to Scotland, and fewer economic advantages. It has become something of a beacon for all those who believe that there is an alternative to the devil-take-the-hindmost banker capitalism that is currently the British way.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Not only does Norway have one of the highest standards of living on the planet, it has one of the lowest levels of income inequality, the highest levels of social security and – Conservative chancellors please note – one of the most dynamic private sectors in the world. Small countries like Norway, Denmark and Finland have discovered that impoverishing the working population while allowing the rich to get even richer, is not the way to encourage business to invest. What works is stability: progressive taxation, full employment, social investment.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Even without oil, countries like Denmark - which the World Bank recently cited as the best country in Europe to start a business – have kept calm and carried on throughout the Great Recession. Workers there are more willing to change jobs, which makes it is easier to start new enterprises. Wages are relatively high ensuring that there is demand in the high streets.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">In Britain, by contrast, 4.8 million workers earn less than the living wage of £7.20</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 20px;">. The top 1% have seen their share of income triple thanks to low taxation. The UK government seems to think that zero hours working creates enterprise and that house price inflation is the same as economic growth. Not so much voodoo economics as vampire economics; sucking the blood out of the real economy.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Scotland is already more like Norway than England, in its social outlook and political culture. A social democracy with communitarian values borne of struggle against a harsh climate and an implacable global economy. The UK squandered North Sea oil revenues, hundreds of billions of it, to finance Margaret Thatcher's industrial recessions and enrich a financial kleptocracy based in the City of London.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Norway has one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world, worth $700bn. Britain has one of the biggest debt problems of nearly £2tr. And he has the nerve to say that Scotland would be worse off? On yer bike, Chancellor: Scots have been fooled once too often.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
</span><br />iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-5191517395989217592013-08-22T14:38:00.000+01:002013-08-22T14:38:12.281+01:00Don't read this. The Internet is not secure. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">"Snowden", "surveillance", "Islam" , "bomb", "terrorist". That's all it takes. Those key words, written in any order on an email - or indeed this column - could be enough for my name to be identified as a 'person of interest' by the security services of the United States of America or Great Britain. Probably both.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Indeed, if you are reading this on the internet, you might well be alerting the attention of some internet 'bot' somewhere in cyberspace, which will by now have logged your IP address, traced your browser history and even had a peek at your email inbox.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The consequences could be quite profound. You might be held at an airport, denied a visa to travel. You might find yourself held for questioning by the police for nine hours with no explanation. Threatened with prison if you don't divulge all your internet passwords.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Paranoid? Absolutely. But that is the world we are now living in, where it must be assumed that everything you do or say on the internet or on the phone is being monitored. Perhaps not by some PC plod on headphones as of old - those of us brought up on television series like The Wire have a very antiquated notion of what surveillance means in the digital age. Now it is all done automatically, anonymously, by computer programmes that search millions, even billions of digital messages in seconds.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The Home Secretary Teresa May made clear yesterday that, under her interpretation of Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, any individual may be detained by the police merely on suspicion that they possess information that might be of use to terrorists. I could hardly believe my ears. That is very close to the definition of a police state.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 21px;">It may not seem a great hardship, to be detained at an airport and questioned. But anyone who has had experience of interrogation will tell you that a lot can happen in nine hours, and the psychological stress is intense.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 21px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 21px;">This is supposed to be a free country. It is shocking that a citizen can be held and interrogated when there is no evidence that he or she is engaged in acts of terrorism - and in the case of David Miranda, the Brazilian partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, there was none.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">We are now being told that Mr Miranda, was not an innocent citizen but a "mule" carrying security sensitive material on behalf of the Guardian newspaper. What a ridiculous concept: to equate journalism with drug trafficking! It is also said that he was "uncooperative" and "asked for his own lawyer". Good for him.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">No free citizen should be forced to co-operate with police going on a blatant fishing expedition, as even the Labour Peer Lord Falconer - who was Lord Chancellor in the government that passed the Terrorism Act 2000 - made clear yesterday. What we are seeing now looks very like a campaign of intimidation of the press.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">What point was there in sending Britain's top civil servant, Sir Jeremy Heywood, to witness the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, destroying computer hard disks containing material which had already been duplicated and lodged in the 'cloud'? There was none - except to make the point that newspaper editors are now targets of the state apparatus. It was sinister theatre. A warning that editors are in the judicial firing line.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The disks contained material leaked by the ex-CIA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, who has revealed in exquisite detail the methods and the manner of internet surveillance by the NSA and our own GCHQ. The state has acquired the power, which is technically illegal under the US constitution, to monitor telephone records from mobile phone companies like Verison. Internet giants like Google and Facebook have been collecting data under a secret surveillance programme called Prism and allowing access to spooks.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The UK government's monitoring station, GCHQ in Cheltenham has been tapping into the fibre optic cables that carry global communications in and out of the country and sharing the data with the NSA in the US. This allows the National Security Agency to get round America's privacy laws because it can say it has not been directly involved in accessing the emails of US citizens. A programme called XKeyscore boasts of having accessed 42 billion records during a one month period in 2012.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Now, I am an old analogue hack who finds all this baffling. I can scarcely get my own computer to work, let alone understand the countless ways in which the digital age has turned into an Orwellian dystopia. Technology changes so fast that the techniques identified by Snowden, (now holed up in Russia hoping to avoid the 35 years handed out to US army whistleblower Bradley Manning yesterday) are probably already obsolete.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Snowden may even have misunderstood the reach of the technology he was using as a relatively lowly CIA operative. He boasted that from his own desk he could monitor the emails of the President of the United States by filling in a simple online form. That has been challenged by others in the techy world.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">But we know from the reaction of the state agencies that much of what he has claimed is going on, is going on. There have been no categorical denials, though the internet companies insist they have acted within the law. President Obama has said that there is a balance to be struck between security and privacy - in other words, watch your back. Governments now employ some of the best computer hackers in the world, and they know how to know everything.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The paralegal website, Groklaw, announced this week that it was closing down because it could no longer guarantee the anonymity of its contributors. Lavabit, the encryption site used by many journalist has also shut up shop after 10 years because its founder, Ladar Levison said email can no longer be trusted.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Journalism is changing as a result. Investigative journalists are now being advised not to use email, social networking sites or even the phone, but to rely on face to face meetings and hand-written notes. This is something the new generation of digital journalists finds hard to get their heads around. They are used to doing almost all of their work on line, using twitter feeds, email and countless informal networks often based on Facebook.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">But it is now clear that - as gmail admitted last week - none of this is private. All of it is potentially under the scrutiny of the surveillance state. Nothing is secure, not even encrypted messages, which can be held by the NSA/GCHQ almost indefinitely and subjected to sophisticated methods of de-encryption. Indeed, encryption is tantamount to an admission of guilt to these people,</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">And how convenient, that the new media is shutting up shop, just as the old paper press is in financial crisis. Having extinguished privacy on the internet, the surveillance state is now screwing down the print media. The intimidation of journalists at airports is surely intended to prevent them transferring information physically without using email, Facebook, or any other compromised internet based mediums of communication.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">I said in a column last month that the surveillance state had opened a digital window into our souls. Now it is reaching through it.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-75329906925257863022013-08-12T11:12:00.003+01:002013-08-12T11:12:29.258+01:00Road to Referendum. Road to Referendum, the TV documentary. To be shown on ITV, 19th August 2013 at 10.30pm. Repeated, STV same night, 11.30. <br />
<br />
This is condensed version of the three part series, presented by me, shown in Scotland in June. <br />
<br />
Meanwhile: "Road to Referendum", my account of the national question since the Middle Ages, published by Cargo is available in bookshops near you in a bewildering range of prices. .iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-49258316197129617572013-08-12T11:05:00.000+01:002013-08-12T11:05:02.137+01:00We need more immigration, not less.
<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;">from Sunday Herald, 10/8/13</span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;">Suddenly,
everyone's doing it. Following the royal baby. and the news that
Edinburgh Zoo's giant panda, Tian Tian, may be pregnant, we hear
that the birth rate in the UK is at its highest rate since 1972,
according to the Office for National Statistics. It's official:
we're bonking for Britain.</span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And
for Scotland - at least a little. For the astonishing news is that
Scotland's population is now higher than it has EVER been : 5,31
million - 14,000 more than the previous peak recorded in 1974.
Yet only a decade ago, we were being told that Scotland was dying
out, as the population dwindled to less than 5 million. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Back
in 2003, the Registrar General forecast that, by 2017, there would
only be 4.84m Scots. The workforce would fall by nearly 10%; the
number of under-sixteens by 80% while the number of Scottish
pensioners would increase by 25%. This was called the Demographic
Time Bomb, and we were told that public finances would be destroyed
by the greyquake.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">As
recently as 2005, the First Minister of the day, Jack McConnell, was
desperately looking for ways to reverse what looked like a terminal
decline in Scottish population. And meeting resistance from
Westminster for his plans to increase immigration by, for example,
allowing foreign students to remain in Scotland after graduation. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Professor
Robert Wright of Stirling University, dismissed the Scottish
Executive's measures as too little too late: "The demographic
problem in Scotland is very, very serious," he gloomed. "The
government is very näive to believe this problem can be solved by
trying to retain a small number of foreign students."</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Well,
it seems that the problem was not quite as serious as supposed, and
that under their duvets, Scots were taking matters into their own
hands, as it were. Perhaps, with diminishing incomes, people have
turned to sex as a low-cost recreational activity. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But
more important than the increase in the birth rate in recent years
(it actually dipped last year) has been the decline in the death
rate. Thanks to remarkable work by the NHS, combatting heart disease
and cancer, Scots are not popping their clogs as they were even ten
years ago. Measures like free personal care and the smoking ban in
2005 have had a remarkable impact on the health of Scots. People are
drinking less, taking few drugs and some of us are even exercising.
</span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">However,
this most remarkable demographic turnarounds in Scottish history
could not have been achieved without another significant factor:
increased immigration. Not only are more people coming to
Scotland, they are having larger families when they get here. And
this is a UK phenomenon - which takes us into rather murky waters.</span></span></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span>
<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For,
as soon as they hear that immigration is boosting the population,
some people start to wonder if the demographic time bomb wasn't such
a bad thing after all. The Daily Mail view is that "migrants"
are not only flooding Britain, taking our jobs and houses, but their
large families are swamping 'our culture'. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
UK government has responded to this by promising to cut immigration
by a factor of ten, and has been sending poster vans round London
boroughs warning immigrants to "Go Home". This is
primarily directed at illegal immigrants, but aas a former
commissioner for racial equality, Lord Ouseley, pointed out, all
immigrants find this language offensive.</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Labour
has also been turning against immigration. Gordon Brown's
confrontation with Labour voter Gillian Duffy in Rochdale during the
2010 general election campaign has seared the Labour psyche. Ed
Miliband, the new leader, says "Labour was wrong to dismiss
peoples' concerns over immigration".</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But
the truth is that, for all our sakes, we need more immigration not
less. There really is no other way of ensuring that, in future, we
have a large enough working-age population to pay the taxes that fund
public services. Moreover, there is a lot of evidence that
immigration makes communities more vibrant and creative, as cultures
meld and fuse into new forms of music, dress, ideas. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">London
has become a world city largely because of its embrace of cultural
diversity, as we saw most clearly at the 1012 Olympics. And while we
may resent the way that the metropolis dominates economic and
cultural life in the UK, there is one very obvious way in which we
could start to emulate London: open borders. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Scotland,
as the former BBC Director General,Greg Dyke might have put it, is
"hideously white". It is the first thing people notice
getting off the train from London. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;">There
is a very hard working and well-integrated asian population in
Scotland, but afro-caribbean immigration stopped at the border long
since. Instead, the majority of immigration to Scotland is white,
typically from Poland and the Baltic states. </span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This
may be one reason why there is so little apparent animosity towards
asylum seekers compared to the South of England. There, the United
Kingdom Independence Party has legitimised attitudes that used to be
associated with the far Right and the BNP. Nigel Farage's party
wants immigration to cease for five years - a policy that, if it were
possible, would be economically disastrous. It would also be
incompatible with membership of the European Union - which doesn't
bother Ukip, since it wants to leave the EU anyway. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Like
Europe, immigration has become one of those touchstone issues that
defines the divergence in political culture between Scottish and
England. In the south east of England, and on the Conservative
benches in Westminster, there is now undisguised opposition to
immigration; whereas in Scotland, the issue scarcely registers on the
list of voter concerns. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Some
have argued that Scottish racism is only 'underground' and that Scots
are just as hostile to mass immigration. But the evidence for this
is hard to find, since Scots vote overwhelmingly for parties that are
traditionally supportive of immigration. Indeed, the most successful
party in Holyrood, the Scottish National Party, is one of the few
nationalist parties in the world that that campaigns for greater
immigration. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And
there are historical reason why this should be the case. Scots have
rarely felt threatened by immigrants. Since the Middle Ages, Scots
have been migrating to other European countries in huge numbers. Our
greatest export has always been our people, which makes it difficult
to feel animosity towards incomers here. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Moreover,
Scots had a subordinate, 'subaltern' role in the British Empire, and
didn't indulge in that sense of effortless racial superiority that
defined the English upper classes. The SNP does not have cultural or
racial superiority writtin into its DNA - if only because Scots have
never had anything to feel very superior about. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<br />
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I'm
not saying that Scotland is immune to racism - no country is. All I
am saying is that it is not a defining political issue in Scotland in
the way it is becoming south of the border. We have a utilitarian
attitude to migrants - that if they come here to work and be part of
the community they are more than welcome. And, come to think of
it, that's one of the things makes me rather proud to live here</span></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-after: auto; page-break-before: auto; page-break-inside: auto;">
<span style="color: black;"> </span>
</div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-68940932095997391012013-06-17T13:39:00.000+01:002013-06-17T13:40:04.055+01:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span>From Sunday Herald, 16/6/13<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">I don't know about the Scottish cringe, but I found Thursday's Edinburgh Question Time toe-curling. It was a nightmare version of the referendum campaign, complete with an omni-rant from George Galloway, the Respect MP, forming a devil's alliance with the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage - a demented glove-puppet - to claim, mendaciously, that the latter had been the victim of ugly anti-English behaviour when he last appeared in Scotland. </span> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">I felt some sympathy for the journalist Lesley Riddoch, trying confusedly to make a moderate non-party case for voting Yes against those two unionist foghorns. The SNP Westminster leader, Angus Robertson, made the cardinal error of attacking the programme for bias. This never works because it looks like an attack on David Dimbleby, who is of course a national institution. Robertson may have had a case since he was outnumbered three to one, but in these situations you just have to suck it up because whingeing antagonises viewers.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Having worked on BBC programmes like Question Time I'm sure there was no political bias intended by the producers. It doesn't work that way. They just wanted a good old confrontation, a rammy, and because it was Scotland they knew they could get away with it. If it had been Question Time the week before, say, the Eastleigh by-election in Hampshire, rather than Donside in Aberdeen, they wouldn't have dared pack the panel with eccentrics and nationalists representing constituencies in another country.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">But better get used to this, because I suspect the QT spat is what next year's referendum campaign will be like, only on a larger scale. The SNP are wrong to assume that they will get favourable treatment from the broadcasters in 2014. The 'story' of the referendum will be nationalists trying to break up Britain and setting Scot against English. We have seen nothing yet.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The BBC generally takes its editorial agenda from the press, and the UK press in the run up to the referendum will be ferocious. The Scottish press is already intensely hostile to independence so imagine how the Sun and the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph will cover the referendum for their predominantly English readers? They will portray the SNP and the Yes campaign as anti-English bigots and grasping splitters.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Even the liberal Guardian presented last month's confrontation between Scottish anti-racism demonstrators and Nigel Farage in Edinburgh's Royal Mile as a "battle of nationalists", suggesting a moral equivalence between Ukip and the SNP. There will be many more such confrontations engineered in the run up to September 2014. Alex Salmond will be portrayed, inaccurately, as a liberal version of the French nationalists, Jean Marie Le Pen. The SNP will be compared with ethnic nationalist parties like the True Finns.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">There will be lots of boring and balanced BBC Scotland programmes on late at night that no one will watch, and then a series of dramatic UK-led prime time debates chaired by David Dimbleby and Jeremy Paxman which will define the campaign. It will be about acrimonious divorce rather than the highly nuanced and consensual separation proposed by Yes Scotland. Television doesn't deal in nuance.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">And anyway, from an English point of view, the story IS about the break up of Britain. How else can they be expected to understand it? It's no use the Yes campaign complaining that they don't want to set up border posts or victimise English people and that they want to keep the Queen and the pound. It will be entirely natural for the fifty five million people who do not live in Scotland to feel a sense of rejection when they hear that Scotland might vote to leave the UK, taking North Sea oil with them.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">There will be lots of "vox pops", those supposedly random but highly selective interviews with citizens of the English street, which will no doubt reveal a well of antagonism towards Scots over things like free personal care and free tuition fees being paid for by English taxes. These attitudes have already been exposed in research conducted by the Institute for Public Policy Research, IPPR, in its report last year, "The Dog that Finally Barked", which noted growing hostility towards Scots.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Holyrood policies like tuition fees are not paid for by English taxpayers, but out of the fixed bloc grant set by the Barnett Formula. Free care has to be financed by economies elswhere in the Scottish budget. But try explaining that to a working class undergraduate in Brentford who is racking up debts at the rate in excess of £9,000 a year in order to get a degree that probably won't get him a decent job. Or to English families selling granny's home to finance her nursing care.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">I felt every sympathy with the bright young woman in the Question Time audience who expressed her dismay at the inability of either side to address the real issues in the referendum. But sitting next to her was a misguided young man who seemed to believe that Scottish people were routinely victimised when they travel to England. Guess who David Dimbleby chose to focus on? That young man and those like him, will be pursued by UK newspapers and his views relayed to English readers.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The portrayal of the Scottish debate as divisive and essentially about ethnic chauvinism will be encouraged by Scottish politicians like the Scottish Conservative leader, Ruth Davidson and Labour's Anas Sarwar, who recently described Scotland as a "dictatorship". Figures like the former President of the Scottish Law Society, Ian Smart, will no doubt be asked to elaborate on his view that Scotland may "turn on the Poles and pakis" after independence.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Many Scottish voters will be horrified by what they see of themselves refracted through the prism of a hostile London media. They don't want to be accused of breaking up anything, let alone hating English people and foreigners, and many will simply turn away from the whole debate in disgust.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">What can the Yes campaign do about this? Not a lot. I have argued before that the Scottish government could try to convene a new cross party constitutional convention to build a consensus for post referendum Scotland. But that isn't going to happen because it would look like defeatism by the SNP, and anyway the other parties wouldn't participate. Labour wants a convention after the referendum - a pointless exercise which will be ignored by Westminster after a No vote.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">But one bright note: the Question Time audience sounded more intelligent than the politicians, and since they were all 16 and 17 year olds, made a pretty strong case for lowering the voting age for all elections. I'd trust them a lot more, certainly, than the middle aged white men on the panel. </span></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-73076988463555235552013-06-14T12:42:00.001+01:002013-06-14T12:42:31.775+01:00Low pay is a cause of stagnation, not a consequence of it. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Another 'here's tae us' press release from the Scottish Government on jobs. “The employment rate is now higher in Scotland than in the other four nations of the UK”, it proclaims, “whilst the unemployment is now lower than in any of the four nations of the UK”. Leave aside whether there are four nations in the Union, the last time I looked there were only two. Unemployment in Scotland is indeed down 7.000, which is indeed remarkable given the sluggish recovery and the shake-out of jobs in the hight street.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Funny, though, how it's always Westminster's fault when unemployment goes up, but when it goes down down it is thanks to the wisdom of the SNP government. That's politics of course. Governments always try to own good news and disown bad. And it's hard to argue with figures showing that more than 2.5 million Scots are now in employment, which means that nearly 50,000 jobs have been in the last quarter alone.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">However, there is a dark side to this good news story of happy Scots toddling off to work in unprecedented numbers. They may be earning, but they're not spending. An inconvenient statistic this week revealed that that retail sales in Scotland have not been recovering in the way they have been in the rest of the UK. The difference is quite dramatic. As the Herald reported yesterday, the total value of retail sales was up 0.8% last month, year on year, as against 3.4% in the UK.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Retailers always talk about this in terms of “consumer confidence” as if people in Scotland are wandering around in a state of dismal depression at the weather and keeping their purses tightly shut out of spite. The Scottish Retail Consortium says that “in terms of consumer confidence, London is certainly weathering the difficult economic conditions better than elsewhere in the UK”. Well, yes, it would do, since that's where all the money is. Look at London house prices which are rising dramatically as they fall elsewhere.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">There is a very obvious reason why people outside the metropolis are spending less: they are earning less. The Institute for Fiscal Studies confirmed yesterday that we have lived through the deepest and longest squeeze on earnings in a century. Far worse than the 1990 recession or even the 1930s. Real earnings are 15% lower today than they would have been had the banking crisis not wrecked the British economy after 2007. It's the biggest five year fall in earnings in history, according to the IFS. One in three workers has suffered a cut or freeze in their pay packets in real terms since 2010.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">We all know what has been happening. Many workers are too scared to ask for pay increases because they fear for their jobs. Others have been hired on iniquitous zero hours contracts with no security and minimum wages. But, it's not all exploitation and coercion. There is evidence that many employers have tried to hang on to as many workers as possible and have cut hours to keep staff. There's evidence too that many workers have voluntarily accepted lower pay or gone part time in order to help the companies they work for stay in business through the longest recession since the 1930s.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It is surely better for people to be in work than to be languishing on the dole, even if there is a temporary dip in earnings. The Scottish government is right to boast that youth unemployment has fallen significantly from around 25% to 15% in eighteen months partly through its job boosting measures on modern apprenticeships and training. There is nothing worse for young people than to start your working life on benefits and just about any kind of work is better than none.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Moreover, a temporary reduction in pay levels can sometimes be beneficial. In Germany, workers accepted reductions in wages a decade ago and are in more secure jobs today as a result. However, there is an assumption among too many British businessmen and women that poor wages are a good thing in themselves. We heard this again yesterday from the former trade minister, Lord Digby Jones, arguing that low earnings for workers would lead to increased investment by employers.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Well, it can do so, but there is no necessary connection between low pay and productive investment. Indeed, the IFS confirmed yesterday that British industrial productivity, unlike Germany's, has collapsed. Not only are we employing people on low wages, they are producing a lot less as well. A low wage economy isn't a firm foundation for recovery, it is a recipe for stagnation.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Germany used its pay pause to retool after national reunification and has become the world's leading manufacturing nation as a result. In Britain by contrast we have continued to use out-dated plant and obsolete methods and are making inferior products. This is why there has been no export-led recovery in Britain despite the pound being devalued by 25%. British exports may be cheaper than ever, but that's not much good if no one actually wants to buy them. And domestic demand – that's all our wages - has fallen by a staggering £52bn a year since 2008.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The Scottish government could do well to consider the dangers of the low pay/low investment cycle. To hear Alex Salmond, you could be forgiven for believing that the only route to industrial recovery in Scotland is through cuts in business taxes like corporation tax. But there is precious little scope for that in Scotland, now that the UK's corporation taxes are being cut to 20%.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Scotland, and the SNP, are still suffering a hangover from the banking bubble which went pop five years ago. With two of the biggest banks in the world, RBS and HBOS, Scotland was supposed to become a neo-liberal Celtic tiger, a haven of funny money capitalism. Financial services still account for 100,000 jobs and 7% of Scottish GDP, but that is no longer a possible future even if it were morally acceptable.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Scotland has to reconnect with its manufacturing past. Scotland was one of the most advanced industrial civilisations in the world a century ago, a cradle of the industrial revolution. There was nothing inevitable about Scotland's industrial collapse – it was the result of economic policies that allowed Britain to become grossly over centralised in the South East of England.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">And it's still happening, with the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, launching his “Vision for 2020” this week, demanding even more national wealth being poured into the infrastructure of the metropolis, in order to make one of the most congested regions on the planet even more congested.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Whatever happens in the Scottish independence referendum, the priority has to be preventing this relentless southern vortex of wealth and power from sucking the economic life out of Scotland and turning this country into a tartan theme park. Scots may be unconvinced about the merits of formal independence, but there is a greater understanding today about the causes of Scotland's decline than ever before, and a greater determination to reverse it. That should be the top line on the manifesto of every party in Scotland in 2014.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-59212246112111630242013-06-09T13:02:00.000+01:002013-06-09T13:53:34.953+01:00Road to Referendum: the book and the film. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">My documentary series on the national question <a href="http://player.stv.tv/programmes/road-referendum/2013-06-04-2000/">"Road to Referendum"</a>, continues this week with part 2 on Tuesday at 8.00pm on STV. See the stars of the poll tax era - and I mean stars - as we revisit the 80s and Thatcherism. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> Also, Part 1 is repeated tonight at 7.00 on STV for those who missed it through technical difficulties. This tells the extraordinary story of how Scotland went from being at the heart of the Union in 1945 to a referendum on independence in 2014. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I have also written a book of the same name - <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Road-Referendum-Iain-Macwhirter/dp/1908885211">Road to Referendum</a> - which is launched at the Aye Write book festival in Glasgow on 17th June published by <a href="http://www.cargopublishing.com/">Cargo Press.</a> This charts the history of the national question in Scotland since the Middle Ages, through the age of Empire - when Scots fought Britain's wars and ran much of its colonial business - to the present existential crisis of British unionism. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Reviews of "Road to Referendum":</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;">"A truly important book, particularly at this moment. It offers a huge sweep of history and deals with recent Scottish politics in formidable, but never tedious detail". --Andrew Marr</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br style="background-color: white;" /><span style="background-color: white;">"Iain Macwhirter is shrewd, insightful and with few rivals in the business of understanding - and explaining - the changing politics of Scotland". --Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br style="background-color: white;" /><span style="background-color: white;">"Iain Macwhirter offers a highly readable and personal account of Scottish history drawing on wide reading and a career during which he has followed these debates more closely and consistently than any other journalist. He enlivens old stories with new perspectives, challenges established wisdom and raises awkward questions for protagonists and antagonists in equal measure on either side of today's debate". --Professor James Mitchell, University of Edinburgh</span></span><br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">---</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">This extract from my book was published in the <a href="http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/columnists/road-to-referendum.21228296">Sunday Herald 2/6/13.</a></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The most extraordinary thing about Scotland's independence referendum next year is that it is happening at all. We could be only eighteen months away from the dissolution of one of the most successful political unions in history: the United Kingdom - a country whose empire once dominated the planet. Yet, Scotland has no real history or tradition of political nationalism, at least not on the scale of Ireland or any of the former British colonies that sought independence in the 1950s and 60s.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">And there's a very good reason for this. Scots have not rebelled against the UK because, for most of the last 300 years, Scots have been among its most enthusiastic supporters. They helped to create it after 1707 along with the currency union based on sterling. The Bank of England was even founded by a Scot, William Paterson. Which makes it offensive to hear unionists like the Chancellor, George Osborne, threaten to deny Scotland the use of its own currency. It's like denying the pound and the Bank of England to Yorkshire.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">When Scotland gave up its parliament in 1707, it wasn't quite the corrupt annexation that has been presented in Jacobite lore, or the ambiguous poetry of Robert Burns. Nor was it the last gasp of a nation impoverished by the Darien disaster, which is how it tends to be presented in some school history books. The Treaty of Union was essentially about security: about ending three hundred years of debilitating warfare between Scotland and England, that had continued, and even intensified, after the Union of the Crowns in 1603 which was supposed to have ended this historic enmity.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">King Edward's armies may never have conquered Scotland and extinguished Scottish nationhood, but Oliver Cromwell's roundheads nearly did after 1650. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and the turbulent Stuart Restoration that followed, left Scotland exhausted physically, economically and spiritually. It has been estimated that 100,000 Scots died in these terrible conflicts, in a population of little more than 1 million.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Economic and political union was seen by its advocates as a way of resolving this conflict by creating a new economic and political entity, Great Britain - rather as the European Union was seen as a way of ending conflict between France and Germany. And it worked - even though, crucially, Scotland and England remained nations with their identities intact. The abortive '45 Rebellion was the last battle ever fought on British soil.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">England didn't move the Treaty out of altruism, of course. It wanted the security of the Hanoverian succession, and also needed Scottish taxes and Scottish men to fight its battles with France. Scotland's parliament was folded into Westminster with indecent haste. However, losing a parliament was not considered as great a loss in 1707 as it would be today. Scotland was not a democracy at the start of the 18<sup>th</sup> Century – it was more like a theocracy, dominated by the Presbyterian Kirk.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The old Scottish parliament before 1707 was more like a chamber of commerce for the nobles, lairds and burgesses - people of property. Yes, 'a parcel o' rogues', were shamelessly bribed by Queen Anne's agents into voting for the Treaty of Union. And yes, many Scots did riot against the 1707 union, especially when they discovered that they were expected to pay the cost of it through an array of new taxes, like the hated Malt Tax on alcoholic beverage. But crucially the Presbyterian Kirk accepted the deal because the Acts of Union left it in sole charge of its own religious turf, and for most Scots this was more important than the location of a parliament in which they had no say.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Scottish merchants and money lenders got what they wanted: access to the lucrative markets created by the British Empire. By the 1750s, they had begun to make good money out of tobacco, the slave plantations of Jamaica and the cotton trade, which helped fuel Scotland's mills in the early industrial revolution. Meanwhile many lower class Scots, some of whom had fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie against Cumberland's red coats in the '45, were enlisted into the British army and became the shock troops of the British Empire.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Scotland provided an “inexhaustible treasury of men”, according to one contemporary account. From Quebec to Balaclava; from the Indian Mutiny to the First World War, it was generally the Scots who went over the top first, suffering the worst casualties as a result. Their exploits were glorified in epic Victorian paintings like the Thin Red Line and Scotland Forever. These were the blockbuster films of their day and lent a mystique and celebrity to the Scottish soldier which exists to this day in plays like Black Watch.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Scots saw themselves as partners in the Empire - junior ones, but partners nevertheless. The Scots fought Britain's wars, kept its books, ran its colonial administrations, evangelised the heathens. By the mid 19<sup>th</sup> Century, Scots were flattering themselves that they were the best bit of the Empire – the hardy ones who did the work, handled the natives and even lent a moral dimension through the work of Scots missionaries like David Livingstone.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Back home, the fantasy image of the heroic Highlander, created by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, captivated Victorian England and helped turn Scotland into a deer-hunting theme park for the English upper classes. They were often clad in tartans invented by the Highland Society of London, and wearing the short kilt or philabeg, which was popularised, if not created, by an Englishman, Thomas Rawlinson, and bore little relation to the great plaid worn by true Highlanders. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Scots rather liked being regarded by the English as fearless warriors, canny entrepreneurs and prudent bankers. Being a patriotic Scot, and celebrating Wallace and Bruce, became a way of expressing Britishness in Scotland. The mighty Wallace monument outside Stirling was built in the 1860s. Scotland became a hub of the British industrial revolution, thanks to Watt and his steam engine. By the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> Century Scotland was arguably the most technologically advanced country in the world after England and Glasgow called itself the Second City of the British Empire.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Working class Scots didn't get much change out of it however – Edinburgh's slums in the 19<sup>th</sup> Century were almost as bad as Calcutta's. Scots, many cleared off their ancestral lands by former clan chiefs, were turned into industrial wage slaves. But their patriotism, and their presbyterian religion, consoled many lowlanders, and seemed to immunise Scotland from the political nationalism that swept Ireland and Europe in the 19<sup>th</sup> Century. 1848 may have been the Springtime for Nations on the continent, but it was still winter in Scotland. Scots continued to respond to the call of the British Empire in 1914, enlisting in prodigious numbers and dying disproportionately in the trenches.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">World War Two is often called the “High Noon” of the Union, as Scottish and English soldiers fought to defeat fascism. And they fought side by side again afterwards to create the welfare state, a new post-imperial social contract, defined by the NHS, sponsored by the 1945 Labour government. It really did look like a land fit for heroes in the 50s, as the slums were cleared, Scottish wages tripled and infant mortality became a thing of the past. Scots probably never felt more British than they did in the early 60s, as popular culture and television made the border seem irrelevant</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Scottish nationalism was certainly irrelevant in post war Scotland. The SNP, created in 1934, barely registered in elections until 1967 when Winnie Ewing won the safe Labour seat of Hamilton. That, plus the discovery of Scottish oil, launched the wave of constitutional innovation that ultimately led to the creation of the Scottish parliament in 1999. Though it was Margaret Thatcher, and her poll tax, who finally convinced Scots that they needed to restore their parliament, essentially as a defence against Tory governments in Westminster.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">But this was very much Labour's Scottish parliament, the SNP having boycotted the cross-party Scottish Constitutional Convention that devised it. Holyrood was delivered on the back of the 1997 UK Labour landslide as a subordinate, devolved parliament within the UK. In the early years, it looked as if the Scottish parliament really had “killed nationalism stone dead” as the former Labour Shadow Scottish Secretary, George Robertson had forecast in 1996. As late as 2003, the SNP's support was in steep decline in the Scottish parliamentary elections.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">It was only the return of the 'absentee landlord' Alex Salmond from voluntary exile in Westminster that allowed the SNP to crawl to power in 2007 over the ruins of the Scottish Labour Party, whose period in office had been marked by scandals and resignations. Scots were so relieved at the SNP's performance that they re-elected Salmond with a landslide in 2011, making the referendum inevitable. The Scottish parliament had thus been the incubator, for the first time, of a genuine political nationalism in Scotland.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">However, it is important to stress that most Scots were not voting for independence in 2011, but for a better devolution. Scottish voters have told opinion pollsters repeatedly over the last thirty years that they do not want to leave the UK, but want a stronger, essentially federal parliament with a full range of economic powers, but leaving policy on defence and foreign affairs with Westminster. The most recent confirmation came in the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey in January 2013. In this most exhaustive independent survey of Scottish opinion, two thirds, 67% said either that the Scottish parliament should take all decisions for Scotland (35%) or that it should make all decisions apart from defence and foreign affairs (32%). Yet, this is the one option Scots are not allowed to choose in the 2014 referendum.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">It isn't hard to understand why so many Scots are confused and irritated about the referendum in September 2014. They will be presented with a choice of unacceptable alternatives - independence or the status quo – in a referendum they never really asked for. Moreover, Alex Salmond, in trying to tailor his message to mainstream Scottish opinion has confused matters by talking of a new 'social union' in which Scotland would keep the Queen the pound, Nato bases, UK pensions etc..</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">So, on the one hand,we have the Scottish National Party offering a form of ersatz autonomy, which leaves so much power with Westminster that it is hard to call it independence. On the other we have the reactionary unionism of Labour's MPs in Westminster, who won't even allow their own Scottish leader, Johann Lamont, the freedom to contemplate more powers for Holyrood, as was demonstrated by their rubbishing of her tentative tax proposals in March.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Scots are increasingly confident that they could become a viable independent country if they really wanted. The great change in the Holyrood years has been the increasing acceptance by both sides of the independence debate that Scotland, with its burgeoning oil industry, its financial services, its universities, renewable energy resources etc, has the means to become an independent state just like Denmark of Norway. Scotland increasingly resembles a Nordic country in terms of economic and political culture. This is apparent in the continuing commitment in Scotland to collective provision expressed in policies like elderly care to student fees and opposition to the commercialisation of the NHS.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">However, it is understandable that the Scots should not want to discard the UK because they helped build it, even if it is looking unfit for purpose. With Conservative-led government back in Westminster, the divergence of political culture between Scotland and England is becoming more pronounced. “Tory” is still a four letter word in Scotland. Scots can no longer be confident even of remaining in the European Union now that the UK Conservatives are committed to an in/out referendum.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The worst that could happen in 2014 is an inconclusive and bad tempered referendum campaign after which a No vote is taken by Westminster as a sign that the Scottish question is no longer important. This is what happened after the 1979 referendum, which failed to meet the 40% rule. UK governments then allowed Scotland's manufacturing economy to be dismantled, while the UK balance of payments deficit was being financed by Scottish oil revenue.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">To avoid that fate, many Scots may be tempted to vote Yes in September 2014, even though they don't want independence. Others may vote No, even though they want a deeper form of devolution. The fate of Scotland may be decided by the frustrated middle who decline to make any choice at all. It would be the ultimate irony if Scotland left the UK through apathy.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-38817606428244594652013-06-08T12:32:00.004+01:002013-06-08T12:35:03.219+01:00Independence in the UK. What does it mean?<br />
<div id="article-abstract" style="clear: both; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; margin: 12px 0px 0px;">
<div style="font-family: Arial, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
from Herald 6/6/13</div>
</div>
<div class="body-content" style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px 0px 40px;">
<div id="videoHolder" style="margin: 0px;">
</div>
<div id="article-content" property="dc:description" style="clear: both; font-family: Arial, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px;">
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
The Herald-STV Road to Referendum documentary series was sabotaged by technical difficulties on Tuesday. Apparently 65% of viewers in Scotland were unable to watch the first 25 minutes of the first instalment of our three-part television history of the national question in Scotland since the war. Part one of Road to Referendum will now be shown on Sunday June 9th at 7pm on STV, and is available now on the STV website. My book of the same name is published this week by Cargo.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
And no, this wasn't a Unionist conspiracy to obliterate Scotland's history. ITV in England was also blanked out for two hours, the first time since the miners' strike, or so I was told. The only region that didn't get a blank screen was London, and they wouldn't have been watching anyway. But I'm pleased to say a version of Road to Referendum will be shown in England later this year.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
However, some have already made up their minds. It was a "60-minute advert for nationalism" according a headline in the Spectator magazine. Yet I defy anyone to view this unique collaboration between The Herald and STV as an exercise in nationalist propaganda. The first documentary is all about how the SNP was electorally insignificant as recently as the 1960s and could only register its existence by blowing up pillar boxes.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
The unsolved mystery of Scottish politics, which I explore further in my book, is why an independence referendum should be happening at all in a country which hasn't had a tradition of political nationalism until the day before yesterday – at least not since the Scottish wars of independence in the Middle Ages, which is where my investigation of the national question begins.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
Some Unionists believe a veil should be drawn over the history of Wallace and Bruce for fear of inciting hatred of the English. As if history itself is suspect. Yet 19th-century Unionists, like the Tory novelist, Sir Walter Scott, weren't in the least afraid of Scottish nationalist history – in fact, he invented a lot of it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
Scottish nationalism is unlike nationalist movements in other countries. This is not, and never has been, about national liberation in the conventional sense. Scots don't feel they are oppressed; rather, they feel they are being excluded from a unique multinational entity, the UK, that they helped create.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
</div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
When David Livingstone "discovered" the Victoria Falls in Central Africa (the locals had known about it for a few years) it never occurred to him that calling it after the Queen of England was in any way anti-Scottish. And Livingstone – probably the most famous Scot of the 19th century – was a Scottish patriot who recited Burns's A Man's a Man to bemused natives in the bush.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
Scottish history is a catalogue of contradictions. The Treaty of Union was itself a marriage of convenience between two countries who pledged to become one without having the remotest intention of actually doing so. In theory, both England and Scotland were extinguished in 1707 and replaced by a new country called Great Britain. But there was never any chance of that happening, not least because England found it unthinkable.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
So when the Yes-supporting businessman Jim McColl talked of "independence in the UK" this week, it wasn't just a constitutional oxymoron – he was expressing an important truth about Scottish history. A number of commentators affected shock and surprise at his contradictory declaration. How can Scotland be independent and in the United Kingdom at the same time? But it isn't as daft as it sounds. Indeed, the first time I heard the phrase "independence in the UK" it was uttered by Donald Dewar, the former Labour First Minister, back in 1988. Granted, he didn't use it very often. But for a while, independence in the UK was Labour policy in Scotland.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
The point Mr Dewar was making was that the United Kingdom is whatever its partners choose to make it. It is joint property, which is why the SNP is quite right to say that British institutions, like the Bank of England, are as much Scotland's as England's. You could argue that modern Scottish nationalism emerged 40 years ago, not because Scotland rejected the United Kingdom, but because England increasingly lost interest in it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
The most successful party in Scotland during most of the 20th century wasn't Labour but the Scottish Unionist Party, which only became the Conservative Party (SUP) in 1965. The SUP dominated elections in Scotland even during the Depression in the 1930s. This was because Scotland had been one of the hubs of the industrial revolution, a technologically-advanced country second only to England.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
But towards the end of the 1960s, not long after the Unionists became the Tories, Scots began to realise that the deal had changed. They were no longer partners in anything. Instead Scotland was becoming a provincial backwater, losing its industrial significance and falling off the map of an increasingly centralist British state based in, and captured by, London.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
After the abortive devolution referendum of 1979, Margaret Thatcher's recessions deepened the deindustrialisation of Scotland, while her poll tax violated Scotland's communitarian values. That was when the real breach occurred – and yet it wasn't the SNP that benefited from the demise of Scottish Unionism. The SNP was divided and largely irrelevant electorally in the 1980s. It was left to Labour to be the party that restored the Scottish Parliament after 300 years. Even then, the SNP made very little impact in the early years of devolution.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
It wasn't the Scottish National Party that made the Scottish Parliament, but Labour's Parliament that made the Scottish National Party. It was Labour's failure to deliver in the Scottish Parliament that let Alex Salmond form his minority government in 2007, a form of consensual governance that Scottish voters found extremely attractive, which is why they voted so massively for the SNP in 2011.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
This paradoxical history is one important reason why the Yes campaign is having an uphill struggle right now. It has tried to argue that it is leaving the UK and staying in it at the same time. This puzzles many voters. If it is saying that a better union is possible, why leave Britain to gain it? The SNP seems to be basing its argument for independence on how well Scotland is doing in the UK, which also undermines the case for departure. It has seized on this week's inward investment figures from Ernst and Young as confirmation that Scotland could stand on its own two feet, even though the inward investment has been to a Scotland that is still part of Britain.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 1.1em;">
The SNP's case is that Scotland needs the economic levers of power in particular business taxes, in order to thrive. But Scottish voters have yet to be convinced that it is necessary to leave the UK to achieve this, and hearing talk of independence in the UK makes them even more confused. I don't pretend that our documentaries and my book will make all things clear, and they certainly won't tell people how to vote in the referendum. But hopefully they will provoke debate – that's if they ever get transmitted.</div>
</div>
</div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-54383877174904113102013-05-20T14:36:00.000+01:002013-05-20T14:40:05.554+01:00Come back Arch Duke Franz - all is forgiven<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Wull ye no come back again, Arch Duke Franz of Bavaria? The Kirk dropped a constitutional bombshell into the referendum campaign last week by suggesting that Scottish monarchs should be crowned in Scotland after independence. The last king to have been so invested was Charles 11 in 1651, who was of course a Catholic. Direct in line through the Jacobite succession today is one Franz of Bavaria, an amiable octogenarian who may not fully appreciate that he is King over the Water.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Restoration didn't end too well for the Presbyterians back in the day. It led to the “Killing Time” of the 1680s - when thumbscrews and the gallows were the penalties Presbyterians suffered for holding their open-air 'conventicles'. The Act of Settlement in 1701 prevented Catholics from becoming monarchs ever again, and we are still signed up to that – much to the frustration of Alex Salmond who has been trying to get the Act changed so that it no longer discriminates against Catholics.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Which might be why the Kirk also called last week for the Church of Scotland to be called the National Church of Scotland. If the Jacobites got their hands back on the throne, Franz might be minded to bring back thumbscrews for Protestants. And then invade England.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">What does all this mean? Well, almost nothing, since no one seriously takes issue with the Hanoverian succession these days, and few of us are members of any church. But it provided another perplexing constitutional issue for Scots to worry about as they await the referendum, or should that be referendoom, in September 2014. Like the threat that Scotland's bank notes may be taken away, as alleged by the UK Treasury's latest broadside against independence. Not content with oor Pandas, they will even take oor poonds.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Scottish pensions may be insecure too according to a shock report last week from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, which also dominated the front-pages. This warned that, under EU rules, unfunded pension liabilities cannot be held in funds that cross borders. Now, like me you probably haven't a clue what that means. All I know is that what I laughingly call my pension seems to be worth less every year, indeed every month. However, all this unfunded funding certainly sounds scary – which is the general idea.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Scottish government insists that there is nothing unusual in unfunded private pension liabilities being held in funds that cross borders. There is one apparently with Ireland. But I'm not going to pretend that I fully understand this, let alone the operation of the EU Pensions Directive. The underlying problem, as I understand it, is that the UK government has run up around £1 trillion in pension liabilities for public sector workers without putting any money aside to pay for it. I don't see how this becomes a uniquely Scottish problem after independence, but I couldn't guarantee that it wouldn't.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">It's the same with the national debt. We are told that Scotland will have to bear the “crippling” cost of up to £120BN taking a population share of the UK liabilities. But since the UK debt is £1.2 trillion I don't see how this is an independence issue. In fact, since Scotland would have access to North Sea oil assets, it would arguably be in a better position to service its debt than the rest of the UK, which has lost its AAA credit status . But then as the Cabinet Secretary, John Swinney, himself conceded in the leaked cabinet minute last year, there is no guarantee THAT the price of oil will not fall. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">There are no guarantees in life, we all know, except death and taxes - and referendum scares. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> It's not pretty, but Better Together's campaign against independence is proving to be highly effective in sowing seeds of doubt about almost every aspect of the policy. It has managed to coordinate a succession of issues - EU membership, monetary union, Nato, pensions - which the Scottish government tries to explain, but can't. This is not necessarily because it doesn't have any answers, but because in many cases no one does.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">To answer these questions about pensions the UK and Scottish governments would have to get together now and work out what transitional arrangements would be needed to secure pension rights after independence. That is actually what the accountants were calling for last week. But this is not going to happen for the very obvious reason that the UK Treasury doesn't want to appear to be smoothing the path the independence.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">But that's politics, after all, and the SNP JUST have to deal with it. Find some way of speaking over the heads of the media as they did in 2007 and 2011. But perhaps too, it should start moving the debate onto its own terrain. The trouble is that they have been left repeatedly on the back foot, responding to the scare agenda set for them by the Unionists. We have been promised a series of papers from the SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT on issues like pensions. We had the report of the Fiscal Commission last year which argued for monetary union . And there is to be a white paper in November. But by then the argument may be over, and lost. The iron law of rebuttal is that you have to kill stories in the first 24 hours if you don't want them to become fact.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Last week, the Treasury also warned, again, that Scots couldn't take for granted that it would be allowed to use the pound sterling after independence. The Scottish government wants to stay in the sterling zone [ ] so that Scots don't have to change money at the border. Now, it is inconceivable that monetary union would be rejected by the UK government, the Treasury or the Bank of England for the obvious reason that UK banks and businesses and individuals won't want to have to go to the trouble and expense of changing money EITHER WHENEVER THEY DEAL WITH SCOTLAND. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The threat however is that Scotland will not be allowed to use the pound sterling unless it accepts regulation and financial control from London. The Bank of England may want to control government borrowing in Scotland, interest rates and may even demand a say in Scottish taxation. The comparison is with European single currency zone, where delinquent members like Greece have been forced to accept draconian public spending cuts, privatisations of public assets, and all manner of impositions by the European Central Bankers, who take their lead from Germany.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">But Scotland is not like Greece. It's economy is not decades behind England, but level pegging, so there is no particular reason to expect a sovereign debt crisis HERE. However, if England really does want to play rough, and tries to refuse the pound, then perhaps Scotland should answer in kind. It could say, well, if you don't want a monetary union you won't be wanting Scotland's share of the national debt. After all, Ireland didn't pay when it left the UK. That £120bn could pay for a lot of Scottish bank notes. Perhaps instead of Churchill you could put Franz of Bavaria's mug shot on them? </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-75542715086758649162013-05-20T14:30:00.001+01:002013-05-20T14:44:47.855+01:00Brexit - But what happens to Scotland?<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
FROM SUNDAY HERALD<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">It seems only yesterday that everyone was talking about a "Grexit" - the forecast, made by most of the UK press, that Greece was about to leave the European Union because of the onerous bailout terms imposed by the EU and IMF. Now, suddenly, we are talking about the "Brexit" - the possibility, indeed probability, of a British exit from Europe when the current Lisbon Treaty comes up for negotiation in 2015.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Last week, three prominent Tory grandees - the former Chancellor, Lord Lawson, the former Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, and Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, called for British withdrawal from the European Union. The former Tory Scottish Secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind said they'd "hurled a hand-grenade into a small building". It certainly put a bomb under David Cameron's policy of promising to renegotiate the terms of British membership, and then putting the result to a referendum after the next general election. Tory backbenchers, emboldened by Lord Lawson and co. are demanding a firm commitment right away. Labour says it is opposed to a referendum now, but agrees on the need for reform, and is not ruling out its own referendum on independence from Europe.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Viewed from Scotland, where opposition to Europe is muted and where we have another referendum on our minds, this all seems more than a little surprising. Most Scots still want to stay in the EU, according to the latest Ipsos Mori poll, and only a third want out. But in England - especially the south - there has been a growing frustration with Europe that finally erupted two weeks ago in the English local elections, when UKIP - the party seeking withdrawal from the EU - won up to 25% of the vote. There is little doubt that many people in England feel that Europe is a "bureaucratic monstrosity" to use Lord Lawson's description, and that their democracy is being subverted by Brussels.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">But what exactly do they mean by this? When you ask eurosceptic Tory MPs they tend to reply with relatively trivial examples - compulsory seat belts for children under 12, regulations on food standards, health and hygiene. Those infamous straight bananas. But most of these relate to the terms under which the UK is a member of the Single European Market, where standardisation is necessary to ensure a level playing field for all trading nations.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Similarly, the social protections of the EU, like the working time directive, are intended to make the single market work fairly and prevent some countries seeking advantage by forcing their workers to spend longer at work. The "social Europe" as it is called is hardly onerous, and Britain anyway has an opt out from the 48hr working week.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Eurosceptics also talk of the Human Rights Act and claim that the failure to deport suspected terrorists like Abu Qatada has something to do with the European Union. This is completely wrong. The Human Rights Act is based on the European Convention on Human Rights which was set up by Winston Churchill after the Second World War to prevent totalitarianism returning to Europe.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">None of these, it seems to me, are reasons to go to war with Europe, and deny the benefits of the single market which has undoubtedly boosted prosperity. Trade within Europe has doubled since 1992, thanks to the abolition of tariffs and barriers to the free movement of goods and services in Europe.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The reason Lord Lawson has come out now and demanded withdrawal, appears to be to do with the future not of Britain as a whole but of the City of London. The EU is in the process of constructing a fiscal and banking union, as a result of the eurozone debt crisis. European central bankers have come to the conclusion that the only way to prevent any such recurrence of financial turmoil is to create a central European treasury with powers to regulate banks and to issue bonds backed by the entire EU rather than simply members states. This would prevent borrowing costs rising unsustainably as they did in Greece and Spain last year.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">To finance all this, and to police the banks, the EU wants to cap banker bonuses and to introduce a financial transactions tax - a so-called Tobin Tax - on the banks' activities. This money would go into an insurance fund to guarantee that, next time there is a banking crisis, the bailout is paid for by the banks not the tax payers. Many regard these measures as the very least that are necessary to get banking back onto some kind of stable and socially responsible footing.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">But the City of London is fiercely opposed to the transactions tax, which bankers fear will hit their business. They don't want to lose their bonuses either. They say that financial services is one of Britain's biggest earners and that Europe simply wants to cut British finance down to size. But it's a curious way to go about it, since a lot of the earnings of the City come from Europe and pulling out now would hand much of that over Frankfurt and Paris. Anyway, do we really want to leave Europe just to make life easier for delinquent institutions like Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Lord Lawson argues that Britain could become like Norway or Switzerland, both of whom are out of Europe. But Norway is a member of the single market and pays quite a lot of money for that privilege. It has to abide by all the rules about bananas and working times, without having any say in how they are framed. Switzerland is similarly bound by many of the conditions of membership in order to keep within the free trade area of the EU. The alternative is to have tariffs slapped on their agricultural exports to the European Union.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">America is opposed to British withdrawal from Europe, and President Obama made his views fully known to David Cameron before the PM's speech on Europe in January. This partly strategic - to do with geo-politics and a lingering fear of Russia. But it is also because a lot of American firms have located to Britain in order to service European markets, and they don't want to find that they are excluded from trade with Europe.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">David Cameron says that he wants to negotiate a change in Britain's relations with Europe rather than simply a withdrawal. But there seems little chance that any such negotiation will succeed. Europe is determined to introduce major financial reforms which will strengthen the EU at the centre, and reduce the fiscal liberties of members states. This is not going to be acceptable to Britain, Which means there is a very serious possibility hat Britain will leave the EU as we understand it.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Scotland has long benefited from Europe, not least from EU structural fund money, though this has reduced in recent years. Many electronics firms that set up in Scotland in the 1990s came because of the EU. The Scottish government say Europe has been directly responsible for over 60,000 jobs in the last decade. Scots also benefit from the social chapter regulations on maternity pay, working hours and the like.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The big question in the next year is what impact the impending Euro referendum has on the Scottish independence referendum. Unionists have attacked the SNP for risking Scotland's membership of the EU by becoming independent. But it looks just as likely that Scotland could find itself out of the EU by staying in the UK. </span></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-81104883199482901862013-05-20T14:22:00.003+01:002013-05-20T14:22:47.226+01:00Europe is a good thing. Honest.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"> It was typical of the Guardian to try to suggest some <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/may/17/nigel-farage-alex-salmond">equivalence</a> between Nigel Farrage's UKIP and Alex Salmond's Scottish National Party. At an editorial level the Guardian has always found it hard to understand that the SNP is not a nationalist party in the conventional sense and is not based on any concept of ethnic chauvinism. Don't they ever bother to read its election manifestos? </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"> The SNP is probably the left wing and most multicultural political party in Britain with any significant parliamentary representation in Britain. It was the first party to have a muslim MSP; it supports an open immigration policy; its external affairs spokesman is Hums I gave up trying to make this clear in pieces I have written for them in recent years, and I am not a member of the SNP and don't describe myself as a nationalists. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"> What metropolitan papers cannot quite understand is that the political culture is different in Scotland. The Radical Scotland demonstrators who barracked Farrage called him a racist and a homophobe. They were not attacking him for his nationality. It was convenient for him to present it this way, but it was nauseating to see papers like the Guardian echoing his English nationalist misrepresentation and giving prominence to the equally mendacious accusations by discredited figures like Lord George Foulkes that the SNP condones anti-English racism. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"> It is Labour that has been trying to foment racial antagonism recently. The most egregious example was the former Labour election candidate, Ian Smart's, claim that the SNP wanted to send home "Pakis and Poles". </span><span style="font-size: large;"> It is a matter of record that Labour First Ministers, both SNP and Labour, have been arguing for greater immigration to Scotland and against the policies of the UK government. Jack McConnell and Alex Salmond don't agree on many things, but they are at one on the need for Scotland to receive workers from abroad in order to revive the Scottish economy. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"> The SNP supports same sex marriage and wants to keep Scotland in Europe. </span><span style="font-size: large;">It's a measure of how attitudes to Europe have changed in Britain over the last twenty years, that anti-Europeans like Nigel Farrage of UKIP, who was barracked in an Edinburgh pub last week, are now regarded almost as members of the political mainstream. In England at least. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"> The term "eurosceptic" was originally coined to describe the minority of mainly Tory MPs in the early 1990s who opposed the Maastricht Treaty. But the term has become redundant because almost all Conservatives are now of that persuasion. Over 100 are so hostile, they voted against their own Prime Minister's Queens Speech last week because there wasn't an immediate referendum on withdrawal. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Britain, it seems, is on its way out.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> David Cameron has already promised an in out referendum after the next election. Labour and the Liberal Democrats also support a referendum if there are significant changes to Britain's relationship to Europe, which seem almost inevitable now. Ironically, the only party that doesn't seem to want to repatriate powers from Brussels is the SNP, which wants to take Scotland out of the UK but not the EU. It is almost impossible to find anyone in Britain who makes the positive case for European economic integration any more, now that the eurozone crisis has led to mass unemployment and falling living standards in countries like Spain and Greece</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Yet, for people of my generation, it is hard to regard the Europe as anything other than a huge advance in European civilisation. I can remember when it was impossible to travel to Eastern European countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Latvia. They were communist dictatorships, closed societies, where often impoverished populations lived in fear of the state and had no human rights. They were part of a military alliance which threatened the very security of the West. Now these countries are vibrant European democracies and pose no threat to anyone. This has happened in only twenty five years - the blink of an eye in historical terms.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Of course, eurosceptics say that this has more to do with Ryanair than the European Union. That these countries have become part of the European family simply because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the expansion of capitalism. Conservatives like the former MEP Daniel Hannon, say that Europe itself today poses a threat to democracy because of its bureaucratic institutions and its lack of respect for diversity among the 27 member states. But no one who recalls the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 could deny that Europe played a part in the democratization of Europe. It is not just a willingness to host stag and hen parties that gets you into the European Union.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Counties like Bulgaria and Romania had to liberalise their societies in order to apply for membership under the Copenhagen Criteria established by the Maastricht Treaty in 1993. To be eligible, countries must not only have market economies, they must also have democratic institutions that observe human rights and respect the rule of law. These aren't empty phrases. Applicants must demonstrate that they have a free press, trades unions, independent judges, secret ballots, local democracy. Some countries had to alter their constitutions. Romania, a state that had a poor record on human rights, had to recognise no fewer than 19 minorities and guarantee their political representation before it was allowed to join the EU.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">When I visited Latvia during the 2008 financial crash, the minority Russian population in Riga was living in fear of victimisation. They had been the scapegoats in the past when the economy got into difficulties. But not this time - because Latvia was trying to qualify for membership of the eurozone, and the political leaders on both sides of the ethnic divide refrained from blaming each other for rising unemployment and falling wages. Amazingly, Latvia got through its difficulties, has the fastest growth rate in Europe and is now the poster child of the IMF. But it was being part of Europe that made the difference.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">And the civilising influence of Europe didn't just start in the 1990s with Maastricht. People in Britain are mystified at the determination of countries like Spain and Greece to remain in the EU, despite having suffered internal devaluation, mass unemployment, a property crash and shrinking exports. Why didn't they just leave the EU, ditch the euro and devalue their currencies? Why remain under the heel of the European Central Bank?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">But you have to remember than as recently as the 1970s, both Greece and Spain were under the heel of fascist dictatorships. Spain was under the rule of Franco until 1975, and there was an attempted fascist coup as recently as 1981. These countries feel that being part of Europe has brought them into the modern age, and provided security against any reversion to totalitarianism. But not only that. These countries have been transformed by European trade and see no viable economic alternative to being part of the world's biggest trading bloc. The EU has a single market of 500 million people, a GDP worth $16 trillion and the highest standard of living in the world.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Ireland suffered one of the worst sovereign debt crises of any eurozone country. When its banks crashed in 2008, this small country bravely took full responsibility for the huge debts. It led to inflation, unemployment, and even the return of mass Irish emigration for the first time in a quarter of a century. Why did they stick with the euro and submit to austerity? </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"> Over a decade ago, I was in Dublin on the weekend the euro was introduced. I expected to find deep reservations among citizens of this proud and fiercely independent country about relinquishing economic sovereignty. After all, they'd fought a civil war to leave the United Kingdom - why would they voluntarily hand their national destiny to Brussels? But I found that there was genuine pride at the coming of the single currency. In the pubs and taxis, people were holding up their euro notes and coins as if they'd all won the lottery. Dubliners felt that finally they were now the equals of Britain, the equals of anyone in Europe. They were part of a great European movement and no longer backward, ex colonial appendages to the UK.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;"> Ireland benefited economically from Europe - initially from billions in aid under the structural fund, and then latterly from inward investment. American companies like Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Dell , Ebay, Google, IBM have located in Ireland to be part of Europe, to gain access to this huge free market. And they are still there, despite the banking crisis. When I went back to Dublin in 2008 at the height of the banking crash, I found civil servants accepting 30% reductions in pay with scarcely a murmur. There was no clamour to leave the euro, no resentment at the ECB and Brussels, still less the Germans.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">It is proof of the tenacity with which countries cling to the ideal of Europe that they will go through severe hardship in order to remain part of the eurozone club. Europe is not just a matter of national advantage; it is a political and moral project which is greater than the sum of its debts. I suspect that this is why Britain will never be a full member of the European Union.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">When the EEC was first formed in 1957, it was explicitly designed to prevent war in Europe by harnessing France and Germany together in an economic block so tight that they would no longer be able even to conceive of conflict. It worked. But Britain remained aloof, believing that, since it had won the war, it didn't need to be part of this forced economic integration. Moreover, Britain had the Empire and then the Commonwealth - a global economic network of mainly English-speaking countries with which to trade. Britain didn’t think of itself as just another European country.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">This delusion lasted until the 1960s, when Britain realised that it was falling behind the country, Germany, that it was supposed to have beaten in two world wars. The European Economic Community as it was known after 1963 was becoming a continental powerhouse, and industrialists and bankers in Britain started agitating for membership, arguing that splendid isolation was no longer viable. The Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, finally took Britain into Europe in 1973. Ironically, most of the running on Europe has been made by Conservatives. It was Margaret Thatcher who signed the 1987 Single European Act that created the single market, and she took Britain into the Exchange Rate Mechanism, despite her hostility to the social protections envisaged by Jacques Delors, the interventionist EU President.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The British Left used to be opposed to the EEC, which it called "the bankers Europe". In 1975, when Britain last voted for Europe in a referendum, Labour left wingers, like Tony Benn said it was a conspiracy against working people. The prospect of free movement of capital and labour across this huge economic space was a threatening one for trades unionists trying to defend their members wages and conditions. There was a risk of "social dumping" - a race to the bottom as member countries abandoned worker rights in order to compete with low wage countries where they didn't apply.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993 was supposed to address this by giving all EU workers certain basic rights to things like maternity pay, a 48 hour working week, gender equality, holidays etc. It is a pretty feeble document, which doesn't even formally include the right to strike. Nevertheless, it was considered so left wing that neither John Major nor Tony Blair were prepared to sign up to it, and Britain still has an opt out to the 48 hour week. These very basic social protections are now condemned by Conservatives as an alien imposition on British freedom. There are problems with bureaucracy in the EU, but that can only be addressed by giving the European parliament more power, and Britain is bitterly opposed to that.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">British Conservatives want to have the access to the single market without having to observe the conditions of the European Union membership - one of which is membership of the single currency. The sovereign debt crisis that broke in 2010 traumatized Europe, but the euro hasn't fallen apart as most commentators in Britain assumed it would. Instead, Europe is pressing ahead with deeper economic integration, and next year will introduce together a wide range of banking reforms including a financial transactions tax, or "Tobin Tax" on transactions between banks. The idea is to get the banks to pay for any future bail outs - which cost European tax payers over 4.6 trillion euros during the financial crisis. The EU parliament has also voted to cap banker bonuses to 100% of earnings.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Britain doesn't have to go along with this - only the eurzone countries will be subject to the FTT. But fearful of the impact on the City of London, the UK government has been threatening legal action to prevent it happening anywhere. David Cameron and Boris Johnson have campaigned furiously against any cap on banker pay, even thought it is supported by the vast majority of British voters. In 2011, David Cameron tried to veto new rules on financial regulation in Europe to put limits on future deficits. The eurozone countries ignored him, and went ahead anyway.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Britain is already semi-detached from the euro, the Social Chapter and has refused to implement the Shengen scheme for ending border checks between EU states. It seems inconceivable that Britain will sign up to the moves towards further bank regulation and the creation of what is called a "fiscal Europe" in which member states will have to contribute to an EU treasury with the ability to issue bonds, ie government debt, which is backed by the entire EU. This will be the parting of the ways. David Cameron says that if he cannot secure the repatriation of powers and fails to block banking reform, the Conservatives will hold a referendum advising withdrawal.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Tories say that Britain will do better on its own, and we will be able to trade with the rest of the world instead of relying on Europe, despite the fact that it is the destination for over half of British exports. But the rest of the world isn't so sure. Last week, Barack Obama, urged David Cameron to stick with Europe, because America and the EU are about to sign a mutual trade pact that could be worth hundreds of billions in trade over the next decade. Britain still benefits hugely from Europe - quarter of all the inward investment that comes to Europe, comes to Britain.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">But it has never been a purely economic question. Europe remains a the great ideal: it has created a new international political entity which is based, not on borders and frontiers, but on freedom and diversity. I spend much time these days in the Pyrenees in the south of France, where people speak their own historic language and where the Catalan flag is flown from municipal buildings. The old national allegiances are fading in Europe, as people become both more European and more local in their cultural identity.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In Britain, we are struggling to retain a sense of national exclusivity, tied to the interest of the City of London. We are supposed to condemn these nasty Europeans who want to steal our banker's bonuses and flood Britain with immigrants. Well, when it comes to the crunch, I know which side I'll be on. And it won't be Mr Farrage's.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-72147827241036776292013-05-10T14:50:00.000+01:002013-05-20T14:51:48.893+01:00Postpone the referendum? How can Scots decide on staying in the UK if they don't know whether the UK is staying in the EU?<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
FROM HERALD</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“<span style="font-size: medium;">Do you think that the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union?”. That's the question that looks increasingly likely to be asked of British voters in a referendum in the near future. It is in the draft bill offered by David Cameron to assuage his eurosceptic backbenchers. It didn't, and 116 of them demonstrated their continued dissatisfaction by voting against their own government's Queen's Speech. They still don't believe their leader is serious about holding an in out referendum and want a commitment before 2015. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Labour's Ed Milliband has been enjoying David Cameron's latest troubles over Europe immensely. It is redolent of the mess the Conservatives found themselves in during the early 1990s, when John Major was unable to control his eurosceptic “B@@tards”. But Miliband may not be smiling for long, because things have moved on and Britain, or rather England, appears to be increasingly hostile to the European Union. The pressure will mount on Labour before the next general election to give its own commitment to a referendum on Europe, especially if, as expected, UKIP effectively win the European Elections in May 2014. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> I don't see how the Labour leader can refuse. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 21px;">Indeed, both Labour and the Liberal Democrats already accept that there should be a referendum if there is any “substantial” change in Britain's relationship to Europe. Since Europe is in the process of reviewing the EU treaties prior to introducing a banking and fiscal union, that substantial change looks increasingly likely. Yesterday, at Prime Minister's Question Time, the Deputy Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, said it was a matter of “when not if” there will be a referendum on Europe.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Europe has become the dominant issue in UK politics, and it increasingly looks as if Britain is, if not on its way out, then moving towards a much looser relationship. But where does this leave Scotland? We have a referendum on independence in September in September 2014 in which Scots will be asked whether they want to be out of the UK but in Europe. Then, shortly after, they will be asked in a referendum whether we want to stay in the UK but out of Europe. I don't know about the voters, but I'm confused. I'm not even sure it is possible to have a view on staying in the UK if we don't know whether Britain is staying in Europe.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Indeed, as the constitutional lawyer, Alan Trench has suggested, there is a case for delaying the Scottish referendum until the UK's position in Europe has been resolved. This is because the information essential for making a determination on independence for Scotland will not be available to Scots when they make their choice in September 2014. Will a No vote also be a vote, effectively, to leave Europe - a proposition that a majority of Scots reject? We don't know.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Alex Salmond, ever the optimist, seems to believe that the very threat of a Tory euro referendum will automatically deliver a Yes to independence in 2014. ”The alternative is Scotland being dragged to the EU exit door against our will” says the FM, “A Yes vote means Scotland will remain in the EU as an independent member and a seat at the top table”. But I'm not sure that this necessarily follows. The Nationalists no longer believe in a stand-alone Scotland with its own currency and independent trading status. They want Scotland to retain the pound, the Bank of England, the social union etc. If Scotland is in a currency and customs union with the UK, I am not sure how Scotland could remain in Europe if the UK pulls out.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">To justify a Yes vote to stay in Europe, the SNP would have to be prepared to abandon the pound, join the European single market, and become an independent state outside the UK currency zone. Some prominent figures in the Yes Campaign chair, Denis Canavan, and the independent nationalist MSP, Margot MacDonald, want the SNP to give precisely this commitment to an independent currency. But their appeals have been rejected by Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">I understand the SNP's dilemma here. Its policy of keeping the pound and the social union made a great deal of sense. Scots were never going to vote for customs posts at Gretna Green and going to all the trouble of setting up a separate Scottish currency. Scotland is not an oppressed nation, and is not seeking national liberation from England. Scots will only vote for independence if they can be pretty sure that things will remain largely as they are today, albeit with better economic powers for Holyrood.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">However, by linking Scotland so closely to the “continuing UK” the SNP may have a hard job of persuading Scots in the referendum to vote for something that they aren't even proposing themselves: the idea of Scotland out of the UK single market but in the EU single market. Scottish voters may well decide that, given the uncertainty surrounding the UK's future, it is better to stick to the status quo for the time being.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">There may even be a case for mass abstention in the September 2014 election. Most Scots will feel disenfranchised anyway because they are being offered two unacceptable alternatives: independence, which only a minority support and the status quo which even fewer want. The chair of Better Together, Alastair Darling, has this week all but crushed any hope of there being a “better devolution” if Scots vote No. The former Labour Chancellor says that there would be no mandate for further powers for the Scottish parliament unless it is put to the UK in an election manifesto. And if independence is rejected in 2014, we can be pretty confident that this will not happen.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">2014 is looking like the wrong choice at the wrong time. The European Elections of May 2014 – only four months before the Scottish independence referendum – will likely see UKIP sweeping the board in England. Scotland's referendum campaign risks being overshadowed by a clamour of calls for EU withdrawal. This is not the right atmosphere in which to make a sensible decision about Scottish independence. The mood of the Scottish electorate is likely to be one of confusion and discontent. At the very least, there is going to be a large number of Scots standing in the voting booths, pencils poised, saying: what is this all about?</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-13956123216969793312013-04-14T14:41:00.000+01:002013-05-20T14:43:37.240+01:00Margaret Thatcher: why they should erect her statue outside Holyrood<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<blockquote type="cite">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"><div lang="EN-GB" link="blue" vlink="purple">
<div class="WordSection1">
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">FROM SUNDAY HERALD. </span></div>
</div>
</div>
</span></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<blockquote type="cite">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"><div lang="EN-GB" link="blue" vlink="purple">
<div class="WordSection1">
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">She was as divisive in death as she was in life - or so everyone has been saying about the passing of Lady Thatcher. In fact, you could equally argue the reverse. The Left hasn't been more united for years and nor has the Right, in its hatred for the street parties and sing-alongs that have followed in her wake.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">At times last week I felt as if I had been transported back to the 1980s, watching crowds chanting “Maggie Maggie Maggie” in Glasgow, Liverpool, Brixton. The BBC under attack for threatening to play “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” as it raced up the charts. The press reissuing their 80s classic,“The Enemy Within”, and vilifying ex miners and Labour MPs like Glenda Jackson for sullying the memory of the Great Leader. It has even brought Tony Blair out of his lair to warn the Labour leader Ed Miliband not to get too lefty. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">It's all been in extremely bad taste of course. We shouldn't use a personal tragedy to peddle a political message, said editorials in The Times. But it didn't stop Tories like Boris Johnson doing precisely that. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 18pt;"> On the day after she shuffled off this mortal coil Mayor of London delivered a politically-charged eulogy in the Daily Telegraph. “</span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: #1e1e1e; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">You either gave in to the hunger strikers, or you showed a grim and ultimately brutal resolve”, he roared, referring to the IRA hunger strikers of 1981. “You either accepted an Argentine victory or else you defeated Galtieri. You either took on the miners or else you surrendered to Marxist agitators”.</span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: #1e1e1e; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;"> </span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 18pt;">That exercise in tasteless triumphalism was bound to provoke a response even from those who do not glory in confrontation. Thatcher, remember, also gave comfort to dictators like General Pinochet, promoted homophobia with Clause 28, opposed the liberation of Nelson Mandela, closed down the mines, introduced the poll tax, destroyed manufacturing industry and demonised modern Germany and the European Union. Since you ask.</span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Mayor Boris has been calling for a statue to be erected in Mrs Thatcher's memory, perhaps even on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square, which would be madness. It would rapidly become the most vandalised and desecrated memorial in Britain.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> And then there is the extraordinary decision to give Thatcher what is effectively a state funeral, with gun carriages, the Queen and Jeremy Clarkson in attendance. It is one thing to give a state funeral to a genuine national leader, like Winston Churchill, who led a coalition government during the Second World War; it is quite another to give a similar send off to a politician who simply divided the country on class and north-south lines. It will likely provoke the street party to end all street parties this week, as well as a national rendition of “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” as she is laid to rest.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Yes, it is tasteless and a bit silly to indulge in this nostalgic class warfare, since this is not the 1980s, even if it feels that way. However, the reaction on both sides has demonstrated that the wounds that were opened in that decade have not been healed by the passage of time. My own professional history was dominated by Margaret Thatcher, a politician I only met four times and interviewed twice but who hung like a shadow over Scottish political life. On the day she was elected in May1979 I felt, like many in Scotland, an ominous sense that things would never be the same again.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> Fresh out of university I'd had the dubious fortune to start my journalistic career in the BBC's Referendum Unit for the abortive devolution vote of March 1979. Scotland had voted yes, by 48% to 52% but was denied the Scottish Assembly because of the infamous 40% rule. That led directly to the dawn of Thatcherism because the SNP MPs in Westminster, in their fury at the loss of an assembly they didn't really want, withdrew support for the Callaghan government in the crucial confidence motion later that month. It was an act of unpardonable folly by the 11 SNP MPs, even though David Steel's Liberals were also implicated.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">In the May election, which brought Mrs Thatcher to Number Ten, the SNP lost all but two of its MPs, and was plunged into political obscurity for the next decade. But what was much worse was that their stupidity helped leave Scotland politically undefended in a crucial decade. The incoming Tories concluded that Scotland wasn't a problem any more, with the referendum won and the SNP back in their box, and that consequently Scotland's industrial economy could be sacrificed in the class war. It's an outcome that Scots might do well to reflect upon in the run up to the 2014 referendum.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Anyone who thinks that Thatcherism was a good thing for the Scottish economy, as apologists have been trying to argue in the past week, clearly wasn't around at the time. In the early Eighties I was working as a presenter for BBC Scotland documentary series, Current Account, which charted week by week, the social and industrial consequences of the Thatcher recessions. Singer sewing machines in Clydebank, Dunlop tyres at Inchinnan, Alcan aluminium in Invergordon, the last car factory in Scotland, Linwood, closed in 1981. We filmed factory occupations in Plessey Electronics and British Leyland Bathgate, watched as Scotland's steel industry was run down, the shipyards dismantled. It was blindingly obvious to everyone except Arthur Scargill that Thatcher was storing up coal stocks and political capital so that she could take on the miners in 1984. I spent a large part of the strike seeing the life drain out of pit towns like like Polmaise as the tragedy unfolded. .</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Scotland had been a world leader in engineering technology for nearly a century, a cradle of the industrial revolution, with Glasgow the industrial heart of the British Empire. That was swept away in less than a decade. Around 400,000 jobs, mostly in West Central Scotland were destroyed during the Thatcher recessions, and though many were replaced in electronics assembly plants, Scotland's industrial economy was not. It was an irony entirely lost on the Scottish Tories that the electronics firms that came to Silicon Glen in the 90s were attracted by the very state subsidies she had withdrawn from Scotland's indigenous manufacturing industry. And because of Britain's membership of the EEC she abhorred. Most of them left within 15 years, leaving the deskilled and demoralised Scotland we see today. Scotland's notorious health problems date directly from this period which was the economic equivalent of warfare.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Modernisation it wasn't: countries like Germany didn't destroy their industrial base in Bavaria in the 1980s, they retooled it. Opportunities to rebuild on the basis of the oil industry were missed. And what made it all so profoundly unsettling was the knowledge that the destruction of manufacturing industry was being financed by Scottish oil revenue which was pouring into the UK treasury in the 1980s, masking Britain's balance of payments deficit. Estimates of the value of North Sea Oil vary hugely from £100 – 200bn in the Thatcher era. But what is not in doubt was that it was oil that kept the UK in business in the 80s. Of course, Scotland received its share: in the form of unemployment and invalidity benefit.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">This kind of scorched earth policy would not have been possible in the South East of England because it would have been politically unthinkable. Historians tut tut if you suggest that there was a Scotland-England dimension to Thatcherism because that smacks of nationalism. But it was glaringly obvious at the time, even to non-nationalists like me. Her policies, designed to destroy trades unionism by laying waste to manufacturing industry, were in the direct interests of the City of London financial classes. The other side of the collapse of Scottish industry was the Big Bang of 1986, which deregulated British banking and gave birth to the reckless financial services “industry” we see today. Her privatisations of utilities like gas, electricity and British Telecom earned huge commissions for City of London firms that handled the floatations and speculated on the share prices of state assets. The Russian oligarchs imported her business model to their own country. South of Scotland Electricity, recently fined a record £10m for cheating its own customers is also part of the thatcher legacy. It used to be called the Hydro Board.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Mrs Thatcher's policy of council house sales further benefitted the banks and finance houses who sold the mortgages and raked in the profits, mis-selling dodgy endowment mortgages in the process. . Britain turned into a nation of estate agents, and the value of properties in the South East and in London rocketed, benefitting the middle class Tory voters who made capital gains through property speculation. The Lawson tax cuts, which reduced income tax from 83% to 40% further enriched the wealthy middle classes of the South East of England by allowing them to keep most of it. Meanwhile, Scotland got the poll tax.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">In 1987 I'd just been made the BBC's Scottish Political Correspondent, and was furious that she refused to give us an interview in the run up to the general election. I shamelessly hijacked a packed press conference at the start of the campaign and threw questions at her from the floor. It was insulting to the other journalists present, but sensing the moment, they remained silent when she tried to move on, and we got our interview. Being in Mrs Thatcher's bad books wasn't a very sensible career move, but the poll tax was an unique moment Scottish history. Questions had to be asked about how this policy could be imposed on a country which had rejected it very firmly at the ballot box. Scotland wasn't used as a “guinea pig” as Tory apologists always point out. But the poll tax was introduced a year ahead of England and in the teeth of widespread opposition across all classes expressed in peaceful demonstrations and in the 1987 election where the Tories were routed.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">But what was worse was that the poll tax was only scrapped in 1990 after riots in London. This delivered a sobering message to Scots that peaceful expressions of dissent are not heard in Westminster, and led to the massive endorsement of the devolution in the Referendum of 1997, and also to the wipe out of Tory MPs in the general election of the same year. It wasn't the industrial closures as such but the manifest unfairness of a tax where “a duke pays the same as a dustman” that forced Scotland to rethink its place in the United Kingdom. It also sealed Margaret Thatcher's fate.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I was back in London working in Westminster in 1990 when she finally resigned after Michael Heseltine finally stood against her. It really was announced in the train on the way in – I heard it. Tory ministers like Michael Portillo and Michael Forsyth gathered distraught, some in tears, in the Members Lobby at Westminster promising revenge against the cabinet “wets” who had brought down their leader.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">But I have to record that there was a great deal of relief too among Tory MPs who feared for their seats, and were genuinely worried about what she was doing to the country. Thatcher was never a true Conservative, after all. Her ideological populism, class confrontation and military sabre-rattling was not at all in the Tory tradition, which is why so many of her cabinet ministers trooped in to Number Ten in November 1990 to tell her the game was up.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">But by then the damage was done. Britain would never be the same again. Scotland set up its own parliament and opted out of UK domestic politics. The City of London - a frankenstein monster largely of her creation – went on to bring down the entire financial system. Commentators say it is wrong to blame politicians for the bankers' greed, but they were the direct beneficiaries of her industrial policies and also of the amoral climate of possessive individualism which she introduced to Britain - a travesty of the economic philosophy of Adam Smith whom she claimed as a mentor.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">And today her policies are being pursued again by David Cameron, despite the image of “liberal” Conservatism. We have the bedroom tax in place of the hated poll tax. And yes, I know, it isn't a tax, but nor was the poll tax. It was officially called the “community charge” and the BBC got into exactly the same difficulty for not naming it as such. Margaret Thatcher cut pensions in by not raising them in line with average earnings after 1981. Tories today are cutting all benefits by raising them by less than the rate of inflation. She was profoundly hostile to Europe, but it has taken David Cameron to offer Britain a ballot on withdrawal from the EU. She may be gone, but her work remains.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Why did Scots find her so abominable? After all, Scotland used to be a Tory nation in the 1950s. It was a potent mix of anti-Englishness, moral indignation, legitimate grievance and philosophical revulsion. Her Sermon on the Mound in 1988, with its crass celebration of wealth, offended something deep in Scotland's Presbyterian soul. It convinced Scots that they really were a different country and began the process that could still lead to Scotland leaving he UK for good. The cross-party Scottish Constitutional Convention was set up in the same year as the poll tax and within a decade Scotland had won a parliament with primary legislative powers. Now Scotland faces a referendum on independence.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">If they do erect a statue it should really be outside the Scottish parliament in Holyrood, because Mrs Thatcher was the politician that made Scottish home rule inevitable. And may yet cause the Break up of Britain.</span></div>
<div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
</div>
<div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</span></blockquote>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-33689357292288447612013-04-08T10:26:00.000+01:002013-04-08T10:26:21.081+01:00Kim's nukes to target Glasgow - Cameron<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">David Cameron raised the stakes in the independence debate last week by insisting that it would be “foolish” to abandon Trident in the Clyde when there is a growing threat from countries like North Korea. I'm not sure it was entirely wise to suggest that we might be on Kim's target list. Are we to assume our Trident missiles are now potentially targeting Pyongyang?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Residents of Scotland's largest conurbation might wonder if having weapons of mass destruction, which are illegal under international law, on our doorstep is a good idea if they are liable to attract the attentions of rogue nuclear states. Even the former Tory Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, said Cameron's intervention was “absurd”. But the PM seems to believe that Trident is a key plank in the “positive” case for the union. A majority of Scots seem to disagree, according to opinion polls, and think that there are better things to spend £100bn on than a useless virility symbol.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">David Cameron also believes that the Coalitions's welfare reforms, that kick in this week, will bolster the Union by targeting scroungers and skivers who set fire to their children. But Scots do not seem over keen on weapons of social mass destruction like the bedroom tax, which is shaping up to be the poll tax of the 21<sup>st</sup> Century.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It is “a reckless social experiment” according to the Yes Scotland campaign who believe that the bedroom tax will help win the referendum for independence. Nicola Sturgeon has promised to reverse it in an independent Scotland. With Labour also attacking the tax there was a serious danger last week of cross-party unity breaking out in Scotland. Except of course for the poor Scottish Liberal Democrats who have been left twisting in the wind, defending the indefensible.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Could the bedroom tax galvanise the independence vote in the same way that the 1987 poll tax fuelled demand for the Scottish Parliament? The bedroom tax and its associated cuts have brought thousands onto the streets and the same coalition of charities, churches and trades unions seem to be lining up against the Tory welfare reforms. The bedroom tax – which of course isn't really a tax but a deduction - is part of a constellation of welfare reforms which are being introduced by a Conservative-led government in Westminster which is simultaneously cutting taxes on the richest in society.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">And this isn't just the old few pounds we are talking about. Earners like Ian Marchant, the boss of Scottish and Southern Energy which was fined a record sum for “mis-selling” last week, will be in line for a £40,000 tax reduction on his reported £1m pay packet. Andy Hornby, the former chief executive of HBOS, also criticised last week in the strongest possible terms by a Commons report, will be in line for a similar cash back. Amusingly, Hornby is now chief executive of the bookmakers, Coral – a fitting destination for the former boss of a bank that had to be rescued with £20bn of public money after recklessly gambling with its shareholders funds.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">What infuriated Scots was the perceived unfairness of the poll tax, and while the bedroom tax may not be on the same scale of infamy, it is incredibly damaging to introduce it at the same time as indiscriminately rewarding “wealth creators” such as the bankers who brought Britain to the brink of financial destruction. It is all about double standards. George Osborne may not be Margaret Thatcher, but he is doing as splendid job of inheriting her hand bag.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">As with the poll tax, these measures are being introduced by a government led by a party which has been rejected at successive elections by the Scottish voters. Support for the Conservative Party in Scotland is as low, or lower, than it was in 1997 when they were wiped out at the general election. History may not be repeating itself, but there are pretty clear echoes of the 1980s. In fact, with the privatisation of health, the cutting (in real terms) of welfare benefits, and taxing bedrooms the Cameron Conservatives are going further than Margaret Thatcher dared.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Of course, times – and attitudes – change. We should beware assuming that Scots voters are more fond of welfare than English voters. The Scottish Council for Voluntary Service's own survey recently concluded that “negative public attitudes towards benefits recipients is a major obstacle for charities”. A much-quoted Yougov survey last month suggested that eight out of ten Scots approve the £26,000 benefits cap, and think people who have been offered a job should take it rather than stay on benefits. But these are hard propositions to oppose, whatever your attitude to welfare. There are only a tiny handful of families - if any - in Scotland getting £26,000 in benefits.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Most Scots have no problems with stricter rules on entitlement to benefits for people with phoney disabilities. They don't even object, in principle, to small families being urged to move out of large council houses. The problem with the bedroom tax is that it is a disguised cut in housing benefit. This is because there simply aren't enough smaller houses to go round, so many people will have no alternative but to take a reduction in their benefits. Indeed, the bedroom tax could encourage precisely the kind of child benefit “farming” that led to the Philpott scandal. The more kids you have, the bigger the house.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The biggest shock this month will be the discovery that it is the working poor who are being hit hardest by many of the welfare changes. Benefits that are uprated by less than inflation – 1% - are being cut in real terms and a lot of those "hard working families"will find they no longer get tax credits and child benefits. This autumn will see the introduction of the Universal Benefit which is supposed to replace a raft of existing benefits and make for a simpler and cheaper system. But changes like these invariably create more losers than winners, and they tend to be a great deal more vocal.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Better Together will argue, of course, that this is nothing to do with them, and nothing to do with the Union. You can't blame the UK for George Osborne. Nor is there any guarantee that an independent Scottish government would have been any more willing or able to discipline HBOS or RBS. However, it is equally the case that the policies being pursued by successive governments in Westminster have caused a profound sense of moral unease north of the border. Labour, after all, were ultimately responsible for the credit bubble that blew up in 2008 with disastrous consequences. It was Tony Blair who launched the war on welfare as well as the war in Iraq. The renewal of Trident is a cross party decision in Westminster taken in the teeth of opposition from Scotland.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">These may not be the issues that decide the referendum. But it puts increased pressure on those who support the union to show that it is possible to reject Trident and Tory tax policies without breaking up Britain.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br class="webkit-block-placeholder" /></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-28685441918559443472013-04-08T10:22:00.003+01:002013-04-08T10:22:41.605+01:00SSE - Crooks can be green and Scottish too<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
From Herald, 4/4/13</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Scottish and Southern Electricity has been charged £10m by Ofgem for mis-selling its gas and electricity. Apparently, its telephone sales people were bamboozling potential customers by giving them “misleading and inaccurate” information about prices. They also reported that the Pope is believed to be Catholic.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I'm sure action will be swift. Two years ago Ofgem castigated the energy companies for having 300 different tariffs. This year they have 900. Last month Ofgem reported that the energy utilities were raking in record profits of £110 per household, because wholesale energy costs were falling. So the energy companies announced that they were going to put their prices up even higher.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This is called regulation? Only in the same way that sub-prime mortgages were regulated. Ofgem insists that it is not in the business of setting prices – heaven forfend. Its job is to ensure a competitive market. Well if this is competition, I'd hate to see what a cartel would look like.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Perhaps Ofgem might get better results if it tried penalising the wrongdoers just a little more severely. Tapping them on the wrist and saying “naughty naughty” tends not to work in our high powered global business environment. £10m is about 0.003% of SSE's annual revenues which last year were over £30 billion. Do you think that this penalty is going to make them change their ways? SSE has form here and were found guilty of doorstep mis-selling in 2012 and fined £1.25m. Gosh, that must've hurt.</div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Our largely foreign-owned energy companies put their prices up in lock step, fiddle with tariffs to make it look as if there is some kind of difference between them and then hire armies of telephone sales people to tell lies to customers. Lies? Yes – giving wrong information about rivals' prices and telling people you are putting their tariff down when you are putting it up is lying. At least it is in my book. And that's what SSE has been charged with and, to give SSE its due, has admitted. Jolly decent of them.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Scottish and Southern Electricity is of course a Scottish company registered in Perth, which makes this all the more shocking for those naïve enough to think that it makes any difference which country you screw your brass plate onto. It used to be the old North of Scotland Hydro Electricity board, set up by Tom Johnston, Scotland's greatest Secretary of State, in 1943. The Hydro was merged with the South of Scotland Electricity Board and privatised into SSE back at the end of the last century.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Aren't you glad that we don't have those terrible old nationalised industries any more? Remember how inefficient they were? My goodness, they only had a single tariff in those days and they didn't employ any telephone sales people. They are now a dynamic and competitive private enterprise company cheating their customers.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Scottish and Southern also claims to be the greenest energy company in the UK, which just goes to show that there is nothing inherently decent and honest about either being a Scottish company or being environmentally aware. SSE is the UK's largest generator of renewable energy and is one of Alex Salmond's favourites for that reason. It is one of the inner circle of favoured Scottish businesses turning Scotland in to a green energy hub. Unfortunately, it thinks its customers are pretty green too</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
And what of those responsible for this blatant mis-selling? Ian Marchant, the outgoing chief executive of SSE was paid £1m last year and will leave this summer with a £9m pension pot and shares worth £3.5. That's not bad. I'm sure the pensioners freezing in their homes this Spring think he's worth every penny.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But lets us also tip our hats to Lord Smith of Kelvin, who is the chairman of SSE. He is Chancellor of the University of the West of Scotland, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Museums of Scotland and a former Governor of the BBC. Lord Smith is one of that elite group who are invited to sit on each other's boards and get given honours for doing so. Their only function appears to be to lend an air of respectability to the company's activities. But responsibility?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There have been calls for those at the top of SSE to resign, but it wouldn't enter his head to do so because only little people do that. Like dodgy landlords or benefit fiddlers.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Amusingly, Lord Smith was a board member of the Financial Services Authority back in the days when it was supposed to police mis-selling scandals in the banks. He is also on the organising committee of the 2014 Commonwealth Games. And he is going to be chair of the UK government backed Green Investment Bank which will be based in Scotland. Doesn't it make you proud that these bodies are in such good hands/</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
As we know, it was banks like HBOS and RBS that invented mis-selling when they started cheating their customers selling dodgy endowment mortgages and other fiddles. They were even found guilty of rigging Libor – the key interest rate on which many trillions of investments are calculated. Clearly, the habits that have been developed in our financial services sector are now being adopted across what is left of the energy industry.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The very word, “mis-selling” was invented for the banks and the power companies. There is of course no such thing as mis-selling. It is a euphemism, essentially, for fraud: knowingly misleading customers for the purposes of extracting money from them. Only the grand figures who run companies like HBOS cannot be accused of fraud because they are terribly important people who sit on lots of boards, so a new word had to be invented to immunise them from public obloquy.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Libor has been described as one of the biggest market frauds in the history of banking. SSE has been caught red handed. We know who dunnit; but none will be prosecuted. Royal Bank of Scotland, one of the worst offenders had to be rescued by the injection of tens of billions of pounds of public money. Their expensive advertising campaigns (largely paid for by you and me since this bank is state owned) tell us that they are “with us all the way”. If so, God help us.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-56214592524963152362013-03-18T10:33:00.001+00:002013-03-18T10:33:11.034+00:00Watch out. Press censorship is here. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"></span><br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">'Africa is giving nothing to anyone - apart from AIDS'. A rather nasty remark, and untrue. Africa gives us many things, including most of the world's gold and diamonds, and you can't blame a country for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I would say that this remark, from the Irish journalist and commentator, Kevin Myers, in the Irish Independent in 2008 should actually be censored. But be in no doubt - it cannot be said again in Ireland. And nor can anything like it.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">This was one of the earliest cases taken to the Irish Press Council, the system of press regulation Alex Salmond would like to see in Scotland. It was referred to the Irish press watchdog by the Immigrant Council of Ireland, and a number of NGOs, on the grounds that it breached four of the principles of the Council's Code of Practice for journalists. 1)Accuracy 2)Fairness 3)Respect for rights and 8)Incitement to Hatred. The Council accepted that it was "gratuitously offensive", and "was likely to cause grave offence to people throughout sub-Saharan Africa" It ruled that the article "did breach Principle 8 of the Code". Though confusingly it did not conclude that it was "likely to stir up hatred".</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">But the matter didn't end there. After the ruling, in 2009, the Irish Times ran a headline "Press Council upholds complaint against Myers article". Mr Myers then took the Irish Times to the Press Council on the grounds that this breached Principle 1)Accuracy, 3)Fairness and 4)Respect for Rights. The Times argued that its headline was accurate and fair since it was a direct quote from the Press Council itself. But the Press Council didn't agree and said that even though this is what it had said, the Irish Times headline was misleading and it "breached Principle 1 of the Code". However, just to make things even more confusing, it only partially upheld the complaint made by Mr Myers against the Irish Times.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">I'm afraid this is what happens when you put a group of lawyers,ex- judges and professors in charge of regulating the press. The PC tried to apply these very broad an subjective criteria, like offensive and fair, to a piece of journalism that was neither. But they also realised that freedom of speech does require that sometimes offensive and unfair things are said. So, they tried to have it both ways - they upheld the complaint, and didn't uphold it at the same time.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">But this has had one very clear outcome: censorship.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> The PC may only have partially upheld the complaint against Mr Myers, but that means that the sentence used cannot be printed in any Irish publication ever again. Indeed, I'm not entirely sure what happens if someone takes a copy of the Sunday Herald to Dublin this week - will they be handling illegal goods? I jest, but this is serious. The Irish Press Council model is hailed as the best around by many politicians seeking to address the phone hacking scandal. It is independent, it has statutory underpinning, it is not under the control of government - at least not directly. But slowly and surely it is closing down spirited commentary and restricting freedom of speech.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The proposals from the Scottish expert panel under Lord McCluskey on implementing the Leveson Commission here are more draconian in that there is a direct political involvement through the appointment, by government ministers, of a "recognition commissioner" - a figure who would oversee any regulation body set up by the press. The Leveson report proposed that the ultimate oversight would come from media regulators Ofcom. McCluskey has also ditched Leveson's proposal that it should only be the printed press that is regulated, and has included "all publishers of news-related material" in whatever published form, including the internet, blogs, tweets - the lot. He has also rejected Leveson's proposal that publications should be able to opt in and opt out of the press regulatory regime. Under McCluskey’s law, statutory regulation would be compulsory and it would be universal - like the law of contempt or the harassment laws</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">There is logic to McCluskey’s proposals. One of the anomalies of Leveson was that he only focussed on the press, meaning that if you read this article on line it would be not be regulated, but if you read it in print it is. But the impact is regulation, which I am afraid will lead to </span><span style="font-size: 20px;">serious</span><span style="font-size: 15pt;"> restrictions being placed on freedom of speech. As soon as you get a committee of the great and the good applying vague standards and codes of practice you are likely to get a spiral of precedents that will strangle free expression. Meanwhile, Alex Salmond's "recognition commissioner" will be casting a beady eye over everything to ensure "compliance".</span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Few liberals cared much about Kevin Myers, since he was a right wing xenophobe, but wait until someone who says that Israel is killing innocent people in Gaza is taken to the Press Council. George Galloway called Tony Blair is a murderer - but he won't be able to say that in print or online. Some of the descriptions of Brian Souter, during the "Keep the Clause" campaign against the promotion of homosexuality in schools would be actionable, as would be many of the remarks made by his supporters. Feminists who say silly things like "all men are rapists" could be in the dock , as will loud-mouths like Ray Winstone who said he was "raped by taxes". Words and images will be weighed and calibrated on subjective scales of right and wrong and offensiveness.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Countless Private Eye covers would be actionable because humour is no defence. In June 2008 it ran a front page on the Zimbabwe elections with Robert Mugabe saying "The opposition were soundly beaten", with another speech bubble adding: "To death". You might think it is not possible to be gratuitously offensive about Robert Mugabe, but the government of Zimbabwe might think differently. Anyway, how could Private Eye prove that opponents had been killed? The law has a tin ear when it comes to irony. Private Eye may not even be on sale in Scotland if McCluskey’s proposals are implemented because its editor, Ian Hislop, has already said he will not accept regulation.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Indeed, London-based newspapers might find themselves before the Scottish Press Council for saying things that are considered offensive in Scotland but not in England. No doubt someone would have made a complaint about the Economist magazine's infamous "Skintland" cover story two years ago, which many Scots found offensive. I found it offensive too, but I would always defend the Economist's right to say it.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">But how do we stop journalists from phone hacking, blagging medical records, bribing police, stalking minors, harassing film actresses? Surely we need regulation. Yes - but that should be done by applying the existing law. Phone hacking is illegal, and there are strict limits on handling of official information under the date protection acts. Bribery is illegal, so is stalking. And we already have the most restrictive defamation laws in the world as tweeters discovered when they made untrue allegations that Lord McAlpine was a sex criminal. All these offences, perpetrated by the gutter press, are already illegal. This is the point. The new Press Council, if it is on Irish lines will end up trying to limit the power of the press to give offence to people. And that's where censorship begins. </span></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-81900662458807218812013-03-09T16:56:00.000+00:002013-03-09T16:58:21.488+00:00The Pyrenees are just like the Highlands, only with people.<br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">When the temperature fell below -11 even my Macbook froze. I didn't think they did that, but they do. When I finally thawed it out it had reset the date, for some reason, at 1</span><sup><span style="font-size: medium;">st</span></sup><span style="font-size: medium;"> February 2008 and wouldn't open my email. But since the internet had stopped working, this was kind of academic.. The satellite dish on our roof had a beard of icicles hanging from it which presumably messed up its pointing system with the satellite.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Well, if you choose to holiday at 800metres in the Pyrenees in February, I suppose you shouldn't be surprised if it gets cold. But not like this. This has been the worst winter for 15 years, according to our neighbours in the commune of Alos, who've been struggling to keep their horses fed and free of frostbite. Normally, the people of the Pyrenees welcome snow to keep the ski resorts working – which have become an important part of the local economy.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">And it's very rare for the roads to be blocked as many have been over the past week. This is because they have a highly effective snow-clearing and gritting operation. The big snow ploughs on the main roads tear around so fast they often leave a trail of sparks on the road behind them. Local farmers, it seems, can earn a bit by sticking a snow plough on the fronts of their four-by-fours and driving around the networks of small roads that keep the dispersed community going. And this is a dispersed community.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">One of the reasons I love the Pyrenees is that it's what I imagine the Highlands of Scotland would have been like had the people not been cleared from the land to make way for sheep and deer. In the hills of the Ariege, there are lots of people, in hundreds of tiny, low densities communities or “hameau”, often illuminated by a solitary street light. When you look at the surrounding hills at night here they're dotted with what look like constellations of stars, but are actually the streetlights of these hamlets in the sky. I don't know how these hill farming communities have survived, with their tiny strips of pasture, their goats and kitchen gardens, but they do.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">In fact, there has been an influx of people to the Ariege Pyrenees since 1968 when the hippies, or “soixante-huitards” started coming here to escape the materialism of urban consumer society. There are antique hippy communes still functioning on a largely self-sufficient basis, teaching their own children and growing their own recreational herbs. Many congregate at the Saturday market in St Girons, which is like a small agricultural Glastonbury, where an infinite variety of cheeses are sold by ageing blokes with dreadlocks.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The soixante-huitards came here because property was, and still is, incredibly cheap. You can still find a perfectly habitable detached house with a tiny field and a wood for around £50,000. Try that in Torridon or Glencoe. And local taxes are very low. Property is so cheap because there are so many houses here and an almost limitless supply of ancient pitched-roof barns, in various states of decay, dotted across the hills. Near the ski resorts, many have been turned into posh chalets.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Which brings us back to the Highland Clearances. Those revisionist historians who insist that the clearances were a myth, should take a trip to the Pyrenees. All these houses are a product of policies that have kept rural areas alive over the last 250 years and put people before sheep and sporting estates. There's no housing crisis here. No young families forced to live in caravans because they can't afford the local house prices.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Readers of this column will be aware of my frustration at the perennial housing problem in the highlands and most of the rest of Scotland. We have the lowest population density in western Europe and some of the highest real estate prices. Yet whenever I raise this with civil servants and politicians they suck their teeth and tell me that it isn't as simple as it looks. Don't I know that land prices are high; it costs too much to put in the infrastructure for housing; “and anyway we don't want our beautiful country to be ruined by roads and housing developments”.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Well again – look at the Pyrenees. This place is beautiful precisely because it has people living in it and who look after it. The hills are covered with trees, unlike in Scotland's barren hills where the sheep prevent woodland re-establishing itself. And you don't get those vast empty expanses on the map where there are no roads. Roads aren't always bad – indeed, if you want to develop low density, environmentally-sustainable communities, they are essential.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">In the Pyrenees, as in all of France, the land belongs – at least in theory – to the people, and huge efforts are made to keep their highlands populated and accessible. The mountain areas have thousands of kilometres of way-marked walking routes, the randonnee, maintained by a small army of volunteers. You don't get lost in the Pyrenees unless you try really hard. Every year hundreds of people – not all of them religious – cross the Pyrenees here on the old pilgrim routes to Spain, like the Santiago de Compostelle. Others walk Le Chemin de la Liberte, which follows the routes taken by British airmen during the Second World War.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Of course the Pyrenees suffers from economic decline, in common with all rural areas, and the recession has hit South West France particularly hard. But the local administration is based around powerful local mayors, in the “mairie”, who work hard to hold onto their commune's population. There is keen competition between local mayors to attract and keep people in their bailiwicks, which has its downside. Even amid this superfluity of housing, necklaces of boring bungalows, zoned by the mayor, are still being built around some of the local townships.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">But in the highlands of Scotland, you have the opposite: community politics here tend to dominated by groups of home owners trying to protect values by blocking housing development or windfarms. Of course, there is a value in preserving genuine wilderness areas of Scotland. But the highlands deserve better than to be turned into an environmental theme park. In the Pyrenees people aren't regarded as pollution.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22403989.post-42110147608919607282013-03-01T09:40:00.002+00:002013-03-01T09:40:18.973+00:00If we're printing money it should go to poor people who spend not bankers who hoard.
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"> Imagine
being asked to pay your bank for the privilege of depositing your
money in it. Most of us think that we are victims of reverse bank
robbery already. But actually give them money to take our money?
The Bank of England moved rapidly yesterday to insist that the policy
of negative interest rates, floated by bank official, Paul Tucker,
was “very blue sky thinking” and anyway wouldn't affect the
deposit rate that is paid to ordinary savers, only big banks.
Though, as we'll see, that isn't strictly true.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The
main reason the Bank of England is talking about negative interest
rates is to force the banks to lend to business. Much of that
quantitative easing money that is being printed and handed,
effectively, to the commercial banks is being redeposited with the
Bank of England. Yes, the banks get electronic money from the Bank
of England; then they deposit it back with the Bank of England to
earn interest on the cash it has printed. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">You
might think that is the economics of the mad house, and you might
well be right. But in the paradoxical world of high finance, this is
considered a sound monetary policy. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"></span></div>
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">It
is also an insight into how banks made their money in the first
place. Traditionally, bankers would borrow money in the morning
from the Bank of England at 3% interest, and then loan it out after
lunch to mortgage borrowers at 6%, and make it to the golf course by
4pm. What happened before the banking crisis was that the banks got
greedier and started selling CDOs and toxic mortgages after 4pm
instead of playing golf. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">After
the crash, the banks were insolvent – ie bust – and we had to
bail them out with public money. Now they don't want to lend to
anyone if they can possibly avoid it – especially to businesses in
a recession. They will lend mortgages to homeowners who can afford
big deposits because the house is collateral for the loan. But
lending to businesses means actually taking a degree of risk that it
won't be paid back. Whoa! They're not going to do that, are they? </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Why
bother lending it to business when you can earn interest on it with
no risk by sticking it in the Bank of England. On £1bn, even at
0.5%, the banks are making £5 million, which is not at all bad, and
will at least keep the bonus pool topped up. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">So,
to recap: The Bank of England is printing money in order for banks
to deposit it back to them. Some of those bright chaps in
Threadneedle St eventually noticed that this was happening and
decided that it didn't look quite right. So they want to say to the
banks: “We will charge you for depositing your money (which is
actually our printed money) with us to encourage you to lend it to
small businesses”. This will test the credibility of the bankers'
excuse that they haven't been lending to business because there is no
demand for it. It will also lead to cheaper mortgages because banks
will have an incentive to lend more of it to home buyers. Mind you,
I wouldn't hold my breath.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">The
Bank of England insists that it wouldn't directly lower interest on
ordinary people's bank savings because these negative interest rates
would only be for the banks. But this is not quite telling it
straight. The banks, awash with printed cash, are not going to be
particularly interested in getting more deposits in, so they are
likely to lower the interest rates they offer to savers. ('Lower',
you snort, since most people with savings are lucky to get any
interest at all). Secondly, the banks can impose their own sneaky
negative interest rate by upping the charges paid by depositors.
('Upping' you snort again, isn't that what they've been doing
already?). </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Now,
you might ask, if all this free money is being given away, why can't
we all have some? And there are economists and bankers who have
suggested this, including Ben Bernanke the boss of the US Federal
Reserve. He once proposed dropping millions of dollars from
helicopters onto cities to encourage people to go out and buy things.
Ever since he has been referred to in financial circles as
“Helicopter Ben”. The problem he was trying to address was the
reluctance of people to spend in a recession - our old friend, the
paradox of thrift.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">As
Keynes noted, if everyone saves money at the same time (as they are
inclined to do in an economic crisis) there is less cash in the
system to buy goods in the shops. Factories therefore reduce output,
shed workers, and the cycle continues. His solution was for the
government to start spending on public projects to bolster effective
demand in the economy. It's a different way of dropping money. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Yet
another way would be to give vouchers to unemployed people to buy
stuff. This has been done in countries like Japan, where in 1999 the
government distributed $6bn to the elderly and unemployed. The
problem with what we are doing now, which is stuffing the banks with
printed cash and bolstering executive bonuses, is that rich people
don't spend windfalls – they either buy expensive houses in London,
speculate on stocks, or just save it. To keep money going round the
best thing to do is give it to people who don't already have money,
because they will go out directly and buy food and clothes for their
families. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">But
giving money to anyone other than bankers is thought to be morally
corrosive and a disincentive to work. It is only in the magical
world of banking that money can be invented and distributed by banks
to banks. Also, the government would have to borrow more, or print
more money to give it away. For, there is a penalty to all this
money printing, and we all know what it is: inflation. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">What
the Bank of England is doing is trying to reduce government debt by
all means possible including allowing inflation to rise. Which
brings us to the punch line of this whole story. Because the truth
is, as anyone with a bank deposit knows, we already have negative
interest rates. With inflation at 3% and interest rates at 0.5% you
do the math. </span>
</div>
iain macwhirterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14486911281896217461noreply@blogger.com7