Don't believe what you've been told about Quebec.

   The Scottish imprint on Montreal is unmistakeble; it’s everywhere.  The civic coat of arms has a thistle on it. The financial district rings to the names of the Scottish businessmen - Angus, Ballantyne, Cameron, McGill, Torrance, McTavish - who turned this fur trading station on the St Lawrence river into one of the great cities of the world.   The oldest golf club in North America was established here by and for the Scots diaspora. You wonder what Scotland might’ve been like today had these capitalist adventurers never left.

   However, the official language here is not Scots but French and  the politics of the province has been dominated for the last thirty five years by attempts by the Parti Quebecois to turn Quebec into an independent francophone state. To leave the Canadian Federation that was itself founded by a bibulous Glaswegian, John A MacDonald, in 1867.  Quebecers don’t seem to see any contradictions here and celebrate their Scottish connection even while seeking to turn themselves into the new France of North America.  Indeed, the social democratic Parti Quebecois has long sought to identify with the Scottish and Catalan civic nationalist movements, if only to define itself against the more racially-oriented right-wing nationalist movements of Europe like the French National Front of Jean Marie Le Pen.

   Quebecers are immensely proud of their success in turning their  province into the most open and egalitarian region in North America.  Immigration has been encouraged - though newcomers are obliged to send their children to French=speaking schools. Quebec has a welfare state that has largely been immune to the wave of North American neo-liberalism.  Parents enjoy universal daycare at $7 a day per child - that’s about £4.50.  Taxes are higher than in the rest of North America, but no one seems to complain very much about that.  Quebecers fiercely reject the claim, made by Canadian federalists, that the national question and independence referendums have damaged the economic and social fabric.   Economic growth has lagged the rest of Canada in recent years, as has population growth, and there are fears that an ageing population could damage future prospects.   But Quebec living standards have improved greatly relative to neighbouring Ontario over the last thirty years and “La Belle Province” is 17th in the OECD on economic performance and 13th in income per capita.   Looking around prosperous cosmopolitan Montreal, it’s hard to believe the picture painted by UK unionists of Quebec as an introverted and impoverished provincial backwater poisoned by cultural narcissism.  We should be so lucky.

Salmond v. Hope. Politics v. Law.

  The highly personal row between Alex Salmond and the Deputy President of the Supreme Court, Lord Hope, gets more astonishing by the week. Further evidence of the enmity between the Bench and Bute House has emerged in an interview given recently to the Holyrood magazine in which the First Minister accused the former Lord Justice General of Scotland, of allowing “some of the vilest people on the planet” to win compensation from the taxpayer. He suggested that Lord Hope was negligent in his previous role as Lord President of the Court of Session. You may recall, earlier in this 'war of the wigs', the Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, accused the Supreme Court judges of “ambulance chasing” and claiming that the English judges on the Supreme Court learned what they know of Scots law from visits to the Edinburgh Festival.

M'learned Friends are giving as good as they get though. In an address to the Scottish Young Lawyers Association, Lord Hope declared that Scots law was under no threat, except perhaps from parochialism. “Pride in our own system is one thing; isolationism is quite another” he said, “We have much to lose if we were to raise the drawbridge and cut ourselves off from the outside world'. Lord Wallace of Tankerness, the Advocate General for Scotland, then waded in to the affray suggesting that the First Minister hadn't even bothered to read the human rights judgements in question. "A fundamental pillar of our society is the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary”, said the former Deputy First Minister. “Surely Scottish ministers are not telling the courts what to do?”

Heaven forfend! It used to be an offence under Scots law for anyone to criticise or “murmur” a judge. That legal remedy appears to have fallen into disuse, which is just as well because Mssrs Salmond and MacAskill might in sterner times have found themselves under lock and key. But the case of Hope v Salmond explodes one of the convenient fictions of our constitution: that the judicial system and the political system are totally separate and independent, and that judges are somehow above politics. They aren't of course, and never have been. Judges interpret – often in very political ways - laws made by the politicians. And there is always tension between the two, especially when obscure clauses in the Scotland Act 1998 appear to have turned the UK Supreme Court into the final court of appeal in Scottish criminal cases.

Who's afraid of the Supreme Court?

Who's afraid of the Supreme Court?  Some nationalists are worried that judges might stomp all over Scotland's forthcoming independence referendum. The Conservative MP, David Mundell, suggested at the weekend that if the wording of the SNP's question wasn't clear the issue might be put before the UK Supreme Court – the very legal body that aroused the ire of the First Minister, Alex Salmond, for what he called its “aggressive” interventions in Scots law.

Well, in Canada, where I have been this week, the Supreme Court did indeed rule on the wording of the independence referendum in the French speaking province of Quebec in 1998. Not only that, in a landmark ruling that has become internationally recognised as a definitive statement on the rights of secession by disgruntled minorities, it ruled that there was no right at all in international or domestic law for one part of a state to leave unilaterally. And even if independence were to be agreed by the other parts of the state, there would have to be absolute clarity of what the independence question meant, and a substantial majority favour of independence, not just a simple majority. In other words, it isn't in the gift of a “regional” government to decide to break away without everyone else having a say in how it is done.

Welcome to the University of Kerrching

 You must be joking, I thought. £18,000 for a degree at maverick philosopher, Christopher Grayling's, new for-profit university? Why? when, for only £9,000 you can get a degree from Oxford or Cambridge, and in Scotland a degree from one of the best universities in the world, Edinburgh, for nothing. Many of the courses at the “New College of the Humanities” appear to have been taken off the peg from other institutions, and as for the “star” academics, like Professor Naill Ferguson or Richard Dawkins, some of them will only be lecturing a couple of times a year.

But then I stopped laughing, and thought about it for a while. Only a very few students can get into Oxford or Cambridge because of the high entrance qualifications. Edinburgh is twelve times over-subscribed and anyway, you have to be Scottish to get a degree here free – one of the best bargains in history. And anyway, when it comes to education, common sense goes out the window. Parents are prepared to pay ten thousand a year to send a child to one of Edinburgh's private schools, when the education they get there is no better than in the city's excellent state schools, and when  there is strong evidence that students from state schools do better at university. They pay out of a misguided belief that “you get what you pay for”.

So apply the same logic to higher education, and you can just about begin to see that some wealthy parents might buy their mediocre offspring a prestigious degree, taught by celebrity academics. Moreover, for foreign students, £18,000 a year isn't all that steep. At Edinburgh most undergraduate courses cost over £15,000 already and medical students pay up to £33,000 a year. At a reception for international parents at Edinburgh's Playfair Library recently, I commiserated with an American soft-ware engineer having to fork out forty grand for his kids. “Heck no!”, he replied,”Couldn't believe how much less it costs than in the 'States. And look at the place. It's like buying a piece of history”.  

Why stop at only having two referendums on Scottish independence?

The row over the Scottish Secretary, Michael Moore's call for a double-headed independence referendum took me back fifteen years to the torrid summer of 1996 when Labour wrestled with the same problem. Tony Blair had decided that a referendum was required to ensure that a Scottish parliament was indeed“the settled will” of the Scottish people. At a stormy meeting of Labour's Scottish executive in Stirling, the shadow Scottish secretary, George Robertson, as he was then, announced that Labour was minded to have two separate referendums on devolution. The idea was shot down almost as fast as Moore's twinarendum on independence this week. Which only confirms that those who fail to learn from history are condemned to make the repeat the mistakes of the past.

I don't want my twelve year old singing about sado-masochism.

When I first heard it on the car radio, I nearly hit a bus.  “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but whips and chains excite me”.  “S&M”, by the Barbadian popstar, Rihanna, is a celebration of sexual sadism, in which she invites here lover to “give it to me strong”.  Her video depicts life in a fetish bar where everyone is dressed in bondage gear and where the chanteuse whips the customers.  She ends up literally hogtied and half naked saying how much she loves “sex in the air”.

   Now, I’ve been around the block a few times, and I’m all for sexual openness, but I was astonished to learn that this was freely played, even on on BBC radio.  Changed days - I remember when Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s single “Relax” was banned by the BBC for a reference to coitus interruptus which was so oblique I hadn’t even noticed it.  I’m even more astonished that  parents haven’t been talking more about this supposedly playful invasion of sadistic bondage into the lives of young girls who learn these lyrics  by heart.  I’m sorry, but I don’t want to hear pre-teens inviting men to whip them, even if itis 'ironic'.. 

Is it possible to ban sectarianism? Computer says no.

       "Technology has given fresh energy to old hatreds and pustulent sectarianism", Alex Salmond told the Scottish Parliament last week " I will not have people living in fear from some idiotic 17th Century rivalry in the 21st Century".   As a non-religious person, I have always found the Catholic-Protestant rivalry in Scotland incomprehensible.  It divides our football teams, schools, housing estates and seems to meet some existential need in male culture. After a decade in which it appeared to be on the wane, the antique divide is back, in a new and bizarre form, with the sending of letter bombs to prominent Catholics, like the Celtic coach, Neil Lennon and the lawyer, Paul McBride.   Where has it come from? and what need does pustulent sectarianism fulfill?  


   I suspect it is a spurious sense of community that leads many to define themselves in terms of religion.   In a post-industrial society defined by rootless individualism, it gives some alienated young men a sense of belonging, of meaning - at least while they are on the football terraces chanting their sectarian hymns.  But what about the rest of their lives?  Its not as if they are exactly ardent church-goers - the decline in kirk attendance has been so great over the past twenty years that estate agents are now doing a lucrative line in selling old churches.  How many of the young men wearing Rangers colours really understand the doctrinal divisions of the reformation - transubstantiation and all that?  Do they really feel that strongly about the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 that they need to send explosive devices to Catholics in 2011?  
     
   We all abhor sectarianism, and politicians are right to seek to curb the worst forms of it.  But in an age of free speech and Twitter, is it possible to outlaw religious sectarianism?  Look on the internet and you will find no shortage of vile sectarian hatred spewing out on social media, YouTube.  But the singing of sectarian songs is a difficult thing to ban.  After all, many used until recently to be called "rebel songs" and featured in the repertoire of mainstream folk singers.   Similarly, songs like The Sash, which are arguably anti-Catholic, have been around a long time.   I am prevented from discussing other more violently sectarian anthems in this space because, unlike the rest of the internet, I write for a newspaper which has to obey the law.  But it will take approximately four minutes for anyone with a search engine to find violent sectarianism celebrated in song. 

Alex Salmond's acceptance speech.

They always said there’d be days like this.  Having sat through many dismal non-events in the press gallery of the Scottish parliament, it was a relief to see the Scottish parliament rising magnificently to the occasion.  The speeches congratulating Alex Salmond’s on his elective coronation were witty, elegant and thoughtful, without a trace of petty party politicking.  And I’m not excluding the defeated Labour leader, Iain Gray’s effort,  which many observers in the press gallery said was his best ever parliamentary speech. 

   Gray congratulated Alex Salmond on his election landslide which he said marked another stage in  “the coming of age of the Scottish parliament”.  That was a pretty remarkable thing for a defeated  opposition leader to say, but it seemed to reflect the mood of the chamber, and not just among the massed ranks of Scottish National Party MSPs, who seem to have squeezed all others to the margins.   Everyone in the Holyrood debating chamber yesterday could feel “the hand of history” as Tony Blair once put it, on their collective shoulder. Everything has changed, as a result the May landslide, though no one is quite sure in what way, not least the SNP, who are still trying to work out what independence actually means in practice. 

Whatever happened to Unionism?

 Stands Scotland where it did?  Damned if I know.  But it is no longer a country afraid to know itself.  Somehow, the air seems different.  Most Scots I’ve come across in the last seven hectic day,  from the right of the political spectrum as well as the left and all points in between,  seem really rather pleased by last week’s landslide vote for the Scottish National Party.   Or maybe I just haven’t bumped into all those committed unionists who represent majority opinion in Scotland according to the polls.  They seem to be laying pretty low. 

   Yesterday, David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions called on drowsing unionists to get off their backsides and “make an optimistic and uplifting case” for Scotland to stay in the Union. It’s not enough, he said, just to frighten Scots by telling them that “small countries can’t make it on their own”.  Well, he’s got that bit right anyway, even if you could hardly hear the PM for the noise of stable doors banging shut.  It seemed a bit late to be making the case for the Union at the very moment when, in Holyrood, Alex Salmond was leading his 69 MSPs in swearing - somewhat reluctantly - their oath of allegiance to the Crown

 

    Unionism has been caught off guard, we’re told,  and needs to get its act together.  Call in John Reid, Douglas Alexander and Gordon Brown (ok maybe not him) and have them get together in  a big, bold British is Best campaign fronted by David Steel and Charles Kennedy with Malcolm Rifkind and Michael Forsyth bringing up the rear...  But just reading the names tells you that any such a referendum campaign is doomed.   These are all men of the past - heavyweights from a different era.   They aren’t like the wiry young women and men who were taking their seats in Holyrood yesterday and  already sorting out the mechanics of independence. Power has shifted in the last seven days, and the UK already feels a different place. 

That wedding. What was it all about?

So what was that all about? A rather gawky young man married a perfectly presentable young woman, and the nation rejoiced. Well, around half of it did. Some people decided that they wanted to eat in the street - but not many in Scotland, where wedding fever was hard to find. Yet two billion people across the world were watching, we’re told, and there were 8,000 journalists covering the Royal Wedding, leading some commentators to call it the biggest media event in history. Or should that have read the biggest hype in history?

Labour's only hope: a referendum on independence

AS Labour heads for what looks like almost certain defeat in the Scottish Parliament election this week, the recriminations have already begun.

How could Iain Gray have thrown away a clear double-digit lead in the opinion polls in only three weeks? Is there anything he could do in the final days that could turn the tide? Actually, I think there is something that Labour could do, but first we need to understand why things have gone so wrong.

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.