Wings Over Scotland

The growing rift between Labour and the trade union movement in Scotland was highlighted yesterday by a statement from the STUC flatly contradicting the narrative spun by all three opposition parties this week, namely that that uncertainty over the date of the independence referendum was damaging the prospects of business investment in Scotland.

In a statement striking for its lack of ambiguity, an unnamed spokesman for the congress was reported by the Scotsman as saying that the unions "had come across no evidence that the forthcoming poll was deterring investment in the country", and that as a result it "did not believe it was necessary to hold a referendum as soon as possible, as is being urged by both the UK government and opposition parties", adding that "There are far more immediate problems that need to be looked at."

Oddly, this fairly dramatic divergence of opinion was afforded just 126 words by the paper, compared to the 2,348 devoted to Douglas Alexander's rather less newsworthy speech to a Labour youth conference.

Not for the first time, the Scotsman is today apparently guest-edited by Douglas Alexander. The paper offers blanket coverage – including a secondary article, analysis, leader column and a personal profile, as well as the front-page lead story itself – to the shadow foreign secretary's latest speech to a Labour audience, in which he urges the Scottish party to back greater devolution rather than campaign alongside the Tories and Lib Dems for the status quo. (The Herald doesn't mention the speech at all.)

The story barely justifies such excitable trumpeting. Alexander has already made public his concerns about how Labour should approach its policy on the constitution, in a speech which was heavily-featured across the Scottish media just a month ago. The latest one puts no meat on the bones of his earlier effort – Alexander makes no specific proposals as to what further devolution the party should support, and maintains Labour's position of opposing a devo-max question on the referendum paper.

Alexander is not an MSP, and therefore has no control over the Scottish party's decisions. (If, that is, Scottish Labour is an entity as autonomous as its supporters frequently insist.) So basically what we have is an outsider with no official influence suggesting that Scottish Labour should slightly change its pronouncements about devolution, but not its actual policies or actions. In other words there is, in essence, no actual news to report here at all.

The Scottish electorate still overwhelmingly supports greatly-extended powers for the Scottish Parliament, albeit with roughly half of the backers of devo-max also supporting independence. Scottish Labour is desperate to tap into this support and create clear Saltire-blue water between itself and the UK coalition, but has painted itself into a difficult corner by  opposing a devo-max option in the referendum.

It's a circle that the party is going to find very difficult (perhaps impossible) to square – it would, in effect, be campaigning on a position of "Vote No to independence and we might give Scotland some (unspecified) extra powers, at some unspecified point in the future, probably after yet another Calman Commission, if we win a Westminster majority under Ed Miliband, and if we keep our promises (unlike with electoral reform and tuition fees), and if we haven't changed our minds again by then".

At present, all Alexander is really achieving is drawing attention to that fact.

All the papers today report on the latest developments over the increasingly doomed-looking Scotland Bill. Perhaps the most telling comment in all of them, though, wanders in unassumingly towards the end of the Herald's piece.

Mr Mundell, the country’s only Tory MSP, said: “I do not believe the Scottish election result earlier this year was a mandate to strengthen this Bill.”

One does tend to get the impression that the Tories still don't see the connection between those two things, and we're going to be so bold as to assert that their electoral prospects are unlikely to improve until they do. Earlier on in the article the Herald's Robbie Dinwoodie notes that "the Westminster Ministers’ repeated riposte was to point to the result of the previous May when the pro-Calman parties won their mandate", which is an underestimation of the Scottish electorate so grave that it all but explains the SNP's landslide in May by itself.

Scottish voters know full well that there's next to no point in electing SNP MPs to Westminster. Even if every single Scottish seat went to the nationalists, they would have almost no chance of achieving or influencing anything, since only twice in the last 50 years (and briefly on both occasions) has the entire block of Scottish MPs held the balance of majority at Westminster. Sending SNP members south serves only to dilute the party's talent base, and while the SNP can never admit this in public and have to put forward a candidate in every seat (because to do otherwise would appear defeatist), it's largely a gesture – the difference in the amount of money and effort the party devotes to Westminster and Holyrood campaigning is huge.

The electorate therefore tends to use its vote tactically against the Tories, and as they can't trust Labour and the SNP to work together against a common enemy – witness Labour's venomous, contemptuous response when the Scottish and Welsh nationalists offered their support for a centre-left coalition in 2010 – Scottish voters in Westminster elections therefore quite reasonably back the biggest of the opposition parties. (It speaks volumes for the degree to which Labour has exhausted the patience of its core vote that even despite this, the SNP have now moved well ahead in the polls for voting intentions at the next UK general election.)

The huffy intransigence of the coalition in the face of the Scottish Parliament's attempts to improve the Scotland Bill – with a cleverly-chosen package of suggestions backed not only by the SNP but variously by all three Holyrood opposition parties – shows how little they've grasped about the reasons for the rise of the nationalists. This stubborn resistance already looks like costing them the Scotland Bill (which in its current form is a sneaky attempt to weaken the Scottish Government by quietly reducing its funding while shifting the blame to Holyrood). If they continue with the see-no-evil-hear-no-evil approach, it may cost them Scotland itself.

So I had a little go at the BBC Lab’s morality test, a large-scale experiment which is designed to try to formulate a snapshot of the morality of modern Britain. Who wants to take a guess at what turned out to be my most prominent moral dimension?

Click below to find out!

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Labour's former Lord Provost of Glasgow and celebrity Celtic fan Michael Kelly would have an entry in the "Zany Comedy Relief" section of our blogroll if there was a central link hub for his outpourings. His latest rant in the Scotsman, though, is demented even by his standards. Under the bizarre title "Alex Salmond’s anti-sectarian purge has gone too far" (is it possible to go too far against sectarianism? Are we saying there's an acceptable level above zero?), he attempts to make an extraordinary case which twists and turns on itself with every line.

Firstly, he expresses his outrage that the police reported Celtic to UEFA for alleged sectarian singing during their Europa League match against Rennes, rather than arresting the perpetrators. Yet in the very next paragraph he relates a tale of them doing just that to a fan accused of singing a pro-IRA ditty during a Celtic-Hibs game, and claims that the arrest "seems excessive".

Kelly then launches into a more general diatribe against the anti-sectarianism legislation currently making its way through the Scottish Parliament, culminating in the astonishing claim that the IRA "was not a sectarian organisation". Because we all remember all its many prominent Protestant members, of course. But Kelly isn't quite done yet. His penultimate paragraph contains the following mind-boggling passage:

"But further, both Celtic and Rangers fans argue there is a significant difference between celebrating the actions of current terrorist groups and remembering with nostalgia the exploits of the freedom fighters of a century ago. Thus the Boys of the Old Brigade and Here Lies a Soldier should be classified as folk songs like the Massacre of Glencoe and the grossly offensive but condoned Flower of Scotland."

This blog doesn't know about you, readers, but we've never heard "The Massacre Of Glencoe" being lustily bellowed from the Fir Park stands when Motherwell take on Kilmarnock – indeed, we've never heard it spontaneously sung anywhere ever, let alone at a football match. Perhaps for the strikingly obvious reason that, just like Michael Kelly's beloved ballads of a century-old war in a foreign country, it's got absolutely sod-all to do with Scottish football. But the notion that "Flower Of Scotland" – Scotland's national anthem – is "grossly offensive" leads us to wonder why in the world Michael Kelly still lives in such a hateful nation.

"Flower Of Scotland" could at a stretch be deemed to contain some anti-English lyrics, but the song is a tale told from a purely defensive perspective. It's about repelling a foreign invader ("and sent him homeward to think again"), not invading others (compare and contrast with the infamous verse in "God Save The Queen" about crushing the Scots in Scotland), and in that deeply moral theme it stands with some of the world's finest anthems, such as "La Marseillaise". Even then "Flower Of Scotland" sounds a pacifistic note, pointing out that:

"Those days are past now, and in the past they must remain."

To call it "grossly offensive", then, is fairly unarguably deranged. (Not to mention irrelevant, since this blog is unaware of any group of supporters having ever sung FoS at league games, which are what the sectarianism bill is designed to tackle.) The Scotsman no longer allows comments on Michael Kelly's posts. Perhaps it should take the logical next step and no longer employ him to write them at all.

Some frightening numbers and home truths from Iain Macwhirter in the Herald today. The piece reaches the only conclusion it's possible to draw from the evidence, namely:

"There will have to be redistribution to claw back the 40% or so of wealth hoarded by the top 1%."

But which party  – particularly in the UK – does one vote for to achieve this? Who stands on a platform of serious wealth redistribution, calling the "But we'll leave!" bluff of the obscenely rich? (Who avoid as much of their tax burden as they can anyway.) The imminent Second Great Depression is a lot like the First World War – everyone can see it coming, nobody actually wants it, but we've hitched ourselves to an ideological bandwagon that's hurtling towards a terrible abyss and nobody's prepared to shoot the horse that's pulling it.

Professor John Curtice, a psephologist at Strathclyde University and the Scottish media's go-to guy for all political analysis, is often attacked by "cybernats" for alleged partiality in favour of Labour. This blog sighs in despair whenever online nationalists automatically scream "Biased!" at anyone who doesn't come onscreen in a kilt and Jimmy hat singing "Flower Of Scotland", but it has to be said that Prof. Curtice has done himself no favours at all this week.

As co-author of a report published yesterday by the Electoral Reform Society Scotland, the good professor has launched what the Scotsman today calls a "strongly worded attack" on Holyrood's proportional electoral system, under which the SNP won a majority of seats (53%) on 45% of the vote. As we noted yesterday, it's odd that the ERSS has chosen now to demand changes to the system, given that when Labour/Lib Dem coalitions had Holyrood majorities in 1999 and 2003, they also commanded less than 50% of the vote (45.5% between them in 2003, 49.5% in 1999), and nobody seemed to have a problem with that.

Now, to be fair to Prof. Curtice, the Scotsman does put words in his mouth, in their characteristic manner. The headline of the piece claims that the report brands the Holyrood system "a failure" (a description which we can't find anywhere in it) and also asserts that the report demands the system "should be changed to prevent one party winning an overall majority", which is something of an exaggeration – Curtice only actually says that the objective of the proposed changes is to make a majority "more difficult", not impossible.

But by fronting such a suspiciously-timed report, the Professor and the ERSS have allowed their credibility to be undermined by exactly the sort of distortion the Unionist media specialises in, and in doing so have left themselves dreadfully open to allegations of political colour. The society claims their motivation is honourable, and aimed only at promoting a fuller range of political views:

"We are convinced our democracy would work better with more parties in the system, so that more voices are represented and heard and that power is shared, checked and balanced."

…but the current method of electing the Scottish Parliament is perfectly capable of delivering that – in 2003, for example, the Greens got 7 seats, the Scottish Socialists won 6 seats and two independents also secured seats, those three groups between them providing almost 12% of the Parliament's MSPs. (For comparison, imagine the UK Parliament having 78 MPs from outwith the three main parties – the actual number is 28, with only one of those representing an English constituency.)

The simple fact is, the electorate could have elected a wider range of MSPs if they'd wanted to, as they have done in the past. Instead, they overwhelmingly chose the SNP. That's democracy, because in practice almost no democracy on Earth is perfectly proportional. This blog has no objections to bringing the Scottish Parliament closer to that ideal, but it's decidedly odd that supposedly neutral organisations like the ERSS didn't feel the need to suddenly press for it until the SNP won a majority.

We're absolutely confident, however, that the author of the above quote – the society's director Willie Sullivan – also being a Labour councillor in his day job (a fact the Scotsman inexplicably neglects to mention) is entirely coincidental.

PS The replacement PR method proposed by the ERSS report is one devised by the French mathematician André Sainte-Laguë. His most famous work is the calculation that it was scientifically impossible for bumblebees to be able to fly.

Scottish Labour embarrassed themselves horribly today when they jumped on comments from SNP MSP Stewart Maxwell in which he noted that the Scottish Government was only legally empowered to hold an advisory referendum on independence rather than a binding one. Not withstanding the fact that ALL referenda in the UK are only advisory, whether conducted by Holyrood or Westminster or anyone else, Labour’s humiliating blunder was in triumphantly asserting there was something new about this position, when in fact the very first sentence of the SNP’s National Conversation website – dating back over two years – says the exact same thing:

“The First Minister has outlined plans for a public consultation on a draft Referendum Bill which sets out proposals for an advisory referendum on extending the powers of the Scottish Parliament.”

But there’s another aspect to the nature of referenda that everyone seems to be inexplicably overlooking of late. The Unionist parties have recently ramped up a campaign in which they demand the SNP “clarify” every last item of policy in an independent Scotland, from currency and EU membership to renewable energy transmission costs, pension provision, and all the way down to what colour the First Minister’s going to paint Bute House’s front door. What nobody seems to have grasped is the fairly crucial point that that’s not what a referendum is for.

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The Scottish Liberal Democrats (remember them?) are rather excited today. With their finger on the pulse of the nation as usual, they invite citizens of Scotland and the UK to rejoice in our low, low petrol prices. No, that's not a typo – they mean low compared to Norway, Scotland's oil-rich neighbour whose people apparently pay up to 20p a litre more than us at the pumps. This concerns all five of Scotland's remaining Lib Dems greatly, as they fret that "hard-pressed families" in an independent Scotland might be forced to pay similar sums for their fuel.

Of course, those same families might be prepared to bear that burden if in return they were to enjoy Norwegian levels of salary. The average Norwegian worker takes home an impressive £46,700 or so a year, in one of the most economically equal countries on the planet, compared to the UK average of £25,500. As a driver, I'd personally like to take this opportunity to announce that I will happily pay a 20p-a-litre premium in exchange for an extra £21,000 a year, should any party wish to propose such a policy. How about you, readers?

Ever since the SNP achieved what was thought by most people to be impossible – winning an absolute majority in the Scottish Parliament under its proportional representation system – the Unionist camp has discovered a sudden pressing concern about the perils of majority government (regardless of the fact that almost every UK Parliament in history has operated with an absolute majority on a minority of the vote, and that Labour and the Tories regularly proclaim this as a great benefit of the wildly undemocratic First Past The Post method thanks to its delivery of "strong" governments, and oppose any form of PR for Westminster).

This concern was given voice today in a report by the Electoral Reform Society, proposing a change in the rules governing Holyrood's system of proportional representation, to a format which – quite coincidentally – would have resulted in the SNP narrowly missing out on a majority in May. The society's justification for the change was that "democracy works better with more parties represented", which seems a hard argument to find fault with.

The odd thing about the report, though, is that the Sainte-Laguë system which it put forward as the solution would have done precisely nothing to increase the number of parties represented at Holyrood, as this analysis of the results by Better Nation shows. The existing parties/groups would have had their representations fiddled around with slightly, but the same six (SNP, Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, Green and independents) would have won seats as actually did. The only difference would have been that the pro-independence Greens would have held the balance of power, wielding a disproportionate influence with their 7 seats over the 64-seat SNP, as they could have held them to ransom over any policy they chose as a price for supporting an independence referendum.

This blog is a supporter of PR, so that's all fair enough. But it's curious that this report has suddenly raised issues with Holyrood now, after 12 years, just at the point where the SNP has taken control over it. It'll be interesting to hear the Unionist parties' take on it, and how they'll square it with the FPTP system at Westminster. Is "strong government" good or bad? As with many things, we suspect the answer depends which side of the border you're on.

Scottish Left Review's "independence issue", in keeping with the publication's core philosophy, gives equal opportunity to both sides of the debate this month. Both a nationalist and a Unionist were asked to provide a "positive case" for their respective positions, from a left-wing perspective, and two substantial figures took up the challenge. For independence we heard from Stephen Maxwell (the Treasurer of the Scottish Independence Convention and the director of the SNP’s campaign for a yes vote in the 1979 referendum), whereas the Union's champion was current Lothians MSP Neil Findlay. The contrast is interesting.

Maxwell's piece, it must be said, is in fact largely negative. It focuses on the damage done to Scotland by various Tory governments, and that yet to come from the current one, while also making the legitimate but far-from-positive point that UK Labour now offers little more than a diluted version of Tory policies (for example on welfare reform). It does, however, also make a decent case for an independent Scotland being better able to afford social-democratic policies (thanks in part to increased oil income and significantly reduced defence expenditure), as well as having the demonstrated political will to carry them out. Maxwell reaches a cautious but optimistic conclusion about a greater sense of national self-confidence and the ability to challenge the prevailing neo-conservative view of UK politics.

Findlay's "positive case for the Union", however, (also run on LabourHame) presents only a dismaying blend of scaremongering, negativity and hopeless defeatism – indeed, it explicitly asserts that the SNP's optimism is a "mistaken analysis". It warns of the dangers of nationalism (spectacularly missing the point of civic as opposed to ethnic nationalism), then accuses the SNP of being pro-business and complains about the SNP's intention to remain in the EU, as if either of these were policies on which the Unionist parties offered an alternative standpoint.

Findlay then looks wistfully back at the working-class (small-L) labour movements of the 50s, 60s and 70s, characterising them as something that could somehow only have happened within the context of the UK without offering any explanation as to why. This is a viewpoint that neglects, for example, to consider the way even partial independence has enabled the Scottish NHS to resist many of the worst market-based "reforms" in the sector that have befallen England and Wales, or the education sector to retain free tuition while English and Welsh students are cast into debt.

He then ponders whether devo-max within the UK could offer social-democratic solutions for Scotland, before being forced to admit that there is no party in Scotland offering it, rendering the question something of a moot point. He concludes that "the role of the Labour and Trade Union movement has to be in evaluating and recommending just what arrangement is most appropriate for ordinary people", which ranks high on the scale of "the bleeding obvious" but perhaps more importantly has nothing whatsoever to do with the question he was asked, namely to provide a positive case for achieving such things under the Union as opposed to independence. "We need to think about it" isn't much of an answer.

It is strikingly and empirically self-evident that in the world as it currently exists, Scotland is better placed to pursue social-democratic policies on its own than within the UK. This is not a supposition or an opinion but a bare black-and-white fact: the UK, after all, just elected a neo-conservative government, while Scotland overwhelmingly returned a social-democratic one, and those respective governments will rule for the best part of the next half-decade (and probably longer). Findlay's piece contains not a single sentence of practical positivity, just vague socialist nostalgia combined with a fantasy about a UK political environment that doesn't currently exist and shows no signs of doing so. Is it really so hard to think of a single positive advantage of the Union? For now, the wait goes on.

We've just caught up with an interesting piece over at Bella Caledonia from a few days ago, in which Robin McAlpine, editor of the non-aligned Scottish Left Review, heralds that publication's "independence issue" with an overview of the Scottish political left wing's position on the subject. We'll let you read it for yourself, but the takeaway soundbite is this one:

"roughly no-one seems to have been persuaded out of a pre-existing pro-independence position but more and more people are moving in the other direction"

The true nature of the modern Labour Party seems to have taken a while to fully dawn on the left, in the UK but particularly in Scotland, and it's intriguing to see a slow but perceptible shift begin to take place, especially with regard to trade unions. The fight between Unionists and the independence movement for the heart and soul of socialism seems to be very much on.