The titanium-clad Lindsay Stewart lecture theatre in Edinburgh’s Napier University, where the SNP launched its manifesto last week, pokes out of the ground like the head of one of those mechanical monsters from War of the Worlds. You half expect it to rise up on its tripod legs to the sound of foghorns and start vaporising the citizens of Morningside.
Well, that’s not far short of what Labour says will happen if the SNP gain power. Chaos and doom. Four years of “tax and turmoil” will follow if the nationalists are allowed to get up on their hind legs. Don’t listen to their assurances about referendums and cutting taxes, says Jack McConnell. These are secessionists, who will destroy the union, vaporise prosperity, divide family from family and turn Scots into aliens in heir own land.
Well, thus far, the Scottish voters don’t seem to have been scared by Labour’s monsters. They don’t seem to see the nationalists as revolutionary fanatics bent on destruction, but relatively benign patriots looking for a better deal for Scotland. In the coming weeks, voters will find a million glossy brochures falling out of their Sunday newspapers featuring Alex Salmond looking like one of those celebs modelling a Marks and Spenser’s suit. This isn’t just a nationalist party...
The SNP are certainly showing us the money. The network media, from the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson down, were in attendance at the Salmond spectacular in the Napier, and they were rather impressed, if only by the stage management. The London-based media are going to play an important role in this Scottish election, if only because it happening in the future Prime Minister’s backyard.
But they want to know if the SNP are for real this time, of if this is just another fleeting nationalist spasm. Is the SNP leader a potential national leader or just another soundbite-monger? Alex Salmond was so under control it almost hurt, trying to sound statesmanlike, suppressing his instinct for the cheeky phrase and the catchy put-down.
But breaking up Britain? No, no, no - that’s all left to the distant future, the referendum or ‘neverendum’ on independence. In 1999, the SNP were taken severely to task for putting independence tenth on their election priority list. This time, it merited but three lines at the foot of page 15 of the 74 page manifesto. And it was so hedged about with provisos that you could almost think this was a strategy for preventing independence rather than achieving it.
The manifesto promises: “Publication of a White Paper, ENCOMPASSING a Bill, detailing the CONCEPT of Scottish independence in the modern world as part of PREPARATIONS for offering Scots the OPPORTUNITY to decide on independence in a referendum with a LIKELY date of 2010”. Not exactly the Declaration of Arbroath. There was a time when true nationalists would have been chewing their sporrans at such a mealy-mouthed formulation.
But Labour say we shouldn’t be fooled. As we left the Titanium mother ship, mobiles trilled that Jack McConnell himself was ready to present a detailed rebuttal of the SNP manifesto. This was impressive work. Labour staffers had within two hours deconstructed the entire spending programme.
Costing every item from their tax exemption scheme for artists to writing off all student debt, from abolishing bridge tolls to introducing first time buyers grants of #2,000, Labour number crunchers come up with a figure of #5,000 in tax for every family. Unfortunately, since this was the same figure they had been using before the costing exercise, it slightly undermined its credibility.
But it has to be said that the nationalists’ list had a lot of wish in it. Abolishing bridge tolls, a thousand more police officers, scrapping prescription charges, abolishing business rates for small businesses, massive investment in renewable energy - it looks like the SNP have taken every demand from every pressure group in Scotland, thrown them together and called it a manifesto. It is the kind of thing Labour used to do, and was rightly criticised for it.
McConnell sliced through the SNP’s local income tax numbers, claiming that even on their 3p cap a two earner couple living in an average Band D property would pay more when their household income is over #47,703 rather than the #64,000 the SNP claim. My own problem with local income tax is rather more straightforward. Why it is fair to remove the burden of local tax from middle aged owners of houses, which have tripled in value, and from people who are living on investment income from shares, in order to place this burden on the backs of younger working families who are currently struggling to get on the housing market?
But the real question is why, when Labour had delivered such a comprehensive demolition of the SNP’s numbers, the Scottish press almost completely ignored it. It was Jack McConnell who was on the defensive, fending off repeated questions about holes in his own council tax policy.
Labour’s own manifesto launch three days earlier - in a rather cramped room in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall - had diced with disaster. After successfully delivering his pitch on making Scottish education the best in the world, McConnell appeared to lose the place over his own plans for local taxation. Labour are promising to halve and then abolish water charges for pensioners and to extend the council tax bands to make them more progressive.
Sounds sensible. This would target pensioners accurately and make owners of big houses pay more. Trouble is, the First Minister didn’t appear to know how many big houses would be affected, nor how the water charges would be paid. He suggest there would be direct payments to pensioners, but his advisers later indicated that Scottish water would receive the subsidy.
Now, these may seem rather arcane, even trivial points, but in the present state of hand-to-hand fiscal warfare, it was incredibly important that Labour had their ducks in a row over local taxation. They had costed every dot and comma of the SNP’s programme, and it was reasonable to expect that McConnell would be able to give a good account of his own.
Fiscal authority figures, like Professor Arthur Midwinter of Edinburgh University, have been looking from on high and issuing thunderous critiques of the various parties’ attempts to play the numbers game. Ten days ago he said that the SNP’s budgetary farrago indicated that they “weren’t fit to govern”.
The nationalists suspect that Prof Midwinter is a Labour stooge, but I can assure them that he is not impressed by Labour’s numbers either. Not just the vagueness about splitting the upper and lower council tax bands to make “some people” in bigger houses pay more. He was dubious also about Jack McConnell’s pledge to funnel #1.2 billion to education by effectively freezing the spending of other departments. This Professor Midwinter says, Jack is not in a position to do, because above-inflation increases are built into the spending of certain departments like health. “McConnell will have to revisit this”, he told me.
Of course, everyone remembers the former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy coming to grief over local taxation at an early morning news conference in the 2005 general election. The Liberal Democrat leader, Nicol Stephen, didn’t fall into that trap, probably because most of the press corps had nodded off. The LibDems want to raise local income tax by 3.5-3.75 to pay for it the abolition of council tax. Otherwise, there manifesto, with its promises of more schools, renewable energy and such like was suspiciously close to Labour’s. And it’s clear where the LibDem sympathies lie.
Tavish Scott, held an impromptu post-manifesto session in which he repeated that the LibDems will never, ever, (read my lips), NEVER agree to a referendum on independence and hope to die. Even if there is another option on the ballot paper - as Alex Salmond hinted at during the SNP manifesto launch - proposing the Liberal Democrat “federalist” policy of more powers for Holyrood, the Tavish Scott says they will not be interested. The Liberal Democrats are prepared to negotiate on every one of their policies except this one.
In other words, the Liberal Democrats will do everything in their power not to form a coalition with the SNP if the nationalists are the largest party after May. They will look instead to support some other arrangements with the non-SNP parties. Anything but let Alex Salmond into Bute House.
Whether this is quite in the spirit of a proportional parliament, or even of the Liberal Democrats’s own democratic traditions is open to debate. They have participated in numerous constitutional referendums in the past. Nicol Stephen’s claim that the May ballot is real “the referendum on independence” is disingenuous. He understands the difference between a constitutional proposition put to the people, and the election of a party to run a legislature.
Whatever, it looks as if the SNP, if they do win, will have to look to minority government, or some form of loose agreement short of giving the Liberal Democrats any place in government. Will the LibDems be happy to do without their ministerial motors? Well, they hope that it will never come to that.
At the end of this crucial manifesto Labour are worried, but still confident that their dominance of all those constituencies in West Central Scotland will prevent the SNP from converting their opinion poll lead into actual seats. They still believe Tony Blair is an election winner, even Scots want to give him a kicking. It is the oldest cliché in political campaigning, but there really is everything to play for in this fascinating election. And Scottish voters are starting to feel the hand of history on their shoulders.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Is this the SNP's 1992 revival?
Herald: 8/4/07
It’s not been a happy Easter for Labour. Another weekend poll, this time in the Mail on Sunday, showed the SNP twelve points ahead in the race for Holyrood. There were stories about Brown and Blair arguing in the back of their limo over the impending electoral disaster; there was renewed speculation about Jack McConnell’s future; and Labour insiders were saying that their own internal polls show Labour is trailing the SNP.
In other words, everything is going to plan. Yes, Labour are remarkably relaxed about their poor poll showings and negative press. They seem almost to be talking up the SNP as a tactic, the better to bring them down later in the campaign. There is method to this madness.
Labour’s poll guru, Philip Gould, in Scotland last week compared the Scottish elections to the 1992 general election campaign. At this stage in ‘92, Labour appeared to have a comfortable lead over the Tories. But as soon as voters looked at the small print of Labour’s economic policies, they took fright and threw in their lot with the devil they knew: the Conservatives.
If history is repeating itself, then it makes sense to play up the prospect of an SNP victory the better to concentrate the minds of the electorate on their policies. Mind you, it’s pretty hard on Gordon Brown and the late John Smith who were responsible for the 1992 shadow budget which Gould says didn’t add up.
But is it a legitimate comparison? I remember the 1992 general election campaign well, since I was working in Westminster at the time. At this stage the early polls certainly placed Labour ahead by around five points. There was an infectious air of excitement in the media, just as today, at the prospect of a historic change of government.
It never happened of course, and Labour’s economic policies probably played a part. However, it was a very different economic and political climate. Britain was still in the depths of recession and house prices were collapsing across the South of England. Scotland today is booming and most people in work have never had it so good.
Moreover, I seem to recall that the decisive moment in that 1992 campaign was the infamous Sheffield rally, where Neil Kinnock let his hair down - metaphorically speaking - and started punching the air crying “well, all right...” like a superannuated soul singer. Maybe Sheffield’s significance was exaggerated, but Kinnock certainly feels he blew Labour’s chances by exposing a side of his character that was not sufficiently prime ministerial.
You couldn’t imagine Alex Salmond doing the same - or could you? Remember the “unpardonable folly” remark about the bombing of Belgrade during the 1999 Scottish election campaign. Labour certainly believe that Salmond has it in him to make a series of arrogant gaffes, and a lot of effort will to to into provoke him into delivering one. Hence Jack McConnell’s repeated taunts about how the SNP leader cut and run to Westminster in 2000 because he couldn’t hack it in the Scottish Parliament.
However, the SNP leader has been showing considerable restraint in this election so far. Salmond’s minders have been impressing upon him the need to leave his “guerilla opposition” days behind him and take on the mantle of sober statesmanship. Stop scoring cheap points in debate, curb his soundbites and avoid leaping onto the air waves to rebut every Labour slight. Seems to be working so far.
Last week Salmond and most of his party virtually absented themselves from the entire campaign, allowing the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, free rein to rubbish their monetary and fiscal policies. It culminated in an astonishing attack at the weekend by Professor Arthur Midwinter of Edinburgh University, an adviser on fiscal matters to the Scottish parliament’s finance committee, who told a sunday newspaper that the SNP “are not fit to govern” because they have not been able to defend their policies on local income tax.
Now, in the past, you would have expected a whole series of SNP figures to be leaping up like Jock-in-the-boxes, to defend their policies on council tax, the deficit and keeping the pound. John Swinney, Jim Mather, Alex Salmond to name but three. They would unintentionally have contradicted each other in subtle ways, which the press and Labour would have been able to exploit. In other words, their interventions would have kept the story running, and allowed the focus to fall on the areas where they are weakest.
Instead of that, the nationalists kept their own council, avoided the airwaves and simply released a couple of alternative academic papers, one from Professor David Simpson, former chief adviser to Standard Life and one from Professor Neil Kay, of Strathclyde University, arguing that the SNP numbers are sound. Or at any rate, no more unsound than anyone else's’.
Salmond has kept his ammunition dry until a press conference in Aberdeen today, where he promises to deal with the issue, on his own, point by point. This is not the febrile SNP we have seen in the past. It represents the kind of self discipline that Labour showed, not in 1992 perhaps, but in 1997.
Of course, the SNP will have to get their act together. The charge is that local income tax would make Scotland the highest taxed region in Britain, would discourage investment, and would hit poorer people hardest. There are some very dodgy numbers flying around about just how much local income tax would have be levied.
The respected Institute for Fiscal Studies says 5p on the basic rate. Salmond says, and will say again today, that - assuming the existing council tax benefits are retained which is by no means certain - the increase would only be 3p plus efficiency savings of around half a billion pounds. Hmm. Whenever a politician resorts to efficiency savings to fund policies, economists reach for their revolvers.
Midwinter points out that government in history has ever achieved cost reductions of that scale, equivalent to 1.5% of total spending. Mind you, the Chancellor is supposedly applying efficiency savings of 2.5% under the existing Gershon review, so I suppose Gordon Brown isn’t fit to be in government either. Or Jack McConnell, who promised to cut Scottish spending in the last CSR round by more than Gershon.
Labour have now made a dramatic promise to halve and eventually abolish water and sewerage charges. There will be more tomorrow from Labour at their manifesto launch about making council tax fairer and more progressive. By the end of the week, it will not just be the SNP who will have to show that they can get their numbers to add up.
However, to return to 1992 and all that, there is another very big difference. In 92, Labour were bidding to be the government of the UK, not coalition partners in a regional legislature. Voters know that the SNP would have to share power with the Liberal Democrats and that Scotland would have to vote for independence in a referendum in 2010. Labour’s task is to convince an electorate fed up with them that it cannot afford to take even this limited risk with the future.
It’s not been a happy Easter for Labour. Another weekend poll, this time in the Mail on Sunday, showed the SNP twelve points ahead in the race for Holyrood. There were stories about Brown and Blair arguing in the back of their limo over the impending electoral disaster; there was renewed speculation about Jack McConnell’s future; and Labour insiders were saying that their own internal polls show Labour is trailing the SNP.
In other words, everything is going to plan. Yes, Labour are remarkably relaxed about their poor poll showings and negative press. They seem almost to be talking up the SNP as a tactic, the better to bring them down later in the campaign. There is method to this madness.
Labour’s poll guru, Philip Gould, in Scotland last week compared the Scottish elections to the 1992 general election campaign. At this stage in ‘92, Labour appeared to have a comfortable lead over the Tories. But as soon as voters looked at the small print of Labour’s economic policies, they took fright and threw in their lot with the devil they knew: the Conservatives.
If history is repeating itself, then it makes sense to play up the prospect of an SNP victory the better to concentrate the minds of the electorate on their policies. Mind you, it’s pretty hard on Gordon Brown and the late John Smith who were responsible for the 1992 shadow budget which Gould says didn’t add up.
But is it a legitimate comparison? I remember the 1992 general election campaign well, since I was working in Westminster at the time. At this stage the early polls certainly placed Labour ahead by around five points. There was an infectious air of excitement in the media, just as today, at the prospect of a historic change of government.
It never happened of course, and Labour’s economic policies probably played a part. However, it was a very different economic and political climate. Britain was still in the depths of recession and house prices were collapsing across the South of England. Scotland today is booming and most people in work have never had it so good.
Moreover, I seem to recall that the decisive moment in that 1992 campaign was the infamous Sheffield rally, where Neil Kinnock let his hair down - metaphorically speaking - and started punching the air crying “well, all right...” like a superannuated soul singer. Maybe Sheffield’s significance was exaggerated, but Kinnock certainly feels he blew Labour’s chances by exposing a side of his character that was not sufficiently prime ministerial.
You couldn’t imagine Alex Salmond doing the same - or could you? Remember the “unpardonable folly” remark about the bombing of Belgrade during the 1999 Scottish election campaign. Labour certainly believe that Salmond has it in him to make a series of arrogant gaffes, and a lot of effort will to to into provoke him into delivering one. Hence Jack McConnell’s repeated taunts about how the SNP leader cut and run to Westminster in 2000 because he couldn’t hack it in the Scottish Parliament.
However, the SNP leader has been showing considerable restraint in this election so far. Salmond’s minders have been impressing upon him the need to leave his “guerilla opposition” days behind him and take on the mantle of sober statesmanship. Stop scoring cheap points in debate, curb his soundbites and avoid leaping onto the air waves to rebut every Labour slight. Seems to be working so far.
Last week Salmond and most of his party virtually absented themselves from the entire campaign, allowing the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, free rein to rubbish their monetary and fiscal policies. It culminated in an astonishing attack at the weekend by Professor Arthur Midwinter of Edinburgh University, an adviser on fiscal matters to the Scottish parliament’s finance committee, who told a sunday newspaper that the SNP “are not fit to govern” because they have not been able to defend their policies on local income tax.
Now, in the past, you would have expected a whole series of SNP figures to be leaping up like Jock-in-the-boxes, to defend their policies on council tax, the deficit and keeping the pound. John Swinney, Jim Mather, Alex Salmond to name but three. They would unintentionally have contradicted each other in subtle ways, which the press and Labour would have been able to exploit. In other words, their interventions would have kept the story running, and allowed the focus to fall on the areas where they are weakest.
Instead of that, the nationalists kept their own council, avoided the airwaves and simply released a couple of alternative academic papers, one from Professor David Simpson, former chief adviser to Standard Life and one from Professor Neil Kay, of Strathclyde University, arguing that the SNP numbers are sound. Or at any rate, no more unsound than anyone else's’.
Salmond has kept his ammunition dry until a press conference in Aberdeen today, where he promises to deal with the issue, on his own, point by point. This is not the febrile SNP we have seen in the past. It represents the kind of self discipline that Labour showed, not in 1992 perhaps, but in 1997.
Of course, the SNP will have to get their act together. The charge is that local income tax would make Scotland the highest taxed region in Britain, would discourage investment, and would hit poorer people hardest. There are some very dodgy numbers flying around about just how much local income tax would have be levied.
The respected Institute for Fiscal Studies says 5p on the basic rate. Salmond says, and will say again today, that - assuming the existing council tax benefits are retained which is by no means certain - the increase would only be 3p plus efficiency savings of around half a billion pounds. Hmm. Whenever a politician resorts to efficiency savings to fund policies, economists reach for their revolvers.
Midwinter points out that government in history has ever achieved cost reductions of that scale, equivalent to 1.5% of total spending. Mind you, the Chancellor is supposedly applying efficiency savings of 2.5% under the existing Gershon review, so I suppose Gordon Brown isn’t fit to be in government either. Or Jack McConnell, who promised to cut Scottish spending in the last CSR round by more than Gershon.
Labour have now made a dramatic promise to halve and eventually abolish water and sewerage charges. There will be more tomorrow from Labour at their manifesto launch about making council tax fairer and more progressive. By the end of the week, it will not just be the SNP who will have to show that they can get their numbers to add up.
However, to return to 1992 and all that, there is another very big difference. In 92, Labour were bidding to be the government of the UK, not coalition partners in a regional legislature. Voters know that the SNP would have to share power with the Liberal Democrats and that Scotland would have to vote for independence in a referendum in 2010. Labour’s task is to convince an electorate fed up with them that it cannot afford to take even this limited risk with the future.
Campaign Commentary Week 1
The first week of any election campaign is usually an anticlimax, and this one was no exception. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown came north to warn again of the economic cost of independence, the SNP tried to keep their heads down, the Tories tried to persuade themselves that they still exist.
But the image of the week has to be the Liberal Democrat leader, Nicol Stephen, brandishing that giant toothbrush. The idea was to underline the collapse of NHS dentistry in Scotland, but since the Liberal Democrats were part of the administration responsible for the situation, it didn’t really wash.
The opportunism of the Liberal Democrats has been an intense irration for the SNP and Labour. Nicol Stephen unceremoniously dumped his party’s policy on congestion charging after discovering that it was a vote loser. Shades of the Edinburgh congestion referendum three years ago. Their comments on local authority finance have been so sparing you would hardly believe that they supported a local income tax.
The Liberal Democrats may be small fry but they are immensely important politically. They came fourth in 2003 but they are the only party in this race which is more or less guaranteed a share in any coalition government. The more votes they win the greater their influence.
The big parties are convinced the Liberal Democrats are doing better than their dismal poll figures suggest. The SNP and Labour fear, with justification, that while they slug it out in the forefront, the LibDems will sneak off with lots of votes behind their backs by pretending to be the ‘none of the above’ party. Hiding behind Nicol Stephen’s smile, they will get through the campaign with minimal scrutiny of their policies.
Mind you, the SNP, for their part, were also trying to avoid policy scrutiny last week. Indeed, they seemed to have disappeared mid week, when their biggest draw appeared to be a photo-opportunity in Bathgate. They studiously avoided rising to any of the barrage of economic challenges hurled in their direction by the Chancellor.
Of course, the SNP realise that they are the ones with the most to lose in this contest and they are in the business of avoiding unforced errors. In a curious role reversal, it is Labour who are the underdogs and the SNP who are burdened by the expectation of victory, based on a run of six opinion polls which came to an abrupt halt on Friday.
The Herald poll showing apparently showing Labour back in the lead surprised everyone, psephologists included, who had expected a continuation of the SNP winning streak. The polling organisation, MRUK wasn’t one of the usual suspect, and the SNP insisted that their was something decidedly murky about their sampling technique. They had put the questions in 23-25 March and then sat on them for a fortnight.
But rogue or not, polls like this are significant in terms of morale. Traditionally, the SNP have shown a brittle self-confidence that is easily shattered by unexpected events and set backs. This is a testing time for them, and that is no bad thing. There was a hint of triumphalism entering into their rhetoric which would do them no good at all.
They may have been showing a consistent lead in recent polls, but there was always a question mark about how reliable those polls actually, given the low visibility of Holyrood politics and the large number of ‘don’t knows’. In short, most people hadn’t realised there was an election on until last week. It is only now, as the parties really get into gear with their manifesto launches this week, that the public will begin to sit up and, fitfully, take note.
Labour knows this only too well, which is why they fielded their ‘big guns’ Gordon Brown and Tony Blair again in what was almost a repeat showing of last month’s engagement. Their message was the same as before, same as it ever was: the SNP economics don’t work; independence would cost every Scottish family #5,000; Scotland would be the highest taxed region of Britain; and anyway they will keep the pound so they aren’t really nationalist.
Gordon Brown went ballistic over the SNP currency policy in his visit to Glasgow, denouncing the nationalist policy of remaining with sterling for leaving Scotland at the mercy of the Bank of England. But the real damage was inflicted on the SNP’s plans for a local income tax. The Institute for Fiscal Studies - the accepted authority on such issues - redid the numbers and claimed that it would take a 5p in the pound increase in income tax to raise the equivalent revenue of the existing council tax.
LIT could turn into the equivalent of the SNP’s “penny for Scotland” back in 1999. It is always dangerous to propose new taxes, even if they involve the scrapping of existing ones. For all its faults, council tax has been around for many years and people are used to paying it, however reluctantly.
The problem with shifting the burden from property to income is that it will look like, well, an income tax It may be progressive, but that doesn’t necessarily make it fairer. It will hit people on low earnings who pay no council tax at present, students and houses with multiple occupants. Council tax is unpopular, but the SNP have yet to explain how their system will be less so.
The irony of course is that the low paid who would be hit by the SNP’s local income tax were also clobbered by the Chancellor’s axing of the 10p income tax rate. This is not a good time to be on the minimum wage. The political parties seem to have given up on the poor, now that everyone has become infatuated with the business vote. There is an assumption from the SNP and from Labour that what is good for businessmen is good for the country.
However, a useful corrective to this media preoccupation was provided by the BBC’s election poll this week. Top of the electoral pops for Scottish voters in 2007 appears to be ensuring that hospitals and schools are built and run by the public sector. I take this to be less about opposing PFI - though there’s no indication that it is particularly popular - and more about the Scots continuing commitment to collective provision.
Scottish Labour has been absolutely correct in resisting the market reforms which have been introduced south of the border - even though Number Ten was not impressed by their decision. Scots still hold to traditional Labour values, even if New Labour does not.
Even on council tax want pensioners to be exempted in the belief that this would alleviate hardship. Crime and schools are next on the list, and it’s no secret that they will feature prominently on Labour’s manifesto when it is published on Tuesday. McConnell will promise to give Scotland the best schools in the world, to crack down on crime, to make the council tax bands more progressive and, of course, to keep Scotland in the union.
Last week the SNP kept its head down; this week we will see the bullets fly. This will be the decisive week of the campaign, when Scotland finally awakes to the choice it has to make in four weeks time.
But the image of the week has to be the Liberal Democrat leader, Nicol Stephen, brandishing that giant toothbrush. The idea was to underline the collapse of NHS dentistry in Scotland, but since the Liberal Democrats were part of the administration responsible for the situation, it didn’t really wash.
The opportunism of the Liberal Democrats has been an intense irration for the SNP and Labour. Nicol Stephen unceremoniously dumped his party’s policy on congestion charging after discovering that it was a vote loser. Shades of the Edinburgh congestion referendum three years ago. Their comments on local authority finance have been so sparing you would hardly believe that they supported a local income tax.
The Liberal Democrats may be small fry but they are immensely important politically. They came fourth in 2003 but they are the only party in this race which is more or less guaranteed a share in any coalition government. The more votes they win the greater their influence.
The big parties are convinced the Liberal Democrats are doing better than their dismal poll figures suggest. The SNP and Labour fear, with justification, that while they slug it out in the forefront, the LibDems will sneak off with lots of votes behind their backs by pretending to be the ‘none of the above’ party. Hiding behind Nicol Stephen’s smile, they will get through the campaign with minimal scrutiny of their policies.
Mind you, the SNP, for their part, were also trying to avoid policy scrutiny last week. Indeed, they seemed to have disappeared mid week, when their biggest draw appeared to be a photo-opportunity in Bathgate. They studiously avoided rising to any of the barrage of economic challenges hurled in their direction by the Chancellor.
Of course, the SNP realise that they are the ones with the most to lose in this contest and they are in the business of avoiding unforced errors. In a curious role reversal, it is Labour who are the underdogs and the SNP who are burdened by the expectation of victory, based on a run of six opinion polls which came to an abrupt halt on Friday.
The Herald poll showing apparently showing Labour back in the lead surprised everyone, psephologists included, who had expected a continuation of the SNP winning streak. The polling organisation, MRUK wasn’t one of the usual suspect, and the SNP insisted that their was something decidedly murky about their sampling technique. They had put the questions in 23-25 March and then sat on them for a fortnight.
But rogue or not, polls like this are significant in terms of morale. Traditionally, the SNP have shown a brittle self-confidence that is easily shattered by unexpected events and set backs. This is a testing time for them, and that is no bad thing. There was a hint of triumphalism entering into their rhetoric which would do them no good at all.
They may have been showing a consistent lead in recent polls, but there was always a question mark about how reliable those polls actually, given the low visibility of Holyrood politics and the large number of ‘don’t knows’. In short, most people hadn’t realised there was an election on until last week. It is only now, as the parties really get into gear with their manifesto launches this week, that the public will begin to sit up and, fitfully, take note.
Labour knows this only too well, which is why they fielded their ‘big guns’ Gordon Brown and Tony Blair again in what was almost a repeat showing of last month’s engagement. Their message was the same as before, same as it ever was: the SNP economics don’t work; independence would cost every Scottish family #5,000; Scotland would be the highest taxed region of Britain; and anyway they will keep the pound so they aren’t really nationalist.
Gordon Brown went ballistic over the SNP currency policy in his visit to Glasgow, denouncing the nationalist policy of remaining with sterling for leaving Scotland at the mercy of the Bank of England. But the real damage was inflicted on the SNP’s plans for a local income tax. The Institute for Fiscal Studies - the accepted authority on such issues - redid the numbers and claimed that it would take a 5p in the pound increase in income tax to raise the equivalent revenue of the existing council tax.
LIT could turn into the equivalent of the SNP’s “penny for Scotland” back in 1999. It is always dangerous to propose new taxes, even if they involve the scrapping of existing ones. For all its faults, council tax has been around for many years and people are used to paying it, however reluctantly.
The problem with shifting the burden from property to income is that it will look like, well, an income tax It may be progressive, but that doesn’t necessarily make it fairer. It will hit people on low earnings who pay no council tax at present, students and houses with multiple occupants. Council tax is unpopular, but the SNP have yet to explain how their system will be less so.
The irony of course is that the low paid who would be hit by the SNP’s local income tax were also clobbered by the Chancellor’s axing of the 10p income tax rate. This is not a good time to be on the minimum wage. The political parties seem to have given up on the poor, now that everyone has become infatuated with the business vote. There is an assumption from the SNP and from Labour that what is good for businessmen is good for the country.
However, a useful corrective to this media preoccupation was provided by the BBC’s election poll this week. Top of the electoral pops for Scottish voters in 2007 appears to be ensuring that hospitals and schools are built and run by the public sector. I take this to be less about opposing PFI - though there’s no indication that it is particularly popular - and more about the Scots continuing commitment to collective provision.
Scottish Labour has been absolutely correct in resisting the market reforms which have been introduced south of the border - even though Number Ten was not impressed by their decision. Scots still hold to traditional Labour values, even if New Labour does not.
Even on council tax want pensioners to be exempted in the belief that this would alleviate hardship. Crime and schools are next on the list, and it’s no secret that they will feature prominently on Labour’s manifesto when it is published on Tuesday. McConnell will promise to give Scotland the best schools in the world, to crack down on crime, to make the council tax bands more progressive and, of course, to keep Scotland in the union.
Last week the SNP kept its head down; this week we will see the bullets fly. This will be the decisive week of the campaign, when Scotland finally awakes to the choice it has to make in four weeks time.
A Very British Hostage Crisis
It was a very British hostage crisis. We just can’t take ourselves seriously anymore as a nation at war, and the return of the gallant fifteen was pure Monty Python.
In their appalling suits, clutching their goody bags containing Iranian craft items, sweets and Sir Alex Ferguson’s autobiography, the gallant fifteen smiled and shook hands with their captors. Happy Easter bunnies.
Apparently the ill fitting tin flutes are the off-duty uniform of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, so in a very real sense the British detainees were being given a dressing down. But since when has the Manchester United coach been seen as an icon for the Iranian mullahs? I think we should be told.
Of course, things were tougher for the captives in Iran when they were off the TV screens - kept in isolation and held at gun point - though there is no evidence they were never actually mistreated. Some wish they had been. Armchair generals were distinctly unhappy about their compliant conduct; what the Daily Mail called the “grovelling acquiescence” of the 15 British naval personnel.
What ever happened to name rank and serial number? Did they need to be quite so, well, co-operative? The odd black eye wouldn’t have gone amiss. “They may deserve our pity,” remarked the Mail columnikst Max Hastings” but they do not command our respect”. John Buchan was no doubt turning in his grave at the sight of Britons being so humbled
But servicemen and women aren’t taught to resist anymore. No one seriously expects soldiers to sacrifice themselves to defend the dignity of the flag. All that Boy’s Own stuff went out with Trevor Howard and the Second World War. Modern marines are trained to do whatever is necessary to ensure survival in captivity, short - presumably - of releasing information which might endanger other British military personnel.
They aren’t really taught to fight either, especially in the navy, which hasn’t been involved in any actual war since the Falklands twenty five years ago. In our gender-balanced, allergy-free, risk-averse Royal Navy, you are meant to spend your time looking at digital read outs from machines that go ‘ping’.
Except when you get a little too close to disputed waters and you get lifted by an Iranian gun boat. I don’t know whether the British patrol strayed into Iranian waters or not - the evidence suggests that they didn’t. But they were getting rather close to a country with which we are engaged in a proxy war over Iranian support for the insurgents in Iraq.
The Americans have been capturing Iranian nationals, so it should hardly have come as a surprise that the Iranians decide to lift a boatful of nearby Brits to even the score. And in propaganda terms, it went beautifully, consolidating President Ahmadinejad’s position domestically against his many critics. Uniting the country against foreign “aggression”. His unexpected release of the detainees was a stunning media coup worthy of Alastair Campbell himself.
Tony Blair’s initial bluster rapidly faded as the issue got lost in the United Nations, which couldn’t decide whether this was an unprovoked act of aggression or an overzealous policing action by the Iranians. Hardly matters now that Ahmadinejad has been allowed to display his magnanimity in the eyes of the world by “gifting” the personnel back to Britain.
The Iranian leader was able to thumb his nose at the most powerful nations in the world for nearly a fortnight - making it look as if the infidels, for all their technological sophistication, were weak, decadent, cowardly even.
Would Iranian revolutionary guards have behaved with such
passivity? Would they have confessed so precipitately? Would they have laughed and joked with their captors and allowed themselves to be paraded like performing chimps on the world’s media? Probably not.
But, look, it’s no bad thing that we behave differently to Islamist fanatics. Senseless martyrdom would have helped no one. The British behaved like representatives of a peacekeeping force should behave, even if they weren’t really there keeping the peace.
British diplomats went into action behind the scenes, keeping open the channels of communication, gently cajoling Tehran, trying to do a deal. Our foreign service is very good at this kind of thing - talking our way out of crisis rather than retaliating first.
Imagine if it had been US marines who had been captured? We would probably be at war with Iran right now. The marines might well have fought back - though armed only with rifles, they wouldn’t have got very far. But they would probably have offered some resistance, passive or otherwise.
President Bush would immediately have threatened Tehran with air strikes. There are two battle groups in the Gulf right now, practicing bombing runs against Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the Guardian reported last week that the Americans had offered to “buzz” Revolutionary Guards positions during the crisis. You could almost hear President Bush’s disappointment when the affair ended peacefully.
It may still come to war, anyway. Tony Blair was quick to blame Tehran for the deaths of four British soldiers last week in Basra by an “Iranian-made bomb”. It’s not clear that the militias who killed the British soldiers, two of whom were women, were actually from the militias supported by Iran. But there is little doubt that Iran has been supporting the Shias in Iraq and has been providing training, refuge and explosives for the deadly IEDs.
Sabres will be rattled. But the whole affair has only underlined again how disastrous has been the entire Anglo-American policy in the Middle East. By invading Iraq on a false pretext, the “coalition of the willing” alienated moderate Arab opinion and encouraged every extremist in the region to pile into Iraq to have a crack at the infidel. We gave the Ahmadinejads of the region their best platform from which to attack the West as neo-imperialists.
We have lost the war in Iraq, and it is only a matter of time before the British and then American troops are withdrawn. What Iran has done is position itself very favourably for the aftermath of the retreat. Ahmadinejad has defied the West and sent them packing. Exposed the emptiness of our military rhetoric, for when it comes down to it, they know, and we know they know, that we will not go to war with Iran. President Bush might, but we won’t be joining him.
That was the message conveyed by last week’s episode. We Brits aren’t in the business of trying to remake the world in our image. We are too old and too wise a nation to have imperial ambitions, and we know the limits of force. Far better to laugh it off, as the British sailors did - smile and shake hands.
Armchair generals may have been squirming in their seats at the sight of a British woman paraded in her hijab, chain smoking on television. There has been much muttering about how this confirms that women should not be placed in the front line because they cannot expect to offer much in the way of resistance. But surely the presence of Leading Seaman Faye Turney’s presence helped civilise the crisis and made the revolutionary guards behave. Perhaps there should be more women in the front line.
Surely, the lesson of this hostage crisis is surely that it is best to humour excitable Islamists and do your best to make them behave decently. Contrast the peaceful outcome of this episode with the bloody end to the American hostage crisis in Iran in 1981. In its own way, the resolution of the crisis - like the deal done with North Korea over its nuclear weapons programme - was a kind of victory disguised as a humiliation. Better Monty Python than Quentin Tarantino.
In their appalling suits, clutching their goody bags containing Iranian craft items, sweets and Sir Alex Ferguson’s autobiography, the gallant fifteen smiled and shook hands with their captors. Happy Easter bunnies.
Apparently the ill fitting tin flutes are the off-duty uniform of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, so in a very real sense the British detainees were being given a dressing down. But since when has the Manchester United coach been seen as an icon for the Iranian mullahs? I think we should be told.
Of course, things were tougher for the captives in Iran when they were off the TV screens - kept in isolation and held at gun point - though there is no evidence they were never actually mistreated. Some wish they had been. Armchair generals were distinctly unhappy about their compliant conduct; what the Daily Mail called the “grovelling acquiescence” of the 15 British naval personnel.
What ever happened to name rank and serial number? Did they need to be quite so, well, co-operative? The odd black eye wouldn’t have gone amiss. “They may deserve our pity,” remarked the Mail columnikst Max Hastings” but they do not command our respect”. John Buchan was no doubt turning in his grave at the sight of Britons being so humbled
But servicemen and women aren’t taught to resist anymore. No one seriously expects soldiers to sacrifice themselves to defend the dignity of the flag. All that Boy’s Own stuff went out with Trevor Howard and the Second World War. Modern marines are trained to do whatever is necessary to ensure survival in captivity, short - presumably - of releasing information which might endanger other British military personnel.
They aren’t really taught to fight either, especially in the navy, which hasn’t been involved in any actual war since the Falklands twenty five years ago. In our gender-balanced, allergy-free, risk-averse Royal Navy, you are meant to spend your time looking at digital read outs from machines that go ‘ping’.
Except when you get a little too close to disputed waters and you get lifted by an Iranian gun boat. I don’t know whether the British patrol strayed into Iranian waters or not - the evidence suggests that they didn’t. But they were getting rather close to a country with which we are engaged in a proxy war over Iranian support for the insurgents in Iraq.
The Americans have been capturing Iranian nationals, so it should hardly have come as a surprise that the Iranians decide to lift a boatful of nearby Brits to even the score. And in propaganda terms, it went beautifully, consolidating President Ahmadinejad’s position domestically against his many critics. Uniting the country against foreign “aggression”. His unexpected release of the detainees was a stunning media coup worthy of Alastair Campbell himself.
Tony Blair’s initial bluster rapidly faded as the issue got lost in the United Nations, which couldn’t decide whether this was an unprovoked act of aggression or an overzealous policing action by the Iranians. Hardly matters now that Ahmadinejad has been allowed to display his magnanimity in the eyes of the world by “gifting” the personnel back to Britain.
The Iranian leader was able to thumb his nose at the most powerful nations in the world for nearly a fortnight - making it look as if the infidels, for all their technological sophistication, were weak, decadent, cowardly even.
Would Iranian revolutionary guards have behaved with such
passivity? Would they have confessed so precipitately? Would they have laughed and joked with their captors and allowed themselves to be paraded like performing chimps on the world’s media? Probably not.
But, look, it’s no bad thing that we behave differently to Islamist fanatics. Senseless martyrdom would have helped no one. The British behaved like representatives of a peacekeeping force should behave, even if they weren’t really there keeping the peace.
British diplomats went into action behind the scenes, keeping open the channels of communication, gently cajoling Tehran, trying to do a deal. Our foreign service is very good at this kind of thing - talking our way out of crisis rather than retaliating first.
Imagine if it had been US marines who had been captured? We would probably be at war with Iran right now. The marines might well have fought back - though armed only with rifles, they wouldn’t have got very far. But they would probably have offered some resistance, passive or otherwise.
President Bush would immediately have threatened Tehran with air strikes. There are two battle groups in the Gulf right now, practicing bombing runs against Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the Guardian reported last week that the Americans had offered to “buzz” Revolutionary Guards positions during the crisis. You could almost hear President Bush’s disappointment when the affair ended peacefully.
It may still come to war, anyway. Tony Blair was quick to blame Tehran for the deaths of four British soldiers last week in Basra by an “Iranian-made bomb”. It’s not clear that the militias who killed the British soldiers, two of whom were women, were actually from the militias supported by Iran. But there is little doubt that Iran has been supporting the Shias in Iraq and has been providing training, refuge and explosives for the deadly IEDs.
Sabres will be rattled. But the whole affair has only underlined again how disastrous has been the entire Anglo-American policy in the Middle East. By invading Iraq on a false pretext, the “coalition of the willing” alienated moderate Arab opinion and encouraged every extremist in the region to pile into Iraq to have a crack at the infidel. We gave the Ahmadinejads of the region their best platform from which to attack the West as neo-imperialists.
We have lost the war in Iraq, and it is only a matter of time before the British and then American troops are withdrawn. What Iran has done is position itself very favourably for the aftermath of the retreat. Ahmadinejad has defied the West and sent them packing. Exposed the emptiness of our military rhetoric, for when it comes down to it, they know, and we know they know, that we will not go to war with Iran. President Bush might, but we won’t be joining him.
That was the message conveyed by last week’s episode. We Brits aren’t in the business of trying to remake the world in our image. We are too old and too wise a nation to have imperial ambitions, and we know the limits of force. Far better to laugh it off, as the British sailors did - smile and shake hands.
Armchair generals may have been squirming in their seats at the sight of a British woman paraded in her hijab, chain smoking on television. There has been much muttering about how this confirms that women should not be placed in the front line because they cannot expect to offer much in the way of resistance. But surely the presence of Leading Seaman Faye Turney’s presence helped civilise the crisis and made the revolutionary guards behave. Perhaps there should be more women in the front line.
Surely, the lesson of this hostage crisis is surely that it is best to humour excitable Islamists and do your best to make them behave decently. Contrast the peaceful outcome of this episode with the bloody end to the American hostage crisis in Iran in 1981. In its own way, the resolution of the crisis - like the deal done with North Korea over its nuclear weapons programme - was a kind of victory disguised as a humiliation. Better Monty Python than Quentin Tarantino.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Sorry, but Brown isn't to blame for the pensions crisis
Of all the stealth taxes dreamed up by the Chancellor Gordon Brown in his decade in office, the pensions tax was by far the most obscure. It wasn't a tax for a start, but a tax break, a loophole. Ten years after closing it, the Chancellor is now in the dock for wrecking the pension prospects of a generation.
However, while the Chancellor must share the blame for the collapse of the pensions industry, this particular measure was only a small part of the problem. It's always tempting to blame the politicians when things go wrong, and the Brown has allowed himself to acquire a reputation for dodgy fiscal manipulation. But there is more to this story than treasury sleight of hand.
The ending of dividend credits on advance corporation tax baffled most hacks - this one included - when Brown announced it in 1997, alongside measures like the windfall tax on the privatised utilities and the national minimum wage. Few financial journalists even appreciated its significance.
The dividend relief appeared to benefit wealthy people with big pension funds rather than the little people in public sector jobs and so scrapping it seemed to most Labour MPs to be acceptable in the context of a tight spending round.
Even the civil servants who are now said to have been warning Brown against scrapping dividend relief were divided about its impact. Treasury papers released under the Freedom of Information act reveal that officials at the time thought that the measure might cut the stock market by 20%.
This was quite erroneous. The FTSE collapsed three years later, but not because of the removal of dividend relief. It was the dot-com madness of the late 90s that led to that.
The anonymous treasury mandarins also warned that final salary pension schemes might be at risk, and personal pensions would lose out, both of which forecasts were correct - but for the wrong reasons.
The collapse of occupational pensions arose largely from the restructuring of the corporate private sector, under the pressure of globalization, and the ending of the life-time career.
Firms no longer valued their long term employees enough to want to pay for them indefinitely.
Private companies have been dumpng occupational pensions so rapidly that soon it will only be the public sector that offers them, which is one reason why graduates in Scotland are shunning the private sector.
As far as the collapse of personal pensions is concerned, this again was largely a result of factors outwith the Chancellor's control. A decade ago a #100,000 fund would have yielded a pension of #9,000 a year; today you would be lucky to get half that. But this is largely because people are living longer and because the private pension funds never fully recovered from the 2000 stock market crash.
The main reason they never recovered was the high commissions charged by the insurance companies that sold them in the 1980s and 90s. Back then, it was not unusual for 30% of the annual premiums paid into a personal pension to be taken out in charges in the first three years. This was the infamous system of "front-loading" commissions.
Like endowent mortgages, with-profit funds and other financial "products", personal pensions gave very poor value. They promised unrealistic long term returns of 9 or 10% which assumed that share prices would never go down.
But this was the roaring 90s, and with the FTSE rising 10-20% a year, hefty commissions appeared justified. It was only after the stock market collapse of 2000-03 that companies and individuals noticed that their pensions had been underfunded all along.
Brown was a victim of the bull market just like everyone else. In 1997 he calculated that the big pension funds could live with losing dividend tax relief. Most were rolling in cash, and many large companies were awarding themselves pension contribution "holidays". Until the roof fell in.
Since then, the financial services industry and impoverished pensioners have been looking for someone to blame. The Chancellor's face fits and he certainly contributed to the problem by withdrawing 5 billion in annual dividend tax reliefs.
But it's not clear that it would have made very much difference had the money stayed put. It was the 'irrational exuberance" of the financial services industry that destroyed the credibility of pensions. As a result, millions face poverty in retirement and two thirds of of people in work now are not saving enough for the future.
The Tory party call for an inquiry into the so-called pensions tax is disingenuous. They were themselves largely responsible for the encouraging growth of private pensons through thatcherite policies in the 1980s. They have no real answer to the pension crisis.
Most middle-aged people today are looking to their houses to provide their pensions. Hardly surprising since in the decade of disaster for pensions, house prices have tripled. People have piled into bricks and mortar in the belief that house prices always go up. They don't of course, and there will have to be a reckoning at some stage.
This is where the Chancellor's culpability becomes much more apparent. By allowing the housing market to get completely out of control, the Chancellor has stored up the mother of all problems for the future.
Yes, it is the independent Bank of England that set the low interest rates that have pumped up the housing bubble. But the Bank is only charged with keeping inflation under control, and the measure of inflation that it uses, the consumer price index, excludes housing costs from the inflation figures.
This means that interest rates are lower than they would have been had the old retail price index been the Banks guiding star.
Brown's response to the affordability crisis has been to subsidise private sales rather than build more houses. The effect of government shared equity schemes like homeshare has been to push prices up even higher.
The question now is where we go from here. The Turner Report called for the government to set up a national pensions saving scheme, but the problem as always is getting private financial serviecs industry to run it. Lord Turner said should the pension providers should only be allowed to charge a maximum of 0.3% per annum, but the pensions industry won't move until they get more. They killed off stakeholder pensions, which charged a maximum of 1%, by simply not telling their clients about them
With a rapidly ageing population, pensions is one of the great issues of the age, and one which will dominate Gordon Brown's era as prime minister. Very soon, those under-funded pensioners are going to be throwing themselves on the mercy of the state.
Brown has been damaged politically, even though he was only a part of the problem. if he doesn't do something to restore saving in this country and make pensions worth investing in, then he really will be guilty of impoverishing a generation now in work.
However, while the Chancellor must share the blame for the collapse of the pensions industry, this particular measure was only a small part of the problem. It's always tempting to blame the politicians when things go wrong, and the Brown has allowed himself to acquire a reputation for dodgy fiscal manipulation. But there is more to this story than treasury sleight of hand.
The ending of dividend credits on advance corporation tax baffled most hacks - this one included - when Brown announced it in 1997, alongside measures like the windfall tax on the privatised utilities and the national minimum wage. Few financial journalists even appreciated its significance.
The dividend relief appeared to benefit wealthy people with big pension funds rather than the little people in public sector jobs and so scrapping it seemed to most Labour MPs to be acceptable in the context of a tight spending round.
Even the civil servants who are now said to have been warning Brown against scrapping dividend relief were divided about its impact. Treasury papers released under the Freedom of Information act reveal that officials at the time thought that the measure might cut the stock market by 20%.
This was quite erroneous. The FTSE collapsed three years later, but not because of the removal of dividend relief. It was the dot-com madness of the late 90s that led to that.
The anonymous treasury mandarins also warned that final salary pension schemes might be at risk, and personal pensions would lose out, both of which forecasts were correct - but for the wrong reasons.
The collapse of occupational pensions arose largely from the restructuring of the corporate private sector, under the pressure of globalization, and the ending of the life-time career.
Firms no longer valued their long term employees enough to want to pay for them indefinitely.
Private companies have been dumpng occupational pensions so rapidly that soon it will only be the public sector that offers them, which is one reason why graduates in Scotland are shunning the private sector.
As far as the collapse of personal pensions is concerned, this again was largely a result of factors outwith the Chancellor's control. A decade ago a #100,000 fund would have yielded a pension of #9,000 a year; today you would be lucky to get half that. But this is largely because people are living longer and because the private pension funds never fully recovered from the 2000 stock market crash.
The main reason they never recovered was the high commissions charged by the insurance companies that sold them in the 1980s and 90s. Back then, it was not unusual for 30% of the annual premiums paid into a personal pension to be taken out in charges in the first three years. This was the infamous system of "front-loading" commissions.
Like endowent mortgages, with-profit funds and other financial "products", personal pensions gave very poor value. They promised unrealistic long term returns of 9 or 10% which assumed that share prices would never go down.
But this was the roaring 90s, and with the FTSE rising 10-20% a year, hefty commissions appeared justified. It was only after the stock market collapse of 2000-03 that companies and individuals noticed that their pensions had been underfunded all along.
Brown was a victim of the bull market just like everyone else. In 1997 he calculated that the big pension funds could live with losing dividend tax relief. Most were rolling in cash, and many large companies were awarding themselves pension contribution "holidays". Until the roof fell in.
Since then, the financial services industry and impoverished pensioners have been looking for someone to blame. The Chancellor's face fits and he certainly contributed to the problem by withdrawing 5 billion in annual dividend tax reliefs.
But it's not clear that it would have made very much difference had the money stayed put. It was the 'irrational exuberance" of the financial services industry that destroyed the credibility of pensions. As a result, millions face poverty in retirement and two thirds of of people in work now are not saving enough for the future.
The Tory party call for an inquiry into the so-called pensions tax is disingenuous. They were themselves largely responsible for the encouraging growth of private pensons through thatcherite policies in the 1980s. They have no real answer to the pension crisis.
Most middle-aged people today are looking to their houses to provide their pensions. Hardly surprising since in the decade of disaster for pensions, house prices have tripled. People have piled into bricks and mortar in the belief that house prices always go up. They don't of course, and there will have to be a reckoning at some stage.
This is where the Chancellor's culpability becomes much more apparent. By allowing the housing market to get completely out of control, the Chancellor has stored up the mother of all problems for the future.
Yes, it is the independent Bank of England that set the low interest rates that have pumped up the housing bubble. But the Bank is only charged with keeping inflation under control, and the measure of inflation that it uses, the consumer price index, excludes housing costs from the inflation figures.
This means that interest rates are lower than they would have been had the old retail price index been the Banks guiding star.
Brown's response to the affordability crisis has been to subsidise private sales rather than build more houses. The effect of government shared equity schemes like homeshare has been to push prices up even higher.
The question now is where we go from here. The Turner Report called for the government to set up a national pensions saving scheme, but the problem as always is getting private financial serviecs industry to run it. Lord Turner said should the pension providers should only be allowed to charge a maximum of 0.3% per annum, but the pensions industry won't move until they get more. They killed off stakeholder pensions, which charged a maximum of 1%, by simply not telling their clients about them
With a rapidly ageing population, pensions is one of the great issues of the age, and one which will dominate Gordon Brown's era as prime minister. Very soon, those under-funded pensioners are going to be throwing themselves on the mercy of the state.
Brown has been damaged politically, even though he was only a part of the problem. if he doesn't do something to restore saving in this country and make pensions worth investing in, then he really will be guilty of impoverishing a generation now in work.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
SNP and Big Money.
Herald 18/3/07
"Broke", cried the Labour advan that toured the vicinity of the SNP conference in Glasgow - referring to the consequences of breaking up the union. But it could scarcely have been less appropriate to the occasion. For the first time in quarter of a century, the SNP ain"t broke.
The Stagecoach boss, Brian Souter, had just donated half a million to the SNP. Topping Tom Farmer's hundred grand, Sir Sean's bequest and countless smaller donations. It takes the nationalist war chest to 1.3 million - its largest ever.
Liberal hackles rose at the thought of the controversial Brian Souter, alleged homophobe, buying a stake in the new nationalist dawn. But they subsided somewhat when it emerged that Bruce Kent, pacifist intellectual and former CND leader, had also endorsed the SNP.
Quite a combination that. Appealing equally to socially conservative Scotland and left wing anti-nuclear Scotland. And it isn't the only odd couple in the nationalist camp.
The former boss of the Royal Bank, Sir George Mathewson has been rubbing shoulders, metaphorically at least, with the former leader of Red Clydeside, Jimmy Reid of UCS. Then there is Tory historian Michael Fry and comedian Hardeep Singh Kohli all marching in Alex's army, even if they are hearing rather different tunes.
The SNP are congratulating themselves for their pre-election conference, as well they might. It went like a dream. However, nationalists are very good at dreaming and the nightmare now is that it will all end in bitter disillusion. Disappointment is practically written into the SNP DNA.
No one knows this better than Alex Salmond, the SNP leader who has lived the dream and lived the nightmare - too often. Perhaps this was why his conference speech yesterday was so low key, solemn even. No one storms a barn better than Salmond but yesterday he was not in the busines of raising rafters. It was as if he was trying to calm down his party, dampen expectations, ease back on the emotional accelerator.
The nationalists have put in an extraordinary performance recently, but as with the Scottish football team this usually means that defeat is just around the corner. So will it be any different this time?
Well, let's not ignore the obvious fact that, whatever happens in May, the nationalists have been getting their campaigning act together. Their professionalisn brings to mind nothing so much as Labour in the mid nineties. Then, Tony Blair's team seemed to score public relations coups on a daily basis. Businessmen and celebrities praised them.
The news agenda seemed to dance to their tune, as the Tory government collapsed in sleaze, incompetence and division. They seemed were driving the events rather than responding to them - just like the SNP now.
Much of this is down to timing and astute staff work. Brian Souter has always supported the SNP and Mathewson has had nationalist sympathies also. If they had made their announcements six months ago, it would have raised little comment.
But using the former RBS boss to upstage the Tony Blair showed astute planning.
And the Prime Minister played into the SNP hands by attacking Scotland's favourite businessman by name
Similarly, the SNP got the maximkum bang from the Souter buck by keeping quiet about his donation until conference time. This meant they could manage the controversy that inevitably followed.
This kind of media management doesn't happen by accident. It takes leadership and vision and some creative energy.
So the SNP have a leader, the staff, the money and the timing. They even have the opinon polls, with Professor John Curtice - the oracle of British psephology - saying that they will beat Labour and become the largest party in the May election with around 45 seats to Labour's 42.
The SNP only returned 28 MSPs in 2003, so that would truly be an unbelievable performance, nearly doubling their representation in parliament. It implies that they are capable of winning constituencies in Glasgow - which they have never done in the past outside Govan. People in West Central Scotland are notorious for voting for non human primates provided they sport a red rosette.
It also suggests they can get win large numbers of constituency seats in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and points north. Now, I'm not saying this is impossible, but it would require the SNP returning votes by the truckload after two elections in which they have done the reverse.
In the 2005 general election was worse than 2003 and they were knocked into third place by the Liberal Democrats. And it was the LibDems, not the SNP, who won Dunfermline and West Fife last year - the noughties equivalent of the '88 Govan by-election.
So there is amountain to climb, and Alex Salmond is going to have to become the Ranolph Ffeinnes of Scottish politics if the SNP is to get to the top.
His policy agenda for the first hundred days sounded attractive enough - smaller class sizes, more nurses, local income tax etc.. But it hasn't been tested in an actual campaign yet. And the three pence rise in income tax to pay for council services has already taken some hostile fire.
And then of course, even if the SNP get the votes, they still don't get the government. They will have to do a deal with the Liberal Democrats which might shatter the nationalist family. The first thing that would have to go would be the referendum on independence.
Granted, this may not be the problem it appears to be. Rather like taxation powers for the Scottish parliament - which once threatened the devolution consensus - it may be possible to find a way of fixing the referendum issue in parliament.
After all, the SNP are only demanding a commitment in principle from the LibDems to a test of opinion on the constitution within four years. This doesn't mean it will necessarily happen within four years.
. The SNP will publish their white paper, and draft referendum bill, in the first hundred days. But before any legislation goes before the Scottish Parliament, it has to be agreed by the parties as represented on the parliamentary bureau, which determines the business of the house. The SNP don't have control of this body.
The Liberal Democrats and the SNP may not be able to agree the form of the bill that is to be put. The Liberal Democrats may want, for example, a federal alternative to be placed on the ballot paper, which the SNP would reject. If no agreement is reached, the SNP can't force matters, because it would not have an overall majority of MSPs in the parliament.
The fact that the SNP will inevitably be a minority in the parliament might hold the key to resolving the referendum conundrum. Then again, it might not. The fundamentalists have been very quiet in the party of late, but they haven't gone away. The spectre of betrayal could reemerge if Salmond appears to be content to run a devolved parliament on its own terms, and not as a battering ram against the Brits.
So it could still end badly. However, the SNP have been making the political weather; they have cash in the bank; Jack McConnell is nowhere to be seen. This is their best shot, they better take i
"Broke", cried the Labour advan that toured the vicinity of the SNP conference in Glasgow - referring to the consequences of breaking up the union. But it could scarcely have been less appropriate to the occasion. For the first time in quarter of a century, the SNP ain"t broke.
The Stagecoach boss, Brian Souter, had just donated half a million to the SNP. Topping Tom Farmer's hundred grand, Sir Sean's bequest and countless smaller donations. It takes the nationalist war chest to 1.3 million - its largest ever.
Liberal hackles rose at the thought of the controversial Brian Souter, alleged homophobe, buying a stake in the new nationalist dawn. But they subsided somewhat when it emerged that Bruce Kent, pacifist intellectual and former CND leader, had also endorsed the SNP.
Quite a combination that. Appealing equally to socially conservative Scotland and left wing anti-nuclear Scotland. And it isn't the only odd couple in the nationalist camp.
The former boss of the Royal Bank, Sir George Mathewson has been rubbing shoulders, metaphorically at least, with the former leader of Red Clydeside, Jimmy Reid of UCS. Then there is Tory historian Michael Fry and comedian Hardeep Singh Kohli all marching in Alex's army, even if they are hearing rather different tunes.
The SNP are congratulating themselves for their pre-election conference, as well they might. It went like a dream. However, nationalists are very good at dreaming and the nightmare now is that it will all end in bitter disillusion. Disappointment is practically written into the SNP DNA.
No one knows this better than Alex Salmond, the SNP leader who has lived the dream and lived the nightmare - too often. Perhaps this was why his conference speech yesterday was so low key, solemn even. No one storms a barn better than Salmond but yesterday he was not in the busines of raising rafters. It was as if he was trying to calm down his party, dampen expectations, ease back on the emotional accelerator.
The nationalists have put in an extraordinary performance recently, but as with the Scottish football team this usually means that defeat is just around the corner. So will it be any different this time?
Well, let's not ignore the obvious fact that, whatever happens in May, the nationalists have been getting their campaigning act together. Their professionalisn brings to mind nothing so much as Labour in the mid nineties. Then, Tony Blair's team seemed to score public relations coups on a daily basis. Businessmen and celebrities praised them.
The news agenda seemed to dance to their tune, as the Tory government collapsed in sleaze, incompetence and division. They seemed were driving the events rather than responding to them - just like the SNP now.
Much of this is down to timing and astute staff work. Brian Souter has always supported the SNP and Mathewson has had nationalist sympathies also. If they had made their announcements six months ago, it would have raised little comment.
But using the former RBS boss to upstage the Tony Blair showed astute planning.
And the Prime Minister played into the SNP hands by attacking Scotland's favourite businessman by name
Similarly, the SNP got the maximkum bang from the Souter buck by keeping quiet about his donation until conference time. This meant they could manage the controversy that inevitably followed.
This kind of media management doesn't happen by accident. It takes leadership and vision and some creative energy.
So the SNP have a leader, the staff, the money and the timing. They even have the opinon polls, with Professor John Curtice - the oracle of British psephology - saying that they will beat Labour and become the largest party in the May election with around 45 seats to Labour's 42.
The SNP only returned 28 MSPs in 2003, so that would truly be an unbelievable performance, nearly doubling their representation in parliament. It implies that they are capable of winning constituencies in Glasgow - which they have never done in the past outside Govan. People in West Central Scotland are notorious for voting for non human primates provided they sport a red rosette.
It also suggests they can get win large numbers of constituency seats in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and points north. Now, I'm not saying this is impossible, but it would require the SNP returning votes by the truckload after two elections in which they have done the reverse.
In the 2005 general election was worse than 2003 and they were knocked into third place by the Liberal Democrats. And it was the LibDems, not the SNP, who won Dunfermline and West Fife last year - the noughties equivalent of the '88 Govan by-election.
So there is amountain to climb, and Alex Salmond is going to have to become the Ranolph Ffeinnes of Scottish politics if the SNP is to get to the top.
His policy agenda for the first hundred days sounded attractive enough - smaller class sizes, more nurses, local income tax etc.. But it hasn't been tested in an actual campaign yet. And the three pence rise in income tax to pay for council services has already taken some hostile fire.
And then of course, even if the SNP get the votes, they still don't get the government. They will have to do a deal with the Liberal Democrats which might shatter the nationalist family. The first thing that would have to go would be the referendum on independence.
Granted, this may not be the problem it appears to be. Rather like taxation powers for the Scottish parliament - which once threatened the devolution consensus - it may be possible to find a way of fixing the referendum issue in parliament.
After all, the SNP are only demanding a commitment in principle from the LibDems to a test of opinion on the constitution within four years. This doesn't mean it will necessarily happen within four years.
. The SNP will publish their white paper, and draft referendum bill, in the first hundred days. But before any legislation goes before the Scottish Parliament, it has to be agreed by the parties as represented on the parliamentary bureau, which determines the business of the house. The SNP don't have control of this body.
The Liberal Democrats and the SNP may not be able to agree the form of the bill that is to be put. The Liberal Democrats may want, for example, a federal alternative to be placed on the ballot paper, which the SNP would reject. If no agreement is reached, the SNP can't force matters, because it would not have an overall majority of MSPs in the parliament.
The fact that the SNP will inevitably be a minority in the parliament might hold the key to resolving the referendum conundrum. Then again, it might not. The fundamentalists have been very quiet in the party of late, but they haven't gone away. The spectre of betrayal could reemerge if Salmond appears to be content to run a devolved parliament on its own terms, and not as a battering ram against the Brits.
So it could still end badly. However, the SNP have been making the political weather; they have cash in the bank; Jack McConnell is nowhere to be seen. This is their best shot, they better take i
So, is Scotland worth it?
Sunday Herald 25/3/05
So, is it worth the hassle? What can we learn from the experiences of the hundred or so small nations that have gained independence in the last Century or so?
Well the first lesson is that every independence struggle is unique. From the amicable separation between Norway and Sweden in 1905, to the troubled birth of Europe's newest nation, Montenegro - formerly a part of war-torn Yugoslavia - which secured independence only last year, the process of independence is always shaped by the particular circumstances of the times.
However, we can make a couple of generalisations about becoming independence. First, it is never an easy option and, second, that the liberated nations generally flourish in the longer term.
Look at all those small Baltic countries, Latvia Estonia Lithuania, which emerged from the former Soviet Union in 1991, and which are now among the most dynamic economies of Europe. They are intoxicated by autonomy and scarily self-confident. But that's perhaps hardly surprising after half a century of Soviet oppression.
Ireland's economy doubled in the 1990s as it took full advantage of its independent status in Europe to reverse two centuries of economic decline and population loss. The Celtic Tiger is the country the SNP always look to when making the case for secession. However, no one ever said it was easy..
It took a bloody civil war in the 1920s before Ireland was able to leave the United Kingdom, and historians argue to this day whether or not the people of the Republic really wanted independence. Many were content with a devolved status within the UK and the Irish people were appalled by the Easter Rising in 1916.
Under the nationalist President, Eamonn de Valera, in the '30s Ireland lapsed into theocratic isolation and economic decline which was to last for forty years. Ireland's economic transformation is a very recent phenomenon, and largely down to membership of the EU. However, there is no doubt that having become their own nation, the Irish would never turn the clock back.
Nor would tiny Iceland, which won independence, peacefully, in 1944 and enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world. It is making huge strides in developing its vast reserves of renewable energy and plans to become the world's first fossil fuel-free economy based on hydrogen.
Now it may be that Iceland would have developed similarly had it remained under Danish jurisdiction, but most Icelanders believe that if they hadn't gone their own way they would still be living on puffins.
There is no doubt that national self-confidence plays a big part in successful nation-building. Rustic, frozen,Norway was regarded with amused contempt by the sophisticated Swedes, until Norway went its own way and discovered oil. It is now one of the most advanced civilisations on the planet, and poised to progress beyond petroleum and into renewable energy.
Norway's oil fund has provided unprecedented security to this small cold nation on the remote fringes of Europe and allowed it to plan its economic future. By comparison, what happened to Scotland's oil is a stark lesson in how not to benefit from a natural resource.
The most peaceful example example of separation in modern time was probably the "Velvet Divorce" between the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. The Czechs, the dominant partner in the the old Czechoslovakia, resented handing financial subsidies to the poorer Slovaks. Shades of the Barnett Formula and Scotland's alleged dependency culture. Relations between the two provinces became increasingly fractious.
In the end, separation happened almost by accident, and without a clear majority of either population being in favour of divorce, according to opinion polls at the time. There was no referendum, and independence arose out of a failed attempt to create a looser federal Czechoslovakia.
Both sides decided that independence was the only coherent solution. The new countries have lived happily apart ever since. And since the break-up, "backward" Slovakia has consistently returned higher economic growth rates than the "advanced" Czech Republic.
Of course, divorce is rarely velvet, in marriage or nation-building. The disintegration of former Yugoslavia into Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and ultimately Montenegro involved ethnic cleansing and civil war. Nationalism showed its dark side in the Balkans with communal violence and poisonous racial and religious divisions. The fate of would be Chechnya is also a grim lesson in the cost of secession - though we can hardly blame the Chechen nationalists for the violence inflicted upon them by Russia.
And where there isn't civil war, there is often regional tension. The instability in the Canadian province of Quebec in the 1970's and 80's as it sought independence is often held up as a warning to Scotland. English-speaking companies left Montreal in droves when the nationalists won political influence. A series of inconclusive referendums, or "neverendums" followed which has, to this day, failed to resolve the national status of Quebec within the Canadian federation. Ironically, the Quebec nationalists are now more influential in the Federal government in Ottawa than they are in Quebec.
Which only goes to show that there is no royal road to national self-determination. However, what is clear is that more and more countries are taking it. Fifty years ago, when the European Union had its origins, no one predicted that it would lead to the growth of smaller nations. But from Ireland to the Baltic, it is small nations that seem to be taking best advantage of European integration.
The very existence of Europe allows small countries to feel more secure, more free to do their own thing, without the fear of aggressive larger countries trying to take them over or bully them.
And Scotland? Well, my own view is that Scotland will, rather like the Spanish province of Catalonia, achieve greater autonomy over the years, but will stop short of a formal declaration of national independence. Scotland already is a nation in its own right, and now that it has its own parliament, it is simply a matter of acquiring the powers necessary to secure Scotland's economic and social objectives.
It will, if you like, be Scotland's unique contribution to the science of self-determinatio
So, is it worth the hassle? What can we learn from the experiences of the hundred or so small nations that have gained independence in the last Century or so?
Well the first lesson is that every independence struggle is unique. From the amicable separation between Norway and Sweden in 1905, to the troubled birth of Europe's newest nation, Montenegro - formerly a part of war-torn Yugoslavia - which secured independence only last year, the process of independence is always shaped by the particular circumstances of the times.
However, we can make a couple of generalisations about becoming independence. First, it is never an easy option and, second, that the liberated nations generally flourish in the longer term.
Look at all those small Baltic countries, Latvia Estonia Lithuania, which emerged from the former Soviet Union in 1991, and which are now among the most dynamic economies of Europe. They are intoxicated by autonomy and scarily self-confident. But that's perhaps hardly surprising after half a century of Soviet oppression.
Ireland's economy doubled in the 1990s as it took full advantage of its independent status in Europe to reverse two centuries of economic decline and population loss. The Celtic Tiger is the country the SNP always look to when making the case for secession. However, no one ever said it was easy..
It took a bloody civil war in the 1920s before Ireland was able to leave the United Kingdom, and historians argue to this day whether or not the people of the Republic really wanted independence. Many were content with a devolved status within the UK and the Irish people were appalled by the Easter Rising in 1916.
Under the nationalist President, Eamonn de Valera, in the '30s Ireland lapsed into theocratic isolation and economic decline which was to last for forty years. Ireland's economic transformation is a very recent phenomenon, and largely down to membership of the EU. However, there is no doubt that having become their own nation, the Irish would never turn the clock back.
Nor would tiny Iceland, which won independence, peacefully, in 1944 and enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world. It is making huge strides in developing its vast reserves of renewable energy and plans to become the world's first fossil fuel-free economy based on hydrogen.
Now it may be that Iceland would have developed similarly had it remained under Danish jurisdiction, but most Icelanders believe that if they hadn't gone their own way they would still be living on puffins.
There is no doubt that national self-confidence plays a big part in successful nation-building. Rustic, frozen,Norway was regarded with amused contempt by the sophisticated Swedes, until Norway went its own way and discovered oil. It is now one of the most advanced civilisations on the planet, and poised to progress beyond petroleum and into renewable energy.
Norway's oil fund has provided unprecedented security to this small cold nation on the remote fringes of Europe and allowed it to plan its economic future. By comparison, what happened to Scotland's oil is a stark lesson in how not to benefit from a natural resource.
The most peaceful example example of separation in modern time was probably the "Velvet Divorce" between the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. The Czechs, the dominant partner in the the old Czechoslovakia, resented handing financial subsidies to the poorer Slovaks. Shades of the Barnett Formula and Scotland's alleged dependency culture. Relations between the two provinces became increasingly fractious.
In the end, separation happened almost by accident, and without a clear majority of either population being in favour of divorce, according to opinion polls at the time. There was no referendum, and independence arose out of a failed attempt to create a looser federal Czechoslovakia.
Both sides decided that independence was the only coherent solution. The new countries have lived happily apart ever since. And since the break-up, "backward" Slovakia has consistently returned higher economic growth rates than the "advanced" Czech Republic.
Of course, divorce is rarely velvet, in marriage or nation-building. The disintegration of former Yugoslavia into Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and ultimately Montenegro involved ethnic cleansing and civil war. Nationalism showed its dark side in the Balkans with communal violence and poisonous racial and religious divisions. The fate of would be Chechnya is also a grim lesson in the cost of secession - though we can hardly blame the Chechen nationalists for the violence inflicted upon them by Russia.
And where there isn't civil war, there is often regional tension. The instability in the Canadian province of Quebec in the 1970's and 80's as it sought independence is often held up as a warning to Scotland. English-speaking companies left Montreal in droves when the nationalists won political influence. A series of inconclusive referendums, or "neverendums" followed which has, to this day, failed to resolve the national status of Quebec within the Canadian federation. Ironically, the Quebec nationalists are now more influential in the Federal government in Ottawa than they are in Quebec.
Which only goes to show that there is no royal road to national self-determination. However, what is clear is that more and more countries are taking it. Fifty years ago, when the European Union had its origins, no one predicted that it would lead to the growth of smaller nations. But from Ireland to the Baltic, it is small nations that seem to be taking best advantage of European integration.
The very existence of Europe allows small countries to feel more secure, more free to do their own thing, without the fear of aggressive larger countries trying to take them over or bully them.
And Scotland? Well, my own view is that Scotland will, rather like the Spanish province of Catalonia, achieve greater autonomy over the years, but will stop short of a formal declaration of national independence. Scotland already is a nation in its own right, and now that it has its own parliament, it is simply a matter of acquiring the powers necessary to secure Scotland's economic and social objectives.
It will, if you like, be Scotland's unique contribution to the science of self-determinatio
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Trident - Why is no one taking it seriously?
Last week, Tony Blair only secured the renewal of Trident because the Conservatives supported him. A total of 95 Labour MPs were unwilling to support their own Prime Minister on an issue of paramount national security. It was the largest defence rebellion in Labour history.
That this went by largely unemarked outside the Westminster village is an indication of how seriously things have deteriorated in the dog days of Tony Blair.
There was a time, not that long ago, when it would have been unthinkable for a Labour leader to rely on Tory votes in this way. Failure to carry the Parliamentary Labour Party would have been a confidence issue, a possible resignation issue.
Not any more. Instead we had the Labour chairwoman Hazel Blears, the crazy frogette, popping up to congratulate the Prime Minister for winning "a majority of Labour backbenchers" - as if it was perfectly normal for the PM to fail to win the backing of his own MPs.
The contagion of conscience has even spread to that most loyal of groups, the Scottish Labour MPs. Fifteen of them rebelled on the Trident vote, including the chancellor's chum, Nigel Griffiths, who resigned as deputy leader of the house.
The departure of the unnaturally ambitious Griffiths' led to speculation about Gordon Brown's private views on Trident renewal. Would the pocket rocket have taken such a drastic step - which nevertheless helps his prospects in his tight marginal Edinburgh South constituency - if there hadn't been just a hint that Brown might be prepared to forgive this act of conscience and employ Griffiths in future? Only he knows.
And we may never find out, because the way things are going, Gordon Brown is unlikely to make it to Number Ten. It's too early to say Tories have won an election that is more than two years away. But what we can say is that, if Labour go on like this, they have certainly lost it.
The Cameron Conservatives have been returning their best polling figures since 1992. This could become habit forming. There is no law that says that people cannot start voting Tory again, in England at least.
Tony Blair has done Brown and Labour a huge disservice by allowing Cameron to get his feet under the table at Westminster. The new Tory leader has grown visibly in stature and authority while the Prime Minister's has drained away.
Last week was another bad one for Labour as the Olympic costs tripled, Sir Hayden Phillips called for a cap on election donations from unions and Cameron's hair style upstaged the Climate Change Bill. A bad Blair day, that
A collapse of Labour support in the Scottish elections in May could be the beginning of the end for Labour in the UK. The party has been piling up the negatives as if determined to alienate as many Scottish voters as possible. Trident is another nail in the coffin.
Renewal of the submarines, which will be based on the Clyde, was rejected by a clear majority of Scottish MPs - something the SNP will not let Labour forget. As we report today, one poll suggests that two thirds of Scots believe it is unacceptable to stationTrident here given the opposition of the Scottish MPs
The Blairites want to blame Brown for any Scottish disaster, and the Brownites want to blame Blair - but they are both likely to get a kicking. Labour's electoral credibility will be the first casualty. Following the Trident vote, there is nothing now to stop the dissidents from dissing the party establishment.
It's not that long ago that rebellion on such a key issue as national security would have led to disciplinary action against errant Labour MPs. Or at least a severe spanking from the whips. Not any more.
Trident shows that Labour MPs can now exercise their consciences without fear of the consequences. That loss of fear is immensely significant. The systems of party discipline and authority which defined New Labour Labour in the early years of this administration have broken down.
Remember the 'pager clones'? They're gone the way of the electronic messaging device after which they were named. Labour MPs don't give a toss any more, and are increasingly becoming an opposition within their own government. Brown be warned.
Meanwhile Tony Blair is becoming a government leader-in-exile, relying on Conservative votes in parliament to impose policies, from university funding to defence, which his own party oppose. It's a weird reversal of roles.
The PM is so close ideologically to the Tories on education, Iraq, nuclear power, Trident, terrorism, attitudes to the White House, public services etc..that there is almost a defacto coalition operating in Westminster. You could hear it in David Cameron's' voice last week in the Commons.
The Tory leader, increasingly performs the role of deputy Prime Minister and chief whip. Cameron is there to echo the pronouncements of the PM on the great issues of state, and to ensure that he gets his way in parliamentary divisions by delivering votes.
You wonder why Tony Blair doesn't cross the floor and be done with it. If you were a conspiracy theorist, which of course I am not, you might have wondered wither Tony Blair has been a kind of Tory mole all along. It's difficult to see how be could have made his departure more protracted and damaging to Labour if he'd tried.
Will Brown be able to put the party back together again? Restore discipline, provide vision and leadership? Inspire and enthuse a party which has lost the will to govern if not the will to live? Possible, but it's beginning to look like lost cause. British voters don't favour divided parties. A house divided is a house defeated.
The chancellor of course is a towering intellect and one of the greatest politicians of his age, as he'll no doubt demonstrate in his last ever Budget this week. But is looking old and tired. He has compromised himself on many of the key issues that are causing his party to disintegrate - like Trident which he supported.
On issues such as defence, Brown is going to have to find some way of addressing the moral revulsion at the renewal of this system.
My own view is that Brown may, in future, try to restore moral legitimacy by seeking to decommission Trident as part of the 2010 round of nuclear non-proliferation talks. I see no evidence that Brown is interested in nuclear weapons for their own sake. Since there are no targets for this Cold War weapon system, designed to cause massive civilian casualties, it would be a logical step to stop sending the boats to sea.
This could be used as an inducement to other countries to disarm. I can't help thinking that Brown would like to take a moral lead on nuclear disarmament, if he ever gets the chance.
But then, what do I know. No one can see in to the mind of Broon - a brooding enigma wrapped in a mystery. As on so many issues, the nuclear cards are held very close to the chancellor's chest. There is now a very real possibility now that they will stay there, and Brown will take his secrets to the political grave-yard.
That this went by largely unemarked outside the Westminster village is an indication of how seriously things have deteriorated in the dog days of Tony Blair.
There was a time, not that long ago, when it would have been unthinkable for a Labour leader to rely on Tory votes in this way. Failure to carry the Parliamentary Labour Party would have been a confidence issue, a possible resignation issue.
Not any more. Instead we had the Labour chairwoman Hazel Blears, the crazy frogette, popping up to congratulate the Prime Minister for winning "a majority of Labour backbenchers" - as if it was perfectly normal for the PM to fail to win the backing of his own MPs.
The contagion of conscience has even spread to that most loyal of groups, the Scottish Labour MPs. Fifteen of them rebelled on the Trident vote, including the chancellor's chum, Nigel Griffiths, who resigned as deputy leader of the house.
The departure of the unnaturally ambitious Griffiths' led to speculation about Gordon Brown's private views on Trident renewal. Would the pocket rocket have taken such a drastic step - which nevertheless helps his prospects in his tight marginal Edinburgh South constituency - if there hadn't been just a hint that Brown might be prepared to forgive this act of conscience and employ Griffiths in future? Only he knows.
And we may never find out, because the way things are going, Gordon Brown is unlikely to make it to Number Ten. It's too early to say Tories have won an election that is more than two years away. But what we can say is that, if Labour go on like this, they have certainly lost it.
The Cameron Conservatives have been returning their best polling figures since 1992. This could become habit forming. There is no law that says that people cannot start voting Tory again, in England at least.
Tony Blair has done Brown and Labour a huge disservice by allowing Cameron to get his feet under the table at Westminster. The new Tory leader has grown visibly in stature and authority while the Prime Minister's has drained away.
Last week was another bad one for Labour as the Olympic costs tripled, Sir Hayden Phillips called for a cap on election donations from unions and Cameron's hair style upstaged the Climate Change Bill. A bad Blair day, that
A collapse of Labour support in the Scottish elections in May could be the beginning of the end for Labour in the UK. The party has been piling up the negatives as if determined to alienate as many Scottish voters as possible. Trident is another nail in the coffin.
Renewal of the submarines, which will be based on the Clyde, was rejected by a clear majority of Scottish MPs - something the SNP will not let Labour forget. As we report today, one poll suggests that two thirds of Scots believe it is unacceptable to stationTrident here given the opposition of the Scottish MPs
The Blairites want to blame Brown for any Scottish disaster, and the Brownites want to blame Blair - but they are both likely to get a kicking. Labour's electoral credibility will be the first casualty. Following the Trident vote, there is nothing now to stop the dissidents from dissing the party establishment.
It's not that long ago that rebellion on such a key issue as national security would have led to disciplinary action against errant Labour MPs. Or at least a severe spanking from the whips. Not any more.
Trident shows that Labour MPs can now exercise their consciences without fear of the consequences. That loss of fear is immensely significant. The systems of party discipline and authority which defined New Labour Labour in the early years of this administration have broken down.
Remember the 'pager clones'? They're gone the way of the electronic messaging device after which they were named. Labour MPs don't give a toss any more, and are increasingly becoming an opposition within their own government. Brown be warned.
Meanwhile Tony Blair is becoming a government leader-in-exile, relying on Conservative votes in parliament to impose policies, from university funding to defence, which his own party oppose. It's a weird reversal of roles.
The PM is so close ideologically to the Tories on education, Iraq, nuclear power, Trident, terrorism, attitudes to the White House, public services etc..that there is almost a defacto coalition operating in Westminster. You could hear it in David Cameron's' voice last week in the Commons.
The Tory leader, increasingly performs the role of deputy Prime Minister and chief whip. Cameron is there to echo the pronouncements of the PM on the great issues of state, and to ensure that he gets his way in parliamentary divisions by delivering votes.
You wonder why Tony Blair doesn't cross the floor and be done with it. If you were a conspiracy theorist, which of course I am not, you might have wondered wither Tony Blair has been a kind of Tory mole all along. It's difficult to see how be could have made his departure more protracted and damaging to Labour if he'd tried.
Will Brown be able to put the party back together again? Restore discipline, provide vision and leadership? Inspire and enthuse a party which has lost the will to govern if not the will to live? Possible, but it's beginning to look like lost cause. British voters don't favour divided parties. A house divided is a house defeated.
The chancellor of course is a towering intellect and one of the greatest politicians of his age, as he'll no doubt demonstrate in his last ever Budget this week. But is looking old and tired. He has compromised himself on many of the key issues that are causing his party to disintegrate - like Trident which he supported.
On issues such as defence, Brown is going to have to find some way of addressing the moral revulsion at the renewal of this system.
My own view is that Brown may, in future, try to restore moral legitimacy by seeking to decommission Trident as part of the 2010 round of nuclear non-proliferation talks. I see no evidence that Brown is interested in nuclear weapons for their own sake. Since there are no targets for this Cold War weapon system, designed to cause massive civilian casualties, it would be a logical step to stop sending the boats to sea.
This could be used as an inducement to other countries to disarm. I can't help thinking that Brown would like to take a moral lead on nuclear disarmament, if he ever gets the chance.
But then, what do I know. No one can see in to the mind of Broon - a brooding enigma wrapped in a mystery. As on so many issues, the nuclear cards are held very close to the chancellor's chest. There is now a very real possibility now that they will stay there, and Brown will take his secrets to the political grave-yard.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Thank Tony for the Constitution
Tony Blair has unwittingly done more to reshape and improve British Democracy than any Prime Minister in the last century. And no, I'm not joking.
A reuctant revolutionary, Blair was never interested in constitutional politics. But he was responsible for setting up the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly which have transformed the unitary British state by creating rival seats of authority. Now, in spite of himself, he is doing it again with the House of Lords.
Last week, MPs effectively voted to abolish the Upper House as it has existed since the days of Oliver Cromwell, and replace it with an elected chamber. The huge vote for a wholly or largely elected Lords means that the status quo and half way houses are now effectively dead.
It might not feel like it, but this is a great moment
In parliamentary history. British democracy will never be the same again. Handled correctly, Lords reform could leave the British constitution more coherent and better balanced - addressing the anomalies of what the former PM John Major last week called "one-sided devolution"
The Lords will resist its own extinction, of course, and this week will vote down the proposal of an elected chamber. This will provoke a constitutional confrontation with the House of Commons. However, it is a battle the Lords cannot win. Now that the democratic genie is out of the bottle, it will be impossible to put it back.
And we have Tony Blair to thank for its liberation, since it was the scandal over cash-for-peerages that made reform of the House of Lords -inevitable. The system whereby Peers are appointed by the Prime Ministers, has been irretrievably discredited.
Even if there are no prosecutions following the cash-for-honours inquiry (and now that Lord Levy's chums are saying he is only being pursued because he is a Jew the police may be reluctant to lay charges) the system is widely regarded as corrupt.
The only way to ensure that members of parliament have democratic legitimacy is to submit them to open election There has been much tosh uttered about how election will mean that "mere politicians" will populate the Lords instead of scientists, captains of industry, academics and people of merit.
Would that it were. Where are all these high calibre individuals? Last time I looked along the red benches I saw lots of ex cabinet ministers, former MPs who'd been egregiously loyal, retired civil servants and military top brass. Then there were the cronies, like the PM's legal chum Lord Falconer, the odd celebrity like Melvyn Bragg and businessmen who have paid large amounts of money to either the Labour Party or the Tories.
If successive governments had indeed filled the Lords with people of merit and intellect who could bring their expertise to bear on the issues of the day, then this argument might stack up. But they haven't been doing that. The parties have been appointing life peers, not to create independence and diversity, but essentially to preserve their power bases and reward their own people.
The fact that the Lords has been showing commendable independence of mind on civil liberties issues and anti-terror legislation is largely because its members, being older, have fewer career ambitions and less to lose than MPs. They listen more to their consciences than to the party whips.
They would be even more independent if they had a mandate from the people.
But wouldn't an elected upper house create a parliamentary doppelganger - another elected chamber which would rival the House of Commons? Well, yes hopefully. And what's wrong with that?
I don't understand why the separation of powers - the key principle informing the United States constitution - gets such a bad press here. In Washington, the Senate and the House of Representatives are expected to conflict, and to represent different interests. They are often led by different political parties. There is no reason why a similar system of checks and balances should not work here.
It is a question of ensuring that the divisions of responsibility make sense and that the members of the respective houses do indeed represent different interests. . In the USA the Senate essentially represents the different states of the union and are elected on a regional basis - 2 from each state. Elected for six year terms, Senators vet all Presidential appointments, oversee the constitution, treaties and issues of foreign policy.
The Senate also acts as a brake on the excesses of the House of Representatives, which is elected on a population basis and deals with all legislation involving revenue.
Now, that's not a bad starting point for a new Westminster. It's not all that different to the present arrangement under which the House of Commons
deals with the day to day legislation and has ultimate power over money bills and the Lords takes the longer view. Election would simply lend these chambers greater authority and legitimacy in performing their different but complementary duties.
And there is good reason for the reformed upper house to take a more territorial perspective. Tony Blair's other constitutional revolution, devolution, turned Britain into a multinational state, with parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. English regions like the North East feel left out, even though they rejected the idea of regional parliaments.
What better way to resolve this than to entrench a regional dimension in a new Lords? Turn it into something like the US Senate, elected from the nations and regions. In such a forum, issues like the Barnett Formula and the West Lothian Question could be dealt with.
If the Commons passed English bills on the strength of the votes of Scottish MPs, the legislation could be reviewed in the Senate. England would have a kind of parliament in the form of a bloc of senators in the New Lords. This would be a much better idea than withdrawing voting rights from Scottish MPs in the Commons which would destroy the unitary principle.
The Senate could even be given powers over reserved legislation, to avoid the West Lothian Question-in-reverse. Broadcasting, drugs and abortion come to mind.
Shortly before he died, Donald Dewar called for the Lords to become a revising chamber for the Scottish Parliament.
The late First Minister was worried about the sheer volume of legislation coming out of Holyrood. That some of it might be badly drafted or even contradictory . A regionally-elected Senate would be able to devote time to reviewing Scottish legislation. All Holyrood Acts have to be ratified by Westinster anyway.
A Senate could also be elected under proportional representation. The would temper the inherent unfairness of the first-past-the-post-system in the Commons that gives the PM an artificially inflated majority. Th e Senators should be elected for longer terms, say 7 years, so that they take a longer view.
I don't want to get carried away by constitutional speculation here. We don't want the Scottish Parliament to be eclipsed by a new, all-powerful Westminster Senate. But there is clearly a role for an elected upper chamber in the new, improved British constitution. And here is the chance to invent it.
Things have to change anyway, following Tony Blair's elective dictatorship. Here is Brown'schance to make an early mark on history. A really Big Idea for the man who said that restoring authority to parliament is his priority.
History has a knack of delivering the right thing at the right time for the wrong reasons. The last thing Tony Blair wanted was an elected Lords and a new British constitution. But it looks as if that is what he is going to get.
And it's all his own work too.
A reuctant revolutionary, Blair was never interested in constitutional politics. But he was responsible for setting up the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly which have transformed the unitary British state by creating rival seats of authority. Now, in spite of himself, he is doing it again with the House of Lords.
Last week, MPs effectively voted to abolish the Upper House as it has existed since the days of Oliver Cromwell, and replace it with an elected chamber. The huge vote for a wholly or largely elected Lords means that the status quo and half way houses are now effectively dead.
It might not feel like it, but this is a great moment
In parliamentary history. British democracy will never be the same again. Handled correctly, Lords reform could leave the British constitution more coherent and better balanced - addressing the anomalies of what the former PM John Major last week called "one-sided devolution"
The Lords will resist its own extinction, of course, and this week will vote down the proposal of an elected chamber. This will provoke a constitutional confrontation with the House of Commons. However, it is a battle the Lords cannot win. Now that the democratic genie is out of the bottle, it will be impossible to put it back.
And we have Tony Blair to thank for its liberation, since it was the scandal over cash-for-peerages that made reform of the House of Lords -inevitable. The system whereby Peers are appointed by the Prime Ministers, has been irretrievably discredited.
Even if there are no prosecutions following the cash-for-honours inquiry (and now that Lord Levy's chums are saying he is only being pursued because he is a Jew the police may be reluctant to lay charges) the system is widely regarded as corrupt.
The only way to ensure that members of parliament have democratic legitimacy is to submit them to open election There has been much tosh uttered about how election will mean that "mere politicians" will populate the Lords instead of scientists, captains of industry, academics and people of merit.
Would that it were. Where are all these high calibre individuals? Last time I looked along the red benches I saw lots of ex cabinet ministers, former MPs who'd been egregiously loyal, retired civil servants and military top brass. Then there were the cronies, like the PM's legal chum Lord Falconer, the odd celebrity like Melvyn Bragg and businessmen who have paid large amounts of money to either the Labour Party or the Tories.
If successive governments had indeed filled the Lords with people of merit and intellect who could bring their expertise to bear on the issues of the day, then this argument might stack up. But they haven't been doing that. The parties have been appointing life peers, not to create independence and diversity, but essentially to preserve their power bases and reward their own people.
The fact that the Lords has been showing commendable independence of mind on civil liberties issues and anti-terror legislation is largely because its members, being older, have fewer career ambitions and less to lose than MPs. They listen more to their consciences than to the party whips.
They would be even more independent if they had a mandate from the people.
But wouldn't an elected upper house create a parliamentary doppelganger - another elected chamber which would rival the House of Commons? Well, yes hopefully. And what's wrong with that?
I don't understand why the separation of powers - the key principle informing the United States constitution - gets such a bad press here. In Washington, the Senate and the House of Representatives are expected to conflict, and to represent different interests. They are often led by different political parties. There is no reason why a similar system of checks and balances should not work here.
It is a question of ensuring that the divisions of responsibility make sense and that the members of the respective houses do indeed represent different interests. . In the USA the Senate essentially represents the different states of the union and are elected on a regional basis - 2 from each state. Elected for six year terms, Senators vet all Presidential appointments, oversee the constitution, treaties and issues of foreign policy.
The Senate also acts as a brake on the excesses of the House of Representatives, which is elected on a population basis and deals with all legislation involving revenue.
Now, that's not a bad starting point for a new Westminster. It's not all that different to the present arrangement under which the House of Commons
deals with the day to day legislation and has ultimate power over money bills and the Lords takes the longer view. Election would simply lend these chambers greater authority and legitimacy in performing their different but complementary duties.
And there is good reason for the reformed upper house to take a more territorial perspective. Tony Blair's other constitutional revolution, devolution, turned Britain into a multinational state, with parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. English regions like the North East feel left out, even though they rejected the idea of regional parliaments.
What better way to resolve this than to entrench a regional dimension in a new Lords? Turn it into something like the US Senate, elected from the nations and regions. In such a forum, issues like the Barnett Formula and the West Lothian Question could be dealt with.
If the Commons passed English bills on the strength of the votes of Scottish MPs, the legislation could be reviewed in the Senate. England would have a kind of parliament in the form of a bloc of senators in the New Lords. This would be a much better idea than withdrawing voting rights from Scottish MPs in the Commons which would destroy the unitary principle.
The Senate could even be given powers over reserved legislation, to avoid the West Lothian Question-in-reverse. Broadcasting, drugs and abortion come to mind.
Shortly before he died, Donald Dewar called for the Lords to become a revising chamber for the Scottish Parliament.
The late First Minister was worried about the sheer volume of legislation coming out of Holyrood. That some of it might be badly drafted or even contradictory . A regionally-elected Senate would be able to devote time to reviewing Scottish legislation. All Holyrood Acts have to be ratified by Westinster anyway.
A Senate could also be elected under proportional representation. The would temper the inherent unfairness of the first-past-the-post-system in the Commons that gives the PM an artificially inflated majority. Th e Senators should be elected for longer terms, say 7 years, so that they take a longer view.
I don't want to get carried away by constitutional speculation here. We don't want the Scottish Parliament to be eclipsed by a new, all-powerful Westminster Senate. But there is clearly a role for an elected upper chamber in the new, improved British constitution. And here is the chance to invent it.
Things have to change anyway, following Tony Blair's elective dictatorship. Here is Brown'schance to make an early mark on history. A really Big Idea for the man who said that restoring authority to parliament is his priority.
History has a knack of delivering the right thing at the right time for the wrong reasons. The last thing Tony Blair wanted was an elected Lords and a new British constitution. But it looks as if that is what he is going to get.
And it's all his own work too.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
At least Meacher had the bottle. Pity about the houses, though.
Poor old Michael Meacher got pretty rough treatment from the hacks last week for having the temerity to stand against Gordon Brown. Mind you, Labour MPs didn’t exactly give him a fair wind. Even the chairman of his launch press conference, Ian Gibson, turned out not to be a supporter of the Meacher ticket.
Much was made of his property empire - Meacher has almost as many homes as the Prime Minister - and the fact that he voted for the war in Iraq. The leader of the house, Jack Straw, made the best crack of the week when he told reporters: “For those who want to place a wager, my advice is to find a horse.”
This is a pity, because whatever you think of Michael Meacher, you have to give him some credit for being prepared to say in public what a lot of Labour MPs, and even more Labour supporters are saying in private. Indeed, when you look at what Mr Meacher stands for, you are reminded in the most painful terms, that what Britain is lacking right now is not a coronation in Number Ten, but a proper party of opposition.
Just look around: an illegal and disastrous war in Iraq; a Unicef report saying that British children are the most miserable in the industrialised world; a climate running out of control because of unrestrained use of fossil fuels; an insane housing market excluding an entire generation from home ownership; a private equity sector tearing up the fabric of the British economy; a rapidly deteriorating race relations climate , long-established freedoms under the law being axed in the name of anti-terrorism.
Just imagine if this were 1996, and the Tories were in charge? Imagine what Labour would be saying now? They would be demanding an immediate end to the Iraq war and a regional peace conference in the Middle East to settle the Palestinian question. They would be calling on the government to seek UN opposition to any war in Iran. Much as Meacher was last week. And if it were the Tories who were renewing Trident, and bidding to host silos for George W. Bush’s ‘son of star-wars; missile defence system, do you think Labour MPs would be so quiescent?
Where are Labour when we need them? What would Gordon Brown, were he still in opposition, have made of the #8bn in city bonuses, the scandalous collapse of occupational pensions, the rip-off bank charges, the fire-sale of British companies, the “non-dom” tax breaks that have made London a haven for Russian plutocrats? a firebrand shadow chancellor would be castigating the PM for allowing the wealth gap to grow ever wider during one of the longest periods of economic growth in British history?
And a proper Labour shadow home secretary would be attacking this government for allowing the fabric of society to be ripped apart by market forces; for forcing single parents out to work when families are falling apart; for allowing guns to become a fashion accessory.
He, or more likely she, would be condemning the police for endangering racial harmony by inept actions like Forest Gate. The opposition - if there were one - would be organising to defeat the government’s renewed attempts to impose 90 day detention on terror suspects - a violation of the 800 year old right of habeas corpus.
Indeed, if Labour were in opposition right now, they would be calling this government the most corrupt, dishonest, incompetent, inhumane, irresponsible and incorrigible in modern times. But unfortunately, Labour are not in opposition. Labour are the government of the day, and as a consequence , much of what they have done has gone unchallenged. A whole tradition of political debate - that of concerned, libertarian social democracy - has been driven out of politics altogether.
The actual party of opposition, the Cameron Conservatives, have tried to occupy some of this space. But Tories are singularly ill-equipped to challenge New Labour’s ‘turbo-capitalism’. They are even keener on the market, support the war, invest in private equity, don’t care much about race, back the police implicitly and are - mostly - unconvinced about the environment.
Yes, I know that David Cameron talks of hugging hoodies, ending poverty, restoring family values and says that you have to “vote blue to go green”, but these are postures rather than actual policies. The Conservatives are essentially the party of privilege, money and property rights.
You are never going to hear them coming up with radical plans to revive council housing, criticising equity pirates, or curbing the use of the private car. They have fought a good fight on civil liberties, but their instincts are always to support the police and the security services.
The real party of opposition is now in government and behaving as badly, or worse, than its Tory predecessors. There is a vacuum of policy and ideas, that sucks the life out of civil society.
The press and media are bereft because there is no alternative ideas to analyse, no focus of civic dissent, no organised challenge to the Establishment. Political journalism in Westminster has become an exercise in palace politics, with journalist-courtiers exchanging gossip about the powerful and chattering about who’s up and who’s down.
Meacher is a perfect illustration of this condition. The story of his candidacy is its hopelessness, his remoteness from power and influence. A forlorn and isolated individual, he cannot get a platform for his arguments, many of which are at least worthy of debate.
For example, his call for a #6 minimum wage rising to 7 in future. This is not a high price to pay in an economy when profits have never been higher and where wages and living standards are being crushed. Surely, any self-respecting Labour Party should be demanding something similar.
It should also be demanding a housing policy. Meacher is right that this is one of the great lost issues of the age. Because Labour MPs and ministers (himself included) have made a pile from the tripling of house prices over he last decade, they are unable to see what rampant inflation is doing to the country.
Effectively, no one under thirty seven can afford to set up a home and family because house prices are impossibly high. Only those with rich parents willing to bankroll their offspring can get on the housing “ladder”. This not only means that home ownership is becoming the privilege of one class, it leads to a sense of hopelessness among an entire generation of young people who cannot afford to settle down and start families.
For those who take the plunge it means both parents having to work to pay an exorbitant mortgage, leaving little time for family life. This in turn creates an excluded class of rootless young males who are turning to deviant means of securing some kind of status and self-esteem by the gun and the syringe.
It is all there. History condemns an entire generation of Labour politicians, who claimed to speak for the people and ended up speaking for millionaires handing them secret loans in exchange for honours. Michael Meacher called for peace, social justice and climate survival. Okay - he may be a joke, but what the says is serious - and its about time some other people on the so-called Left stopped sniggering and started to listen.
Much was made of his property empire - Meacher has almost as many homes as the Prime Minister - and the fact that he voted for the war in Iraq. The leader of the house, Jack Straw, made the best crack of the week when he told reporters: “For those who want to place a wager, my advice is to find a horse.”
This is a pity, because whatever you think of Michael Meacher, you have to give him some credit for being prepared to say in public what a lot of Labour MPs, and even more Labour supporters are saying in private. Indeed, when you look at what Mr Meacher stands for, you are reminded in the most painful terms, that what Britain is lacking right now is not a coronation in Number Ten, but a proper party of opposition.
Just look around: an illegal and disastrous war in Iraq; a Unicef report saying that British children are the most miserable in the industrialised world; a climate running out of control because of unrestrained use of fossil fuels; an insane housing market excluding an entire generation from home ownership; a private equity sector tearing up the fabric of the British economy; a rapidly deteriorating race relations climate , long-established freedoms under the law being axed in the name of anti-terrorism.
Just imagine if this were 1996, and the Tories were in charge? Imagine what Labour would be saying now? They would be demanding an immediate end to the Iraq war and a regional peace conference in the Middle East to settle the Palestinian question. They would be calling on the government to seek UN opposition to any war in Iran. Much as Meacher was last week. And if it were the Tories who were renewing Trident, and bidding to host silos for George W. Bush’s ‘son of star-wars; missile defence system, do you think Labour MPs would be so quiescent?
Where are Labour when we need them? What would Gordon Brown, were he still in opposition, have made of the #8bn in city bonuses, the scandalous collapse of occupational pensions, the rip-off bank charges, the fire-sale of British companies, the “non-dom” tax breaks that have made London a haven for Russian plutocrats? a firebrand shadow chancellor would be castigating the PM for allowing the wealth gap to grow ever wider during one of the longest periods of economic growth in British history?
And a proper Labour shadow home secretary would be attacking this government for allowing the fabric of society to be ripped apart by market forces; for forcing single parents out to work when families are falling apart; for allowing guns to become a fashion accessory.
He, or more likely she, would be condemning the police for endangering racial harmony by inept actions like Forest Gate. The opposition - if there were one - would be organising to defeat the government’s renewed attempts to impose 90 day detention on terror suspects - a violation of the 800 year old right of habeas corpus.
Indeed, if Labour were in opposition right now, they would be calling this government the most corrupt, dishonest, incompetent, inhumane, irresponsible and incorrigible in modern times. But unfortunately, Labour are not in opposition. Labour are the government of the day, and as a consequence , much of what they have done has gone unchallenged. A whole tradition of political debate - that of concerned, libertarian social democracy - has been driven out of politics altogether.
The actual party of opposition, the Cameron Conservatives, have tried to occupy some of this space. But Tories are singularly ill-equipped to challenge New Labour’s ‘turbo-capitalism’. They are even keener on the market, support the war, invest in private equity, don’t care much about race, back the police implicitly and are - mostly - unconvinced about the environment.
Yes, I know that David Cameron talks of hugging hoodies, ending poverty, restoring family values and says that you have to “vote blue to go green”, but these are postures rather than actual policies. The Conservatives are essentially the party of privilege, money and property rights.
You are never going to hear them coming up with radical plans to revive council housing, criticising equity pirates, or curbing the use of the private car. They have fought a good fight on civil liberties, but their instincts are always to support the police and the security services.
The real party of opposition is now in government and behaving as badly, or worse, than its Tory predecessors. There is a vacuum of policy and ideas, that sucks the life out of civil society.
The press and media are bereft because there is no alternative ideas to analyse, no focus of civic dissent, no organised challenge to the Establishment. Political journalism in Westminster has become an exercise in palace politics, with journalist-courtiers exchanging gossip about the powerful and chattering about who’s up and who’s down.
Meacher is a perfect illustration of this condition. The story of his candidacy is its hopelessness, his remoteness from power and influence. A forlorn and isolated individual, he cannot get a platform for his arguments, many of which are at least worthy of debate.
For example, his call for a #6 minimum wage rising to 7 in future. This is not a high price to pay in an economy when profits have never been higher and where wages and living standards are being crushed. Surely, any self-respecting Labour Party should be demanding something similar.
It should also be demanding a housing policy. Meacher is right that this is one of the great lost issues of the age. Because Labour MPs and ministers (himself included) have made a pile from the tripling of house prices over he last decade, they are unable to see what rampant inflation is doing to the country.
Effectively, no one under thirty seven can afford to set up a home and family because house prices are impossibly high. Only those with rich parents willing to bankroll their offspring can get on the housing “ladder”. This not only means that home ownership is becoming the privilege of one class, it leads to a sense of hopelessness among an entire generation of young people who cannot afford to settle down and start families.
For those who take the plunge it means both parents having to work to pay an exorbitant mortgage, leaving little time for family life. This in turn creates an excluded class of rootless young males who are turning to deviant means of securing some kind of status and self-esteem by the gun and the syringe.
It is all there. History condemns an entire generation of Labour politicians, who claimed to speak for the people and ended up speaking for millionaires handing them secret loans in exchange for honours. Michael Meacher called for peace, social justice and climate survival. Okay - he may be a joke, but what the says is serious - and its about time some other people on the so-called Left stopped sniggering and started to listen.
Anyone Seen Jack?
Whatever happened to Jack McConnell, the one time first minister of Scotland? Appearances of the Labour leader are becoming increasingly rare. He has been absent from the last seven major debates in Scotland and the BBC’s Question Time has tried fifteen times to lure him out of his lair without success.
Websites devoted to sightings of Elvis Presley, are adding Jack McConnell to their list. Indeed, people are beginning to wonder if the First Minister exists at all or if it's just a cardboard cut-out at FMQ’s in Holyrood connected to a speak your weight machine. Conspiracy theorists are saying that there never was any concrete evidence of McConnell and that it was a plot by British intelligence to save Scotland from the SNP branch of al Qaeda.
But, assuming that Jack McConnell does indeed exist you have to wonder why he has decided to empty chair himself at every broadcasting opportunity. Aren’t politicians supposed to thrive on the oxygen of publicity? Surely he is keen as mustard to get stuck into Alex Salmond, to show what a gambler and carpet-bagger he is? To trash the other opposition leaders beneath the sheer weight of his dialectic?
I would not entertain for the merest nanosecond the idea that Jack McConnell is actually afraid of going into the television studio in case he makes and arse of himself. I’m sure that the memory of Henry McLeish failing to answer David Dimbleby’s question on his sublet offices does not enter McConnell’s head. It would be unthinkable for the leader of the nation to be incapable of arguing his case on the mass media.
After all, as First Minister, McConnell has been in office now for five and a half years, making him the most experienced politician in Scotland. There is practically nothing that has happened in Scotland in the last half decade that he hasn’t answered questions on or been briefed about. He should be more than a match for an absentee landlord, a Tory matron and a LibDem schoolboy.
McConnell has, moreover, a good message to sell. Scotland, we are told, is on the up and up - leading the UK in educational performance, child poverty, employment levels, skills, graduate numbers and salary rate rises. Gordon Brown comes north nowadays to get lessons in economic management from Jack McConnell.
There’s no political mileage in hiding your light under a bushell. Okay, McConnell may be looking forward to early retirement in the House of Lords, and lots of golfing holidays, but he has to win an election first. That bully Alex Salmond isn’t going to stop his taunts just because the FM closes his eyes and counts to ten thousand.
And as for the public, well, absence makes the heart grow fonder, but there is a danger that, if this goes on, McConnell will become the forgotten man of Scottish politics. And when he finally does appear, there’sa danger that no one will recognise him.
Now, there is a Westminster convention that the Prime Minister doesn’t lower himself by debating with his opposite numbers. Splendid isolation is supposed to enhance the dignity of his office. You wouldn’t catch Tony Blair entering a studio on equal terms with a minority party leader like Alex Salmond. But Jack McConnell isn’t Tony Blair, and anyway, Blair regularly submits himself to interrogation by John Humphries.
In Scotland, politicians are expected to speak their minds and expose themselves to debate with their peers. Especially when they are leaders of minority parties themselves, as Jack McConnell is. There are no constitutional airs graces in Scottish political culture, and when individual politicians start adopting them, and getting above themselves, then they are likely to lost public sympathy before you can say Jack the Lad.
They are likely to be accused of being ‘frit’, and once that charge sticks, it is very difficult to unstick it. Once columnists and cartoonists get the idea that McConnell is afraid to come out of Bute House, then he will find that people will start to believe it. Then, no matter how often McConnell takes part in debates and media forums, he will still be accused of being a wuss.
But it’s not too late. McConnell can still make an impact if he comes out of his corner. The UK ministers made idiots of themselves in November, coming north to Oban and trying to frighten Scots about border controls, terrorist threats and national bankruptcy if Scotland became independent. They rudely brushed McConnell aside, afraid that his more upbeat pro-Scotland message might sound too much like nationalism.
Well, they have changed their tune. Gordon Brown is now playing pussycat, and commending Scots on how well hey are doing in becoming the skills capital of Europe. If this is down to McConnell and the “devolution dividend”, then now is surly the time to press home the advantage; challenge Alex Salmond to say why independence would make Scotland any better.
The opposition’s job is to oppose, and the SNP have every right to accentuate the negative, to portray a London-dominated Scotland as an impoverished dependent incapable of generating its own economic dynamism. It is up to the First Minister to challenge this representation - but he has to be there first.
Websites devoted to sightings of Elvis Presley, are adding Jack McConnell to their list. Indeed, people are beginning to wonder if the First Minister exists at all or if it's just a cardboard cut-out at FMQ’s in Holyrood connected to a speak your weight machine. Conspiracy theorists are saying that there never was any concrete evidence of McConnell and that it was a plot by British intelligence to save Scotland from the SNP branch of al Qaeda.
But, assuming that Jack McConnell does indeed exist you have to wonder why he has decided to empty chair himself at every broadcasting opportunity. Aren’t politicians supposed to thrive on the oxygen of publicity? Surely he is keen as mustard to get stuck into Alex Salmond, to show what a gambler and carpet-bagger he is? To trash the other opposition leaders beneath the sheer weight of his dialectic?
I would not entertain for the merest nanosecond the idea that Jack McConnell is actually afraid of going into the television studio in case he makes and arse of himself. I’m sure that the memory of Henry McLeish failing to answer David Dimbleby’s question on his sublet offices does not enter McConnell’s head. It would be unthinkable for the leader of the nation to be incapable of arguing his case on the mass media.
After all, as First Minister, McConnell has been in office now for five and a half years, making him the most experienced politician in Scotland. There is practically nothing that has happened in Scotland in the last half decade that he hasn’t answered questions on or been briefed about. He should be more than a match for an absentee landlord, a Tory matron and a LibDem schoolboy.
McConnell has, moreover, a good message to sell. Scotland, we are told, is on the up and up - leading the UK in educational performance, child poverty, employment levels, skills, graduate numbers and salary rate rises. Gordon Brown comes north nowadays to get lessons in economic management from Jack McConnell.
There’s no political mileage in hiding your light under a bushell. Okay, McConnell may be looking forward to early retirement in the House of Lords, and lots of golfing holidays, but he has to win an election first. That bully Alex Salmond isn’t going to stop his taunts just because the FM closes his eyes and counts to ten thousand.
And as for the public, well, absence makes the heart grow fonder, but there is a danger that, if this goes on, McConnell will become the forgotten man of Scottish politics. And when he finally does appear, there’sa danger that no one will recognise him.
Now, there is a Westminster convention that the Prime Minister doesn’t lower himself by debating with his opposite numbers. Splendid isolation is supposed to enhance the dignity of his office. You wouldn’t catch Tony Blair entering a studio on equal terms with a minority party leader like Alex Salmond. But Jack McConnell isn’t Tony Blair, and anyway, Blair regularly submits himself to interrogation by John Humphries.
In Scotland, politicians are expected to speak their minds and expose themselves to debate with their peers. Especially when they are leaders of minority parties themselves, as Jack McConnell is. There are no constitutional airs graces in Scottish political culture, and when individual politicians start adopting them, and getting above themselves, then they are likely to lost public sympathy before you can say Jack the Lad.
They are likely to be accused of being ‘frit’, and once that charge sticks, it is very difficult to unstick it. Once columnists and cartoonists get the idea that McConnell is afraid to come out of Bute House, then he will find that people will start to believe it. Then, no matter how often McConnell takes part in debates and media forums, he will still be accused of being a wuss.
But it’s not too late. McConnell can still make an impact if he comes out of his corner. The UK ministers made idiots of themselves in November, coming north to Oban and trying to frighten Scots about border controls, terrorist threats and national bankruptcy if Scotland became independent. They rudely brushed McConnell aside, afraid that his more upbeat pro-Scotland message might sound too much like nationalism.
Well, they have changed their tune. Gordon Brown is now playing pussycat, and commending Scots on how well hey are doing in becoming the skills capital of Europe. If this is down to McConnell and the “devolution dividend”, then now is surly the time to press home the advantage; challenge Alex Salmond to say why independence would make Scotland any better.
The opposition’s job is to oppose, and the SNP have every right to accentuate the negative, to portray a London-dominated Scotland as an impoverished dependent incapable of generating its own economic dynamism. It is up to the First Minister to challenge this representation - but he has to be there first.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
It's not the only the Lords that needs reform.
It’s not the House of Lords that needs to be reformed but parliament itself. What point is there in seeking to make the Upper House marginally more democratic, when the House of Commons has ceased to be any kind of check on the executive power wielded from Tony Blair’s sofa?
Parliament needs to find the strength to reassert itself as the source of power in the land, not as the cheerleader of a personality cult. Too many MPs settle for the booze-and-bitching lifestyle of Westminster, which recently claimed the life of the Labour MP Fiona Jones. Self-destructive behaviour is often a sign of self-loathing; a plea from the powerless.
For ten years Labour MPs have turned out, meekly, at their leader’s command, to support the next war, or the next affront to civil liberties - like 90 day detention, which is due to return to the Commons shortly. Many now regret their willingness to comply over the years, but argue that they lacked the power resist the party whips.
Tony Blair has, more than any previous prime minister, exposed the weaknesses of our unwritten constitution, by forcing the country into an unpopular war on the basis of executive authority alone. Gordon Brown must not be allowed to follow suit.
Elective dictatorship is no longer a constitutional abstraction, but a matter of life and death. Two of the largest backbench parliamentary rebellions in over ahundred years failed to stop the Iraq war. Somehow, Britain must find a way to prevent this kind of thing happening again.
There is a window of opportunity opening here, if MPs have the will to go through it. When power changes hands, as it will in Downing St shortly, ordinary MPs have a chance to shape the future. And there are signs that Brown is open to ideas about how to renew British democracy.
Brown has dropped hints about this in his recent speeches. In July 2004 he told the British Council about his concern for “the golden thread of British liberty.. rooted in the protection of the individual against the arbitrary power of first the monarch and then the state.” His party conference address last year said that “while we do not today have a written constitution” there was a need to “be far more explicit about the common ground on which we stand, the shared values and habits of citizenship”. Many took that speech as a hint that Brown now favours a written constitution.
There have even been reports in the Sunday Times that Brown is to set up a Bill of Rights committee under the Labour Peer, Helena Kennedy - an outspoken critic of the government’s war on terror. The idea is that the commission would define for the first time the rights of the individual, while clearly setting limits for the power of government in areas like war making.
Academics around bodies like the Constitution Unit at University College London are also expecting Brown to move on the constitution because of the implications of devolution. There has been a good deal of grumbling over the last year about the West Lothian Question and the Barnett Formula, and it’s expected that Brown will make some moves on these issues if only to quell criticism in the conservative press about his nationality.
Some commentators have been questioning the right of an MP from a Scottish constituency to become Prime Minister, when the writ of parliament no longer runs in that constituency on devolved issues. The Tory home affairs spokesman, David Davies, has called for “English votes for English laws” and for Scottish MPs to be barred from voting on English legislation in the Commons.
Add to that, the urgent need to reform the Lords, following the cash for peerages scandal , and it’s not hard to see why some people believe that Brown may make the constitution a key theme of his first hundred days. There is all the material necessary for a constitutional “Big Bang’ if Brown is prepared to ignite it.
The chancellor has “done” the economy, what he wants to do know is to reform British politics; reshape it in his own image. Brown likes ideas, and speaks to people, so he understands the nature of the problem - even if his own penchant for control-freakery makes him an unlikely politician to deal with it.
This represents a once in a lifetime opportunity for MPs to re-enter British political life. If parliament is to be more than mere constitutional decoration, then it has to be given a proper job to do. MPs need to demand that parliament is given the means to do the task it was created for: which is to check the arbitrary power of the state.
But time is short. If Brown fails to address the problems facing the constitution in his first year, it is likely to get lost completely in the chaos of day to day “events” that preoccupy all prime ministers. He may also become seduced, as his predecessor was, but the privileges of office.
The UK prime minister exercises the residual powers of the absolute monarchy. Royal Prerogative is most egregious in the power of the prime minister to declare war, but it permeates every aspect of British public life. There is a presumption of centralisation in the British constitution, presumption of executive supremacy. The electoral system for Westminster, by furnishing an artificially large majority, recreates the arbitrary power of a monarch every four or five years.
Tony Blair had a 160 seat majority in the Commons on the eve of the Iraq war on the basis of a minority of the popular vote - 41%. That is simply unacceptable in a democracy. It is just as unacceptable as awarding peerages to businessmen who have secretly loaned the Labour party millions of pounds.
Now, the one problem is that Gordon Brown doesn’t agree with fair voting, and nor do most Labour MPs. They still believe that first-past-the-post gives them the best chance of staying power, if only because it locks minor parties out of power.
But if ever Brown could be persuaded, then it is surely now. It is most unlikely that he will be returned at the next general election with a substantial majority, and he must already be thinking about the possibility of having to do a deal with the Liberal Democrats in order to remain in office. A condition of that will be electoral reform.
But even if he cannot be persuaded on electoral reform right away, the effort must be made to focus Brown’s attention on the constitution. The very process of reforming the Lords, compiling a bill of rights, reviewing the post-devolution role of MPs will bring Brown face to face with the ugly reality of power in parliament. There isn’t any.
Parliament needs to find the strength to reassert itself as the source of power in the land, not as the cheerleader of a personality cult. Too many MPs settle for the booze-and-bitching lifestyle of Westminster, which recently claimed the life of the Labour MP Fiona Jones. Self-destructive behaviour is often a sign of self-loathing; a plea from the powerless.
For ten years Labour MPs have turned out, meekly, at their leader’s command, to support the next war, or the next affront to civil liberties - like 90 day detention, which is due to return to the Commons shortly. Many now regret their willingness to comply over the years, but argue that they lacked the power resist the party whips.
Tony Blair has, more than any previous prime minister, exposed the weaknesses of our unwritten constitution, by forcing the country into an unpopular war on the basis of executive authority alone. Gordon Brown must not be allowed to follow suit.
Elective dictatorship is no longer a constitutional abstraction, but a matter of life and death. Two of the largest backbench parliamentary rebellions in over ahundred years failed to stop the Iraq war. Somehow, Britain must find a way to prevent this kind of thing happening again.
There is a window of opportunity opening here, if MPs have the will to go through it. When power changes hands, as it will in Downing St shortly, ordinary MPs have a chance to shape the future. And there are signs that Brown is open to ideas about how to renew British democracy.
Brown has dropped hints about this in his recent speeches. In July 2004 he told the British Council about his concern for “the golden thread of British liberty.. rooted in the protection of the individual against the arbitrary power of first the monarch and then the state.” His party conference address last year said that “while we do not today have a written constitution” there was a need to “be far more explicit about the common ground on which we stand, the shared values and habits of citizenship”. Many took that speech as a hint that Brown now favours a written constitution.
There have even been reports in the Sunday Times that Brown is to set up a Bill of Rights committee under the Labour Peer, Helena Kennedy - an outspoken critic of the government’s war on terror. The idea is that the commission would define for the first time the rights of the individual, while clearly setting limits for the power of government in areas like war making.
Academics around bodies like the Constitution Unit at University College London are also expecting Brown to move on the constitution because of the implications of devolution. There has been a good deal of grumbling over the last year about the West Lothian Question and the Barnett Formula, and it’s expected that Brown will make some moves on these issues if only to quell criticism in the conservative press about his nationality.
Some commentators have been questioning the right of an MP from a Scottish constituency to become Prime Minister, when the writ of parliament no longer runs in that constituency on devolved issues. The Tory home affairs spokesman, David Davies, has called for “English votes for English laws” and for Scottish MPs to be barred from voting on English legislation in the Commons.
Add to that, the urgent need to reform the Lords, following the cash for peerages scandal , and it’s not hard to see why some people believe that Brown may make the constitution a key theme of his first hundred days. There is all the material necessary for a constitutional “Big Bang’ if Brown is prepared to ignite it.
The chancellor has “done” the economy, what he wants to do know is to reform British politics; reshape it in his own image. Brown likes ideas, and speaks to people, so he understands the nature of the problem - even if his own penchant for control-freakery makes him an unlikely politician to deal with it.
This represents a once in a lifetime opportunity for MPs to re-enter British political life. If parliament is to be more than mere constitutional decoration, then it has to be given a proper job to do. MPs need to demand that parliament is given the means to do the task it was created for: which is to check the arbitrary power of the state.
But time is short. If Brown fails to address the problems facing the constitution in his first year, it is likely to get lost completely in the chaos of day to day “events” that preoccupy all prime ministers. He may also become seduced, as his predecessor was, but the privileges of office.
The UK prime minister exercises the residual powers of the absolute monarchy. Royal Prerogative is most egregious in the power of the prime minister to declare war, but it permeates every aspect of British public life. There is a presumption of centralisation in the British constitution, presumption of executive supremacy. The electoral system for Westminster, by furnishing an artificially large majority, recreates the arbitrary power of a monarch every four or five years.
Tony Blair had a 160 seat majority in the Commons on the eve of the Iraq war on the basis of a minority of the popular vote - 41%. That is simply unacceptable in a democracy. It is just as unacceptable as awarding peerages to businessmen who have secretly loaned the Labour party millions of pounds.
Now, the one problem is that Gordon Brown doesn’t agree with fair voting, and nor do most Labour MPs. They still believe that first-past-the-post gives them the best chance of staying power, if only because it locks minor parties out of power.
But if ever Brown could be persuaded, then it is surely now. It is most unlikely that he will be returned at the next general election with a substantial majority, and he must already be thinking about the possibility of having to do a deal with the Liberal Democrats in order to remain in office. A condition of that will be electoral reform.
But even if he cannot be persuaded on electoral reform right away, the effort must be made to focus Brown’s attention on the constitution. The very process of reforming the Lords, compiling a bill of rights, reviewing the post-devolution role of MPs will bring Brown face to face with the ugly reality of power in parliament. There isn’t any.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Climate Change is a Scottish 1ssue
Climate change may represent the greatest challenge faced by humanity since the Black Death. That is an emotive way of putting it, but the consequences of global warming, as set out by the International Panel on Climate Change, suggest nothing less. If there are to be heat waves, hurricanes , droughts and deserts, then people will die, and populations will fall.
However, as Al Gore says, catastrophism helps no one. The technological means to combat climate change by reducing carbon emissions are already largely to hand - it is largely a question of political will. And by a quirk of fate, Scotland has a number of resources which make us peculiarly well placed to weather the storms ahead. Storms for a start.
Scotland’s wet weather suggest that we will never be short of a reservoir or two of what is likely to become one of the world’s most precious resources; water. Nor will we have to look hard to find wind to power electricity generators, or waves to turn turbines.
There are already serious questions being raised about the viability of urban populations in some parts of the Mediterranean sun belt, if climate change projections are correct. Water is becoming extremely scarce in parts of Provence, in the south of France, and people are already leaving remoter habitations.
Some forecasters think that even the South of England could turn into a very dry place - though with Britain’s annual rainfall being what it is, it should be a technically straight forward exercise to stop London dying of thirst. However, people might not be so keen to live there.
The metropolis is hot and sticky at the best of times, but imagine if the freak weather of the last few years were to become the norm, with temperatures in the the high nineties fahrenheit? Large parts of the centre of London may anyway be under water within a couple of decades
Cities like Edinburgh and Glasgow may become warmer and probably wetter, but they will be more manageable, even if the atlantic conveyor is switched off and Scotland ceases to be warmed by the Gulf Stream. The fear that this could plunge Scotland into a mini ice age seems to have subsided, because scientists now think global warming is happening faster than expected.
How best to make use of Scotland’s natural advantages? Well, the country could become a world centre for renewable energy. We have 25% of Europe’s wind and wave energy, and the Pentland Firth has been described as the Saudi Arabia of world tidal energy with the capacity to produce 10 of the UK’s electricity.
There will have to be a means of transmitting this energy south, and if that means pylons, I’m afraid the Highlands may have to put up with them. Pylons at least have the virtue of being relatively light, removable structures, which don’t actually churn up much of the land itself. When a new way is found to transport, they can be dismantled without any environmental impact at all.
And there are other technologies waiting to be developed. The first commercially viable carbon capture hydrogen gas power station is nearing completion in Peterhead. The idea of capturing C02 emissions and then pumping it back into depleted oil fields is no longer science fiction.
People have often criticised Scotland for being over-reliant on hydrocarbons, and there is certainly a limited future for North Sea Oil. But it remains a significant resource and if the spent fields can be reused as carbon sinks, then there is potential here for serious business.
Our relative remoteness would also make Scotland less vulnerable to large population movements and the spread of diseases like malaria. As temperatures rise, it is expected that there will be a mass migration of tens of millions of people to the northern climes. Parched north Africans will start displacing exhausted southern Europeans. This could lead to civil disturbances on an epic scale.
Fortunately, the English Channel provides a physical barrier to population movement and they’d have to get past England first. There could be a significant increase in Scotland’s population arising from English incomers, but the likelihood is that the country could cope. Scotland has a third of the land mass of Britain with only a twelfth of the population and could absorb a few millions.
So, house prices in Edinburgh could on keep rising, forever. It’s all beginning to look rather attractive: a warmer, richer and more populous Scotland which will be able to look regard with pity the plight of the millions in the hot world.
Except, of course, that it isn’t really like that. Scientists can make their best projections, and politicians and civil servants can try to formulate policies that fit, but no one really knows what the future is going to be like - except that it is going to be hotter and more dangerous. There are probably a whole range of unexpected consequences of global warming which we haven’t seen yet.
The most immediately damaging would be a global economic collapse of the kind feared by the Stern Report last year. Scotland is a post industrial economy, based on services, finance, tourism and higher education. We don’t make things any more, which could mean life becoming very awkward indeed if there were a world crash.
The inconvenient truth is that we are all in this together. The politics of competitive advantage will have to give way to the politics of strategic co-operation. We are perhaps privileged that Scotland can contribute more than most to the solemn task ahead. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that we can somehow beat the planet.
However, as Al Gore says, catastrophism helps no one. The technological means to combat climate change by reducing carbon emissions are already largely to hand - it is largely a question of political will. And by a quirk of fate, Scotland has a number of resources which make us peculiarly well placed to weather the storms ahead. Storms for a start.
Scotland’s wet weather suggest that we will never be short of a reservoir or two of what is likely to become one of the world’s most precious resources; water. Nor will we have to look hard to find wind to power electricity generators, or waves to turn turbines.
There are already serious questions being raised about the viability of urban populations in some parts of the Mediterranean sun belt, if climate change projections are correct. Water is becoming extremely scarce in parts of Provence, in the south of France, and people are already leaving remoter habitations.
Some forecasters think that even the South of England could turn into a very dry place - though with Britain’s annual rainfall being what it is, it should be a technically straight forward exercise to stop London dying of thirst. However, people might not be so keen to live there.
The metropolis is hot and sticky at the best of times, but imagine if the freak weather of the last few years were to become the norm, with temperatures in the the high nineties fahrenheit? Large parts of the centre of London may anyway be under water within a couple of decades
Cities like Edinburgh and Glasgow may become warmer and probably wetter, but they will be more manageable, even if the atlantic conveyor is switched off and Scotland ceases to be warmed by the Gulf Stream. The fear that this could plunge Scotland into a mini ice age seems to have subsided, because scientists now think global warming is happening faster than expected.
How best to make use of Scotland’s natural advantages? Well, the country could become a world centre for renewable energy. We have 25% of Europe’s wind and wave energy, and the Pentland Firth has been described as the Saudi Arabia of world tidal energy with the capacity to produce 10 of the UK’s electricity.
There will have to be a means of transmitting this energy south, and if that means pylons, I’m afraid the Highlands may have to put up with them. Pylons at least have the virtue of being relatively light, removable structures, which don’t actually churn up much of the land itself. When a new way is found to transport, they can be dismantled without any environmental impact at all.
And there are other technologies waiting to be developed. The first commercially viable carbon capture hydrogen gas power station is nearing completion in Peterhead. The idea of capturing C02 emissions and then pumping it back into depleted oil fields is no longer science fiction.
People have often criticised Scotland for being over-reliant on hydrocarbons, and there is certainly a limited future for North Sea Oil. But it remains a significant resource and if the spent fields can be reused as carbon sinks, then there is potential here for serious business.
Our relative remoteness would also make Scotland less vulnerable to large population movements and the spread of diseases like malaria. As temperatures rise, it is expected that there will be a mass migration of tens of millions of people to the northern climes. Parched north Africans will start displacing exhausted southern Europeans. This could lead to civil disturbances on an epic scale.
Fortunately, the English Channel provides a physical barrier to population movement and they’d have to get past England first. There could be a significant increase in Scotland’s population arising from English incomers, but the likelihood is that the country could cope. Scotland has a third of the land mass of Britain with only a twelfth of the population and could absorb a few millions.
So, house prices in Edinburgh could on keep rising, forever. It’s all beginning to look rather attractive: a warmer, richer and more populous Scotland which will be able to look regard with pity the plight of the millions in the hot world.
Except, of course, that it isn’t really like that. Scientists can make their best projections, and politicians and civil servants can try to formulate policies that fit, but no one really knows what the future is going to be like - except that it is going to be hotter and more dangerous. There are probably a whole range of unexpected consequences of global warming which we haven’t seen yet.
The most immediately damaging would be a global economic collapse of the kind feared by the Stern Report last year. Scotland is a post industrial economy, based on services, finance, tourism and higher education. We don’t make things any more, which could mean life becoming very awkward indeed if there were a world crash.
The inconvenient truth is that we are all in this together. The politics of competitive advantage will have to give way to the politics of strategic co-operation. We are perhaps privileged that Scotland can contribute more than most to the solemn task ahead. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that we can somehow beat the planet.
Friday, January 12, 2007
The End of the Union.
Looking back on 2007, it seems amazing that no one seriously expected the SNP to win the May Scottish election, least of all the nationalists themselves. But the return of the SNP as the largest party in May rocked Holyrood and Westminster to their foundations. The new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, reacted with uncharacteristic panic and the UK press demanded to know why no one had see it coming. But the signs were all there, if anyone had cared to look.
Labour MSPs had themselves been hoisting storm warnings, insisting that there was a groundswell of anti-Labour feeling spreading through the constituencies. But most commentators thought that was just the usual exercise in lowering expectations. The truth was that the SNP itself didn’t appear to believe that it was on the eve of an historic breakthrough. Indeed, many MSPs thought that the opinion polls were exaggerating their progress and fully expected most of the Labour vote to return to fold.
But throughout 2006, opinion polls had indicated that there was something stirring in the undergrowth of Scottish politics. Not just in the increase in the numbers of people saying they would vote for the SNP, but - more importantly - the increasing unwillingness of people to vote Labour. The Dunfermline and West Fife by-election where Labour lost an eleven thousand majority to the Liberal Democrats in the future Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s home constituency should have been warning enough. The mood was increasingly ‘anyone but Labour’.
But what no one expected was that Gordon Brown’s entry to Number Ten, far from giving Labour and electoral ‘bounce’, would actually made the party’s situation worse in Scotland. Dramatically worse. The reaction in the UK press to Tony Blair’s shock resignation early in 2007 was hardly unexpected, but the virulence with which sections of the London media attacked Brown for his national origins, sickened many Scots.
Labour MPs in Westminster were initially relieved that there was no leadership election following Tony Blair’s decision to go, which was apparently taken during his controversial stay in Bee Gee Robin Gibb’s mansion in Florida. Time to go. It had become clear to the PM that there was no one in the Labour cabinet prepared to challenge Gordon Brown for the leadership, apart from the home secretary, John Reid, who had zero chance of success. That the education secretary, Alan Johnson, was the only possibility merely underlined the paucity of talent.
Exploiting a New Year lull in he fighting in Iraq following the execution of Saddam Hussein and the breakthrough in Northern Ireland over devolution, the Prime Minister saw his chance and took it. He announced that Gordon Brown would be taking over the helm of government while he tidied his desk in time for his formal departure in May. This gave the Chancellor his “hundred days” in which to set out his stall before entering Number Ten. But it also gave the UK press a window of opportunity to discredit Brown even before he took office.
Editorials thundered that this arrangement was “a constitutional travesty”. “Where else”, thundered the Times, “but in the most squalid dictatorship would the leader of the nation be chosen by a back-room cabal. This is a negation of democracy”.
But the Daily Telegraph went further. “The fact that the future Prime Minister sits for a Scottish constituency, over which English MPs exercise no influence, makes Gordon Brown unfit to lead any legitimate government in England”. The Sun took its own characteristic slant. “Send him home! England will not be ruled by the Scots”. Opinion polls in April suggested that a majority of English voters agreed.
Astonishingly, so did many Labour MPs. The former welfare minister, Frank Field, led a deputation of a hundred Labour MPs and candidates, to Tony Blair urging him not to leave office until there was a resolution to the West Lothian Question. “It is simply untenable for the Prime Minister to hand over, without any democratic election, the leadership of the country to a politician who, for all his personal qualities, is profoundly unacceptable to English opinion”.
Gordon Brown launched a high profile tour of England, addressing countless meetings in town halls, telling Middle England how much he loved the flag and how his favourite sporting moment was that goal by Gazza against Scotland. His announcement in the Daily Mail that he felt “more English than Scottish” appalled many Scottish voters, who believed he was renouncing his own identity.
But when he promised to review the Barnett Formula and curb the voting rights of Scottish MPs in Westminster, the balloon really went up. The truth was that very few people in England really understood the West Lothian Question, still less the obscure formula under which increases in Scottish public spending are calculated.
But the UK press was suddenly filled with stories about the iniquities of a system which “robbed England to pay Scotland”. About how Scottish Labour MPs held a “veto over English laws” by virtue of their voting rights in Westminster on issues which are devolved to Scotland. The websites and blogs went red hot, with denunciations of the “Scottish Raj” and the “greedy jocks” who were bleeding England white.
This was Alex Salmond’s moment, and he seized it. Realising that the outpouring of English resentment was a unique opportunity for the SNP, the nationalist leader started his own tour of English towns, arguing that a new constitutional settlement was indeed essential for Britain. Many commentators in Scotland thought he had completely lost his marbles. Why wasn’t the leader of the SNP back in Scotland, campaigning for his party in the Scottish elections, instead of traipsing round England, persuading people who have no vote?
But Salmond was shrewdly exploiting the increasing anglicisation of the Scottish media. Much of the Scottish press is now dominated by Scottish editions of London papers - Daily Mail, Sun, Times etc. - and Salmond had calculated that he would gain better projection by campaigning in England than in Scotland. The London media became obsessed with this extraordinary double act Brown and Salmond - “the two Scots fighting for the soul of England”. The Murdoch Press, which is strongly English nationalist, gave Salmond acres of coverage, as the “Only Scot who will tell it like it is - that Scots have too much say in England”.
Salmond’s line was that Scotland was indeed over-dependent on England, and should have no say in English affairs in Westminster. The SNP had for many years voluntarily abstained from voting on English legislation in Westminster. Salmond didn’t accept that England subsidised Scotland, but he argued that the present arrangements, under which Scotland gets around fifteen percent more per head in public spending than the UK average, was “discredited and out of date”. Salmond called instead for the Scottish Parliament to be given powers over taxation so that “Scotland will only spend what she earns.”
The UK press took up this fiscal autonomy and ran with it. An issue which had been of marginal interest in the Scottish media for years, suddenly became the dominant issue in the entire UK, leading he BBC Six O’clock News day after day. Gordon Brown argued in vain that, in reality, the Barnett Formula had actually narrowed the gap in relative spending between Scotland and England since Labour came to office. He was hoist by his own fiscal petard.
Similarly, in agreeing to restrict the voting rights of Scottish MPs in Westminster, the Prime Minister played into SNP hands. The sight of Scots being denied the right to vote on the new generation of nuclear power stations, for example, because the first ones were planned for England, incensed many Scots.
The Conservative leader, David Cameron, took full advantage of the situation to argue that the Labour government no longer had a mandate to govern in England. He based this on the fact that the Conservatives had won a majority of votes in England at the last general election. Conservative ministers, he argued, should be given joint responsibility in devolved ministries, such as health and education, on the grounds that the government no longer had legitimacy on devolved areas. This was pure fantasy, of course, but it played very well in the English right wing press, who saw an opportunity to use the Scottish Question to drive Labour from office.
The Scottish elections fell at the height of this extraordinary ferment in UK constitutional politics. The election campaign turned into a referendum on the Union rather than the election of a devolved government in Holyrood. The timing could not have been more apposite, coming on the three hundredth anniversary of the 1707 Treaty of Union.
UK Labour ministers came north again to warn of the dangers of Scotland going it alone - as they had done fruitlessly, in September 2006. “Divorce”. they insisted, “is an expensive business”, and they urged Scots not to endanger the “union dividend”. But against the clamour of the English media demanding that Scotland be punished for fiscal indolence, and interfering in English law-making, they had a difficult job arguing that the Union was still a harmonious marriage. And the union dividend seemed to be a particularly questionable advantage now that the Barnett system was being scrapped by the new Prime Minister.
Even so, it was a profound shock when the SNP emerged with a slim majority of four seats over Labour in the May Holyrood elections. A combination of the Iraq war, the lacklustre performance of the Labour led Scottish Executive, and an increasing frustration with the union conspired to break Labour’s hold on Scotland. Widespread abstentionism by Labour voters and tactical voting to the Liberal Democrats did the rest.
Sections of the UK press pronounced that the Scots had voted to go it alone, and demanded that Scottish MPs should retreat from Westminster voluntarily. “At last, England will be free again” crowed the Sun. The SNP leader Alex Salmond - perhaps carried away by the London press dubbing him the “New Wallace” - announced that he intended to form a “provisional government” for an independent Scotland and announced that his first act as First Minister would be a bill to hold a referendum on an independence.
But what everyone had seemingly forgotten about was the electoral system. The SNP had not “won” the election and remained a minority in the Scottish parliament. The Liberal Democrats, now the third party in Scotland with only eight fewer seats than Labour, refused to join with the Scottish National Party unless it dropped its commitment to holding a referendum on independence. The ten Green MSPs said that the SNP couldn’t be trusted on the environment.
Labour, under its new leader, Tom McCabe, invited the Scottish Liberal Democrats and the Greens to help form a minority administration, to “save the UK”. Talks began as the nationalists complained that they were being locked out of power by a “unionist cabal” and that, as the biggest party, the SNP had a “moral claim” to lead any administration Holyrood administration. But there is nothing in the Holyrood rules that says the largest party has to form a government.
In the end, the “unionist alliance” collapsed as the Greens refused to abandon their commitment to independence, and Labour refused the Liberal Democrats’ demands for their leader, Nicol Stephen, to be made First Minister. For weeks, Scotland was without any form of government at all, and there began to be serious questions about the stability of the Scottish Executive. Labour ministers remained in power in a caretaker capacity, but without any constitutional authority so to do. It was then that Gordon Brown had his “moment of madness”.
No one quite knows why the Prime Minister decided to call a referendum on the constitution. There was certainly no demand for one in Scotland. With turmoil in Holyrood, the last thing Scottish voters wanted was to have to go through another election campaign. It seems that Gordon Brown felt that the only way to resolve the matter would be to pre-empt the nationalists and hold a referendum on independence, but not at a time of Alex Salmond’s choosing.
Since the constitution is still a responsibility that lies with Westminster, it was quite in order for the UK Prime Minister to move a bill in the Commons for a referendum. With the Scottish coalition in disarray, Brown hoped that Scots would see the folly of following the nationalists and would deliver a crushing rejection of independence. This would silence the voices in England who had been arguing that Scotland already was effectively out of the Union because it had “voted for independence” in the Holyrood elections.
But the bill in Westminster created a furious reaction in Scotland, where people argued that the Prime Minister was treating Scots with contempt by holding what was called an “opportunistic plebiscite” during a period of electoral instability. The move pushed the Liberal Democrats into a coalition with the SNP, and created a constitutional confrontation between Holyrood and Westminster.
As this extraordinary year drew to a close, the SNP and the LibDems put together a programme for an essentially federalist settlement under which Scotland would get substantial tax raising powers, a greater share of oil revenues, powers over things like immigration, nuclear power and broadcasting. At present, opinion polls suggest that this is the option which will win most support in the forthcoming referendum. But in truth no one really knows what will happen in 2008.
It looks like the union has survived its three hundredth birthday, but only just.
Labour MSPs had themselves been hoisting storm warnings, insisting that there was a groundswell of anti-Labour feeling spreading through the constituencies. But most commentators thought that was just the usual exercise in lowering expectations. The truth was that the SNP itself didn’t appear to believe that it was on the eve of an historic breakthrough. Indeed, many MSPs thought that the opinion polls were exaggerating their progress and fully expected most of the Labour vote to return to fold.
But throughout 2006, opinion polls had indicated that there was something stirring in the undergrowth of Scottish politics. Not just in the increase in the numbers of people saying they would vote for the SNP, but - more importantly - the increasing unwillingness of people to vote Labour. The Dunfermline and West Fife by-election where Labour lost an eleven thousand majority to the Liberal Democrats in the future Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s home constituency should have been warning enough. The mood was increasingly ‘anyone but Labour’.
But what no one expected was that Gordon Brown’s entry to Number Ten, far from giving Labour and electoral ‘bounce’, would actually made the party’s situation worse in Scotland. Dramatically worse. The reaction in the UK press to Tony Blair’s shock resignation early in 2007 was hardly unexpected, but the virulence with which sections of the London media attacked Brown for his national origins, sickened many Scots.
Labour MPs in Westminster were initially relieved that there was no leadership election following Tony Blair’s decision to go, which was apparently taken during his controversial stay in Bee Gee Robin Gibb’s mansion in Florida. Time to go. It had become clear to the PM that there was no one in the Labour cabinet prepared to challenge Gordon Brown for the leadership, apart from the home secretary, John Reid, who had zero chance of success. That the education secretary, Alan Johnson, was the only possibility merely underlined the paucity of talent.
Exploiting a New Year lull in he fighting in Iraq following the execution of Saddam Hussein and the breakthrough in Northern Ireland over devolution, the Prime Minister saw his chance and took it. He announced that Gordon Brown would be taking over the helm of government while he tidied his desk in time for his formal departure in May. This gave the Chancellor his “hundred days” in which to set out his stall before entering Number Ten. But it also gave the UK press a window of opportunity to discredit Brown even before he took office.
Editorials thundered that this arrangement was “a constitutional travesty”. “Where else”, thundered the Times, “but in the most squalid dictatorship would the leader of the nation be chosen by a back-room cabal. This is a negation of democracy”.
But the Daily Telegraph went further. “The fact that the future Prime Minister sits for a Scottish constituency, over which English MPs exercise no influence, makes Gordon Brown unfit to lead any legitimate government in England”. The Sun took its own characteristic slant. “Send him home! England will not be ruled by the Scots”. Opinion polls in April suggested that a majority of English voters agreed.
Astonishingly, so did many Labour MPs. The former welfare minister, Frank Field, led a deputation of a hundred Labour MPs and candidates, to Tony Blair urging him not to leave office until there was a resolution to the West Lothian Question. “It is simply untenable for the Prime Minister to hand over, without any democratic election, the leadership of the country to a politician who, for all his personal qualities, is profoundly unacceptable to English opinion”.
Gordon Brown launched a high profile tour of England, addressing countless meetings in town halls, telling Middle England how much he loved the flag and how his favourite sporting moment was that goal by Gazza against Scotland. His announcement in the Daily Mail that he felt “more English than Scottish” appalled many Scottish voters, who believed he was renouncing his own identity.
But when he promised to review the Barnett Formula and curb the voting rights of Scottish MPs in Westminster, the balloon really went up. The truth was that very few people in England really understood the West Lothian Question, still less the obscure formula under which increases in Scottish public spending are calculated.
But the UK press was suddenly filled with stories about the iniquities of a system which “robbed England to pay Scotland”. About how Scottish Labour MPs held a “veto over English laws” by virtue of their voting rights in Westminster on issues which are devolved to Scotland. The websites and blogs went red hot, with denunciations of the “Scottish Raj” and the “greedy jocks” who were bleeding England white.
This was Alex Salmond’s moment, and he seized it. Realising that the outpouring of English resentment was a unique opportunity for the SNP, the nationalist leader started his own tour of English towns, arguing that a new constitutional settlement was indeed essential for Britain. Many commentators in Scotland thought he had completely lost his marbles. Why wasn’t the leader of the SNP back in Scotland, campaigning for his party in the Scottish elections, instead of traipsing round England, persuading people who have no vote?
But Salmond was shrewdly exploiting the increasing anglicisation of the Scottish media. Much of the Scottish press is now dominated by Scottish editions of London papers - Daily Mail, Sun, Times etc. - and Salmond had calculated that he would gain better projection by campaigning in England than in Scotland. The London media became obsessed with this extraordinary double act Brown and Salmond - “the two Scots fighting for the soul of England”. The Murdoch Press, which is strongly English nationalist, gave Salmond acres of coverage, as the “Only Scot who will tell it like it is - that Scots have too much say in England”.
Salmond’s line was that Scotland was indeed over-dependent on England, and should have no say in English affairs in Westminster. The SNP had for many years voluntarily abstained from voting on English legislation in Westminster. Salmond didn’t accept that England subsidised Scotland, but he argued that the present arrangements, under which Scotland gets around fifteen percent more per head in public spending than the UK average, was “discredited and out of date”. Salmond called instead for the Scottish Parliament to be given powers over taxation so that “Scotland will only spend what she earns.”
The UK press took up this fiscal autonomy and ran with it. An issue which had been of marginal interest in the Scottish media for years, suddenly became the dominant issue in the entire UK, leading he BBC Six O’clock News day after day. Gordon Brown argued in vain that, in reality, the Barnett Formula had actually narrowed the gap in relative spending between Scotland and England since Labour came to office. He was hoist by his own fiscal petard.
Similarly, in agreeing to restrict the voting rights of Scottish MPs in Westminster, the Prime Minister played into SNP hands. The sight of Scots being denied the right to vote on the new generation of nuclear power stations, for example, because the first ones were planned for England, incensed many Scots.
The Conservative leader, David Cameron, took full advantage of the situation to argue that the Labour government no longer had a mandate to govern in England. He based this on the fact that the Conservatives had won a majority of votes in England at the last general election. Conservative ministers, he argued, should be given joint responsibility in devolved ministries, such as health and education, on the grounds that the government no longer had legitimacy on devolved areas. This was pure fantasy, of course, but it played very well in the English right wing press, who saw an opportunity to use the Scottish Question to drive Labour from office.
The Scottish elections fell at the height of this extraordinary ferment in UK constitutional politics. The election campaign turned into a referendum on the Union rather than the election of a devolved government in Holyrood. The timing could not have been more apposite, coming on the three hundredth anniversary of the 1707 Treaty of Union.
UK Labour ministers came north again to warn of the dangers of Scotland going it alone - as they had done fruitlessly, in September 2006. “Divorce”. they insisted, “is an expensive business”, and they urged Scots not to endanger the “union dividend”. But against the clamour of the English media demanding that Scotland be punished for fiscal indolence, and interfering in English law-making, they had a difficult job arguing that the Union was still a harmonious marriage. And the union dividend seemed to be a particularly questionable advantage now that the Barnett system was being scrapped by the new Prime Minister.
Even so, it was a profound shock when the SNP emerged with a slim majority of four seats over Labour in the May Holyrood elections. A combination of the Iraq war, the lacklustre performance of the Labour led Scottish Executive, and an increasing frustration with the union conspired to break Labour’s hold on Scotland. Widespread abstentionism by Labour voters and tactical voting to the Liberal Democrats did the rest.
Sections of the UK press pronounced that the Scots had voted to go it alone, and demanded that Scottish MPs should retreat from Westminster voluntarily. “At last, England will be free again” crowed the Sun. The SNP leader Alex Salmond - perhaps carried away by the London press dubbing him the “New Wallace” - announced that he intended to form a “provisional government” for an independent Scotland and announced that his first act as First Minister would be a bill to hold a referendum on an independence.
But what everyone had seemingly forgotten about was the electoral system. The SNP had not “won” the election and remained a minority in the Scottish parliament. The Liberal Democrats, now the third party in Scotland with only eight fewer seats than Labour, refused to join with the Scottish National Party unless it dropped its commitment to holding a referendum on independence. The ten Green MSPs said that the SNP couldn’t be trusted on the environment.
Labour, under its new leader, Tom McCabe, invited the Scottish Liberal Democrats and the Greens to help form a minority administration, to “save the UK”. Talks began as the nationalists complained that they were being locked out of power by a “unionist cabal” and that, as the biggest party, the SNP had a “moral claim” to lead any administration Holyrood administration. But there is nothing in the Holyrood rules that says the largest party has to form a government.
In the end, the “unionist alliance” collapsed as the Greens refused to abandon their commitment to independence, and Labour refused the Liberal Democrats’ demands for their leader, Nicol Stephen, to be made First Minister. For weeks, Scotland was without any form of government at all, and there began to be serious questions about the stability of the Scottish Executive. Labour ministers remained in power in a caretaker capacity, but without any constitutional authority so to do. It was then that Gordon Brown had his “moment of madness”.
No one quite knows why the Prime Minister decided to call a referendum on the constitution. There was certainly no demand for one in Scotland. With turmoil in Holyrood, the last thing Scottish voters wanted was to have to go through another election campaign. It seems that Gordon Brown felt that the only way to resolve the matter would be to pre-empt the nationalists and hold a referendum on independence, but not at a time of Alex Salmond’s choosing.
Since the constitution is still a responsibility that lies with Westminster, it was quite in order for the UK Prime Minister to move a bill in the Commons for a referendum. With the Scottish coalition in disarray, Brown hoped that Scots would see the folly of following the nationalists and would deliver a crushing rejection of independence. This would silence the voices in England who had been arguing that Scotland already was effectively out of the Union because it had “voted for independence” in the Holyrood elections.
But the bill in Westminster created a furious reaction in Scotland, where people argued that the Prime Minister was treating Scots with contempt by holding what was called an “opportunistic plebiscite” during a period of electoral instability. The move pushed the Liberal Democrats into a coalition with the SNP, and created a constitutional confrontation between Holyrood and Westminster.
As this extraordinary year drew to a close, the SNP and the LibDems put together a programme for an essentially federalist settlement under which Scotland would get substantial tax raising powers, a greater share of oil revenues, powers over things like immigration, nuclear power and broadcasting. At present, opinion polls suggest that this is the option which will win most support in the forthcoming referendum. But in truth no one really knows what will happen in 2008.
It looks like the union has survived its three hundredth birthday, but only just.
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