From Protest to Power

This week Edinburgh University Press have just published this book The Modern SNP from Protest to Power. This launch essay from author Gerry Hassan was published in the Sunday Times Ecosse section, which isn’t published online, so the link for the full article is to Gerry’s own site:

“While not disputing the centre-left nature of today’s Nationalists, what drives the party in its soul is not social democracy, but a sense of being ‘Scotland’s party’. This can at times be articulated as an ‘I believe in Scotland’ outlook, which has seen some of the party’s opponents believe they are perceived by the Nationalists as being ‘anti-Scottish’. This infuriates Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem politicians who believe that the SNP see themselves as having exclusive ownership of ‘Scotland’.

Piscator

This from Alastair McIntosh: “In the forecourt of Euston station sits a tractor-sized sculpture called Piscator. “Silvery and enigmatic”, said the Telegraph in its obituary of Sir Eduardo Paolozzi. He’d crafted the piece in honour of Erwin Piscator, the German exponent of so-called “epic theatre”.

I pondered Piscator during a break at a Quaker conference on the “zero-growth economy” – linking climate change and the credit crunch. Piscator just brooded, stolid and squat. But the scene shifted. In some epic theatre of my own mind he became an old-fashioned locomotive … elemental, unstoppable, stoked by fires of the human predicament.

Green fixes seek to reconcile economy with ecology. But the harsh truth is that many don’t add up when ripped from their contexts of honest-to-God simplicity and forced to serve industrial frenzy…”  full article here.

Fade to Gray

This from Open Democracy’s Our Kingdom website:

“This is charitably the fifth policy position of Scottish Labour on the independence question in two years. First, they were against it. Then they were bounced into supporting it by Wendy Alexander with Gordon Brown initially in favour, then unsure, and finally against. Then they officially weren’t sure. The Gray leadership then took them back to being against a vote, but now it has moved again.

The current position of being against a vote not on principle, but expediency of timing and the Nats having the temerity to decide the vote hardly looks a stable position, and the issue will be how long it will be party policy before we are on to the sixth policy.

Voting Rights of Young People

This from the Guardian on the voting rights of young people:

“The constitutional question of suffrage for young people is becoming important as the country faces big decisions This week saw the announcement that the Scottish government plans to give 16-and 17-year-olds the vote in a referendum on Scottish independence.

The issue raises an age-old cultural question: When do you become an adult? Is it when you have your first pint? When you get your first mobile phone? When your get your legs blown off by an IED in Britain’s imperial adventure in Helmand?

The origins of this policy are inspiring. Aileen Campbell, Holyrood’s youngest MSP, contacted the constitution minister, Mike Russell after she was approached by a 16-year-old constituent. Campbell said:

Taking Scotland on the road to independence through a referendum is all about increasing democracy and accountability in Scotland – so it simply makes sense that 16-and 17-year-olds have their say too – it is after all, their generation that will be mostly affected by Scotland’s decision.

Your own response to this may be influenced by your understanding of self-determination, your own development and your ideas about the history of the union.

The constitutional relationship between Scotland and England is usually framed as a marriage, now in troubled times and inevitably facing the horrors of “divorce”, “break-up” or “separation”. It’s a traditional unionist view of the relationship, which frames the natural state of affairs as a marital union. I’m never sure of the gender status of each nation in this picture. A republican interpretationviews the two nations as siblings brought up in the same home and now ready to leave and join the adult world.”

Read the full article here.

Labours Nuclear Nightmare

All of last week there was a big debate about the SNP Governments ‘anti-Glasgow’ agenda due to cutting the GARL (Glasgow airport link) in the face of oncoming economic cutbacks (we gave the banks are our money).

While no-one mentioned that Scotlands’s other major infrastructure (the fifth Forth Bridge) is also now looking pretty doubtful – it was a good story for Unionist journos, agitated SNP activists like ‘Mediawatch2009′ worried about the impending North East ByElection. But if you really want to talk about dumping on Glasgow you can’t do better than Rob Edwards exclusive:

Thousands of litres of radioactive waste have leaked into the Firth of Clyde from the Hunterston nuclear power station in breach of pollution law. The station has been accused by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa), of breaking legal promises it made to prevent people and the environment from being contaminated by radioactivity. Sepa says it is “deeply concerned” about the leak. Pete Roche, a former government adviser on radiation safety, said:

“There is no such thing as a safe level of radiation, so any increase in discharges means an increased risk of cancer and health effects. Yet another mistake by the industry is yet another reason not to go ahead with Gordon Brown’s nuclear nightmare.”

Compassion (Part One)

This the first of a series of commissioned articles on the concept of ‘compassion’, by Alastair McIntosh…

I got an email from the editors of Bella Caledonia asking if I’d write about compassion.

I’m going to share with you the dream that woke me up at 6.30 this morning. I’m then I’m going to set it in the context of what my wife and I were discussing last night.

I’ve not much time to edit this so it’s a raw stream of consciousness. And I’m only going to mention “compassion” once more, so it’s up to you to decide if I’m off-subject or not.

Let me set the cultural context. Recent years have seen both Labour/Liberal and the SNP administrations in Scotland struggling with how to reform the law surrounding crofting – small scale traditional living with the land. If I might simplify a complex spectrum of opinion, the debate is torn between two camps.

The Long March

This from Gerry Hassan on Our Kingdom:

“The progressive story of Britain is in deep, deep crisis, perhaps mortally so; it has been battered by the onslaught of Thatcherism which killed off the gentlemanly, benign Tory unionism which understood intuitively where to push and when to caress the strange hybrid that is the union. It was then brutalised by Blair’s twin track continuation of Thatcherism consolidated along with his grotesque application of the British state and foreign policy. This leaves us with the old but now emaciated parables of Tory unionism and a Labour version of Britain reduced to little more than flag-waving and barking at ‘toffs’ in the supposedly ‘classless’ accents of mid-Atlantic corporate efficiency – ‘the people’s story’, savaged, humiliated… and over.

Events are moving fast here in Scotland. An incoming Conservative Government in Westminster in 2010 will have a scant to non-existent Scottish mandate. It will have to preside over massive public spending cuts much more savage than Thatcher in 1979-81. The Cameron Conservatives have barely begun to think anything about Scotland, and they are to put it mildly going to have their plate full next year, and will not want to be looking for avoidable northern troubles. It is highly probable that they will, along with the painful medicine offer the Scots a conciliatory gesture of going beyondthe proposals of the Calman Commission, to full fiscal autonomy, which could be presented well in the Tory shires as tackling the ‘subsidy junkie Scots’.”

View Newsnight Scotland here.

Dismantling the Empire State

The SNP has begun its attempt to break up Great Britain by bringing forward a bill for a referendum on independence. First Minister Alex Salmond is due to make a statement to MSPs on Thursday, outlining plans for the next parliamentary session, in which the bill will be formally announced.  A spokesman for the First Minister said that a vote on the bill would “place the issue of Scotland’s future – and the powers we need to succeed as a nation – at the heart of political and public debate”.

Various wishful scenarios declare that the proposed referendum “will never happen”, that the ‘celestial peace of the British Union’ will go unperturbed, that the SNP hasn’t the majority, or, perhaps less credibly, that the Scottish Government are acting beyond their legal remit. But there are many good reasons why we may be on the eve of momentous change comparable with what we have just witnessed on the other side of the world in Japan. There is good political reason to think that the referendum will happen and its result is by no means certain.

First, there’s that annoying problem of democracy. Labour may have shuffled about their response to a referendum in a bewildering flurry since Wendy’s rhetorical “Bring it on!”. But Iain Gray, a man who you could never accuse of rhetoric, and who’s position appears less certain each day will need to face-up on Thursday and present a coherent response. All of the opposition parties in Scotland share the difficult prospect of opposing the peoples right to have their say. Let’s be clear, there are many more people who want a poll on independence than want independence itself or who would vote for the SNP. Support for a referendum on independence is vast, ranging from between 60 and 80% of the Scottish public in recent opinion polls. Can you be a Liberal Democrat, or even a ‘Fiscal Autonomy Tory’ and oppose this level of consensus? You can, but you’ll need to stand for office within the year on that record.

Browns Silence

Why is Gordon Brown silent? Yesterday’s Herald newspaper, wrote:

“Speaking from a hospital bed at his home in Tripoli, Megrahi talked extensively about his 10-year battle with the Scottish legal system and insisted he did not commit the worst terrorist act on mainland Britain.

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Saif al Islam al Gaddafi claimed the proposed prisoner transfer deal with Britain had targeted Megrahi and was linked to talks on trade and oil, but that his release on compassionate grounds was completed unrelated to commerce.” Read the full article here.

This is the simple truth, and when the truth comes out about 1) Megrahi’s innocence and subsequent miscarriage of justice and 2) the British States routine embroilement in international subterfuge and covert bartering for oil and filthy lucre the grin will be wiped off Mandelsons face and the whole episode may yet become Brown and New Labours final hour. The almost universal derision and glee with which the press currently report the aftermath of MacAskills decision may yet take a different turn.

Megrahi Reflections

It will be interesting to see just how desperate the opposition parties are today, and if they want to put the knife into Kenny MacAskill. More sober reflections were worth reading over the weekend. To see which way the wind is blowing its worth noting  Alan Cochrane: “For perhaps the first time ever, I find myself on the same side of an argument as Scotland’s Nationalist administration. It is not a comfortable place to be.” More here.