In future the Scottish Tories are going to have to learn to love homosexuals. Well, that’s surely the implications of the historic meeting between the Conservative party chairman, Francis Maude, and the gay pressure-group “Stonewall” on Friday.
I wonder what plans they to follow up the rapprochement with Scotland’s gay community? Will Annabel Goldie be piloting a phone in the Strathclyde Gay and Lesbian Switchboard? Or writing a column on ScotsGay magazine? Might MSP Phil Gallie be offering his services as a mentor to the the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Youth Scotland, which promotes homosexual awareness among young people? Maude made a point of visiting them too to show that Conservatives really have changed - in England at least.
For, most Scottish Tories still believe that introducing young people to gay ideas is practically paedophilia. They used to say that groups like LGBT groomed young people into homosexual ways, which is one reason Tories were so keen on Section 2A, the notorious clause which outlawed the teaching of homosexuality in schools.
The row over Keep the Clause seems like ancient history , but that’s the problem - in their attitudes the Scottish Tories are still living in ancient history. Just look at them: I'm told there are more Tory students these days but the public face is middle aged, middle class and generally male. Crusty lawyers, businessmen and masons, waxing nostalgic for the glory days of Thatcherism over a G and T in the golf club bar.
The “Dave” revolution has left the Scottish Tories cold - in deep freeze even. There’s no way they are going to start going around sympathising with single mothers, gays and greens. They want to get back to the old virtues of tax cuts, family values and law and order, which they see being ripped off them by Labour.
Indeed, I suspect a lot of Tory MSPs secretly yearn to be on Jack McConnell’s side of the Scottish Parliament these days rather than their own touchy-feely compassionate Conservative benches. If they were Labour they could still do macho things like cheer asbos, war on drugs, war on neds, war in Iraq.
Cameron has even deprived the Scottish Tories of their traditional platform as the war party. The Tory leader used his 9/11 address last week to attack American foreign policy, and Britain’s “slavish” pursuit of it. What defeatism! Tories used to have an absolute rule that you don’t question any war while ‘our boys’ are still fighting it - and dying in Afghanistan. It’s the kind of thing that Neil Kinnock used to do!
This is a living nightmare for your average Scottish Tory - an identity crisis, a collective nervous breakdown. Some console themselves with hopes that David Cameron is all front, a walking PR campaign, and that in a couple of years, the mask will slip and the “Liberal Conservative” will reveal himself as a true blue "Neo-Conservative". But I wouldn’t bank on it. As another Tory leader once put it: there is no alternative.
The Cameronians don’t even support cuts in public services any more. It leaves the Scottish Tories little distinctive to say apart from opposition to Scottish Enterprise and cutting Scottish MPs voting rights in Westminster.
OK, the policy of “English votes for English laws” is supposedly under review right now, but the chairman of the the Tory Democracy Commission looking into the West Lothian Question, Kenneth Clarke, has repeatedly said that Scottish MPs should be stopped from voting on English bills in Westminster. In July, David Cameron said he agreed, and that the Speaker should rule certain bills “English only”.
Similarly, Cameron is committed to reviewing the Barnett Formula on Scottish public spending. He promised in his speech in Glasgow that “we wouldn’t fall out about money”, but that remains to be seen. Labour will be able to accuse the Tories of offering Scots nothing but spending cuts and less say in Westminster.
Which doesn’t sound like an election-winning formula to me, or even a survival strategy. The Scottish Tories are already falling into the margins of Scottish politics, with some opinion polls showing them as low as 14%. There is a serious risk that the party could now be on a permanent decline, and that - rather like the Arctic ice cap - they may be gone forever in a generation. Something has to be done and done soon.
The Tories problem - as “Dave” conceded in his Glasgow speech on Friday - is bound up with the “blunders” they made in the 1980s. It was Thatcher’s failure on the Scottish question, plus her introduction of the poll tax to Scotland, that turned Scotland - which, remember, was a Tory country in living memory - forever against them. “Tory” became a four-letter word - it still is. Tories are the pantomime villains of Scottish politics.
They had a chance of a clean break in 1997 after the referendum result resolved the devolution issue once and for all. The Tories could have changed their name to the Peoples Party, or some such phrase, and ridden back to reality as a natural centre-right regional party. They didn’t, and despite insisting that they accepted the new constitutional arrangement, they didn’t change their political character.
Now, new Labour has swept in and taken law and order populism from them. David Cameron is washing his hands of them - unless they turn themselves into liberals, which they won’t. Many English nationalists in the Tory party want rid of Scotland altogether because in England the Conservatives have a majority of votes.
The Scottish Tories now have one chance and once chance only to get back in the race. They should accept the logic of devolution - as the former Scottish Secretary, Michael Forsyth saw it - and opt for independence. Many Conservatives in Westminster continue to believe that independence is the rational option for Scotland and preferable to the present half way house.
It wouldn’t necessarily mean they cease to be unionists. The Scottish Tories could call it “Independence in the UK” - maintaining the Crown, flag, currency and armed forces, but giving the Scottish parliament responsibility for its own affairs, across the entire range of domestic policy, and raising its own revenues.
Standing on your own feet, spending only what you earn, loving your country and uniting under the flag - these are enduring Tory virtues. If the Scottish Conservatives turned into the Scottish National Conservatives they could tap into the groundswell of support in Scotland, which now includes much of the business community, calling for a Scottish parliament with full tax powers.
The alternative is oblivion. Only something as radical as what David Cameron is doing in England will work in Scotland. By adopting civic nationalism, the Tories could remove forever the taint that they are “the English Party”. And Scottish Conservatism could finally come in from the cold.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Negotiating Trident away isn't such a daft idea
Jack McConnell can’t win. If he speaks about important moral issues like nuclear defence, he is attacked for getting above himself. If he avoids the issue, on the grounds that defence is not a responsibility of the Scottish Parliament, he is accused of moral cowardice.
Well, increasingly, on issues like asylum, immigration, Trident, Jack McConnell is prepared to speak out, and I think he should be congratulated for that - even by people who disagree with what he has to say. Last week he started a serious debate about the role of nuclear weapons in the age of global terrorism, addressing the concerns of the church leaders whose “Long March For Peace” arrived in Glasgow yesterday.
The FM, who was a unilateral nuclear disarmer in the 1980s, said that now believed that Trident should be used constructively in multilateral negotiations with countries like Iran who are trying to get into the nuclear club.
Jack McConnell was accused of “stupidity” by his Westminster colleagues for daring to discuss the uses of Trident at First Minister’s Question Time. How naive! How presumptuous! How dare this ridiculous little man intrude on these matters which are none of his concern!
An anonymous official in the foreign office was quoted as saying the idea of using Britain’s nuclear deterrent as a bargaining chip in arms talks was “completely ridiculous”. That the policy of the British government was to put pressure on Iran, not do some kind of deal.
But the idea certainly isn’t stupid or ridiculous - it is still the policy of the British Labour Party to use nuclear weapons in multilateral negotiations on arms reduction. Or at any rate this formula, which replaced the old unilateralism of the 1980s, has never been formally revoked by Labour. Now, these multilateral deals were intended to be with countries which already possessed nuclear weapons, rather than ones, like Iran, which are trying to acquire them. However, the principle is essentially the same.
It is certainly worth looking at, and the Chancellor, Gordon Brown has already looked at it. We know this because Brown had a number of in depth conversations on the matter with the late Robin Cook before the former Labour Foreign Secretary’s tragic death on a Scottish hillside in 2005. Brown spoke movingly at Cook’s funeral, and it was widely believed that, had Cook lived, he would have had a place in Brown’s cabinet.
In his final years, Cook had become a dedicated advocate of phasing out Trident. Moreover, he believed that Britain could become a moral force in the world by virtue of the manner in which we disarmed. Trident is an expensive anachronism, a deterrent which no longer deters, totally unsuited to the challenges faced by international terrorism. You can’t launch-multiple warhead nuclear missiles, designed to destroy cities, at al Qaeda or the Taleban. It would mean blowing up Pakistan as collateral damage.
As it is, the Vanguard submarines, which are of course based at Faslane in the Clyde, go out on ocean jollies where they cruise around a bit and then come home when they get bored. They can’t take part in exercises or war games, because there is no known military contingency for which they could exercise. The missiles are no longer targeted anywhere, because Vladimir Putin wouldn’t like the idea that finger trouble could obliterate Moscow, St Petersburg and Tashkent in about forty minutes. The idea of renewing this system at a cost of 30 billion is an offence against reason.
The only justification for keeping such a weapon, in Cook’s eyes, was to use it in arms decommissioning talks, rather like the ones that ended the war in Northern Ireland. That might seem fanciful, but nuclear arms reduction is not impossible. South Africa gave up her nuclear weapons after the fall of apartheid, and Ukraine did the same after the fall of Communism. Argentina and Brazil dropped their nuclear programmes after negotiating a non-nuclear pact.
It’s not inconceivable that there could be a similar pact between Russia and China, and between India and Pakistan. But it take someone to get the ball rolling, to show the world that the west really is serious about eliminating nuclear weapons from the world.
Brown is an internationalist and, unlike Tony Blair, an intensely moral individual. In the age of climate change and global warming the last thing the world needs is further proliferation of nuclear weapons. Yet in the present stand off between the Muslim world and the West, when even the Pope can provoke the wrath of Islam, there is a terrible danger of this clash of civilisations going nuclear.
Following the disastrous invasions of Iraq and the Lebanon, a nightmare vision emerges of an Islamic bomb facing a Christian bomb. Iran is determined to acquire nuclear weapons and argues, not unreasonably, that it is surrounded by nations that already possess them - India, Pakistan, Israel. If the logic of deterrence applies to us, then it applies equally to them.
It is hypocrisy for the West to lecture Iran on non-proliferation, and threaten invasion, when America and Britain are developing their own new generation of nuclear weapons, and making no effort whatever to dispose of their existing ones. We are in breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which calls on nations to dismantle their own nuclear arsenals. This hypocrisy is clear to the entire Arab world, and it will make their determination to acquire nuclear weapons all the greater.
Brown is, of course now committed to the renewal of Trident. But he could use this an opportunity to downsize our nuclear deterrent, to make it compatible with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. If he did this as part of negotiations with the Muslim world, he could make a huge impression on history.
Only if we address this moral question of nuclear equity does disarmament in the Middle East become a possibility. In a few years, it may be too late. It may be wishful thinking, but I suspect Brown - like McConnell - may be thinking right now about whether it would be possible to use the nuclear deterrent, constructively, as a form of bargaining with so-called rogue nations, to persuade them to put their own arsenals ‘beyond use’. It worked in Northern Ireland.
There’s some evidence that the chiefs of staff would not be unhappy at the prospect of saving the 4% of the military budget that goes on Trident and using it to buy something more useful - like decent boots and rifles and armoured cars in Afghanistan.
Brown is an internationalist and has already shown his concern for world peace and the alleviation of poverty. He is one of the few politicians on the planet who can speak on equal terms with the IMF and the wretched of the earth. Perhaps he should listen to the McConnell doctrine. It’s surely worth a shot.
Well, increasingly, on issues like asylum, immigration, Trident, Jack McConnell is prepared to speak out, and I think he should be congratulated for that - even by people who disagree with what he has to say. Last week he started a serious debate about the role of nuclear weapons in the age of global terrorism, addressing the concerns of the church leaders whose “Long March For Peace” arrived in Glasgow yesterday.
The FM, who was a unilateral nuclear disarmer in the 1980s, said that now believed that Trident should be used constructively in multilateral negotiations with countries like Iran who are trying to get into the nuclear club.
Jack McConnell was accused of “stupidity” by his Westminster colleagues for daring to discuss the uses of Trident at First Minister’s Question Time. How naive! How presumptuous! How dare this ridiculous little man intrude on these matters which are none of his concern!
An anonymous official in the foreign office was quoted as saying the idea of using Britain’s nuclear deterrent as a bargaining chip in arms talks was “completely ridiculous”. That the policy of the British government was to put pressure on Iran, not do some kind of deal.
But the idea certainly isn’t stupid or ridiculous - it is still the policy of the British Labour Party to use nuclear weapons in multilateral negotiations on arms reduction. Or at any rate this formula, which replaced the old unilateralism of the 1980s, has never been formally revoked by Labour. Now, these multilateral deals were intended to be with countries which already possessed nuclear weapons, rather than ones, like Iran, which are trying to acquire them. However, the principle is essentially the same.
It is certainly worth looking at, and the Chancellor, Gordon Brown has already looked at it. We know this because Brown had a number of in depth conversations on the matter with the late Robin Cook before the former Labour Foreign Secretary’s tragic death on a Scottish hillside in 2005. Brown spoke movingly at Cook’s funeral, and it was widely believed that, had Cook lived, he would have had a place in Brown’s cabinet.
In his final years, Cook had become a dedicated advocate of phasing out Trident. Moreover, he believed that Britain could become a moral force in the world by virtue of the manner in which we disarmed. Trident is an expensive anachronism, a deterrent which no longer deters, totally unsuited to the challenges faced by international terrorism. You can’t launch-multiple warhead nuclear missiles, designed to destroy cities, at al Qaeda or the Taleban. It would mean blowing up Pakistan as collateral damage.
As it is, the Vanguard submarines, which are of course based at Faslane in the Clyde, go out on ocean jollies where they cruise around a bit and then come home when they get bored. They can’t take part in exercises or war games, because there is no known military contingency for which they could exercise. The missiles are no longer targeted anywhere, because Vladimir Putin wouldn’t like the idea that finger trouble could obliterate Moscow, St Petersburg and Tashkent in about forty minutes. The idea of renewing this system at a cost of 30 billion is an offence against reason.
The only justification for keeping such a weapon, in Cook’s eyes, was to use it in arms decommissioning talks, rather like the ones that ended the war in Northern Ireland. That might seem fanciful, but nuclear arms reduction is not impossible. South Africa gave up her nuclear weapons after the fall of apartheid, and Ukraine did the same after the fall of Communism. Argentina and Brazil dropped their nuclear programmes after negotiating a non-nuclear pact.
It’s not inconceivable that there could be a similar pact between Russia and China, and between India and Pakistan. But it take someone to get the ball rolling, to show the world that the west really is serious about eliminating nuclear weapons from the world.
Brown is an internationalist and, unlike Tony Blair, an intensely moral individual. In the age of climate change and global warming the last thing the world needs is further proliferation of nuclear weapons. Yet in the present stand off between the Muslim world and the West, when even the Pope can provoke the wrath of Islam, there is a terrible danger of this clash of civilisations going nuclear.
Following the disastrous invasions of Iraq and the Lebanon, a nightmare vision emerges of an Islamic bomb facing a Christian bomb. Iran is determined to acquire nuclear weapons and argues, not unreasonably, that it is surrounded by nations that already possess them - India, Pakistan, Israel. If the logic of deterrence applies to us, then it applies equally to them.
It is hypocrisy for the West to lecture Iran on non-proliferation, and threaten invasion, when America and Britain are developing their own new generation of nuclear weapons, and making no effort whatever to dispose of their existing ones. We are in breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which calls on nations to dismantle their own nuclear arsenals. This hypocrisy is clear to the entire Arab world, and it will make their determination to acquire nuclear weapons all the greater.
Brown is, of course now committed to the renewal of Trident. But he could use this an opportunity to downsize our nuclear deterrent, to make it compatible with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. If he did this as part of negotiations with the Muslim world, he could make a huge impression on history.
Only if we address this moral question of nuclear equity does disarmament in the Middle East become a possibility. In a few years, it may be too late. It may be wishful thinking, but I suspect Brown - like McConnell - may be thinking right now about whether it would be possible to use the nuclear deterrent, constructively, as a form of bargaining with so-called rogue nations, to persuade them to put their own arsenals ‘beyond use’. It worked in Northern Ireland.
There’s some evidence that the chiefs of staff would not be unhappy at the prospect of saving the 4% of the military budget that goes on Trident and using it to buy something more useful - like decent boots and rifles and armoured cars in Afghanistan.
Brown is an internationalist and has already shown his concern for world peace and the alleviation of poverty. He is one of the few politicians on the planet who can speak on equal terms with the IMF and the wretched of the earth. Perhaps he should listen to the McConnell doctrine. It’s surely worth a shot.
Friday, September 08, 2006
The Scottish Media is Doomed.
We're all doomed - how often have we heard the Scottish media sound it's own death knell. But look around – the stench of decay is unmistakeable.
The Scottish press is engaged in a desperate war of all against all in a rapidly shrinking market. Scottish broadcasting is in a dreadful state with STV having given up the ghost and BBC Scotland forcing through cuts of 25% in its news and current affairs budget.
Just imagine if the BBC in London had tried to cut network news and current affairs by a quarter in an election year? There would have been a political outcry, a media firestorm. But the Scottish quality press has utterly failed to appreciate the significance of this act of cultural vandalism, even after the resignation of Blair Jenkins, the highly respected head of News and Current Affairs at BBC Scotland.
Collapsing the English language service of BBC Scotland (Gaelic retains its prodigious funding) is not just bad news for broadcasting. It will upset the delicate ecology of the Scotiish media. But the Scottish press seems too preoccupied by its own troubles to notice what is happening in Quen Margaret Drive.
The Scotsman has been suffering double digit falls in circulation over the summer, and the revenues of its new owners, Johnston Press, have plummeting by nearly a tenth as advertising evaporates. The Herald isn't in great shape either. The Record has capitulated to the Sun, and faces an uncertain future under Trinity Mirror, who axed the Scottish Mirror. The launch of evening cheapos by the Record - a vulpine attempt to feed of the decaying carcass of the Scottish evening press - will help no one.
Johnston have responded by appointing as editor of the Scotsman a local newspaper man who has no obvious familiarity with the Scottish political or media scene - Martin Gilson of the Portsmouth News.
"Life is Local” as the Johnston Press mission statement, puts it. Well, now we know.
Mr Gilson and may indeed be a brilliant operator, but his appointment was greeted by dismay among the Edinburgh chatteratti who fear that the Scotsman is being turned into another local paper, rather than a a forum for a national conversation.
Bring back Andrew Neil, say denizens of Barclay Towers, who are shell-shocked at the latest humiliation. At least he had national ambitions for the Scotsman and was prepared to pay for it, instead of syphoning cash to keep share-prices up.
The decline of great national papers is a matter of crucial importance to Scotland. The national media is disintegrating before our eyes, to be replaced by editionised English titles - Times, Daily Mail, Sun. This has real effects on Scottish civil society.
Speak to MPs and MSPs right now and they say that their constituents are preoccupied with immigration and the "swamping of Scotland". This has nothing to do with demographic reality and everything to do with the prominence given to immigration in the English titles, like the Mail and the Sun, which Scots increasingly read.
There is no immigration crisis in Scotland – we remain appallingly white, as Gregg Dyke might have put it – and the influx of 2,000 Polls has done nothing but good for the Scottish economy. But that isn’t what people are reading. The Scottish conversation is being hi-jacked by the racial obsessives of another country.
The Scottish political classes must wake up to the nature of the crisis and start to make waves before it is too late. The BBC is central to what happens to Scotland. It is what has been keeping the rest of the Scottish media honest. But increasingly the BBC is being reduced to a localized service.
Just look at the BBC Scotland website in which national stories are eclipsed by local tales about Edinburgh city parking arrangements and a school being closed because of a tummy bug.
This is what the BBC regards as suitable fare for Scotland's national broadcaster. Meanwhile, Scots put up with patronising and parochial opt-outs from Newsnight and the Politics Show. The Scottish dimension is being driven out of the Scottish media.
Pessimism may be a national sport in Scotland, but sometimes the doom-sayers are right. And they are right now.
The Scottish press is engaged in a desperate war of all against all in a rapidly shrinking market. Scottish broadcasting is in a dreadful state with STV having given up the ghost and BBC Scotland forcing through cuts of 25% in its news and current affairs budget.
Just imagine if the BBC in London had tried to cut network news and current affairs by a quarter in an election year? There would have been a political outcry, a media firestorm. But the Scottish quality press has utterly failed to appreciate the significance of this act of cultural vandalism, even after the resignation of Blair Jenkins, the highly respected head of News and Current Affairs at BBC Scotland.
Collapsing the English language service of BBC Scotland (Gaelic retains its prodigious funding) is not just bad news for broadcasting. It will upset the delicate ecology of the Scotiish media. But the Scottish press seems too preoccupied by its own troubles to notice what is happening in Quen Margaret Drive.
The Scotsman has been suffering double digit falls in circulation over the summer, and the revenues of its new owners, Johnston Press, have plummeting by nearly a tenth as advertising evaporates. The Herald isn't in great shape either. The Record has capitulated to the Sun, and faces an uncertain future under Trinity Mirror, who axed the Scottish Mirror. The launch of evening cheapos by the Record - a vulpine attempt to feed of the decaying carcass of the Scottish evening press - will help no one.
Johnston have responded by appointing as editor of the Scotsman a local newspaper man who has no obvious familiarity with the Scottish political or media scene - Martin Gilson of the Portsmouth News.
"Life is Local” as the Johnston Press mission statement, puts it. Well, now we know.
Mr Gilson and may indeed be a brilliant operator, but his appointment was greeted by dismay among the Edinburgh chatteratti who fear that the Scotsman is being turned into another local paper, rather than a a forum for a national conversation.
Bring back Andrew Neil, say denizens of Barclay Towers, who are shell-shocked at the latest humiliation. At least he had national ambitions for the Scotsman and was prepared to pay for it, instead of syphoning cash to keep share-prices up.
The decline of great national papers is a matter of crucial importance to Scotland. The national media is disintegrating before our eyes, to be replaced by editionised English titles - Times, Daily Mail, Sun. This has real effects on Scottish civil society.
Speak to MPs and MSPs right now and they say that their constituents are preoccupied with immigration and the "swamping of Scotland". This has nothing to do with demographic reality and everything to do with the prominence given to immigration in the English titles, like the Mail and the Sun, which Scots increasingly read.
There is no immigration crisis in Scotland – we remain appallingly white, as Gregg Dyke might have put it – and the influx of 2,000 Polls has done nothing but good for the Scottish economy. But that isn’t what people are reading. The Scottish conversation is being hi-jacked by the racial obsessives of another country.
The Scottish political classes must wake up to the nature of the crisis and start to make waves before it is too late. The BBC is central to what happens to Scotland. It is what has been keeping the rest of the Scottish media honest. But increasingly the BBC is being reduced to a localized service.
Just look at the BBC Scotland website in which national stories are eclipsed by local tales about Edinburgh city parking arrangements and a school being closed because of a tummy bug.
This is what the BBC regards as suitable fare for Scotland's national broadcaster. Meanwhile, Scots put up with patronising and parochial opt-outs from Newsnight and the Politics Show. The Scottish dimension is being driven out of the Scottish media.
Pessimism may be a national sport in Scotland, but sometimes the doom-sayers are right. And they are right now.
The Scottish opposition parties could govern after May - but do they want to?
There’s only one question at the start of this crucial election year: have they got the bottle? Do the Scottish opposition parties really want to be in government after the Holyrood elections in May?
I’m afraid that the short answer is: no they don’t. Which is very unfortunate because a change of government is precisely what the Scottish Parliament needs. In fact, it might do the Scottish Labour Party good to spend a little time in opposition to discover what it really wants to do with devolution.
That Labour could be defeated in May is beyond doubt. All the evidence from opinion polls, local elections, by-elections like Dunfermline and Moray confirms that there is a strong “anyone-but-Labour” mood among Scottish voters. Party workers have deserted in droves.
Indeed, to hear some insiders speak you almost wonder if there is a Scottish Labour Party worth the name. If you stripped out elected members and their retinues, what would be left? Not a lot, perhaps. Labour doesn’t even have a lot of cash left for fighting the Scottish parliamentary election, following the cash for peerages scandal, which has frightened a lot of business donors away.
Jack McConnell can do very little about all this, since most of Labour’s troubles originate Westminster. The Scottish Executive has been performing pretty well of late, as the list of 280 achievements published by Labour last week confirmed. A lot of things are going right with the economy. But the voters are in an ugly mood and seem unprepared to give Labour any credit.
However, the likelihood is that Jack McConnell will lose the election but still remain in office government. This is because the opposition parties in Scotland - as I see them right now - are not in a mood for a change of government. That may seem absurd - what are political parties there for if not to win power? But that is to misunderstand the dynamics of opposition, and the challenges posed by coalition politics.
Let’s take a hypothetical outcome: Labour loses seven seats and is reduced to 43, the SNP get 36 (up 9); the Liberal Democrats 21 (up 3); the Greens get 10 (up 3) and the Tories get 17. Many would regard this as a serious rebuff to Labour, but it would still be the largest party and could continue governing with the support of the Liberal Democrats on a minority basis - perhaps with the support of independents like Margo Mac Donald who has fallen out badly with the SNP - provided the other parties didn’t get their act together. The Greens and the SNP would need need the support of the Scottish Conservatives to get near power, which isn’t going to happen.
Of course, if the Liberal Democrats went in with the SNP and the Greens, then a secure government majority could be formed of 67 seats. But that assumes that the Liberal Democrats want to be part of an SNP administration, and that isn’t at all clear.
Which would Nicol Stephen prefer? life under Jack McConnell, whom he knows he can do business with, or life under Alex Salmond, who is an unknown quantity and mistrusted by many LibDem MSPs? Look what the LibDems have got from Jack McConnell over the years: free personal care, tuition fees, electoral reform from local government etc.. They have been doing nicely under Labour.
Now, arguably, they should do even more nicely under the SNP because they share most of the nationalists’ policies: extending the powers of the parliament over tax, immigration , broadcasting and the like. Both parties oppose Trident and nuclear power, and both the SNP and the Liberal Democrats are unhappy with the authoritarian approach to crime and civil liberties. But there is one big issue between them that obscures all their agreements: independence.
The SNP are committed to a referendum on dissolving the union which must be held before the end of their first term of office. The Liberal Democrats, under their former leader, Jim Wallace, would not countenance any referendum on independence. They were opposed to any co-operation with the SNP so long as the nationalist sought to break up the UK. Wallace. This might seem like a bit of a contradiction for the Liberal Democrats, who have been happy in the past to support constitutional referendums. Why shouldn’t the Scottish voters have their say? But on this they are adamant: no deal.
So, the SNP would have to make some kind of move on the referendum issue if there were to be any prospect of an alternative coalition. Perhaps offering to delay the referendum until after the next-but-one Scottish elections in 2011. This would ensure that independence was not an issue in the first parliament of the Lib-SNP coalition. The Greens by the way already support independence, so no problems there.
This historic compromise would make a new coalition theoretically possible - but I see no indication of it being proposed. Neither party is giving any indication that they are even thinking in terms of a change of government in 2007. The SNP leader Alex Salmond might even face an internal revolt if he fiddled again with the referendum timing and appeared to be betraying independence. Many would be happier for the SNP just to maintain its purity in opposition and not have to bother about the compromise of office.
This is regrettable, if only because it represents a kind of betrayal of democracy. What is the point of people voting for a new government, if the new governors don’t want to govern? If both the Liberal Democrats and the SNP would, for their own narrow party reasons, prefer to stick with Labour what’s the point of their being there? This failure to explore the implications of the popular vote by the opposition will only fuel disillusion and cynicism about politics.
The voters of Scotland want a lead. They are dissatisfied with the lacklustre and under-confident administration of Labour, which has had too much of the air of the council chamber about it. Voters want a more dynamic and spirited political leadership, one which is not looking over its shoulders at London all the time. There are signs that the voters are overcoming their fear of independence also, and are prepared to explore further powers for the parliament, to make up for its deficiencies.
All it needs is for the opposition parties to give some kind of sign that an alternative is possible. Of course they can’t negotiate coalition before the election, but they do need to offer hope. The voters will do the rest.
I’m afraid that the short answer is: no they don’t. Which is very unfortunate because a change of government is precisely what the Scottish Parliament needs. In fact, it might do the Scottish Labour Party good to spend a little time in opposition to discover what it really wants to do with devolution.
That Labour could be defeated in May is beyond doubt. All the evidence from opinion polls, local elections, by-elections like Dunfermline and Moray confirms that there is a strong “anyone-but-Labour” mood among Scottish voters. Party workers have deserted in droves.
Indeed, to hear some insiders speak you almost wonder if there is a Scottish Labour Party worth the name. If you stripped out elected members and their retinues, what would be left? Not a lot, perhaps. Labour doesn’t even have a lot of cash left for fighting the Scottish parliamentary election, following the cash for peerages scandal, which has frightened a lot of business donors away.
Jack McConnell can do very little about all this, since most of Labour’s troubles originate Westminster. The Scottish Executive has been performing pretty well of late, as the list of 280 achievements published by Labour last week confirmed. A lot of things are going right with the economy. But the voters are in an ugly mood and seem unprepared to give Labour any credit.
However, the likelihood is that Jack McConnell will lose the election but still remain in office government. This is because the opposition parties in Scotland - as I see them right now - are not in a mood for a change of government. That may seem absurd - what are political parties there for if not to win power? But that is to misunderstand the dynamics of opposition, and the challenges posed by coalition politics.
Let’s take a hypothetical outcome: Labour loses seven seats and is reduced to 43, the SNP get 36 (up 9); the Liberal Democrats 21 (up 3); the Greens get 10 (up 3) and the Tories get 17. Many would regard this as a serious rebuff to Labour, but it would still be the largest party and could continue governing with the support of the Liberal Democrats on a minority basis - perhaps with the support of independents like Margo Mac Donald who has fallen out badly with the SNP - provided the other parties didn’t get their act together. The Greens and the SNP would need need the support of the Scottish Conservatives to get near power, which isn’t going to happen.
Of course, if the Liberal Democrats went in with the SNP and the Greens, then a secure government majority could be formed of 67 seats. But that assumes that the Liberal Democrats want to be part of an SNP administration, and that isn’t at all clear.
Which would Nicol Stephen prefer? life under Jack McConnell, whom he knows he can do business with, or life under Alex Salmond, who is an unknown quantity and mistrusted by many LibDem MSPs? Look what the LibDems have got from Jack McConnell over the years: free personal care, tuition fees, electoral reform from local government etc.. They have been doing nicely under Labour.
Now, arguably, they should do even more nicely under the SNP because they share most of the nationalists’ policies: extending the powers of the parliament over tax, immigration , broadcasting and the like. Both parties oppose Trident and nuclear power, and both the SNP and the Liberal Democrats are unhappy with the authoritarian approach to crime and civil liberties. But there is one big issue between them that obscures all their agreements: independence.
The SNP are committed to a referendum on dissolving the union which must be held before the end of their first term of office. The Liberal Democrats, under their former leader, Jim Wallace, would not countenance any referendum on independence. They were opposed to any co-operation with the SNP so long as the nationalist sought to break up the UK. Wallace. This might seem like a bit of a contradiction for the Liberal Democrats, who have been happy in the past to support constitutional referendums. Why shouldn’t the Scottish voters have their say? But on this they are adamant: no deal.
So, the SNP would have to make some kind of move on the referendum issue if there were to be any prospect of an alternative coalition. Perhaps offering to delay the referendum until after the next-but-one Scottish elections in 2011. This would ensure that independence was not an issue in the first parliament of the Lib-SNP coalition. The Greens by the way already support independence, so no problems there.
This historic compromise would make a new coalition theoretically possible - but I see no indication of it being proposed. Neither party is giving any indication that they are even thinking in terms of a change of government in 2007. The SNP leader Alex Salmond might even face an internal revolt if he fiddled again with the referendum timing and appeared to be betraying independence. Many would be happier for the SNP just to maintain its purity in opposition and not have to bother about the compromise of office.
This is regrettable, if only because it represents a kind of betrayal of democracy. What is the point of people voting for a new government, if the new governors don’t want to govern? If both the Liberal Democrats and the SNP would, for their own narrow party reasons, prefer to stick with Labour what’s the point of their being there? This failure to explore the implications of the popular vote by the opposition will only fuel disillusion and cynicism about politics.
The voters of Scotland want a lead. They are dissatisfied with the lacklustre and under-confident administration of Labour, which has had too much of the air of the council chamber about it. Voters want a more dynamic and spirited political leadership, one which is not looking over its shoulders at London all the time. There are signs that the voters are overcoming their fear of independence also, and are prepared to explore further powers for the parliament, to make up for its deficiencies.
All it needs is for the opposition parties to give some kind of sign that an alternative is possible. Of course they can’t negotiate coalition before the election, but they do need to offer hope. The voters will do the rest.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
The Mirror memo reflects Blair's vanity
It would be tragic if it weren’t so funny. The Downing St memo on Blair’s last days reads like the curtain call for some Eastern European dictator. It is all about personality, about stage-managing the departure of the Dear Leader so that it creates maximum resonance with posterity. And as such it invites nothing but derision.
“Tony needs to go with the crowds wanting more” says the memo, “He should be the star who won’t even play that last encore”. Where have these people been for the last two years? The crowds aren’t calling for more, they’re calling for Tony Blair to go - now. The last thing they want is an encore.
At first, I thought this memo must be a hoax - they couldn’t be that stupid. Then Number Ten admitted that the document was genuine and entitled: “Reconnecting with the public - a new relationship with the media”.
But what kind of reconnection is this? Number Ten staffers have been busy scheduling final appearances for Blair on “Blue Peter” and “Songs of Praise”. Is this a bog roll and sticky tape leader who’ll sing his own praises on the God slot? Where's Cliff?
The memo talks of the need to ensure that Tony Blair is shot (presumably photographically) in suitable “iconic locations”, like the 20 landmark buildings constructed during his reign. Well, top of the list must surely be the Millennium Dome, since the PM said in 1998 that it would be “the first line of the next Labour Manifesto”.
This empty billion pound tent has stood as a symbol for the vacuity of the Tony years. The only prospect seems to be to turn it, for the benefit of John Prescott’s cowboy chum Philip Anschutz, into Britain’s first super casino. A rather apt metaphor for the insecure, self-centred, grab-the-money-and-run society which Tony Blair has sought to create.
The PM insists he hasn’t actually seen the memo, and that is probably true. But his character is reflected in the courtiers who surround him and who are paid to read his mind. This is what the boss wants - let’s give it to him. “His genuine legacy, ” continues the memo with unintentional irony, “ is not delivery...but the triumph of Blairism.”
What an astonishing statement that is. As if there ever were a “Blairism” - a coherent philosophy of government which marked the age, in the way that “Thatcherism” defined the 1980s. The only “ism” that defines this particular Labour leader is egoism.
It is this extraordinary vanity, this selfish obsession with personal image, that has caused almost the the entire Labour Party to join the chorus of Go Now! Even two key Blairite MPs, Sion Simon and Chris Bryant, have penned a letter inviting the PM to kindly leave the stage. It has been signed by a total of 17 Blairite backbenchers. This is like the Republican Guard calling for Saddam to step down on the eve of the American invasion.
Again, I didn’t believe this latest ‘letter to Tony’ until BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, confirmed that Number Ten had actually seen it. Loyalists then hastily put together a counter letter, signed by another 48 backbenchers, calling for an “orderly transfer of power”. But even this was a little ambiguous since just about everyone agrees that the main obstacle to that orderly succession is the PM himself.
This has been a pivotal week for Labour - the moment when the party finally lost all patience with Tony Blair. It is comparable to the Ides of November 1990 when Thatcher finally provoked her party into regicide. Yesterday, both the Blairite minister ,David Milliband, and the chairman of Labour’s National Executive, Sir Jeremy Beecham, effectively gave Blair his marching orders. Milliband said on “Today” that he couldn’t see Blair lasting more than a year; Beecham told “The World at One” that he expected Blair to make clear at this month’s Labour conference that he would not be attending another.
Trouble is, until Labour MPs hear it from the Prime MInister himself, they simply won’t believe it. We’ve been here too often before. It is going to have to be signed in blood - and signed soon. The alternative could be civil war.
Those inveterate Blairite outriders, Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn, have been urging Blair to remain for a full term and have launched a newspaper campaign calling for a kind of permanent revolution of Blairite modernisation.
They suggest that the gains of New Labour are in danger, and that there must be a “fundamental debate” about policy and party direction before Blair goes. Milburn warned in the Sunday Times of “electoral catastrophe” if the Chancellor didn’t join it. “Trappist vows of silence won’t do”, he said.
This thinly disguised attack on the Chancellor, who has been keeping own counsel recently, has infuriated many Labour MPs. The last thing the party needs is to be plunged into a lather ideological soul-searching just at the moment when the Tories are resurgent under David Cameron. Especially since there aren’t any recognisable issues of ideology dividing the party. This isn’t the 1970s. Gordon Brown isn’t Tony Benn. There is no “Alternative Economic Strategy” for a state-socialist Britain.
The Chancellor may use social democratic rhetoric now and again, such as at Scottish Labour Conferences, but he has been one of the most right-wing Chancellors since the Second World War. Brown has thrown open markets, let foreign interests buy British firms en masse, let the housing market explode, allowed income inequality to rocket. The rich have become richer under Brown than they ever were under the Tories.
Labour MPs can see this perfectly well themselves. They realise now that the threat to their seats comes not from the Chancellor, brooding away in his Fife fastness, but from a leader intoxicated by his own sense of destiny.
I have spoken to ministers of both sides of the supposed divide, Blairite and Brownite, in the last week, and the message I get from both sides is that Number Ten is undermining Labour’s case by a indulging in self-destructive negativity. There is simply no need to create this atmosphere of crisis, to suggest that Gordon Brown is a throwback to the past or that modernising reforms are in danger.
Some people are beginning to wonder if Blair has lost it. Has become Labour’s Tommy Sheridan. Like the former Scottish Socialist leader, he thinks the party belongs to him, and if he doesn’t get his way, he’ll take it away. Embattled by the war in Iraq and deluded by the adulation of hand-picked aides, Blair has become a paranoid leader, convinced that people are trying to steal his legacy.
The tragic thing is that if Blair had only been able to see past himself, he would have realised that his legacy was always secure - as the most successful Labour leader in history. It should have been as simple as that. Now he will be remembered for two things above all: the Iraq disaster, and the long good-bye.
“Tony needs to go with the crowds wanting more” says the memo, “He should be the star who won’t even play that last encore”. Where have these people been for the last two years? The crowds aren’t calling for more, they’re calling for Tony Blair to go - now. The last thing they want is an encore.
At first, I thought this memo must be a hoax - they couldn’t be that stupid. Then Number Ten admitted that the document was genuine and entitled: “Reconnecting with the public - a new relationship with the media”.
But what kind of reconnection is this? Number Ten staffers have been busy scheduling final appearances for Blair on “Blue Peter” and “Songs of Praise”. Is this a bog roll and sticky tape leader who’ll sing his own praises on the God slot? Where's Cliff?
The memo talks of the need to ensure that Tony Blair is shot (presumably photographically) in suitable “iconic locations”, like the 20 landmark buildings constructed during his reign. Well, top of the list must surely be the Millennium Dome, since the PM said in 1998 that it would be “the first line of the next Labour Manifesto”.
This empty billion pound tent has stood as a symbol for the vacuity of the Tony years. The only prospect seems to be to turn it, for the benefit of John Prescott’s cowboy chum Philip Anschutz, into Britain’s first super casino. A rather apt metaphor for the insecure, self-centred, grab-the-money-and-run society which Tony Blair has sought to create.
The PM insists he hasn’t actually seen the memo, and that is probably true. But his character is reflected in the courtiers who surround him and who are paid to read his mind. This is what the boss wants - let’s give it to him. “His genuine legacy, ” continues the memo with unintentional irony, “ is not delivery...but the triumph of Blairism.”
What an astonishing statement that is. As if there ever were a “Blairism” - a coherent philosophy of government which marked the age, in the way that “Thatcherism” defined the 1980s. The only “ism” that defines this particular Labour leader is egoism.
It is this extraordinary vanity, this selfish obsession with personal image, that has caused almost the the entire Labour Party to join the chorus of Go Now! Even two key Blairite MPs, Sion Simon and Chris Bryant, have penned a letter inviting the PM to kindly leave the stage. It has been signed by a total of 17 Blairite backbenchers. This is like the Republican Guard calling for Saddam to step down on the eve of the American invasion.
Again, I didn’t believe this latest ‘letter to Tony’ until BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, confirmed that Number Ten had actually seen it. Loyalists then hastily put together a counter letter, signed by another 48 backbenchers, calling for an “orderly transfer of power”. But even this was a little ambiguous since just about everyone agrees that the main obstacle to that orderly succession is the PM himself.
This has been a pivotal week for Labour - the moment when the party finally lost all patience with Tony Blair. It is comparable to the Ides of November 1990 when Thatcher finally provoked her party into regicide. Yesterday, both the Blairite minister ,David Milliband, and the chairman of Labour’s National Executive, Sir Jeremy Beecham, effectively gave Blair his marching orders. Milliband said on “Today” that he couldn’t see Blair lasting more than a year; Beecham told “The World at One” that he expected Blair to make clear at this month’s Labour conference that he would not be attending another.
Trouble is, until Labour MPs hear it from the Prime MInister himself, they simply won’t believe it. We’ve been here too often before. It is going to have to be signed in blood - and signed soon. The alternative could be civil war.
Those inveterate Blairite outriders, Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn, have been urging Blair to remain for a full term and have launched a newspaper campaign calling for a kind of permanent revolution of Blairite modernisation.
They suggest that the gains of New Labour are in danger, and that there must be a “fundamental debate” about policy and party direction before Blair goes. Milburn warned in the Sunday Times of “electoral catastrophe” if the Chancellor didn’t join it. “Trappist vows of silence won’t do”, he said.
This thinly disguised attack on the Chancellor, who has been keeping own counsel recently, has infuriated many Labour MPs. The last thing the party needs is to be plunged into a lather ideological soul-searching just at the moment when the Tories are resurgent under David Cameron. Especially since there aren’t any recognisable issues of ideology dividing the party. This isn’t the 1970s. Gordon Brown isn’t Tony Benn. There is no “Alternative Economic Strategy” for a state-socialist Britain.
The Chancellor may use social democratic rhetoric now and again, such as at Scottish Labour Conferences, but he has been one of the most right-wing Chancellors since the Second World War. Brown has thrown open markets, let foreign interests buy British firms en masse, let the housing market explode, allowed income inequality to rocket. The rich have become richer under Brown than they ever were under the Tories.
Labour MPs can see this perfectly well themselves. They realise now that the threat to their seats comes not from the Chancellor, brooding away in his Fife fastness, but from a leader intoxicated by his own sense of destiny.
I have spoken to ministers of both sides of the supposed divide, Blairite and Brownite, in the last week, and the message I get from both sides is that Number Ten is undermining Labour’s case by a indulging in self-destructive negativity. There is simply no need to create this atmosphere of crisis, to suggest that Gordon Brown is a throwback to the past or that modernising reforms are in danger.
Some people are beginning to wonder if Blair has lost it. Has become Labour’s Tommy Sheridan. Like the former Scottish Socialist leader, he thinks the party belongs to him, and if he doesn’t get his way, he’ll take it away. Embattled by the war in Iraq and deluded by the adulation of hand-picked aides, Blair has become a paranoid leader, convinced that people are trying to steal his legacy.
The tragic thing is that if Blair had only been able to see past himself, he would have realised that his legacy was always secure - as the most successful Labour leader in history. It should have been as simple as that. Now he will be remembered for two things above all: the Iraq disaster, and the long good-bye.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
For God's sake Gordon, get on with it.
So, now we know. Tony Blair isn’t going, according to the Times on Friday. Oh yes he is, according to the Guardian on the same day. The PM has decided that it would be destabilising to give a timetable for his departure says one news outlet. But he has agreed to go next summer say the others - he just doesn’t want to make a fuss about it.
Tony Blair’s long good-bye is turning into a thundering bore. It is the most tedious story in British politics, yet it remains the only story in British politics. It drives the public mad hearing about his latest prevarication's; it drives hacks bonkers having to write about it.
I mean, how long can we go on alternating headlines about Tony going with headlines about Tony staying? We are caught in a loop - condemned to self-contradiction as every new briefing or interview reverses the previous one. But the trouble is, the entire political system is caught in this loop paralysed by the Prime Minister’s indecision. Nothing can get moving again until he goes.
In his round of pre-conference interviews Blair was playing the old tune about there being so much left to do. “Revolutionary” reforms in the health service, the war on terrorism, antisocial behaviour. But in the clearest sign et that Blair has been afflicted by mad-Prime Minister disease, he announced that he is going to tackle antisocial behaviour where it starts: in the womb.
Teenage mothers could be forced to accept state help before their children are born in order to prevent their progeny becoming a “menace to society a few years down the line” as the PM put it. If they don’t, they could lose benefits or have their children taken into care.
It isn’t clear exactly what kind of ante-natal intervention he has in mind. Perhaps they could be obliged to listen to improving recordings of the Prime Minister’s speeches on respect and community, much as middle class mothers used to play Beethoven to their unborn. Perhaps the intervention could be sterner than that. After all, if we know these children are going to be a threat to society and themselves, as the Prime Minister insists, why let them be born at all?
Of course, Tony Blair isn’t going to turn to eugenics - at least we hope not. But the idea of foetal interventionism is so Orwellian it seems astonishing that he or his advisers could have thought it was a sensible initiative to highlight at the start of a crucial parliamentary session. The idea was immediately dubbed the FASBOs - Foetal Anti Social Behaviour Orders.
Do Labour seriously believe that this rubbish is going to do them any good? The focus on crime may chime with public concern, but it also reminds people that crime is still a serious problem nine years after Labour came to power. Law and order initiatives represent a kind of anti-spin - they actually divert attention from the fact that, overall, crime is actually down in Britain.
As for the “revolutions” in public provision, I don’t know if the PM has looked recently, but things aren’t going well south of the border. PFI is becoming a national scandal as further evidence emerges - as in the recent Channell 4 “Dispatches: Public Service, Private Profit” - of the way PFI projects have been hi-jacked by sharp-witted financiers. Wards are being closed and operations cancelled as hospitals come to terms with their billion pound deficit. The six billion pound national computer system, which was supposed to make a reality of patient choice, is a disaster area with suggestions that it may end up costing over twenty billion. Many doctors still believe the new system will not work
.
The near impossibility of selling the PM’s modernising reforms suggests he will fall back on the war on terror to rekindle public passion for his leadership. We are promised a raft of new measures to make us safer and deal with the greatest threat “since the Second World War” as the Home Secretary John Reid put it. Expect 90 day detention to figure prominently in the forthcoming Westminster agenda.
But again, I think we have been here once too often. It isn’t so easy to scare people with the power of nightmares now that they’ve been living with them for five years. People have had time to consider the nature of the terrorist threat, and the likely impact on their lives There is clearly a threat from Islamist extremism in Britain, but the threat is thankfully a limited one.
We know what the terrorists can do - we saw it in London a year ago. But the phlegmatic British people brushed it off - as well they might since more people were killed on British roads that day than were destroyed by the bombers. The devastation caused by al Qaeda is very much less extensive than that caused by the IRA in the Seventies.
We are manifestly not facing a world war. There is no Muslim invasion force preparing to storm the English Channell. Moreover, people are increasingly coming to recognise, as opinion polls have demonstrated over the summer, that the government’s own policies in the Middle East have fuelled the threat.
Whenever the PM opens his mouth, he reminds the British voters of the reasons they don’t want him around any more. Or his 3,200 spin doctors and consultants. There is another agenda for Labour but it lies, for the time being, in the Chancellor’s head. Brownites hope that he has great things up his sleeve, comparable to Bank of England independence, to jump start his administration. Perhaps a reform of the Lords, a mass house-building programme, rebuilding the railways. But the truth is that no one really knows what is going on in Gordon’s skull. His silence is as conspicuous as ever.
The Chancellor is avoiding any public endorsement of Blair’s latest ‘come back’ programme, presumably as a mute commentary on what he thinks of it. Some believe he is keeping quiet about his own plans in case Tony Blair steals them, as he did the pension reforms. But Brown will have to break his silence at the Labour party conference later this month. He will have to give some idea of what the country, and the party, can expect under his leadership. At the very least he has to give some hope that there IS an alternative to Blair, and that Trident replacement and nuclear power isn’t the sum total of his vision. For the real nightmare in Downing St is the possibility that the Chancellor doesn’t really have any alternatives. That he will just continue with the same old neo-liberal economic policies, the flexible labour market, PFI (which he strongly supports), and ever more complex schemes of personal taxation.
The speculation has been going on so long now that it will almost certainly be an anticlimax when Brown does finally get the keys to Number Ten. Perhaps this is what Tony Blari intended. It’s only human to hope that your successor doesn’t outshine you. Has all the delay been designed to create a climate of uncertainty and speculation which will diminish Gordon Brown?
We know that Blairites want to lock him into “modernising” policies which allow Tony Blair to continue his rule after he’s gone. Do they also want us to get bored by Brown even before he’s in the door? Either way, Labour are now staring at electoral defeat as a result of this interminable succession crisis. And the rest of us are being driven quietly mad.
Tony Blair’s long good-bye is turning into a thundering bore. It is the most tedious story in British politics, yet it remains the only story in British politics. It drives the public mad hearing about his latest prevarication's; it drives hacks bonkers having to write about it.
I mean, how long can we go on alternating headlines about Tony going with headlines about Tony staying? We are caught in a loop - condemned to self-contradiction as every new briefing or interview reverses the previous one. But the trouble is, the entire political system is caught in this loop paralysed by the Prime Minister’s indecision. Nothing can get moving again until he goes.
In his round of pre-conference interviews Blair was playing the old tune about there being so much left to do. “Revolutionary” reforms in the health service, the war on terrorism, antisocial behaviour. But in the clearest sign et that Blair has been afflicted by mad-Prime Minister disease, he announced that he is going to tackle antisocial behaviour where it starts: in the womb.
Teenage mothers could be forced to accept state help before their children are born in order to prevent their progeny becoming a “menace to society a few years down the line” as the PM put it. If they don’t, they could lose benefits or have their children taken into care.
It isn’t clear exactly what kind of ante-natal intervention he has in mind. Perhaps they could be obliged to listen to improving recordings of the Prime Minister’s speeches on respect and community, much as middle class mothers used to play Beethoven to their unborn. Perhaps the intervention could be sterner than that. After all, if we know these children are going to be a threat to society and themselves, as the Prime Minister insists, why let them be born at all?
Of course, Tony Blair isn’t going to turn to eugenics - at least we hope not. But the idea of foetal interventionism is so Orwellian it seems astonishing that he or his advisers could have thought it was a sensible initiative to highlight at the start of a crucial parliamentary session. The idea was immediately dubbed the FASBOs - Foetal Anti Social Behaviour Orders.
Do Labour seriously believe that this rubbish is going to do them any good? The focus on crime may chime with public concern, but it also reminds people that crime is still a serious problem nine years after Labour came to power. Law and order initiatives represent a kind of anti-spin - they actually divert attention from the fact that, overall, crime is actually down in Britain.
As for the “revolutions” in public provision, I don’t know if the PM has looked recently, but things aren’t going well south of the border. PFI is becoming a national scandal as further evidence emerges - as in the recent Channell 4 “Dispatches: Public Service, Private Profit” - of the way PFI projects have been hi-jacked by sharp-witted financiers. Wards are being closed and operations cancelled as hospitals come to terms with their billion pound deficit. The six billion pound national computer system, which was supposed to make a reality of patient choice, is a disaster area with suggestions that it may end up costing over twenty billion. Many doctors still believe the new system will not work
.
The near impossibility of selling the PM’s modernising reforms suggests he will fall back on the war on terror to rekindle public passion for his leadership. We are promised a raft of new measures to make us safer and deal with the greatest threat “since the Second World War” as the Home Secretary John Reid put it. Expect 90 day detention to figure prominently in the forthcoming Westminster agenda.
But again, I think we have been here once too often. It isn’t so easy to scare people with the power of nightmares now that they’ve been living with them for five years. People have had time to consider the nature of the terrorist threat, and the likely impact on their lives There is clearly a threat from Islamist extremism in Britain, but the threat is thankfully a limited one.
We know what the terrorists can do - we saw it in London a year ago. But the phlegmatic British people brushed it off - as well they might since more people were killed on British roads that day than were destroyed by the bombers. The devastation caused by al Qaeda is very much less extensive than that caused by the IRA in the Seventies.
We are manifestly not facing a world war. There is no Muslim invasion force preparing to storm the English Channell. Moreover, people are increasingly coming to recognise, as opinion polls have demonstrated over the summer, that the government’s own policies in the Middle East have fuelled the threat.
Whenever the PM opens his mouth, he reminds the British voters of the reasons they don’t want him around any more. Or his 3,200 spin doctors and consultants. There is another agenda for Labour but it lies, for the time being, in the Chancellor’s head. Brownites hope that he has great things up his sleeve, comparable to Bank of England independence, to jump start his administration. Perhaps a reform of the Lords, a mass house-building programme, rebuilding the railways. But the truth is that no one really knows what is going on in Gordon’s skull. His silence is as conspicuous as ever.
The Chancellor is avoiding any public endorsement of Blair’s latest ‘come back’ programme, presumably as a mute commentary on what he thinks of it. Some believe he is keeping quiet about his own plans in case Tony Blair steals them, as he did the pension reforms. But Brown will have to break his silence at the Labour party conference later this month. He will have to give some idea of what the country, and the party, can expect under his leadership. At the very least he has to give some hope that there IS an alternative to Blair, and that Trident replacement and nuclear power isn’t the sum total of his vision. For the real nightmare in Downing St is the possibility that the Chancellor doesn’t really have any alternatives. That he will just continue with the same old neo-liberal economic policies, the flexible labour market, PFI (which he strongly supports), and ever more complex schemes of personal taxation.
The speculation has been going on so long now that it will almost certainly be an anticlimax when Brown does finally get the keys to Number Ten. Perhaps this is what Tony Blari intended. It’s only human to hope that your successor doesn’t outshine you. Has all the delay been designed to create a climate of uncertainty and speculation which will diminish Gordon Brown?
We know that Blairites want to lock him into “modernising” policies which allow Tony Blair to continue his rule after he’s gone. Do they also want us to get bored by Brown even before he’s in the door? Either way, Labour are now staring at electoral defeat as a result of this interminable succession crisis. And the rest of us are being driven quietly mad.
The immigrants are welcome here
There’s a newsagent on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile which sells foreign papers. These days, the vast majority of titles on sale come not from France or Germany, but Poland, bought by the thousands of Polish workers who have come to work in Edinburgh in the last two years.
Indeed, we may shortly discover that Scotland’s second language is not Gaelic, but Polish. Who knows - perhaps in a couple of years time, the Scottish Executive will be setting up Polish language schools and and BBC Scotland will be producing childrens programmes for them.
Well, why not? Scotland has long had a substantial and highly industrious Polish community. The arrival of a further 20,000 in the last two years - part of an influx of 32,000 from Eastern European accession states since 2004, is unprecedented in Scottish history and is changing the social landscape. It is part of one of the most dramatic migrations Europe has ever experienced outside wartime.
Last year, the UK registered its largest year-on-year population increase since 1962, largely as a result of inward migration, taking Britain’s population over 60,000,000 million. 427,000 Eastern European workers 600,000 if the self-employed are taken into account - are known to have come here and another 200,000 may be working the black market. The Labour MP for Southampton, John Denham, has said the true number is closer to one million.
So, should we worry? Does this amount to ethnic dilution, a “swamping” - as the former Home Secretary, David Blunkett once put it - of our culture by foreigners? Is it a form of social dumping, creating a reserve army of cheap labour which will force down the wages of indigenous workers, as some trades unionists fear?
Was it acceptable for the government to embark on a course that could fundamentally alter the social, economic and even religious complexion of these islands without any proper debate about the consequences? Finally, does Scotland need these foreign job-seekers while there are still tens of thousands of young Scots on job-seekers allowance themselves?
These questions certainly need to be answered, and I think they can be. Diversity has been good for Britain, and Scotland needs a lot more of it. But the task of arguing this has been made immeasurably harder by catastrophic mishandling of the politics of immigration by a government which is as incompetent as it is divided on the issue, and which has destroyed public trust by wilful misuse of population statistics.
It was, simply, the worst spin in history. Two years ago, the government forecast that the number of Eastern Europeans who would want to come here following the accession of 10 new states to the EU would be less than 20,000. The real figure has been forty times that. Running scared over asylum seekers and hostility to the proposed EU constitution, the government simply demanded numbers that suited its case.
The failure to prepare Britain for this great white migration, still less to argue the case for it, has had disastrous consequences. It has fuelled the paranoia of those who believe that the government has all along been lying about immigration and the implications of European integration. It has shattered the political consensus on the liberal left about immigration and turned discontent among the voters into outright hostility. A Mori poll last week indicated that three quarters of the UK electorate want now support far stricter controls on immigration. Worse, more than half have serious doubts about whether allowing foreigners to settle in Britain is good for the country.
The debate about Polish plumbers has become a kind of cipher for a wider debate on immigration which has been largely suppressed in Britain since the days of Enoch Powell. Look at the websites, the comments posted on papers like the Scotsman, and there is widespread hostility to the “scum” as one correspondent there put it recently. Because the new immigrants are white, it is possible to use language which would be unacceptable, or even illegal, if applied to black immigrants. There is a thinly-disguised hostility in the media. Last week the Scottish Sun ran a story claiming that Polish immigrants were accessing pornography on library computers.
The government has responded by sending out conflicting messages. There have been suggestions of a review of the entire policy of EU immigration from the Industry Minister, Alastair Darling. The Home Secretary, John Reid, has argued for curbing the influx from two new accession states, Romania and Bulgaria, who are due to come on stream next year. This infuriated the Europe Minister, Geof Hoon, who has been arguing that it would be illegal under EU rules for Britain to discriminate against any workers legitimately seeking work here. Since the government figures have been so manifestly unreliable, it is open season on forecasting how many Romanians and Bulgarians will actually come here, but the figure of 350,000 is in widespread currency.
The Left has been all over the place too. No longer do calls for curbing immigration come solely from right wingers, racists and bigots. The Guardian commentator, Polly Toynbee, has argued that, in future, immigration from accession states should be limited until their GDP is matches to ours. Workers in Britain should not have their wages depressed by the flood of immigrants from low pay economies, she says, claiming that the day rates of building workers have halved since 2004. They come over here...
But this is not just an argument about pay levels. “Social democracy”, according to Toynbee , “needs enough social cohesion to persuade people that everyone benefits when resources are more fairly distributed. But people will resent paying taxes towards others if they feel national borders are porous to the whole world” By suggesting that the very integrity of British society could be imperilled by immigration, Toynbee is treading ground which the Liberal Left in Britain has long feared to tread for fear of being accused of sounding racist. Indeed, this argument could equally be applied to immigration from non-white countries. But because we are talking about Poles and Lithuanians, rather than Pakistanis and Indians, it doesn’t sound like Powellism.
Toynbee’s arguments parallel those of the “progressive nationalists” like the editor of “Prospect” magazine, David Goodhart, and Trevor Phillips of the Commission for Racial Equality both of whom have been arguing for an end to multiculturalism. The Communities Secretary, Ruth Kelly, made clear last week in a speech that the government has now accepted that the policy of encouraging ethnic and religious diversity must now be reviewed by a new “communities commission”. That there must now be “creative engagement” with minority cultures and populations. Ironically, white migration has been the catalysts for a change in attitudes on the left to all forms of race and assimilation.
The Conservatives are watching these developments with wry amusement. The Right has been arguing for decades for controls on immigration, for restrictions on labour mobility in Europe and for an end to multiculturalism. At the last election, the Tory leader, Michael Howard called for a kind of ‘citizenship test’ for Asian immigrants and was widely accused of “playing the race card”. The Tories were also criticised for forecasting that immigration from Eastern Europe would be far higher than the government forecast, though even they underestimated the scale of the influx by three hundred percent. No wonder the Daily Telegraph has been saying; “told you so”.
So, has the Right won the argument? Are we all Powellites now? No - the fact that the government has failed to mount the progressive case for immigration, doesn’t mean that it falls by default. For, far from destroying Britain, the recent inward migration is a tribute to the dynamism of the British economy under Labour, and its extraordinary capacity to generate jobs. The economic boom which has made Britain so wealthy in the last decade could not have happened without an influx of flexible and committed Labour prepared to turn its hand to virtually anything and willing to move to where the jobs are. Unfortunately, the government has failed to make this case effectively, partly because of the absence of the Chancellor.
Migration is one problem that the other big EU economies would love to have. It is a sign that Europe really is working.
In the 1990s, those who argued against European monetary integration said that it would create mismatches between investment and population. It was thought that people wouldn’t travel long distances, uproot their families, or live away from home for long periods. Therefore, it was argued, there would be overheating in economies which were booming, and in the slow-lane economies of Europe there would be slump and depression.
Well, the eurosceptics were wrong. Clearly, there is formidable mobility of Labour within the EU. People are prepared to travel thousands of miles to go to where the jobs are - and right now, the jobs are in Britain, particularly in Scotland. The latest job market figures indicate that nearly a half of Scottish companies have vacancies right now. Scotland is finally beginning to attract more immigrants, proportionately, than England.
But won’t this place a burden on Scotland? The idea that immigrants are a drain on the welfare state is nonsense. First of all, they don’t qualify for unemployment benefits, or housing benefits in their first four years. Most of the immigrants from Eastern Europe are young and single and most of the rest have families back home which they support with their earnings.
But they also support Scotland’s old and sick. This is because, according to the government’s own figures, the average new immigrant pays higher taxes than we do: #112 compared to #100 for the average British-born person. The Polish plumbers do not qualify for all the tax credits and other benefits we enjoy but they still pay for them.
Of course, there is the paradox of British unemployment increasing while immigration is at record levels. But this is largely a result of an inability of the British economy to find the kind of jobs that British workers want to do. Yes, there is growing inequality of income, and the rich are getting richer in Britain. But that is an imbalance that should be tackled through the taxation system and by increasing the minimum wage, not by locking out non- British workers who want to work in the jobs we don’t want to do.
Diversity is generally a good thing, and in employment it is particularly beneficial. Incoming workers bring with them different habits and attitudes as well as new skills. The sight of Polish workers willingly taking on jobs that we consider menial and making something of them, is good for all of us. They are building the economy we have allowed to fall into disuse, and are filling vacancies from bus drives to dentists.
Many of the Eastern Europeans want to start businesses, and if we can persuade them to do so here in Scotland, so much the better. But they are much more likely to want to take their earnings and their enterprise back to their home countries, because that is where most of the new migrants want to settle. As they do this, the economies of the Eastern European countries will prosper, and GDP and wage rates will rise there. In a few years, who knows, we may be going to look for jobs in Poland. It has happened before. Remember when labourers on English roads were all Irish? Not any more. Go to Dublin and you’ll find a there are now a lot of London accents amid the day-glo jackets.
Of course, economics isn’t everything, and people shouldn’t feel that their their indigenous culture is being transformed without their consent But I don’t see any sign that Polish people are taking over Scotland and I don’t know how you would tell if they did. Increased attendance at Catholic churches doesn’t seem constitute a clash of civilisations. This migration represents a form of mutual economic co-operation and self help which benefits Scotland as much as it benefits Poland.
There’s an old Polish saying: “ The guest sees more in an hour than the host sees in a year”. Eastern European immigrants are helping us see Scotland differently. As for me - I wonder how long it takes to learn Polish?
Indeed, we may shortly discover that Scotland’s second language is not Gaelic, but Polish. Who knows - perhaps in a couple of years time, the Scottish Executive will be setting up Polish language schools and and BBC Scotland will be producing childrens programmes for them.
Well, why not? Scotland has long had a substantial and highly industrious Polish community. The arrival of a further 20,000 in the last two years - part of an influx of 32,000 from Eastern European accession states since 2004, is unprecedented in Scottish history and is changing the social landscape. It is part of one of the most dramatic migrations Europe has ever experienced outside wartime.
Last year, the UK registered its largest year-on-year population increase since 1962, largely as a result of inward migration, taking Britain’s population over 60,000,000 million. 427,000 Eastern European workers 600,000 if the self-employed are taken into account - are known to have come here and another 200,000 may be working the black market. The Labour MP for Southampton, John Denham, has said the true number is closer to one million.
So, should we worry? Does this amount to ethnic dilution, a “swamping” - as the former Home Secretary, David Blunkett once put it - of our culture by foreigners? Is it a form of social dumping, creating a reserve army of cheap labour which will force down the wages of indigenous workers, as some trades unionists fear?
Was it acceptable for the government to embark on a course that could fundamentally alter the social, economic and even religious complexion of these islands without any proper debate about the consequences? Finally, does Scotland need these foreign job-seekers while there are still tens of thousands of young Scots on job-seekers allowance themselves?
These questions certainly need to be answered, and I think they can be. Diversity has been good for Britain, and Scotland needs a lot more of it. But the task of arguing this has been made immeasurably harder by catastrophic mishandling of the politics of immigration by a government which is as incompetent as it is divided on the issue, and which has destroyed public trust by wilful misuse of population statistics.
It was, simply, the worst spin in history. Two years ago, the government forecast that the number of Eastern Europeans who would want to come here following the accession of 10 new states to the EU would be less than 20,000. The real figure has been forty times that. Running scared over asylum seekers and hostility to the proposed EU constitution, the government simply demanded numbers that suited its case.
The failure to prepare Britain for this great white migration, still less to argue the case for it, has had disastrous consequences. It has fuelled the paranoia of those who believe that the government has all along been lying about immigration and the implications of European integration. It has shattered the political consensus on the liberal left about immigration and turned discontent among the voters into outright hostility. A Mori poll last week indicated that three quarters of the UK electorate want now support far stricter controls on immigration. Worse, more than half have serious doubts about whether allowing foreigners to settle in Britain is good for the country.
The debate about Polish plumbers has become a kind of cipher for a wider debate on immigration which has been largely suppressed in Britain since the days of Enoch Powell. Look at the websites, the comments posted on papers like the Scotsman, and there is widespread hostility to the “scum” as one correspondent there put it recently. Because the new immigrants are white, it is possible to use language which would be unacceptable, or even illegal, if applied to black immigrants. There is a thinly-disguised hostility in the media. Last week the Scottish Sun ran a story claiming that Polish immigrants were accessing pornography on library computers.
The government has responded by sending out conflicting messages. There have been suggestions of a review of the entire policy of EU immigration from the Industry Minister, Alastair Darling. The Home Secretary, John Reid, has argued for curbing the influx from two new accession states, Romania and Bulgaria, who are due to come on stream next year. This infuriated the Europe Minister, Geof Hoon, who has been arguing that it would be illegal under EU rules for Britain to discriminate against any workers legitimately seeking work here. Since the government figures have been so manifestly unreliable, it is open season on forecasting how many Romanians and Bulgarians will actually come here, but the figure of 350,000 is in widespread currency.
The Left has been all over the place too. No longer do calls for curbing immigration come solely from right wingers, racists and bigots. The Guardian commentator, Polly Toynbee, has argued that, in future, immigration from accession states should be limited until their GDP is matches to ours. Workers in Britain should not have their wages depressed by the flood of immigrants from low pay economies, she says, claiming that the day rates of building workers have halved since 2004. They come over here...
But this is not just an argument about pay levels. “Social democracy”, according to Toynbee , “needs enough social cohesion to persuade people that everyone benefits when resources are more fairly distributed. But people will resent paying taxes towards others if they feel national borders are porous to the whole world” By suggesting that the very integrity of British society could be imperilled by immigration, Toynbee is treading ground which the Liberal Left in Britain has long feared to tread for fear of being accused of sounding racist. Indeed, this argument could equally be applied to immigration from non-white countries. But because we are talking about Poles and Lithuanians, rather than Pakistanis and Indians, it doesn’t sound like Powellism.
Toynbee’s arguments parallel those of the “progressive nationalists” like the editor of “Prospect” magazine, David Goodhart, and Trevor Phillips of the Commission for Racial Equality both of whom have been arguing for an end to multiculturalism. The Communities Secretary, Ruth Kelly, made clear last week in a speech that the government has now accepted that the policy of encouraging ethnic and religious diversity must now be reviewed by a new “communities commission”. That there must now be “creative engagement” with minority cultures and populations. Ironically, white migration has been the catalysts for a change in attitudes on the left to all forms of race and assimilation.
The Conservatives are watching these developments with wry amusement. The Right has been arguing for decades for controls on immigration, for restrictions on labour mobility in Europe and for an end to multiculturalism. At the last election, the Tory leader, Michael Howard called for a kind of ‘citizenship test’ for Asian immigrants and was widely accused of “playing the race card”. The Tories were also criticised for forecasting that immigration from Eastern Europe would be far higher than the government forecast, though even they underestimated the scale of the influx by three hundred percent. No wonder the Daily Telegraph has been saying; “told you so”.
So, has the Right won the argument? Are we all Powellites now? No - the fact that the government has failed to mount the progressive case for immigration, doesn’t mean that it falls by default. For, far from destroying Britain, the recent inward migration is a tribute to the dynamism of the British economy under Labour, and its extraordinary capacity to generate jobs. The economic boom which has made Britain so wealthy in the last decade could not have happened without an influx of flexible and committed Labour prepared to turn its hand to virtually anything and willing to move to where the jobs are. Unfortunately, the government has failed to make this case effectively, partly because of the absence of the Chancellor.
Migration is one problem that the other big EU economies would love to have. It is a sign that Europe really is working.
In the 1990s, those who argued against European monetary integration said that it would create mismatches between investment and population. It was thought that people wouldn’t travel long distances, uproot their families, or live away from home for long periods. Therefore, it was argued, there would be overheating in economies which were booming, and in the slow-lane economies of Europe there would be slump and depression.
Well, the eurosceptics were wrong. Clearly, there is formidable mobility of Labour within the EU. People are prepared to travel thousands of miles to go to where the jobs are - and right now, the jobs are in Britain, particularly in Scotland. The latest job market figures indicate that nearly a half of Scottish companies have vacancies right now. Scotland is finally beginning to attract more immigrants, proportionately, than England.
But won’t this place a burden on Scotland? The idea that immigrants are a drain on the welfare state is nonsense. First of all, they don’t qualify for unemployment benefits, or housing benefits in their first four years. Most of the immigrants from Eastern Europe are young and single and most of the rest have families back home which they support with their earnings.
But they also support Scotland’s old and sick. This is because, according to the government’s own figures, the average new immigrant pays higher taxes than we do: #112 compared to #100 for the average British-born person. The Polish plumbers do not qualify for all the tax credits and other benefits we enjoy but they still pay for them.
Of course, there is the paradox of British unemployment increasing while immigration is at record levels. But this is largely a result of an inability of the British economy to find the kind of jobs that British workers want to do. Yes, there is growing inequality of income, and the rich are getting richer in Britain. But that is an imbalance that should be tackled through the taxation system and by increasing the minimum wage, not by locking out non- British workers who want to work in the jobs we don’t want to do.
Diversity is generally a good thing, and in employment it is particularly beneficial. Incoming workers bring with them different habits and attitudes as well as new skills. The sight of Polish workers willingly taking on jobs that we consider menial and making something of them, is good for all of us. They are building the economy we have allowed to fall into disuse, and are filling vacancies from bus drives to dentists.
Many of the Eastern Europeans want to start businesses, and if we can persuade them to do so here in Scotland, so much the better. But they are much more likely to want to take their earnings and their enterprise back to their home countries, because that is where most of the new migrants want to settle. As they do this, the economies of the Eastern European countries will prosper, and GDP and wage rates will rise there. In a few years, who knows, we may be going to look for jobs in Poland. It has happened before. Remember when labourers on English roads were all Irish? Not any more. Go to Dublin and you’ll find a there are now a lot of London accents amid the day-glo jackets.
Of course, economics isn’t everything, and people shouldn’t feel that their their indigenous culture is being transformed without their consent But I don’t see any sign that Polish people are taking over Scotland and I don’t know how you would tell if they did. Increased attendance at Catholic churches doesn’t seem constitute a clash of civilisations. This migration represents a form of mutual economic co-operation and self help which benefits Scotland as much as it benefits Poland.
There’s an old Polish saying: “ The guest sees more in an hour than the host sees in a year”. Eastern European immigrants are helping us see Scotland differently. As for me - I wonder how long it takes to learn Polish?
Friday, September 01, 2006
The Spectre of Nationalism
A spectre is haunting Scotland - the spectre of nationalism. As Labour falters north of the Border, the SNP is rising in opinion polls. The latest, by Scottish Opinion, putx Alex Salmond’s party four points ahead.
All of which suggests that the best way to achieve success in the Scottish Parliament is to leave it. For, the SNP leader has, of course, spent the last five years in the Imperial Parliament in London, as a matter of his own free choice. Whatever, the SNP are on the march again.
The party everyone had written off three years ago, when it lost badly in the last Scottish parliamentary elections, is making progress again. With Scotland’s oil soaring in price, and with the Westminster government mired in sleaze and division, the Scottish Nationalists think their time may have finally come.
Suddenly, old arguments are being dusted down about whether or not Scotland could secede from the UK as a result of a vote in the Scottish Parliament, or whether Westminster would have to give its say so. The formal answer is that Westminster would have to endorse independence because constitutional matters are reserved. But in practice it seems unlikely that a Scottish Parliament, dominated by nationalists, would take a blind bit of notice of what Westminster said. The Scottish Parliament represents the people's will, and so it would likely pass an Enabling Act giving itself sovereign powers to dissolve the union.
However, it’s never going to happen like that - not in a parliament of minorities elected under proportional representation. The prospects for the SNP gaining an absolute majority in next May's Scottish parliamentary elections are practically zero. Nothing short of a Lebanon style invasion by an English army would cause Scots to vote in sufficient numbers to give the SNP more than fifty percent of the popular vote.
Labour insiders used to say that this was precisely the point. Stuck in a proportional Scottish parliament with limited powers, the SNP would never be able to break out of the limits imposed by the Additional Member electoral system. That the Scottish nationalists would be condemned to impotent fulmination on the backbenches of Holyrood, a secessionists faction permanently deprived of power. Ha! fiendish cunning, that Donald Dewar.
This belief that the parliament was “sorted” led Jack McConnell and his predecessors as First Minister to believe that Labour was likely to be in government indefinitely. Ten year plans abound. Jack McConnell ruminated in public a year ago about whether or not he should linger in office for a decade, or step down to give another Labour figure a chance.
However, the Scottish voters show no signs of being content to have Labour in office for eternity. Indeed, there are signs that the Scottish voter is heartily sick of its indifferent and unimaginative leadership and its connexion to the party of the same name in Westminster.
We saw in Dunfermline and Moray by-elections earlier this year just how ruthless the Scottish electorate can be. In Dunfermline and West Fife, the Chancellor’s home seat, Labour lost an 11,500 majority to the Liberal Democrats, and in Moray Labour was pushed into fourth place. The voters seem to want to punish Labour for being Labour. MSPs in the Scottish Parliament tell of voters hurling abuse at Labour politicians . Some complain that there is such a shortage of party workers on the ground that elected politicians are having to rely on heir extended families to get the message across.
It’s not just Iraq, but cash-for-peerages, privatisation, Trident replacement, nuclear power civil liberties, and of course Cherie’s #7,000 hairdressing bill, which may turn out to be the most expensive hairdo in history. So Labour can be beaten. The question is whether the opposition parties can get their act together.
If Labour is to be removed from office, the opposition parties will have to unite to lever it out. The SNP will have to lure the Scottish Liberal Democrats into some kind of coalition with themselves and the Greens if there is to be a chance of removing Labour from power.
At present, the Liberal Democrats are relatively happy partners of Labour in the Scottish Executive. Though the new LibDem leader, Nicol Stephen, is saying that Labour can’t take them for granted, it’s clear that most of his MSPs would prefer a stable arrangement with Labour than an unstable one with Alex Salmond and the Greens.
They don’t want to break up the union with England for a start, and both the SNP and the Greens want an independent Scotland. Moreover the LibDems have got a lot out of their eight year partnership with Labour - tuition fees, free personal care, reform of local government. It will take a lot to prize the LibDems apart from this embrace with.
Nothing is impossible of course. But the SNP would effectively have to give up on independence to enter government. Nationalism seems set to remain a ghostly apparition rather than a concrete reality.
All of which suggests that the best way to achieve success in the Scottish Parliament is to leave it. For, the SNP leader has, of course, spent the last five years in the Imperial Parliament in London, as a matter of his own free choice. Whatever, the SNP are on the march again.
The party everyone had written off three years ago, when it lost badly in the last Scottish parliamentary elections, is making progress again. With Scotland’s oil soaring in price, and with the Westminster government mired in sleaze and division, the Scottish Nationalists think their time may have finally come.
Suddenly, old arguments are being dusted down about whether or not Scotland could secede from the UK as a result of a vote in the Scottish Parliament, or whether Westminster would have to give its say so. The formal answer is that Westminster would have to endorse independence because constitutional matters are reserved. But in practice it seems unlikely that a Scottish Parliament, dominated by nationalists, would take a blind bit of notice of what Westminster said. The Scottish Parliament represents the people's will, and so it would likely pass an Enabling Act giving itself sovereign powers to dissolve the union.
However, it’s never going to happen like that - not in a parliament of minorities elected under proportional representation. The prospects for the SNP gaining an absolute majority in next May's Scottish parliamentary elections are practically zero. Nothing short of a Lebanon style invasion by an English army would cause Scots to vote in sufficient numbers to give the SNP more than fifty percent of the popular vote.
Labour insiders used to say that this was precisely the point. Stuck in a proportional Scottish parliament with limited powers, the SNP would never be able to break out of the limits imposed by the Additional Member electoral system. That the Scottish nationalists would be condemned to impotent fulmination on the backbenches of Holyrood, a secessionists faction permanently deprived of power. Ha! fiendish cunning, that Donald Dewar.
This belief that the parliament was “sorted” led Jack McConnell and his predecessors as First Minister to believe that Labour was likely to be in government indefinitely. Ten year plans abound. Jack McConnell ruminated in public a year ago about whether or not he should linger in office for a decade, or step down to give another Labour figure a chance.
However, the Scottish voters show no signs of being content to have Labour in office for eternity. Indeed, there are signs that the Scottish voter is heartily sick of its indifferent and unimaginative leadership and its connexion to the party of the same name in Westminster.
We saw in Dunfermline and Moray by-elections earlier this year just how ruthless the Scottish electorate can be. In Dunfermline and West Fife, the Chancellor’s home seat, Labour lost an 11,500 majority to the Liberal Democrats, and in Moray Labour was pushed into fourth place. The voters seem to want to punish Labour for being Labour. MSPs in the Scottish Parliament tell of voters hurling abuse at Labour politicians . Some complain that there is such a shortage of party workers on the ground that elected politicians are having to rely on heir extended families to get the message across.
It’s not just Iraq, but cash-for-peerages, privatisation, Trident replacement, nuclear power civil liberties, and of course Cherie’s #7,000 hairdressing bill, which may turn out to be the most expensive hairdo in history. So Labour can be beaten. The question is whether the opposition parties can get their act together.
If Labour is to be removed from office, the opposition parties will have to unite to lever it out. The SNP will have to lure the Scottish Liberal Democrats into some kind of coalition with themselves and the Greens if there is to be a chance of removing Labour from power.
At present, the Liberal Democrats are relatively happy partners of Labour in the Scottish Executive. Though the new LibDem leader, Nicol Stephen, is saying that Labour can’t take them for granted, it’s clear that most of his MSPs would prefer a stable arrangement with Labour than an unstable one with Alex Salmond and the Greens.
They don’t want to break up the union with England for a start, and both the SNP and the Greens want an independent Scotland. Moreover the LibDems have got a lot out of their eight year partnership with Labour - tuition fees, free personal care, reform of local government. It will take a lot to prize the LibDems apart from this embrace with.
Nothing is impossible of course. But the SNP would effectively have to give up on independence to enter government. Nationalism seems set to remain a ghostly apparition rather than a concrete reality.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
An Inconvenient Truth
Al Gore is a recovering politician. It’s a joke he must made a thousand time since he lost the 2000 US Presidential election, and I heard him crack it three times in Edinburgh this week alone. Politicians at this level have to develop a capacity to repeat themselves almost indefinitely without getting bored by the sound of their own voice.
Gore has been repeating himself on the threat of climate change for thirty years and many of his critics say he has bored for the world. But it’s beyond a joke now. This deeply serious politician, one of the most intelligent and persuasive I have ever met, has dedicated the remainder of his political career to repeating an argument he has been consistently making since he entered Congress in 1976. Namely, that man-made climate change poses the most serious challenge to mankind since the last Ice Age ten thousand years ago.
So, what’s new you say? Heard it all before a thousand times. What more is there to be said? Well, that was my attitude before I saw Al Gore’s film “ An Inconvenient Truth” and had the opportunity to question him about it at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Indeed, I had rather suspected that Gore’s climate change offensive might merely be a convenient platform on which to launch a Presidential campaign for 2008. But his film convinced me otherwise.
“An Inconvenient Truth” could become the most influential documentary in history. It is already the third largest grossing documentary of all time. All the more surprising then that it isn’t really a film at all, but a lecture - an illustrated talk. A summation of the state of scientific knowledge on climate change and our role in it. This is not just another polemic about man’s destruction of the planet. The very sobriety of its delivery is what makes it sensational.
And it poses this question: How is it that there can be an historic consensus among the world’s scientists about the nature of the problem, and yet such resistance to it by the US political establishment - both Democrat and Republican? Why isn’t this the paramount issue not just of this forthcoming Presidential election campaign, but of the last one and the one before that?
. The National Academies of Science of all the industrialised countries, including India and China, all agree that we are changing the climate in a potentially catastrophic manner. The United Nations Climate Change Panel is unanimous as are US Nobel Prize in all relevant fields. A random survey by the University of California at San Diego of all peer-reviewed scientific papers on climate change published in scientific journals over the last decade discovered there is simply no significant disagreement with the fundamental science.
Of course, it’s the same in Britain. Yet here we are, continuing to pursue policies which pump ever greater amounts of C02 into the environment, through wasteful industrial processes, poor insulation and transport policies which favour the car and the plane Yesterday, it was reported in the Times that the government’s chief transport adviser, Sir Rod Eddington, is to reject a new fast rail line between Glasgow and London on grounds of cost. Cost to the planet clearly didn’t enter into his calculations Both the Strategic Rail Authority and Network Rail have argued that the British rail network is already at capacity and cannot meet the existing demand, let alone future growth.
So, why is this? The answer most people give is the dominance of corporate interests in the corridors of power. Sir Rod is, surprise surprise, a former chief of British Airways. Certainly, the influence of the oil lobby in the US Republican Party is a major cause of the failure of the Bush administration to recognise the seriousness of the problem, or even recognise its existence.
However, private companies aren’t stupid. They have scientists who advise them on the state of the planet and many of them realise that their own bottom line is in danger if climate change isn’t addressed. In June, 14 of the UK’s largest firms, including Shell, Tesco, B&Q and Standard Chartered Bank, lobbied Downing St to demand tougher action on greenhouse emissions. Wall Mart has unilaterally introduced a zero emissions policy. Even the media magnate Rupert Murdoch, we hear, has been persuaded.
And still nothing happens. Except that he British government casually admits that we have failed to meet out climate change targets set after Kyoto. America never had any, and the growth economies of the world, China and India, with a third of the world’s population, have embarked upon industrial booms which, if unchecked, will quintuple the current unsustainable levels of C0z in the atmosphere within a generation.
It’s not as if we don’t have alternatives to fossil fuels - they’re all around us, in the wind, tides, solar rays. “An Inconvenient Truth” is actually a very positive film which argues that even with existing technologies we could reduce CO2 emissions to 1970 levels within about 20 years - and boost the world economy doing it.
Al Gore blames the frogs. If you boil them slowly enough, frogs don’t notice they are being cooked until it’s too late, and that he thinks is what is happening to humanity. We need shocks to bring it home. But while I don’t disagree with that, I feel there is more to it. After all, it is only a year since Hurricane Katrina showed the devastating impact of warming oceans when it destroyed half of old New Orleans. Look at the pictures of disappearing glaciers, heat waves in Europe and England, and the evidence of drought and desertification across Africa and the Middle East.
It’s at this stage that you start to wonder if there is some kind of death wish gripping humanity, so wilful is the resistance to doing something about this extinction level event. It defies logic, reason. Al Gore concedes is that rationality - or rather a failure of it - is the heart of this problem. We literally have stopped thinking straight.
Half a century of political spin, anti-science quackery, religious and spiritual fads and declining standards in schools have undermined the status of the scienctific view of the world. People have started believing in anything. In America, creationism is taught in schools as being ‘equally valid’ as evolution. Look at our celebrity culture, where obscure pop singers are given more prominence in obituary columns than leading scientists.
This is taking us a long way from the practical issue of what to do about climate change, into what are issues of epistemology and ethics. But I make no apologies for that. Some things are too serious to simplify, even if there is no space here to explore the complexity.
But here's one simple thought: you simply have to see this film. Everyone has to. And Al Gore had better not get himself assassinated.
Gore has been repeating himself on the threat of climate change for thirty years and many of his critics say he has bored for the world. But it’s beyond a joke now. This deeply serious politician, one of the most intelligent and persuasive I have ever met, has dedicated the remainder of his political career to repeating an argument he has been consistently making since he entered Congress in 1976. Namely, that man-made climate change poses the most serious challenge to mankind since the last Ice Age ten thousand years ago.
So, what’s new you say? Heard it all before a thousand times. What more is there to be said? Well, that was my attitude before I saw Al Gore’s film “ An Inconvenient Truth” and had the opportunity to question him about it at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Indeed, I had rather suspected that Gore’s climate change offensive might merely be a convenient platform on which to launch a Presidential campaign for 2008. But his film convinced me otherwise.
“An Inconvenient Truth” could become the most influential documentary in history. It is already the third largest grossing documentary of all time. All the more surprising then that it isn’t really a film at all, but a lecture - an illustrated talk. A summation of the state of scientific knowledge on climate change and our role in it. This is not just another polemic about man’s destruction of the planet. The very sobriety of its delivery is what makes it sensational.
And it poses this question: How is it that there can be an historic consensus among the world’s scientists about the nature of the problem, and yet such resistance to it by the US political establishment - both Democrat and Republican? Why isn’t this the paramount issue not just of this forthcoming Presidential election campaign, but of the last one and the one before that?
. The National Academies of Science of all the industrialised countries, including India and China, all agree that we are changing the climate in a potentially catastrophic manner. The United Nations Climate Change Panel is unanimous as are US Nobel Prize in all relevant fields. A random survey by the University of California at San Diego of all peer-reviewed scientific papers on climate change published in scientific journals over the last decade discovered there is simply no significant disagreement with the fundamental science.
Of course, it’s the same in Britain. Yet here we are, continuing to pursue policies which pump ever greater amounts of C02 into the environment, through wasteful industrial processes, poor insulation and transport policies which favour the car and the plane Yesterday, it was reported in the Times that the government’s chief transport adviser, Sir Rod Eddington, is to reject a new fast rail line between Glasgow and London on grounds of cost. Cost to the planet clearly didn’t enter into his calculations Both the Strategic Rail Authority and Network Rail have argued that the British rail network is already at capacity and cannot meet the existing demand, let alone future growth.
So, why is this? The answer most people give is the dominance of corporate interests in the corridors of power. Sir Rod is, surprise surprise, a former chief of British Airways. Certainly, the influence of the oil lobby in the US Republican Party is a major cause of the failure of the Bush administration to recognise the seriousness of the problem, or even recognise its existence.
However, private companies aren’t stupid. They have scientists who advise them on the state of the planet and many of them realise that their own bottom line is in danger if climate change isn’t addressed. In June, 14 of the UK’s largest firms, including Shell, Tesco, B&Q and Standard Chartered Bank, lobbied Downing St to demand tougher action on greenhouse emissions. Wall Mart has unilaterally introduced a zero emissions policy. Even the media magnate Rupert Murdoch, we hear, has been persuaded.
And still nothing happens. Except that he British government casually admits that we have failed to meet out climate change targets set after Kyoto. America never had any, and the growth economies of the world, China and India, with a third of the world’s population, have embarked upon industrial booms which, if unchecked, will quintuple the current unsustainable levels of C0z in the atmosphere within a generation.
It’s not as if we don’t have alternatives to fossil fuels - they’re all around us, in the wind, tides, solar rays. “An Inconvenient Truth” is actually a very positive film which argues that even with existing technologies we could reduce CO2 emissions to 1970 levels within about 20 years - and boost the world economy doing it.
Al Gore blames the frogs. If you boil them slowly enough, frogs don’t notice they are being cooked until it’s too late, and that he thinks is what is happening to humanity. We need shocks to bring it home. But while I don’t disagree with that, I feel there is more to it. After all, it is only a year since Hurricane Katrina showed the devastating impact of warming oceans when it destroyed half of old New Orleans. Look at the pictures of disappearing glaciers, heat waves in Europe and England, and the evidence of drought and desertification across Africa and the Middle East.
It’s at this stage that you start to wonder if there is some kind of death wish gripping humanity, so wilful is the resistance to doing something about this extinction level event. It defies logic, reason. Al Gore concedes is that rationality - or rather a failure of it - is the heart of this problem. We literally have stopped thinking straight.
Half a century of political spin, anti-science quackery, religious and spiritual fads and declining standards in schools have undermined the status of the scienctific view of the world. People have started believing in anything. In America, creationism is taught in schools as being ‘equally valid’ as evolution. Look at our celebrity culture, where obscure pop singers are given more prominence in obituary columns than leading scientists.
This is taking us a long way from the practical issue of what to do about climate change, into what are issues of epistemology and ethics. But I make no apologies for that. Some things are too serious to simplify, even if there is no space here to explore the complexity.
But here's one simple thought: you simply have to see this film. Everyone has to. And Al Gore had better not get himself assassinated.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
The Edinburgh Festival Must be Saved from Edinburgh
The Naked City - How the Edinburgh Festival is too important to be left to Edinburgh.
- - - -- - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - =- - - - - - - - - - - --- - - - - -
The Edinburgh Festival Theatre on Nicholson St. has been around in one form or another since 1830. It’s auditorium is an exotic collision of art nouveaux and neo-classicism. Colin Ross’s bold glass exterior, added in 1994, turns the theatre into an event in itself, revealing the crowds swimming around inside like exotic fish in a giant tank.
When it is illuminated, that is. But this year, every time I have passed the Edinburgh Festival Theatre on my way to shows at the Edinburgh Festival, it has been dark. The lights seem have gone out. There have been performances there - seven of them - but you really wouldn’t know there was a festival going on at all.
It’s the same across Edinburgh. We’re always told that this is the biggest arts festival in the world - but Edinburgh goes to remarkable lengths to conceal it. The Ross Bandstand in Princess St. Gardens is dead and sad despite the best summer weather Edinburgh has enjoyed in years. Princess St is decked out as usual by cheap shops and sale signs. There are no flags, no celebrations, nothing to remind you that - right here, right now - you are in the greatest concentration of cultural capital on the planet.
They have a name for this kind of civic salesmanship in the marketing world. It’s called “dressing the city”. Well if so, Edinburgh should be called the naked city - it certainly hasn’t put its glad rags on. Even the Royal Mile, which used to be a mayhem of street theatre seems constrained to a confined pedestrianised space. Indeed, were it not for the Military Tattoo on the Castle Esplanade, which booms and bangs every night, you could be in any provincial city at the end of the holiday season.
The lack of any obvious sense celebration of the Edinburgh Festivals - or even recognition of their existence - is an acute frustration for the Fringe venue producers, who mount the vast majority of the shows running in Edinburgh in August. These are the arts-entrepreneurs like Bill Burdett-Coutts, of the longest-established independent venue, the Assembly Rooms; Ed Bartlam, of the upstart Underbelly; Julian Caddy of Sweet, the newest and smallest of the venues. They all tell the same story: Edinburgh is complacent, apathetic, ignorant of the value of its Festival.
The City doesn’t support it with adequate infrastructure, transport or promotion, despite increasing the cost of theatre licences this year by 300%. The arts Establishment in Edinburgh, I’m told, is riddled with amateurism and complacency, and sometimes behaves as if the Festival is its own private club, which they would really rather not spoil by letting new members in the door. As for the Scottish Executive and Holyrood - they might as well be on a different planet.
Granted, the Fringe venue producers aren’t the only “stake holders” in the Edinburgh Festivals, and they aren’t above criticism themselves. They have been steadily allowing ticket prices to rise year on year, and the venues take in around seventy five million pounds in the space of three weeks. Organisations like the Pleasance are big commercial enterprises, with rich backers, who perhaps could be recycling a little more revenue into promoting themselves.
Last week, they formed a new association of independent venue producers to get theri act together. But the big four - Gilded Balloon, the Pleasance, Assembly Rooms and Underbelly - have been responsible for the phenomenal growth of the Festival in recent years and they really have to be listened to. Anyway, you only have to look around Edinburgh to see what they mean. It’s like being at a party where there is no host, and where the guests are left to amble around looking for the action until they get bored.
Now, I grew up in Edinburgh and one of the main reasons I wanted to return in 1999 was the Edinburgh Festival, which still has no parallel anywhere, and remains one of the cultural wonders of the world. But I am increasingly perplexed at the crazy way this unique cultural asset is being managed. Something is missing; it is slipping away.
You feel that Edinburgh is like an over-inflated balloon, puffed up by its own pretensions, and about to be pricked by sharp newcomers from the North of England, like Manchester and Liverpool. Festivals who want a piece of Edinburgh’s cultural action and know exactly how to go about it. The Manchester International Festival has offered the outgoing director of the Edinburgh International Festival, Brian McMaster, a place on its board.
Edinburgh is awash with statistics at this time of year. But here’s the important one: Liverpool is spending more promoting its “spend a day in Liverpool” campaign than the entire annual promotion budget of the Edinburgh Fringe.
Some other numbers: Taking all the Festivals together (film, fringe, official, jazz etc..) there were 2.4 million attendances in Edinburgh in 2004. This year, there could be around three million bums on Edinburgh seats. That’s a colossal attendance, matched only by events like the Olympic Games - and it is every single year. Yet who outside the arts promotion world actually knows this, let alone appreciates its significance? Precious few in Edinburgh, let alone Glasgow or London.
More numbers: London is spending pounds12 billion on the 2012 Olympics. The Scottish Executive is prepared to spend at least pounds 200 million on the 2014 Commonwealth Games. But the Edinburgh Fringe, the Olympics of the arts world, selling 1.4 million tickets, gets a grand total of - wait for it = pounds 64,000. That is simply absurd. It is an act of cultural self-mutilation.
It sometimes appears as if city is actually embarrassed by its Festivals. That like its celebrated absence of knickers, Edinburgh would prefer to conceal them behind a genteel exterior. The bulk of the Fringe is hidden in in subterranean caves in the Cowgate, in the sandstone fortress of the Pleasance, or behind the concrete blocks of Edinburgh University.
This absence of celebration would be more understandable if the people of Edinburgh were hostile to the arts community that descend on the city to pay their inflated rents, but they aren’t. Incredibly, the majority of tickets for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe - around six hundred thousand of them - are sold in Scotland, predominantly around Edinburgh and the Lothians. The days when Edinburgh folk grumbled about there being “nothing for us” in the Festival are long gone. Imaginative promotions, like the two-for-one deals have created a huge domestic market.
However, this is a mixed blessing. The big venue promoters all complain that the Edinburgh Festival is in danger of becoming parochial. It is not attracting the punters from London and beyond that it needs if it is to maintain its pre-eminent world status. The performers still come, but the metropolitan critics are losing interest, and if they stop coming, so will the acts.
The Independent commentator, and playwright, Johan Hari, says that “if you can’t afford a ticket to the world, a ticket to Edinburgh is the next best thing”. Perhaps - but the world isn’t coming back. And the newer generation is going taking its tickets elsewhere. The Edinburgh Festival is becoming middle aged. Even at the youngest and most lively mega-venue, the Underbelly, the majority of tickets are bought by people over forty years of age.
There is a lot of slack too. This year, the Fringe venues say that they are only filling, on average, around fifty percent of their seats. Many come, but more are needed. The writing is on the wall, and it says: “Thundering Hooves”. That’s the title of a report published in May, part-sponsored by Edinburgh City Council, which warned in the starkest terms that the Edinburgh Festival’s days could be numbered, This is because of the number of rival arts festivals galloping behind. But if so - and nobody disputed the report’s findings - why is Edinburgh lying back and waiting to be trampled?
It’s easy to attack Edinburgh City Council - and in many ways that is unfair. The council is no longer filled with prudes and philistines complaining about nudity and bad language. Councillors nowadays are right behind the Festival - as they should be given the hundred and twenty million it generates for the local economy - and say they are prepared to put a million pounds into keeping Edinburgh ahead of the race.
But the municipal commitment is belied by unbelievable acts of bureaucratic pettiness. Example: There have been repeated appeals this year to the city authorities to make space available for a camp site so that people who can’t afford to blow #500 on a long weekend in the city can take part in the Festival. This might put Edinburgh on the UK festival circuit and open up a new market. Individual councillors I have spoken to believe it is an idea worth looking at, but the official line is that Edinburgh isn’t in the business of camp sites - except for one off events like the G8 last year, when it accommodated some fifteen thousand people around the Jack Kane Centre. But why not? Twice as many come to the Festival every year as came to G8.
The council has rejected the idea of a tent city on the Meadows, which is fair enough. It is a World Heritage Site. However, I simply cannot believe that it is beyond the wit of Edinburgh’s city fathers to organise a bit of green space. Similarly with transport. You can’t get back to Glasgow after half eleven, which makes attending late shows impossible for people who can’t afford the high prices of staying over. Why not special trains to take the pressure off accommodation and give Glasgow a stake in the Festival?
Indeed, why not go one step further and get the West of Scotland properly involved in the Edinburgh Festival? Too many people still believe that Edinburgh is only about orchestras and obscure foreign language dramas. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is challenging material at the Edinburgh International Festival, which which is as it should be, but there is a huge amount of highly accessible art like Ron Mueck’s incredible shrinking sculptures. Every comedian worth knowing about comes to Edinburgh. Plays like the sensational “Black Watch” by the new National Theatre of Scotland echo the epic productions staged in Glasgow in the 1980s by Bill Bryden, and match the production values of the West End of London at a fraction of the price.
The point is that the Edinburgh Festival is now too big for Edinburgh - it needs to be embraced by Scotland as a whole, both politically and economically. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is not like subsidised theatre. This is a consumer-led phenomenon, unique in the British arts sector, indeed in the world - 1,867 separate productions over 231 venues No one curates the Fringe, no one tells it what to do, which means you can get everything from “Puppetry of the Penis” to “Midsummer Night’s Dream” under the same roof. You get shows as diverse as the hip hop musical, “Into the Hoods” round the corner from “My Name is Rachel Corrie” - a sobering play about eath in Palestine.
What the Edinburgh Festival needs isn’t artisitc direction and it isn’t even really about money. It is a huge attraction requiring elementary infrastructure. What is required is essentially an information exercise - a project in mass communication. Everything is there, it just needs to be broadcast, to Scotland, Britain and the world. “T in the Park” is better promoted than the Edinburgh Festival, especially in Glasgow where the Festival is regarded as something for the Edinburgh cultural establishment
This isn’t just a tourist attraction, or an opportunity for student thespians to express themselves - it is a window into the way the world sees itself. Created sixty years ago as a means of reviving war-torn Europe through artistic endeavour, the Edinburgh Festival represents one of the great achievements of European civilisation. From the writers who flock to the Edinburgh Book Festival in Charlotte Square, to the stand up comedians in the Cowgate, all human life really is there. But it may not be for very much longer.
- - - -- - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - =- - - - - - - - - - - --- - - - - -
The Edinburgh Festival Theatre on Nicholson St. has been around in one form or another since 1830. It’s auditorium is an exotic collision of art nouveaux and neo-classicism. Colin Ross’s bold glass exterior, added in 1994, turns the theatre into an event in itself, revealing the crowds swimming around inside like exotic fish in a giant tank.
When it is illuminated, that is. But this year, every time I have passed the Edinburgh Festival Theatre on my way to shows at the Edinburgh Festival, it has been dark. The lights seem have gone out. There have been performances there - seven of them - but you really wouldn’t know there was a festival going on at all.
It’s the same across Edinburgh. We’re always told that this is the biggest arts festival in the world - but Edinburgh goes to remarkable lengths to conceal it. The Ross Bandstand in Princess St. Gardens is dead and sad despite the best summer weather Edinburgh has enjoyed in years. Princess St is decked out as usual by cheap shops and sale signs. There are no flags, no celebrations, nothing to remind you that - right here, right now - you are in the greatest concentration of cultural capital on the planet.
They have a name for this kind of civic salesmanship in the marketing world. It’s called “dressing the city”. Well if so, Edinburgh should be called the naked city - it certainly hasn’t put its glad rags on. Even the Royal Mile, which used to be a mayhem of street theatre seems constrained to a confined pedestrianised space. Indeed, were it not for the Military Tattoo on the Castle Esplanade, which booms and bangs every night, you could be in any provincial city at the end of the holiday season.
The lack of any obvious sense celebration of the Edinburgh Festivals - or even recognition of their existence - is an acute frustration for the Fringe venue producers, who mount the vast majority of the shows running in Edinburgh in August. These are the arts-entrepreneurs like Bill Burdett-Coutts, of the longest-established independent venue, the Assembly Rooms; Ed Bartlam, of the upstart Underbelly; Julian Caddy of Sweet, the newest and smallest of the venues. They all tell the same story: Edinburgh is complacent, apathetic, ignorant of the value of its Festival.
The City doesn’t support it with adequate infrastructure, transport or promotion, despite increasing the cost of theatre licences this year by 300%. The arts Establishment in Edinburgh, I’m told, is riddled with amateurism and complacency, and sometimes behaves as if the Festival is its own private club, which they would really rather not spoil by letting new members in the door. As for the Scottish Executive and Holyrood - they might as well be on a different planet.
Granted, the Fringe venue producers aren’t the only “stake holders” in the Edinburgh Festivals, and they aren’t above criticism themselves. They have been steadily allowing ticket prices to rise year on year, and the venues take in around seventy five million pounds in the space of three weeks. Organisations like the Pleasance are big commercial enterprises, with rich backers, who perhaps could be recycling a little more revenue into promoting themselves.
Last week, they formed a new association of independent venue producers to get theri act together. But the big four - Gilded Balloon, the Pleasance, Assembly Rooms and Underbelly - have been responsible for the phenomenal growth of the Festival in recent years and they really have to be listened to. Anyway, you only have to look around Edinburgh to see what they mean. It’s like being at a party where there is no host, and where the guests are left to amble around looking for the action until they get bored.
Now, I grew up in Edinburgh and one of the main reasons I wanted to return in 1999 was the Edinburgh Festival, which still has no parallel anywhere, and remains one of the cultural wonders of the world. But I am increasingly perplexed at the crazy way this unique cultural asset is being managed. Something is missing; it is slipping away.
You feel that Edinburgh is like an over-inflated balloon, puffed up by its own pretensions, and about to be pricked by sharp newcomers from the North of England, like Manchester and Liverpool. Festivals who want a piece of Edinburgh’s cultural action and know exactly how to go about it. The Manchester International Festival has offered the outgoing director of the Edinburgh International Festival, Brian McMaster, a place on its board.
Edinburgh is awash with statistics at this time of year. But here’s the important one: Liverpool is spending more promoting its “spend a day in Liverpool” campaign than the entire annual promotion budget of the Edinburgh Fringe.
Some other numbers: Taking all the Festivals together (film, fringe, official, jazz etc..) there were 2.4 million attendances in Edinburgh in 2004. This year, there could be around three million bums on Edinburgh seats. That’s a colossal attendance, matched only by events like the Olympic Games - and it is every single year. Yet who outside the arts promotion world actually knows this, let alone appreciates its significance? Precious few in Edinburgh, let alone Glasgow or London.
More numbers: London is spending pounds12 billion on the 2012 Olympics. The Scottish Executive is prepared to spend at least pounds 200 million on the 2014 Commonwealth Games. But the Edinburgh Fringe, the Olympics of the arts world, selling 1.4 million tickets, gets a grand total of - wait for it = pounds 64,000. That is simply absurd. It is an act of cultural self-mutilation.
It sometimes appears as if city is actually embarrassed by its Festivals. That like its celebrated absence of knickers, Edinburgh would prefer to conceal them behind a genteel exterior. The bulk of the Fringe is hidden in in subterranean caves in the Cowgate, in the sandstone fortress of the Pleasance, or behind the concrete blocks of Edinburgh University.
This absence of celebration would be more understandable if the people of Edinburgh were hostile to the arts community that descend on the city to pay their inflated rents, but they aren’t. Incredibly, the majority of tickets for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe - around six hundred thousand of them - are sold in Scotland, predominantly around Edinburgh and the Lothians. The days when Edinburgh folk grumbled about there being “nothing for us” in the Festival are long gone. Imaginative promotions, like the two-for-one deals have created a huge domestic market.
However, this is a mixed blessing. The big venue promoters all complain that the Edinburgh Festival is in danger of becoming parochial. It is not attracting the punters from London and beyond that it needs if it is to maintain its pre-eminent world status. The performers still come, but the metropolitan critics are losing interest, and if they stop coming, so will the acts.
The Independent commentator, and playwright, Johan Hari, says that “if you can’t afford a ticket to the world, a ticket to Edinburgh is the next best thing”. Perhaps - but the world isn’t coming back. And the newer generation is going taking its tickets elsewhere. The Edinburgh Festival is becoming middle aged. Even at the youngest and most lively mega-venue, the Underbelly, the majority of tickets are bought by people over forty years of age.
There is a lot of slack too. This year, the Fringe venues say that they are only filling, on average, around fifty percent of their seats. Many come, but more are needed. The writing is on the wall, and it says: “Thundering Hooves”. That’s the title of a report published in May, part-sponsored by Edinburgh City Council, which warned in the starkest terms that the Edinburgh Festival’s days could be numbered, This is because of the number of rival arts festivals galloping behind. But if so - and nobody disputed the report’s findings - why is Edinburgh lying back and waiting to be trampled?
It’s easy to attack Edinburgh City Council - and in many ways that is unfair. The council is no longer filled with prudes and philistines complaining about nudity and bad language. Councillors nowadays are right behind the Festival - as they should be given the hundred and twenty million it generates for the local economy - and say they are prepared to put a million pounds into keeping Edinburgh ahead of the race.
But the municipal commitment is belied by unbelievable acts of bureaucratic pettiness. Example: There have been repeated appeals this year to the city authorities to make space available for a camp site so that people who can’t afford to blow #500 on a long weekend in the city can take part in the Festival. This might put Edinburgh on the UK festival circuit and open up a new market. Individual councillors I have spoken to believe it is an idea worth looking at, but the official line is that Edinburgh isn’t in the business of camp sites - except for one off events like the G8 last year, when it accommodated some fifteen thousand people around the Jack Kane Centre. But why not? Twice as many come to the Festival every year as came to G8.
The council has rejected the idea of a tent city on the Meadows, which is fair enough. It is a World Heritage Site. However, I simply cannot believe that it is beyond the wit of Edinburgh’s city fathers to organise a bit of green space. Similarly with transport. You can’t get back to Glasgow after half eleven, which makes attending late shows impossible for people who can’t afford the high prices of staying over. Why not special trains to take the pressure off accommodation and give Glasgow a stake in the Festival?
Indeed, why not go one step further and get the West of Scotland properly involved in the Edinburgh Festival? Too many people still believe that Edinburgh is only about orchestras and obscure foreign language dramas. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is challenging material at the Edinburgh International Festival, which which is as it should be, but there is a huge amount of highly accessible art like Ron Mueck’s incredible shrinking sculptures. Every comedian worth knowing about comes to Edinburgh. Plays like the sensational “Black Watch” by the new National Theatre of Scotland echo the epic productions staged in Glasgow in the 1980s by Bill Bryden, and match the production values of the West End of London at a fraction of the price.
The point is that the Edinburgh Festival is now too big for Edinburgh - it needs to be embraced by Scotland as a whole, both politically and economically. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is not like subsidised theatre. This is a consumer-led phenomenon, unique in the British arts sector, indeed in the world - 1,867 separate productions over 231 venues No one curates the Fringe, no one tells it what to do, which means you can get everything from “Puppetry of the Penis” to “Midsummer Night’s Dream” under the same roof. You get shows as diverse as the hip hop musical, “Into the Hoods” round the corner from “My Name is Rachel Corrie” - a sobering play about eath in Palestine.
What the Edinburgh Festival needs isn’t artisitc direction and it isn’t even really about money. It is a huge attraction requiring elementary infrastructure. What is required is essentially an information exercise - a project in mass communication. Everything is there, it just needs to be broadcast, to Scotland, Britain and the world. “T in the Park” is better promoted than the Edinburgh Festival, especially in Glasgow where the Festival is regarded as something for the Edinburgh cultural establishment
This isn’t just a tourist attraction, or an opportunity for student thespians to express themselves - it is a window into the way the world sees itself. Created sixty years ago as a means of reviving war-torn Europe through artistic endeavour, the Edinburgh Festival represents one of the great achievements of European civilisation. From the writers who flock to the Edinburgh Book Festival in Charlotte Square, to the stand up comedians in the Cowgate, all human life really is there. But it may not be for very much longer.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
On day in the life of the Underbelly
First find your belly. For the locationally-challenged, getting to a show at the Smirnoff Underbelly can be a test of endurance as well route-finding skills. There are twelve separate venues across seven city centre sites, all with similar-sounding names - Big Belly, Baby Belly, Belly Button, Belly Dancer, Delhi Belly etc.
It's eleven forty am and I'M trying to find “Netochka Nezavanova - Nameless Nobody”, a stage adaptation by Russkiya Notchi of a little-known and unfinished novel by Dostoevsky. This is surely the ultimate Fringe experience - a dark story of madness, death and violins performed in a dank cave on an Edinburgh morning.
It wasn’t bad either. The luminous Ukranian actress Vera Filatova is clearly a future star, though she doesn’t yet possess the range to carry off this demanding one-woman play. But she won the hearts of the Baby Belly audience - even the guy in the front row who fell asleep during the performance. (I asked him afterwards). Most of the audience seemed to have actually read the book. One had come back again to sketch Vera for a sculpture.
And so begins another day at the extraordinary Underbelly. Not so much theatre-going as pot-holing in the stone vaults under Edinburgh’s Bridges. Since it was established five years ago by two ex-Edinburgh University students, Ed Bartlam and Charlie Wood, the Smirnoff Underbelly has grown into a two million pound subterranean culture factory. They mount seventy different productions here every day. Last year they sold over 100,000 tickets and this year they will sell twice that number.
You can’t argue with that - except of course you can. For critics, the Underbelly sums up how the Fringe has lost is way, become commercialised, entertainment-led, unadventurous and dominated by comedy. For me - I’m just astonished that it happens at all in dour old Edinburgh.
After lunch I go to a rare performance of “Flood”, by the German novelist, Gunter Grass. First performed in East Germany in 1957, its theme of denial in the face of catastrophe takes on a new resonance following Grass’s own denial about his own involvement with the SS. The retelling of Noah's Ark through the eyes of the rats also served as a rather clunky allegory for global warming.
But the performance was impressive, the pace urgent. So urgent indeed that the cast were dismantling the stage before the audience had entirely left the venue. They'd run into the slot assigned to “Krapp’s Last Tape” and Andrew Dallmeyer, the renowned Beckett actor, was in the gents making himself up – truly - next to punters like me queuing for a pee.
Where else would you find prominent thespians dressing in public toilets? Undressing perhaps – but not preparing for a performance. Or directors serving in the bar, which is where I found Allegra Galvin, of “Flood”. Underground, everyone is equal.
Booze is very big for the vodka-sponsored Underbelly where there are a dozen bars and everyone seems to go into shows with a glass in their hand - even at three in the afternoon. This year, Underbelly was concerned it might lose its license because of the smoking ban - not because of obstinate actors, but through English theatre-goers lighting up in ignorance. They needn’t have worried.
By now I'd taken in “Bloggers” a diverting trawl through look-at-me internet sites, and “Radio” a meditation on militarism and middle America by a wannabe astronaut. It took a little time to achieve lift off, but accomplished its mission.
Later, I emerge into daylight to speak to Ed and Charlie, the monsters of mirth, at their newest venue, a huge purple inflatable cow called “The Udderbelly”, which dominates Bristo Square in the heart of Edinburgh University. Looking less like culture capitalists than disheveled students, they talk wearily about the need for better marketing and infrastructure by the city authorities.
The Godfathers of the Edinburgh mega venues, Pleasance, Assembly, Gilded etc got together last week to bury their feuds and form a united front the Voice of the Independent Producers. About time too. The last thing they need is the council calling the shots.
Ed and Charlie want Edinburgh to become more like Glastonbury, complete with a tent city and a three-day festival pass, so that it can tap into the huge UK-wide market for music and mud. At present, according to credit card receipts, 70% of their punters come from Edinburgh and the Lothians – a figure I found staggering. Time was when Edinburgh folk wouldn’t touch the Festival, except to rob the actors through exorbitant rents.
Back in the steamy vaults I take in “Painters”, engaging physical theatre and slapstick but about as challenging as Norman Wisdom. Unlike the amazing Taylor Mac, who is a cross between Tom Lehrer and Leigh Bowery, but with a ukele. Not just another ‘performance artist, Mac really can sing and his songs were witty, sardonic and sad and laced with acute political commentary.
At eleven, Paul Provenza hosts a chat show with comics Demetri Martin and Jimmy Carr where they talk about the ethics of cracking jokes about rape. And my day in the underworld ends at Spank, a showcase for stand ups. I’m still laughing at three am, which must mean something.
All these shows were packed and rowdy and young. The theatre I saw was a little uneven (I deliberately avoided the well-reviewed big-name productions like Eric Bogosian’s “Talk Radio”) but it certainly wasn’t unadventurous. And at #7.50 – 8.50 a pop, represented good value.
Call me naïve, but I don’t see this kind of enterprise as any kind of threat to the spirit of the Fringe or to artistic standards. Nor is it “cultural colonialism” as one over-wrought figure described it last week. The Underbelly is surely a portal through which an entire generation can gain access to the arts - on its own terms. Roll on Glastonbelly.
It's eleven forty am and I'M trying to find “Netochka Nezavanova - Nameless Nobody”, a stage adaptation by Russkiya Notchi of a little-known and unfinished novel by Dostoevsky. This is surely the ultimate Fringe experience - a dark story of madness, death and violins performed in a dank cave on an Edinburgh morning.
It wasn’t bad either. The luminous Ukranian actress Vera Filatova is clearly a future star, though she doesn’t yet possess the range to carry off this demanding one-woman play. But she won the hearts of the Baby Belly audience - even the guy in the front row who fell asleep during the performance. (I asked him afterwards). Most of the audience seemed to have actually read the book. One had come back again to sketch Vera for a sculpture.
And so begins another day at the extraordinary Underbelly. Not so much theatre-going as pot-holing in the stone vaults under Edinburgh’s Bridges. Since it was established five years ago by two ex-Edinburgh University students, Ed Bartlam and Charlie Wood, the Smirnoff Underbelly has grown into a two million pound subterranean culture factory. They mount seventy different productions here every day. Last year they sold over 100,000 tickets and this year they will sell twice that number.
You can’t argue with that - except of course you can. For critics, the Underbelly sums up how the Fringe has lost is way, become commercialised, entertainment-led, unadventurous and dominated by comedy. For me - I’m just astonished that it happens at all in dour old Edinburgh.
After lunch I go to a rare performance of “Flood”, by the German novelist, Gunter Grass. First performed in East Germany in 1957, its theme of denial in the face of catastrophe takes on a new resonance following Grass’s own denial about his own involvement with the SS. The retelling of Noah's Ark through the eyes of the rats also served as a rather clunky allegory for global warming.
But the performance was impressive, the pace urgent. So urgent indeed that the cast were dismantling the stage before the audience had entirely left the venue. They'd run into the slot assigned to “Krapp’s Last Tape” and Andrew Dallmeyer, the renowned Beckett actor, was in the gents making himself up – truly - next to punters like me queuing for a pee.
Where else would you find prominent thespians dressing in public toilets? Undressing perhaps – but not preparing for a performance. Or directors serving in the bar, which is where I found Allegra Galvin, of “Flood”. Underground, everyone is equal.
Booze is very big for the vodka-sponsored Underbelly where there are a dozen bars and everyone seems to go into shows with a glass in their hand - even at three in the afternoon. This year, Underbelly was concerned it might lose its license because of the smoking ban - not because of obstinate actors, but through English theatre-goers lighting up in ignorance. They needn’t have worried.
By now I'd taken in “Bloggers” a diverting trawl through look-at-me internet sites, and “Radio” a meditation on militarism and middle America by a wannabe astronaut. It took a little time to achieve lift off, but accomplished its mission.
Later, I emerge into daylight to speak to Ed and Charlie, the monsters of mirth, at their newest venue, a huge purple inflatable cow called “The Udderbelly”, which dominates Bristo Square in the heart of Edinburgh University. Looking less like culture capitalists than disheveled students, they talk wearily about the need for better marketing and infrastructure by the city authorities.
The Godfathers of the Edinburgh mega venues, Pleasance, Assembly, Gilded etc got together last week to bury their feuds and form a united front the Voice of the Independent Producers. About time too. The last thing they need is the council calling the shots.
Ed and Charlie want Edinburgh to become more like Glastonbury, complete with a tent city and a three-day festival pass, so that it can tap into the huge UK-wide market for music and mud. At present, according to credit card receipts, 70% of their punters come from Edinburgh and the Lothians – a figure I found staggering. Time was when Edinburgh folk wouldn’t touch the Festival, except to rob the actors through exorbitant rents.
Back in the steamy vaults I take in “Painters”, engaging physical theatre and slapstick but about as challenging as Norman Wisdom. Unlike the amazing Taylor Mac, who is a cross between Tom Lehrer and Leigh Bowery, but with a ukele. Not just another ‘performance artist, Mac really can sing and his songs were witty, sardonic and sad and laced with acute political commentary.
At eleven, Paul Provenza hosts a chat show with comics Demetri Martin and Jimmy Carr where they talk about the ethics of cracking jokes about rape. And my day in the underworld ends at Spank, a showcase for stand ups. I’m still laughing at three am, which must mean something.
All these shows were packed and rowdy and young. The theatre I saw was a little uneven (I deliberately avoided the well-reviewed big-name productions like Eric Bogosian’s “Talk Radio”) but it certainly wasn’t unadventurous. And at #7.50 – 8.50 a pop, represented good value.
Call me naïve, but I don’t see this kind of enterprise as any kind of threat to the spirit of the Fringe or to artistic standards. Nor is it “cultural colonialism” as one over-wrought figure described it last week. The Underbelly is surely a portal through which an entire generation can gain access to the arts - on its own terms. Roll on Glastonbelly.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
The polls might actually be right.
It might seem easy to dismiss the latest Guardian/ICM opinion poll showing the Tories in contention to win the next general election. It’s deep summer, Blair’s away leaving “crap” John Prescott’s in charge, and we’ve just had a serious security scare. Hardly surprising, then, if the polls are all over the place.
Except that they aren’t. There has been a secular trend of Labour decline now for fully a year. And while it’s too soon to forecast a Tory victory, the opinion poll evidence of the last year shows Labour has lost it - at least in terms of an absolute majority of seats in the House of Commons.
We really can’t ignore this. The Tories are at their highest in the polls for 19 years and we are living in a new political era. For the first time since the Black Wednesday debacle which destroyed the Tory government of John Major in 1992, there is now an established Conservative lead. And Labour are doing everything to maintain it, by presenting a divided front over issues like Lebanon and immigration.
David Cameron may have been having difficulties with some of the old guard in the Tory Party who think he should be tougher on tax and immigration and don’t particularly like the idea of having women candidates foisted upon them. But there’s no doubt that the Tory leader’s strategy is working. He has erased a lot of the reasons people didn’t vote Tory in the past - hostility to immigrants and homosexuals, public service cuts etc.. Labour used to call this “eliminating the negatives” in the 1990s and the Conservatives have shown they can do it too.
However, the modernisation of the political right isn’t all that’s going on. There are messages in the recent polls which should be profoundly worrying for Labour - and Gordon Brown in particular, since he stands to inherit the ruins of this government. Indeed, there is a very disturbing message for whichever party comes to power in Westminster.
In the ICM poll, only 1% of voters said they believe the government’s foreign policy has made Britain safer . One percent! That is a devastating commentary on the “war on terror” which Tony Blair has been fighting - with Brown and Cameron’s help - for the last five years. Afghanistan and Iraq were supposed to make us feel more secure, not less. In times of international tension and terrorist attacks like last week’s abortive plane bombing, voters are supposed to rally behind the government of the day. It’s the Churchill effect. Not this time.
Moreover, only 20% of voters say they think the government is telling the truth about the threat, 26% suspect the government has exaggerated the danger to the public and 51 % think the government is not telling the full truth. This comes as dramatic confirmation of the rampant paranoia that I examined in this space last week and which has been been unleashed by the war on terror.
People clearly now regard this government as toxic to the body politic. This is could readily evolve into an “anyone-but-Labour” movement in the country, similar to the popular revolt against the Tories in 1997. In this state of mind, voters don’t really need to have huge expectations of David Cameron - they just need a credible alternative, an opposition party which seems to have learned some lessons, has made its peace with the modern world and that looks half competent.
The question is: what is Gordon Brown doing about all this? The Chancellor has disappeared from the face of political map while he is on paternity leave with his one month old son. Good for him. Shows he means it about restoring the work/life balance. But the troops are getting restive. “Gordon’s fiddling with nappies while Labour burns” as one Labourite put it. Apart from releasing the bank account details of the alleged plane bombers, the Chancellor has said nothing of substance since he made that string of commitments to keep Trident, build more nuclear power stations and press ahead with privatisation in the NHS.
Some unreconstructed modernisers evidently think that it’s safe to come out of the woodwork again, which is why the former industry secretary, Stephen Byers, made his call for the Chancellor to scrap inheritance tax relief this week. John Reid, the Home Secretary, has re-emerged as a possible leadership contender who is tough on crime, tough on terror and tough on immigration - well, tougher than Gordon anyway.
But the Chancellor is unmoved. Perhaps he believes that the challengers are so feeble, they’re not worth dignifying with a response. It has been left to Alastair Darling (surely now the Chancellor of the Exchequer-in-waiting) to slap down calls for tax cuts for the top 6% of home owners and remind people of the economic benefits to Britain of immigration from the EU.
The Chancellor would have no truck with Guardian liberals like Polly Toynbee who want to curb immigration from Bulgaria and Romania. In the Chancellor’s eyes, the 600,000 who have come from new accession states in the last two years are a measure of the success of the British economy. Their taxes easily pay for their limited welfare rights and they constitute no proven threat to wage levels of British workers. That’s according to the Treasury - though I suspect people working in the building trades, hotels and catering might disagree.
But the debate on immigration is not one the Chancellor has engaged with, and nor has he been doing anything obvious to counter David Cameron, or present a different front on Iraq. Presumably, Gordon Brown’s silence is designed to prevent at least some of the mud from the Middle East from sticking to him. So long as the Chancellor keeps silent about the Lebanon and the deteriorating situation in Iraq, the less he will be seen to be to blame for it.
But he can’t ignore the polls. The situation is a critical one for Labour. They face an acrimonious conference in Manchester next month in which the pressure will be on Tony Blair to announce his departure date - though all indications are that he will not oblige. This means a prolonged leadership struggle against a background of deepening uncertainty over national security. So long as Blair is Prime Minister, and continues uncritically to support the Bush foreign policy, Britain will remain in the front line and therefore a prime target of terror.
Then, next May, the Labour Party is expected to get a severe drubbing in the Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections. Jack McConnell’s people are bracing themselves for losses, and able politicians, like the former Health Minister, Susan Deacon, seem to have decided there is little future in Holyrood for Labour.
All this means that there is little real chance of a Labour revival until 2008/9. It will be a massive task for Brown when he finally takes over undoing all this and measuring up to David Cameron. Labour’s party organisation is largely bankrupt and activists have left in droves following the cash-for-peerages scandal. But they were leaving in droves even before that.
Of course, a change of leadership might work wonders, and Brown showed his popularity in the 2005 electin campaign when he rode to Blair’s rescue. But the risk is that Labour has left it too late. Gordon Brown may be the leader who has to take Labour back into opposition.
Except that they aren’t. There has been a secular trend of Labour decline now for fully a year. And while it’s too soon to forecast a Tory victory, the opinion poll evidence of the last year shows Labour has lost it - at least in terms of an absolute majority of seats in the House of Commons.
We really can’t ignore this. The Tories are at their highest in the polls for 19 years and we are living in a new political era. For the first time since the Black Wednesday debacle which destroyed the Tory government of John Major in 1992, there is now an established Conservative lead. And Labour are doing everything to maintain it, by presenting a divided front over issues like Lebanon and immigration.
David Cameron may have been having difficulties with some of the old guard in the Tory Party who think he should be tougher on tax and immigration and don’t particularly like the idea of having women candidates foisted upon them. But there’s no doubt that the Tory leader’s strategy is working. He has erased a lot of the reasons people didn’t vote Tory in the past - hostility to immigrants and homosexuals, public service cuts etc.. Labour used to call this “eliminating the negatives” in the 1990s and the Conservatives have shown they can do it too.
However, the modernisation of the political right isn’t all that’s going on. There are messages in the recent polls which should be profoundly worrying for Labour - and Gordon Brown in particular, since he stands to inherit the ruins of this government. Indeed, there is a very disturbing message for whichever party comes to power in Westminster.
In the ICM poll, only 1% of voters said they believe the government’s foreign policy has made Britain safer . One percent! That is a devastating commentary on the “war on terror” which Tony Blair has been fighting - with Brown and Cameron’s help - for the last five years. Afghanistan and Iraq were supposed to make us feel more secure, not less. In times of international tension and terrorist attacks like last week’s abortive plane bombing, voters are supposed to rally behind the government of the day. It’s the Churchill effect. Not this time.
Moreover, only 20% of voters say they think the government is telling the truth about the threat, 26% suspect the government has exaggerated the danger to the public and 51 % think the government is not telling the full truth. This comes as dramatic confirmation of the rampant paranoia that I examined in this space last week and which has been been unleashed by the war on terror.
People clearly now regard this government as toxic to the body politic. This is could readily evolve into an “anyone-but-Labour” movement in the country, similar to the popular revolt against the Tories in 1997. In this state of mind, voters don’t really need to have huge expectations of David Cameron - they just need a credible alternative, an opposition party which seems to have learned some lessons, has made its peace with the modern world and that looks half competent.
The question is: what is Gordon Brown doing about all this? The Chancellor has disappeared from the face of political map while he is on paternity leave with his one month old son. Good for him. Shows he means it about restoring the work/life balance. But the troops are getting restive. “Gordon’s fiddling with nappies while Labour burns” as one Labourite put it. Apart from releasing the bank account details of the alleged plane bombers, the Chancellor has said nothing of substance since he made that string of commitments to keep Trident, build more nuclear power stations and press ahead with privatisation in the NHS.
Some unreconstructed modernisers evidently think that it’s safe to come out of the woodwork again, which is why the former industry secretary, Stephen Byers, made his call for the Chancellor to scrap inheritance tax relief this week. John Reid, the Home Secretary, has re-emerged as a possible leadership contender who is tough on crime, tough on terror and tough on immigration - well, tougher than Gordon anyway.
But the Chancellor is unmoved. Perhaps he believes that the challengers are so feeble, they’re not worth dignifying with a response. It has been left to Alastair Darling (surely now the Chancellor of the Exchequer-in-waiting) to slap down calls for tax cuts for the top 6% of home owners and remind people of the economic benefits to Britain of immigration from the EU.
The Chancellor would have no truck with Guardian liberals like Polly Toynbee who want to curb immigration from Bulgaria and Romania. In the Chancellor’s eyes, the 600,000 who have come from new accession states in the last two years are a measure of the success of the British economy. Their taxes easily pay for their limited welfare rights and they constitute no proven threat to wage levels of British workers. That’s according to the Treasury - though I suspect people working in the building trades, hotels and catering might disagree.
But the debate on immigration is not one the Chancellor has engaged with, and nor has he been doing anything obvious to counter David Cameron, or present a different front on Iraq. Presumably, Gordon Brown’s silence is designed to prevent at least some of the mud from the Middle East from sticking to him. So long as the Chancellor keeps silent about the Lebanon and the deteriorating situation in Iraq, the less he will be seen to be to blame for it.
But he can’t ignore the polls. The situation is a critical one for Labour. They face an acrimonious conference in Manchester next month in which the pressure will be on Tony Blair to announce his departure date - though all indications are that he will not oblige. This means a prolonged leadership struggle against a background of deepening uncertainty over national security. So long as Blair is Prime Minister, and continues uncritically to support the Bush foreign policy, Britain will remain in the front line and therefore a prime target of terror.
Then, next May, the Labour Party is expected to get a severe drubbing in the Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections. Jack McConnell’s people are bracing themselves for losses, and able politicians, like the former Health Minister, Susan Deacon, seem to have decided there is little future in Holyrood for Labour.
All this means that there is little real chance of a Labour revival until 2008/9. It will be a massive task for Brown when he finally takes over undoing all this and measuring up to David Cameron. Labour’s party organisation is largely bankrupt and activists have left in droves following the cash-for-peerages scandal. But they were leaving in droves even before that.
Of course, a change of leadership might work wonders, and Brown showed his popularity in the 2005 electin campaign when he rode to Blair’s rescue. But the risk is that Labour has left it too late. Gordon Brown may be the leader who has to take Labour back into opposition.
Apocalypse Book Festival
For hacks like me, chairing sessions at the Edinburgh Book Festival is a little like going back to university. The difference is that you get to interrogate in person some of those academic authorities whose works are held in awe by undergraduates and politicians alike. It can be a disarming experience.
I'm not quite sure what I expected the US neo-conservative thinker Francis Fukuyama - author of "The End of History and the last man" - to be like in person. But I assumed there would be at least some of the trademark neucon swagger, intellectual arrogance and God-bless-America chauvinism. After all, he was the soul mate of the arch Republican hawk, Paul Wolfowitz. I couldn't have been more wrong.
In the author's yurt I discovered a diminutive, unassuming academic in jeans who'd lost his bags on the Edinburgh flight. When I got him on the stage he was subdued, almost penitent about the Iraq war, which his neo-con colleagues championed.
He described as a dangerous mess, which should never have happened and which could destabilise the entire region, if not the world. 'The end of history' began to take on a new and sinister connotation. Indeed Fukuyama's attitude to the Iraq folly and his contempt for the handling of the subsequent crisis he reminded me of the late Robin Cook, who used to be a regular presence in Charlotte Square in August.
Nor did he subscribe to the bellicose 'Third World War' rhetoric of George W Bush and Tony Blair. Fukuyama insists that the way to defeat al Qaeda is through patient intelligence and policing work. New wars and suspensions of civil rights only enlist more to the terrorist cause.
I think the audience too were somewhat unnerved by his apostasy, humility even. It just didn't compute. Here was one of the inspirers of the neocon Project for a New American Century coming over like a member of the Stop The War Coalition.
Clearly, history has a habit of starting up again when you least expect it. Fukuyama's misfortune is to have had his name linked unfairly to a project for American hegemony lover the planet. Now, with the rise if radical Islam, we’ve suddenly got more history than we know what to do with.
Fukuyama wasn't the only penitent in the EBF tent city last week. George Packer, the celebrated writer for the New Yorker magazine, is another former supporter of the Iraq war who’s changed his mind. An old Middle East hand, he'd hoped to see Saddam's bloody dictatorship replaced by an Eastern European style popular revolution. Big mistake. His prognosis for the Middle East following the Lebanon is even gloomier than Fukuyama's. Packer fears an all out regional war an Islamic terror threat to the West for a generation.
In one sense this chimes with the views of the thinking man's Tory MP, Michael Gove, with whom I also crossed swords in the Spiegel Tent. He agrees there is a big fight coming - though unlike Packer he doesn't believe the upcoming apocalypse is a down to a botched scheme for world domination from a handful of pro-Israeli ideologues who somehow got their levers on power in the Pentagon. The fight can’t come soon enough for Gove.
Gove is one of those on the Right who think that the West was always going to have to settle accounts with what he calls "Islamic totalitarianism", which he claims is to this century what fascism or communism was to the last. He berates liberals and "cultural relativists" for failing to defend Western values and thus allowing muddleheaded Muslims to be "bewitched" by Islamists.
Gove, who is a very bright and congenial guy -one of David Cameron's best assets - simply doesn't buy the line that the West has been a cause of its own misfortune. That we inflamed Islamic resentment because of our policies in the Middle East. It's all their fault for rejecting liberal democracy, capitalism and the end of history.
Well, I don't know about Osama, but he sure as hell frightens me. It leaves little scope for reconciliation if we simply demonise Islamists and declare ourselves to be in a life and death struggle with evil. I can't help thinking that it plays into the hands of terrorists to compare them with Hitler and Stalin, who posed real and serious threats to civilization.
But I would say that, wouldn’t I as a fully paid-up member of the "liberal left elite" who Michael Gove claims, are really running the country. For such a clever guy, he speaks an inordinate amount of rubbish.
This was all pretty sobering stuff, notwithstanding the effects of the excellent Orkney malt in the hospitality tent. I can't recall a bleaker Book Festival - at least in terms of the views expressed on world affairs. But all credit to the EBF for allowing them to be aired. Packer lamented the supine US media and the lack of any serious conversation about the reality on the ground in Iraq and what to do about it. But it's the same in Britain. It's not as if there isn't public interest. The tens of thousands of people who come to Edinburgh in August are extraordinarily well informed and eager for engagement with the issues – but where do they go to engage?
As for solutions, I'll be doing the man some hope to see as the next Democrat presidential candidate, Al Gore on 27th.. Worth a visit if you can beg or borrow a ticket.
I'm not quite sure what I expected the US neo-conservative thinker Francis Fukuyama - author of "The End of History and the last man" - to be like in person. But I assumed there would be at least some of the trademark neucon swagger, intellectual arrogance and God-bless-America chauvinism. After all, he was the soul mate of the arch Republican hawk, Paul Wolfowitz. I couldn't have been more wrong.
In the author's yurt I discovered a diminutive, unassuming academic in jeans who'd lost his bags on the Edinburgh flight. When I got him on the stage he was subdued, almost penitent about the Iraq war, which his neo-con colleagues championed.
He described as a dangerous mess, which should never have happened and which could destabilise the entire region, if not the world. 'The end of history' began to take on a new and sinister connotation. Indeed Fukuyama's attitude to the Iraq folly and his contempt for the handling of the subsequent crisis he reminded me of the late Robin Cook, who used to be a regular presence in Charlotte Square in August.
Nor did he subscribe to the bellicose 'Third World War' rhetoric of George W Bush and Tony Blair. Fukuyama insists that the way to defeat al Qaeda is through patient intelligence and policing work. New wars and suspensions of civil rights only enlist more to the terrorist cause.
I think the audience too were somewhat unnerved by his apostasy, humility even. It just didn't compute. Here was one of the inspirers of the neocon Project for a New American Century coming over like a member of the Stop The War Coalition.
Clearly, history has a habit of starting up again when you least expect it. Fukuyama's misfortune is to have had his name linked unfairly to a project for American hegemony lover the planet. Now, with the rise if radical Islam, we’ve suddenly got more history than we know what to do with.
Fukuyama wasn't the only penitent in the EBF tent city last week. George Packer, the celebrated writer for the New Yorker magazine, is another former supporter of the Iraq war who’s changed his mind. An old Middle East hand, he'd hoped to see Saddam's bloody dictatorship replaced by an Eastern European style popular revolution. Big mistake. His prognosis for the Middle East following the Lebanon is even gloomier than Fukuyama's. Packer fears an all out regional war an Islamic terror threat to the West for a generation.
In one sense this chimes with the views of the thinking man's Tory MP, Michael Gove, with whom I also crossed swords in the Spiegel Tent. He agrees there is a big fight coming - though unlike Packer he doesn't believe the upcoming apocalypse is a down to a botched scheme for world domination from a handful of pro-Israeli ideologues who somehow got their levers on power in the Pentagon. The fight can’t come soon enough for Gove.
Gove is one of those on the Right who think that the West was always going to have to settle accounts with what he calls "Islamic totalitarianism", which he claims is to this century what fascism or communism was to the last. He berates liberals and "cultural relativists" for failing to defend Western values and thus allowing muddleheaded Muslims to be "bewitched" by Islamists.
Gove, who is a very bright and congenial guy -one of David Cameron's best assets - simply doesn't buy the line that the West has been a cause of its own misfortune. That we inflamed Islamic resentment because of our policies in the Middle East. It's all their fault for rejecting liberal democracy, capitalism and the end of history.
Well, I don't know about Osama, but he sure as hell frightens me. It leaves little scope for reconciliation if we simply demonise Islamists and declare ourselves to be in a life and death struggle with evil. I can't help thinking that it plays into the hands of terrorists to compare them with Hitler and Stalin, who posed real and serious threats to civilization.
But I would say that, wouldn’t I as a fully paid-up member of the "liberal left elite" who Michael Gove claims, are really running the country. For such a clever guy, he speaks an inordinate amount of rubbish.
This was all pretty sobering stuff, notwithstanding the effects of the excellent Orkney malt in the hospitality tent. I can't recall a bleaker Book Festival - at least in terms of the views expressed on world affairs. But all credit to the EBF for allowing them to be aired. Packer lamented the supine US media and the lack of any serious conversation about the reality on the ground in Iraq and what to do about it. But it's the same in Britain. It's not as if there isn't public interest. The tens of thousands of people who come to Edinburgh in August are extraordinarily well informed and eager for engagement with the issues – but where do they go to engage?
As for solutions, I'll be doing the man some hope to see as the next Democrat presidential candidate, Al Gore on 27th.. Worth a visit if you can beg or borrow a ticket.
Festival Faith
There is an unwritten rule on the Fringe that, unless the venue is packed, no one ever sits in the front three rows. It’s as if there is an invisible barrier beyond which no mortal may cross, a kind of embarrassment force field. Which is why, as a curmudgeon, I generally sit in the front row.
Yes, it does mean that you invite the attention of stand up comedians who’ll attack your dress sense and speculate about your sexual orientation. But just try answering back as if you are a German tourist and see what happens.
However, I went one step beyond the front row last week when I turned up to an event and actually became part of the show. It was an event at the first “Edinburgh Festival of Spirituality and Peace” (St Johns), chaired by the esteemed arts commentator, Brian Morton, exploring the predominance of religious themes at this Festival. Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh and chair of the Scottish Arts Council, had been unable to make it. I was invited to take his place on the platform.
Now, this was ambitious casting since I’m an atheist who’s never voluntarily gone to church, let alone pontificated about the state of the human spirit. Fortunately, there were people who knew what they were talking about, not least in the audience. We discussed the decline of radical theatre and the search for values and meaning in the post-Marxist millennium, and other lofty themes.
Then I made the rather tendentious aside that, while the Judaeo-Christian morality may have been a foundation of civil society, there remains a dark side to religion, which is all too apparent in the Middle East. A heated debate ensued. I was taken task for failing too look behind the surface of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. It’s not about religion but about the occupied Palestinian territories, American foreign policy, the thirst for oil.
Funny, but that’s what I used to think too. Only I’ve been forced to the conclusion that religion, while perhaps not the sole cause of these conflicts, really does make them peculiarly difficult to resolve because of the unholy passions released. Something to do with jealous Gods and golden calves; martyrdom and 72 virgins. The assurance of a afterlife does make people less concerned about their longevity in this world.
Anyway, anyone who’s interested in the interplay of religion and politics, the so-called ‘clash of civilisations’, should take a look at the programme at St Johns. And I promise they won’t have to listen to me. Tomorrow Moazzeem Begg will be speaking about his incarceration in Guantanamo Bay. David Greig, Jo Clifford, Karen Armstrong will be looking at everything from sex and religion to the women and Islam. And a week tomorrow, the comedian Bill Bailey will be trying to discuss humour, religion and cartoons - hopefully without sparking another Jihad.
But what of the premise: that faith is invading the Festival this year? Well, there ‘s no shortage of shows on religious themes - I counted over sixty. Something’s clearly going on , though it’s too early to conclude that spirituality is occupying the space left by politics.
However, I’m not sure if it’s particularly good news for the Festival, because none of the religious-theme shows I’ve seen so far have given me much to write home about. “Mary and the Stripper” (Hill Street Theatre) is an interesting attempt to recast the story of Mary Magdalene in Soho, which failed to convince, despite being based on a real story and having a ‘saved’ ex-stripper in the cast. “We Don’t Know Shi’ite” (Underbelly) is a review based on the cast’s experience of trying to understand Islam, which I’m afraid rather lived up to its title. The project foundered on its attempts to ‘understand’ aspects of Islam like the subjection of women, creationism, homophobia.
The Egyptian comic Omar Marzouk (Pleasance), who has a fine track record of poking fun at obscurantism, rather lost my sympathy this year by declaring his support for the censorship of those Danish cartoons of the prophet. Elsewhere, the Black-Jew Dialogues (CVenue 34) tries intelligently to exploration of the competitive victim culture of Jewish and Afro-Americans groups. But as comedy it didn’t quite achieve lift off.
It all left me wondering whether religion has a dampening effect - like Bob Dylan after he fund God in 1978. But my faith was partially restored by “Jesus the Guantamo Years” (Underbelly). This extended sketch about Christ coming back as a stand up comedian, and being incarcerated as a suspected terrorist, contained some brilliant material, including a wicked reworking of the Monty Python Parrot Sketch with a man bringing back a dud Messiah. “If he hadn’t been nailed to the cross, he’d be pushing up the daisies”.
Offensive perhaps, but the show contained a moral message: that humour is an expression of the human spirit, and laughter unites rather than divides. Which perhaps why fundamentalists aren’t funny.
Yes, it does mean that you invite the attention of stand up comedians who’ll attack your dress sense and speculate about your sexual orientation. But just try answering back as if you are a German tourist and see what happens.
However, I went one step beyond the front row last week when I turned up to an event and actually became part of the show. It was an event at the first “Edinburgh Festival of Spirituality and Peace” (St Johns), chaired by the esteemed arts commentator, Brian Morton, exploring the predominance of religious themes at this Festival. Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh and chair of the Scottish Arts Council, had been unable to make it. I was invited to take his place on the platform.
Now, this was ambitious casting since I’m an atheist who’s never voluntarily gone to church, let alone pontificated about the state of the human spirit. Fortunately, there were people who knew what they were talking about, not least in the audience. We discussed the decline of radical theatre and the search for values and meaning in the post-Marxist millennium, and other lofty themes.
Then I made the rather tendentious aside that, while the Judaeo-Christian morality may have been a foundation of civil society, there remains a dark side to religion, which is all too apparent in the Middle East. A heated debate ensued. I was taken task for failing too look behind the surface of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. It’s not about religion but about the occupied Palestinian territories, American foreign policy, the thirst for oil.
Funny, but that’s what I used to think too. Only I’ve been forced to the conclusion that religion, while perhaps not the sole cause of these conflicts, really does make them peculiarly difficult to resolve because of the unholy passions released. Something to do with jealous Gods and golden calves; martyrdom and 72 virgins. The assurance of a afterlife does make people less concerned about their longevity in this world.
Anyway, anyone who’s interested in the interplay of religion and politics, the so-called ‘clash of civilisations’, should take a look at the programme at St Johns. And I promise they won’t have to listen to me. Tomorrow Moazzeem Begg will be speaking about his incarceration in Guantanamo Bay. David Greig, Jo Clifford, Karen Armstrong will be looking at everything from sex and religion to the women and Islam. And a week tomorrow, the comedian Bill Bailey will be trying to discuss humour, religion and cartoons - hopefully without sparking another Jihad.
But what of the premise: that faith is invading the Festival this year? Well, there ‘s no shortage of shows on religious themes - I counted over sixty. Something’s clearly going on , though it’s too early to conclude that spirituality is occupying the space left by politics.
However, I’m not sure if it’s particularly good news for the Festival, because none of the religious-theme shows I’ve seen so far have given me much to write home about. “Mary and the Stripper” (Hill Street Theatre) is an interesting attempt to recast the story of Mary Magdalene in Soho, which failed to convince, despite being based on a real story and having a ‘saved’ ex-stripper in the cast. “We Don’t Know Shi’ite” (Underbelly) is a review based on the cast’s experience of trying to understand Islam, which I’m afraid rather lived up to its title. The project foundered on its attempts to ‘understand’ aspects of Islam like the subjection of women, creationism, homophobia.
The Egyptian comic Omar Marzouk (Pleasance), who has a fine track record of poking fun at obscurantism, rather lost my sympathy this year by declaring his support for the censorship of those Danish cartoons of the prophet. Elsewhere, the Black-Jew Dialogues (CVenue 34) tries intelligently to exploration of the competitive victim culture of Jewish and Afro-Americans groups. But as comedy it didn’t quite achieve lift off.
It all left me wondering whether religion has a dampening effect - like Bob Dylan after he fund God in 1978. But my faith was partially restored by “Jesus the Guantamo Years” (Underbelly). This extended sketch about Christ coming back as a stand up comedian, and being incarcerated as a suspected terrorist, contained some brilliant material, including a wicked reworking of the Monty Python Parrot Sketch with a man bringing back a dud Messiah. “If he hadn’t been nailed to the cross, he’d be pushing up the daisies”.
Offensive perhaps, but the show contained a moral message: that humour is an expression of the human spirit, and laughter unites rather than divides. Which perhaps why fundamentalists aren’t funny.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
