AV is not PR so WTF?

 

  It is now looking almost certain that next week's referendum will lead to a defeat of the Alternative Vote.  Not many people will lose any sleep over this since not many people are interested in electoral reform, and even fewer are proponents of AV.  But I fear that this will be a disaster for those seeking to reform our political system.   We can say goodbye to fair voting for a generation at least. 

    The Conservative leader, David Cameron, played it brilliantly, seducing the LIberal Democrats into coalition by offering them a referendum on an electoral system that isn't proportional representation, but would give the Liberal Democrats a few more seats. Now that the naive LibDems have been caught in the trap, they have turned nasty, behaving like bad losers, threatening court action against their detractors.  How ludicrous they look. How vain and petty.  It was their own intellectual dishonesty that got them into this mess.  

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.   I feel genuinely angry about this - not just at the absurd claims made by the No campaign about “letting in the BNP” and other alarmist nonsense. But at the dishonesty at the heart of the Yes campaign led by the Liberal Democrats   As Nick Clegg said himself, in a quote that may become his political epitaph, AV is a “miserable little compromise”.  Indeed, and it’s miserable that the LibDems have accepted it, not because they believe in it, but because it will probably lead to more Liberal Democrat MPs being elected.

   

    But as Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University has pointed out, had the 1997 or 2001 elections been fought on AV, the result would if anything have been more disproportional.  In ‘97, Tony Blair won a 167 seat majority on 44% of the popular vote, a grotesque distortion of the true result.  If AV could actually lead to an even more unfair result, you wonder what point there is in voting for it.  The Yes campaign responds that, while it isn’t ideal, the Alternative Vote is at least proportional in single constituencies.  Voters rank the candidates from one to four,  or however many are standing, in terms of their preference.  If no candidate has a majority of the vote on the initial ballot, the bottom candidate is dumped and his or her second preference votes are distributed among the remaining candidates.   This goes on until one candidate emerges with 50% of the vote. This is arguably fairer than the present system where a candidate can win on a minority of the votes cast. 

   However, the problem arises when there are 650 seats.  Then the AV system fails to guarantee what, for my money, is the only purpose of electoral reform: to ensure that the parties’ representation in parliament broadly reflects the number of votes cast for them in the election.   Prime Ministers like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair used their unassailable majorities to pursue their own narrow-minded and destructive obsessions.  That gave us the industrial recessions of the 1980s, plus Mrs Thatcher’s poll tax,  and allowed Tony Blair to launch an illegal war in Iraq.  Had it not been for his inflated majority,  we would not have invaded Baghdad in 2003, because parliament would have voted against it,  and tens of thousands of lives would have been saved.  FPTP encourages  megalomania in Number Ten because it allows Prime Ministers to ignore parliament altogether if they want. 

   Only a system of fair votes can prevent this happening - a system such as the Additional Member System that elects MSPs to the Holyrood parliament.  AMS ensures that the composition of the parliament reflects the wishes of the voters.  But it also addresses one of the criticisms of other forms of PR, like the Single Transferrable Vote, that they break the link between the elected member and the geographical constituency.   AMS does this by having two votes: one in the 73 Scottish constituencies using FPTP, and another based on 8 regional lists of party candidates lists.  Using a mathematical formula called the “d’Hondt method”, the regional votes are redistributed in such as way as to supply additional members to each region to balance out the unfairnesses that arise from First Past The Post.  Simple. 

    Well, not really - but it is a creditable system that has served Scotland well.  It has prevented one party dominating Holyrood on the basis of a minority vote.  But more importantly, it has ensured that minority parties and independent candidates can gain representation. Now, some critics of PR say this is undesirable because it might allow nasty parties like the BNP to gain respectability. But this objection if fundamentally undemocratic. Better to expose these parties to the light of public scrutiny and political accountability, than let them fester in extra-parliamentary obscurity. 

   There is a kind of electoral Darwinism with PR which ensures that only relatively able politicians and parties survive. In 2003,  fed up with the big party monopoly, Scottish voters returned 7 Scottish Socialist and 6 Green MSS, as well as a senior citizens MSP and the redoubtable Margo Macdonald.  Unable to cope with the  exposure, the SSP collapsed into internal division and acrimony, its leader ending up in prison for perjury.  But the Greens are still in there fighting the good fight, as is Margo Macdonald, a national treasure and one of the most distinctive and influential voices in Scottish public life.  

   The other criticism of PR is that it leads to coalition and government by compromise.  But sometimes compromise, or rather collective decision making, is the best way.  And coalition isn’t inevitable.  The SNP minority government in Holyrood has been more effective than its coalition predecessors. PR has forced MSS  not just to vote on party lines, but to engage in serious detailed negotiation over annual budgets.  All MSPs are important, and they all have to exercise their consciences on a regular basis.  First Past the Post does the opposite: it allows legions of timeserving MPs with safe seats to hang around parliament at the beck and call of their party whips. Prime Ministers in Westminster treat MPs with indifference or contempt because they are not afraid of them.  

   But of course, the AMS system is not on offer in the referendum.  We are stuck with lousy AV.  Perhaps it will be a “baby step” towards real PR, but I have my doubts.  If I do vote for it, it will be with thumb and forefinger fixed firmly to my nose. 

From the killing fields of Cambodia to the meatball marinara.

From the killing fields if Cambodia to the perilous platforms of Glasgow Central Station, Iain Gray has demonstrated how not to win an election campaign.  It was the image that will define the 2011 Scottish parliamentary election campaign.  Pursued by anti-cuts protesters, the Scottish Labour leader fearlessly retreated into a Subway sandwich bar, before being evac'd by taxi to a Labour mobile field hospital where medics conducted emergency surgery on his wounded ego.  Labour made things even worse by putting out  that line about Iain Gray's war-zone experiences  "Teaching in Mozambique during a bloody civil war... doing aid work in Rwanda 2 months after the genocide etc".  But the first rule about being bold is not to boast about it. The second is not to get others to boast about it on your behalf. 


     The  meatball marinara massacre was the nadir of the Scottish Labour campaign, leaving Iain Gray looking as accident-prone as Gordon Brown last May. The manifesto launch  was beset by fire alarm and lashing rain.  The former Labour MP, Dennis Canavan, and the Labourite actor Brian Cox, then came out in support of Alex Salmond for First Minister.     The press rubbished Iain Gray's give-away manifesto, with its promises to reward every special interest, public sector union and lobby group in the land at a time of unprecedented public spending restraint.  

  Indeed, you couldn't help feeling a smidgeon of sympathy for Mr Gray being barracked for cuts in spending when his manifesto was promising precisely the reverse.  Labour  tried to conduct their campaign as if they were fighting the Tories in Westminster, rather than the SNP in Holyrood.   Like the killing fields of Cambodia, this is rather remote from the Scottish electoral reality.  Mind you, I believe there was mileage in the "fight the Tories" strategy, had it been effectively deployed.   Similarly, the fact that his promise to "abolish" youth unemployment is almost certainly unachievable  is beside the point.  It's what many voters want to hear right now with nearly one in five young people out of work.  Maybe, in the final week of the campaign, this approach may swing the polls back toward Labour, at least marginally. Not that it will do Mr Gray a lot of good. Throwing away a ten point opinion poll lead during an election campaign is simply unacceptable and unforgiveable.  There is no way he should remain leader after this debacle.  

Tommy Sheridan to the Sun - is anyone NOT backing the SNP?

   From imprisoned Trotskyite, Tommy Sheridan, to the Sun newspaper.  From bisexual hollywood star, Alan Cumming, to David Murray of Rangers Football Club.   The  Alex Salmond supporters club continues to throw up ever more bizarre alliances.    None of it means anything of course since celebrity endorsements can be counterproductive.  They antagonise as many people as they energise - unless you are Sir Sean Connery, of course, who is more national monument than celebrity.  

    What does mean something is momentum, impetus, drive - that sense of being in command of events which is Alex Salmond’s stock in trade.  No one wants to be linked right now to the Labour leader Iain Gray - who attempted to relaunch his faltering campaign yesterday - because he just doesn’t have it.    It’s not even clear that many Labour politicians want to be associated with Mr Gray right now, following reports that prominent frontbenchers like Andy Kerr and Jackie Baillie are fighting for their seats in the face of the SNP’s astonishing opinion poll advance.  

  For his part, the UK Labour leader, Ed Miliband, seems to have decided not to poke his nose into the campaign - if you'll excuse the pun.  The former Chancellor, Alastair Darling,  was sighted a couple of weeks ago, but there have been remarkably few high profile Labour poiticians on the stump. Apart from Gordon Brown - and that is one celebrity endorsement that Iain Gray could have done without right now.  Westminster Labour figures, like Ian Davidson,  Douglas Alexander et al,  appear to have been called on to take a low profiile in the Holyrood campaign so far for reasons that are not obvious. 


    There have been consistent complaints from Labour MPs that they have either not been asked or have been positively discouraged from taking part in the great battle against the Nats.  Now, presumably this is because Iain Gray is wanting to show that he is his own man, leading a distinctly Scottish Labour Party, and that the days when Scottish leaders took instruction from "London Labour" are gone.  Certainly, the Scottish Labour manifesto is not one that you could have imagined any UK leader of recent times endorsing, with its rejection of university tuition fees and its promise to create a quarter of a million jobs.    But it seems odd that, when the main plank of Labour's Scottish campaign is that "The Tories are back", and that only Labour can stop the Condem cuts, that the MPs on Labour's Westminster front line have not been prominent in the campaign. 


    Of course, things have deteriorated so far in the Scottish Labour campaign that Iain Gray is now attacked almost whatever he does.  If he called for a raft of Labour MPs to come and help, he would be accused of making a desperate and undignified bid to get Westminster to save him from Salmond. If he hadn't tried to raise the stakes on independence this week in his "relaunch" speech - which he was going to make anyway - he'd have been accused of ignoring Alex Salmond's number one policy weakness.  


   One long-standing but alienated former Labour activist put it to me yesterday that he was beginning to feel really sorry for Iain Gray.  Perhaps that's the way forward.  A celebrity campaign of sympathy endorsements along the lines of "I'm not voting Labour, but I do feel sorry for Iain".  Come on people.  It's time to Save the Gray

  

Even the SNP don't believe their polling numbers.

     Opinion polls don't get much more sensational than today's  YouGov poll in Scotland on Sunday.  It suggests that the SNP's lead over Labour has bumped from 2% to 13% in the constituency vote in only a week.  This is quite astonishing, and indicates that the Ipsos/Mori poll last week. which showed Alex Salmond's party surging ahead by 11% over Labour,  was no rogue.  On the regional list vote, the SNP lead has also rocketed from 2% to 10% according to YouGov.   These really are epic numbers.  I can't think of any British election in modern times where there has been such a dramatic turnaround in the course of an election campaign, let alone in only ten days.  Labour had been ten points ahead of the SNP in the poll of polls for most of the last year.  

   Perhaps, indeed, it is too good to be true.  Scotland on Sunday seemed to be a little wary of its own poll and rather downplayed the story, confining it to a brief side bar on page one.   There has been a stunned silence from most of the political parties, and even the SNP are advising caution.  The Nationalists believe that their actual lead is much less than the recent polls have been indicating, and they are starting to worry about complacency among party worker ten days before polling day.


     Certainly, all polls are subject to sampling peculiarities and can often exaggerate small movements in opinion.  Just think back to the general election in May 2010 when the Liberal Democrats forged ahead of Labour after Nick Clegg's TV outing.  Polls should always be taken, but not inhaled.  But I think there's every indication that the polls on voting intentions are simply reflecting the long held view of the Scottish voters that Alex Salmond is the best choice as First Minister.  His personal ratings have hardly changed in four years.  Iain Gray was never a runner in the leadership race, and since there is very little in terms of policy to differentiate the two parties, it is hardly surprising that the national polls  are now swinging to the SNP.  Certainly,   Labour have offered no compelling reason why Scots should change horses in Bute House.   This is one of the most sophisticated electorates in the world, long experienced in the arts of tactical voting.  Scottish voters have no difficulty, splitting their ticket, and  voting Labour in Westminster while backing the SNP in Holyrood.

Can Alex Salmond be stopped?

      They think it's all over.  Chattering Scotland has already held the Holyrood election in its head, and Alex Salmond has won.  The bookies have slashed the odds on an SNP victory.  Labour are already fighting amongst themselves about whom to blame.  Unionists are vainly hoping that the royal wedding might somehow upset the Nationalist bandwagon. Perhaps an outbreak of Britishness will waken Scots from their slumbers, and remind them that  Alex Salmond wants to tear the British national family apart.  Some hope. It will take more than a few street parties and commemorative mugs to halt this nationalist advance.  Momentum is everything and Salmond has got it all right now. 

Sectarianism: it starts in the home and is perpetuated in the classroom.

  Well, someone has to say it.  Religious sectarianism in Scotland will never fully be eradicated while religious apartheid is written into the state education system.  So long as children grow  up to define themselves as Catholic or Protestant, in segregated schools, and associate predominantly with their own kind, then the old antagonisms and rivalries will remain. I have great respect for Catholic schools and their high educational standards -  which cause so many non-believers try to send their children there, the Liberal leader Nick Clegg being one.   However, they do discriminate on grounds of religion, and there’s no getting away from that. 

  Now, I know this line of thinking will outrage many of my Catholic friends, practising or lapsed, who believe that religious schools are a defence AGAINST sectarianism, Protestant sectarianism, rather than the cause of it.    And of course, Catholic schools don’t cause letter bombs. It is from the darker recesses of Protestant Unionism, that come the death threats and the street violence. The nail bombs sent to Neil Lennon, lawyer Paul McBride and Trish Godman, the former Labour MSP, were probably assembled by paramilitary elements in one of the stagnant pools of Loyalist Orangism that still linger in the housing estates of West Central Scotland.  Aye, and not only in the housing estates, but in some of the best addresses in Glasgow, in certain golf clubs and legal chambers. 

      Scotland’s half million Catholics rightly feel that they have been, and continue to be, victims of discrimination -  from their exclusion from succession to the throne to harsh treatment by football authorities.  It is to the eternal shame of my own grandfather’s generation of Clyde shipyard workers that Catholics generally did not get jobs in the major yards.  However,  the worst forms of discrimination, in council house waiting lists, in the workplace, in policing and the justice system, are surely a thing of he past. 

    Moreover, we live in a predominantly secular society.  Sectarian violence is a bizarre anachronism - how many of the bigots who chant religious sectarian songs at old firm matches understand the theological distinction between consubstantiation and transubstantiation?  This is tribalism - it is communal violence based on a barely comprehended historic identity.   But the identity has a basis in religion and is rooted in the separation at five years old between Catholics and Protestants.  

Tuition fees - the argument continues.

 University principals have been up in arms again over the abolition of university tuition fees.  “It’s a catastrophe for the university sector” said one university head, “how will we improve teaching and infrastructure?”  Industry leaders have warned that graduate standards might deteriorate.   Familiar sentiments.   However,  these are  objections to the abolition of university tuition fees, not in Scotland, but in Germany.   Hamburg has become the latest regional government to abolish tuition fees in Europe’s leading industrial nation, leaving only three out of the 16 German land governments sticking with fees.  The argument has prevailed there that, when times are tough, the tough get learning - and that it is essential to eliminate barriers to entry into higher education. 

Where are the university principals on tuition fees?

  The silence has been deafening.  Since the major Scottish political parties all came into line behind the policy of keeping Scotland tuition-fee free two weeks ago, I have not heard one positive comment from any of Scotland's university principals.    Why aren't they celebrating the fact that Scotland has decided to make a decisive break with the creeping privatisation of higher education that is afflicting England?   They have been behaving like a sectional special interest group, truculent in lobbying for their own policies, peevish and negative when they don't get their way.

    They need to remember that they are public institutions and that they are there to serve the Scottish people, not their own balance sheets.

   What have they got to complain about?   The Scottish government has given an unequivocal commitment to financing Scottish universities.  "Any funding gap [with fee paying universities] will be closed" . Where else in the public sector is there such a commitment?  Only the NHS. Universities should count themselves lucky that they are receiving a record of £1.2 billion from the public purse.  That places on them an obligation to accept with good grace the wishes of the Scottish public that higher education should remain free.

UK Nuclear power programme has just gone up in smoke.

     There is a long established protocol for dealing with accidents at nuclear power plants.   First. the authorities insist there is no possibility of radiation escaping and that the public shouldn't worry.  Then various nuclear experts appear on television saying that this accident shows just how safe nuclear power really is because it can withstand earthquakes and tsunamis.   As the reactors explode one by one we are told that the detonations don't mean much because the nuclear containment vessels cannot be penetrated.   Until they are.  But even then we are told not to worry because any radiation leak will be less than background radiation in the granite city of Aberdeen.  The final act is always the same.  It emerges that nuclear fuel rods have been exposed,  radiation is pouring into the atmosphere, and that there is a potential catastrophe in the making.


   At the striken Fukushima Daiichi plant in northern Japan, selfless power station workers risk their lives to try to put out the nuclear fires.  Last night it emerged that radiation at the nuclear power station had reached at a critical level of  400 millisieverts an hour.  The normal 'safe' dosage of radiation is 100 milliseverts A YEAR, according to the World Health Organisation.  The plant managers were reduced to hosing sea water from fire engines onto superheated reactors cores in a desperate attempt to prevent a meltdown . Then one of the fire engines runs out of fuel.


 And so history repeats itself as tragedy as well as farce.   Windscale, 1957, Three Mile Island, 1978 and Chernobyl, 1986 and now in Fukushima Daiichi. This, though, must be the ultimate nuclear nightmare:  a disaster of epic proportions in the country, Japan, which has led the world in the development of supposedly safe nuclear power generation.    We don't know what is going to be the final fate of Fukushima Daiishi - but one thing we do know for certain:  civil nuclear power is finished. This is the end of the nuclear dream.  It finally died when the third explosion ripped through those innocent-looking concrete blocks on Tuesday 15 March 2011.

Sovereign debt crisis: hasn't gone away you know.

   The sharks are circling again. The cost of debt rising inexorably in the Club Med countries.  After a couple months of respite, the spectre of sovereign debt is again casting a shadow over Europe.     I was in Portugal recently, on the eve of the biggest general strike  since that country became a democracy after the ‘Red Rose Revolution’ in 1974.  The  show of strength by the trades unions was impressive though largely futile.  Following Greece and Ireland, Portugal will almost certainly become the latest  victim of the sovereign debt crisis that is rocking the EU to its very foundations. 

   Outside Lisbon, there was an eerie calm. The Algarve is now one long housing estate punctuated by golf courses.  In Albufeira I marvelled at the endless estates of candy coloured holiday homes, all empty.   It’s like being in one of those post-apocalyptic video games where all the people have all been killed by a mystery disease.  You half expected to see a crowd of zombies.  What I did see was a guy in a hat trotting along in a cart drawn by a donkey.  You see rather a lot of blokes on donkeys here, if you hang around long enough.  For, beneath the veneer of prosperity brought by tourism, Portugal is a low-growth, low-tech, essentially agricultural economy.  Nothing wrong with that.  Except that dozy Portugal is harnessed, via the euro, to the the most technologically efficient and productive manufacturing force on the planet: Germany.  And that’s the problem: it’s a donkey yoked to a race horse . 

What do the SNP have to do to stay in office?

At their conference in Glasgow this weekend the Scottish National Party faithful are doing their best to keep their spirits up. Everything to play for.  Polls ambiguous. Alex will see us right.  No one thinks Iain Gray is a leader.  Perhaps not.  But the SNP is up against one of the greatest challenges in modern political history.  How to break the link between Labour and the soul of Scotland.  The Scottish Labour Part my be bereft of ideas, lost for leaders, out of touch and fearful of office.  But almost inspite of themselves, Labour still look like being the favourites to win the Scottish election in May.  The bond of sentiment is just too strong with the Scottish voters.  When the Tories are in office in Westminster, Scotland just votes Labour.

Don't buy a house! Just say no.

   Negative equity.  It's not something we have been hearing much about since 2008, when UK property prices started falling.  Prompt action by the Bank of England and the government halted the crash in real estate prices.  But the underlying problem is as serious now as before:  British house prices are just too high. First time buyers are having to save more than year's salary to buy a home, at a time when wages and salaries are falling in real terms and inflation is rising fast.  2011 is the year the roof falls in. 

Trident: Fox says four, no less no more. Someone tell the LibDems.

             

    One of the very few achievements of the Liberal Democrats in the UK coalition has been the decision to review the replacement of Trident.  Nick Clegg said during the election campaign that he was opposed to renewing the weapons system.  But someone seems to have forgotten to tell the defence secretary, Liam Fox. This week he announced, not only that he was ordering the steel to build the next generation of Trident, but that the country needs four Trident submarines, not three as the former prime minister, Gordon Brown,  believed back in 2009.  Presumably the extra one is to cover for vessels that get lost in the Minch and end up colliding with the Isle of Skye.

    Except that the decision on whether to renew Trident, whether with three or four boats, is not supposed to be taken until 2016. A commission of senior politicians and defence chiefs is reviewing the whole question of whether we need to renew our “independent” nuclear deterrent at all,  given that Trident is designed to obliterate Russian cities and Russia is no longer an enemy.  But you wouldn't have known, hearing Mr Fox interviewed for Sally Magnusson’s through-the-porthole look at life in a Trident nuclear submarine on BBC Scotland .  Gosh, they’re so fit.

Tony Blair, Col Gaddafi and Osama bin Laden.

 Now we know.  That handshake in the desert wasn't just about oil and al Megrahi.  Tony Blair and Col Gaddafi, shoulder to shoulder in the war against Osama bin Laden.   Of course we gave him arms - he was one of the good guys.   How fitting that now, in his desperation to cling on to power, Muammar Gaddafi has resorted to the same bin Laden bogeyman that was used by President George W. Bush and Tony Blair to muster support for their repressive legislation and foreign wars.  

Selling democracy in the desert - a Marshall Plan of the mind.

  If as seems increasingly likely,  the day of the dictator is drawing to a close in North Africa and the Middle EAst, what should we be doing to hasten the sunset?  No fly zone in Libya?  Perhaps, if Gadaffi continues to use aircraft to kill his own people.  Suspend exports of arms?  Absolutely: it is indeed shameful that we have been supplying ammunition for the guns that have mown down pro-democracy supporters in Libya.  A Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of North Africa - undoubtedly, in the longer term, if only because this would be in our economic interest to create new markets and trading partners.   But what else?  What should we do now?   Are pious lectures about introducing democracy enough?


   Actually, they might be. 

And so farewell Wendy Alexander, resignation queen of Holyrood.

Wendy Alexander has walked out again, resigning her Paisley seat and citing the oldest and lamest excuse in politics,  “to spend time with her family”.  She leaves the Scottish Labour leader, Iain Gray, and fellow career women in the lurch.   Though somehow, I don't think this is the last we have heard of Wendy.   Labour’s former Scottish leader has made something of a career out of resignation.  She first walked out in 2002 as enterprise minister after a frantic 7.00 am encounter with the then First Minister Jack McConnell on his Wishaw doorstep. 

Libya, Egypt, Bahrain - they just want to be like us.

  It is hard not to be inspired by the example of the young people of North Africa and the Middle East who have launched and sustained the most dignified, principled and peaceful democracy movement since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.    In Lybia, Bahrain, Morocco, Yemen, Algeira they have taken to the streets and the blogosphere to demand democracy, freedom and human rights.  But what does that mean?  

   There has been a deal of confusion in the west about how to make sense of these pro-democracy movements.  We don't quite know who is fighting for what.   It all looks so spontaneous and un-organised.  Where are the leaders?  What's the programme?  Will they end up like Iran after 1979 as dismal  theocracies run by religious obscurantists?  Will they degenerate into civil war like the Balkans and the countries in the horn of Africa.  Or will they become democracies like the former communist states in the 1990s or South Africa under Mandela?   Is the CIA involved - either suppressing them or encouraging them.  There are reports that a number of the student leaders in Egypt had been trained in the use of social media by US-backed NGOs.  
  

SNP are back. Bad day for monkeys.

It was a bad day for monkeys. It has long been said that, in large parts of Scotland, you if you put a red rosette on a monkey it would still win in most Labour constituencies, especially when there is a Conservative government in Westminster. The old rule certainly appeared to be holding following the general election in May when Labour stacked up over a million votes in Scotland and knocked the stuffing out of Alex Salmond. But the day of the primate may be over. 
If the latest opinion poll from Ipsos Mori is right, and the SNP has clawed back the 10 point lead Labour had over them as recently as November, Labour may have to start looking for a better species of candidate.

Hasta la vista Jeremy. The end of the car is nigh.

  A hundred pounds to fill a tank. At first I couldn’t believe it - staring at the pump in disbelief.  Ok,  my VW campervan has a slightly larger tank than most cars.  And yes, I was up north where fuel prices are higher.   But still - a ton just to fill up!  How did we get here?   This is just not sustainable - economically or environmentally.  

  I looked around at the motorists waiting patiently to be fleeced after me.  How do they manage in rural areas  where there’s no public transport and fuel stations charge whatever they want?   What do small businesses do?  Perhaps there is some sort of black market in bootleg diesel - otherwise the place would come to a standstill. 

  But it’s not just an issue for the highlands and islands - everyone seems to be talking about the cost of fuel right now.   Expressing a kind of impotent rage - at ourselves as much as the fuel profiteers.  We all know we shouldn’t still be depending on cars;  that they are environmentally damaging, cause congestion and encourage laddish individualism.  But we’re all still using them.  With children it’s just not an option not to.  

    On my own, I use a bicycle around town, because it’s far quicker and I can park it anywhere - but I’m not fooling myself that this makes me any holier than thou.  I can bike it because I can afford to near the centre of town.  Most people can’t and have no choice but to use their cars in the suburbs or the country.  Try commuting by bike in Argyle in winter and you’re liable to end up with hypothermia.  Car transport is a collective addiction which is very difficult to kick on your own.

   But I think now,   with the hundred pound fill up,  we may  just have reached a kind of transport tipping point. 

Let's close Glasgow University. Who needs degrees anyway?

    It’s called the “bleeding stumps” strategy.  How managers of publicly-funded organisations resist cuts in their budgets.  They propose cuts in the most painful and visible services in the hope that the media firestorm forces the government to back down.  Aberdeen City Council did it by saying it was considering closing all the city’s parks and making 900 compulsory redundancies among council staff.  North Ayrshire proposed a four day week for schools, a patently ludicrous idea that became headline news for days.  Professor Anton Muscatelli, the vice chancellor of Glasgow University,  has been warning of his university going bankrupt in 2013, inviting images of unemployed academics in gowns and mortar boards shuffling along dole queues, while sheriff officers hold warrant sales of university furniture.  Come to think of it, that Glasgow university building would make a very decent hotel. 

Because of Iraq we have no role in Egyptian revolution.

  I have been bad tempered all day.  It's because I had the misfortune to listen to Tony Blair on Egypt - sticking very much to the line that Mubarak is our bastard, who has delivered "stability" to the Middle East and we should be wary of any attempts to remove him.  So much, so predictable.  What was infuriating though was not just that this man had launched an illegal war against Iraq in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction that weren't there. If the beneficiaries of the Egypt revolution turn out to be the Muslim Brotherhood, then we only have ourselves, or Tony, to blame. What is happening in the Middle East is the Muslim equivalent of the revolutions that overthrew communism in Eastern Europe twenty years ago.   The movement is overwhelmingly peaceful, broadly based and determined to introduce democracy to countries that has lived under dictatorship for decades.  What right do we have as outsiders to try now to dictate the course of the revolution? 


   But the truly maddening thing is that the West could have been the passive agents of freedom in North Africa, just as in Europe in the 1990s, and could have played a significant constructive role in helping countries like Egypt move into the democratic age.  But because of Iraq, we have no credibility in the region whatsoever.  Hardly surprising.  If Bush and Blair had just let the Middle East alone, instead of using military force to impose US democracy, we would probably be seeing secular liberal democracy established in countries like Egypt through force of opposition by the people. 


  Thanks to the stupidity of the Iraq war, as brought to your screens by Tony Blair et al, we in the West have opted out of history.    We behaved so badly that we even made the dictators look reasonable by comparison.  And now, of course, we are bigging up Mubarak as if he were a noble statesman and democrat, which he isn't.  He is a tyrant and torturer. The people in Tahrir don't trust us, and who can blame them.  

You've been Tesco'd

 Forget the Egyptian revolution, all hail the heroes of Holyrood who have saved the nation  from the iniquitous SNP Tesco Tax.  Thousands of grateful Scots lined the boulevards of  the capital yesterday cheering Labour's Iain Gray as he rode to the Scottish parliament on a Morrisons shopping trolley.  Tearful checkout ladies strew club-cards in his way.   Grateful trades unionists doffed their flat caps as Lord Sainsbury drove past in his limousine.  

Of course my phone is hacked.

  Is there anyone left in public life who has not been the target of Rupert Murdoch’s sleazy evesdroppers? We’ve had Prince William, Gordon Brown, Tessa Jowell, Leslie Ash, even the sexist sport commentator Andy Gray and the former MP George Galloway. Not having had your messages intercepted is practically an admission that you’re loser and no one is interested in you.  Ex Labour ministers like David Clarke say they ‘assume’ their messages are intercepted.  Michael Portillo, the broadcaster and former Tory defence secretary, says he hasn’t used voice-mail for ten years. 

Iain Gray. Bute House. But why?

  George Galloway for the Scottish Parliament?  Bring it on. At least he’d liven things up a bit - and no catty remarks at the back, please.  Nor should "Georgeous George", who announced his candidature this week,  be underestimated.  He was the youngest ever chair of the Scottish Labour Party and one of the most vibrant Labour politicians of his generation in Westminster, before he went off to the wilder shores of minority politics. 

    If Galloway is elected on the Glasgow list -  and he only needs around 11,000 votes - he’s made clear he will be supporting the Labour leader Iain Gray on the big issues of the day - on public spending cuts and the constitution.   And truth be told, Labour needs someone with a bit of charisma even though, as a Respect candidate, Galloway won’t be sitting on the Labour benches or taking the party whip.  There is an air of complacency, of entitlement,  about the Scottish Labour Party right now which isn't justified.  Iain Gray is supremely confident of  coasting to Bute House on the wave of opposition to the Tory-led coalition in Westminster.   Ed Miliband has pencilled in victory in the Scottish parliamentary elections in May as the next milestone on his road back to power. It's all too easy.

Does Ed have the balls?

 Politicians in trouble traditionally say that they are resigning to spend more time with their families.  Alan Johnson’s resignation last week over ‘personal issues’ was unusual in that it seemed for once to be genuine.  That’s not to say that there weren’t political reasons also for his departure.  Had the shadow chancellor been performing supremely well in his post, one suspects he might have persuaded himself that his country and his party needed him, and that he had a serious job to do whatever his wife was up to. 

   But either way, it looks like another lucky break for Ed Miliband, following his victory in the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election, and the resignation of David Cameron’s communications director, Andy Coulson, over the phone-hacking scandal.  Johnson’s departure gets Miliband out of the hole he had dug for himself by failing to appoint the right man for the treasury job in the first place. That man was, of course, Gordon Brown’s protégé, Ed Balls, the best economic thinker in the shadow cabinet by far.   Miliband minor was left looking faintly ridiculous as Alan Johnson stumbled from gaffe to gaffe, celebrating his own ignorance of economics and stumbling over the rate of employers national insurance.  It was obvious that Miliband had made the wrong call.

   Sending Balls off to the home office was not only a waste of his talents, it showed the new Labour leader to be weak.   Surely, the only reason for sidelining Balls was to prevent him dominating the cabinet on the economy.   Now Miliband has had to accept Ed Balls as his shadow chancellor anyway, and the question everyone’s asking is: has Miliband minor got the balls to handle him?   He has a very dangerous rival now, at his side - arguably a more dangerous rival than Gordon Brown was to Tony Blair.  There may have been no Granita pact, but Balls is now immovable and owes his leader nothing.  If Ed Miliband fails to raise his game as leader, and so far he has been pretty unimpressive, then the ‘other Ed’ will be watching for the main chance. 

Tommy Sheridan v Andy Coulson. It's not over.

 What a performance.  Gail Sheridan’s declaration of faith in her husband Tommy on the steps of the High Court yesterday was straight out of country and western iconography.  Talk about standing by your man.  Shame Tammy Wynette isn’t still around to sing about it.  

  Gail’s man had just been jailed for three years for lying about his affairs with party followers and his forays into the sleazy world of swingers’ clubs. The kind of places where ‘the carpet sticks to your feet’, as one of his conquests put it.  Yet there she was, without a hair out of place, not a hint of hesitation in her voice, defending him as the peoples’ champion. “The real reason he’s been imprisoned is because he has fought injustice and inequality with every beat of his heart”, said Mrs Sheridan, without a trace of irony. “But it won’t be long before Tommy is back stronger and continuing the fight”.

   It seemed churlish to point out that Sheridan had been jailed, not for fighting capitalism,  but for lying in court over a £200,000 defamation action against the News of the World.  He makes an odd addition to the pantheon of socialist martyrs.  Not sure John McLean would’ve been found promoting the cause of communism in Cupids sex club.  But Gail Sheridan is probably right about Tommy living to fight another day.  Being jailed after losing a battle with the mighty Murdoch mafia is no great blot on any socialist’s character.  He lied about his private life, certainly, but so did President Clinton.

It's over for the bankers. No, Really.

I’d hoped to avoid writing about banksters for a while, but how can you?  Prime Minister’s Question Time was once again dominated by bankers behaving badly following, the news that Eric Daniels of Lloyds group, is getting his snout in the trough to the tune of £2m. Playing catch up with that other state-owned banker boss, Stephen Hester of RBS, who has awarding himself £2.3 million in bonuses.   Really, how can you ignore this kind of thing?  These people are engaged in legal theft - their banks only exist because of public subsidy. If anyone should be getting bonuses, it’s the tax-payers. 

   I keep reading headlines about how it’s time to stop “banker bashing”.  That it might damage the City of London’s reputation if we keep harping on about their bonuses.  But I hardly think reputation comes into it: bankers clearly have no reputations left to defend. I can’t think of any group in society which as so unconcerned about their public image, so unwilling to mend their ways. Even paedophiles feel remorse. 

Old and Sad: Liberal Democrats down the plughole

“At least we didn’t disappear down the plug hole”, remarked the Liberal Democrat President, Tim Farron the last week after the Oldham and Saddleworth by-election.  True, but I fear Liberalism is going doon the stank nevertheless. The Tories came third, but David Cameron was the real winner.

    There was very little for the Liberal Democrats to celebrate in ‘Old and Sad’.  Had it not been for Tory tactical voting, they  wouldn’t have made it even to second place.  They lost by 3,500 votes in a seat where the sitting Labour MP had been forced to resign because he lied to the voters, and where Labour’s majority over the LibDem candidate, Elwyn Watkins, was only 103 votes.  That’s no kind of success. 

Banker bonuses? Give them to everyone.

There's a very simply answer to the problem of banker bonuses.  Give them to everybody.  No, I'm serious.   The banks are only in existence because of the hundreds of billions in state support.  Had it not been for the guarantee of public money to back up their dodgy asset base, not just direct capital injections but liquidity, asset swaps and loans, even the nominally private banks like Barclays would have gone under in 2008 because the entire financial system would have collapsed and their assets would have been valueless.   

   Very well then.  In future, when the banks hand themselves bonuses, the public should get equal, if not greater bonuses for having underwritten their profits in teh first place.  It's only what the banks would do were the situation reversed, and they were lending to government.  They call it interest.  So seven billion in bonuses  to investment bankers?  Seven billion to us.  Twenty billion in City salaries?  Twenty to us.  

  Such would be the condition for any future public support for banks.  If some banks reject this they can reject this arrangement and go out on their own, but they would really be on their own.   Then we would see what the state guarantee is really worth in the market where it counts.  Can you imagine anyone putting their money in a bank today that would have no future access to any public support?  Exactly.  They would be out of business tomorrow.

Is the financial crisis really over?

   Shake off that New Year hangover; it’s time to party.  After two and a half years of unmitigated gloom, economists and commentators are entering 2011 full of optimism. At least,  the 78 business analysts and economists polled by the Financial Times this week are.  They’ve concluded that there is no double dip recession and that we are on the way to an export-led recovery that will astonish Europe and gob-smack the G8.  Forget sovereign debt crisis, bankrupt banks, inflation, they’re history.   The stock market is booming, growth has returned and manufacturing orders are storming ahead thanks to the low pound. 

    Now,  they don’t call it the dismal science for nothing - economists are usually pessimistic to the point of self-harm. So why are they suddenly looking on the bright side or is the Financial Times on the waccy baccy?   Well the short answer is that the City of London is making serious money again.  Zero interest rates and the fear of governments defaulting on their debts, has suddenly made the stock market look a relatively safe bet.  Money has been piling out of  bonds and into equities, pushing the FTSE index of leading shares back up to 6,000 over Christmas - up nearly a quarter since the recession bottomed.  This makes financiers very happy because they rake in large sums in commissions from buying and selling shares.

Predictions 2011

  It’s prediction time again, and another chance for political commentators to fall flat on their faces.  Who could have forecast, twelve months ago, that the Liberal Democrats would be in government by now?  Or that the Scottish transport minister would resign because he got the weather forecast wrong?  Or that Vince Cable would become public enemy number one for introducing  £9,000 tuition fees in England? 

    Reality often turns out to be far more bizarre than anyone could have imagined, which is the fun of crystal ball gazing.  Who could have imagined that the stock markets would boom in 2010, even as a sovereign debt crisis was sweeping Europe?  Or that Scotland’s referees would go on strike?  Or that Ed Miliband would beat his brother David Miliband in a knife edge race for the Labour leadership?   Prediction is a mug’s game, but here are mine. 

2010: An apology.

    2010 will always be, for me, the year of apology, the year of humble pie,  the year I go it wrong.  Yes, I know: I get things wrong all the time - I’m a political journalist after all.  But this was different.  During the general election campaign in May, I suggested that in certain key marginal seats, like Edinburgh South,  voters should consider voting for the Liberal Democrats.  Why?  Because I thought there was a chance that, by levering in more LibDems,  we might finally see a fair voting system in this country, proportional representation.  There was a good chance that a Liberal-Labour coalition - for that seemed the only credible outcome of a hung parliament -  would finally end the first past the post voting system that handed too much power to Number Ten and not enough to the House of Commons.  I also hoped that the  Liberal Democrats might act as the radical conscience of a Liberal Labour coalition.  Hadn’t they stood alone against the Iraq?   I even commended the Liberal Democrats to students since they -  and only they - had given cast iron pledges not to increase tuition fees in England or introduce them in Scotland. 

2011: the End of Work.

  And so this is Christmas, and what have you done? Or so sang John Lennon, the 30th anniversary of whose death was commemorated this month.  Can it really be that long ago?.  Curiously, the music and image of the former Beatle doesn’t seem dated, even though he is a figure from digital prehistory.  Lennon died before there were mobile phones, personal computers or the internet.  He was a product of the mass media, but that media has changed in ways he could never have comprehended. 

   If you compare the world as it is now, in 2010, even with how we lived only a decade ago, at the Millennium, the differences are striking enough.  Flat screen TVs, mobile computers, sat nav broadband  and WiFi have transformed our work and leisure.  Social networking - Facebook, Twitter and the rest - has changed the way we relate to each other to such an extent that we don’t really know what the word “friend” means any more. We had email ten years ago, but it didn’t dominate our lives . And while blogging was on the horizon, no one thought that the newspaper industry would face a crisis because of it.   Digital technology has accelerated the pace of modern life.  We live in a real time world, where information is no longer something you have to spend time finding, but is ever present in one electronic form or another. 

2010: Year of Protest.

 It all started with a carnival atmosphere, as tens of thousands of students and six formers took to the streets to protest about the state of higher education and inequality in society.  Students carried placards with witty and sometimes obscure slogans such as “Be realistic, ask the impossible” and “Under the paving stones, the beach”.  But it all turned violent as groups of anarchists seized buildings and confronted the police. Pretty soon, there was an atmosphere of revolution.  

Result. SNP rules out tuition fees.

Who said protest never changed anything?  The bill to introduce £9,000 tuition fees in England may last week have passed in Westminster, despite the  demonstrations by students, lecturers and school pupils.  But Scotland is another country, and it look as if the students have had a result here.  The SNP government has now unofficially committed itself to keeping Scotland fee free.  No up front fees, no graduate contribution, no endowment no graduate tax.  Zilch.  In Scotland, higher education will remain open to all, on the basis of ability to learn, not ability to earn. That is the substance of briefings given by Alex Salmond this week.  

Tuition fees CAN be stopped in Scotland.

  What happens now?  The bill to triple student fees in England became law on Thursday,  even as Parliament Square itself was ablaze, and the heir to the throne besieged in his limousine by angry demonstrators.   Is that it?  Will the students now go back to their rooms to study while the nation indulges in the usual orgy of Christmas consumerism?   No way!   The students should not abandon their intifada,  but take it north to Scotland where fees are still free - but perhaps not for long. 

     The 2010 student uprising is the biggest show of popular discontent since the poll tax demonstrations twenty years ago.  The poll tax became law too, but not for long. Mass protests made the law unworkable, and its author, Margaret Thatcher, was brought down by her own cabinet in large part because of the unpopularity of the community charge.    The students can do the same.  They have lost the parliamentary battle, but won the argument.  They must now demand that the Scottish government sticks to its pledge not to reintroduce tuition fees, nor any "graduate contribution" which amounts to the same thing.  A victory in Holyrood will make Westminster think again. The May Parliamentary elections in Scotland should be turned into a referendum on tuition fees.  And a funeral for the Liberal Democrats. 

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

    Sorry, but I am getting heartily sick of the Great Girn, the endless moaning about the weather.  We’ve turned into a  nation of whinging children desperate for someone to blame. Stuff happens.  Weather happens.  But instead of just getting on with it, and using the gift of community to adapt to the challenge, we adopt the mantle of victimhood and start looking for politician to hold responsible. Instead of ‘keep calm and carry on’ it’s find me a lawyer so I can make a spurious negligence claim. 

Calman tax powers are a milestone to Scottish independence, not a millstone for Holyrood.

If there was a twinkle in the eye of Alex Salmond last week, as he scoffed at the new tax powers being offered in the Scotland Bill , it may be because, under the table, he was pinching himself.   I’m pinching myself.  I still can’t quite believe that a Tory-led coalition government in London is introducing the widest and deepest extension of Scottish constitutional powers since devolution, even if they are flawed. 

Swinney didn't lie about tartan tax

 The world held its breath as conflict erupted between North and South Korea; Ireland braced itself for civil unrest as its government imposed a crushing austerity budget;  British students and school six formers took to streets and occupied universities over tuition fees.  And Holyrood spent the afternoon rowing over the unspent cost of collecting a tax, the SVR, that no one intends to raise and is about to be abolished. Cover up? Abuse of power?  Grow up. 

Gray man v ginger rodent

 Just Iain Gray’s luck.  He makes his best conference speech since becoming leader, and is upstaged by a ginger rodent.  Harriet Harman’s extraordinary attack on the Liberal Democrat finance minister, Danny Alexander, as a redheaded rat inevitably stole the headlines at the Scottish Labour Conference in Oban.  There was no way that the Iain Gray was going to be able to top that.  But he did at least try.  

CSR: forget it, Osborne isn't serious

 It’s one of Westminster’s favourite cliches that a budget that looks good the day it is delivered usually falls apart by the end of the week.  George Osborne’s CSR lasted about four hours.  That was how long it took the Institute for Fiscal Studies, to contradict the central claim that the deficit reduction plan was progressive and shared the burden equally across all income groups.  It clearly wasn’t.  It didn’t take a genius to work this out since most of the cuts announced last week hit people on benefits,  who are by definition the lowest income group. 

   Actually, the unfairness of the spending review isn’t really much of a political worry for the Tories.  They think, and there is ample polling evidence to confirm this, that the British people now have much less sympathy for those at the bottom of the heap than has been the case in the past.  All those press stories of families receiving £95,000 in benefits, plus the fact the welfare budget has risen by 45% in the last ten years, has made us much less soft-hearted as a nation.   The latest YouGov/Sun poll confirms this, indicating that nearly 60% believe the welfare cuts were “unavoidable”.  

Osborne's CSR and the ghost of Gordon.

  We were warned in advance that it was going to be the most savage round of public spending cuts since the Geddes Axe nearly ninety years ago. An unprecedented  25-40% reduction in departmental spending.  The state would be reduced to a forest of bleeding stumps, forecast Labour,  after George “slasher” Osborne had swung his Condem chopper.   In the event, the headline cuts in departmental spending were only 19% - which is actually less than the former Labour chancellor, Alistair Darling had planned.  How they guffawed  on the Tory benches as Labour’s shadow chancellor, Alan Johnson tried to respond to one of the cleverest, and arguably the most cynical spending statements since, well, since the days of Gordon Brown.  

    

     George Osborne’s CSR had a remarkable similarity to one of Brown’s classic budget speeches. The hectic delivery,  the gratuitous self-congratulation, the blizzard of spending initiatives from Crossrail to the widening of the A11 around Norwich, which for some reason provoked cheers from Tory benches.  Cuts? What cuts? Pensioners are to keep their winter fuel allowances and free TV licences.  Child benefits for 18 year olds remain. Museums and galleries stay free.  

Broken promises: what would the Greeks have made of it?

As the general election campaign drew to a close in May, I wrote that the political parties were playing a game of bluff with the voters.  They didn’t want to tell us the truth  and we didn’t want to hear.  All of them knew that the deficit was running at around £150bn and that this is represented an extinction level event for many public services.  But they went right on and, well, lied about it.   I have thought carefully about using that word, which is of course unsayable in parliament. But I can’t think of any other way of encapsulating the scale of the misrepresentation. 

   David Cameron promised not to cut child benefits, free bus passes and winter fuel allowances for old people. Well child benefit has gone and just watch the others go in short order.  He also said the Tory plans “didn’t involve an increase in VAT” when they clearly did, for no sooner was Cameron in the door at Number Ten than he announced that VAT would rise in January by 2%.  The Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg also promised not to raise VAT, which he called the “Tory tax bombshell”.  Then he dropped it.

  Yes, all politicians break promises,  but the Coalition has set a new benchmark in infamy.   “No more pointless and disruptive reorganisation of the health service” said David Cameron solemnly, before launching the most radical upheaval in English health care in decades.  Next will likely be  charges for “hotel” costs while people are in hospital.  Then what about road pricing, legal aid, pension taxes...

     However, all of this pales against the LibDem behaviour over tuition fees. Before the election, their MPs actually signed a pact that they would vote against any increase in fees, only Sir Menzies Campbell, the former leader seems willing to honour it.   Vince Cable said upping fees would be a  “disaster”.  Not any more, for in the Browne report he is endorsing the biggest increase in university fees in modern history.  In any other walk of life you would be able to sue people who behaved like this.  And don’t tell me he changed his mind when he ‘opened the books’ - he of all politicians knew exactly how bad the books were.  All that's changed is that he is in government.

Tuition fees - bigger than the poll tax?

   It is one of the most cherished myths of Scottish national identity: the lad o’ pairts.  The image of proud Jock, of peasant stock, striding out of the kailyard with his bag of meal in one hand and his bible in the other. Whistling a Man’s a Man while preparing to take on the  upper classes  thanks to the free Scottish university system.    Like all myths, the “Democratic Intellect”, as George Davie described the Scottish tradition of open access higher education, involves an element of pure fantasy.  Scottish universities in the 19th Century weren’t free, for a start, though fees were very low and most students received bursaries courtesy of the Carnegie Trust.

   Nevertheless, there was some truth in the lad o' pairts myth, and cynics ridicule it at their peril.   At the end the 19th Century,  nearly 25% of Glasgow University students came from manual working class backgrounds, something inconceivable in  the English system,  which was the exclusive preserve of the upper classes.   The belief that higher education should be based on ability learn rather than ability to pay is deeply ingrained in Scottish  culture.  Universities have been seen here as national public institutions which should be mainly financed out of general taxation.  This is confirmed in opinion polls, such as the recent Scotsman/panelbase poll of 1001 Scots which this month showed that two thirds of Scots reject a graduate tax related to earnings.

Now I know why Cameron wears that condom

I’ve never quite understood the cartoonist Steve Bell’s caricature of David Cameron wearing a condom over his head, except for the rather obvious suggestion that he is, well, a male member.  However, following the row over how many children benefit claimants should be allowed to have, I finally do get it.  Vote Tory and stop one.