The euro is not the problem; it is the solution.

   I'm in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with the eurosceptic Telegraph commentator, Jeff Randall, even while he lambasts people like me who supported, and continue to support, the single european currency. He's right that some politicians were profligate fools for believing that monetary union could be achieved without any political union. He's right that the EU allowed Greece to join even though everyone knew it had fiddled its figures. He's also right that voters were deluded that debt fuelled consumption was the path to prosperity.

  But wait a minute. It wasn't the fools in Brussels who believed that debt was the way to prosperity. In fact, the Bundesbank has been a bulwark against the debt delusion perpetrated primarily by the Anglo Saxon economies of Britain and America.  Who were the countries that allowed the epic real estate bubble to grow unchecked? Not France or Germany for sure.  British politicians have spent years grumbling about the European Central Bank's apparent obsession with monetary stability. British economists have been urging Germany to join the debt delusion by manufacturing domestic inflation. 


  And in Europe, who was it who blocked any political union and urged the EU to extend its boundaries while not deepening its union? It was Britain above all who wanted a `”wider but shallower union”. Randall writes as if Britain played no role in shaping the EU. Wrong. We have been in there all along, keeping alive the flame of economic nationalism.

And now, as it is in danger of falling apart, what has been Britain's response? To begin the great currency war that has propelled the euro economies to crisis. Is Jeff proud of the fact that Britain has debauched its currency in order to gain a short term trading advantage through a devalued pound? As a fiscal conservative, surely this is the kind of short term fix that he loathes. Is quantitative easing, the inflationary Anglo Saxon solution to debt, really preferable to international co-operation? 

And now that everyone is getting in on the act of protectionism, how does he believe the international economic Humpty can be put together again? But yet more American debt-fuelled growth? That appears to be what is on offer. Under the Randall plan, presumably Greece defaults, Germany turns the euro into a new deutschmark; France's banks go bust and America retreats behind tariff barriers.  Meanwhile three trillion of tax payer's money is thrown at a financial system, shaped by the City of London and Wall Street, that has turned into a kleptocracy.


But as I say, I actually find I agree with Randall's conclusion. Let me quote him in full: “This illusion of political primacy is perpetuated because a confession of impotence would not only undermine the worth of those in power but also expose the euro's fatal flaw: monetary union without fiscal union is a marriage that weds the prudent to the profligate with no control over the latter's spending” .  He is dead right there.  There is no solution without 'more Europe'.

Without increased monetary and economic union, the countries of the world face a stark choice. Either mutually assured destruction through economic nationalism or a massive debt splurge through existing international agencies like the IMF. But the danger of the splurge is that it entrenches moral hazard. All those French banks who lent to Greece will feel an immense sense of relief that they can return to making irresponsible but lucrative loans to countries and households who can't pay it back secure in the knowledge that the tax payer will bail them out.

And countries like Italy and Spain will give up trying to pay their debts or manage their economies because they know that they will also get bailed out, just so long as they borrow enough money they can't repay. . That isn't an alternative. That is economic anarchy. At least the euro was an attempt to resolve these problems through human reason rather than the law of the jungle.   

So is this a Great Depression? Pt Deux

    Economists cannot predict the future; most can't even predict the past.   The dismal truth is that no one really knows what is going on - economists, politicians, historians all pretend to have some grasp of events but are only fooling themselves when they aren't trying to fool others.  Journalists at least don't pretend to have any special insight, but they are also prisoners of the current financial or political orthodoxy - that's when they haven't actually bought up by one or other vested interest.  (They know who they are). 

    But it seems reasonable to look to the past if only to rule out what might be happening in the present.  So, we have to look at the 1930s, because that was the last time the world faced a stock market crash linked to a crisis of banking insolvency,  allied to a burst real estate bubble.  Then America dominated the world economy, and what happened there pretty much defined the 1930s.  Those of a nervous disposition should look away now.

So, is this a now Great Depression or what?

  So, we are in the midst of another global financial shock.  Stock markets bungee jumping.  Dire warnings from the IMF.  Countries collapsing under the weight of their own debts.  Unemployment rising as real incomes fall (except of course for the rich who do well whatever happens).  What do we call this?


  Is this still the Great Recession, that followed the 2008 banking crash?   Is it the Great Contraction, as 30 years of accumulated debt finally has to be paid?  Or is it, as some forecast as early as 2007, another Great Depression?. Well, none of these terms is very precise.  Recession is just two quarters of negative growth, and there is no accepted measure of economic depression.  But I can't think of any better way of describing it.  


It is four years since Northern Rock became the first major retail British bank to suffer a run on its deposits since the Second World War. Since then, we have had a secular decline in living standards, a return of inflation, growing unemployment and part time working. There has been a collapse of small businesses, an investment strike and two rounds of quantitative easing - money printing.   Britain lost about 6% of output in the 2008-9 crash and while this hasn't been made up, the economy has been growing, albeit painfully slowly.  The massive fiscal stimulus delivered by the G20 in 2008-9 has done its work.  But it appears that the same problems are recurring: a failure of banks to lend, investment strike by corporations.  


   This does look very like 1933.  After the Great Crash of 1929, the stock markets recovered quite quickly, and a lot of people made money fast.  Everyone thought that it was back to business as usual.  It wasn't and by 1933 all the nasty symptoms were returning.  This was when Roosevelt finally grabbed the economy by the scruff of the neck. 


   I think we have been through a period of denial.  After 2008, nothing really changed.  In Britain we handed the banks £1 trillion of public money and essentially told them to get on with it.  There were no banking reforms.  Governments didn't want to know. They wanted the good times to roll again, and they thought that by stuffing the banks with taxpayer's money, all would be well again.  No one was prosecuted for fraud, even though most of our financial institutions had been involved in misrepresenting the value of assets and selling financial products which they knew to be highly risky. 


  The Union Bank of Switzerland story tells it all.  There is no better parable for the failure of governments to realise the nature of the 2008 banking crisis and the sheer irresponsibility of regulators in failing to do anything about it.  Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.  

Quick - send for Gordon. Or anyone who knows what they're doing

 Quick. Someone send for Gordon. What is signally lacking in this new and most dangerous phase of the Great Contraction is someone, anyone,  who seems to command the authority to get political leaders to focus on resolving the crisis.  In 2008, at the London G20, Gordon Brown banged heads together and got the international community to launch a co-ordinated multi-trillion dollar stimulus that prevented the recession becoming a depression.  There seems to be no one around with either the will or the vision to do this in 2011. Which is very unfortunate for the world.

     What is most striking about this latest twist to the financial crisis is that it is currently largely political rather than financial.  Yes, there are problems about Greek debt and deficits, and there is a great "deleveraging" taking place - that's a euphemism for paying debts.  But we should not be facing  the melt-down that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank in 2008, when banks stopped lending to each other and world trade froze.   Most of the Western banks have either been nationalised or recapitalised.  There is economic restructuring certainly in countries like Britain with over-valued real estate and a bloated and parasitic financial "services" sector.  But apocalypse it isn't. 

  Germany has been an economic powerhouse of export led recovery.  Asia is growing faster than ever. Corporate profitability is high - or was before the banks stopped lending - and there is no shortage of capital around.  It's just that it is being hoarded by banks and companies because they have become gripped by fear.  Or rather fear of fear.  This is the moment when leadership becomes absolutely crucial to world events.  

As Jim O'Neil of Goldman Sachs put it to the BBC yesterday:  "The thing that really brought the world to a better place in 2008 was genuine collective action involving both the developed and the developing world through the G20"  Perhaps this sense of collective action will happen at this weekend's meeting of the G20 in Washington.  But I'm not holding my breath.  There is an ugly mood of economic nationalism sweeping through Europe - mainly focussed on the "sun-Med" states or the PIGS - Portugal Italy Greece and Spain.  People are fed up with bail outs and hand outs and constant .  Perhaps this is the moment the real crisis begins. 

9/11 Origins - How America joined the bad guys

 Everyone remembers where they were when the towers came down. I was in my attic writing a column for the Herald about Tony Blair's forthcoming confrontation with the Trades Union Congress in Brighton. I turned on the television to catch the live conference coverage and found that I was watching a Hollywood disaster movie. If only.

Out of interest, I dug out the articles I filed in the immediate aftermath of the greatest terrorist atrocity in history.. “President Bush's first instinct after yesterday's attack”, I wrote on 12/11/ 2001, “will have been to launch massive and unpitying retaliation - except that he has no obvious target. Osama Bin Laden? The Taleban? Afghanistan? The West Bank? Iran? Iraq?”. I went on: ”An unbridled pursuit of revenge would turn the world into a vastly more dangerous place...History will not excuse America if it now inflicts indiscriminate violence and terror against innocent peoples because they happen to live in the Middle East or Asia, have a brown skin or follow the Islamic faith”. America then proceeded to do precisely that.

Why the absence of communism is behind the financial crisis.

 It is a convenient myth of democratic politics that we elect people who know what they are doing.  We don't. We elect people who look good, can raise a lot of campaign funds and sound plausible.  They might be good; then again they might be smooth talking scoundrels like Tony Blair who, it has emerged, made several trips to Libya after he left office to help Col Gadaffi with his investment plans.  Nice of him.  

   Then there is the priapic Silvio Berlusconi, a walking disaster area, whose inability to keep his zip fastened is matched only by his skills at economic management.   He reportedly called the German Chancellor, Angela Merkell, an "Unf@@@able lardarse" which is probably mild compared to what she calls him.   Unfortunately for the bunga bunga man, Italy looks like being the latest casualty of the rolling sovereign debt crisis, following its credit downgrade, and will be seeking financial help from the lardarse herself.  Then Silvio will be F@@@ed.

Murphy review of Scottish Labour leaedership. Same difference?

  It may be the biggest overhaul in 90 years, but I'm not entirely sure what has changed in the Murphy Review of the constitution of the Scottish Labour Party.   Mr Murphy says that he intends to make devolution a reality within the party.  "From now on, whatever is devolved to the Scottish Parliament will be devolved to the Scottish Labour Party".  


  But that has explicitly been the case since the Scotland Act in 1998.    The Scottish Labour Party - to use the name Donald Dewar entrenched  - publishes its own manifesto for Scottish elections, and were Labour not already devolved internally it would never have been able to enter into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats in Holyrood.  


     Is clear that Ed Miliband will still be the Labour Leader, pre-eminent in all 'non-devolved issues'.  Since controversial issues like corporation tax, oil revenues and the constitution are not devolved, this still leaves control pretty much where it is now - in Westminster.   Indeed, these reforms will have to be ratified by the UK Labour Party Conference, and the Party leader - Ed Miliband. 




     The Scottish leader of the Scottish Labour Party will now be the leader of the Scottish Party, which is certainly a step in the right direction.  But the centre of power in the party still resides in Westminster with the UK leadership.  The review does not appear to set up a separate federal party in Scotland as has been recommended by the former labour First Minister Henry McLeish.  


   The biggest change will be to allow MPs to stand for the leadership, which is probably a good idea, since no one in the Scottish Parliament seems to be particularly capable or interested in leading the Scottish party.  But it will play massively into Alex Salmond's hands if the next leader is a Labour MP like Tom Harris - and he appears to be the only one interested in throwing his hat in the ring since Mr Murphy and ministers like Douglas Alexander are uninterested.  I agree with Henry McLeish that the leader should be an MSP. 


 As for setting up a "political strategy board", realigning constituency party boundaries and opening an office in Edinburgh - I think the scale of Labour's electoral defeat requires something more than a rearrangement of deckchairs.  This is not a move to rename Labour in Scotland, or create a new party as has been proposed for the Tories by their leadership candidate, Murdo Fraser. Strange that the Scottish Tories seem to  be making all the running in Scottish politics right now. 

The Big Optimistic Case for the Union.

     Another review of the Barnett Formula.  Just what we need, as Scotland slips into a treble dip recession. I think that probably makes six reviews of Scottish spending since the Tory Scottish Secretary, Michael Forsyth, started publishing the GERS figures on spending in Scotland, which was supposed to resolve the matter once and for all.  It never did. 

    Alex Salmond seems to have ignored the call, just as he seems to have ignored the Treasury's demolition job on the Scottish Government's case for "repatriating" corporation tax.  Actually, I have some sympathy for Treasury Man in this particular row.  Cutting corporation tax would mean a the loss of a large chunk of an independent Scotland's revenues.  Unless you subscribe to the neo-liberal view that cutting taxes always increases revenues.  That might happen if the Scottish economy were to be galvanised into new business formation.  But there is no evidence that a simple cut in ACT would achieve this - even if Europe were to allow Scotland to go down the Irish route of 12% business taxes which is highly doubtful.  Many other EU countries resent the "fiscal dumping" implied by Ireland's tax policy.  

    Still.  This does not amount to a coherent case against independence, and nor does it answer the fundamental question of how Scotland can retain capital and investment against the relentless pull of London and the South East.  There need to be some oountervailing measures introduced, otherwise Britain's over centralisation will continue unchecked and Scotland will be reduced to a peasant economy based on tourism and whisky.  

Tramageddon: Swinney steps in.

   What is infuriating about the people who are supposedly running the civic administration of Scotland's capital city, is that they seem unable to accept responsibility for their actions.  After the Finance Secretary, John Swinney, refused to accept their plan to pay three quarters of a billion on a tram service that goes nowhere near any of Edinburgh's population, and has already caused three years of disruption, they eagerly voted down their own decision of only ten days ago. Oh yes, they said collectively, it was a ludicrous proposal and none of us had anything to do with it.  It was all the other lot.  I'm beginning to wonder if the only way to get someone to take charge is to bring in a mayor.  At least then the council tax payers of Edinburgh would at least know whom to blame. 

The only people who are going to try Abdelbaset al-Megrahi are the Libyan people themselves.

   They seek him here, they seek him there.  The hunt for the man convicted of murdering 270 people in Pan Am 103 in 1988 Britain's, Abdelbaset al Megrahi, continues.  He's not at his mansion in Tripoli, though neighbours claim he was there untll very recently - scotching one of the more fanciful rumours about the Lockerbie Bomber: that he's already dead and that a body double has been sitting in at Gaddafi's rallies.  But what to do when they find him?   There are reports that Libya's new government is reluctant to extradict him because he is a member of Gaddafi's clan.  American politicians and commentators are calling for his capture - dead or alive. It shouldn't be too difficult to locate a dying man in a wheel-chair in a war zone.  But when he is apprehended - the only people with the right to try him again are the people of Libya. 

If society is broken, who broke it?

  If society is broken, who exactly broke it?  If there is a moral vacuum in society who sucked the air out of it?  If people are out for themselves, who has set the bench-mark of selfishness?   Iain Duncan Smith says on Today that "we all need to put our house in order".  But who exactly is fixing the roof?  MPs made huge sums of money out of abusing abusing their expenses, and the vast majority got away with it.  The bankers who wrecked the economy out of greed and short termism, have been rewarded with huge sums of public money.  The sections of the press that crow loudest about the need for law and order and respect for authority turn out to have been engaging in illegality on an industrial scale.  If it is time to "make life hell" for the hoodies, as the government is promising,  when is fire and brimstone going to land on the City of London, the Houses of Parliament,   the offices of Wapping?

   Remove benefits from young rioters, say petitioners.  But when are the politicians going to give back the tens of thousands in capital gains they made out of flipping second homes?  What about removing the bonuses bankers have been awarding themselves without any moral or financial justification?  Why is it that the only person who has been punished in the News International phone hacking affair been the comedian who threw a pie in the face of Rupert Murdoch?  

  These aren't mere debating points.  Society breaks from the top down.  You cannot punish those below while those at the top are exonerated.   You cannot lecture people on their responsibilities when those at the top show none at all.    

If the response to these disturbances is purely to crack down on the dispossessed, single mothers, benefit claimants then there will only be more violence. Governments govern only by consent of the governed.  Or else we have Leviathan.

    Mindless violence is never totally mindless.  Many of the rioters do have a moral universe, do have a sense of justice, and feel that middle class society has lost it.  Look at the unemployment rates in the constituencies that were set ablaze.  Almost half of young black men in some inner city boroughs are unemployed.  They are locked out of the consumer society which taunts them from billboards and MTV.  The roots of this problem are blindingly obvious.  


 And no - that doesn't make it right to riot.      

Riots always happen under the Tories.

  'Nothing excuses violence/it's all about the cuts'.  'Parents are to blame/society is to blame' The riots are the legacy of the Labour years/ riots always happen under the Tories'.  It's time we moved on from this sterile party political exchange.   Of course violence is inexcusable and has to be tackled by a robust policing, but that doesn't mean you can detach the riots form social circumstances in which they arise - in particular the lack of jobs and opportunities available to young males in inner cities.  We all share responsibility for social unrest by the dispossessed, but it would be ludicrous to ignore the role played by poor parentlng in breeding a generation of nihilistic young people who destroy their own neighbourhod.  Urban unrest has no party affiliation, and rather than scoring points, the politicians need to demonstrate that they are capable of rising above their own narrow interests. 

Financial crisis: too few consumers

   On Friday morning Google offered me one of their irresistible targeted ads when I punched 'financial crisis' into the search box. “The year 2008 marked the last of God's warnings to mankind” announced the blurb for a book called Gods Final Witness, “and the beginning of a countdown to the final three and one half years of man's rule that will end on May 27, 2012”. This was only marginally less apocalyptic than the commentary on the financial pages.

  GFC2, it's being called – Great Financial Crisis 2. The recovery was illusory. Politicians are all fools. You can't trust no one no more. Grab a bag of gold and a shotgun and head for the hills. Financial panics are not supposed to happen in August – they do now. The Dow Jones lost an entire year's earnings in one day on Thursday. Some called for David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg cut short their summer holidays. Though how that would have halted the panic wasn't clear.

Things can only get better.

  Britain is under attack from within by gangs of feral youth who are torching their own neighbourhoods.  America is being crushed by a debt mountain of its own making.   Spain and Italy are sinking beneath the waves; Greece is on fire; Norway recovering from mass murder. The Arab Spring has been drowned in Syrian blood. In Scotland, teenage mothers are smoking themselves to death; students are being advised to sell their kidneys; house prices are collapsing. Has there ever been a summer of woe like this one? Give us a break guys!

And yes, I know that it sounds simple-minded to be looking on the bright side when there's so much misery around. Hasn't the Prime Minister just make a bit of a fool of himself with his attempts to promote a happiness index? Along with his top adviser, Steve Hilton, who suggested that cloud-bursting technology could be used to make the weather better. No – no one can tell us to be happy, especially when some of us are never happier than when miserable.  However, we can – with an effort of will – take stock of our situation and realise that things aren't half as bad as they seem. 

   The riots have been disturbing and frightening for many people, and three young men have died in tragic circumstances after being mown down by a car.  But let's get that in perspective.  Under the circumstances, it is astonishing that there weren't far more fatalities.  I'm not trying to diminish the tragic loss of life in Birmingham, but in the same week there were hundreds of people killed in road traffic accidents.  We criticise the police, rightly, for standing idly by.  But did we really want a bloodbath, plastic bullets, broken heads?  Some of those who are calling for a crack down by police should remember the appalling race riots that disfigured our cities in the 1980s.  I for one would rather live in a society where the police erred on the side of restraint than became like an army of occupation. 

I wasn't going to write about the Norwegian massacre because it has rather fallen from the front pages – then I realised that was precisely the point. Had it been the al Qaeda atrocity that many initially suspected, things would've been different. Today's press would've been dominated by commentary about 'Norway's 9/11' and the 'New Nordic Front in the War on Terror'. We would no doubt be told that there was now 'nowhere to hide' from Islamic fanatics.

“Is Scotland next” the red tops would've asked, as they picked over David Cameron's latest security review. We would be told that the Glasgow Airport bombing four years ago should have alerted us to a change in the modus operandi of international terror. Columnists would have been arguing that it is because 'politically correct' countries like Norway are so naïve about multiculturalism that they have become vulnerable targets for Islamic fanatics. Rebekah Brooks had she still been a Murdoch editor, would have flown to the scene offering free mobile phones to the victims' parents.

We were wrong about Megrahi - for all the right reasons.

Sometimes in life, you just have to admit that you got it wrong. With hindsight it was a mistake to release the Lockerbie bomber Adelbasset ali al Megrahi on compassionate grounds in 2009. The Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, did the right thing by the tenets of Scots law. He thought long and hard and, on the basis of medical advice that al Megrahi had three months to live, he made the wrong call. So did I, by the way, so I'm not exercising 20/20 hindsight here.

Why was it wrong? First of all, because of the impact on the Lockerbie victims' families, who have had to endure two years of seeing al Megrahi celebrated as a national hero by Col Gaddafi's murderous regime in Tripoli. He has become a potent symbol of defiance by the regime against Western “imperialism”. He was paraded again this week in the latest show of strength by the Libyan dictator. Of course, we didn't know in 2009 that we would be at war, effectively, with Gaddafi but Megrahi has now turned into a major propaganda asset for the enemy.

Damage has also  been done to Scotland's image in America and the rest of the world and it has made our justice system look absurd. Kenny MacAskill took guidance on Scots law on compassionate release, but he was not bound to follow it. In retrospect he should have said that this involved such an exceptional crime, under such extraordinary circumstances, that it would be morally deficient, if legally correct, to release him from jail. Megrahi could have been allowed compassionate time with his family in Scotland, while still a prisoner.

Get over it - the euro is here to stay

 Another week, another crisis in the eurozone. Another last minute deal and another hundred billion or so tossed at the bankrupt Greek government. It's an odd way to run a whelk stall, and makes you wonder how long it can go on. The consensus among the British press and politicians this week is that it can't and that the euro is a busted flush. Ha ha – told you so.

Mind you, British opinion formers have confidently predicted the demise of the euro repeatedly over the last few years and the single currency somehow survives. And if you go abroad this summer you'll find that the euro is not only still around, it's worth a great deal more than the pound. It remains one of the world's reserve currencies, which suggests that someone somewhere still has confidence in it.

So, has anything changed after this latest bail out – the second “final solution” in six months? And should we bother about it anyway, since Britain declined the euro?. Well, I think something pretty fundamental has changed through this sovereign debt crisis, if only because the countries of Europe have looked into the abyss and decided that there is no alternative but to keep the euro almost at any cost. We can't go on basing policy on the complacent expectation that the euro will somehow go away. It won't.

On Thursday, President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel agreed once again to save Greece from default by another massive loan. In the financial world this is called “kicking the can further down the street” - i.e. putting off the inevitable Greek default. Though it's a pretty long street and a pretty big can. Greece will now be able to borrow at 3.5% over 30 years, instead of at 16% for 30 months as it does now. Greek bonds now have the backing of France and Germany – two of the greatest industrial powers on the planet.

Sorry guys: regulation is the only way to restore faith in journalism.

 Throughout the phone hacking scandal, I've noted the parallels with the financial crisis in 2008. The concentration of market power in fewer and fewer hands; the negligence of regulators; the complicity of politicians; and the ultimate crisis of a conglomerate that was “too big to fail” - for Lehman Brothers read Rupert Murdoch's News International. The banks cut corners, out-sourced risk, relied on dubious practices conducted by third parties in the so called “shadow banking system”. Sound familiar?

Rupert Murdoch's people had followed the same path – explosive growth, moral abdication, using shadowy underworld figures to hack phones and blag information from official sources. Murdoch's halting appearance before the Commons select committee this week even reminded me a little of the octogenarian former head of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, when he faced Congress in 2009 and admitted that he had been humbled by a crisis he failed to foresee.

No, I'm not apologising for Rupert Murdoch here, nor suggesting that he is to be equated to a central banker. His defence that he knew nothing about how his own newspapers acquired their greatest scoops, echoed by his son James and former Sun and News of the World editor, Rebekah Brooks, is patently ridiculous. As ridiculous as bankers like Fred Goodwin of RBS not knowing about sub-prime mortgage bonds. But I make the comparison because a number of commentators have been saying that the hacking scandal is trivial compared with other grown up issues, like the debt crisis sweeping Europe right now. I don't think it is trivial because it is a product of the same complex of lax regulation, political hypocrisy and naked self-interest.

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.