Labour’s new Scottish leader, Wendy Alexander, has been out and about “listening and learning”. What’s she learned? Well, she was reportedly “taken aback” by the strength of feeling across Scotland about the lack of affordable housing. "The huge issue", she said.
But why it took a nation-wide tour for Wendy, an economist, to discover that there is a housing crisis? Her party was in government only four months ago. The former First Minister, Jack McConnell, has a second home on Arran, where the crisis is so severe the island faces losing its indigenous population - priced out by holiday home owners like, well, Mr McConnell.
The Nationalists are just as bad as Labour. Last week the SNP housing minister, Stewart Maxwell, unveiled the new government’s bold solution to the housing crisis: another “consultation” with “stakeholders”. In other words, doing nothing at all.
I’m always astonished at the extent to which politicians seem unable to grasp that housing really is the biggest issue in politics right now. You only need to look at the property pages. The vast majority of people under 35 are unable to afford a rabbit hutch now that prices are up to ten times average earnings. The average age of a first time buyer is now 37, according to the Scottish government’s own figures.
But housing isn’t just about property. If you want to understand why the Scottish population is declining, and talented people are leaving, this is where you have to start. Even professionals can’t afford houses on the salaries they earn here, so they are taking their skills south or abroad. Those who stay are having to put off starting a family because they don’t want to raise children in a one-bedroom flat.
Housing is also the key to understanding the why policies on transport, the environment, global warming don’t work. People are using their cars more because they have to commute further and further to escape inflated house prices. The average commuting distance has risen by a mile and a half in ten years. Our houses are also so inefficient that they expend the equivalent output of Hunterston power station to heat the sky.
And housing now also threatens the stability of the economy. As the American sub-prime mortgage crisis has reminded us, prices can go down as well as up. And when they do, there is chaos and a “repricing of risk” - a euphemism for boardroom panic and governments throwing billions at bankrupt finance companies. In Britain, with house prices having tripled in ten years, we are sitting on a time-bomb.
Yet there is no need for this. Building houses is one of the few things that governments can actually do - as even the Tories showed in the 1950s. The housing shortage is an entirely artificial one in Scotland because, unlike the south of England, Scotland has an abundance of land - we have one third of the land mass of the Britain with less than a tenth of the population. To have a housing crisis here is really, really difficult. Yet the rate of new house building in Scotland is only one third that of England.
So, why do politicians seem unable to act? Could it have anything to do with the fact that most of them are multiple homeowners themselves? Could it be the mindset of senior civil servants, who are invariably middle-aged owner-occupiers? All of us who've ridden the long boom have been corrupted in one way or another by seeing our houses ‘earn’ more than we do year on year. But a time must come when we put aside l selfishness and start to build our way out of this crisis. Here’s a chance for Wendy to show how clever she really is.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
British soldiers are killing more people in Scotland than in Afghanistan.
Are British soldiers killing more people in Scotland than in Afghanistan? An unintended consequence of our current “surge” in the war-torn country has been a massive increase in cultivation of the opium poppy in Helmand province. Afghanistan now provides 92% of Europe’s street heroin. Meanwhile back home there has been a 40% increase in
the death rate among Scottish addicts. I wonder if there could be a connection?
Nothing could better illustrate the failure of our “war against drugs” than the fact that even the British army seems to be making the problem worse. But anyone who knows anything about the drugs business, like former deputy chief constable Tom Wood, knows that the war was lost years ago. This is a thriving multinational industry; one of the fastest-growing and most profitable in the world. Its captains earn the kind of money that chief executives of private equity firms get out of bed for.
Drug barons have their own hedge funds, and they have been recycling their cash in the booming property markets of London, Birmingham and Edinburgh. Pretty soon they’ll be joining the Rotary Club and the chambers of commerce. Meanwhile their streetwise lieutenants turn places like Croxteth in Liverpool into war zones. The killer of Rhys Jones was a member of one of the drug gangs fighting for control of the streets.
These hooded pharmaceutical warriors carry guns as a matter of routine, and don’t fear the penalties because they know the police, and everyone else, has largely given up trying to catch them. The occasional high publicity drug seizure is what the police look for now, like last month’s record seizure of opium en route to Aberdeen. The estates of Scotland are left fending for themselves.
In a way, the drug gangs have themselves become a kind of delinquent police force. The cycle-hoodies with their guns are on the periphery of this chaos maintaining a kind of territorial order. It’s not an easy life, but if you are prepared to work at it, and have the bottle, it’s a living. Drugs have become a kind of job-creation programme of the dispossessed, a mainstay of the local economy in the estates. Scotland’s 50,000 addicts (plus all the addicts we don’t know about) constitute an entire social system based on addiction, with a kind of underworld work ethic. Since they need a thousand pounds a week to maintain their habit, addicts are responsible for 75% of property theft.
Lock ‘em up and throw away the key you say - well of course we do. Scottish jails are filled to overflowing - as we also learned last week - and most of the people in there are prostitutes, drug dealers, gang members, murderers, burglars fine defaulters who are connected to the industry in some way. And those that aren’t are soon introduced to drugs when they are incarcerated. This is because our jails are awash with hard drugs, often supplied by members of the prison staff acting in conjunction with legitimate visitors and others.
The young thug who has signed up on the estates will discover that prison is a pretty good finishing school - a university of crime, where he or she will learn about advanced techniques of coercion, money laundering, use of firearms, sources of supply, even accountancy. Yes, the disciplines of financial management are just as relevant to this multi-million pound industry as they are to the brewers or the pharmaceutical industries.
Back outside, they will use their expertise and contacts to spread the drugs further and wider into the community, enlisting children who are too young to be prosecuted as look outs and carriers who will themselves be encouraged to become users. For this is a unique trade in which the consumer is also the sales force - the young pusher has to sell drugs in order to feed his own habit. Which is why the drugs business spreads so rapidly, like an epidemic. It is also why, like cancer, it needs a radical solution.
And I don’t mean just law enforcement - the war on drugs has been as ineffective here as it has been in Afghanistan. The only way to destroy the drug trade is to destroy it as a business - use the laws of supply and demand. It is the exponential growth of consumption which is the key to the burgeoning drugs industry. Kill the demand, and you kill the supply.
This means two things: decriminalising hard drugs and devoting the kind of resources that presently go into the ‘war’ into rehabilitation. Addiction is an illness, so it should be treated that way, with the drugs available to addicts under prescription from the NHS. The users would come under the protection of health professionals who would use supply as a lever to get them into proper rehabilitation programmes.
As soon as users find they can get cheap and reliable narcotics from licensed outlets then the entire drugs industry will start to collapse. The hoodies will be out on the streets, as it were, forced to go to college or join the army or even get a job. The drug lords would become bankrupt, left demanding cheap loans from European central banks to bail them out (that’s a joke).
Of course, this involves an act of faith. We have to believe that junkies, most of them, want to get of drugs somehow, sometime. Very few want to spend their lives hooked up to this death machine suffering physical, financial and psychological decay. Given the opportunity we know from the research that the vast majority would eventually get clean given proper rehab.
But rehabilitation only works if the communities they return to afterwards are also clean. Very often it is reacquaintance with lifestyle that makes ex-junkies relapse. If the drug industry were wiped out there wouldn't be the same temptation on every street corner, and the patient’s friends and relatives wouldn't be luring them back into the world of addiction.
Yes, some may choose to remain on drugs, even to their own destruction - but in the end, we can’t stop people destroying themselves Some surprising people in history have been lifelong hard drug addicts. One was the antislavery campaigner, William Wilberforce, a devout Christian evangelical who disapproved of dancing and theatre, and yet took opium every day of his life. I’m not suggesting he should be a role model - we understand far better the risks of long term drug-abuse than in the early 19th Century - but the point is that it is a condition, a disease, that can be managed.
Anyway, what is the alternative? Existing policies are clearly not working, and the situation is rapidly running out of control. The only people who are benefiting are the Taliban and the traffickers. We need to apply the successful methods used against that other great addiction, smoking, to hard drugs. Management and control - above all, keeping it out of children's hands and robbing the gangsters of their profits is the key. The battle against nicotine is being won, while the battle against heroin is being lost, and the dead are littering the streets of Scotland as well as Afghanistan.
the death rate among Scottish addicts. I wonder if there could be a connection?
Nothing could better illustrate the failure of our “war against drugs” than the fact that even the British army seems to be making the problem worse. But anyone who knows anything about the drugs business, like former deputy chief constable Tom Wood, knows that the war was lost years ago. This is a thriving multinational industry; one of the fastest-growing and most profitable in the world. Its captains earn the kind of money that chief executives of private equity firms get out of bed for.
Drug barons have their own hedge funds, and they have been recycling their cash in the booming property markets of London, Birmingham and Edinburgh. Pretty soon they’ll be joining the Rotary Club and the chambers of commerce. Meanwhile their streetwise lieutenants turn places like Croxteth in Liverpool into war zones. The killer of Rhys Jones was a member of one of the drug gangs fighting for control of the streets.
These hooded pharmaceutical warriors carry guns as a matter of routine, and don’t fear the penalties because they know the police, and everyone else, has largely given up trying to catch them. The occasional high publicity drug seizure is what the police look for now, like last month’s record seizure of opium en route to Aberdeen. The estates of Scotland are left fending for themselves.
In a way, the drug gangs have themselves become a kind of delinquent police force. The cycle-hoodies with their guns are on the periphery of this chaos maintaining a kind of territorial order. It’s not an easy life, but if you are prepared to work at it, and have the bottle, it’s a living. Drugs have become a kind of job-creation programme of the dispossessed, a mainstay of the local economy in the estates. Scotland’s 50,000 addicts (plus all the addicts we don’t know about) constitute an entire social system based on addiction, with a kind of underworld work ethic. Since they need a thousand pounds a week to maintain their habit, addicts are responsible for 75% of property theft.
Lock ‘em up and throw away the key you say - well of course we do. Scottish jails are filled to overflowing - as we also learned last week - and most of the people in there are prostitutes, drug dealers, gang members, murderers, burglars fine defaulters who are connected to the industry in some way. And those that aren’t are soon introduced to drugs when they are incarcerated. This is because our jails are awash with hard drugs, often supplied by members of the prison staff acting in conjunction with legitimate visitors and others.
The young thug who has signed up on the estates will discover that prison is a pretty good finishing school - a university of crime, where he or she will learn about advanced techniques of coercion, money laundering, use of firearms, sources of supply, even accountancy. Yes, the disciplines of financial management are just as relevant to this multi-million pound industry as they are to the brewers or the pharmaceutical industries.
Back outside, they will use their expertise and contacts to spread the drugs further and wider into the community, enlisting children who are too young to be prosecuted as look outs and carriers who will themselves be encouraged to become users. For this is a unique trade in which the consumer is also the sales force - the young pusher has to sell drugs in order to feed his own habit. Which is why the drugs business spreads so rapidly, like an epidemic. It is also why, like cancer, it needs a radical solution.
And I don’t mean just law enforcement - the war on drugs has been as ineffective here as it has been in Afghanistan. The only way to destroy the drug trade is to destroy it as a business - use the laws of supply and demand. It is the exponential growth of consumption which is the key to the burgeoning drugs industry. Kill the demand, and you kill the supply.
This means two things: decriminalising hard drugs and devoting the kind of resources that presently go into the ‘war’ into rehabilitation. Addiction is an illness, so it should be treated that way, with the drugs available to addicts under prescription from the NHS. The users would come under the protection of health professionals who would use supply as a lever to get them into proper rehabilitation programmes.
As soon as users find they can get cheap and reliable narcotics from licensed outlets then the entire drugs industry will start to collapse. The hoodies will be out on the streets, as it were, forced to go to college or join the army or even get a job. The drug lords would become bankrupt, left demanding cheap loans from European central banks to bail them out (that’s a joke).
Of course, this involves an act of faith. We have to believe that junkies, most of them, want to get of drugs somehow, sometime. Very few want to spend their lives hooked up to this death machine suffering physical, financial and psychological decay. Given the opportunity we know from the research that the vast majority would eventually get clean given proper rehab.
But rehabilitation only works if the communities they return to afterwards are also clean. Very often it is reacquaintance with lifestyle that makes ex-junkies relapse. If the drug industry were wiped out there wouldn't be the same temptation on every street corner, and the patient’s friends and relatives wouldn't be luring them back into the world of addiction.
Yes, some may choose to remain on drugs, even to their own destruction - but in the end, we can’t stop people destroying themselves Some surprising people in history have been lifelong hard drug addicts. One was the antislavery campaigner, William Wilberforce, a devout Christian evangelical who disapproved of dancing and theatre, and yet took opium every day of his life. I’m not suggesting he should be a role model - we understand far better the risks of long term drug-abuse than in the early 19th Century - but the point is that it is a condition, a disease, that can be managed.
Anyway, what is the alternative? Existing policies are clearly not working, and the situation is rapidly running out of control. The only people who are benefiting are the Taliban and the traffickers. We need to apply the successful methods used against that other great addiction, smoking, to hard drugs. Management and control - above all, keeping it out of children's hands and robbing the gangsters of their profits is the key. The battle against nicotine is being won, while the battle against heroin is being lost, and the dead are littering the streets of Scotland as well as Afghanistan.
Murder means more in England
“Sometimes you want to sit there and say: ‘nothing much has happened, I’d go to bed if I were you.” So said the Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman about a phenomenon all of us face in the street of shame - what to do when there is a dearth of news.
The media is a machine which is sustained by shock and awe, and if there isn’t much going on, then we manufacture it. Not generally by inventing stories, though that does go on, but by investing the stories that are around with a significance they may not warrant. It's principally a tabloid vice, but none of us are immune and the coming of twenty four hour television has magnified it. I'm contributing to it here by writing this column.
I normally avoid reading murder and royal stories altogether because I simply don’t believe in them, and it saves time in the daily chore of reading all the papers. It’s not that I don’t believe the facts of the case: certainly Madeleine McCann was abducted (probably); Princess Diana perished in a car crash ten years ago(certainly); and a little boy was murdered last week in Liverpool. But the machine can’t leave it there, and in the absence of competing news, we have been subjected to a weekend of futile attempts to extract meaning from the random killing of eleven year old Rhys Jones: fevered anticipation of the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death; further fruitless anguish about the McCann affair. Why can’t we just leave them alone?
Now, I’m not saying that gangs of feral youths aren’t a problem; or that we should ignore gun crime; or that family break-up is good for children. But the Liverpool killing, which has launched many thousands of words on these issues, tells us very little about any of them. Rhys Jones’s murder was a tragic one-off, a unique event. Gun crime is actually going down (or up, depending on the statistics you look at). It wasn’t a typical gang-land killing and his parents are white and happily married. Stuff happens.
The search for explanation is a populist version of what the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb called the “Black Swan” phenomenon - the human tendency to look for meaning when there often isn’t any. We are “fooled by randomness”. Paxo has a rather more robust way of putting it. Media frenzies like the McCanns, Diana and Rhys simply rob us of our reason: “At times like this, when the television hurricane hits a story, it too often sucks good sense and consideration out of the brains of those involved”.
The McCanns voluntarily became a media sensation, of course, and then were consumed by it. In a desperate search for black swans, the media descended on Gerry McCann seeking somehow to find a connexion between the loss of their daughter and the murder in Liverpool. The key, it turned out was the Everton shirt. Of course! Madeleine McCann and Rhys Jones shared a passionate support for the same football team. 40,000 Everton fans paying their respects at Goodison Park became the image of the weekend, as if in some way murder and sport had become one.
“Liverpool sometime seems to be made for grief”, said the Sunday Times, improbably linking Hillsborough, Jamie Bulger and Rhys Jones, whose death, “has brought Liverpool face to face with the sinister new cultural phenomenon of modern Britain: where youngsters feel empowered to shoot each other on a whim and are proud of it.” The only reason they didn’t add Holly and Jessica Chapmen was because they supported Manchester United. But this is not a 'sinister new phenomenon' - gangs have been around as long as long as there have been newspapers to run stories about them.
Politicians are made the biggest fools of all, having to respond to events like these because the media is running around looking for answers. So we have had David Cameron talking about everything from family breakdown to abolishing the Human Rights Act in the wake of the Liverpool killings. Yes, I know, that wasn’t about Rhys Jones, but the impending non-deportation to Italy of Learco Chindamo, who was jailed 11 years ago for the murder of headteacher Philip Lawrence. But somehow the HRA has become part of the same frenzy about "broken Britain". It's the collapse of the family, community, football, Europe, race...whatever.
There has been much debate about black fathers not raising their children, as if white marriages don’t break down. We are told that gangs have become surrogate families to disaffected urban black youth. "It's a cultural problem” the justice secretary Jack Straw told the BBC last week, “It's the absence of fathers who are actively involved in parenting... and they are more likely to be absent in the case of the Afro-Caribbean." Even the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, has got in on this one, suggesting that they could all do with a spell in the army. He wants black officers to start mentoring young black males to become responsible dads.
The Prime Minister tried not to get too involved in the Rhys Jones frenzy, but he was unable to in the end. The media would have murdered him for being unwilling to join in the emotional , rather as they attacked the Queen when she failed to show appropriate emotion over the death of Diana. Is Gordon so cold that he cannot feel the pain of 40,000 Everton supporters? Prime Minister, where are you when your nation needs you?
So, Brown had to follow the script by promising a “tougher enforcement...crackdown...more police... new laws if necessary”. Now, there may well be a case for having more police on the streets instead of filling in forms, and there may be a case for new laws, but the Rhys killing doesn’t tell us what they should be. Far more killings are the result of knife crime than guns, which tend to be carried by drug dealers for show rather than use. Airguns are responsible for a lot of killings too, and the Scottish government is pressing ahead with a law to outlaw them. But this reveals another curious dimension to the black swan hunt.
Strangely, murders mean more if they happen in England than in Scotland. Three weeks ago a teenager, Andrew Devlin, was shot and killed outside a snooker club in Paisley, but that didn’t launch an outpouring of national grief and angst. Nor did the death of two year old Andrew Morton two years ago by an airgun pellet. I’m not saying it should have, but it does lead to a curious hierarchy of impact - things seem to have more meaning the further south they happen. This is because the media machine is based in London and increasingly regards Scotland as a foreign country, even though the media it produces is broadcast here. Perhaps we should count our blessings. It means there is a chance of a more level-headed response to these episodes of inexplicable and implacable human tragedy.
The media is a machine which is sustained by shock and awe, and if there isn’t much going on, then we manufacture it. Not generally by inventing stories, though that does go on, but by investing the stories that are around with a significance they may not warrant. It's principally a tabloid vice, but none of us are immune and the coming of twenty four hour television has magnified it. I'm contributing to it here by writing this column.
I normally avoid reading murder and royal stories altogether because I simply don’t believe in them, and it saves time in the daily chore of reading all the papers. It’s not that I don’t believe the facts of the case: certainly Madeleine McCann was abducted (probably); Princess Diana perished in a car crash ten years ago(certainly); and a little boy was murdered last week in Liverpool. But the machine can’t leave it there, and in the absence of competing news, we have been subjected to a weekend of futile attempts to extract meaning from the random killing of eleven year old Rhys Jones: fevered anticipation of the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death; further fruitless anguish about the McCann affair. Why can’t we just leave them alone?
Now, I’m not saying that gangs of feral youths aren’t a problem; or that we should ignore gun crime; or that family break-up is good for children. But the Liverpool killing, which has launched many thousands of words on these issues, tells us very little about any of them. Rhys Jones’s murder was a tragic one-off, a unique event. Gun crime is actually going down (or up, depending on the statistics you look at). It wasn’t a typical gang-land killing and his parents are white and happily married. Stuff happens.
The search for explanation is a populist version of what the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb called the “Black Swan” phenomenon - the human tendency to look for meaning when there often isn’t any. We are “fooled by randomness”. Paxo has a rather more robust way of putting it. Media frenzies like the McCanns, Diana and Rhys simply rob us of our reason: “At times like this, when the television hurricane hits a story, it too often sucks good sense and consideration out of the brains of those involved”.
The McCanns voluntarily became a media sensation, of course, and then were consumed by it. In a desperate search for black swans, the media descended on Gerry McCann seeking somehow to find a connexion between the loss of their daughter and the murder in Liverpool. The key, it turned out was the Everton shirt. Of course! Madeleine McCann and Rhys Jones shared a passionate support for the same football team. 40,000 Everton fans paying their respects at Goodison Park became the image of the weekend, as if in some way murder and sport had become one.
“Liverpool sometime seems to be made for grief”, said the Sunday Times, improbably linking Hillsborough, Jamie Bulger and Rhys Jones, whose death, “has brought Liverpool face to face with the sinister new cultural phenomenon of modern Britain: where youngsters feel empowered to shoot each other on a whim and are proud of it.” The only reason they didn’t add Holly and Jessica Chapmen was because they supported Manchester United. But this is not a 'sinister new phenomenon' - gangs have been around as long as long as there have been newspapers to run stories about them.
Politicians are made the biggest fools of all, having to respond to events like these because the media is running around looking for answers. So we have had David Cameron talking about everything from family breakdown to abolishing the Human Rights Act in the wake of the Liverpool killings. Yes, I know, that wasn’t about Rhys Jones, but the impending non-deportation to Italy of Learco Chindamo, who was jailed 11 years ago for the murder of headteacher Philip Lawrence. But somehow the HRA has become part of the same frenzy about "broken Britain". It's the collapse of the family, community, football, Europe, race...whatever.
There has been much debate about black fathers not raising their children, as if white marriages don’t break down. We are told that gangs have become surrogate families to disaffected urban black youth. "It's a cultural problem” the justice secretary Jack Straw told the BBC last week, “It's the absence of fathers who are actively involved in parenting... and they are more likely to be absent in the case of the Afro-Caribbean." Even the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, has got in on this one, suggesting that they could all do with a spell in the army. He wants black officers to start mentoring young black males to become responsible dads.
The Prime Minister tried not to get too involved in the Rhys Jones frenzy, but he was unable to in the end. The media would have murdered him for being unwilling to join in the emotional , rather as they attacked the Queen when she failed to show appropriate emotion over the death of Diana. Is Gordon so cold that he cannot feel the pain of 40,000 Everton supporters? Prime Minister, where are you when your nation needs you?
So, Brown had to follow the script by promising a “tougher enforcement...crackdown...more police... new laws if necessary”. Now, there may well be a case for having more police on the streets instead of filling in forms, and there may be a case for new laws, but the Rhys killing doesn’t tell us what they should be. Far more killings are the result of knife crime than guns, which tend to be carried by drug dealers for show rather than use. Airguns are responsible for a lot of killings too, and the Scottish government is pressing ahead with a law to outlaw them. But this reveals another curious dimension to the black swan hunt.
Strangely, murders mean more if they happen in England than in Scotland. Three weeks ago a teenager, Andrew Devlin, was shot and killed outside a snooker club in Paisley, but that didn’t launch an outpouring of national grief and angst. Nor did the death of two year old Andrew Morton two years ago by an airgun pellet. I’m not saying it should have, but it does lead to a curious hierarchy of impact - things seem to have more meaning the further south they happen. This is because the media machine is based in London and increasingly regards Scotland as a foreign country, even though the media it produces is broadcast here. Perhaps we should count our blessings. It means there is a chance of a more level-headed response to these episodes of inexplicable and implacable human tragedy.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
She isn't Labour's Scottish leader - that's the problem.
The Scottish Labour Party elected a new leader this week - except that it didn’t. The new nominal leader, Wendy Alexander, is only the leader of the Labour group of MSPs in the Scottish Parliament, and she was elected to that position unopposed. Never has Labour’s North Korean predilection for single candidate elections been more self-defeating. It has undermined the new broom even before she has begun to sweep.
Wendy Alexander is a capable and intelligent politician with a lot of support across Scotland in the media and academia. She is also the first woman leader the Scottish party has ever had and the party’s best chance of escaping from its male-dominated West of Scotland political ghetto. But she will have to take on the Labour Party in Scotland if she wants to have any chance of taking on the SNP.
Yesterday she announced that: “I will lead the Scottish Labour Party. I am my own person with my own causes.” She has already contradicted the Scottish Secretary, Des Browne, by saying that she wants to enter the debate - begun by the SNP last week - on new powers for the Scottish parliament. She is letting it be known that she favours further tax powers being devolved to Holyrood including possibly stamp duty and corporation tax. Mr Browne has said there is no need to change the devolution settlement.
Labour MPs have lost no time in failing to support the new leader, just as they failed to support her predecessor, Jack McConnell. Scottish Labour MPs were contemptuous of his attempts to make a positive case for progressive home rule
and blocked moves to make the party more Scottish and autonomous. This was regarded by Westminster MPs and Lords as presumption by a second-rate politician getting above himself. The press was continually reminded that Jack McConnell was not the leader of the party in Scotland, Tony Blair was.
Gordon Brown may look on things rather differently. Wendy Alexander is the sister of his closest confederate, Douglas Alexander, and regarded by some in the party as the more able of the two. Brown understands Scotland and the subtleties of the home rule debate rather better than his predecessor and might well be minded to give Wendy her head. He certainly understands the need to take on Alex Salmond on his own Scottish ground, and dispel the impression that the Labour Party in Scotland is under remote control from London.
But he will have to move quickly. Wendy Alexander needs to be clearly in charge of the party before the Scottish parliament returns in September. The carping from Westminster Labour has to stop and only the firm smack of authority will do that - and no one smacks firmer than Wendy Alexander. Colleagues and civil servants who have disagreed with her in the past have been left smarting after being “Wendied” - a new Scottish political verb which means being subjected to extreme verbal attrition.
Brown should also endorse proposals for a second referendum on the constitution which is being called for ten years after the devolution vote in 1997. With support for independence running at less than thirty percent in the polls, there is a clear opportunity here to resolve the constitutional debate for a generation. But it will mean a new round of constitutional innovation in Holyrood, and a constitutional convention to give them authority. Such a process is now explicit policy of all the main political parties in Scotland, including the Conservatives. The sooner they get together and decide just what kind of parliament they want, the better.
Wendy Alexander is a capable and intelligent politician with a lot of support across Scotland in the media and academia. She is also the first woman leader the Scottish party has ever had and the party’s best chance of escaping from its male-dominated West of Scotland political ghetto. But she will have to take on the Labour Party in Scotland if she wants to have any chance of taking on the SNP.
Yesterday she announced that: “I will lead the Scottish Labour Party. I am my own person with my own causes.” She has already contradicted the Scottish Secretary, Des Browne, by saying that she wants to enter the debate - begun by the SNP last week - on new powers for the Scottish parliament. She is letting it be known that she favours further tax powers being devolved to Holyrood including possibly stamp duty and corporation tax. Mr Browne has said there is no need to change the devolution settlement.
Labour MPs have lost no time in failing to support the new leader, just as they failed to support her predecessor, Jack McConnell. Scottish Labour MPs were contemptuous of his attempts to make a positive case for progressive home rule
and blocked moves to make the party more Scottish and autonomous. This was regarded by Westminster MPs and Lords as presumption by a second-rate politician getting above himself. The press was continually reminded that Jack McConnell was not the leader of the party in Scotland, Tony Blair was.
Gordon Brown may look on things rather differently. Wendy Alexander is the sister of his closest confederate, Douglas Alexander, and regarded by some in the party as the more able of the two. Brown understands Scotland and the subtleties of the home rule debate rather better than his predecessor and might well be minded to give Wendy her head. He certainly understands the need to take on Alex Salmond on his own Scottish ground, and dispel the impression that the Labour Party in Scotland is under remote control from London.
But he will have to move quickly. Wendy Alexander needs to be clearly in charge of the party before the Scottish parliament returns in September. The carping from Westminster Labour has to stop and only the firm smack of authority will do that - and no one smacks firmer than Wendy Alexander. Colleagues and civil servants who have disagreed with her in the past have been left smarting after being “Wendied” - a new Scottish political verb which means being subjected to extreme verbal attrition.
Brown should also endorse proposals for a second referendum on the constitution which is being called for ten years after the devolution vote in 1997. With support for independence running at less than thirty percent in the polls, there is a clear opportunity here to resolve the constitutional debate for a generation. But it will mean a new round of constitutional innovation in Holyrood, and a constitutional convention to give them authority. Such a process is now explicit policy of all the main political parties in Scotland, including the Conservatives. The sooner they get together and decide just what kind of parliament they want, the better.
Monday, August 20, 2007
How Wendy could change things
Sales of Wendies collapsed yesterday, as confidence slumped in Labour’s leader-in-waiting. A YouGov poll in the Sunday Times suggesting that only 7% of voters would like to see her as first minister has led political forecasters to mark her down. Only bankrupt Nicol Stephens are selling worse in the turbulent post-Salmond market.
Her failure to come up with any new political products has also damaged Wendy’s share price. She marked her candidacy by promising to combat “electronic stranger danger” - which is omething to do with paedophiles on the internet targetting “cotton wool kids” kept at home by parents are fearful of abusers on the streets. But creating yet another nameless dread to keep parents awake at night is not the ideal way to herald a new political dawn.
Some hope might be nice; a vision or two; perhaps a great speech of reconciliation with middle Scotland, promising to challenge metropolitan centralism, London dominance, of everything from broadcasting to the Olympic Games. Come to think of it, she could borrow from Jack McConnell’s valedictory interview in the Sunday press yesterday in which he suggested British institutions like the BBC, sports organisations and energy regulators were a greater danger to the unity of the UK than the SNP. “It’s almost like we’re under the radar”, said the soon-to-be-former First Minister. He also criticised Scottish Labour MPs for undermining his attempts to fly the Scottish flag.
There is an obvious agenda here for Wendy and doesn’t mean dressing in tartan and singing Scots Wha’ Hae’. She needs to take on the city state of London, which is draining the life out of the rest of the country - not just Scotland, but all non metropolitan areas. It is not acceptable for organisations like the BBC to slash their investment in Scotland, or for the London Olympics to rob the national lottery fund, or for Ofgem to charge discriminatory grid connection fees.
Nor is it acceptable for investment and jobs to drain relentlesly south, denuding Scotland of professionals, skilled workers and graduates, year after year. Scotland’s historically deficient growth rates are not a result of lack of talent or some kind of genetic failure of enterprise, but of structural and essentially political imbalances in the British economy. These need appropriate economic and fiscal measures to rebalance the country - it has nothing to do with independence.
London needs to be saved from itself. It has created a monster in the overblown, over-leveraged City, which has crowded out all other forms of economic activity on these islands, and created a perilously over priced housing market. Scotland needs cheaper housing as much as it needs lower business taxes to keep the economically active population in Scotland and prevent the nation becoming a retirement home. But why couldn’t Labour demand both? If the ultra-unionist Ian Paisley can call for cuts in corporation taxes in Northern Ireland, to help business in the province compete with the Irish Republic, why not Scotland?
These are the kind of thing that Wendy Alexander should be saying if she wants to turn the tide against the SNP, not serving up reheated warnings about the economic consequences of independence. At least consider them seriously. She needs to take a lesson from her mentor, Gordon Brown, who lost no time in office distancing himself from his predecessor, even as he praised him.
Brown tossed “sofa government” onto a skip and promised to scrap the constitutional provisions that underpinned elective dictatorship. If Brown can announce the most radical constitutional reforms to the UK in a generation, why can’t the First Minister of Scotland? Wendy could wreck Alex Salmond’s 100 days by calling for a second cross-party Scottish Constitutional Convention, to consider the results of the “national conversation’ which has been launched by Alex Salmond. The SNP should of course be invited.
And if the convention decides that a new referendum is necessary to resolve the independence question, then why not? What better way to clear the air? The weekend polls confirmed that formal independence is supported by only around 23% of Scots voters, so this is hardly high-risk option. Alex Salmond has agreed that such a referendum would be a “once in a generation” thing and that the SNP wouldn’t be coming back with yet more “neverendums” until it got the answer it wanted. This is a tremendous opportunity for a confident Scottish Labour leader.
Who dares wins. Of course, Scottish Labour MPs would howl “betrayal”, pour scorn on “lady Braveheart”, dismiss her as naive - but that would be entirely to the good. Wendy Alexander needs to take on her own party before she can be in any position to take on the nationalists. She would find widespread support in Scotland for a determined break with the Labourism of the past, which has led to a moribund, impoverished party barely able to contest elections. As she said to Jim Sillars in that note after she resigned from the executive in 2001, the Scottish Labour Party hasn’t had a fresh idea since 1906. Well, maybe it’s time for some. Come the hour, cometh the woman.
She should be banging her fist on Gordon’s table until he makes her leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, not just leader of the MSPs in Holyrood. She should be given control of all the party functions north of the border, with freedom to develop an independent political agenda, and authority to ram it down the throats of the unionist old guard. That would show Scotland that you don’t need trousers to have cojones. Or a kilt.
After a referendum, she could declare the independence/ unionism dichotomy is history. That Scotland is a confident nation which makes its own way in the world, by taking whatever powers - economic or otherwise - are required, without apologising for itself, and without fearing the consequences. The truth is that Britain needs Scotland as much as Scotland needs the UK, and the threat of an independent Scotland actually is a source of strength for Wendy Alexander. If Scotland broke away, the UK would lose a lot of its clout in international forums, and it would also lose valuable oil and renewable energy reserves. Why should it be left to Alex Salmond to play the Scottish card?
It’s rather been assumed that Salmond and his team regard Wendy Alexander with contempt, as a mouthy disaster with zero voter appeal. I don’t believe that is entirely the case. I haven’t heard Alex Salmond dis her the way he dissed Jack McConnell, and privately the Nationalists realise that with the passing of Tony Blair and Jack McConnell they are losing their best assets. Alex Salmond will treat her, initially at least, with respect just as he treated Brown with respect. And if Gordon and Wendy work apart together, the only way is up.
Her failure to come up with any new political products has also damaged Wendy’s share price. She marked her candidacy by promising to combat “electronic stranger danger” - which is omething to do with paedophiles on the internet targetting “cotton wool kids” kept at home by parents are fearful of abusers on the streets. But creating yet another nameless dread to keep parents awake at night is not the ideal way to herald a new political dawn.
Some hope might be nice; a vision or two; perhaps a great speech of reconciliation with middle Scotland, promising to challenge metropolitan centralism, London dominance, of everything from broadcasting to the Olympic Games. Come to think of it, she could borrow from Jack McConnell’s valedictory interview in the Sunday press yesterday in which he suggested British institutions like the BBC, sports organisations and energy regulators were a greater danger to the unity of the UK than the SNP. “It’s almost like we’re under the radar”, said the soon-to-be-former First Minister. He also criticised Scottish Labour MPs for undermining his attempts to fly the Scottish flag.
There is an obvious agenda here for Wendy and doesn’t mean dressing in tartan and singing Scots Wha’ Hae’. She needs to take on the city state of London, which is draining the life out of the rest of the country - not just Scotland, but all non metropolitan areas. It is not acceptable for organisations like the BBC to slash their investment in Scotland, or for the London Olympics to rob the national lottery fund, or for Ofgem to charge discriminatory grid connection fees.
Nor is it acceptable for investment and jobs to drain relentlesly south, denuding Scotland of professionals, skilled workers and graduates, year after year. Scotland’s historically deficient growth rates are not a result of lack of talent or some kind of genetic failure of enterprise, but of structural and essentially political imbalances in the British economy. These need appropriate economic and fiscal measures to rebalance the country - it has nothing to do with independence.
London needs to be saved from itself. It has created a monster in the overblown, over-leveraged City, which has crowded out all other forms of economic activity on these islands, and created a perilously over priced housing market. Scotland needs cheaper housing as much as it needs lower business taxes to keep the economically active population in Scotland and prevent the nation becoming a retirement home. But why couldn’t Labour demand both? If the ultra-unionist Ian Paisley can call for cuts in corporation taxes in Northern Ireland, to help business in the province compete with the Irish Republic, why not Scotland?
These are the kind of thing that Wendy Alexander should be saying if she wants to turn the tide against the SNP, not serving up reheated warnings about the economic consequences of independence. At least consider them seriously. She needs to take a lesson from her mentor, Gordon Brown, who lost no time in office distancing himself from his predecessor, even as he praised him.
Brown tossed “sofa government” onto a skip and promised to scrap the constitutional provisions that underpinned elective dictatorship. If Brown can announce the most radical constitutional reforms to the UK in a generation, why can’t the First Minister of Scotland? Wendy could wreck Alex Salmond’s 100 days by calling for a second cross-party Scottish Constitutional Convention, to consider the results of the “national conversation’ which has been launched by Alex Salmond. The SNP should of course be invited.
And if the convention decides that a new referendum is necessary to resolve the independence question, then why not? What better way to clear the air? The weekend polls confirmed that formal independence is supported by only around 23% of Scots voters, so this is hardly high-risk option. Alex Salmond has agreed that such a referendum would be a “once in a generation” thing and that the SNP wouldn’t be coming back with yet more “neverendums” until it got the answer it wanted. This is a tremendous opportunity for a confident Scottish Labour leader.
Who dares wins. Of course, Scottish Labour MPs would howl “betrayal”, pour scorn on “lady Braveheart”, dismiss her as naive - but that would be entirely to the good. Wendy Alexander needs to take on her own party before she can be in any position to take on the nationalists. She would find widespread support in Scotland for a determined break with the Labourism of the past, which has led to a moribund, impoverished party barely able to contest elections. As she said to Jim Sillars in that note after she resigned from the executive in 2001, the Scottish Labour Party hasn’t had a fresh idea since 1906. Well, maybe it’s time for some. Come the hour, cometh the woman.
She should be banging her fist on Gordon’s table until he makes her leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, not just leader of the MSPs in Holyrood. She should be given control of all the party functions north of the border, with freedom to develop an independent political agenda, and authority to ram it down the throats of the unionist old guard. That would show Scotland that you don’t need trousers to have cojones. Or a kilt.
After a referendum, she could declare the independence/ unionism dichotomy is history. That Scotland is a confident nation which makes its own way in the world, by taking whatever powers - economic or otherwise - are required, without apologising for itself, and without fearing the consequences. The truth is that Britain needs Scotland as much as Scotland needs the UK, and the threat of an independent Scotland actually is a source of strength for Wendy Alexander. If Scotland broke away, the UK would lose a lot of its clout in international forums, and it would also lose valuable oil and renewable energy reserves. Why should it be left to Alex Salmond to play the Scottish card?
It’s rather been assumed that Salmond and his team regard Wendy Alexander with contempt, as a mouthy disaster with zero voter appeal. I don’t believe that is entirely the case. I haven’t heard Alex Salmond dis her the way he dissed Jack McConnell, and privately the Nationalists realise that with the passing of Tony Blair and Jack McConnell they are losing their best assets. Alex Salmond will treat her, initially at least, with respect just as he treated Brown with respect. And if Gordon and Wendy work apart together, the only way is up.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
The National Conversation.
When is an event not an event? When it’s a process. The Scottish Secretary, Des Browne, insisted on BBC’s World at One on Wednesday that Donald Dewar had never uttered his most famous remark: “devolution is a process not an event”. On the contrary, he said, the late First Minister had agreed with Mr Browne’s own constitutional dictum that the Scotland Act was “an event not a process”, a destination rather than a starting point.
Now, there is some evidence that it was actually Ron Davies, the former Welsh Labour leader, who first uttered the words in question in parliament, in January 1998. But I certainly recall Donald using the P word, and so does everyone else, at the time of the Scottish Parliament’s creation. More importantly, his acolyte, Wendy Alexander, has certainly said that devolution is a process, most recently during the Scotland on Sunday debate on the Union in January. This is important since it is she, rather than Des Browne, who will shortly be leading Labour in Scotland, now that Jack McConnell has opted to become high commissioner for smart, successful Malawi.
Except of course, that she won’t, because as Labour MPs always insist, the leader of the Labour group of MSPs is not the leader of the Scottish Labour Party. She will have no authority over Scottish MPs, Lords or the party apparatus in Scotland since she is only the Holyrood parliamentary leader. This democratic deficit in the Labour Party is something she should address at the earliest opportunity if she doesn’t want to share the fate of her predecessor, who had the right ideas but lacked authority over his own party. Jack McConnell’s attempts to make Labour the party of progressive home rule were blocked by elements in Labour who treated him with thinly-disguised contempt. Labour needs a proper leader in Scotland just as much as Scotland needs a proper government.
Devolution is of course a process - whoever said it - and the open-ended nature of that constitutional process is enshrined in the Scotland Act, a remarkable document which few have read and even fewer understand. For, the Act that set up the Scottish parliament specifically avoided defining the limits of devolution and contains within it the mechanisms to devolve most of the responsibilities reserved to Westminster, like broadcasting, firearms, conduct of elections even tax.
Yes, if he wanted to, Alex Salmond could legitimately seize most of the powers he wants repatriated to Holyrood without a referendum. He wouldn’t do so, of course, because he is too clever and realises that there would be an unholy row and a breakdown in the subtle consensus he has forged on the Scottish constitution. The FM rightly argues that some powers are so important - taxation being the obvious example - that there would need to be the explicit consent of the Scottish people to any such developments.
However, the white paper on independence, last week -”Choosing Scotland’s Future” - actually makes a rather strong case for incrementalism, or extending the process of devolution, rather than going for any “big bang”. Full independence is of course still what the SNP wants to see - a constitutional one-off event after which the Westminster parliament would cease to have powers to legislate for Scotland. However, the white paper sets out the home rule alternatives so comprehensively and positively that you can’t help but think that the SNP government is now beginning to think in terms of process rather than event.
Indeed, by the time you get to the section of the white paper which deals with full independence, you begin to wonder just what difference formal constitutional disengagement would actually make if the preceding stages had already been reached. When it comes down to it, we are only talking “macro-economics, defence and foreign affairs” (3.9). These are very important matters, of course, but would Scots want a separate currency and army?
Moreover, the white paper makes clear that Scotland, even under full ‘independence’, would remain part of a political union - albeit one based on the principle of pooled sovereignty rather than incorporation. There would have to be a UK-wide authority, rather like the European Union, which could make laws which applied across the UK in common areas, like the environment, currency, citizenship.
Never has a politically-inspired document given such an even-handed and open-minded assessment of the policies of its opponents, and the SNP government is to be congratulated for starting this debate in such a constructive manner. Its very reasonableness has has floored critics and led the opposition parties to make complete fools of themselves. Labour, the Scottish Tories and the Liberal Democrats united last week to reject the SNP’s constitutional conversation as a waste of time and money, and then announced that they wanted to start one their own, but excluding any consideration of independence. They either want a conversation or they don’t. The idea that SNP voices should be excluded when they have just won an election is so ridiculous it seems incredible that sensible people could actually propose it. Wendy Alexander is intelligent enough to see that this is not a sustainable position and will try to move Labour back into the constitutional centre-ground. But it may be that the horse has already bolted.
For what the opposition parties have done is hand the political and moral initiative to the SNP, and allowed nationalists to appear the inheritors of the spirit of the 1989 Scottish Constitutional Convention - an irony since the SNP boycotted it. Alex Salmond has accepted the founding principle of Scotland’s Claim of Right document that “sovereignty resides with the people” not with any government or party. He has said he will move only as far and as fast as the people of Scotland wish, and the steps are all laid out in the white paper. This is ‘variable-geometry’ nationalism, which will lead to a multi-option referendum if and only when the Scots decide they want it.
The white paper is silent on who should decide whether and when that referendum happens, and what options might be on the paper. Nor does it specify who would assess the results of the consultation - which has already attracted well over a thousand submissions. It’s now up to Scottish civil society to fill in the gaps and create the appropriate institutions, ‘Convention 2.0’ or whatever, to forge a new political consensus.
My own view is that this process will probably stop short of formal separation, if only because it is not the British way to go in for constitutional absolutes. Our tradition is incremental, ad hoc, issue-by-issue, ‘let’s-see-what-works’ constitutionalism. The Queen will remain head of state, we will have a common currency, a British army and Scotland will still be represented at some level in a UK parliament in Westminster which will legislate for residual UK-wide affairs. We can never cut ourselves off completely, and anyway it isn’t necessary. Scotland could become “independent in the UK” to use another of the late Donald Dewar’s lesser known remarks from 1988.
But the SNP have made a formidable start. The way things are going, Scotland could be functionally independent in ten years, if the SNP plays its cards right and the opposition parties opt out. Perhaps it is time to rephrase what Donald did or didn’t say - it is now independence which is a process not an event.
Now, there is some evidence that it was actually Ron Davies, the former Welsh Labour leader, who first uttered the words in question in parliament, in January 1998. But I certainly recall Donald using the P word, and so does everyone else, at the time of the Scottish Parliament’s creation. More importantly, his acolyte, Wendy Alexander, has certainly said that devolution is a process, most recently during the Scotland on Sunday debate on the Union in January. This is important since it is she, rather than Des Browne, who will shortly be leading Labour in Scotland, now that Jack McConnell has opted to become high commissioner for smart, successful Malawi.
Except of course, that she won’t, because as Labour MPs always insist, the leader of the Labour group of MSPs is not the leader of the Scottish Labour Party. She will have no authority over Scottish MPs, Lords or the party apparatus in Scotland since she is only the Holyrood parliamentary leader. This democratic deficit in the Labour Party is something she should address at the earliest opportunity if she doesn’t want to share the fate of her predecessor, who had the right ideas but lacked authority over his own party. Jack McConnell’s attempts to make Labour the party of progressive home rule were blocked by elements in Labour who treated him with thinly-disguised contempt. Labour needs a proper leader in Scotland just as much as Scotland needs a proper government.
Devolution is of course a process - whoever said it - and the open-ended nature of that constitutional process is enshrined in the Scotland Act, a remarkable document which few have read and even fewer understand. For, the Act that set up the Scottish parliament specifically avoided defining the limits of devolution and contains within it the mechanisms to devolve most of the responsibilities reserved to Westminster, like broadcasting, firearms, conduct of elections even tax.
Yes, if he wanted to, Alex Salmond could legitimately seize most of the powers he wants repatriated to Holyrood without a referendum. He wouldn’t do so, of course, because he is too clever and realises that there would be an unholy row and a breakdown in the subtle consensus he has forged on the Scottish constitution. The FM rightly argues that some powers are so important - taxation being the obvious example - that there would need to be the explicit consent of the Scottish people to any such developments.
However, the white paper on independence, last week -”Choosing Scotland’s Future” - actually makes a rather strong case for incrementalism, or extending the process of devolution, rather than going for any “big bang”. Full independence is of course still what the SNP wants to see - a constitutional one-off event after which the Westminster parliament would cease to have powers to legislate for Scotland. However, the white paper sets out the home rule alternatives so comprehensively and positively that you can’t help but think that the SNP government is now beginning to think in terms of process rather than event.
Indeed, by the time you get to the section of the white paper which deals with full independence, you begin to wonder just what difference formal constitutional disengagement would actually make if the preceding stages had already been reached. When it comes down to it, we are only talking “macro-economics, defence and foreign affairs” (3.9). These are very important matters, of course, but would Scots want a separate currency and army?
Moreover, the white paper makes clear that Scotland, even under full ‘independence’, would remain part of a political union - albeit one based on the principle of pooled sovereignty rather than incorporation. There would have to be a UK-wide authority, rather like the European Union, which could make laws which applied across the UK in common areas, like the environment, currency, citizenship.
Never has a politically-inspired document given such an even-handed and open-minded assessment of the policies of its opponents, and the SNP government is to be congratulated for starting this debate in such a constructive manner. Its very reasonableness has has floored critics and led the opposition parties to make complete fools of themselves. Labour, the Scottish Tories and the Liberal Democrats united last week to reject the SNP’s constitutional conversation as a waste of time and money, and then announced that they wanted to start one their own, but excluding any consideration of independence. They either want a conversation or they don’t. The idea that SNP voices should be excluded when they have just won an election is so ridiculous it seems incredible that sensible people could actually propose it. Wendy Alexander is intelligent enough to see that this is not a sustainable position and will try to move Labour back into the constitutional centre-ground. But it may be that the horse has already bolted.
For what the opposition parties have done is hand the political and moral initiative to the SNP, and allowed nationalists to appear the inheritors of the spirit of the 1989 Scottish Constitutional Convention - an irony since the SNP boycotted it. Alex Salmond has accepted the founding principle of Scotland’s Claim of Right document that “sovereignty resides with the people” not with any government or party. He has said he will move only as far and as fast as the people of Scotland wish, and the steps are all laid out in the white paper. This is ‘variable-geometry’ nationalism, which will lead to a multi-option referendum if and only when the Scots decide they want it.
The white paper is silent on who should decide whether and when that referendum happens, and what options might be on the paper. Nor does it specify who would assess the results of the consultation - which has already attracted well over a thousand submissions. It’s now up to Scottish civil society to fill in the gaps and create the appropriate institutions, ‘Convention 2.0’ or whatever, to forge a new political consensus.
My own view is that this process will probably stop short of formal separation, if only because it is not the British way to go in for constitutional absolutes. Our tradition is incremental, ad hoc, issue-by-issue, ‘let’s-see-what-works’ constitutionalism. The Queen will remain head of state, we will have a common currency, a British army and Scotland will still be represented at some level in a UK parliament in Westminster which will legislate for residual UK-wide affairs. We can never cut ourselves off completely, and anyway it isn’t necessary. Scotland could become “independent in the UK” to use another of the late Donald Dewar’s lesser known remarks from 1988.
But the SNP have made a formidable start. The way things are going, Scotland could be functionally independent in ten years, if the SNP plays its cards right and the opposition parties opt out. Perhaps it is time to rephrase what Donald did or didn’t say - it is now independence which is a process not an event.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
The Great Caledonian Paradox
It’s the great Caledonian paradox: why is this SNP government so popular when the vast majority of Scots appear to reject its defining policy of Scottish independence? Opinion polls last week confirmed that opposition to formal independence is as strong as ever, even as Alex Salmond’s personal ratings have soared.
The SNP registered its highest ever score, 48% in the PSO poll in the Daily Mail, while independence was down to 31% Other polls have put support for independence as low as 22%. Indeed, a recent ICM/Daily Telegraph poll, suggested that there is more support for Scottish independence in England than in Scotland.
Not, you might think, fertile ground for the launch tomorrow of the SNP’s long-awaited White Paper on Independence, the climax to the nationalist government’s 100 days. But that isn’t going to stop Alex Salmond. The Nationalists realise that they have an uphill struggle persuading the Scots of the merits of independence, but they are resolved to push the boulder all the way to the top and are prepared to enlist anyone who wants to go at least part of the way with them. And as long as Labour and the other parties exclude themselves from the constitutional process, the SNP will have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
For, there is of course no real contradiction between SNP popularity and opposition to independence, not if you look at it from the point of view of the Scottish electorate, one of the most educated and sophisticated in the world. Scottish voters don’t see why they should be put in any particular political box. They tell pollsters they’re agin separatism because, well, everyone is against it; it’s a bit like being against racism or sectarianism. No one wants to appear narrow-minded or chauvinist or interested in cutting Scotland off. Registering opposition to independence is also done out of courtesy to England. Very few Scots harbour any animosity towards the English anymore, and saying you don’t want to break up Britain is a polite way of saying that you respect your neighbours.
But Scots want a proper parliament and political autonomy, and opinion polls on that have never wavered. This bedrock of progressive home rule sentiment is the one constant in Scottish politics of the last thirty years. Devolution is a process not an event, as Donald Dewar wisely observed. Voters have called repeatedly for more powers for that parliament, though there is understandable vagueness about what those powers should actually be.
What Scots did not call for was a devolved government which didn’t even have the self-confidence to call itself a government, and which hid behind the bureaucratic gobbledegook of “Scottish executive”. They didn’t want a leadership which was lacked the courage of its own convictions, was constantly looking over its shoulder at Westminster, and forever wondering whether it was getting above itself, overstepping the mark, sounding too ‘nationalist’.
Above all they didn't want a leadership which was incapable of articulating any vision, and lacked the language skills to express Scottish aspirations and celebrate Scottish culture. But unfortunately, that was precisely the leadership it got. An administration whose constribution to Scottish political discourse were the phrases: “do less better” and “the best small country”. History doesn’t award statues for that kind of rhetoric.
Seizing the opportunity, Alex Salmond has delivered a virtuoso performance as the kind of First Minister Scotland really, really wants. He has used the existing powers of the Scottish parliament to launch a blizzard of announcements and initiatives, cutting class sizes, abolishing bridge tolls, tuition fees, nuclear power...showing by example just how unimaginative and unambitious the previous lot were, even within the confines of the devolution settlemement.
Emboldened, Salmond has gone on to challenge big institutions like the BBC, demand a new role for Scotland in Europe and to push the envelope of devolution by arguing for more powers for Holyrood. All this frenetic activity has been to one end: to show that Scots really can and should expect better, and that under independence, anything is possible. If you think this is good, Salmond is saying, just imagine what it would be like if Scotland were a truly self-governing country.
The Scots aren’t convinced yet, but they are clearly minded to humour Salmond some more - find out just where it is that this political dynamo is going. It’s fun. What they don’t need are patronising warnings from Labour politicians that behind the mask of consensus the SNP are still determined to break up Britain. They can see that perfectly well themselves. But they are using the nationalists to secure a better deal with Westminster and may continue to do so even as many vote for Gordon Brown as UK prime minister at the next general election.
In this game, it isn’t at all clear who is using whom. So, when the SNP unveil their independence white paper tommorrow, there will be a constitutional double bluff: the SNP are using devolution to promote independence, while the voters are using nationalists to promote home rule. Seems a sensible bargain. The SNP realise there is no point in pushing for an independence referendum which will never get past the Scottish parliament, where the nationalists are in a minority. So, instead, they will open a “national conversation” on the constitution, inviting all and sundry to attend, and offer their tuppence-worth.
Broadcasting is the model on which the white paper process will be based. The SNP won widespread support last week for setting up a cross party Scottish Broadcasting Commission - building the case for Holyrood to have power over the media. A few years ago it would likely have been attacked as a nationalist coup, an assault on the independence of the BBC. But Alex Salmond presented the case intelligently and constructively, exposing the shortcomings of the existing arrangements, and inviting all the interested parties to put their case. Expect a similar process to be used over firearms, marine policy, Europe, asylum and immigration, oil and taxation.
If there is a referendum, it will be a multi-option one, in which voters will be able to choose an enhanced Holyrood if they don’t want formal independence. The SNP will offer a review of constitutional arrangements, a decade after the devolution referendum. Labour remain doggedly opposed to this, saying it is a waste of civil service time and money. Well, in that cast, the biggest time-waster of all is the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who has launched a constitutional review in Westminster. This really is a defining moment in Scottish history, comparable to 1997. Labour needs to get its act together if it doesn't wand to be left in the dustbin with the Scottish Tories.
The SNP registered its highest ever score, 48% in the PSO poll in the Daily Mail, while independence was down to 31% Other polls have put support for independence as low as 22%. Indeed, a recent ICM/Daily Telegraph poll, suggested that there is more support for Scottish independence in England than in Scotland.
Not, you might think, fertile ground for the launch tomorrow of the SNP’s long-awaited White Paper on Independence, the climax to the nationalist government’s 100 days. But that isn’t going to stop Alex Salmond. The Nationalists realise that they have an uphill struggle persuading the Scots of the merits of independence, but they are resolved to push the boulder all the way to the top and are prepared to enlist anyone who wants to go at least part of the way with them. And as long as Labour and the other parties exclude themselves from the constitutional process, the SNP will have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
For, there is of course no real contradiction between SNP popularity and opposition to independence, not if you look at it from the point of view of the Scottish electorate, one of the most educated and sophisticated in the world. Scottish voters don’t see why they should be put in any particular political box. They tell pollsters they’re agin separatism because, well, everyone is against it; it’s a bit like being against racism or sectarianism. No one wants to appear narrow-minded or chauvinist or interested in cutting Scotland off. Registering opposition to independence is also done out of courtesy to England. Very few Scots harbour any animosity towards the English anymore, and saying you don’t want to break up Britain is a polite way of saying that you respect your neighbours.
But Scots want a proper parliament and political autonomy, and opinion polls on that have never wavered. This bedrock of progressive home rule sentiment is the one constant in Scottish politics of the last thirty years. Devolution is a process not an event, as Donald Dewar wisely observed. Voters have called repeatedly for more powers for that parliament, though there is understandable vagueness about what those powers should actually be.
What Scots did not call for was a devolved government which didn’t even have the self-confidence to call itself a government, and which hid behind the bureaucratic gobbledegook of “Scottish executive”. They didn’t want a leadership which was lacked the courage of its own convictions, was constantly looking over its shoulder at Westminster, and forever wondering whether it was getting above itself, overstepping the mark, sounding too ‘nationalist’.
Above all they didn't want a leadership which was incapable of articulating any vision, and lacked the language skills to express Scottish aspirations and celebrate Scottish culture. But unfortunately, that was precisely the leadership it got. An administration whose constribution to Scottish political discourse were the phrases: “do less better” and “the best small country”. History doesn’t award statues for that kind of rhetoric.
Seizing the opportunity, Alex Salmond has delivered a virtuoso performance as the kind of First Minister Scotland really, really wants. He has used the existing powers of the Scottish parliament to launch a blizzard of announcements and initiatives, cutting class sizes, abolishing bridge tolls, tuition fees, nuclear power...showing by example just how unimaginative and unambitious the previous lot were, even within the confines of the devolution settlemement.
Emboldened, Salmond has gone on to challenge big institutions like the BBC, demand a new role for Scotland in Europe and to push the envelope of devolution by arguing for more powers for Holyrood. All this frenetic activity has been to one end: to show that Scots really can and should expect better, and that under independence, anything is possible. If you think this is good, Salmond is saying, just imagine what it would be like if Scotland were a truly self-governing country.
The Scots aren’t convinced yet, but they are clearly minded to humour Salmond some more - find out just where it is that this political dynamo is going. It’s fun. What they don’t need are patronising warnings from Labour politicians that behind the mask of consensus the SNP are still determined to break up Britain. They can see that perfectly well themselves. But they are using the nationalists to secure a better deal with Westminster and may continue to do so even as many vote for Gordon Brown as UK prime minister at the next general election.
In this game, it isn’t at all clear who is using whom. So, when the SNP unveil their independence white paper tommorrow, there will be a constitutional double bluff: the SNP are using devolution to promote independence, while the voters are using nationalists to promote home rule. Seems a sensible bargain. The SNP realise there is no point in pushing for an independence referendum which will never get past the Scottish parliament, where the nationalists are in a minority. So, instead, they will open a “national conversation” on the constitution, inviting all and sundry to attend, and offer their tuppence-worth.
Broadcasting is the model on which the white paper process will be based. The SNP won widespread support last week for setting up a cross party Scottish Broadcasting Commission - building the case for Holyrood to have power over the media. A few years ago it would likely have been attacked as a nationalist coup, an assault on the independence of the BBC. But Alex Salmond presented the case intelligently and constructively, exposing the shortcomings of the existing arrangements, and inviting all the interested parties to put their case. Expect a similar process to be used over firearms, marine policy, Europe, asylum and immigration, oil and taxation.
If there is a referendum, it will be a multi-option one, in which voters will be able to choose an enhanced Holyrood if they don’t want formal independence. The SNP will offer a review of constitutional arrangements, a decade after the devolution referendum. Labour remain doggedly opposed to this, saying it is a waste of civil service time and money. Well, in that cast, the biggest time-waster of all is the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who has launched a constitutional review in Westminster. This really is a defining moment in Scottish history, comparable to 1997. Labour needs to get its act together if it doesn't wand to be left in the dustbin with the Scottish Tories.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
The BBC should show us the Scottish Six
A Scottish six o’clock news? Tartan nightmare. Wall to wall murders, stories about the SNP, couthy human interest tales replacing Nick Robinson and John Simpson - it would be like Newsnight Scotland, only much much worse. Well actually it wouldn’t.
I’m one of the few people in this debate who has actually seen a Scottish Six. In 2004, BBC Scotland produced pilot programmes, for internal consumption only , to show what a Scottish-generated national news bulletin might look like. Surprise, surprise, it worked extremely well. The programmes were well presented and gave excellent UK and foreign coverage while treating devolved Scottish issues with the respect and authority they deserved.
I can well understand why the BBC didn’t show them to the public. As soon as you actually see a Scottish Six, you wonder how we could have tolerated the present arrangement for so long. It doesn’t equal parochialism. All that happens is that irrelevant or positively misleading stories about English grammar schools, A level results and trust hospitals are marginalised. Not excluded, of course, because political events in the largest country in the UK can still be relevant in Scotland even if they turn on devolved issues. But it is a question of the weight given to these items, and the context.
As for the charge, repeated last week by Labour MSPs that a Scottish Six would eliminate coverage of foreign and UK national stories, a look at the running order of the pilots shows this fear to be baseless. With the BBC’s new computerised news gathering, foreign reports filed in advance by BBC correspondents can be accessed by any desktop terminal anywhere in the entire corporation. This means they can be transmitted simultaneously, if necessary, on different programmes or channels. Nor is there any technical obstacle to doing live interviews with BBC foreign correspondents abroad, since the satellite link is already there.
The Scottish Six is not the most important issue in Scottish broadcasting by any means, but it is important - more for what it says about us than what it says about the BBC. There is an assumption that if it is Scottish is must necessarily be inferior, local, trivial. This is understandable given the poor quality of much existing Scottish output, which is systematically under-resourced. But that hasn’t happened by accident. BBC budgets are structured in a way that ensures Scottish programmes are technically inferior, and have lower production values. Funding, like the Scottish Six, is a political issue.
I know this only too well. Back in the 1990’s I presented the BBC 2 network programme, Westminster Live, from the BBC’s parliamentary complex at Millbank in London. This had an entire department devoted to it, with dedicated film crews and editing suites, graphics, transport, countless producers, researchers. The comparable Scottish programme, Holyrood Live, which I returned to present in Scotland in 1999, had a man and a dog. A brilliant man and a brilliant dog, as it happened - highly professional and incredibly hardworking producers, but people who were ground down by lack of resources and constant cuts.
When I complained about underfunding, as I frequently did, the response was always the same from BBC executives: “Well, this is Scotland. We have a tenth of the population so we only get a tenth of the budget for programmes”. I could never accept this kind of regionalist defeatism, which seemed to me an insult to the Scottish people. Why should political programmes be of inferior quality just because they happen to be made in Scotland?
You might have thought that the BBC would be boosting its Scottish output as Scotland becomes more autonomous post devolution, but the reverse is the case. Ofcom figures, quoted last week by the former BBC executive, Blair Jenkins, chair of the new Scottish Broadcasting Commission, indicate that current affairs spending in Scotland has been cut by 45% in the last few years and news spending has been cut by 27% Scotland’s share of total UK spending by the BBC is down to 4%, when it should be around 9%.
Well, we are told, the BBC has to tighten its belts. Yet this is the same corporation that can pay Jonathan Ross the equivalent of the entire BBC Scotland news and current affairs for asking if the leader of the opposition masturbates to images of Margaret Thatcher.
The broadcasting professionals who attended the First Minister’s speech last week at the National Museum of Scotland last week know perfectly well what is going on, which is why there has been not a cheap of dissent from any of them - even from the BBC itself, which has uniquely failed to rebut the charges that have been levelled at it by the new Scottish government. In the past, media folk might have worried at the prospect of politicians, especially Nationalist ones, meddling in broadcasting - not any more. I have never seen such unity of purpose among the Scottish media.
Devolving responsibility for broadcasting to the Scottish parliament wouldn’t solve the problem overnight, might not solve it at all. But it is difficult to see what else the Scottish political classes can do. At least the Scottish parliament would be able to put pressure on the regulators and the BBC, which has charter obligations to the nations and regions. It would also provide a focus for Scottish public opinion, and an opportunity for the creative industries in Scotland to be given a voice. It would emphatically not involve political direction of the broadcasters by Alex Salmond as Labour MSPs implied last week. Westminster has responsibility for broadcasting, but that doesn’t give Gordon Brown any say in programme-making.
I was saddened to hear the former FM, Jack McConnell, attack Salmond’s “separatism” over the broadcasting initiative, for I know for a fact that McConnell was himself profoundly concerned by the state of Scottish broadcasting, and the media generally, when he was in Bute House.. I also know that he approached the then BBC chairman Michael Grade about the nature and quality of Scottish coverage. He had very good reasons for doing so. Labour MSPs and ministers were finding their constituents complaining about the state of their local hospitals’ finances even though they were doing fine. This was because they were watching the stories about bankrupt English health trusts on the Six O’Clock news and assumed that the same problems existed north of the border.
This is the problem every viewer faces in Scotland. Whenever you watch a network news or political programme you have to deconstruct it in your head. Take Gordon Brown’s pre-legislative statement earlier this month. Important story, new prime minister, relevant across the UK. However, his “overarching themes” were education, hospitals and housing - all of which are devolved. Most of the specific bills he announced - a new health and social care bill, a children in care bill and a criminal justice bill - will not apply in Scotland. Even his constitutional reform bill has a radically different resonance here because of devolution.
But the BBC network bulletin that day made no serious attempt to explain all this. And why should it? It’s viewers are predominantly in England. They are not going to accept Scottish politicians popping up repeatedly giving lengthy statements about the situation north of the border. Or lengthy backgrounders on Scottish child care.
This problem will only get worse as the news agenda moves back to domestic affairs post Iraq. The rational solution is to have a separate Scottish bulletin which can place important stories in their proper context. It’s not about a tartan takeover. The BBC should show Scottish viewers its own pilots of the Scottish Six, and then let them make up their own minds.
I’m one of the few people in this debate who has actually seen a Scottish Six. In 2004, BBC Scotland produced pilot programmes, for internal consumption only , to show what a Scottish-generated national news bulletin might look like. Surprise, surprise, it worked extremely well. The programmes were well presented and gave excellent UK and foreign coverage while treating devolved Scottish issues with the respect and authority they deserved.
I can well understand why the BBC didn’t show them to the public. As soon as you actually see a Scottish Six, you wonder how we could have tolerated the present arrangement for so long. It doesn’t equal parochialism. All that happens is that irrelevant or positively misleading stories about English grammar schools, A level results and trust hospitals are marginalised. Not excluded, of course, because political events in the largest country in the UK can still be relevant in Scotland even if they turn on devolved issues. But it is a question of the weight given to these items, and the context.
As for the charge, repeated last week by Labour MSPs that a Scottish Six would eliminate coverage of foreign and UK national stories, a look at the running order of the pilots shows this fear to be baseless. With the BBC’s new computerised news gathering, foreign reports filed in advance by BBC correspondents can be accessed by any desktop terminal anywhere in the entire corporation. This means they can be transmitted simultaneously, if necessary, on different programmes or channels. Nor is there any technical obstacle to doing live interviews with BBC foreign correspondents abroad, since the satellite link is already there.
The Scottish Six is not the most important issue in Scottish broadcasting by any means, but it is important - more for what it says about us than what it says about the BBC. There is an assumption that if it is Scottish is must necessarily be inferior, local, trivial. This is understandable given the poor quality of much existing Scottish output, which is systematically under-resourced. But that hasn’t happened by accident. BBC budgets are structured in a way that ensures Scottish programmes are technically inferior, and have lower production values. Funding, like the Scottish Six, is a political issue.
I know this only too well. Back in the 1990’s I presented the BBC 2 network programme, Westminster Live, from the BBC’s parliamentary complex at Millbank in London. This had an entire department devoted to it, with dedicated film crews and editing suites, graphics, transport, countless producers, researchers. The comparable Scottish programme, Holyrood Live, which I returned to present in Scotland in 1999, had a man and a dog. A brilliant man and a brilliant dog, as it happened - highly professional and incredibly hardworking producers, but people who were ground down by lack of resources and constant cuts.
When I complained about underfunding, as I frequently did, the response was always the same from BBC executives: “Well, this is Scotland. We have a tenth of the population so we only get a tenth of the budget for programmes”. I could never accept this kind of regionalist defeatism, which seemed to me an insult to the Scottish people. Why should political programmes be of inferior quality just because they happen to be made in Scotland?
You might have thought that the BBC would be boosting its Scottish output as Scotland becomes more autonomous post devolution, but the reverse is the case. Ofcom figures, quoted last week by the former BBC executive, Blair Jenkins, chair of the new Scottish Broadcasting Commission, indicate that current affairs spending in Scotland has been cut by 45% in the last few years and news spending has been cut by 27% Scotland’s share of total UK spending by the BBC is down to 4%, when it should be around 9%.
Well, we are told, the BBC has to tighten its belts. Yet this is the same corporation that can pay Jonathan Ross the equivalent of the entire BBC Scotland news and current affairs for asking if the leader of the opposition masturbates to images of Margaret Thatcher.
The broadcasting professionals who attended the First Minister’s speech last week at the National Museum of Scotland last week know perfectly well what is going on, which is why there has been not a cheap of dissent from any of them - even from the BBC itself, which has uniquely failed to rebut the charges that have been levelled at it by the new Scottish government. In the past, media folk might have worried at the prospect of politicians, especially Nationalist ones, meddling in broadcasting - not any more. I have never seen such unity of purpose among the Scottish media.
Devolving responsibility for broadcasting to the Scottish parliament wouldn’t solve the problem overnight, might not solve it at all. But it is difficult to see what else the Scottish political classes can do. At least the Scottish parliament would be able to put pressure on the regulators and the BBC, which has charter obligations to the nations and regions. It would also provide a focus for Scottish public opinion, and an opportunity for the creative industries in Scotland to be given a voice. It would emphatically not involve political direction of the broadcasters by Alex Salmond as Labour MSPs implied last week. Westminster has responsibility for broadcasting, but that doesn’t give Gordon Brown any say in programme-making.
I was saddened to hear the former FM, Jack McConnell, attack Salmond’s “separatism” over the broadcasting initiative, for I know for a fact that McConnell was himself profoundly concerned by the state of Scottish broadcasting, and the media generally, when he was in Bute House.. I also know that he approached the then BBC chairman Michael Grade about the nature and quality of Scottish coverage. He had very good reasons for doing so. Labour MSPs and ministers were finding their constituents complaining about the state of their local hospitals’ finances even though they were doing fine. This was because they were watching the stories about bankrupt English health trusts on the Six O’Clock news and assumed that the same problems existed north of the border.
This is the problem every viewer faces in Scotland. Whenever you watch a network news or political programme you have to deconstruct it in your head. Take Gordon Brown’s pre-legislative statement earlier this month. Important story, new prime minister, relevant across the UK. However, his “overarching themes” were education, hospitals and housing - all of which are devolved. Most of the specific bills he announced - a new health and social care bill, a children in care bill and a criminal justice bill - will not apply in Scotland. Even his constitutional reform bill has a radically different resonance here because of devolution.
But the BBC network bulletin that day made no serious attempt to explain all this. And why should it? It’s viewers are predominantly in England. They are not going to accept Scottish politicians popping up repeatedly giving lengthy statements about the situation north of the border. Or lengthy backgrounders on Scottish child care.
This problem will only get worse as the news agenda moves back to domestic affairs post Iraq. The rational solution is to have a separate Scottish bulletin which can place important stories in their proper context. It’s not about a tartan takeover. The BBC should show Scottish viewers its own pilots of the Scottish Six, and then let them make up their own minds.
I will regret this
Like most political hacks I tend to be a bit of a professional pessimist - if not a borderline depressive. The world of public affairs is not a sunny one, and the reward for optimism about politicians is generally ridicule. So this is one column I will probably regret writing.
For, at the close of this political year, I feel compelled to say that I feel more positive about our political culture and leadership now than I can recall in almost three decades of observing the political game. And it is all down to personalities.
Political enemies they may be, but in Gordon Brown and Alex Salmond we have two astute and even visionary politicians at the very top of their game. They have clear ideas about where they think the country is going and the political skills to make things happen. I may not agree entirely with the policies of either, but I'd have no hesitation in pronouncing them the sharpest tools to have come out of the British political box in the last half century. And no, this isn't a wind up.
Both Brown and Salmond strike me as more humane and grounded than Margaret Thatcher, more principled than Harold Wilson, more intelligent than Tony Blair. None of the other post war leaders since Churchill stand comparison, except perhaps the late Donald Dewar, who lacked elementary political and presentational skills.
Gordon Brown, had of course already shown himself to be a politician of the highest quality during his ten years in the treasury. But in the last few weeks he has revealed an entirely new dimension of himself in the sure-footed and intelligent way in which he has taken over in Number Ten.
Brown has made a philosophical and political break with the tawdry politics of Blairism without igniting civil war in his party. That took real class, after all those years of frustrated ambition. But there has been not one squeak of dissent from the remnants of the old regime, even as Brown has dismantled it.
The new PM's sober handling of the attempted London bombings and the English floods was exemplary. He was right to recognise that housing is one of the great issues of the 21st century, right to scrap supercasinos, right to review drug and alcohol laws. He was right to ditch sofa government, begin to put an end the war in Iraq, address the defects in the constitution and promise to clean up party funding.
Yes I know that it sounds naive and even sycophantic to talk this way, but bear with me.For if we don't identify when some politicians are getting it right, how can we expect the rest of them to raise their game
In his current visit to America Gordon Brown is showing that he is capable of achieving distance from the US Republican leadership without compromising diplomatic relations with America. Brown has already shown that he understands the imperatives of climate change and the importance of addressing economic failure in Africa and he is rightly determined to speak over the heads of America's myopic political leadership to the thinking Americans who must be mobilised if these great global challenges are to be met.
And yes, I know Brown voted for the war in Iraq, but I don't believe he would have gone to war on the basis of dodgy intelligence. And his contrition now is sincere. It is rare enough for leader to live up to his or her expectations; for them to exceed them is practically unheard of. But that is what Brown has done. And coincidentally we also have the makings of Scotland's first great political leader in three hundred years in the shape of Alex Salmond.
The FM has shown tactical genius and real political courage in the manner in which he has run an effective government in Scotland with only 46 out of 129 MSPs and no coalition partner. When the Liberal Democrats boycotted the Salmond executive it looked as if Scotland's nationalist experiment would be short-lived. But most independent observers believe that this administration has a lot of life left in it and may even go the distance. Certainly, if there were an election tomorrow, the SNP under Alex Salmond would likely be returned by a landslide.
Of course, no party's success is down to just one individual, and Salmond has had able support from his subordinates. But there is little doubt in my mind that only someone with Salmond's self-confidence, boldness and intelligence could have carried it off. Like him or loathe him, the first minister is a brilliant political operator. Just look at his conduct in parliament, the succession of executive initiatives, the al Megrahi affair, the handling of the trams defeat.
Above all it is Salmond's sense of destiny that marks hin out from other Scottish political figures of the modern age. He is the real deal; the first genuine political leader in Scottish democratic history. A very different character, of course, from Gordon Brown - impetuous, more of an outsider,less pious, much more willing to take a gamble than the ultra-cautious Labour leader. But in a curious way, they are both the right men for the times. Scotland is clearly in the mood to take risks, live a little dangerously as it becomes more culturally assertive. England, on the other hand, is suffering from an excess of charisma and military adventures and wants to live rather less dangerously right now.
But they are polar opposites politically, so how - you ask - can I trust both of them at the same time? They can't both be right. Many would say that it is reckless to applaud someone like the Scottish National Party leader who is widely regarded as an unreliable and devious egotist, or a Labour leader whom many in his own party believe to be a neurotic control freak. But somehow, I do Their positives outweigh their negatives.
Of course, all politicians are fallible; make promises they cannot keep; and are often corrupted by power. Promising leaders become diminished by the compromises of office, and as Enoch Powell put it "every political career ends in tears". But just for now, just for this moment, let's calmly celebrate the fact that we are in a rare moment in history which the nation's leaders are actually doing the business.
And how extraordinary that both of them should be Scottish. What is it about this little country that it generates such a disproportionate share of British political leaders? For, of course the present and immediate past Lib Dem leaders are also Scots, and even Blair was a Jock of sorts. In celebrating the new generation of British political leaders we are also celebrating Scottish society and culture. That's something surely to feel good about.
For, at the close of this political year, I feel compelled to say that I feel more positive about our political culture and leadership now than I can recall in almost three decades of observing the political game. And it is all down to personalities.
Political enemies they may be, but in Gordon Brown and Alex Salmond we have two astute and even visionary politicians at the very top of their game. They have clear ideas about where they think the country is going and the political skills to make things happen. I may not agree entirely with the policies of either, but I'd have no hesitation in pronouncing them the sharpest tools to have come out of the British political box in the last half century. And no, this isn't a wind up.
Both Brown and Salmond strike me as more humane and grounded than Margaret Thatcher, more principled than Harold Wilson, more intelligent than Tony Blair. None of the other post war leaders since Churchill stand comparison, except perhaps the late Donald Dewar, who lacked elementary political and presentational skills.
Gordon Brown, had of course already shown himself to be a politician of the highest quality during his ten years in the treasury. But in the last few weeks he has revealed an entirely new dimension of himself in the sure-footed and intelligent way in which he has taken over in Number Ten.
Brown has made a philosophical and political break with the tawdry politics of Blairism without igniting civil war in his party. That took real class, after all those years of frustrated ambition. But there has been not one squeak of dissent from the remnants of the old regime, even as Brown has dismantled it.
The new PM's sober handling of the attempted London bombings and the English floods was exemplary. He was right to recognise that housing is one of the great issues of the 21st century, right to scrap supercasinos, right to review drug and alcohol laws. He was right to ditch sofa government, begin to put an end the war in Iraq, address the defects in the constitution and promise to clean up party funding.
Yes I know that it sounds naive and even sycophantic to talk this way, but bear with me.For if we don't identify when some politicians are getting it right, how can we expect the rest of them to raise their game
In his current visit to America Gordon Brown is showing that he is capable of achieving distance from the US Republican leadership without compromising diplomatic relations with America. Brown has already shown that he understands the imperatives of climate change and the importance of addressing economic failure in Africa and he is rightly determined to speak over the heads of America's myopic political leadership to the thinking Americans who must be mobilised if these great global challenges are to be met.
And yes, I know Brown voted for the war in Iraq, but I don't believe he would have gone to war on the basis of dodgy intelligence. And his contrition now is sincere. It is rare enough for leader to live up to his or her expectations; for them to exceed them is practically unheard of. But that is what Brown has done. And coincidentally we also have the makings of Scotland's first great political leader in three hundred years in the shape of Alex Salmond.
The FM has shown tactical genius and real political courage in the manner in which he has run an effective government in Scotland with only 46 out of 129 MSPs and no coalition partner. When the Liberal Democrats boycotted the Salmond executive it looked as if Scotland's nationalist experiment would be short-lived. But most independent observers believe that this administration has a lot of life left in it and may even go the distance. Certainly, if there were an election tomorrow, the SNP under Alex Salmond would likely be returned by a landslide.
Of course, no party's success is down to just one individual, and Salmond has had able support from his subordinates. But there is little doubt in my mind that only someone with Salmond's self-confidence, boldness and intelligence could have carried it off. Like him or loathe him, the first minister is a brilliant political operator. Just look at his conduct in parliament, the succession of executive initiatives, the al Megrahi affair, the handling of the trams defeat.
Above all it is Salmond's sense of destiny that marks hin out from other Scottish political figures of the modern age. He is the real deal; the first genuine political leader in Scottish democratic history. A very different character, of course, from Gordon Brown - impetuous, more of an outsider,less pious, much more willing to take a gamble than the ultra-cautious Labour leader. But in a curious way, they are both the right men for the times. Scotland is clearly in the mood to take risks, live a little dangerously as it becomes more culturally assertive. England, on the other hand, is suffering from an excess of charisma and military adventures and wants to live rather less dangerously right now.
But they are polar opposites politically, so how - you ask - can I trust both of them at the same time? They can't both be right. Many would say that it is reckless to applaud someone like the Scottish National Party leader who is widely regarded as an unreliable and devious egotist, or a Labour leader whom many in his own party believe to be a neurotic control freak. But somehow, I do Their positives outweigh their negatives.
Of course, all politicians are fallible; make promises they cannot keep; and are often corrupted by power. Promising leaders become diminished by the compromises of office, and as Enoch Powell put it "every political career ends in tears". But just for now, just for this moment, let's calmly celebrate the fact that we are in a rare moment in history which the nation's leaders are actually doing the business.
And how extraordinary that both of them should be Scottish. What is it about this little country that it generates such a disproportionate share of British political leaders? For, of course the present and immediate past Lib Dem leaders are also Scots, and even Blair was a Jock of sorts. In celebrating the new generation of British political leaders we are also celebrating Scottish society and culture. That's something surely to feel good about.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
The BBC is giving up on Scotland
You may not have noticed, but over the weekend that the BBC’s latest trust scandal had effectively shut down Scotland’s independent television production sector. RDF, the company that furnished the BBC controller Peter Fincham with the doctored footage of the Queen, owns pretty much all the Scottish action, since it bought up IWC Media and the Comedy Unit, our largest independent producers two years ago. Now, because of the Queen scandal, BBC and ITV have frozen any commissions from RDF.
IWC had itself been created in out of a merger of Kirsty Wark’s company Wark Clements and the former Sunday Herald columnist Muriel Gray’s outfit, Ideal World. They were formerly the Scotland’s biggest producers - but they eventually sold out to the London-based RDF because it was the only way to ensure that they would get commissions from London channel controllers. I think there is a kind of pattern here.
But it gets worse. In 2008, I’m told, STV is going to be allowed by Ofcom, the industry regulator, to shut down much of its Scottish generated non-news programming. Something to do with digital switch-over and the coming of a Gaelic TV channel. I have great respect for the Gaelic tongue and wish it well, but it is no substitute for a quality service that the vast majority of Scots can understand.
However, it looks like close down for Scottish broadcasting. Network commissions from the four terrestrial channels (BBC,ITV, Channel 4, Five) have halved in the last three years from 6% of total UK spend to around 3%, according to the regulator, Ofcom. That’s a loss of somethign like forty million a year. The BBC should be spending around 9% of its UK budget in Scotland, on a population basis, but it has been spending 4%. If I didn’t know them better, I’d think they were trying to tell us something.
The creative industries in Scotland - which depend massively on the big television companies - are simply being wiped out. Producers, writers, directors, actors, editors, camera crews, make up artists, set designers have all had to go off to London to get work. Or Cardiff, or Birmingham. Scotland used to be proud of its broadcasting and creative sector - not anymore. It’s going the way of the electronics industry.
This shrinkage raises all sorts of political questions. Blair Jenkins, the former head of news and current affairs in BBC Scotland revealed in this column in June that spending on news and current affairs in Scotland has been cut by 45% and news by 27% in the same period. He resigned in disgust - and all credit to him. At a time when Scotland is taking greater charge of its own destiny through devolution, it was an act of culural vandalism on behalf of BBC bosses.
Now, this doesn’t just mark the end of a great tradition of Scottish film and television making, which goes back to the days of John Grierson and Lord Reith. It’s not just that we are losing our stake in one of the key industries in the post industrial economy, one which, according to the DCMS recently, is worth more to the UK than financial services. No, the creative clearances also poses the most fundamental challenge to Scottish society: if there is no medium which authentically reflects Scotland’s culture and politics, how can conduct a coherent national conversation? If we see ourselves through the distorted prism of a London medial, how do we know who we are? And how do we talk to the world instead of just to ourselves?
I will be accused of being parochial for saying all this, but the truth is that the only converstion that matters now is the one that takes place in the West London postal districts. There is no cohort of knowledge workers in the world more narrow minded and parochial than the London media village. Broadcasting in Britain is increasingly run by a handful of metrocentric solipsists who have completely lost touch with reality outside the M25.
At the recent Ofcom conference on public service broadcasting in the the nations and regions held in Cardiff, they revealed their contempt for anyone outside the loop. The ITV chief executive, Michael Grade, said that Scotland just “didn’t have the talent” anymore. The Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson said that Scotland simply “wasn’t coming up with any ideas”. Tough old world. Big boys game.
This is patronising nonsense. I spent over twenty years in the BBC, half in London; half in Scotland, and in my experience there was just as much creativity in Scotland as in London, and a lot more energy. But that creative drive was constantly frustrated by lack of funds and the pull of the south. As soon as you reach a certain level in Scotland - in broadcasting in many other fields of professional life - you simply have to go where the jobs are, which is London. Some come back, but precious few.
This magnetic attraction of London has become all the more powerful since public service broadcasting capitulated to the market. The BBC used to be a countervailing force to metropolitan centralisation; but now it has become an agent of it. Yet, the market doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The broadcasting industry is conditioned by politics - by the funding it gets from the public purse and by the regulatory regime established by government. If the politics is right, the market will follow - in fact, speak to most people in the creative industries in London and they say that Scotland is a fantastic place to do media business - it’s just that there’s no business anymore. If you want to get commissions, you have to do it in London
Well, the time has come to put an end to all that. Scotland cannot allow its most important cultural institutions to be ripped off by people cannot be trusted to uphold ethical standards or to understand the imperatives of public service.
The Scottish political system has to be deployed to redress the balance and revive Scotland as a creative force in the world. The first step must be the Scottish parliament taking on responsibility for broadcasting. It makes no sense that this is a reserved power, except in the minds of paranoid unionists who believe that BBC Scotland is a nationalist plot. I’m sure that Gordon Brown, who is in giving mode, would respond to a clear expression from Holyrood that this is function which should properly be exercised in Scotland.
Then there has to be a regulatory regime established which doesn’t have the metrocentric blindness of Ofcom. The Scottish government also needs to lobby the BBC, north and south, to remind it of its charter obligations and its public service remit. Oh, and there’s the cash that goes to STV for all those public information slots.
The BBC has just opened one of the most advanced broadcasting facilities in Europe, in Pacific Quay. It would be nice if they found something useful to do in it. And it makes no sense for network news bulletins, transmitted in Scotland, to continue to be dominated by the politics of a parliament which no longer has jurisdiction over Scottish domestic affairs.
This is a matter of profound importance to everyone living in Scotland; for every business and for every citizen.
Nearly three years ago the former FM, Jack McConnell, promised in his St Andrews Day address that Scotland would become a “global hub” of the creative industries. No body laughed; they would now.
IWC had itself been created in out of a merger of Kirsty Wark’s company Wark Clements and the former Sunday Herald columnist Muriel Gray’s outfit, Ideal World. They were formerly the Scotland’s biggest producers - but they eventually sold out to the London-based RDF because it was the only way to ensure that they would get commissions from London channel controllers. I think there is a kind of pattern here.
But it gets worse. In 2008, I’m told, STV is going to be allowed by Ofcom, the industry regulator, to shut down much of its Scottish generated non-news programming. Something to do with digital switch-over and the coming of a Gaelic TV channel. I have great respect for the Gaelic tongue and wish it well, but it is no substitute for a quality service that the vast majority of Scots can understand.
However, it looks like close down for Scottish broadcasting. Network commissions from the four terrestrial channels (BBC,ITV, Channel 4, Five) have halved in the last three years from 6% of total UK spend to around 3%, according to the regulator, Ofcom. That’s a loss of somethign like forty million a year. The BBC should be spending around 9% of its UK budget in Scotland, on a population basis, but it has been spending 4%. If I didn’t know them better, I’d think they were trying to tell us something.
The creative industries in Scotland - which depend massively on the big television companies - are simply being wiped out. Producers, writers, directors, actors, editors, camera crews, make up artists, set designers have all had to go off to London to get work. Or Cardiff, or Birmingham. Scotland used to be proud of its broadcasting and creative sector - not anymore. It’s going the way of the electronics industry.
This shrinkage raises all sorts of political questions. Blair Jenkins, the former head of news and current affairs in BBC Scotland revealed in this column in June that spending on news and current affairs in Scotland has been cut by 45% and news by 27% in the same period. He resigned in disgust - and all credit to him. At a time when Scotland is taking greater charge of its own destiny through devolution, it was an act of culural vandalism on behalf of BBC bosses.
Now, this doesn’t just mark the end of a great tradition of Scottish film and television making, which goes back to the days of John Grierson and Lord Reith. It’s not just that we are losing our stake in one of the key industries in the post industrial economy, one which, according to the DCMS recently, is worth more to the UK than financial services. No, the creative clearances also poses the most fundamental challenge to Scottish society: if there is no medium which authentically reflects Scotland’s culture and politics, how can conduct a coherent national conversation? If we see ourselves through the distorted prism of a London medial, how do we know who we are? And how do we talk to the world instead of just to ourselves?
I will be accused of being parochial for saying all this, but the truth is that the only converstion that matters now is the one that takes place in the West London postal districts. There is no cohort of knowledge workers in the world more narrow minded and parochial than the London media village. Broadcasting in Britain is increasingly run by a handful of metrocentric solipsists who have completely lost touch with reality outside the M25.
At the recent Ofcom conference on public service broadcasting in the the nations and regions held in Cardiff, they revealed their contempt for anyone outside the loop. The ITV chief executive, Michael Grade, said that Scotland just “didn’t have the talent” anymore. The Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson said that Scotland simply “wasn’t coming up with any ideas”. Tough old world. Big boys game.
This is patronising nonsense. I spent over twenty years in the BBC, half in London; half in Scotland, and in my experience there was just as much creativity in Scotland as in London, and a lot more energy. But that creative drive was constantly frustrated by lack of funds and the pull of the south. As soon as you reach a certain level in Scotland - in broadcasting in many other fields of professional life - you simply have to go where the jobs are, which is London. Some come back, but precious few.
This magnetic attraction of London has become all the more powerful since public service broadcasting capitulated to the market. The BBC used to be a countervailing force to metropolitan centralisation; but now it has become an agent of it. Yet, the market doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The broadcasting industry is conditioned by politics - by the funding it gets from the public purse and by the regulatory regime established by government. If the politics is right, the market will follow - in fact, speak to most people in the creative industries in London and they say that Scotland is a fantastic place to do media business - it’s just that there’s no business anymore. If you want to get commissions, you have to do it in London
Well, the time has come to put an end to all that. Scotland cannot allow its most important cultural institutions to be ripped off by people cannot be trusted to uphold ethical standards or to understand the imperatives of public service.
The Scottish political system has to be deployed to redress the balance and revive Scotland as a creative force in the world. The first step must be the Scottish parliament taking on responsibility for broadcasting. It makes no sense that this is a reserved power, except in the minds of paranoid unionists who believe that BBC Scotland is a nationalist plot. I’m sure that Gordon Brown, who is in giving mode, would respond to a clear expression from Holyrood that this is function which should properly be exercised in Scotland.
Then there has to be a regulatory regime established which doesn’t have the metrocentric blindness of Ofcom. The Scottish government also needs to lobby the BBC, north and south, to remind it of its charter obligations and its public service remit. Oh, and there’s the cash that goes to STV for all those public information slots.
The BBC has just opened one of the most advanced broadcasting facilities in Europe, in Pacific Quay. It would be nice if they found something useful to do in it. And it makes no sense for network news bulletins, transmitted in Scotland, to continue to be dominated by the politics of a parliament which no longer has jurisdiction over Scottish domestic affairs.
This is a matter of profound importance to everyone living in Scotland; for every business and for every citizen.
Nearly three years ago the former FM, Jack McConnell, promised in his St Andrews Day address that Scotland would become a “global hub” of the creative industries. No body laughed; they would now.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Salmond in Brussels
Standing anonymously in the concourse of Edinburgh airport with their entourage of young female civil servants, they look a bit like a family off to attend a wedding. The First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, is off on his first foreign visit accompanied by his wife Moira carrying a posh hat in a big box. "John F. Kennedy used to introduce himself as the man who accompanies Jackie Kennedy", the First Minister remarks, "I'm the man who accompanies Moira's hat". Just as well too, because their luggage goes astray and they arrive in Brussels accompanied only by Moira's hat. Fortunately, it's the most important piece of kit, since they are meeting the Queen, for the 90th anniversary of the battle of Passchendaele.
It's Salmond’s fourth close encounter with Royalty and he is very proud of his good relations with the Queen, and with Prince Charles, who was instrumental in getting Dumfries House and its contents saved for the nation, with a little help from Bute House. Salmond intends to go through the formal ceremony to become a Privy Counsellor in a couple of weeks. “All that walking backward and garters?”, I ask him, “Aren’t you worried you’re becoming a part of the Establishment, seduced by the embrace of Monarchy?“ He doesn’t rise to it, saying the Queen understands the Scottish Question a lot better than her government. “She knows a Scot became the King of England”.
For a political leader with a 24/7 schedule, Salmond is intensely relaxed. He exudes it, the way some people exude tension or anxiety; he is the virtuoso of just being there. Whether it is laying wreaths with the Queen at the Menin Gate or sitting in the airport bus in Edinburgh, exchanging banter with passengers, Salmond has an ability to adapt to his surroundings and appear to dominate them without really doing anything.
The First Minister is a big man - though with a rigorous diet trying to get smaller – and he is renowned for having an ego to match. But Salmond seems completely uninterested in the trappings of power or celebrity, and doesn’t appear to have any particular sense of his own personal importance. One of the most intelligent politicians of his age, he has the gift of normality.
There’s no media fanfare associated with his inaugural trip to Brussels, his first overseas engagement since he became First Minister. No motorcades or fancy dinners, just a sweaty reception at Scotland House - a pokey corner of anonymous Brussels block - with the usual tartan tat of whisky and pipers. Salmond works the room, mainly lower order bureaucrats, some business types and local Caledonian societies. “The Scotteratti”, Salmond calls them, “But don’t underestimate the networks of Scots expats. They are a very valuable resource, they know everything that’s going on here, and they tell us”.
When Salmond gets up to speak no one expects more than a few pleasantries, least of all Michael Aron, the senior Scottish Executive civil servant whose internal memo about Scottish ministers being kept in the anteroom during UK-led European delegations was leaked eighteen months ago. Officials tell me that Jack McConnell hardly ever spoke at events like these, worried about charges of getting above himself, and preferring to merge into the crowd. But Alex Salmond is all about getting above himself and he doesn’t do merging.
The FM launches into a blatantly political speech, declaring: “I believe that it is time to transform the nature of Scotland’s representation and impact in Europe…Tonight, my message is a clear and unambiguous one – this is the time for Scotland to assume our obligations and responsibilities and to help mould the world around us…to rediscover the sense of internationalism which once defined our nation”. The eurocrats look around slightly bewildered at Salmond's Brussels declaration. Did they hear right? This wasn't a political event , and there was no one of any importance present. Not even the Scottish press, who have given up attending these things because nothing ever happens at them – except this time. For Salmond is making clear this goes way beyond taking the lead in fishing talks. On issues from energy to financial services, if the FM means what he says, Scotland will no longer adopt the agreed UK negotiating position, but will increasingly pursue an independent line in Europe.
The officials from the UK office in Brussels certainly got the message: "This is really heavy”, says one. “If the Scots are going to start making their own policy here, instead of just being consulted, then there could be tears before bed". Later, I ask Salmond why he didn’t seek for a bigger build up to this milestone address. “Some things are better understated”, he says, “like:‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’” Hmm. I don’t recall Thomas Jefferson delivering the American Declaration of Independence over warm wine and canapés.
How does he respond to the charge that he was getting above himself, exceeding his authority? After all, as a minority leader in a regional parliament, how can he unilaterally alter Britain’s constitutional relationship with Europe, for that is effectively what he is calling demanding? There is no machinery for Scotland to be independently represented. “We’ll see. I think the people here realise what we are about, and that Scotland’s interest has not been articulated in the past. It’s not actually about independence. Look at Flanders, which leads for Belgium on fishing talks”. Indeed, the Laender regional governments in Germany mostly have their own independent representation in Europe, as do autonomous Spanish provinces like Catalonia.
But it takes supreme self-confidence, not to say brass, to get away with this kind of thing. Any less secure politician, might have feared being laughed at - as a kind of political Walter Mitty, going around Brussels making grand pronouncements to no one in particular. If Jack McConnell had delivered the speech he would have been panned by the Scottish press as a jumped-up interloper and an embarrassment to Scotland. But Salmond gets away with it because of his immunity to ridicule and self-doubt, because of the prestige he has built in his short spell in government, and also because he can speak intelligently and with a passion that belies the formal limits of his political power.
As with his minority administration in Holyrood, which has no visible means of support, people suspend disbelief. He sounds like the real deal. Influential people may not have been listening to him in Brussels, but lots of their officials were - the Brussels ‘bureaucratti’ – and they seemed impressed, excited even.
Next day, Salmond did a round of engagements with European commissioners, including Peter Mandelson, one time New Labour “prince of darkness”, and now the commissioner with responsibility for world trade. Salmond claims claimed to have struck up an instant rapport with Mandelson, and to have achieved “a result” over the problem of Norwegian salmon dumping. “I’ve a lot of respect for Peter Mandelson and what he has achieved.”, he says, utterly straight-faced. “Actually, I asked him if he was writing a diary. He said: not one like ‘that’ – meaning Alistair Campbell’s - which he says he hasn’t read.” Salmond makes a virtue of being on improbably friendly terms with everyone he meets, and it seems to work. “People need to understand, I’m not here to pick fights”, he says.
But is he going to pick a fight with Gordon Brown? Tomorrow, on the next leg of Salmond’s grand tour, the First Minister will be face to face for the first time with the new Prime Minister. The occasion is the British-Irish Council in Belfast, where Salmond joins the leaders of the other devolved parliaments and assemblies. Top of his agenda will be getting access to the £1.5 bn in unspent Scottish EYF (End Year Flexibility) cash which he says is sitting in the Treasury because Labour failed to make any use of it over the last 8 years. He seems genuinely annoyed about this: “Scotland is treated with less responsibility in its financial affairs than a lunatic, a bankrupt or a minor”. Unlike a lowly local authority, the Scottish Executive cannot borrow money, or even take charge of its own unspent revenues, he complains.
And of course there is the matter of those attendance allowances, which were with held by London after the introduction of free personal care. “It’s a mad mechanism”, Salmond says, “The idea that you can’t change policy in Scotland for fear of losing funding is outrageous.” Labour MSPs in Holyrood are convinced that London will similarly refuse to keep paying £380m in council tax benefits if and when Salmond abolishes the council tax. But the FM isn’t so sure they’re right. He believes that Brown will allow payments to be maintained through the Barnett Formula and the funding mechanism because the last thing Downing St wants is a row over Scottish spending.
Intriguingly, Salmond believes his is close to achieving a “modus vivendi” with the new Prime Minister, largely through the way in which the governments co-operated over the Glasgow Airport attack. He has made a point of setting aside the row over the transfer of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, which Number Ten now accepts was discussed during Tony Blair’s meeting with Gadaffi in May. (though the Scottish press surely deserves and apology for being told repeatedly that Megrahi had been excluded from the secret deal in the desert). Salmond says he deliberately didn’t depart from the “Brutishness” agenda that Gordon Brown raised in the aftermath of the failed terrorists bombings. Nor did he rise to the challenge when he was briefed against for saying that the terrorists weren’t Scottish.
Clearly, there is a mutual respect here; something that makes the FM think that he can do business with the new PM. “What is the difference for you between dealing with Brown and Blair”, I ask him. The answer is surprising. “Well, I wouldn’t lie to him”., says Salmond. “Would you have lied to Blair?” “No, though I didn’t really get the chance, since we didn’t talk, but I wouldn’t have trusted him”. Perhaps because the new Prime Minister, unlike his predecessor, understands devolution and understands Scottish politics, Salmond thinks relations will be better between them.
Chance would be a fine thing. The reality is that Salmond and Brown are deadly enemies, who will look to every opportunity to out-smart each other. There is an epic quality to this confrontation between the two most powerful Scottish politicians of their generation: the lad o’ pairts versus the son of the manse; the quick-witted iconoclastic Scottish radical versus the strict and moralising dominie.
And what an extraordinary stage on which to hold their first skirmish - in Belfast, presided over by the former megaphone of militant Protestantism, the Rev Ian Paisley and the Republican nationalist, Martin McGuinness. No, you simply couldn’t make it up. When Gordon Brown supported devolution all those years ago, did he ever think he would preside as Prime Minister over a gathering like this? With a nationalist First Minister of Scotland and a nationalists acting First Minister of Wales?
Salmond was joined at the Menin Gate cemetery by Ieuan Wyn Jones, of Plaid Cymru, who is co-leader of the new Labour-nationalist coalition in Cardiff. They discussed matters of common interest – in particular finance and how to strike a better deal for the national parliaments in their dealings with London. The whole issue of joint subcommittees between Holyrood and Westminster is on the way to being resolved. Mind you, the question of separate Scottish representation in Europe certainly is not. The government line remains that Scotland is best represented by the UK in Europe, because that way it gets listened to and there is no prospect of there being any change in the constitutional relationship with Brussels – so watch this space.
Salmond returned from his Brussels expedition claiming to be well satisfied with the response, particularly from civil servants. But in the end, what has actually been achieved? A change of tone, certainly, and some big talk – but can Scotland really play in the Euro-league? Who knows. Like everything Salmond does right now, his Brussels trip was an exercise in improvisation, riding on the back of an official engagement. Salmond is a man in a hurry, who has to seize every opportunity to make an impact before being closed down by the logic of the parliamentary arithmetic in Holyrood. He needs to move as fast as possible because a moving target is always harder for the opposition to hit.
"I was determined not to end up like Donald Dewar, that was constantly in my mind". But his real role model comes as a surprise, to me at least. "I'm a great fan of Harold Wilson, you know". I didn't. Harold Wilson a political inspiration? The Gannex-wearing pipe-smoker who became the butt of 60s cartoonists? It's not as daft as it sounds: Wilson achieved a lot in two years, with a minority administration, and then won a comfortable majority in the 1966 general election.
Wilson was a brilliant political improviser also. Somehow, I think Salmond will be in power long enough to get a decent diary out of it al least. That’s as long as some minion doesn’t beat him into print.
It's Salmond’s fourth close encounter with Royalty and he is very proud of his good relations with the Queen, and with Prince Charles, who was instrumental in getting Dumfries House and its contents saved for the nation, with a little help from Bute House. Salmond intends to go through the formal ceremony to become a Privy Counsellor in a couple of weeks. “All that walking backward and garters?”, I ask him, “Aren’t you worried you’re becoming a part of the Establishment, seduced by the embrace of Monarchy?“ He doesn’t rise to it, saying the Queen understands the Scottish Question a lot better than her government. “She knows a Scot became the King of England”.
For a political leader with a 24/7 schedule, Salmond is intensely relaxed. He exudes it, the way some people exude tension or anxiety; he is the virtuoso of just being there. Whether it is laying wreaths with the Queen at the Menin Gate or sitting in the airport bus in Edinburgh, exchanging banter with passengers, Salmond has an ability to adapt to his surroundings and appear to dominate them without really doing anything.
The First Minister is a big man - though with a rigorous diet trying to get smaller – and he is renowned for having an ego to match. But Salmond seems completely uninterested in the trappings of power or celebrity, and doesn’t appear to have any particular sense of his own personal importance. One of the most intelligent politicians of his age, he has the gift of normality.
There’s no media fanfare associated with his inaugural trip to Brussels, his first overseas engagement since he became First Minister. No motorcades or fancy dinners, just a sweaty reception at Scotland House - a pokey corner of anonymous Brussels block - with the usual tartan tat of whisky and pipers. Salmond works the room, mainly lower order bureaucrats, some business types and local Caledonian societies. “The Scotteratti”, Salmond calls them, “But don’t underestimate the networks of Scots expats. They are a very valuable resource, they know everything that’s going on here, and they tell us”.
When Salmond gets up to speak no one expects more than a few pleasantries, least of all Michael Aron, the senior Scottish Executive civil servant whose internal memo about Scottish ministers being kept in the anteroom during UK-led European delegations was leaked eighteen months ago. Officials tell me that Jack McConnell hardly ever spoke at events like these, worried about charges of getting above himself, and preferring to merge into the crowd. But Alex Salmond is all about getting above himself and he doesn’t do merging.
The FM launches into a blatantly political speech, declaring: “I believe that it is time to transform the nature of Scotland’s representation and impact in Europe…Tonight, my message is a clear and unambiguous one – this is the time for Scotland to assume our obligations and responsibilities and to help mould the world around us…to rediscover the sense of internationalism which once defined our nation”. The eurocrats look around slightly bewildered at Salmond's Brussels declaration. Did they hear right? This wasn't a political event , and there was no one of any importance present. Not even the Scottish press, who have given up attending these things because nothing ever happens at them – except this time. For Salmond is making clear this goes way beyond taking the lead in fishing talks. On issues from energy to financial services, if the FM means what he says, Scotland will no longer adopt the agreed UK negotiating position, but will increasingly pursue an independent line in Europe.
The officials from the UK office in Brussels certainly got the message: "This is really heavy”, says one. “If the Scots are going to start making their own policy here, instead of just being consulted, then there could be tears before bed". Later, I ask Salmond why he didn’t seek for a bigger build up to this milestone address. “Some things are better understated”, he says, “like:‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’” Hmm. I don’t recall Thomas Jefferson delivering the American Declaration of Independence over warm wine and canapés.
How does he respond to the charge that he was getting above himself, exceeding his authority? After all, as a minority leader in a regional parliament, how can he unilaterally alter Britain’s constitutional relationship with Europe, for that is effectively what he is calling demanding? There is no machinery for Scotland to be independently represented. “We’ll see. I think the people here realise what we are about, and that Scotland’s interest has not been articulated in the past. It’s not actually about independence. Look at Flanders, which leads for Belgium on fishing talks”. Indeed, the Laender regional governments in Germany mostly have their own independent representation in Europe, as do autonomous Spanish provinces like Catalonia.
But it takes supreme self-confidence, not to say brass, to get away with this kind of thing. Any less secure politician, might have feared being laughed at - as a kind of political Walter Mitty, going around Brussels making grand pronouncements to no one in particular. If Jack McConnell had delivered the speech he would have been panned by the Scottish press as a jumped-up interloper and an embarrassment to Scotland. But Salmond gets away with it because of his immunity to ridicule and self-doubt, because of the prestige he has built in his short spell in government, and also because he can speak intelligently and with a passion that belies the formal limits of his political power.
As with his minority administration in Holyrood, which has no visible means of support, people suspend disbelief. He sounds like the real deal. Influential people may not have been listening to him in Brussels, but lots of their officials were - the Brussels ‘bureaucratti’ – and they seemed impressed, excited even.
Next day, Salmond did a round of engagements with European commissioners, including Peter Mandelson, one time New Labour “prince of darkness”, and now the commissioner with responsibility for world trade. Salmond claims claimed to have struck up an instant rapport with Mandelson, and to have achieved “a result” over the problem of Norwegian salmon dumping. “I’ve a lot of respect for Peter Mandelson and what he has achieved.”, he says, utterly straight-faced. “Actually, I asked him if he was writing a diary. He said: not one like ‘that’ – meaning Alistair Campbell’s - which he says he hasn’t read.” Salmond makes a virtue of being on improbably friendly terms with everyone he meets, and it seems to work. “People need to understand, I’m not here to pick fights”, he says.
But is he going to pick a fight with Gordon Brown? Tomorrow, on the next leg of Salmond’s grand tour, the First Minister will be face to face for the first time with the new Prime Minister. The occasion is the British-Irish Council in Belfast, where Salmond joins the leaders of the other devolved parliaments and assemblies. Top of his agenda will be getting access to the £1.5 bn in unspent Scottish EYF (End Year Flexibility) cash which he says is sitting in the Treasury because Labour failed to make any use of it over the last 8 years. He seems genuinely annoyed about this: “Scotland is treated with less responsibility in its financial affairs than a lunatic, a bankrupt or a minor”. Unlike a lowly local authority, the Scottish Executive cannot borrow money, or even take charge of its own unspent revenues, he complains.
And of course there is the matter of those attendance allowances, which were with held by London after the introduction of free personal care. “It’s a mad mechanism”, Salmond says, “The idea that you can’t change policy in Scotland for fear of losing funding is outrageous.” Labour MSPs in Holyrood are convinced that London will similarly refuse to keep paying £380m in council tax benefits if and when Salmond abolishes the council tax. But the FM isn’t so sure they’re right. He believes that Brown will allow payments to be maintained through the Barnett Formula and the funding mechanism because the last thing Downing St wants is a row over Scottish spending.
Intriguingly, Salmond believes his is close to achieving a “modus vivendi” with the new Prime Minister, largely through the way in which the governments co-operated over the Glasgow Airport attack. He has made a point of setting aside the row over the transfer of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, which Number Ten now accepts was discussed during Tony Blair’s meeting with Gadaffi in May. (though the Scottish press surely deserves and apology for being told repeatedly that Megrahi had been excluded from the secret deal in the desert). Salmond says he deliberately didn’t depart from the “Brutishness” agenda that Gordon Brown raised in the aftermath of the failed terrorists bombings. Nor did he rise to the challenge when he was briefed against for saying that the terrorists weren’t Scottish.
Clearly, there is a mutual respect here; something that makes the FM think that he can do business with the new PM. “What is the difference for you between dealing with Brown and Blair”, I ask him. The answer is surprising. “Well, I wouldn’t lie to him”., says Salmond. “Would you have lied to Blair?” “No, though I didn’t really get the chance, since we didn’t talk, but I wouldn’t have trusted him”. Perhaps because the new Prime Minister, unlike his predecessor, understands devolution and understands Scottish politics, Salmond thinks relations will be better between them.
Chance would be a fine thing. The reality is that Salmond and Brown are deadly enemies, who will look to every opportunity to out-smart each other. There is an epic quality to this confrontation between the two most powerful Scottish politicians of their generation: the lad o’ pairts versus the son of the manse; the quick-witted iconoclastic Scottish radical versus the strict and moralising dominie.
And what an extraordinary stage on which to hold their first skirmish - in Belfast, presided over by the former megaphone of militant Protestantism, the Rev Ian Paisley and the Republican nationalist, Martin McGuinness. No, you simply couldn’t make it up. When Gordon Brown supported devolution all those years ago, did he ever think he would preside as Prime Minister over a gathering like this? With a nationalist First Minister of Scotland and a nationalists acting First Minister of Wales?
Salmond was joined at the Menin Gate cemetery by Ieuan Wyn Jones, of Plaid Cymru, who is co-leader of the new Labour-nationalist coalition in Cardiff. They discussed matters of common interest – in particular finance and how to strike a better deal for the national parliaments in their dealings with London. The whole issue of joint subcommittees between Holyrood and Westminster is on the way to being resolved. Mind you, the question of separate Scottish representation in Europe certainly is not. The government line remains that Scotland is best represented by the UK in Europe, because that way it gets listened to and there is no prospect of there being any change in the constitutional relationship with Brussels – so watch this space.
Salmond returned from his Brussels expedition claiming to be well satisfied with the response, particularly from civil servants. But in the end, what has actually been achieved? A change of tone, certainly, and some big talk – but can Scotland really play in the Euro-league? Who knows. Like everything Salmond does right now, his Brussels trip was an exercise in improvisation, riding on the back of an official engagement. Salmond is a man in a hurry, who has to seize every opportunity to make an impact before being closed down by the logic of the parliamentary arithmetic in Holyrood. He needs to move as fast as possible because a moving target is always harder for the opposition to hit.
"I was determined not to end up like Donald Dewar, that was constantly in my mind". But his real role model comes as a surprise, to me at least. "I'm a great fan of Harold Wilson, you know". I didn't. Harold Wilson a political inspiration? The Gannex-wearing pipe-smoker who became the butt of 60s cartoonists? It's not as daft as it sounds: Wilson achieved a lot in two years, with a minority administration, and then won a comfortable majority in the 1966 general election.
Wilson was a brilliant political improviser also. Somehow, I think Salmond will be in power long enough to get a decent diary out of it al least. That’s as long as some minion doesn’t beat him into print.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
The Queen and the BBC
So, who can you trust these days? It’s a good question. Politicians? We gave up trusting them long ago, and a glance at the Campbell diaries shows why. The Police? A sixteen month investigation into cash for honours, involving multiple arrests (and the prime minister’s collar being felt three times) produces no charges. As Private Eye’s Ian Hyslop once put it: “if that’s justice, I’m a banana”.
We used to place our trust in the media, but the pillar of public service broadcasting, the BBC, is now in the dock for fixing phone-ins, staging dodgy quizzes, misrepresenting statistics. A BBC Scotland producer has been suspended for creating a fictional winner of a contest during the Children in Need appeal. The Queen herself has been misrepresented. And as we report today, even Newsnight has had to apologise for playing fast and loose with the truth; claiming during a pre-election debate that a survey of 50 top businesses had shown them all opposed to independence, when only seven firms had actually responded.
People have been rushing to defend the corporation in the wake of fiddle-gate, and as someone who worked in the BBC for many years, I willingly join the rush - though with reservations. It is still the honest broker in the increasingly crooked world of modern media. The fact that the BBC bosses have apologised so profusely, and have come clean about cases of abuse the corporation has itself unearthed, shows that at least they can be held to account. (Though I find it astonishing that no one has had to resign over this systemic breach of trust with the viewer. )
As an institution, the BBC remains a bulwark of our battered civil society, and a key element in our democracy. America has nothing like it, which is why their political culture has been debased. The thought of the BBC being privatised - as some have urged in the past week - is unthinkable. The commercial broadcasters are infinitely worse on trust, but because they are not funded by the licence fee, they are somehow allowed to behave less responsibly.
The regulator, Ofcom, was equally scathing about ITV and the Michael Grade, the chairman of ITV, has admitted that there has been a collapse of standards throughout his organisation. Industry sources tell me that a recent internal ITV investigation discovered deception in almost every programme that involved viewer interaction. Why have these not been revealed to the viewer? Is that not a breach of their licence?
The commercial stations also make much of their cash now from those iniquitous quiz channels on digital, which defraud their audiences on a daily basis. A recent commons inquiry into premium rate channels, revealed that questions were shamelessly rigged. One question asked phone-in contestants to guess what things a woman might keep in her handbag. One of the correct answers was: rawlplugs. They also kept hundreds of callers hanging on on premium rate lines, in the hope of being allowed to put their question. The chances of actually being selected was around 800-1. So, one caller gets to answer rigged questions, while 800 sit waiting on quid a minute premium lines. Talk about a licence to print money.
These dodgy practices are rife within the industry, and since the BBC has been casualised, outsourced, multi-skilled and marketised, it is hardly surprising that they are being discovered in the BBC. The corporation is a very different organisation to the one I joined over twenty years ago. Insufferably bureaucratic at times and institutionally conservative, the BBC nevertheless was a secure and confident place in those days, a cultural standard bearer which new right from wrong and observed the highest standards of accuracy.
So dedicated was the Beeb to getting things right that it tended to avoid breaking stories because it couldn’t risk getting anything wrong. Most Westminster stories in the press are based on unattributable, off the record briefings - the practice is institutionalised in the Lobby system. This is an open invitation to disreputable journalists to make quotes up, and to my certain knowledge after working in the Westminster Lobby for nearly ten year, quotes were very often “adapted” to fit, or invented altogether. Boris Johnson, the Tory higher education minister, was once sacked from the Times for falsifying a quote. (Mind you, he got his own back on the BBC many years later when he revealed that the questions on “Have I Got News For You” were given to the contestants in advance).
On the occasions that it does try to run pieces based on unattributable briefings, it tends to come unstuck. I had just moved to the BBC’s political unit in Westminster in 1989, when the then chief political correspondent, John Sergeant, ran a story that Mi5 was investigating Labour politicians’ links with Soviet Russian officials. The story had come from an off the record lunch with William Waldegrave, the Tory minister. But as soon as it was read on the Nine O’Clock news, all hell broke loose, and the foreign office denied it, leaving Sergeant with a credibility crisis. The story would have run on any broadsheet newspaper without any comeback - and indeed it subsequently re-emerge in print.
Of course, different standards are required in political journalism than in pop phone ins on BBC radio 6. But as Michael Grade said, the cardinal rule for all broadcasters should be: “you do not lie to audiences at any time, in any show - whether it's news or whether it's a quiz.' This tradition of authenticity used to be very deeply ingrained in the BBC because it was enforced by editors and producers who regarded themselves as having an almost sacred duty not to deceive. This was often a Quixotic task, since of course, television involves artifice at almost every level. Whenever you see an taped interviewer nodding, smiling or reacting with a knowing or quizzical eyebrow, you are generally watching what are called “noddies” - reaction shots filmed after the interview takes place.
But the people who used to make BBC programmes were real sticklers for accuracy and sometimes went to extraordinary lengths in their mission to be true. I once made a television documentary with a time-served BBC producer about Scottish heart patients who were having to go south for operations because there were no adequate coronary facilities in Scotland. Many of them died on the way. We arranged to film one middle aged man who was taking the long trip as he said good-bye - possibly for the last time - to his wife and family.
Now, I assumed that we would take some shots of the family at the bedside, and then leave them in peace to make their own farewells. But the producer was having none of it. If we were going to say that this was the man saying good-bye, then it had to be the real good-bye - otherwise we would have to say that it was a ‘reconstruction’. I was appalled and stomped off, assuming that the man would surely not allow his privacy to be invaded by cameras and lights at such a delicate and emotional moment. But to my surprise, he and his family agreed.
Now, I could see that this was an ethical dilemma, of course, but it seemed to me to represent an obsession with authenticity, a fetish even. The mere presence of a film crew at the bedside automatically made the exercise artificial. It is almost impossible to make real “reality television” because as soon as there is a camera, lights and microphones, present it ceases to be real. But I couldn’t help but respect the producer for her dedication to what she believed to be ethical broadcasting. There would be no place for her in the modern industry; people like that were “retired” long ago.
The industry is now staffed by very young people, rarely over thirty five, who move from programme to programme on temporary contracts, desperately trying to get noticed. It is a professional environment ripe for all manner of abuses - nepotism, exploitation, deception, sexual harassment, ageism - and all human life is there. Network television is a very nasty place to work nowadays, in the hothouse atmosphere of commercial competition where the only morality is the bottom line. And with digital coming, it can only get worse. Which is why we need the BBC more than ever, even if Auntie has shown her knickers. Let’s hope she keeps them up in future.
We used to place our trust in the media, but the pillar of public service broadcasting, the BBC, is now in the dock for fixing phone-ins, staging dodgy quizzes, misrepresenting statistics. A BBC Scotland producer has been suspended for creating a fictional winner of a contest during the Children in Need appeal. The Queen herself has been misrepresented. And as we report today, even Newsnight has had to apologise for playing fast and loose with the truth; claiming during a pre-election debate that a survey of 50 top businesses had shown them all opposed to independence, when only seven firms had actually responded.
People have been rushing to defend the corporation in the wake of fiddle-gate, and as someone who worked in the BBC for many years, I willingly join the rush - though with reservations. It is still the honest broker in the increasingly crooked world of modern media. The fact that the BBC bosses have apologised so profusely, and have come clean about cases of abuse the corporation has itself unearthed, shows that at least they can be held to account. (Though I find it astonishing that no one has had to resign over this systemic breach of trust with the viewer. )
As an institution, the BBC remains a bulwark of our battered civil society, and a key element in our democracy. America has nothing like it, which is why their political culture has been debased. The thought of the BBC being privatised - as some have urged in the past week - is unthinkable. The commercial broadcasters are infinitely worse on trust, but because they are not funded by the licence fee, they are somehow allowed to behave less responsibly.
The regulator, Ofcom, was equally scathing about ITV and the Michael Grade, the chairman of ITV, has admitted that there has been a collapse of standards throughout his organisation. Industry sources tell me that a recent internal ITV investigation discovered deception in almost every programme that involved viewer interaction. Why have these not been revealed to the viewer? Is that not a breach of their licence?
The commercial stations also make much of their cash now from those iniquitous quiz channels on digital, which defraud their audiences on a daily basis. A recent commons inquiry into premium rate channels, revealed that questions were shamelessly rigged. One question asked phone-in contestants to guess what things a woman might keep in her handbag. One of the correct answers was: rawlplugs. They also kept hundreds of callers hanging on on premium rate lines, in the hope of being allowed to put their question. The chances of actually being selected was around 800-1. So, one caller gets to answer rigged questions, while 800 sit waiting on quid a minute premium lines. Talk about a licence to print money.
These dodgy practices are rife within the industry, and since the BBC has been casualised, outsourced, multi-skilled and marketised, it is hardly surprising that they are being discovered in the BBC. The corporation is a very different organisation to the one I joined over twenty years ago. Insufferably bureaucratic at times and institutionally conservative, the BBC nevertheless was a secure and confident place in those days, a cultural standard bearer which new right from wrong and observed the highest standards of accuracy.
So dedicated was the Beeb to getting things right that it tended to avoid breaking stories because it couldn’t risk getting anything wrong. Most Westminster stories in the press are based on unattributable, off the record briefings - the practice is institutionalised in the Lobby system. This is an open invitation to disreputable journalists to make quotes up, and to my certain knowledge after working in the Westminster Lobby for nearly ten year, quotes were very often “adapted” to fit, or invented altogether. Boris Johnson, the Tory higher education minister, was once sacked from the Times for falsifying a quote. (Mind you, he got his own back on the BBC many years later when he revealed that the questions on “Have I Got News For You” were given to the contestants in advance).
On the occasions that it does try to run pieces based on unattributable briefings, it tends to come unstuck. I had just moved to the BBC’s political unit in Westminster in 1989, when the then chief political correspondent, John Sergeant, ran a story that Mi5 was investigating Labour politicians’ links with Soviet Russian officials. The story had come from an off the record lunch with William Waldegrave, the Tory minister. But as soon as it was read on the Nine O’Clock news, all hell broke loose, and the foreign office denied it, leaving Sergeant with a credibility crisis. The story would have run on any broadsheet newspaper without any comeback - and indeed it subsequently re-emerge in print.
Of course, different standards are required in political journalism than in pop phone ins on BBC radio 6. But as Michael Grade said, the cardinal rule for all broadcasters should be: “you do not lie to audiences at any time, in any show - whether it's news or whether it's a quiz.' This tradition of authenticity used to be very deeply ingrained in the BBC because it was enforced by editors and producers who regarded themselves as having an almost sacred duty not to deceive. This was often a Quixotic task, since of course, television involves artifice at almost every level. Whenever you see an taped interviewer nodding, smiling or reacting with a knowing or quizzical eyebrow, you are generally watching what are called “noddies” - reaction shots filmed after the interview takes place.
But the people who used to make BBC programmes were real sticklers for accuracy and sometimes went to extraordinary lengths in their mission to be true. I once made a television documentary with a time-served BBC producer about Scottish heart patients who were having to go south for operations because there were no adequate coronary facilities in Scotland. Many of them died on the way. We arranged to film one middle aged man who was taking the long trip as he said good-bye - possibly for the last time - to his wife and family.
Now, I assumed that we would take some shots of the family at the bedside, and then leave them in peace to make their own farewells. But the producer was having none of it. If we were going to say that this was the man saying good-bye, then it had to be the real good-bye - otherwise we would have to say that it was a ‘reconstruction’. I was appalled and stomped off, assuming that the man would surely not allow his privacy to be invaded by cameras and lights at such a delicate and emotional moment. But to my surprise, he and his family agreed.
Now, I could see that this was an ethical dilemma, of course, but it seemed to me to represent an obsession with authenticity, a fetish even. The mere presence of a film crew at the bedside automatically made the exercise artificial. It is almost impossible to make real “reality television” because as soon as there is a camera, lights and microphones, present it ceases to be real. But I couldn’t help but respect the producer for her dedication to what she believed to be ethical broadcasting. There would be no place for her in the modern industry; people like that were “retired” long ago.
The industry is now staffed by very young people, rarely over thirty five, who move from programme to programme on temporary contracts, desperately trying to get noticed. It is a professional environment ripe for all manner of abuses - nepotism, exploitation, deception, sexual harassment, ageism - and all human life is there. Network television is a very nasty place to work nowadays, in the hothouse atmosphere of commercial competition where the only morality is the bottom line. And with digital coming, it can only get worse. Which is why we need the BBC more than ever, even if Auntie has shown her knickers. Let’s hope she keeps them up in future.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Brown answers the English question
Gordon Brown may be running up the Union Jack, but English Tories aren't saluting it. The tousle-haired Tory minister, Boris Johnson, their latest reluctant candidate for London Mayor, last week fulminated against the "corruption" of a Scottish Prime Minister inflicting policies on England which do not apply in Scotland. David Cameron called for "English votes for English laws". A raft of media commentators have also been complaining about subsidies to Scotland, and Lord Barnett is looking to set up a Lords committee to scrap his own formula.
So, what's new? you say. They've been grumbling about the Barnett Formula and the West Lothian Question since 1978, when both phrases came into existence. But there are three reasons why this is crunch time on both dimensions of the Scottish Question. We have a Nationalists First Minister in Holyrood, a Scottish Prime Minister in Westminster, and a full scale review of the UK constitution.
The Tories will rightly insist that this review addresses the anomalies inherent in the 10 year old devolution settlement. Alex Salmond will egg them on, insisting that it is time Scots "stopped ruling England". Gordon Brown has anyway told BBC on June 28th that he would "listen" to the grievances of "the 80%" who don't have a devolved parliament.
WLQ should be the easiest thing to tackle. Last week Brown, as expected ruled out "English votes for English laws", on the not unreasonable grounds that it would create two classes of MP and likely break up Britain by creating a defacto English Parliament in Westminster. Instead, he has offered a series of committees of the regions in which MPs from the eight English regions can put issues of concern (such as the way that the UK media seemed totally uninterested in the Hull flooding which, had it happened in London, would have been treated like another New Orleans).
Now, there are already informal regional groups of MPs so it'snot clear quite what this would achieve. The old Scottish Grand Committee was an insult to Scots and English regional versions would also be regarded as tokenism. Anyway, here is a much better answer. If you further reduced the number of Scottish MPs going to Westminster, you would diminish their impact on English legislation.
Scots should still be represented in Westminster of course, because so many of its decisions, on finance especially, apply equally to Scotland. But there is no need to have so many of them - 59 - in a chamber where, historically, government majorities have often been lower than that figure. Given that so many issues have been devolved it seems reasonable to reduce the number to half that.
There's not, after all, very much for Scottish MPs to do at Westminster. The number has already been cut from 72 as a consequence of devolution, so the precedent is well established. I can't see anyone seriously objecting that 25 or 30 Scottish MPs were "ruling England" in a chamber of 650. They would be a Scottish voice, nothing more.
Barnett is trickier. There have been real grievances expressed at Scots (and Europeans) not paying tuition fees while English students are buckling under the burden. There is an obvious problem if English pensioners are losing their home to pay for care costs when Scottish pensioners are not (and may soon not be paying council tax) ; and if English patients are dying because of being denied drugs that are keeping Scots alive.
Yes,I know - this is what devolution means, and it all has to be paid for in the Scottish budget. But when that budget is underspent by a cumulative #1.5billion (as revealed byJohnn Swinney last month) then questions are bound to be asked.
The English complaint will continue so long as Scotland appears to get #1500 more per head in public spending than England. I say 'appears' because this is all based on the highly dubious GERS estimates for Scottish public spending.
GERS assigns amounts of common spending to Scotland the bulk of which are actually spent in the South East of England. I am thinking of 'non identifiable' public spending on things like defence industries and the civil service which go disproportionately to the south . Also spending on infrastructure projects like the Millennium Dome (1bn), the Jubilee line (3,5bn) and the Olympic Games (9bn plus).
Moreover, since Scotland has one third of the land mass of the UK, but only a tenth of the population, it costs more to administer services like roads and schools in Scotland than it does in densely populated areas in the south. Then of course there is the one billion a month that goes south in the form of revenues from Scotland's oil...
Now, the people who want to scrap Barnett say there should be a needs assessment to find out just how much people should be getting per head for public services. This sounds straightforward but it is not. And no one really wants to see a squalid row over how much it should cost for every cancer case or every school place in Scotland. Even the SNP find this kind of thing distasteful, and they are politically in favour of replacing Barnett with full fiscal autonomy.
So, what will Brown do? Well, I wouldn't bet against him setting up something like a Royal Commission into the funding arrangements of devolution. The Kilbrandon Commission of 1973 still stands as a formidable analysis of the Scottish Question.
It looked at things like oil reveues and taxation, and it would be reasonable to look again now that new parliament has bedded down and is about to be joined by a Welsh Parliament as the Cardiff assembly gains primary legislative powers under the new Lab Plaid leadership. ( another blow to the stand-alone LibDems)
A serious examination of what tax powers the Scottish Parliament could use have is anyway long overdue. There is much talk of fiscal autonomy but no one actually says what the taxes should be. A share of VAT? Drink taxes? Variable income tax? And what implications might the coming of local taxes have? Brown has already indicated that he is wanting people in the localities to have more of a role in spending decisions. He could shoot the Nationalist fox by getting his fiscal retaliation in first.
So, what's new? you say. They've been grumbling about the Barnett Formula and the West Lothian Question since 1978, when both phrases came into existence. But there are three reasons why this is crunch time on both dimensions of the Scottish Question. We have a Nationalists First Minister in Holyrood, a Scottish Prime Minister in Westminster, and a full scale review of the UK constitution.
The Tories will rightly insist that this review addresses the anomalies inherent in the 10 year old devolution settlement. Alex Salmond will egg them on, insisting that it is time Scots "stopped ruling England". Gordon Brown has anyway told BBC on June 28th that he would "listen" to the grievances of "the 80%" who don't have a devolved parliament.
WLQ should be the easiest thing to tackle. Last week Brown, as expected ruled out "English votes for English laws", on the not unreasonable grounds that it would create two classes of MP and likely break up Britain by creating a defacto English Parliament in Westminster. Instead, he has offered a series of committees of the regions in which MPs from the eight English regions can put issues of concern (such as the way that the UK media seemed totally uninterested in the Hull flooding which, had it happened in London, would have been treated like another New Orleans).
Now, there are already informal regional groups of MPs so it'snot clear quite what this would achieve. The old Scottish Grand Committee was an insult to Scots and English regional versions would also be regarded as tokenism. Anyway, here is a much better answer. If you further reduced the number of Scottish MPs going to Westminster, you would diminish their impact on English legislation.
Scots should still be represented in Westminster of course, because so many of its decisions, on finance especially, apply equally to Scotland. But there is no need to have so many of them - 59 - in a chamber where, historically, government majorities have often been lower than that figure. Given that so many issues have been devolved it seems reasonable to reduce the number to half that.
There's not, after all, very much for Scottish MPs to do at Westminster. The number has already been cut from 72 as a consequence of devolution, so the precedent is well established. I can't see anyone seriously objecting that 25 or 30 Scottish MPs were "ruling England" in a chamber of 650. They would be a Scottish voice, nothing more.
Barnett is trickier. There have been real grievances expressed at Scots (and Europeans) not paying tuition fees while English students are buckling under the burden. There is an obvious problem if English pensioners are losing their home to pay for care costs when Scottish pensioners are not (and may soon not be paying council tax) ; and if English patients are dying because of being denied drugs that are keeping Scots alive.
Yes,I know - this is what devolution means, and it all has to be paid for in the Scottish budget. But when that budget is underspent by a cumulative #1.5billion (as revealed byJohnn Swinney last month) then questions are bound to be asked.
The English complaint will continue so long as Scotland appears to get #1500 more per head in public spending than England. I say 'appears' because this is all based on the highly dubious GERS estimates for Scottish public spending.
GERS assigns amounts of common spending to Scotland the bulk of which are actually spent in the South East of England. I am thinking of 'non identifiable' public spending on things like defence industries and the civil service which go disproportionately to the south . Also spending on infrastructure projects like the Millennium Dome (1bn), the Jubilee line (3,5bn) and the Olympic Games (9bn plus).
Moreover, since Scotland has one third of the land mass of the UK, but only a tenth of the population, it costs more to administer services like roads and schools in Scotland than it does in densely populated areas in the south. Then of course there is the one billion a month that goes south in the form of revenues from Scotland's oil...
Now, the people who want to scrap Barnett say there should be a needs assessment to find out just how much people should be getting per head for public services. This sounds straightforward but it is not. And no one really wants to see a squalid row over how much it should cost for every cancer case or every school place in Scotland. Even the SNP find this kind of thing distasteful, and they are politically in favour of replacing Barnett with full fiscal autonomy.
So, what will Brown do? Well, I wouldn't bet against him setting up something like a Royal Commission into the funding arrangements of devolution. The Kilbrandon Commission of 1973 still stands as a formidable analysis of the Scottish Question.
It looked at things like oil reveues and taxation, and it would be reasonable to look again now that new parliament has bedded down and is about to be joined by a Welsh Parliament as the Cardiff assembly gains primary legislative powers under the new Lab Plaid leadership. ( another blow to the stand-alone LibDems)
A serious examination of what tax powers the Scottish Parliament could use have is anyway long overdue. There is much talk of fiscal autonomy but no one actually says what the taxes should be. A share of VAT? Drink taxes? Variable income tax? And what implications might the coming of local taxes have? Brown has already indicated that he is wanting people in the localities to have more of a role in spending decisions. He could shoot the Nationalist fox by getting his fiscal retaliation in first.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
But what have the SNP actually done?
For reasons too boring to explain, the Scottish Parliament has its state opening on the day it goes into the summer recess. This year, for the third time, the Queen spoke to MSPs about how in 1999 the parliament had generated “what might now with hindsight seem unrealistic expectations”. Well, I don’t know about unrealistic, but the expectations have gone through the roof.
It is only six weeks since the Alex Salmond became First Minister of Scotland’s first minority SNP government, but he seems to have achieved more in that time than his three predecessors did in eight years. The initiatives and announcements have come so thick and fast that the intensely sceptical Scottish media has been largely blown away.
When Salmond was elected First Minister, by the narrowest of margins in May, it was widely expected that his administration would be short lived and ineffectual. With only 47 out of 129 MSPs, the odds against effective government looked overwhelming. But the Nationalists simply carried on regardless, using executive powers to implement large parts of their election manifesto, almost before the other opposition parties had gathered their wits.
The SNP have abolished the graduate endowment (postgraduate fees), bridge tolls and nuclear power. They have extended free personal care, promised a massive house-building programme, frozen council tax, abolished business rates for small companies, cut prescription charges, halted private sector involvement in the NHS, saved local hospitals. They have also introduced one of the world’s most ambitious targets for C02 reductions - 80% by 2050 - in their Climate Change Bill; begun the process of cutting primary class sizes to 18; and reviewed major infrastructure projects in Scotland, like Edinburgh’s light railway and the Edinburgh Airport Rail Link (EARL).
In 24 divisions in the Scottish Parliament since May, the Nationalists have only lost one vote of any significance - that was on their attempt to axe Edinburgh’s £650 million tram system. In the closing week of the session, the opposition parties finally got their act together and insisted that the SNP Finance Secretary, John Swinney, give the go-ahead to the project, which has already cost over a hundred million before a single rail has been laid.
The SNP gave in gracefully, accepted the will of parliament, and somehow turned defeat into a kind of victory for the “new politics” of consensus and co-operation that Alex Salmond promised to pursue in office. It was making a virtue of a necessity, but in practice, the Nationalists have discovered that consensus can work to their advantage - especially when the opposition parties are unable to agree on how to take them on.
So, this is an administration with no visible means of support, which has managed to suspend disbelief and govern as if it were a majority party. It has been an extraordinary achievement, and is largely down to the personality and leadership of Alex Salmond, who has dominated the Holyrood chamber in the past weeks in a way none of his predecessors have. Even one of his most prominent opposition critics told me that Salmond has “played a blinder”.
First Minister’s Question Time used to be a dull and inconsequential event, dubbed “hamster wars” by the press, who regarded it as an embarrassing waste of time. Not any more. The gallery is packed for Salmond’s weekly performance and he has provided excellent copy. The Scottish press isn’t easily impressed, but journalists and commentators of all political persuasion and none have agreed that Salmond has made the Scottish parliament come alive. Even many opposition MSPs I speak to agree. The quality of debates has increased, questions are sharper and better informed, and ministerial statements are coherent and .
It can’t go on of course, and the reckoning will come in the autumn when the SNP has to find ways to finance its ambitious spending programmes. Axing projects like the Edinburgh trams was intended to release funds for other uses, but will not. However, John Swinney, announced on the closing day of the parliamentary session that cumulative End Year Flexibilities - that’s the cash the previous administration had been unable to spend by the end of the financial year - has risen to £1.5bn - a tidy sum. Reducing the size of the Scottish Executive should also release cash.
But will Gordon Brown bring the party to an end? The new Prime Minister has been under pressure from the Conservatives and the London media over the alleged unfairness of Scotland abolishing university tuition fees when English students are paying variable top up fees. Brown has argued, correctly, that Nationalist policies have to be paid within a finite budget, and any new spending has to be balanced by cuts in other areas. But that has only intensified the anger of those who believe Scotland receives too much public spending for her own good.
There are suggestions that Brown might seek to reform Barnett but the crunch may com ebefore that - over the SNP’s plans to abolish council tax and replace it with a local income tax. At present, Scotland receives £380m in council tax benefit, and the new Chancellor, Alistair Darling, is believed to be unwilling to keep paying this. No council tax; no benefit, is the line from the Treasury. The Scottish Executive is also demanding back payments of attendance allowances of £23 million a year (in 2000 prices) which was withheld when Holyrood introduced free personal care for the elderly. The cost of this programme has increased from £140 million to over £200 million a year.
Certainly, there will be some hard talking in the autumn, as the next comprehensive spending review is put together. But the Treasury will have to be careful. Salmond is on record as saying that he believes the Barnett Formula should be scrapped and Scottish MPs denied full voting rights in parliament. If Westminster takes a tough line on spending, it might find the Scottish Executive demanding a review of oil revenues and the repatriation of taxation powers to Holyrood.
It is only six weeks since the Alex Salmond became First Minister of Scotland’s first minority SNP government, but he seems to have achieved more in that time than his three predecessors did in eight years. The initiatives and announcements have come so thick and fast that the intensely sceptical Scottish media has been largely blown away.
When Salmond was elected First Minister, by the narrowest of margins in May, it was widely expected that his administration would be short lived and ineffectual. With only 47 out of 129 MSPs, the odds against effective government looked overwhelming. But the Nationalists simply carried on regardless, using executive powers to implement large parts of their election manifesto, almost before the other opposition parties had gathered their wits.
The SNP have abolished the graduate endowment (postgraduate fees), bridge tolls and nuclear power. They have extended free personal care, promised a massive house-building programme, frozen council tax, abolished business rates for small companies, cut prescription charges, halted private sector involvement in the NHS, saved local hospitals. They have also introduced one of the world’s most ambitious targets for C02 reductions - 80% by 2050 - in their Climate Change Bill; begun the process of cutting primary class sizes to 18; and reviewed major infrastructure projects in Scotland, like Edinburgh’s light railway and the Edinburgh Airport Rail Link (EARL).
In 24 divisions in the Scottish Parliament since May, the Nationalists have only lost one vote of any significance - that was on their attempt to axe Edinburgh’s £650 million tram system. In the closing week of the session, the opposition parties finally got their act together and insisted that the SNP Finance Secretary, John Swinney, give the go-ahead to the project, which has already cost over a hundred million before a single rail has been laid.
The SNP gave in gracefully, accepted the will of parliament, and somehow turned defeat into a kind of victory for the “new politics” of consensus and co-operation that Alex Salmond promised to pursue in office. It was making a virtue of a necessity, but in practice, the Nationalists have discovered that consensus can work to their advantage - especially when the opposition parties are unable to agree on how to take them on.
So, this is an administration with no visible means of support, which has managed to suspend disbelief and govern as if it were a majority party. It has been an extraordinary achievement, and is largely down to the personality and leadership of Alex Salmond, who has dominated the Holyrood chamber in the past weeks in a way none of his predecessors have. Even one of his most prominent opposition critics told me that Salmond has “played a blinder”.
First Minister’s Question Time used to be a dull and inconsequential event, dubbed “hamster wars” by the press, who regarded it as an embarrassing waste of time. Not any more. The gallery is packed for Salmond’s weekly performance and he has provided excellent copy. The Scottish press isn’t easily impressed, but journalists and commentators of all political persuasion and none have agreed that Salmond has made the Scottish parliament come alive. Even many opposition MSPs I speak to agree. The quality of debates has increased, questions are sharper and better informed, and ministerial statements are coherent and .
It can’t go on of course, and the reckoning will come in the autumn when the SNP has to find ways to finance its ambitious spending programmes. Axing projects like the Edinburgh trams was intended to release funds for other uses, but will not. However, John Swinney, announced on the closing day of the parliamentary session that cumulative End Year Flexibilities - that’s the cash the previous administration had been unable to spend by the end of the financial year - has risen to £1.5bn - a tidy sum. Reducing the size of the Scottish Executive should also release cash.
But will Gordon Brown bring the party to an end? The new Prime Minister has been under pressure from the Conservatives and the London media over the alleged unfairness of Scotland abolishing university tuition fees when English students are paying variable top up fees. Brown has argued, correctly, that Nationalist policies have to be paid within a finite budget, and any new spending has to be balanced by cuts in other areas. But that has only intensified the anger of those who believe Scotland receives too much public spending for her own good.
There are suggestions that Brown might seek to reform Barnett but the crunch may com ebefore that - over the SNP’s plans to abolish council tax and replace it with a local income tax. At present, Scotland receives £380m in council tax benefit, and the new Chancellor, Alistair Darling, is believed to be unwilling to keep paying this. No council tax; no benefit, is the line from the Treasury. The Scottish Executive is also demanding back payments of attendance allowances of £23 million a year (in 2000 prices) which was withheld when Holyrood introduced free personal care for the elderly. The cost of this programme has increased from £140 million to over £200 million a year.
Certainly, there will be some hard talking in the autumn, as the next comprehensive spending review is put together. But the Treasury will have to be careful. Salmond is on record as saying that he believes the Barnett Formula should be scrapped and Scottish MPs denied full voting rights in parliament. If Westminster takes a tough line on spending, it might find the Scottish Executive demanding a review of oil revenues and the repatriation of taxation powers to Holyrood.
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