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. 

Iraq: Labour need a truth and reconciliation commission

 So, it did turn into a ‘geek’ tragedy after all, at least for David Miliband.  Just as we were all digesting Brother Ed’s rather dull but worthy address to conference on Tuesday, and thinking that Labour had  put the past behind it, a huge, ugly crack suddenly appeared in the facade of Labour conference unity.   In a fatal lapse of self control, the defeated David  turned to admonish his colleague, the deputy leader, Harriet Harman, for applauding Ed Miliband’s admission that the Iraq war had been wrong.  “Why are you clapping?” said Miliband D,  “You voted for it”. 

  Those eight words echoed around Manchester as David Miliband walked out of the shadow cabinet, the only action he could have taken.   Had he remained, there was a real risk that a kind of civil war could have broken out.  David Miliband wasn’t the only former minister to be outraged by Ed’s condemnation of their collective action over Iraq.   Every member of  the shadow cabinet  is going to have to submit to the 'were-you-clapping' test now brother Ed has finally admitted on their behalf that Iraq was a disaster.  How many, like Harriet Harman, privately agreed with him?   Why did they allow it to happen?  

Who will lead Labour's Star Trek convention? Spock or Sulu

 Watching the five Labour leadership candidates enter the final straight this week,  I couldn’t help remembering David Cameron’s wicked quip about a Star Trek convention.  There is indeed a hint of the Starship Enterprise with David Miliband as Mr Spock - austere, rational, borderline autistic,  and Ed Balls as Captain Kirk - bumptious, over-promoted, lacking emotional intelligence.  Diane Abbott is of course  Uhura, interjecting every now and then from left field and being largely ignored. I see Ed Miliband as navigator Lieutenant Sulu, who knows the way ahead but sometimes has difficulty explaining it..  Andy Burnham, like Ensign Pavel, is the one whose name no one can remember. 

  The Labour hopefuls shouldn’t be too bothered -  the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, always regarded it as a political allegory.  Nevertheless, the sense that the entire leadership cadre of New Labour are not on the planet is something of a handicap in an election race before a very down to earth media. But what is it about the Labour leadership candidates that makes them seem just a little other-wordly?  I think it stems from the fact that all five are essentially policy wonks, career politicians who've risen to prominence in a party that has lost touch with  any kind of mass popular movement. 

Vince is about as Marxist as Adam Smith

 ‘’Vince Cable “not a Marxist”’said a BBC headline yesterday on the eve of  his speech to the Liberal Democrat conference in Liverpool.  Indeed, he is not.  Vince Cable is an economic conservative, who has long advocated free market capitalism and cutting the state.  . Cable was a prominent contributor to the LibDem “Orange Book” which argued  for market reforms in the public sector, including the NHS.  He is an enthusiastic advocate of the Chancellor, George Osborne’s deficit reduction programme

Nick Clegg: an apology.

  I suppose I should apologise.  I was one of those McChattering hacks who urged Scottish voters to consider backing the Liberal Democrats, tactically, last May.  Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.  The LibDem surge seemed like a unique opportunity to break the dead hand of the two-party monopoly in Westminster and introduce fair voting. It was time, I said, to bring an end to elective dictatorship once and for all.

    But look where it’s landed us: with the most conservative government in modern times pushing through the most swingeing programme of public spending cuts since the “Geddes Axe” of 1921.  And declaring war on welfare and the NHS (in England at least).  And what have we  Liberal Democrat fellow travellers got in return?  A referendum on the Alternative Vote method of proportional representation, which it isn’t actually proportional and which will very likely be defeated anyway.  Ok , they have got things like scrapping identity cards and a raising of tax thresholds, but these are small beer.  And now Nick Clegg has declared that there is "no future" for the Left in the new, Tory-friendly LibDems.  All those election promises about Trident, taxing the bankers, not increasing VAT, hammering CGT tax avoiders, abolishing tuition fees...all sacrificed in the interest of getting Liberal Democrat bums on cabinet seats. 

Is the Pope really a Catholic?

   So, atheists are Nazis according to Pope Benedict, speaking in Edinburgh today. This is just a little rich coming from a former member of the Hitler Youth. I don't believe that the Pope is or was a Nazi, but I think it was a peculiarly inept and thing to say.  It was offensive, also,  to the majority of people in this country who do not believe in god.   

The Pope's exact words were these:    "Even in our own lifetimes we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.  As we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus a reductive vision of a person and his destiny."  

   This is very dubious history. Adolf Hitler was a Christian, a Catholic who remained so all his life, though he wasn't very devout.  Nevertheless, he repeatedly invoked god and Christianity in his war against "faithless communism" and the jews.   In his Proclamation to the German Nation in February 1933 Hitler said  that "The National Government regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of our national life".  German soldiers were required to wear belts bearing the legend "Gott Mit Uns",   "god with us".  The SS was supposedly based on the Jesuits.  In the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of 1933 Hitler agreed to outlaw secular schools and have all teaching based on faith. 


  Now, just because Adolf Hitler believed in god, I don't conclude that Roman Catholics are Nazis.  But the pontiff really does suggest that atheists are morally responsible for fascism.  Following the remarks from, Cardinal Walter Kaspar, one of the Pope's senior advisers about Britain being "a third world land" full of "aggressive secularists", where Christians are victimised for wearing a cross, it rather suggests that this state visit is turning into a public relations disaster.  The Holy Father and the Roman Catholic leadership is becoming detached from reality. 

Independence - Is that it?

As Alex Salmond’s flagship referendum bill sank beneath the waves last week, there were precious few mourners at the quayside, even amongst the SNP. There were even fewer criers of ‘betrayal’ - though the godfather of fundamentalism, the former SNP deputy leader, Jim Fairlie, remarked that: "at the mention of the word 'independence', a shiver ran through the ranks of the SNP, frantically searching for a spine to run up."

    The opposition parties snorted about broken promises and nails in the coffin of  Alex Salmond’s credibility, but it was pretty routine stuff - as if the abandonment of the independence referendum bill was just another item on the list of lost manifesto commitments along with local income tax, the Scottish Futures Trust and abolishing student debt. But it is much more than that.  Only two years ago, at the height of the SNP honeymoon, people were seriously talking about the momentum towards Scottish independence becoming unstoppable.  August bodies like the Constitution Unit at UCL in London were holding conferences on the mechanics of separation -  one referendum or two? how to split the national debt? It was more or less assumed that an independence referendum would happen, somehow. Not any more  

I have been naked with William Hague

   I can't keep this secret any longer.  It has to get out.  I have been naked, on several occasions, in a room with William Hague, who was also  without clothes.  Yes, I realise that this latest bombshell will re-ignite the whole two-men-in-a-bedroom scandal, but I can no other.  I have to get it off my chest.   I know my phone is tapped but I want to sell my story before they do.  

Poor Tony: domestic abuse drove him to the bottle. A Journey is misery literature for the political classes

  So that explains it:  Tony Blair was pissed half the time.  One of the most extraordinary revelations in the former PM’s foray into confessional literature, “A Journey”, is that he was, by many medical definitions, a problem drinker.  A stiff G and T (3 units) and up to half bottle of wine (5 units) each night put the PM way over the government’s safe limit of 21 units a week.  Did it addle his brain? make him careless? affect his judgement?  Actually, I doubt it. By the standards of his predecessors in Number Ten, notably Winston Churchill who began his day with a large Scotch, had a bottle of  Pol Roger champagne for lunch and kept himself liberally topped up throughout the day, Blair’s imbibing was purely recreational.  However, it is a curious thing to highlight in a political  memoir. 

   But then, as its title suggests, “A Journey”  is a very modern   memoir - aimed at a media culture of confessional womens magazines and celebrity journalism.  What better way to get noticed, and divert attention from the real issues - like Iraq -  than to get onto the therapy couch and admit to having a little bit of a drink problem - just like countless middle class, middle aged men and women.    Just like his hero George W. Bush, in fact -  though Dubya gave up the bottle after he found God.  Tony lied too - and was “manipulative”, he tells us. But always in a good way.Amd of course he never felt comfortable in Scotland because it was Gordon country.

Expenses: MPs in the right, shock.

  MPs were in the doghouse again last week - or should that be the duck house - over  their expenses.  Employees at the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, who process MPs’ expenses claims, say they have been threatened, insulted and abused. Called  “f..ing idiots” and  “monkeys” by irate MPs one of whom described their computerised system as a “f...ing abortion”.  Mind you that’s nothing compared to the language voters used about MPs when their expense abuses became known last May. However, in this case, MPs aren't wholly to blame.  IPSA is being called to put its own house in order

Edinburgh: how "Dodge City" really makes its money.

    Summertime and the living is easy - at least for Edinburgh’s commercial classes.   The Festivals are jumping - heading for two million ticket sales across the 'cultural olympiad'.  The warm weather is stuffing the pockets of hoteliers and those Edinburgh folk who famously decamp for the summer in order to charge inflated rents to festival goers.  Where else could you see a caravan being offered at £800 a week? 

   But it’s not just the Festival that’s putting a smile on the faces of Edinburgh’s business class.  Somehow, the financial crisis that was supposed to turn the capital city into a soup kitchen for bankers seems to have completely passed it by.    Edinburgh house prices rose 20% in the year to February 2010;  unemployment at 3.3% is way below the Scottish average.  New business start ups are up 33%, planning applications are pouring in, commercial property is recovering.  Even the tram chaos seems to be passing, to be replaced by something worse:  an endless traffic jam of new Range Rovers and BMW as Edinburgh’s new money pours into the car showrooms. If you’re looking for austerity, you won’t find it here.

   But there’s a slightly shifty quality to this prosperity - as if the benefiaries feel just a little guilty about it.  One prominent Edinburgh financial commentator has taken to calling Edinburgh “Dodge City”, such has been its ability to side-step the banking collapse, the economic recession and now the government’s austerity drive. The city that was at the centre of the financial cyclone seem to be making a fortune out of it.  But  the catch is that their good fortune is almost entirely built on other peoples’ taxes. 

What goes up... Mobility isn't very social

 I’ve always been just a little suspicious of people who advocate social mobility as a cure for society’s ills, as the answer to  inequality.   It isn’t.    When Nick Clegg said last week that social mobility is “the badge of fairness in society” he is missing the point.  The very image of “social mobility” is one of those loaded metaphors like “housing ladder” which implies that we can can make it to the top if they have enough drive and are given the right opportunity.  This has always been a myth.  

Long Live al Megrahi

    Will the Queen be sending a telegram to Abdel Basset al Megrahi when he reaches a hundred?   

       Has this man no decency?  Doesn’t he realise that by clinging on to life he is daily destroying the credibility of our own Justice Minister, Kenny MacAskill.  Tony Blair - whose ‘deal in the desert’ with the Libyan dictator began the process that led to Megrahi’s release - is in the dock of American opinion. I mean, sales of Blair’s autobiography, The Journey, could seriously be affected.    If only Megrahi could see the distress he’s causing I’m sure he’d top himself. 

Jimmy Reid's failure

 Many and various have been the tributes to Jimmy Reid, hero of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in in 1971.  The  occupation was a success, the yards saved, but politically it was downhill all the way from then on for Scotland’s favourite communist.  I don’t mean that to sound negative or unsympathetic:  Jimmy had a great life and was much loved by friend and foe alike.  He became a national institution: successful journalist, university rector and genuine working class hero.  Latterly, like many on the Scottish left, he gravitated toward nationalism, became an influential voice in the home rule movement and ultimately joined the SNP.   So, no tears necessary, and he wouldn’t want them. He’d want us to reflect instead on the history and politics of his times.  But it’s not a comfortable history for the Left.