Den of the Hyena

1001 Nights

2012-01-11T07:57:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, we were told, was going to be a big day for Scotland's future. In the morning we were to get a statement from Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Moore listing a deadline for the referendum and setting out Westminster's terms. Well, the morning became the afternoon, the statement was more of a ramble and the deadline – well, Mr Moore has put that on hold for the meantime. At least, he tried to, before Alex Salmond stepped in and stole his thunder by announcing, whilst Moore was still mumbling, that the SNP have plumped for Autumn 2014. Does that mean it was an eventful day after all? I'm not so sure.

The thing is – and I suspect Salmond knew this from the start – all this angst about a date is really a bit beside the point. There's horrified talk at Westminster about how Salmond wanted his referendum to coincide with the anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, which just shows how limited understanding of the Scots is there, because I'm pretty sure I've never met one who would care in the slightest. But the distraction worked, stole away focus, kept the unionists from looking at the issues on which they might actually win hearts and minds. Moore, to be fair, could filibuster himself on virtually any subject even if you gave him all day, and his intervention – forced by David Cameron's – has made it difficult for other unionists to make their voices heard. The consultation produced by the Westminster government is a lightweight piece of fluff (though I would still urge you all to fill it in – you can find it here and it'll only take you ten minutes). Yesterday was noise, signifying next to nothing.

The emptiness of the much-hyped announcement is clearly embarrassing even Moore himself, who looked shattered by the end of a turn on Newsnight, poor thing. And there's one of his problems. If Westminster wants to lead the unionist campaign, it has very few people to do the talking. A Cameron speech on the subject means guaranteed gains for the SNP (which may be Cameron's plan, since his party could benefit nicely from losing Scotland, or so he is liable to think). There's Jim Murphy on the opposite benches, but he's lost a lot of sympathy in Scotland in recent weeks and seems to have his ambitions fixed on Westminster now. Margaret Curran has stepped in but isn't quite singing the same song. So we can watch Moore get increasingly exhausted as the SNP rolls out an endless line of fresh, energised opponents for him – and let's not forget that the Scottish Greens support independence too.

The real problem is that the shift of control over the unionist campaign to befuddled Westminster politicians means that all they really can talk about are things like the date and the legal technicalities (whereby they seem to have confused legal weight with political weight). In Scotland, every commentator I speak to and most of the politicians say they want a Real Debate on the issues. Salmond's date, at least, should allow for that – I'll admit I was confused by Moore's simultaneous demands that the referendum be held as soon as possible and follow deep and meaningful consultation. Yet today the Westminster unionists, in a misguided bid for relevance, continue to flap about how the date must be changed.

Then there's the issue of devo max. On independence, Scots have very different views, and many have yet to make up their minds. Yet a large majority evidence a strong interest in further devolution. If this devolution is to be relatively minor, there's no need to take it to a referendum; it can fairly be sorted out between the Holyrood and Westminster parliaments. But if it is to involve, say, a shift of control over defence sector issues or the provision of an element of fiscal autonomy, it would seem appropriate that the people get to decide. Since referenda are expensive (as several members of the current Westminster administration have emphasised), why not have a question about devo max presented at the same time as one about independence?

I don't believe that Scottish voters would find a two question referendum too complicated, and I wonder at the smugness of politicians who suggest they would. Neither do I care if no political party is pushing for devo max as its favoured objection. Plenty of individuals within those parties are, and, more importantly, so are plenty of ordinary Scots. This is not and should not be a referendum about party politics and petty political allegiances. It must be a referendum that allows the Scottish people to express their views in a simple, fair, and inclusive way.

I would hate to live in a Scotland that remained bound to the United Kingdom against the will of its people. Similarly, I would hate to live in a independent Scotland that the majority of Scottish people didn't really want. It is important that we get this process right not just for the sake of ideologies but for the sake of doing right by everyone affected. This must be a listening process, a responsive process. It must not be about polarisation, about pushing people to absurd political extremes. Because one way or another, within three years, this process will be over. And whatever happens then, Scotland must find a way to bring those who have been disappointed into the fold, to heal itself and move forward as a whole nation.

We have roughly 1001 nights to go until Salmond's promised referendum happens. I think I can speak for the vast majority of my fellow Scots when I say please don't force us to listen to the same soulless story on every one.

Race and Justice

2012-01-03T09:59:00.000-08:00

Today the killers of Stephen Lawrence were finally brought to justice. Tomorrow they will be sentenced. It is widely agreed that this verdict was far too slow to arrive, and with the racially motivated murder of Anuj Bidve still fresh in the headlines, it can hardly be seen as the end of the road. The question is, has anything really changed since Stephen's death? Is racism still every bit as endemic as once it was? It is my contention that, whilst deep problems remain, some things have improved and that is in no small part thanks to the efforts of the Lawrence family themselves.

I'm a year older than Stephen would be if he were still alive. I'd recently finished my A-levels at the time of his murder; he was in the middle of his. Four years before, I'd started working with an anti-racist campaigning group, SOS Racism. It had been a natural progression for me. When I was a child my mother volunteered for a charity called SAFTA which provided tutors to immigrant women who wanted to learn English in their homes. I helped out and quickly grew familiar with some of the prejudice they and their families faced. Coincidentally my primary school boyfriend was Arabic and the first time I ever encountered direct racism was from our headmistress – hardly a shining example of authority.

I know there are some people who raise their eyebrows at the thought of white people being involved in race politics at all, but there are ways to work outside the ugly colonial structures of the past. SOS Racism was a partnership between local people of various races determined to bring about social change. My white skin meant I was able to do certain things that would have been much more difficult or dangerous for a darker skinned person – namely research with other white people, sometimes including members of far right groups. I was young, slightly shy, wide-eyed; they opened up to me. They told me things that made me want to punch them and I kept smiling. I collected data that could be used to lobby for support.

In relation to that, I tend to agree with others who have summed up the change over the last twenty years as a shift from overt to covert racism. Though I no longer do the same type of research (I have moved on to work, at least primarily, on other equality issues), I still encounter racism. The difference is that I see far fewer direct expressions of hatred, far more excuse-making and attempts to justify discrimination as rooted in something more rational (belief systems, economic concerns or - ironically – a supposed threat to other social minority groups). This is not to say that incidences of direct aggression don't happen or, indeed, that covert racism is any more acceptable. But it's an interesting change nonetheless, in that it tells us the rational case against racial hatred has been successfully made. This is an achievement campaigners should be proud of. It's a step along the way; and it is now necessary to reframe some aspects of the debate.

As I noted, I now work on other minority issues, and over the last few years this has included research work with the police. Attitudes to the police in some minority communities are so polarised that it's hard to do any such work without being perceived as some sort of collaborator, so let me explain that I sympathise with the feelings behind that and I took on this work partially in order to challenge that in myself, to try and shed my own preconceptions and prejudices and see what was real. As a young queer person and an activist, I knew what it was to be afraid of the police, but I felt that research in that area ought not to be left solely as the domain of people who had no such hesitations – who might be too willing to accept that everything was rosy.

Everything is most assuredly not rosy. Of course there is still prejudice (and I continue to hear distressing stories from those on the receiving end). But just as wider society has changed, so has the police force, and in this case the change has more pronounced effects. The existence of police diversity officers and so forth may sometimes be mocked, but in practice it does mean there are safe ports of call for those who fear prejudice. It has also contributed to a much greater awareness of diversity issues among individual police officers. Forces vary, but in many the old macho culture has been substantially eroded, and with it the notion that prejudiced attitudes are the mark of the hard man. Admitting to prejudice is something officers are much more reluctant to do, whilst others like their work environment precisely because they consider it free of prejudices that have always disturbed them, including racism.

One of the difficulties in making change is that examples of successful communication and progress don't tend to get talked about, whereas a single bad experience may resonate for an individual for decades, and resonate socially too. This is often raised as a reason why ethnic minority officers are still under-represented in the police. It's tough to ask individuals to take risks for the sake of long term social improvement. More effective is change through modifying structures and rules, and where this has improved things within the police force, it can more often than not be traced back directly to the original Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. I would venture to say that (alongside rapid growth in the number of women serving) this has changed the police force more than anything else in the last sixty years.

Of course there is a long way to go. Nevertheless, we should celebrate these changes which are a credit to the bravery of a family who became important campaigners at a time of tremendous personal grief. Changing institutions must be part of wider cultural change (with society and the police force reflecting back on one another), but this change was no small thing.

It's just a pity Stephen couldn't have been here to see it. And it remains a great injustice that, though the world has changed dramatically in ways he could never have imagined, one thing he might have guessed with accuracy at the time of his death is that, in 2012, young men in the UK are still being attacked because others hate the colour of their skin.

Incoming

2011-12-30T07:37:00.000-08:00

The news that 205,000 people have moved to Scotland from elsewhere in the UK within the past four years should be a wake-up call to those who doubted the success of devolution. It's also a sign of things to come, and a warning that we need to act now to develop policies for integration so we can make room for these people, benefit from their skills, and avoid related social problems.

To some of you living in other parts of the world, 205,000 may not seem like that big a number – but bear in mind that Scotland's total population is just five and a quarter million. Scotland has big cities – Glasgow and Edinburgh – but large parts of it are virtually empty, popular with tourists as one of Europe's last remaining wildernesses. In many ways this small population is its biggest strength. Not only does it have ample natural resources, it's really well represented in terms of politicians per constituent. Whilst Westminster increasingly flounders under the weight of the work it has to process, Scotland is a country where things can actually get done, where it's easier for parliamentary activity to keep pace with social change. Individuals have more chance of getting their problems noticed and it's easer for them to contribute their ideas.

Of course, whilst people are coming into Scotland, others are leaving. Nevertheless, net inward migration has risen steeply over the last decade and as far as our relationship with the rest of the UK is concerned, immigration has consistently outpaced emigration during that period. Furthermore, whilst population growth may not be as dramatic as those initial figures suggest, immigration creates its own particular issues, not all of which are tied to population growth itself.

With a birth rate below replacement rate, Scotland has, over the last few decades, been notably more welcoming to immigrants than other parts of the UK. We should be taking lessons from other areas, however, in how easily that can change. Immigration is particularly hard on low-skilled people who already struggle to find employment. If we are to avoid the tensions that have resulted from this elsewhere, we need to (a) concentrate on boosting this part of the economy (not as hard as it might sound in a recession, when building homes and infrastructure can be a good way to kick-start growth), and (b) ensure that incomers are well distributed across the country, avoiding a build-up of people competing for the same jobs in already deprived areas. We need to understand incomers in the same way we understand tourists and effectively market different parts of the country to them, helping them to make informed choices about the available options rather than just being drawn to the bright lights.

Scotland has a particular advantage when it comes to English immigration given the disparity in house prices north and south of the border. It's always easier to relocate if one has money; if one sells a house in England and buys one in Scotland one will have money left over. Of course most people doing this will still be weighed down by mortgages, but they should nevertheless see their disposable income rise, and we need to encourage them to invest that in Scottish businesses as well as spending it on Scottish goods. This financial gain will be important in balancing the initial outlay on integration.

There is one other sizeable group of people moving, or thinking of moving, to Scotland, and that's long term sick and disabled people. Scotland's free personal care has long been attractive to those south of the border, and coupled with the fact that changes in the UK's support system look likely to be resisted up here, it's creating a situation in which many people feel they can't afford not to move. This may worry some Scots, given the potential cost of providing support for a larger disabled population, but it shouldn't need to. Most disabled people can work if they have the right support, whilst others can make different types of contribution to society. The key is to make work more accessible so that support costs are balanced out, if not exceeded, by the tax revenue generated by working disabled people. This is relatively easy to do if approached as a serious social and economic infrastructure project. Making it more tempting for business to take on disabled employees who work from home, for instance, can make a big difference. If the state steps in more quickly to help with the costs of sickness absence (rather than repaying money months later) and if regulations ensure new office buildings have better disabled access, we can all gain not only from the work of disabled incomers but also from an enhanced contribution from our existing disabled citizens.

One thing all immigrants have in common is initiative, and settling in a new country often goes along with a desire to contribute, to make oneself a part of it. Scotland as a nation needs to engage with that. Many of those now arriving are long-absent Scots or have family here and are excited by the emerging sense of nationhood. Others are among those traditionally seen as the old enemy, but want to be part of what's happening here. We need to make sure they're not seen as invaders and act now so this process can provide opportunities for everyone, including Scotland's long term poor. That means we need to start national conversation on the matter now, not wait until we begin to feel overwhelmed.

NOTE: Thanks to Kate Higgins for succesfully clearing up a problem with the stats I originally used in this article. I've amended it accordingly but am leaving it in place because I still think the trend is significant and the issues I've raised here need to be addressed.

Values, Virtues and Votes

2011-12-17T09:18:00.000-08:00

David Cameron's recent comments on religion seem, on the surface, to be among the silliest of his reign. So what do they really mean, who are they really for, and what is their likely consequence?

First of all, let's deal with the comments themselves. Britain is a Christian nation, he says. Well, that's debatable. The British Social Attitudes Survey of 2001 found that 48% of Britons considered themselves to belong to one religion or another, and this number has declined ever since until, in 2009, the number of people identifying as Christian fell, for the first time, below the number of those identifying as non-religious. Interestingly, a YouGov poll conducted last April found that 55% percent identified as Christian and 40% as non-religious, but that if the question was framed differently – are you very religious or not really/not at all? - then only 35% fell into the former category (across all religions) with 63% in the latter one. Only 11% said that they attended a religious service once a month or more. And of course, there are many other religious groups in Britain besides Christians – at least 3% of the population is Muslim and 1% Hindu, with smaller but not insignificant groups of Jews, Sikhs and Buddhists (it's hard to get an accurate figure for those who follow Pagan religions because their self-descriptions are so varied and quite a few surveys exclude them altogether).

It might therefore be fairest to say that around half the British population is notionally Christian but that a significantly smaller percentage is actively so, with many people rejecting or ignoring the organised aspects of their religion.

In these circumstances, arguing that Britain is a Christian nation is likely to make a majority of people feel uncomfortable, excluded or outright insulted. A nation cannot be labelled as belonging to a particular religious group on the basis of a first past the post system (no matter what the new rulers of Tunis might like to believe). Britain is plainly a secular country where lots of different religious interests (and the interests of those who are not religious) need to be taken into account. And secularism has served Britain well – in fact, it serves everyone well. Rates of violent crime are lower in secular countries; whilst this may be seen as correlated to stages of development, it's no reason to turn our backs on an approach that's working well. Secularity does not, as various researchers have shown, reduce the risk of a nation being violent to others, but it does reduce rates of religious hate crime within that country. It promotes an ideology of respect between religious groups and individuals. It also, interestingly, correlates to lower rates of domestic violence and unprotected sex, and to higher rates of self-reported happiness.

78% of those participating the YouGov poll mentioned above said they think religion has no place in politics. Religious neutrality among politicians is art of how we protect our secular culture, as Tony Blair understood when he chose to try and separate his Catholic values from what he perceived as his ethical duties to the electorate. But if Christianity is an inappropriate thing for a prime minister to focus on, what about Christian values? Can't most of us agree that, for instance, compassion, good neighbourliness, honesty and abstention from violence are virtues worth aspiring to?

I think most of us can. The trouble is, can David Cameron? Many would contend that his recent reductions in support for disabled people, for example, leave him looking a little short on the compassion front; and he really stumbles when it comes to the rejection of usury. He must know that advocating Christian values in this context risks making him look like a hypocrite or, at best, a buffoon, in the eyes of a large part of the population. So why do it?

Does he really believe it? If so, he's kept remarkably quiet about it until now. Is he seeking political advantage? There lies the rub.

Cameron is nothing if not an opportunist, and he knows full well that when he says “Christian values” some of us think of the Bible but many more of us snap back to thinking of Margaret Thatcher's moral crusade, of the red top social virtues that have, even very recently, led certain newspaper editors to declare that they would not vote for MPs who cheated on their wives (presumably, given the politics of their papers, they're quite happy to vote for MPs who fiddle their expenses). This is a world where sex is the true sin and, especially, sex that other people are having – undesirable other people like the gays whose side Cameron simultaneously insists he is on. This is, quite simply, a tactic aimed at creating loyalty in particular groups of voters by reinforcing the myth of the pernicious other that has so often driven people into the arms of the right. Calling Britain a Christian nation is an excuse for seeking to drive out those who are not like us, and talking about Christian values perpetuates the notion that some among us are really other.

His couldn't be much further away from the ideals of the majority of Christians, but it plays well, and Cameron knows it. It impacts at an emotional level before people have really thought it through. The thing is, it doesn't impact the same way on everyone. Consequently, there is always the danger of a backlash, as when Gordon Brown foolish blustered about British jobs for British workers. So it's a risky move and it's one which, to be successful, must impact on a particular group of (swing) voters at just the right time. Women – especially mothers – are more likely to hold religious values than men, so this could be an attempt to win back unhappy female voters. It's also worth noting that, outside Scotland, people in urban areas are less religious than those living in the countryside. We can map this against areas where the Tories need to solidify their support and the picture starts to look interesting. This is a call to the heartlands – a test, perhaps, to see if wayward voters who have flirted with the LibDems or been seduced by New Labour are now ready to return to the fold.

The question is, why test now? Why take risks now with strategies only likely to work in the short term? If Westminster rumours are true, Cameron and Osborne have been discussing the prospect of a March election. It would be a big gamble; with jilted LibDems unlikely to return to the fold and the Eurosceptic bounce unlikely to provide a sustained bounce, it might well pave the way to minority government (if not outright failure). At any rate, Cameron will probably watch the odds for a while longer before he decides whether or not to make a move; but if he does then, even before an announcement, we can expect a few more audacious statements like this. It may be reaching the stage where we all need to decide just what kind of nation we want to live in.

Island Empire

2011-12-11T03:36:00.000-08:00

Was David Cameron right to take the actions he did in Europe? It's fascinating that, superficially at least, everyone in politics is treating this as a matter of morality. In fact it's a prime example of moral (and even pragmatic) concerns being sacrificed for political expediency. So, once again, did David Cameron do the right thing?

In David Lynch's Inland Empire, tragic characters are doomed to repeat the actions of those in a film-within-a-film, a Polish tale called 47. The number 47 acquires ominous associations, eventually appearing on a door no-one wishes to pass through, like the portal to a latter-day Room 101. Bereft of his Polish allies (despite manifest compromises in the past), David Cameron, floundering at the gateway to Europe, is also afraid of the number 47. There are 47 MPs, it is reliably reported, who are definitely out for his blood. This is a magic number because it happens to represent 15.3% of the parliamentary party – just enough to force a leadership election which there is a very real chance he would lose.

Whilst this may come as a shock to some, those watching the Conservatives closely have observed the situation building for some time. Cameron rose to power because of his supreme blandness – he was the only man rival factions could agree on. He also seemed able to charm the public, to come across as a decent sort of chap who was ready to do away with troublesome aspects of the party's image. But these talents are very different from those required in a leader. Once established, Cameron appears to have thought that was sitting pretty. He liked power. He had less interest in government. Cheerfully delegating all the hard work (which is inevitably harder for a party without a majority), he developed a habit of clocking off early, of taking extended holidays as if he were an American president. Like any boss behaving that way, he swiftly lost goodwill. Add to this a willingness to ride roughshod over the concerns of the 1922 Committee and to try and ride out numerous political storms just by ignoring them, and it soon became evident that he was making more enemies than he could afford.

Cameron's big advantage was the coalition between his party and the LibDems. It was the perfect excuse for telling backbenchers he couldn't do everything the way they might like, particularly on Europe, where it is quietly rumoured that he holds personal views far more favourable than most in his party would tolerate. But whilst the coalition excuse bought off his own party for a while, it carried no weight with UKIP, who steadily grew like a leech on the Conservatives' shoulder, sucking away their constituency party members. This made the party faithful feel increasingly threatened. They had to do something.

And so we come back to the number 47, and Cameron's fateful decision to use his veto on the new EU fiscal arrangements. In return for staying in power he was prepared to sacrifice everything that made that power count for something. What he has done has not only cost him LibDem support (with Vince Cable reportedly threatening to resign) and placed the coalition in jeopardy, it has demonstrated to his backbenchers that they own him, body and soul. He is now little more than a puppet; it is no longer clear that he can even choose which tune to dance to.

And there's worse. Having superficially decreased the likelihood of his party giving him the boot, Cameron has made it more likely that his country will do so, one way or another. Because by replacing him, by disavowing his actions, Britain could go back to Europe and reopen negotiations from a stronger position than Cameron's original one. Having shown that it is possible for it to play its worst card, it could almost certainly negotiate a better deal – provided, of course, that the person at the helm had some guts.

What does all this mean? For the Conservatives, it's a triumph of party ideology over successful government, and in due course it may cost them dear. For the LibDems it looks humiliating, but if they're smart they'll keep Cameron on the run and extract a different set of prizes. At any rate, in the long term, they can only stand to benefit from the disintegration of the major political forces. That's why it's not actually a bad thing for them that UKIP are overtaking them in the polls (given that their own support is not yet actually shrinking beyond the levels it was at six months ago). UKIP may, in turn, be feeling very pleased with themselves, but their particular position makes it unlikely they'll go on to great things. They're a right wing SDP; they may rattle sabres, but when it comes to a general election they are neither distinctive nor rounded enough to gather much more than a protest vote.

Where this situation becomes really interesting is in relation to Scotland. Cameron's European antics have now created a situation in which the Scots potentially have much more to gain from independence than as the case before. There will be gaps in the market as England tears itself (and Wales and Northern Ireland) away from Europe; niches opening up which Scotland is perfectly positioned to exploit. Separate from England and close to the EU, Scotland could pick up the advantages England has dropped – and research suggests that when individual Scots finally make the big decision about how to vote in the independence referendum, the deciding issue will be money in their pockets. Because this isn't really about the niceties of international unions or who takes instructions from who. It isn't about great men and it isn't about party favours. It's the economy, stupid.

We Are Devo

2011-11-14T14:13:00.000-08:00

How much do you know about Devo Max? Probably not much,since there is as yet no agreement on exactly what it means. Despite this lack of agreement, some politicians are telling us it's the only way forward, whilst others claim it is a sneak tactic aimed at getting something close to independence by the back door. Alex Salmond, meanwhile, says that whilst it's not his preference he would be willing to offer it in a referendum – if another party wished to define and propose it.

Polls suggest that the majority of Scots want either independence or the mysterious Devo Max – more powers for the Scottish Parliament, at any rate. A defiant minority want things to remain as they are. Only internet troll Tom Harris and his pals seriously seem to think that it might be a good idea to return some powers to Westminster. Devo Max might seem like a natural compromise, but that assumption is based on another one – that the spread of support for this option is evenly distributed among unionists and pro-independence types. My research suggests that's not the case.

When I say research, I should make clear from the start that this was a small survey (with only 65 participants). It was deliberately kept as simple as possible. This leaves room for it to be developed and run on a larger scale, should any organisation choose to take that up. 57% of poll respondents favoured independence, which, in light of other polls, suggests it is not a representative sample. I do not think, however, that this compromises the validity of what says about Devo Max.

This is because the results are quite stark. Respondents were asked to answer on a sliding scale between being strongly in favour of Devo Max or strongly against. 54% of those who favoured independence defined themselves as somewhat supportive of Devo Max, with a further 19% strongly supportive (19% were opposed). This contrasts strongly with the picture for unionists, whose preferences were widely distributed. Unionist politicians may be mistaken in assuming that none of their constituency support this option – 14% described themselves as strongly in favour, 25% as mildly in favour. 11% were mildly against, 25% strongly against, and a further 25% didn't care.

What does this tell us? It suggests, first and foremost, that there is a wide spectrum of views within the unionist group, and that people belong to that group for a variety of reasons. The unionist campaign has largely centred on the premise that these people have strong British identities (even if they also have strong Scottish identities) and that they feel they benefit from the status quo. This may be true of some, but others, whilst unhappy about the idea of leaving the union, seems deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. Indeed, some may prefer to see Scotland go it alone as far as they think is reasonably practicable – their unionism may be less about loving Britishness and more about thinking it impractical, or dangerous, for Scotland to be entirely on its own.

If there is more overall support for Devo Max in the pro-independence group, might unionist politicians be making a mistake by calling for a simple either/or referendum? True, these respondents favoured Devo Max overall (though again, the sample is probably too small for this to be meaningful), but a Devo Max option might have the potential to split off more independence supporters than unionists. Of course, in the end, a simple three question referendum could come down to tactical voting and a game of bluff, which is why it is vital that careful consideration be given to the format – and that, for everyone's sake, this sensitive matter not be rushed. The recent referendum on AV, which involved the distribution of information later admitted to be false, should have taught us that much.

What about those pro-independence people who are strongly against Devo Max? There are two straightforward ways of interpreting their position. Some may think that any degree of support for Devo Max decreases the chance of getting independence (in which case they may change their approach in the context of a referendum that specifically removed this risk). Others may fear that further Scottish devolution would reduce the long term prospect of Scotland becoming full independent (though there are, of course, others who see it as a possible step along the way). Perhaps, on both sides of the independence question, there are concerns not so much about the uncertainty of what Devo Max means today but about the uncertainty of what it may produce in the future. In this context, the fact that the majority still seem to favour it (if this is borne out by larger studies) may indicate deeper support.

In any event, a proper understanding of the relationship between Scottish voters and Devo Max will be essential to winning the forthcoming referendum. Naturally individual preferences will change as the details of this option are pinned down, but given the variables participants in my survey were already having to consider, it seems unlikely it will change all that much. It's time people on both sides stopped taking the preferences of unionists, in particular, for granted. The real debate going on in Scotland is much more complex than the one reflected in the headlines.

Stoning the Fox

2011-10-12T09:19:00.000-07:00

Scandal ain't what it used to be, and neither are smear campaigns. That which Liam Fox pronounced himself the victim of must be among the strangest in British history, extraordinarily restrained and polite. Because whilst allegations relating to state security must be taken very seriously indeed, everybody knew there was another matter underlying this. Until Chris Bryant's comments in the House about how anybody, even in politics, ought to be allowed a friend, few had even hinted at it.

That matter, of course, is Fox's sexuality. It has been approached with caution for two reasons. Firstly, it's a personal matter. Secondly, the issue here isn't really whom Mr Fox is attracted to per se, but whether or not he was having a romantic relationship with the ubiquitous Mr Werrity. There is a difference between what interests the public and what is genuinely in the public interest. But there are other aspects to Fox's behaviour that make his sexuality acutely relevant to public matters.

Bryant is a politician whom I have always admired for pursuing his profession at a time when it was very difficult to do so as an openly gay person. I dropped out of a promising political career myself because I felt I would simply have no chance in what was then an intensely homophobic media climate, and I know a number of other prominent people - now working in journalism, the civil service or the charity sector - who did likewise. One cannot, then, accord much blame to those who might have chosen to keep their sexuality a secret in order to pursue such careers, especially if, as is bound to be the case for some, they valued their political principles more highly than personal freedom and openness.

There is a danger, however, in having politicians in senior positions who harbour secrets which they dare not see exposed. Fundamental to changing the law on homosexuality in England was the Dirk Bogarde film Victim, which centres on a lawyer who is compromise by blackmail relating to his sexuality. Viewing the film, the public came to understand that not only is homophobia damaging to individuals, a climate of secrecy about such a matter creates dangerous opportunities for extortion. It creates a risk of corruption and, should that apply to a Minister of Defence, the potential dangers to state security could be considerable.

In politics, these risks are managed by a system of vetting whereby individuals working closely with the government are asked about their secrets and vulnerabilities. This does not necessarily apply to ministers, but efforts are made to ensure that those in positions of power cannot be compromised. Additional security was, in recent years, provided by the close relationship between Downing Street and certain media magnates, but now that relationship has started to sour the risks are increasing, as today's sniping at Fox by The Sun reveals.

The Sun story has not gone down as well as its editors might have expected. Aside from a pretty flimsy premise (which suggests there could be no legitimate reasons for secrecy around who visits the Minister of Defence), it has roundly been perceived as homophobic. But whilst attacking Fox over the suspicion of homosexuality is contemptible, there is a legitimate side to journalistic probing in this area. It would be entirely legitimate to attack Fox for hypocrisy.

Those of you who remember the Family Values moral crusading of the Conservative Party in the 'eighties will be familiar with this one. Ultimately, if you are going to condemn others for certain types of behaviour then you had better not be caught doing it yourself. Whether it's having threesomes with other people's wives and daughters or ordering a distraught secret lover to have an abortion, it is not going to advance your political career.

Most of the Conservative Party has moved on from those days, at least when it comes to homosexuality. But Liam Fox has not. Right from the start of his career, when he was involved in student politics at the University of Glasgow, he was spouting exclusionary rhetoric about gay people. Since 1998 he has voted against the liberalisation of laws relating to homosexuality nine times, and has absented himself from such votes a further ten times. This position, increasingly extreme within the context of his party, has endeared him to its right wing, which has been instrumental in advancing his career. To put it bluntly, without the support he bought at the expense of gay people, it is unlikely he would have become Minister of Defence, and he certainly wouldn't have come to be seen (at least until recently) as a strong potential challenger to David Cameron.

Of course, it is quite possible to argue that even if he were gay he might genuinely believe homosexuality to be morally wrong, and may thus have voted in good conscience. Some of his choices, such as voting against measures designed to protect children from homophobic bullying, might still seem harsh, but of course he is entitled to them. What he is not entitled to is the freedom to make those choices on behalf of an electorate which is unaware of the contrast between what he says others should do and what he may in fact be doing himself. To draw a parallel, an MP caught engaging in tax avoidance whilst urging that others be punished for it could not reasonably expect to get an easy ride from the press.

If Fox is in fact gay or bisexual, several concerns arise. He has been exploiting right wing supporters who might never have backed him had they been aware of his behaviour. He has enjoyed the freedom to indulge his own passions whilst seeking to deny that to others. And he has, through his secrecy, potentially put state security at risk. It is often said that the first duty of a government is to protect its people. If the Minister of Defence is compromised, that is no small thing.

There is of course another possibility, which is that Fox may be gay but suffering from internalised homophobia, perhaps in relation to his religious beliefs. But as far as the security issues go, this isn't just about sex, it's about the strength of a particular emotional attachment. Imagine that Mr Werrity were in fact a young woman. The papers then would likely have been even quicker to shout scandal! in relation to all those meetings, as I'm sure Christine Keeler would confirm. And sexual attraction in denial can make emotional influences all the more powerful - there's nothing like the lure of forbidden fruit.

Could it all be nonsense? Could Fox be straight? Of course (and it could be that any corruption he may be involved in is purely mercenary, with no mitigating emotional element). Still, in light of all the revelations over the years preceding this one, it will be difficult for him to convince many people of that. And it is public business, because the consequences of hypocrisy and secrecy could be dire for all of us.

All these matters mean that Fox's position must now be considered untenable. Not only is he a liability as Minister of Defence (his civil service minders must be tearing their remaining hair out trying to work out how to vet his appointments) but it seems likely he will have lost that critical wedge of support that made him a future leadership contender. The game is up. Short of a Portillo-style reinvention, there are few ways forward. Those of us who considered but could not face Bryant's struggle may feel some sympathy, but if this is a tragedy, it is a tragedy of Fox's own making.

The Ladies Are Turning

2011-10-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

It's rare for a sitting prime minister to go on television and make a well publicised apology; rarer still when the issue at hand is not one of policy, but of his general behaviour. Yet that's what David Cameron has now done. His apology to women (“I said a few things... that didn't come out right”) marks an urgent attempt to stem the flow of women voters away from the party. He is right to be worried. Women's votes have always been a key plank in Tory success, and when a key demographic like this leaves, it rarely comes back.

When British women first obtained the vote in 1918, they quickly disabused sitting politicians on the assumption that they would vote like their husbands. Yet although the suffragists at the heart of the movement were radicals, women's votes have always, in the majority, tended to the right of the political spectrum. To an extent this is explained by the fact women live longer and most people move to the right as they get older (furthermore, traditionally, older people have been more likely to defer to perceived natural authority). But as the Conservatives at the last election came to rely much more heavily on the support of the young, they retained a lot of that female support, with polls giving them a 45% female approval rating.

That figure has now dropped to 25%.

So what? you might ask. Conservative support has clearly not fallen by that much overall, so they must have made gains elsewhere. But what matters – and their election managers will know this – is not just support, but the solidity of that support. The loss of this set of votes which could previously be taken for granted will hit the Conservative party the way Labour has been hit by its loss of support in urban Scotland. There is no way any political party can afford to campaign for every vote and policies can't be tailored to suit everyone, so these underlying blocks of support are essential to success. They allow campaign managers to relax in some areas and concentrate their tactics more efficiently in others. No party is equipped to handle a truly unpredictable electorate.

Will Cameron's apology make a difference? The early signs say otherwise – it may even have been a mistake. By acknowledging certain of his errors, Cameron has highlighted the problem to those who hadn't worried about it before whilst at the same time suggesting to his critics that he fails to understand the real issue. If he could have avoided the casually sexist remarks in parliament then he might have got away without having to talk too much about policy, but at this stage he will have to give dissatisfied women voters something more substantial. The suggestion that it is really all just about explaining better isn't going to wash. Women up and down the country are used to hearing carefully prepared explanations from errant men in their lives.

So we come to the age old question, what do women want? Whilst it might be tempting to shout furiously that women are people and want the same things as any other people, the stats present a more complicated picture. Women are more likely to have family responsibilities; to be carers; to be unemployed (female unemployment is now at its highest for nearly twenty five years) or to be low-waged. This makes them more likely to be impacted directly by the cuts. They also do the bulk of grocery shopping, so are more likely to notice and worry about rising food prices. They constitute the majority of elderly and disabled people, making them more vulnerable to the cold and more likely to be concerned by increasing fuel costs. And those lower levels of full employment mean women are more likely to be involved in community activities, primarily with other women – so their worries are likely to be shared.

For these reasons and more, pleasing women is likely require at least a rebalancing, if not a wholesale rethink, of the government's attempts to reduce the deficit. But there's more. Women are smart enough to know when they are being patronised and pandered to, so bringing them on side will require demonstrating that they have a voice in government. It is possibly in acknowledgement of this that we have seen a bit more of the Conservatives' female ministers lately. Whilst it is unlikely that Theresa May's pronouncements on the Human Rights Act will result in any real change, she is a forceful politician and her renewed prominence may do something to counter the image of the government front benches as a millionaire boys' club. Sayeeda Warsi, meanwhile, has featured prominently in conference coverage. It may be unfortunate that she embodies some of the worst stereotypes of femininity, but at least in this context she can demonstrate her emotional intelligence (more valuable that colleagues may realise) without getting into the sort of muddle over logic that she did when it came to AV.

The party's real difficulty will be in convincing women voters that this is more than just window dressing. This time around it doesn't have the advantage of a female leader, and it is difficult for it to take a strong lead on family issues when the Tea Party across the water is making this area toxic for the right. What it needs is to identify key issues affecting women's lives and focus funding there, rather than frittering it away on speed limit changes and extra bin collections that may please stalwart supporters but won't win over wavering ones. It needs to start investing now, before the rot gets too severe, or it may find its foundations crumbling.

Naughty Words

2011-09-28T17:47:00.000-07:00

Despite intermittent backtracking, Labour now seem to be talking seriously about the idea of a register for members of the press from which 'bad journalists' could be struck off. That they could ever have thought this is a good idea is illustrative of how desperately they still need media advice (which doesn't need to be from Murdoch types – Coulson didn't exactly do a brilliant job for the Tories anyway). It is rarely a good idea to make enemies of large numbers of journalists, as the Murdochs are now finding out. If one finds just one supporter in the profession, well, Independent editor Chris Blackhurst hasn't been looking like the shrewdest judge of journalistic quality lately. And it is also unwise for Labour to lurch back so quickly toward the authoritarianism Ed Miliband recently assured us they were leaving behind them. But all this aside, how do they suppose such a register could ever hope to function in the real world?

The closest thing we currently have to a register of journalists is the NUJ. Membership is voluntary, of course, but one has to qualify for it (and be recommended), which means that it provides at least some guarantee of quality when it comes to writing skill. But alongside well known broadsheet columnists, the NUJ represents the kind of tabloid hacks most likely to attract public ire. And despite being the chair of a media watchdog organisation (as well as an NUJ member myself) I fully support this. Breaches of newspaper etiquette, plagiarism and so forth should be dealt with by editors. Libel should be dealt with by the law. Regulatory bodies can work to ensure fair play. But journalists are workers like any others, and must have a union they can rely on to ensure they're fairly treated even if what they're saying is unpleasant.

Where would this leave a register? Several difficult questions arise. How do we define who is and is not a journalist? If we use NUJ membership as a barometer, we'll find there are quite a few freelancers and occasional scribblers who wouldn't be included. Then there's the issue of blogging. This is already an issue for the many journalists who occasionally need to supplement their income with state benefits. They're required to declare how many hours they work. But when is writing work, and when is it just self expression? We can't use pay as a marker. Some blogs pay even if they don't employ professionals; many small print publications and respected online news outlets don't. As journalists need to keep their profiles high in order to get work, writing for free can sometimes be essential. And anybody who has a public profile also needs to be aware that any time they express themselves it can impact their careers, even inadvertently. So is a journalist ever completely off work?

Given the difficulty these things present in determining who should be on a register in the first place, just what would striking someone off it involve? We might ban them from writing in a certain list of officially recognised publications – newspapers and magazines over a certain circulation, for instance – but of course that would need to be limited to those based in the UK (restricting foreign publications would result in real disaster). But this would only work if they were honest about their authorship or editors were astute enough to recognise their style (and honest in reporting them). It's easy enough to switch to a pseudonym and even a hint of whom that name belongs to can quickly summon back old readers. It would rely, in other words, on co-operation – not an easy thing to gain in the circumstances.

Let's suppose, for the meantime, that it did work. What, then, would we do about blogging? Attempts to regulate the internet are already in a mess, with politicians repeatedly demonstrating their cluelessness about the technical and sociological issues involved. And if it could be done, would it be ethical to stop de-registered journalists from putting down their thoughts like anyone else? When is a blog personal and when is it political? That's a philosophical minefield beyond Messrs Miliband and Lewis' pay grade.

Back in the old days, before blogging was an option, unofficial journalism was conducted through letters, journals and newsletters. Some freesheets met with the disapproval of the authorities but were still pretty easy to get hold of, just as illicit drugs are easy to get hold of now. Now, of course, we also text. We borrow each other's phones. It's very hard to be sure who's saying what, or where. And in the absence of such options, as Egypt's revolutionaries demonstrated, we can go back to spraying messages on walls.

I have a number of friends who are trained martial artists. Some of them are licensed as such. This gives them certain extra responsibilities should they find themselves caught in altercations. Their particular skills being recognised, they are expected to show a greater ability to restrain an opponent; they are granted less leeway for causing harm in self defence. This is all very well when it comes to fighting because most of us do our best to avoid getting into fights most of the time, and many will spend their whole lives without a serious encounter. But can we treat people who are skilled with words in the same way?

Police officers, miners, accountants and librarians are, by and large, valued for what they do (or are perceived to do). Journalists are valued for who they are. We might not always like them, but silencing somebody is a serious business with implications that go far beyond the professional sphere. Before Ed Miliband says that 'bad' people should be forbidden from engaging in journalism, he should ask himself how he would give up engaging in politics.

The Biggest Aspidistra in the World

2011-09-14T14:44:00.000-07:00

Truth will out. At least it will if you're a habitual liar; lies built upon lies are almost impossible to keep balanced forever. Like many habitual liars, Johann Hari spent months crafting new inventions in an attempt to escape the consequences of those he'd made before. Now he says he's truly sorry. But should we believe him?

In a situation like this, many people consider it churlish to withhold forgiveness in response to a proffered apology. There is a suggestion that those who refuse to engage must be revelling in some kind of malicious glee. It is of course possible that this is true of some, but I would counter that there can be an equal degree of self-interest in rushing to say that the apology is accepted, that everything is alright now. It makes us feel magnanimous, but it isn't necessarily an honest or a wise response.

The real problem with forgiveness is that it is only a response; it cannot solve the underlying problem on its own. To mean anything, it has to be a response to genuine contrition, and contrition is not possible without a full understanding of what has been done wrong. Hari now says that he regrets altering Wikipedia pages to slander people he disliked because he would have been sad if they had done that to him. Not because, you know, it's wrong, never mind that it's professionally unacceptable. This is certainly an improvement on denying that he ever made those alterations, but it falls considerably short of the level of moral understanding required of a journalist who frequently focuses on the moral responsibilities of others. If Hari cannot improve on this, it doesn't matter whether or not his fans still believe in him – he simply will not have the authority to speak as he wishes to.

So what are Hari's options? Journalism school is a good start. There's no doubt he's already a good writer, but one hopes that he might learn something about ethics – or at least how to craft a more believable story next time he falls prey to temptation. The usual approach to moral gaffes like this is to disappear for a few years and then return as a reformed character, Portillo-like, complete with a book full of painful confessions emphasising one's noble sense of guilt. The journalist becomes the story, his abuses the sensation – and, of course, he still profits, though if he's smart and wants long term success he'll make a hefty donation to charity. Hari is a good candidate for this, because he's young and because he can produce elegant prose. But that opens up another question – why does he want to return to journalism at all?

I cannot be the only person to have observed that Hari's real success has been as a writer of fiction. The problem was that he was passing it off as fact. If he ceased to pepper it with pieces of other people's work (something editors will be very wary of in future) and if he constrained his cruel characters to speaking within the confines of a novel, he might give us something truly compelling. Hari's tragedy (such as it is) centres no on his fall from grace but on his failure, from the outset, to speak with his own voice. By hiding behind pilfered material he has belittled his own talent. His challenge, now, must be to show us what he is capable of.

The return of an Orwell prize already destined to be taken from him is a poor gesture on Hari's part. Journalism is about more than good writing – it is about social awareness, honesty, and a certain fastidiousness, at none of which Hari excels. His pursuit of it at this stage suggests a childish desire to be a somebody rather than the intelligent realisation of his talents. If he really wants to be taken seriously again, he needs to take a different path.

Moral Collapse

2011-08-21T05:53:00.000-07:00

Are the recent riots and other social ills a result of a decline in moral values? Yes, but not the ones most pundits suggest.

Crucial to the Conservative Party's success in the 2010 election was the scrupulous effort made by several of its leading lights to move it away from its history of moral posturing. This was considered to be electoral poison, a view supported by the polls. Plenty of people support the Conservatives' take on economics but feel that how people live out their personal lives is none of anybody else's business. Indeed, one would think that family structures would be of more interest to socialists than to those who stress a belief in personal independence. If there is no such thing as society, why try to micro-manage it?

Moral crusading, however, is a guaranteed way to get attention. When things begin to go wrong they exert a strong appeal to politicians looking for a way out. The idea of the scapegoat first emerged in the Ancient Near East, where actual goats were ritually burdened with the sins of a troubled populace and then killed or driven into exile. These days we look for human ones, ans David Cameron has chosen two of the easiest targets – Criminal Elements and Young People Today.

Complaining about criminals seems straightforward enough, especially when one can blame them on the last Labour government. It's a shame that crime rates rose consistently under the last Conservative government and actually fell under Labour, but this reality is easily obscured by the public's emotive conviction that things are generally getting worse (something people have been keen to believe for centuries). More troubling issues come to light when one looks at the poor literacy skills and poor diet of the persistent petty criminals in our society. Experts in both areas say these factors interfere with cognitive ability, making it hard for people to connect actions and consequences. Of course this doesn't excuse criminality, but it does suggest there are more useful ways to tackle it than moral outrage and political grandstanding over prison sentences.

So what about young people? It's true that the majority of those involved in the riots were young. It's true that people between the ages of eighteen and twenty five are more likely to be involved in criminality than any other group, but this has always been the case. Statistically, there is not much to suggest that this group of young people is more inclined to be destructive than any previous one. This does not, however, mean that there are no positive ways we can intervene to reduce the destructiveness of this group. Many projects have been successful over the years, but only on a small scale, because getting funding for them is difficult. We know, for instance, that providing activities and social spaces for young people is very effective (and if you think this is just about fluffy liberalism, bear in mind that boxing and scouting are among the successes).

Perhaps the most obvious way to identify factors that trigger criminality in young people is to look at the great many in that age group who don't get involved with crime. Two factors stand out about this group: they are more likely to be in continuing education or to have good educational prospects; and they are more likely to be in employment. (This does not, of course, mean that there are not some educated, working vandals; and the vast majority of unemployed, less educated people are law-abiding.) It is a further illustration, however, of the importance of having an active stake in society. To put it simply, people need to feel a connection to society in order to feel committed to it. They need to feel that the law respects them – that they will not be assumed to be criminal simply because they are young – before they can respect the law. The hasty approach to processing suspects in the aftermath of the riots, lurid 'naming and shaming' and all, really doesn't help with this. Cases like that of Dane Williamson, who was named before he had even been tried, whose flat was burned down in a revenge attack, who lost everything he had in the world and who has since been found innocent, do not inspire much faith.

Aside from youth, one characteristic that stands out about the rioters is that the vast majority of them were male, yet it has not taken long for politicians and pundits to start finding ways to blame women. Single mothers have, as so often, taken the brunt of the blame. Some commentators have raised the long debunked notion that if minor girls were denied access to contraception without their parents' consent then there would be fewer teenage pregnancies. There has been an implicit assumption that it is female carelessness that leads to single motherhood, with abandonment by men scarcely discussed; and an unwillingness to discuss the evidence that, in many cases, children do better after parents in unhappy or abusive relationships have separated.

“Children need fathers,” says Cameron and Miliband, though there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that female couples raise children less successfully than mixed-sex couples or that the children of single fathers are more successful than the children of single mothers. Even evidence that the children of single parent families are more likely to be involved in crime than those with two parents starts to look shaky once you control for economic variables. And identifying fathers with a physical discipline which may control problem behaviour is also a flawed approach. This confuses good parenting with forceful parenting, strength with aggression. In fact, there is quite a bit of evidence to show that children who are physically punished by their parents are more likely, not less likely, to go on to commit criminal offences.

So where exactly is this moral decline we've heard so much about? It's true that moral values are changing. There is less automatic deference to those in authority (and more of an assumption that if they want respect they must earn it, as the young are often told to do), but this is something that can be traced across decades and it is arguably a healthy thing in a democracy. Some other changes are more troubling – the increased distrust of education and science, for instance. This is perhaps a by-product of a wariness about received wisdom, which has unfortunately not been balanced by teaching about the do-it-yourself principles underlying the scientific method, nor by teaching research skills at an early age. The resultant marginalisation of intellectual discourse, particularly within the working class, is undoubtedly bad for democracy.

Over the past four decades two moral shifts in British society have really stood out. The first is a focus on the importance of material goods as status symbols (from trainers to BMWs). The second is a breakdown of the notion of society itself. Margaret Thatcher's very deliberate emphasis on individualism and shift away from the notion of social responsibility is perhaps now bearing fruit. If you talk to people in African and Middle Eastern countries, these are the two biggest criticisms they have of Western society in general. We don't look after each other, we value things above people, and consequently we are moving toward a mercenary way of living that makes criminality look far more reasonable than it should.

This criminality, of course, is just as evident at the top of our society as it is at the bottom – and it is here that we have seen a measurable change. Corruption itself is nothing new but it is rare for the public to see it as starkly as they have in recent years. Between the parliamentary expenses scandal and the hacking scandal (and, perhaps less fairly, unpopular wars), the public has seen those whom it looks to for leadership increasingly revealed as self-interested opportunists. Of course this isn't true of all politicians, but it's just as damaging as the illusory dangerousness of all young people. Our politicians talk about absent fathers meaning young people lack role models, but shouldn't they be role models in their own capacity? What message do they think it sends when people perceive corruption everywhere?

We do need to make changes in our society, and if we start working together we can do that. It should begin with enquiries at the top that are incisive enough to restore public confidence, and corrupt politicians (regardless of party) must step down; there can be no second chances at this stage if we are to restore faith in British democracy. Next, we must stop making scapegoats of the vulnerable and start investing in them so that everybody has access to real opportunities in life. We must demonstrate that social policy is founded in evidence, not only because this is more likely to be efficacious in itself but also because it is part of the process of reasserting the value of intellectual endeavour. We must show people at all levels of society that they are valued as something more than mere 'consumers'; we must stop using terms like 'feral' and start showing respect for our fellow human beings. We must celebrate families and communities in all their diverse forms so that we can encourage social support rather than attacking those who don't fit one narrow definition of acceptable living. There has been enough destruction. It's time to start constructing something better.

It Gets Better

2011-08-09T08:30:00.000-07:00

For many younger people watching the riots that have unfolded around England in recent days, it must feel as if they're witnessing an unprecedented level of destruction. Buildings burning, looting, vehicles hijacked, increasing violence against non-participants - it's a scary business. So it's really important that we keep these incidents in perspective. Shocking though they are, they not unfamiliar; and more to the point, neither is recovery from them. We have been here before and at some point we will be here again. But the underlying trend, over time, is toward a decrease in violence.

"What is the world coming to?" is a question repeated so often that we give it more credence than we should. Similarly, we take altogether too seriously the suggestion that young people today are more savage and uncontrollable than they have ever been. People have been claiming that, generation after generation, since at least the sixteenth century, so think about it - if it were true, we would all have evolved into some kind of gore-fixated mutant killing machines by now. In fact, violence is the preserve of a minority and most people never do more than get into a couple of half-hearted punch-ups in their adolescent years.

What we need understand is that violence and chaos do not represent a state human civilisation is coming to, but rather one it is coming from. Let's start by looking at some of the principles that underlie our concerns. At the most basic level, we are horrified by violence because we fear people may be killed. Yet life has not always been accorded any civil value. It was only around 4,000 years ago - an eyeblink in the history of our species - that civil codes began to incorporate the idea that killing was wrong. Of course people objected to killing before that, and took revenge, but by and large states didn't care. And when life did begin to be valued, it was only male life, and the lives of male citizens at that, which counted. There was no assumption that the lives of women, slaves, visiting foreigners etc. should be protected by the state.

We have moved on from this. We have lapsed, sometimes, and there are still places where the lives of some are not protected (the recent Ghanaian purges against gay people provide a pertinent example), but by and large we have moved in a consistent direction, toward placing greater value on all human life. This is at the heart of what civilisation means. As it's Ramadan, let's take the example of how Islam, at its point of origin, advanced women's rights. Islam is often criticised in relation to a phrase in the Qur'an that describes woman as "the animal that speaks". In a modern context it is easy to understand why - we are horrified by the comparison of a woman and an animal - but in its time, when women were generally considered to be worth no more than camels or goats, the emphasis was different: the animal that speaks. In this way the Prophet Muhammed emphasised the personhood of women and their separateness from the animals traded by their masters. As Islam advanced, the trade in women decreased rapidly and women gained a civil influence which, in that part of the world, they had never had before.

History is full of these examples of progress. It is also full of cruelty, of course, and these cruelties can have such emotional impact that they seem to undermine everything else. Overall, in proportion to our numbers, we have killed each other far less often over the past century than at any time in our known history. How can this be true, people ask, when the twentieth century brought us the Holocaust? It's hard for us to imagine worse horrors; and yet the fact is that they did exist. In the century before the Holocaust came the vast European expansions into Africa and the Americas that led to the wholesale slaughter of millions of native peoples. The ancestors of today's Britons not only killed the natives but, in some cases, were responsible for flogging off their skins; for sticking their heads on spikes or using them to decorate flowerbeds; for driving them into the desert and watching as they died of dehydration, shooting those who tried to return. This is the ugly truth about what we are, about the potential that still remains within us, but we are moving onward. Although such horrors do still happen, they do so now on a much smaller scale. Back in the nineteenth century, the average European hearing about such things would have considered it a reasonable and natural part of the extinguishing of an inferior species. Today, for the most part, we recognise each other as human beings, and even where we feel unable to intervene as atrocities are committed, we care. Just caring may seem impotent, but it is a step forward - it is one of the building blocks of a better future.

After the Holocaust Europe collectively reassured itself that this would never happen again. Of course it has done - within Europe's borders as well as elsewhere. We don't yet have the power, or the collective will, to make it stop. But we are at least motivated to try. What doesn't tend to get taught to schoolchildren learning about the Second World War is that most of those who fought on the side of the Allies did so without knowing about the Jews in the concentration camps until the very end, and that many of them held deeply anti-Semitic views themselves - that was the prevailing culture of the time. There were those among Britain's leaders who would not have disagreed with Hitler's Final Solution. Of course there are still racist pundits today, but we don't give that kind of hatred the same easy public reception as once we did.

And so to riots. It is very important to distinguish riot from revolution. Revolutions can happen with or without them, but are ultimately dependent on a shift in ideas which many riots have nothing to do with. Looting and burning things down, in isolation, cannot bring about political change. Riots at their outset often incorporate crowd of idealistic young people who really believe they can use the violence to change society for the better, but in cases like the recent one it doesn't take long for them to become disillusioned (one hopes they won't give up on working toward peaceful change as a result). Once they're gone, there is no solidarity, no real social organisation, so thrill-seekers and criminals come to the fore. This pattern has varied very little over the centuries. What has changed - improved - is the capacity of civil forces to contain the rioting, and the capacity of civil organisations (whether part of the state or formed by parallel social movements) to rebuild. So although police numbers have been too low to contain much of the violence in the recent uprisings, and although a great deal of suffering is taking place, these are far from the ugliest riots in the history of these cities. In London, we don't have to look back very far - just three hundred years or so - to the Gordon Riots, when half the city burned, many died, and a huge number of people permanently lost their livelihoods. Not only was there the same restricted police control, but there were no insurance companies to pick up the bill, there was no civil movement to identify the perpetrators, there was no system of communication to help identify those in need of urgent help (yes modern communications can also aid the rioters, but we must not overlook the good they enable).

In the Gordon Riots, as it many others that took place in the run-up to the twentieth century, there was also the problem of prisons being emptied and dangerous criminals of all types spilling out onto the streets, often continuing to cause havoc for several years after the riots had been quelled. That is something against which we have much better defences this time around. And these defences did not come from nowhere - they are a result of our collective effort. They are what we pay our taxes for. We have all these facilities to minimise the impact of violence because we have worked together to build a society that values life.

When you go our into the streets and see the glow of flames on the horizon, or when you turn on your television set and see gangs running loose in the streets, remember that they do not represent all that we are. They certainly do not represent our future. The people out there in the mornings with their brooms and their cups of tea for strangers - they are our future. We know this because when we look at history we can see how our civil structures have grown. Tempting though it may be to some, selfish aggression is not a winning strategy. It is, at best, a means to short term gain. Working together is what we are good at as a species and it's where our real advantages lie. Violence isn't the end of what we have worked for, it's just a stumbling block along the way. It gets better.

Know Your Right

2011-07-25T16:34:00.000-07:00

You have the right not to be killed. Most people agree on that. Who doesn't? Those who value other things more highly than individual lives – personal aggrandisement, or political ideology. Often the two go together, and nowhere are they more comfortable bedfellows than on the far right.

When the attacks in Norway took place, many politicians and media contributors immediately leapt to the conclusion that they must be the work of Islamic terrorists. So did many ordinary people, with the result that there was an immediate rise in the number of Islamophobic threats reported across Europe. Individuals were threatened or told to “go home” (despite the fact many were born in Europe), whilst mosques and madrassas came under attack.

The horror of this is pretty obvious. What may be less obvious is just how ridiculous it is. When you look at the statistics you'll see that the percentage of terror attacks in Europe committed by Islamist groups is very small. The reason they seem more commonplace is entirely down to the way they are treated by politicians and the media. In other words, there is an agenda here. That agenda has two aspects.

For politicians, encouraging a fear of Islamic terrorism is useful. Scapegoats and distractions are always handy in tough economic times. It also helps to justify wars in countries with large Muslim populations when local populations are unwilling to accept other reasons. For newspapers, it's even simpler: fear sells. The papers have always played this game. From anarchists threatening terror to black men endangering white women and gay men endangering children, it's the same thing recycled, generation by generation, finding a convenient monster. The important thing is that the monster has to be demonstrably Other. It can't come from the bedrock of readers or voters. It has to be excluded from the assumed Us.

All this makes it rather embarrassing that the Norwegian attacker turned out to be white, educated, middle class – in all respects the sort of person we Europeans are supposed to think of as one of us. A lot of desperate flailing has followed, from unsubstantiated claims he was inspired by Islamist violence to the bizarre ramblings of Glenn Beck, who, with his usual political incoherence, compared the Utøya victims to the Hitler Youth. A strange apologism for the far right has since developed in parts (thankfully not all) of the press. Perhaps it's fitting. After all, the killer, Anders Behring Breivik, quoted extensively from certainly popular press pundits – most notably Melanie Phillipps – in the manifesto in which he endeavoured to justify his violence. He recognised the right wing press as his allies, and they have been notably slow to disavow his agenda.

Is it fair to blame the wider right for actions like this? Of course the vast majority of them would never condone violence (and many, of course, are economically right wing without sharing this sort of social agenda at all). Any hesitation in so doing must, however, be weighed against that same old eagerness to let all Muslims take the blame for Islamist terrorist attacks.

Perhaps most telling has been the reaction of the English Defence League, which Breivik cited as one of his inspirations. Of course they wouldn't condone the attacker's actions, they insist, but they share his agenda. They have taken advantage of this raising of their profile to argue, as he did, that this centres on the need to remove all Muslims from Europe in order to protect its indigenous people (whoever they are). Breivik felt that sending a message about this made the killings even he called 'atrocious' worthwhile. His logic in this regard is somewhat unclear. Even if one wee to accept his ill-justified contention that Muslims are a threat, how exactly is he protecting people by, um, killing them?

You have the right to free speech, argue the EDL. If we shut down their democratic right to express their objection to our Muslim citizens' presence here, something not unlike the Norwegian attacks could take place in the UK. Worryingly, there are already hints of support for this kind of thinking coming from the mainstream. These Islamophobes are unpleasant, it's said, but we must placate them a little – make immigration laws a bit tougher, allow fewer new mosques to be built – or there could be trouble. This is nothing short of capitulation to blackmail. Why should ordinary Muslims suffer when they are not the ones making threats?

The rhetoric we hear in this situation asserts that it is liberalism that has allowed these problems to develop. Liberals, it is said, are so busy standing up for people's rights that they don't realise Muslims wouldn't grant them the same courtesy.

This is not only a misunderstanding of Islam – it is missing the point. Human rights are just that – part of being human – and they do not depend on one's affiliations or behaviour. What's more, this isn't about liberals versus the rest of the world. It's about everybody who wants to live in a peaceful civilisation versus the right wing extremists who don't.

Ultimately, those extremists vary very little in their aims, no matter which ideological tokens they cling to. Those advocating violence on the far right and those doing so in the name of Islam are much the same. They are all attacking the diversity, equality, and respect for human life that are the cornerstones of our civilisation. They are attacking the true Us. We are the ones who stand together, as the diverse peoples of Norway stood together in their grief, and say that we will not be bullied and threatened into giving up the civilisation we have worked so hard to build. We will not be turned against one another by those who can offer only destruction.

The far right has no place in our society and we must be neither bullied nor embarrassed into giving it one. It is time for right wingers who do not share that agenda to clearly differentiate themselves. That means an end to the use of Islamophobic articles to sell newspapers. It means an end to moronic statements about the 'failure' of multiculturalism from political leaders who should know better. It is time to stop feeding hate and to assert clearly that those who wish to label themselves European must show respect for all of the rest of us, no matter our religion, if they wish to be respected in return.

Education, Education, Education

2011-07-16T16:11:00.000-07:00

Should Rupert Murdoch be in command of multiple media outlets? Despite public passivity on this matter that has lasted for decades, most people would now say no. The scandal that began at The News Of The World has changed the game. Now it is beginning to expand to other titles, with tabloid newspapers unconnected to Murdoch also the subject of suspicion. But there's another issue here that isn't getting nearly enough coverage, and that relates to Murdoch's wider interests – most significantly, his interest in education.

Aside from the media, education is Murdoch's great passion. He is a man who has always understood that power resides in control of information, and education is as important in this regard as newspapers and Fox News. Specifically, his interest over recent years has been in the Free School movement, whose development in the United States he provided with crucial support. That interest has extended to the UK, and the revelation that Michael Gove was paid £1,250 a week for one hour's work for News International, whilst serving as Shadow Education Secretary, is rightly raising eyebrows. [Update: he is still being paid this amount for a Times column.]

The Free Schools movement provides a vital opportunity for entrepreneurs of Murdoch's type. Because of the freedom it offers from the usual restrictions of the National Curriculum it makes controlling the information children receive – and don't receive – much easier. As such it has natural appeal to any number of fringe political movements and ambitious individuals. There's a financial interest for Murdoch too. He is committed to the notion that learning through computers is the way of the future, and just happens to own ninety percent of educational technology business Wireless Generation, which is already snapping up lucrative contracts in the 'States.

In the UK, Free Schools have got off to a less successful start, with the number of initial applications dramatically lower than Gove, as Minister of Education, predicted, and with considerable opposition from the public and teachers' groups. The government's health, justice and now even welfare policies have been compromised in face of difficulties like this, so why has it pressed ahead so hard with its educational strategy despite them? Is this simply about sticking to principle or is it about pleasing a third party whose influence when it comes to winning elections could be more important than policies themselves?

It's worth remembering that Gove started out as a journalist, working for The Times (as his wife still does) – which may itself place him in a vulnerable position as the News Corp scandal unravels further. He has enjoyed a close personal friendship with Rebekah Brooks and it is difficult to imagine that, even in the absence of direct pressure, his approach to policy has not been influenced by his social circle. Further to this, he has among his advisers former New York Chancellor for Education Joel Klein, who closely supported Murdoch's projects. For a man who has been described as a potential future Prime Minister, he would be well advised to tread carefully over the next few weeks. The News Corp contagion could well spread beyond the media.

If this sounds paranoid, consider what Murdoch himself has said on the subject of education in a series of speeches and articles that represent teachers and school governors as conspiring the benefit financially from the current system at the expense of their pupils. We would be better off, he told the New York Times, if schools were more like American Idol. But win or lose, all children grow up to be potential voters. This is why it is vital that we keep our educational system as politically neutral as possible, and to do so we must ensure that it is managed in accordance with choices made at the ballot box, not influence purchased by those who stand to gain.

The Damage Done

2011-07-10T05:47:00.000-07:00

As a journalist, I'm as sorry as anyone to see good people lose their jobs as a result of the closure of the News of the World. But I'm not sorry to see the paper itself go. I hope to see Rebekah Brooks and the Murdochs properly taken to task for what they've done. I hope to see a future which has more room for decent publications that respect their staff and readers alike.

In the meantime, having written about the political implications of the scandal, I feel it's important to address an area that has received too little attention in all of this: the human cost of tabloid journalism.

By 'tabloid journalism' I don't mean everything ever written for a tabloid newspaper. There are good people at most of them, many trying to please their readers whilst pursuing a socially responsible agenda. But we all know that there's another sort of journalist - and editor, and owner - involved in the business too. These are the ones I encounter day to day through my work at Trans Media Watch. They are the ones whose victims come looking for help, with nowhere else to turn. Rarely celebrities. Generally just ordinary people whose private lives have been splashed across the pages in lurid detail, along with photos (often their own, used without permission) to identify them to the neighbours. Often they are subject to outright slander but they lack the financial means to challenge it. Their stories are heartbreaking. Some lose jobs. Some lose their families. Some are assaulted in the street. They are the ones paying the price for the "much loved family newspaper".

I'm lucky. I've never been the victim of a direct attack by a tabloid myself. But then again, I find myself thinking, hasn't their presence indirectly affected my life to a considerable degree?

Let me explain.

I've been passionate about politics from a very early age. At fifteen I was a member of the Labour Party; by seventeen I was on its local housing committee, working to ensure social provision for those facing a financial squeeze under Thatcherism. There wasn't much new blood in the party at that time and I was treated as something of a rising star. I was asked if I would consider getting involved at conference, perhaps addressing the whole party. A promising career beckoned.

I walked away from it for two reasons. The first was the Kinnock purges, which, though I didn't altogether disagree with his intent to reshape the party, created an internal atmosphere in which neighbour spied on neighbour; it was deeply unpleasant to be around. But the second, more pertinent today, was that I'm queer.

I realised that, at that time, it would simply be impossible for me to take on any senior political role without being torn to pieces the moment a tabloid found it convenient to attack my sexuality or gender. This was the 1980s, and I inhabited a landscape full of screaming headlines whipping up panic about how homosexuals might harm our children. They were the same reason I daren't hold a girlfriend's hand in public; the reason I would walk around the block twice to be sure no-one was following me before I entered my favourite bar. The thing was, even if I hadn't been afraid of such an attack on a personal level it would still have ruined me politically; it made the whole thing seem pointless. It was broadly agreed that, for all the gradual legal progress that might be made by gay rights campaigners, nobody would ever accept a queer in office.

I'm not so vain as to expect you to reel in horror at the thought of my lost opportunity (I'm not unhappy with the way things worked out for me in the longer term anyway). What I do want to make clear is the far reaching effect that kind of tabloid intimidation had. It curtailed the ambitions of individuals who weren't even on the papers' radar. How much talent did our country lose access to as a result? How many brilliant people - potential sports stars and entertainers as well as politicians - gave up and chose to live quiet lives underneath the radar, wasting their talent, because of what they very reasonably feared would happen to them otherwise?

That's all in the past, you might say. It's better now. But if you spend as much time watching the tabloids as I do you'll soon see that it's not. The campaigns against gay people are less overtly vicious now and are couched in different terms, but they're still there. Attacks on transsexual people are frequent and often try to paint them as paedophiles or other kinds of sex attacker. There may no longer be ugly headlines about black people but we see plenty about Muslims, Poles and Roma people, often followed by stories which rely heavily on fabrication. Disabled people are frequently portrayed as workshy scroungers regardless of whether they're really incapable of working or, in some cases, they actually are in work. And the attacks on people who simply have the misfortune to grow up poor are horrific. This is an industry built on hate.

Sometimes the tabloids get it wrong, misjudging how much hate their readers will tolerate. Attacking the victims of the Hillsborough Football Stadium disaster went too far and cost The Sun the support of a whole city. Jan Moir's Daily Mail piece about Stephen Gately provoked outrage that went far beyond the gay community. Yet day to day, the attacks continue. A Monday afternoon's titillating scandal can ruin the life of a hapless individual who happened to draw the wrong kind of attention. And those who have already been the victims of crimes know that tabloid attention can make it worse, whether they're the targets of phone hacking or rape victims whose experiences have been salaciously detailed opposite page three.

For anybody who has failed to sit up and take notice of this, the way in which the News of the World was willing to treat the families of Milly Dowler, Jessica Chapman and so forth must make a difference now. It must show the contempt in which these newspapers hold those whom they claim to serve. It must, because as a society we simply cannot go on like this. Former News of the World journalists seeking redemption have already discussed several suicides which they believe their stories contributed to. The human cost of this kind of journalism is too high. It is time to stand up, all together, and say that we will not tolerate it any more.

Why Press?

2011-07-07T10:28:00.000-07:00

Every now and again a news story breaks whose connotations are so obvious to those working in the media that we forget our duty to explain them to other people. The News International scandal, which today saw the demise of 168 year old newspaper The News Of The World, is such a story. It has flooded television news and slowed down the internet, bewildering those who think of it, ultimately, as just an unfortunate tale of privacy intrusion.

I have talked with a number of people who have been upset that this story is getting so much coverage when other important matters aren't. I quite agree with them that issues such as the mass rapes and murders in Sudan, the catastrophic violence against women in Nicaragua and the pogroms against LGBT people in Iraq are more shocking, more disturbing. I agree that such matters deserve extensive coverage. But that is precisely why I consider it vital that the News International story stay in the headlines now.

As this scandal has encouraged opportunistic politicians to talk about state regulation of the press (as if regulation by a neutral independent body were not even a possibility), it has set up the false dichotomy of a state controlled press (certainly an unpleasant prospect) versus a 'free press'. The truth is that there can be no such thing as a free press if our major newspapers and broadcasting companies are owned by a tiny handful of people. Corporate influence is no more bound to be politically neutral than government influence. The vast majority of journalists (assuming they want to be paid) don't get to write about what they want. Even section editors have limited control where powerful editors-in-chief and owners are involved. They are told what to cover. They are told what constitutes the news.

This situation no longer represents the fait accompli that it once did. The internet means that people now have access to many more sources of news. Yet the fact is that only a small proportion of them actually take advantage of this. Many millions more still depend on red top newspapers as one of their principal sources of news. Research suggests that they are increasingly cynical about this news , yet it still shapes their world view - and, perhaps most importantly of all, it delineates what they are unaware of.

Without a balanced picture of what is going on around the world, it is difficult for people to understand major political issues like how we get involved in wars, why terrorist threats occur (and how seriously we should take them), and why people seek asylum here. But it's not only in their filtering of world news that the red tops routinely distort the political landscape. Heavily biased social and sometimes party political agendas distort their coverage of what goes on in the UK. They can bring down governments - witness their unrelenting attacks on Gordon Brown - or they can connive with governments they like to keep challenging ideas off the agenda.

Why would they do this? There are two reasons. First, perhaps most importantly, they have a self-perpetuating agenda. In order to get away with behaviour like that we have seen from the news of the World, they have to minimise government interference. In order to maximise profits, they have to keep their tax situations comfortable. And so forth. When a political party depends on you to stay in power, this is relatively easy to arrange. Secondly, there is power for its own sake. Many people crave it. When they have it, they want to use it, to shape society as they see fit. See, for example, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, who has a moral agenda that includes the denigration of LGBT people. This is the reason why we saw yesterday's peculiar attack on soap operas by Brian Sewell, clearly out of step with how the majority of the paper's readers actually feel.

Of course, we all like to feel that we are not influenced by this sort of thing. If we are good liberal types we may like to believe that other people are more sophisticated that we give them credit for, too. That's fair enough, but there are complicating factors. Most people outside media related professions don't really have much time to consult a variety of news sources, nor even to research particular stories they distrust. Furthermore, people are influenced in all sorts of subtle ways by the views of those around them, and if those views have been shaped by politically biased newspapers, those papers will still be able to advance their agenda.

If you ask people who actually work in journalism, you'll find that most - including those who work for red tops - agree that there are really important stories that don't get the coverage they deserve. Many will also agree that those stories can be written so as to interest the public, even if they are about places that are far away or with which those readers have no personal connection. Part of the art of writing news, after all, is to make readers feel they have a personal connection. So it would be perfectly possible to run a news organisation that carried stories like this. The reason it doesn't happen is that it simply doesn't interest those with established financial and political power bases.

To change the media is to change society. There is no more profound cultural influence, and cultural change lies at the base of every major political and economic change. The media, more than anything else, is where power lies in the modern world. This is why we cannot tolerate corruption and abuse within it; why we cannot risk letting monopolies form; why we must promote the representation of a diverse range of viewpoints. This is why the battle for justice at News International must go on. If we fail, most of us will never hear about the other things that matter in the first place.

Entitlement

2011-06-14T05:05:00.000-07:00

After the shredding of Andrew Lansley by the Royal College of Nursing and David Willetts by the Congregation of Oxford, the next major government policy plank looking likely to run into trouble is Social Security. Meanwhile, the first volleys are being heard in a battle to determine whether or not Scotland will take control of its own Social Security matters after independence or a further devolution settlement. The demonisation of working class people and those with disabilities which commentators like Polly Toynbee and Owen Jones have recently remarked on ought to have made these issues politically straightforward, but this is a context in which the political ground can shift very quickly. What does this mean for the Westminster coalition, for Holyrood, and for those who depend on the welfare state?

Let's start with a simple question. Why change the Welfare State at all? The answer the Westminster government will give you (and one which was earlier espoused, to an extent, by its Labour predecessors) is that it is all a matter of money. The system costs too much (at £152 billion a year) and loses too much in fraud (approximately £1 billion). The danger of buying into this theory is that it's too easy to see those figures in isolation. As with every other public service, we should be asking what we get in return for this investment, what we would stand to lose if we cut the money, and how it fits into the context of comparable services.

First of all, let's set aside the issue of fraud. Fraud is, of course, a serious problem and needs to be tackled, but it should not be a major consideration in policy making for two very good reasons: firstly, that £1 billion is a small amount when compared, proportionally, with losses made by major financial organisations operating in the private sector; and secondly, it is a small amount in comparison with the amount of benefit that goes unclaimed by British citizens who are entitled to it. The value of unclaimed benefits amounted to around £15 billion last year. Some people choose not to claim, of course, but others are not aware of their full entitlement because the system is so complicated.

How did it get this way? This is a natural consequence of Social Security having been a political football for several decades now, kicked around by politicians of all stripes. Many have tried to reform it, for varying reasons, and the end result is that it has become a collection of poorly connected systems assembled around half-complete strategies that are at odds with one another. This is a problem for governments, staff and claimants alike. It's one of the reasons why the system is riddled with poverty traps whereby claimants can end up being poorer if they work. It contributes to claims taking months to process whilst claimants struggle to feed themselves and stay in their homes. It has also resulted in a bloated bureaucracy that costs the taxpayer a fortune. If we want to make Social Security cheaper we should be looking not simply at how much claimants receive, but at how much it costs to deliver it to them.

Simplifying this is a noble aim and there is a lot to be said for Iain Duncan Smith's early ambitions. Unfortunately, like many ministers before him, he has found that this isn't so easy to do in reality – especially within the lifetime of a Parliament. The measures now travelling through Parliament are consequently just another half-baked plan that doesn't really tackle the underlying problems with the system and will end up adding to the existing mess. That the government knows this too is evident in its cautious climbdown over hasty suggestions like the cap on benefits at £26,000 per year. Now that we are told this “was never intended to apply” to households which include disabled people and that it is unlikely to be applied to households with children, it is difficult to see who it will apply to. Despite the shocking figures which the Department of Social Security has now admitted it took, without verification, from the Daily Mail, there is no real evidence that people on benefits are bringing in over £100,000 a year. Most live on very little.

So let's take a look at some of the central problems in the system, how they manifest, and what could realistically be done about them.

First up is the issues of long term recipients of Incapacity Benefit. When Iain Duncan Smith and Ed Miliband express their shock at how some people have been 'left' on these benefits for over a decade it may sound shocking, but what does that really mean? In some cases there is reason to be sceptical about long term claimants. In the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher's government was worried about the consequences of spiralling unemployment figures, many claimants with relatively minor health problems were moved onto Incapacity Benefit as a convenient way of massaging the statistics. This was a particular issue in depressed areas of the country where little employment was available (it's one of the reasons, for instance, why the number of claimants in Glasgow is so high, when you consider that unemployment reached 85% on some Glasgow housing estates during that period). Some (not all) of these people could now go back to work, though they would of course need extra support to update their skills and to find jobs when they are unlikely to be considered very employable. But this does not apply to all Incapacity Benefit claimants.

It is estimated that approximately a third of current Incapacity Benefit claimants could work, a third will never be able to work, and another third can do some types of work with a lot of support. Though I have never claimed this benefit, I might consider myself in the latter camp – my serious illness means that I am limited to working from home, which in turn effectively limits my earnings. It's not so very bad for me because I have skills that enable me to do this, but many people with long term illnesses and disabilities don't. Any government serious about having them work – and keep working – must provide the necessary training, create suitable job opportunities (by more effectively tackling employers' unwillingness to take on disabled staff, by encouraging the development of more telecommuting opportunities, etc.), and acknowledge that many of these people will be unable to cope with full time hours. The upshot of this is that it may well cost more to help such people into employment than it does to keep them in receipt of Social Security. This is one of the reasons why we have a welfare state – sometimes it's the most practical option.

This brings us to another intrinsic problem with the system – it is built around a model that assumes people will be in full time work or not working at all. Again, Iain Duncan Smith has the right idea with his pledge to support those in 'micro jobs', but at a policy level he has failed to follow through on this. Part time working is heavily penalised at many levels. People working more than one part time job because that's the only way they can earn enough to support themselves are penalised by the tax system, hardly an encouragement to work. Benefit claimants working over sixteen hours a week can have their benefits docked even if they are not earning enough to compensate for their losses – not a problem if they are above the minimum wage but a serious impediment to people who are self employed, for instance. As an individual earns more, they become ineligible for specific benefits such as free dental care, so that they may easily end up being poorer as a consequence of working. They should do it anyway, you may well say (and, indeed, I have long done it anyway), but when one is on the breadline and has a family to support, that's not such an easy call.

Part time working is the best model for many people with long term illnesses and disabilities, for single parents and others with care responsibilities; and it's also very often the only choice people have when full time jobs are scarce. We might prefer that people not claim benefits at all, but it's better people contribute what they can than not contribute at all. Working also tends to result in better health outcomes for individuals and reduced pressure on families, both of which reduce later costs for the state. So these barriers to work need to be removed. How do we find them all? By using the only research tactic that has been consistently ignored throughout these decades of poorly thought-out changes: sitting down the long-term claimants and asking them what has made it difficult for them to work.

One point raised again and again in these situations is the particular difficulty experienced by families. Because partners (whether married, in civil partnership, or not) are expected to support each other financially there is a disincentive for one partner to work when the other is not working (because if their earnings are relatively low they will receive very little financial reward for it) and there is an incentive for families to split up, which then costs the state more because it is more expensive to provide Housing Benefit for two properties and there may be additional bureaucratic costs in relation to child support. It would be one thing to penalise partners like this if their responsibility for one another as dependants were acknowledged in the tax system, but it is not, so they lose out at both ends. The system also loses out because this means that people can be paying taxes at the same time as they are receiving benefits, so the state is taking with one hand and giving with the other and inevitably losing money in administration during each process. Iain Duncan Smith's early proposals included the suggestion that this obligation of support be broken, so that people were responsible simply for themselves and their children; he also proposed ensuring that people would not pay tax until they were above the threshold at which they received benefits; but again, these potentially effective measures were lost in subsequent redrafting as political concerns interfered with his attempt to bring a straightforward management approach to the system.

The danger of allowing political rhetoric to contaminate approaches to Social Security is twofold. First of all, it can create lead to real suffering and a lack of help for the most vulnerable people in our society, something all politicians decry but few seem willing to take action on. Secondly, it encourages short term solutions that fob off the worried taxpayer whilst doing nothing to reduce costs in the long term. Taking away people's benefits if they're fit to work but don't accept jobs might sound like a good idea, but the reality of it is much more complicated. What if they have children – do we leave the children to starve, or take them into care (costing the state a lot more)? What if they start stealing in order to provide for themselves? What if they have been wrongly assessed as fit and their health declines rapidly in the working environment (at least one man has already died of a heart attack after finding himself in this situation)? As so often, this cost saving measure could easily become more expensive than simply leaving things as they were.

There is a real problem with a small minority of benefit claimants who simple can't be bothered to work, but to focus policy around them is economically naïve and risks seriously harming those in genuine need. It makes for good soundbites but it doesn't make for good government. Simply put, we need to take the same approach to the benefits system as the banks – fraudsters must feel the full force of the law and we must aim to clarify the rules to make things more difficult for those who simply avoid doing their duty. Meanwhile, we must make take care that the problem minority are not allowed to tarnish the whole system.

Just as we all depend on having access to banks, we all depend on Social Security. It's a safety net for society and it's insurance for us as individuals – that portion of our taxes that goes toward supporting it is not just there to provide for other people, it's there to ensure that we, too, will receive support if we should ever fall on hard times. In a recession, this is something people should be acutely aware of. Politicians and tabloid journalists frequently complain about benefit claimants having a sense of entitlement, but they should feel entitled to draw upon a system that their taxes have contributed to. Why do bankers have a sense of entitlement to large bonuses when their companies are making losses? Why do some of Mr Cameron's front bench colleagues have a sense of entitlement to inherited wealth and, well, titles? If we are to question the entitlement of the poor it should cut both ways.

There are real problems with the Welfare State and there are fictitious ones. It's time our leaders stopped play-fighting with the latter and took responsible measures to introduce genuine reform and make Social Security a better system for everyone.

A Friend of the Family

2011-06-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

The recently released Bailey Review into the commercialisation and sexualisation of children places a lot of emphasis on the need to make society 'more family friendly'. Every government likes to proclaim that it has family friendly policies – it is, after all, a pretty easy way to sound like the good guys – but what does it actually mean? Just what kind of family are they talking about?

Of the UK's approximately seventeen million families, just twelve million are headed by married couples. Around two and a half million are headed by couples who are cohabiting without marriage or civil partnership, and this figure is steadily growing as a proportion of the whole. There are just over two million single mother families and a mere hundred thousand single father families; neither of these groups has grown or declined much in recent years, although if you read the tabloids you may well have been under the impression that they're an epidemic. The evidence suggests that most single parents are in relationships at the point when their children are born. Only around ten percent of them are under twenty five, so the irresponsible teenager stereotype is misleading too. Oh, and over half of single parents work, though they are significantly more likely than those in two parent families to be living below the poverty line.

Of course, this only gives us a rough idea of what Britain's families really look like, because families aren't limited to the nuclear group. There are certainly quite a few polyamorous families out there, with more than two adults providing for children, but we don't have any firm details on this because the people running the National Census decided to disregard all data concerning multiple partner groups and instead assign each individual thus described a single partner, on the basis that they probably made an error when describing themselves (how they can arrive at this conclusion in the absence of other quantitative data on polyamorous households is unclear). There are also many families which have fractured and reformed so that children frequently travel between their birth parents' homes and are also looked after by step parents. And then there's co-parenting, where two unrelated adults who are not romantically involved share a home in order to raise their children together – many women find this a practical way to work around problems they would otherwise face in finding childcare to enable them to work.

Add to this the extended family. Modern UK society is unusual in its notional adherence to the parents-and-children-only model. In most societies today and throughout history, grandparents, aunts and uncles and often close friends of the family have played important roles in raising children – not just providing childcare, but helping more generally with education and socialisation. In fact there are still a great many families in the UK that function like this, they just tend to be under the political radar. There are also many complex care situations in which families may include elderly, ill or disabled adult dependants, some of whom also help to look after children.

Given this complex picture, it should be pretty clear that one-size-fits-all approaches to family friendliness are not going to work. The UK has a sad history of prioritising some family types at the expense of others and of using crude financial levers to try and force people into that 'standard' model (though David Cameron's much-vaunted plan to create a new tax allowance for married couples seems to have been consigned to the back burner). Single mothers are made scapegoats for everything from male violence to the struggling economy, generally with no substantiating evidence, whilst relatively little attention is paid to the men whose desertion has left many of them in that situation in the first place, even where non-payment of parental contributions is commonplace. Single fathers, meanwhile, tend to lose out because they are 'invisible' when policy is being developed.

To complicate things further, families include people who face different kinds of social exclusion. There are three and a half million children in the UK living below the poverty line – a statistic which becomes more worrying when one realises how many of them were born to parents who grew up in the same circumstances. To families like this, the notion that their primary concerns should include the appearance of the kids' underwear must seem ludicrous to say the least. One in six kids in this situation considers suicide. Shouldn't we be more concerned about that? Or about the kids who feel suicidal because they experience racist, homophobic or transphobic bullying whilst Cameron's government increasingly deregulates the schools that ought to be protecting them?

Moral panics have a nasty way of making things harder for kids like these. Public fear of paedophiles has made it harder for many kids to access sport, hobby groups or outdoor play. This is despite the fact that most child molestation occurs within the family unit or its immediate social circle. Denying kids contact with other adults makes it harder for them to find people they can confide in when things are wrong at home. It also means that a kid who is worried about developing homosexual feelings, for instance, will find it harder to ask a neutral adult for advice. Responsible advice is hard to find online if parents have installed content-blocking software. So such young people are often left more vulnerable, not less so, like those prevented by the same software from accessing safer sex advice. If Nadine Dorries and her allies succeed in placing the focus of school sex education on abstinence we can expect rates of sexually transmitted infections to soar as they have where similar approaches have been taken in the US. Protecting children is not always as obvious a process as it might first seem.

It's also an emotive business. The phrase 'family friendly' is designed to appeal to the emotions, but often it does so at the expense of good sense. People who care passionately about protecting children often believe that qualifies them to act on instinct. It doesn't. To make good policy which has the effects intended, it is necessary to consider the evidence. Fortunately there is a good quantity of this, though little in the Bailey Review, which amounts to little more than a collection of opinions.

There is one other important question to ask here, and that's whether it is appropriate to place so much extra emphasis on parental input when it comes to developing policies that affect children. Parents generally do know their own children better than anyone else does, but that doesn't make them experts on children in general. And the welfare of children is not solely their concern. It's not just that non-parents may also want to see children do well, it's that the whole of society depends on how children are raised. Everybody has to live with problems like youth violence and everybody will ultimately depend on the skills and hard word of those who are now children to sustain the economy when they grow too old to work themselves. Children are a social investment, not just a familial one.

The hard truth of the matter is, most genuine ways to improve the lives of families and children across the board require money – more money than successive governments have been willing to invest. Until they are ready to put that money where their mouths are, they should be wary of announcing that they're family friendly. Baby-kissing is out of fashion on the campaign trail (I am still uncertain as to why, in the internet age, we don't see more politicians posing with kittens). It is time we also put its rhetorical cousin to bed.

Asking for it?

2011-05-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

Ken Clarke's comments on rape at Westminster today have prompted mass outrage and calls for him to resign or be sacked. But following on as they do from comments about child abuse made by Nadine Dorries on The Vanessa Show, are they indicative or a deeper level of misunderstanding or misogyny within the Conservative party?

This has been another extraordinary week. Among other things it has seen the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF, on seven counts of sexually-motivated assault against a hotel cleaner. This case stands out for two reasons. Firstly, because the accused is such an influential figure; and secondly, because (despite that) it ever got this far. A brutalised women feeling brave enough to report what happened to her; an employer offering instant sympathy and support, doing all the right things; police officers taking the complaint seriously and taking immediate action; a judge taking the complaint seriously enough to refuse Strauss-Kahn bail. This shouldn't be an unusual story, but it is. And that in itself is a story we should be paying more attention to.

Of course, Strauss-Kahn may yet turn out to be innocent, and any change in rape laws must always take account of the possibility of the accused being innocent, but this is precisely why rape should be a subject for civilised discussion in parliamentary committee, not for point scoring arguments on the floor of the House and not for television chat shows. Discussions of the latter sort are bound to lead to the issues being confused and distorted. They are distressing for victims of sexual violence to observe (let's not forget that, statistically, that's likely to have included a number of people sitting in the House for Prime Minister's Questions) and they can easily lead to politicians saying things they later regret.

Witness Kenneth Clarke. Nobody seems more surprised than he does by the position he finds himself in today. He did, after all, start out by trying to make a reasonable point: that the issues covered by rape laws are various and that a nuanced approach to sentencing is the most effective way to respond to this. But his attempts to defend himself upon receiving criticism led to him digging himself a deeper and deeper hole, especially in his use of the term 'serious rape' (perhaps akin to the Whoopi Goldberg concept of 'rape rape'), which by default implies that there are types of rape he thinks of as not serious (probably not the case) or, at best, as less serious. Following that up by accusing the Labour Party of whipping up 'false outrage' was his crowning error. The outrage was real and palpable; it behoves a minister to acknowledge such a response even in circumstances where he does not consider it appropriate.

There is background to this. In 2006 the then government commissioned an extensive consultation on sexual offences and how they should be treated in law. After lengthy consideration by committee, some of the resulting recommendations were adopted into law. Others were notably excluded. These included the suggestion that the age of consent should be staggered so that, from the age of fourteen, it is legal for a young person to have sex provided that their partner is not themselves below that age or more than two years older. This would have brought Britain more closely into line with European law and would have tackled an important problem with age of consent laws - that, whilst they are intended to protect children from exploitation by adults, they too often end up criminalising young people who are experimenting together, where there is an equal power relationship and no need to panic about predation.

It's easy to understand why the Labour government ignored this proposal; it would have been a political hot potato. Yet it is precisely in this sort of area that the public is dissatisfied with laws describing rape. As long as somebody is considered old enough to be capable of giving informed consent, and is not under pressure, should sex automatically be classified as rape on equal terms with some of the other cases we could discuss here? This is the sort of issue Mr Clarke appears to have been referring to in his initial statements.

It is all the more regrettable, then, that in attempting to clarify his remarks Mr Clarke starting producing much more problematic examples, for instance claiming that rape committed by a stranger "jumping out of the bushes" should be considered a more serious crime than rape committed by a partner (in fact, victim support organisations generally report that the latter is more damaging because of the breach of trust involved and the fact victims may have no safe space to retreat to). This illustrates muddled thinking on the issue, as does his suggestion that rape is more serious if it involves violence. Rape must be treated equally seriously in cases where victims avoid violence through compliance because otherwise justice is biased toward those who place themselves at increased risk. If prosecutors are unwilling to bring multiple charges (such as, where relevant, GBH alongside rape) then this can be tackled by adding an extra element to the principle charge, as with hate crimes law. In fact, British law already allows for something like this, hence the charge of 'aggravated rape'.

Mr Clarke has spoken out on rape issues before, making equally problematic comments; the fact that he seems to have learned nothing in the interim suggests that this is an area which he is failing to approach with the thoroughness one would hope for in a Justice Secretary. One must also wonder why his party did not nip this in the bud before he spoke out in the House, but then, Clarke's opinions, ill-informed though they are, may not be all that rare within his party (they are sadly not rare in the country as a whole though we must always look to politicians to set a better example and make more effort to educate themselves about the jobs they are required to do). The Conservatives have had several embarrassing episodes over the past few years with prominent members who had to be removed after making unacceptably misogynistic comments, and let's not forget Bill Aitken MSP's inconsiderate suggestion that a woman raped in Glasgow may have been a sex worker (as if, indeed, it would have made the crime any less serious had that been true).

This week the Conservatives have had a double helping of embarrassment in this area. Fortunately for them, fewer people were watching The Vanessa Show, so there has been less of an outcry over Nadine Dorries suggestion that teaching young girls to say no to sex would decrease rates of child abuse - but those comments are, when you think about it, much more serious. Clarke's problem is that he's clumsy and he doesn't understand how rape victims are affected by the experience. Dorries' is that she expects girls to take responsibility for assaults upon them initiated by other people. She is, in effect, blaming children for failing to prevent themselves from being sexually abused.

I'll leave you to imagine the kind of damage that can do. Plenty of people have written eloquently on the subject already, detailing the agony of self-blame they lived with for years before finally realising that they weren't the ones who did something wrong - and, indeed, the struggle to break those habits of self-hatred even after that revelation. What matters here is that children who are suffering now should not be placed in that position by somebody whose job it is to help create the laws which are there to give them recourse.

I suspect Ms Dorries genuinely doesn't understand the full import of what she has said. She has, after all, a history of hurling herself into debates without properly thinking things through first. But this isn't enough to excuse her actions. She, like Clarke, needs to acknowledge her mistakes and make a real effort to understand where she has gone wrong. Only when these two politicians are able to deliver informed apologies should they be considered fit to do their jobs.

Of course, many in the Conservative Party would be delighted if Mr Clarke lost his job and Ed Miliband may have dug a hole for himself by calling for Clarke's resignation. The current minister would almost certainly be replaced by someone further to the right - quite possibly someone with more recidivist views on rape. But this aside, it is time that the Conservatives got their act together in this area and showed willingness, as a party, to do something about it. Proper training for MPs, PPCs and researchers would be a start - if they cannot be trusted to handle themselves sensibly around such sensitive issues, teach them. But please, if you want to avoid regaining that Nasty Party title for reasons you couldn't justify even to yourselves - please, dear Conservatives, do it soon. Hundreds of thousands of people you represent have been victims of rape of sexual assault. They deserve better. We all deserve better. And nobody should be in parliament unless they are willing to make that effort.

The Liberal Beef

2011-05-15T05:27:00.000-07:00

Should the Scottish Liberal Democrats split from their Westminster counterparts? Some party activists have suggested it, but Willie Rennie, currently the only candidate to take over the leadership as Tavish Scott steps down, has said that it won't be his choice. He wants, instead, to work closely with Nick Clegg in an effort to restore the party's fortunes. Meanwhile, Clegg is attempting to assert himself at Downing Street, vocally objecting to proposed restructuring of the NHS and making obscure statements about muscular liberalism. What does this mean? Could it be enough? Just how should the party turn things around after massive losses in Scotland and in the English and Welsh local elections?

The Liberals, of course – to go back to their roots – have been here before, and for similar reasons. Although their 1999 Holyrood coalition with Labour was widely considered a success, the 1977 Lib Lab pact left them reeling, with voters fleeing en masse as it was concluded that a vote for the Liberals was a vote for Labour. Left to carry the can for the failures of the Callaghan-led government, they found it much harder to recover than Labour did, though of course both parties suffered a long period with little power thanks to the success of Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives. Now Clegg's LibDems have found themselves in the same position. Has their attempt to compromise and shore up Cameron for a share of power doomed them to another two decades of unelectability? With the Greens on the rise might they, in fact, find themselves shunted aside permanently?

The difficulty for those who support Willie Rennie's strategy is that the LibDems at Holyrood and the LibDems at Westminster cannot rationally pursue the same things. At Westminster, for as long as the first past the post system is in use (I wouldn't count on it lasting forever; what nobody seems to be pointing out about the recent referendum is that one in three people being unhappy with the voting system is a serious problem) then they will remain the third party. Any chance they might have had to change that passed last year. This isn't all bad. A third party can still exert an influence – either by forming coalition type agreements or by raising a distinctive voice in opposition. It can contribute to committee work and, of course, local politics. But a good policy-based approach to this must be different from that of a party truly readying itself for government.

In Holyrood, by contrast, the situation is wide open. Despite the SNP's massive recent success nobody expects them to dominate in perpetuity. The voting system gives smaller parties advantages they simply don't have a Westminster and coalitions are the norm. The LibDems enjoyed considerably more influence in their previous Holyrood coalition than they now do at Westminster. If they can recover their core vote and make themselves electable again, there is no reason why they couldn't hold out hope of becoming the dominant party in a Scottish government of the future. It may take decades but it's on the cards in a way that is simply not the case down south.

What does this mean for the party as a whole? How can it gear itself up to fight both these battles at once? The key is to concentrate not on policy per se but on the real, underlying liberal agenda. This also has the advantage of clarifying what LibDems stand for and will continue to stand for even when they feel obliged to compromise their policies for political reasons.

So what does 'the liberal agenda' mean today? Does anyone care? Actually, I'd say there's quite a lot of demand for it. To see how this works it's necessary to look not at how the LibDems lost votes in this year's elections but at how Labour lost them in 2010. There were three principal reasons why Labour went under. One, sad to say, was Gordon Brown's personality, compounded by savage attacks from right wing newspapers which immediately saw the advantage in concentrating on people rather than politics. One was the economy, a situation which, to a large extent, they were unable to control. And one was their attitude to civil liberties. It was this which was responsible for the massive shift of Labour votes toward the LibDems; it even caused some to shift directly to the Conservatives. Those who had always prioritised social justice found themselves unable to tolerate any longer the erosion of those civil liberties essential to defending it in the longer term.

It is a sorry fact of British political life that socialism always seems to go hand in hand with authoritarianism; it really doesn't need to be that way. And to an extent, Labour were just tagging along with a shifting international mood, taking the cue from George Bush Jr with his Office of Homeland Security and continually expending police powers. But Britain is not a country that takes that kind of thing lying down. Our democracy hinges on certain principles: the right to freedom of speech; the right to freedom of assembly; the right to freedom of association. The LibDems need to show that they will stand up for those freedoms and that they will treat them not as minor issues, supplementary to big topics like health or education, but as principles that inform everything they do. These are the areas in which they must not compromise. By taking a lead on them, they can recover the respect they once enjoyed as an established political force, emphasising that they are defenders of respected traditions – the perfect way to counter critics who dismiss them as trivial in their concerns and overly focused on untested new ideas.

There is nothing woolly about traditional liberalism, nothing effete about defending the foundations of democracy. David Blunkett's recent characterisation of LibDems as being all about hugging trees is characteristic of where Labour lost the plot on liberal issues; it mistakes aggression for strength. Sure, a government can make itself look tough by setting aside liberal concerns in favour of increased security – the problem is that this does nothing to address the real problems underlying security risks (and there's not much real evidence that it works, either). It's macho nonsense substituted for a real political strategy. A genuinely strong political party doesn't hide behind authoritarian policies but takes the initiative and challenges threatening elements to participate in real discussion – meanwhile enabling ordinary people to enjoy the very freedoms which, by and large, terrorists would be happy to see them lose.

This coalition government, of course, is not strong, and that's undoubtedly one of the reasons why we've seen no meaningful relaxation of Labour's security obsession. But all the panic about anarchists, the attempts to smear organisations like UK Uncut and the massively OTT security attached to events like the royal wedding will only make the government look weaker in the long term. The LibDems are the ones who can lead the way out of this. In doing so, they can demonstrate that they are a party with a distinctive voice. There is a lot of work to be done to undo the damage caused by successive governments and rebuild a liberal society in Britain, but the trend that led to this should not be seen as a reason for despair; it's an opportunity. It's time for the LibDems to stop reacting and start showing moral leadership. This is an area where they can be strong, and informed, and confident, and offer the electorate a real alternative. It's an alternative they are crying out for. It's the substance that was missing from Cleggmania. It can be powerful in opposition just as it can be in government. So the question now is, are they up to the task?

Holyrood Leadership Blues

2011-05-11T03:57:00.000-07:00

In a very long week, even by political standards, Holyrood has witnessed the departure of no fewer than three party leaders. First to announce his resignation was Labour's Iain Gray, who will no doubt fade from political history as quickly as he faded from the minds of voters on election day, though it has to be said that his farewell speech showed a quiet dignity he would have done well to get across earlier. Next came Liberal Democrat leader Tavish Scott, making the best speech of his life and ready to carry the can so his party can reinvent itself, not just post- electoral losses but post-coalition. And finally, perhaps more surprising than the others, came the resignation of Conservative Annabel Goldie.

Those saying that Patrick Harvie should be nervous would do well to remember that the Greens have convenors instead of leaders, so he's probably safe. Outside Holyrood, efforts are ongoing to persuade George Galloway to resign from himself.

Labour, of course, has plenty of possible choices for Gray's replacement. The LibDems, despite having only five MSPs, are surprisingly well off (my advice would be that they go with Willie Rennie). For the Conservatives, however, things are rather more difficult. Goldie remains a highly respected politician (it's said she'll now stand for the job of presiding officer) and there's really nobody else in the party of that calibre. Top of the running list at present is Murdo Fraser, who has a lot of allies within the party but really doesn't go down well with SNP or LibDem supporters, the two groups from which the Conservatives will be trying to win back votes next time. He doesn't come across well on television and with the increasing use of social media campaigning, any awkward or embarrassing appearances will likely be seen again and again. Whilst he probably has a good chance of winning, he'd be a poor choice.

That leaves fifteen others. Ruth Davidson has suggested she might stand; she comes across as very capable but she has no parliamentary experience and would therefore represent a big risk, so she's probably out. This is a shame as parliament would benefit from more prominent women and most of the others in the Conservative party are worse choices. Mary Scanlon is tainted by her unscientific approach to vaccination issues, something which could easily become politically toxic. Elizabeth Smith showed poor judgement in her response to teenage survivors of the Dunblane shootings and would be too easily smeared. Nanette Milne has impeccable credentials but her political profile is low and, at sixty nine, she's probably too old to take on that level of commitment for what would probably be a minimum of five years.

At least they're better off than the party at Westminster, which has so few suitable elected women that it has had to resort to giving posts to a string of incompetent baronesses. The most recent of these is Angela Browning, who, when last in office, spent her time pushing for an enquiry into the Beast of Bodmin Moor.

Of the women at Holyrood, the best choice would undoubtedly be Margaret Mitchell, who is well established within the party and has considerable experience as an advisor; but she, like Davidson, lacks direct parliamentary experience. It may also be unhelpful that she worked for David McLetchie, the former leader disgraced by an expenses scandal who is, of course, also ruled out as a contender.

There are other Conservative MSPs who couldn't even get a look in. Electing a baronet like Jamie McGrigor as leader would be political suicide given the public's feelings about millionaires in the Tory cabinet down south, and Jackson Carlaw is also ruled out for occupational reasons – you can imagine the headlines that would be generated by his past as a used car salesman. He's also a known racist.

That leaves five possible contenders. John Scott and Gavin Brown are both wholesome enough but are not natural leaders, and with only a small Conservative team in parliament, personality will matter. A relatively safe bet might be former whip Alex Johnstone, whose past involvement with farmers' movements could be useful in helping the party to win back its traditional rural vote; but though he's a good organiser and apparently good at maintaining discipline, he's not the most charismatic prospect for a front line role.

Those remaining – and the only two seen as serious potential competitors for Fraser – are John Lamont and Alex Fergusson. Lamont is young for the role at thirty five but he's bright and energetic. He'd need to lose his nervous smile and stop dressing like an accountant (he's actually a lawyer by trade), but his slight quirkiness could be an advantage, especially in terms of the contrast it presents to the slick dynamism of the Westminster leadership team. A Conservative leader in Scotland needs to be capable of endearing himself personally to a public tense with inherited hostility, and Lamont might just be the man for the job.

Fergusson, meanwhile, certainly doesn't want for authority, having previously served as presiding officer. He too is in a good position to attract the rural vote. His apparently genuine love of curling and country dancing could give the Nationalists a run for their money and he enjoys respect right across the political spectrum. His weakness, in the context of the leadership race, is that he's very much a free thinker – he has ignored the party whip on several occasions and the prospect of him leading the Scottish party may well make his Westminster colleagues nervous.

Which of these two men would be best for the Scottish Conservatives depends on two things: the direction they want to take, and the direction Scotland takes. If they want to push for renewed support in urban areas and reshape their image, they'd be better to go with the youthful Lamont. If they want to build up that old rural loyalty again and create a firm base from which to expand more slowly, Lamont is okay but Fergusson is probably the better choice. If Scotland remains in the United Kingdom, Lamont is likely to maintain a better relationship with Westminster. If it leaves, Fergusson could be well equipped to take the party back to its traditional roots in Scotland, restoring the respect it enjoyed in pre-Thatcher days.

Either way, the choice is a tricky one, and it's likely to impact the tone of Scottish politics beyond the Conservative party itself. But at least the winner will have five years of peace to enjoy before facing off against the SNP in another Scottish election.

First They Came For The Homosexuals

2011-05-10T14:54:00.000-07:00

David Bahati's Anti-Gay Bill has been kicked around the back benches of the Ugandan parliament for two years now. Despite widespread condemnation and campaigns against it, it has remained viable; and by the time you read this, it may already have become law. But why now? The answer is one that should remind us all, regardless of sexuality or personal moral beliefs, why lgbt equality is a cornerstone of wider human rights.

To understand the development of this bill it's important to understand a few factors about Ugandan history and culture. Chief among this is the poor access to education faced by many Ugandan people and the prevaling awareness, despite this, that the country has been screwed over economically by Western interests (though several other problems contribute to its financial difficulties today). This means that people are largely unaware of historic attitudes to homosexuality in the area (a fact also true of British people if we go back more than a few hundred years). Whereas same sex relationships existed in the past in various socially accepted forms, it is widely believed that traditional Ugandan society was intolerant of homosexuality, and that it is a form of behaviour that was imported from the West. This means it is associated with decadence and exploitation.

Where Ugandan children from poor families do have access to education, it is generally through the Church. Missionary groups from America provide many schools and their importance in improving children's prospects cannot be underestimated. A considerable number of them, however, perpetuate existing ideas about homosexuality and describe it as an abomination. It has been suggested that this is a political strategy, a means whereby the West can play out its culture wars at a distance. In this case, the word 'war' threatens to lose its metaphorical status.

The Anti-Gay Bill emerged from a context in which homosexuality was stigmatised but ordinary Ugandans were not yet ready to consider taking aggressive action against it. What changed this was a religiously-inspired crusade by Martin Ssempa, a pastor whose tactics have since been widely discredited within the country but whose influence remains. His strategy involved positioning gay people as a threat to children (this, of course, worked for many decades in Britain). He also showed graphic videos of certain types of gay activity and focused on presenting anal sex as damaging and disease-spreading. This created an apparent emergency which an ambitious politician like Bahati could easily recognise as an opportunity.

That was two years ago. An international outcry at the time – hard won, because much of the mainstream media chose to ignore what was happening – eventually persuaded President Yoweri Museveni to withdraw his support and the bill was quietly sidelined 'into committee', as civil servants put it. This didn't stop a vicious newspaper campaign against lgbt people (though Uganda's rather more effective version of the PCC reined it in to an extent); and it didn't stop riots, occasional murders, or the exhumation of the bodies of gay people so that they could be dumped outside relatives' houses – but it did mean that the state itself stood apart from the violence. Until now.

What has changed? The answer is, again, rather complicated, but it centres on an increasing shift toward the kind of contempt for human rights shown in the bill itself. If we look at the bill in more detail we can see that it was never intended simply as an instrument for criminalising lgbt people. Because it's very difficult to prove a person's sexual orientation – certainly if they haven't had anal sex (which supporters assume, incorrectly, isn't practised by straight people) – homosexuality is something that anybody can be accused of. This provides an easy way of framing and disposing of political opponents (or those who simply fall foul of corrupt officials). And there's more. Simply knowing that somebody else is lgbt and failing to report it can lead to a prison sentence. This would criminalise parents who fail to turn in their children, but it is also, again, an easy means whereby to frame people.

The Anti-Gay Bill was always an attractive political tool to corrupt factions within government. What has changed is that the Ugandan government has now reached a point where it has more need of such measures to control an unhappy populace, and where it also needs a distraction. Those opposing the bill around the world need to think carefully about what that means.Yes, it is important to challenge the bill, but how many other stories do you see about Uganda in the Western news? With the focus on this piece of legislation it is all the easier for Museveni's government to get away with the other human rights abuses it is perpetuating and to keep foreign eyes off the protests and riots. Because ultimately, the suffering of lgbt people is unlikely to lead to sanctions or other serious forms of intervention.

When you want to be free to deal with a population using violence, you start by dehumanising them. That was easy for the Ugandan government and its allies to do with gays. Once that happened, ordinary people became more comfortable with the idea of lynch mobs. Some will have joined in, perhaps thinking they had to do it to protect their children, and once one has been involved in something like that it is harder to convincingly express moral outrage when one sees the same tactics used against other groups. Dehumanisation spreads. Police officers, too, become more comfortable with using violence against the population they serve. Yes, lgbt people are at serious risk in Uganda, but not just because of their sexuality or gender identity (little distinction is made there between the two); they are at risk because all Ugandan citizens are at risk in a rapidly deteriorating situation.

Yoweri Museveni has been president since 1986, popular partly because of the role he played in taking down the tyrranical dictator Idi Amin. Yet things have deteriorated so badly now that Ugandan sources are beginning to compare the two. There's talk of serious financial corruption and despite the country's new-found oil wealth little money seems to be reaching the country's poor. It's a difficult situation which requires a hard line. The Anti-Gay Bill is a good tool for the job at hand. Its day has come.

So what can concerned people in the West do? Don't neglect the petitions and the writing to representatives, but remember that there's a lot more to express concern about than the fate of lgbt people alone. Ugandan lgbt activists are now standing side by side with others defending wider human rights issues.

Read the African press. Follow what is happening in Uganda. And write to the Ugandan government to let them know what you think.

President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni
 State House Nakasero 
email: info@statehouse.go.ug

   Prime Minister Apollo Nsibambi
 email: ps@opm.go.ug

  Chair of the Uganda Human Rights Commission
 Med Kaggwa
 email: uhrc@uhrc.ug

Remember, this is something you can do regardless of the passage of the Anti-Gay Bill. This is something we need to keep up. Because after they come for the homosexuals, they come for other people; and when this sort of process gets started, the human consequences can be catastrophic.

Minority Report

2011-05-07T15:54:00.000-07:00

Two days on from Scotland's election, a fair bit has already been written about the gender imbalance in parliament. Only a third of MSPs now are women. Personally this doesn't worry me too much - below a third and I'd start to worry, but variation to that degree is, I think, something we can expect to see from time to time without any special cause. (Of course, only time will tell if it sometimes varies in the other direction.) Any concern I might have is further mitigated by the calibre of our female MSPs. With women like Nicola Sturgeon, Annabel Goldie and Margo MacDonald around, what women may lack in numbers they make up for in talent and force of personality.

What we should perhaps be more worried about is the shortage of representation of key minority groups in parliament. The new intake gives us only two non-white MSPs - 1.5% - whereas 11% of Scotland's population falls into this group. Of the two, one (Humza Yousaf) is only twenty five but already has some impressive achievements to his name and seems a promising new talent. The other is Hanzala Malik. Those familiar with him from his work on Glasgow City Council are not exactly expecting great things. Of course, they shouldn't be obliged to carry any extra burden beyond what we ordinarily expect of MSPs, but the fact remains that young people will look to them for an example if their first impression of parliament is that it's a white people's club they have little hope of joining.

The same issue applies to openly lgbt people. There were four in the last parliament and, so far as I can discern, five in this one (two have left). Patrick Harvie is, of course, a formidable (though very likeable) presence and punches well above his weight, being particularly good at courting media attention, whilst the SNP's Marco Biagi seems likely to achieve big things. Still, their numbers fall well short of the Westminster government's estimate that 6% of the population is lgbt, a figure considered by many lgbt groups and academics to be a considerable underestimate. Again, the impression is given that parliament is for a particular type of person and, among other things, that person is straight.

62% of MSPs are (or pretend to be) straight white men.

As far as age variation goes, the Scottish parliament is fairly impressive, with around 3% of MSPs in their twenties, 12% in their thirties, 30% in their forties, 33% in their fifties and the rest older. That there are no truly elderly MSPs probably reflects on the youth of the parliament itself; the oldest politicians in any such institution tend to be long-serving incumbents. At any rate, this matches up fairly well against positions in industry and academia with comparable levels of responsibility, suggesting that age discrimination isn't something we need to be concerned about.

With this balance in mind, however, it's all the more remarkable how few disabled MSPs there are. Holyrood just got its first blind MSP in Dennis Robertson and Margo MacDonald has spoken extensively about her experiences with Parkinson's disease; there are also a few MSPs with minor sensory and mobility impairments; but this is in stark contrast to the 14% of the general population identified as disabled in official statistics, especially allowing for the fact that people are more likely to be disabled from their forties onwards. Of course, not all disabled people are capable of working outside their own homes, or at all, but it's still evident that something is wrong here.

What can and should be done about this? "It ought to be about merit," many people protest, quite understandably. Of course there is absolutely nothing wrong with any individual MSP being straight, white, male and able-bodied, but when most of them are, that's a big problem. It means that parliament lacks the experience and expertise to be properly representative; it lacks the depth of perspective available to more balanced groups. Parliament is poorer for it - we are all poorer for it - and to make things worse, it's a self-reinforcing problem.

This applies for two reasons. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, young people considering careers in politics are often put off if they perceive people like themselves as being excluded. Secondly, those from minority groups who do want to give it a try are less likely to have useful social contacts who can help them along the way. It would be nice to think that, in modern Scotland, people would socialise across the boundaries or things like race, sexual orientation and disability/able-bodied status, but research demonstrates that this isn't the case; or that, at any rate, it is proportionally a much less successful form of networking than that conducted within such groups. This is something which, one hopes, will change in time, but it may need a few nudges to do so.

This brings us to the big question: what can be done to remedy the imbalances in parliament? Many people shrink in horror from the term positive discrimination, yet the example of Westminster demonstrates its success - numbers of women in the House of Commons have increased dramatically since it was introduced on certain party shortlists. The counter-argument to this is that rushing women through the system means many reach positions of power despite a shortage of experience or talent, and this is indeed a problem, but the short term difficulty (along with the short term unpleasantness of any form of discrimination) must be balanced against the long term gains - the generational difference that is made when newcomers are able to find the role models and make the connections that would otherwise have been unavailable to them. There is, after all, no reason why these newcomers should be lacking in ability.

If it is used, positive discrimination has to be a party thing - it is not something that parliament as an institution can do. This means that parties have to take responsibility for the imbalances among their own MSPs. The Greens have the best record for this (taking into account their candidates as well), but none of the other major parties in Scotland is significantly worse than its opponents. All seem to want to move forward and address the problem. It is a matter, for each one, of figuring out how best to do so within its own party structures.

One final point - it is a notable characteristic of parties which employ positive discrimination to advance women that their ambitious men complain about having to work harder to get to the top. From a party perspective, this means additional gains - not only a better gender balance but more capable, more accomplished male candidates. Any smart party will therefore ask not how can we make things easier for women? but how can we make things harder for men? A tough, competitive party environment that doesn't let anybody cruise by on traditional advantages will result in stronger politicians getting to the top and should improve a party's chances of electoral success.

O Labour, Where Art Thou?

2011-05-06T15:41:00.000-07:00

After a landslide victory for the SNP, the loss of much of Labour's heartland and the near defeat of Labour leader Iain Gray, the red flag is at half mast in Scotland today. Where now for Scottish Labour? Can they ever really hope to recover from this? If so, over what timescale, and what will they have to accomplish in the meantime?

Labour's problem is a complex one, and the first thing they need to realise is that it is their problem. Their habit of putting the blame on other people has reached ridiculous proportions in the course of this election and the problems it causes are manifold. For one thing, it directly reduces people's sympathy for them – they are seen as bitchy rivals and sore losers. For another, it often puts them at odds with the popular perception of events to the extent that they seem deluded, which hardly inspires confidence in their policies (a shame as they have some good stuff there). Beyond this, it simply stops then from devising and implementing solutions.

Iain Gray's conciliatory speech the morning after went some way toward tackling this problem, albeit a little late. It suggests that there is room, even among senior Labour politicians, for a new line to be taken; but, of course, it has to be about more than talk. And the message has to be communicated throughout the party. Today there are still numerous labour activists insisting that the people of Scotland have made a terrible mistake and don't realise what they've done. They don't seem to realise that patronising the electorate like this played a significant part in costing them the election.

Alongside a shift in how they treat their opponents and the electorate, Labour need to change the way they treat themselves. Some of their people are complaining, now, about a press campaign against Iain Gray. Is that true? I'm not sure. When I wrote my own piece about Iain Gray it wasn't intended as an attack, it was intended as a warning. Seeing what was happening to the party I felt it necessary to speak out, like a small boy warning an emperor about the scantiness of his attire. It should have been obvious to Labour that Gray was a liability. Did they really fail to notice? Or is it simply that the pattern of cliques and alliances within the party made it impossible for them to do anything about it?

One of the difficulties for the Labour party is that its internal structure makes it easy for established cliques to dominate at both the local and national level. Despite the self-titled 'reformers' who have been at the helm over the past twenty five years, little has really been done about this. With the exception of those able to take advantage of positive discrimination lists, anybody wanting to move up in the party hierarchy has to win the support of a committee at every stage. It's at the grassroots stage that this is most problematic, because success in that context requires popularity within a small group of people; it requires being able to fit in socially in a very particular social context. This ensures that local parties keep on putting forward the same sorts of candidates generationally. A little further up in the hierarchy, where it's important to win wider approval, the party effectively selects for candidates skilled at flattery. Some of those who are merely talented inevitably fall by the wayside, but the bigger problem inherent in this system is that it breeds politicians who, for all their internal squabbles, are strongly inclined to flatter those in power and to root out dissent. There is a shortage of serious internal debate. It's too easy for those who can establish themselves socially to cling on even when they are obviously untalented or well past their sell by date.

This is not to pretend that power struggles within the party cannot be vicious, nor that there is a complete stifling of discussion (the Conservative party has far more problems of the latter sort), but it does mean that Labour tends to be slow to let go of poorly thought out policy. And policy development also suffers within this system, as it is formed through a series of committee decisions in which social priorities lead to overcooked, bland results.

Take the party's 2011 election manifesto. It promises a consultation on same sex marriage. On the face of it this may not seem like a big deal, but now let's put it in context. Any intent to consider same sex marriage is going to put off a certain set of voters. This needn't be a problem for a party if it wins over enough pro-lgbt voters to compensate. But by suggesting that equality should be up for debate, this stated policy puts off those voters too. It's a masterpiece of self-harm. Now consider that the actual plan behind the party is to consult not on whether or not same sex marriage should happen, but on how it should be structured, and the circle of fail is complete. The committee process has ensured that a potentially useful policy appeals to nobody.

This isn't to say that parties shouldn't operate internal democracy. Policies, however, need to be drawn up clearly by unbiased people who know what they're doing. They can then be submitted to a vote as finished products not to be compromised further. The same thing needs to happen with manifesto commitments and, more generally, with the party's image. Decisions need to be clear and they need to be informed. In other words, the party needs management. And that management must be free from the fear of dismissal for treading on people's toes.

In the immediate term, Labour can benefit from making stronger decisions about candidate selection that focus more on the preferences of the electorate and less on popularity within the party. But in the longer term, only structural changes will help it to produce the policy, the materials and the candidates necessary to ensure electoral success. And policy is an area where it needs to do still more. In this case it needs to understand that following the preferences of the electorate is not a solution. I met one Labour candidate, elected today, who told me “Sometimes we have to do things just because that's what the public want.” Um, no. That's never a good reason to do anything. Did your teacher never ask you at school, if your friends told you to jump out of a window, would you do it? (Many children's honest answer to this would be 'yes', but adults should know better.)

The policy that particular candidate was referring to was Labour's approach to knife crime, and it's another excellent example of how to do these things wrong. Knife crime in certain parts of Scotland is a really nasty problem, and it's understandable that Labour thought a) action was needed and b) action would be popular. Unfortunately, their hasty attempt to devise a solution was fraught with problems and was substantiated with really dodgy, misinterpreted statistics. As a consequence what ought to have been a vote winner became a liability.

Populism is by nature fickle and can easily lead an over-eager party into a trap. Pursuing it also makes the party look fickle. Yes, it is important to be seen to listen, but if you give the impression you'll do anything you're told, nobody will have any confidence in your ability to govern. You shouldn't be chasing other people's agendas – you should be setting your own. Take the initiative. Show strength, show confidence, frame the debate in your own terms. Just doing what you think other people want, like sniping at the policies of others, does nothing to substantiate your own identity. People will not vote for you if they can no longer believe in who you are.

As I write, John McTernan is on BBC Newsnight continuing to get it wrong. Labour needed to challenge the SNP on law and order, he says, missing the fact that a move in that direction inevitably placed Labour to the right of a party they were calling the Tartan Tories. His reasoning is that “The SNP will start to look weak” in this area. Um, sorry mate, but they've been in power for four years; if they were going to look weak on that, in the eyes of the electorate, they'd do so already. Ergo this was the wrong area in which to tackle them. Ought to be obvious...

So much about this mess ought to be obvious that it's really hard to figure out just how Labour managed to miss it. What matters now, though, is that the party's more clueful activists take control and get it sorted out. It's going to take a while to do the job and it won't be pleasant – 'cleansed with fire' is a phrase I've heard a lot from the activists themselves – but hard work and sacrifice now will be worth it in the long term. Labour still has some talented people. It still has a core identity worth fighting for. And it still has a connection with the people of Scotland that could, in time, see the red rose flower again.

The Morning After

2011-05-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

The sun is now rapidly climbing in the sky. It's morning – a good twenty two hours since I last got any sleep – and it's been quite a night. If you've seen any news then you'll know by now that the SNP have made historic gains in the Scottish elections. Labour have struggled, with their leader coming very close to losing his seat, and the Liberal Democrats have suffered a crushing defeat, losing their deposits in at least thirty seats.

So what happened?

It's interesting to see all the speculation on this topic, much of it from outsiders with a poor understanding of how Scottish politics works. Scottish nationalism, in particular, is often misunderstood, and that hasn't been helped by Labour attempts to tarnish the Scottish National Party in the run-up to this election. Although right wing extremist parties do exist in Scotland, they have only a handful of supporters, and the SNP is something very different. Scottish politics tends toward the centre left and the SNP fits fairly comfortably into this position.

If there's one guaranteed set of bad guys as the Scottish electorate perceive things, it's the Conservatives (bear in mind that during Margaret Thatcher's rule, unemployment in some parts of Glasgow was as high as 85%). Labour have therefore endeavoured to brand the SNP as 'tartan Tories'. They've had a boost in this regard thanks to the Sun's support of Alex Salmond, but still the illusion has only really confused outsiders. Most Scottish voters see the SNP as occupying similar ground to Labour, or perhaps being slightly to the left. The Sun's support is simply about selling papers – and, perhaps, about delivering what has been one of several minor but notable kicks to the Tories, reminders of what they might have to lose if Jeremy Hunt doesn't give Sun owner Murdoch the deal he wants over BskyB.

There has been a long tradition in Scottish politics of holding the SNP at bay using scare tactics. The prospect of independence has been heralded as a threat, and simultaneously the SNP used to be accused of being so single-minded that they couldn't competently pursue any other policy. This illusion was shattered when they did manage to take power in the 2007 Scottish election, forming a minority administration. Although they didn't get everything right in the years that followed (what government does?), nothing exploded and the country's economy didn't fall to pieces – they were, in a word, competent. That was all they needed to be. They proved that people didn't need to be afraid to vote for them, that they were a real choice, and that was all that really mattered.

The reasons for that lie elsewhere. The legacy of Conservative action in Scotland, especially urban Scotland, when combined with the first past the post system, meant that most Scottish people felt for a very long time that voting Labour was their only option. This became a generational thing, an emotional thing. Loyalty to Labour was often intense. But as any relationship advisor will tell you, obsessive love can become unhealthy and can leave one vulnerable to abuse. Just as the Conservatives didn't show much care for Scotland because they knew they wouldn't get votes there anyway, Labour stopped caring because they knew they would. They took Scotland for granted. They got away with it – but only as long as people believed they had no choice.

What happened last night for the SNP is in many ways similar to what happened in 2010 for the LibDems across the UK – vast numbers of people seizing their chance for change. Unlike the LibDems, however, SNP voters didn't seriously have to worry that by taking that chance they would split the vote and let in a party they truly despised. This wasn't because of differences in the voting system – the Additional Member System which Scotland uses doesn't make much difference in that regard. Rather, it was because the Conservative vote was already too low to represent a danger. Those hoping for an SNP victory had nothing to lose.

It's worth noting that, independence aside, there isn't really a great deal of difference between the SNP and Labour at a policy level. They frequently steal policies from one another and bicker over who had them first. Even when independence is factored into the equation is doesn't make a lot of difference, in part because many in the Labour party favour extensive further devolution and in part because most Scottish voters don't believe a referendum – all a Scottish government could constitutionally do about the issue – would result in the choice of independence, regardless of the SNP's overall popularity.

Is this belief correct? That's less clear. Certainly, most Scots reject the idea of independence when it's proposed outright. Issue by issue, however, they are likely to agree that Scottish control is needed. This suggests that the success or failure of a referendum would depend on exactly what the question was and how it was promoted. The SNP's decision to hold off a referendum until the second half of this parliament is an interesting one, suggesting that they believe support for it will grow. This may very well be the case if the current coalition government, with its policy of cuts, remains in power at Westminster; but the situation there is volatile to say the least (Ed Miliband says his party is now on an election footing), and it's hard to say how things might develop if the coalition collapsed.

Given a situation in which the SNP were starting to gain ground in the polls, in the run-up to this election, Labour, confused, panicked. They didn't know quite what was happening so they did the only thing they could think of and resorted to the scare tactics that had always worked for them. The problem is that people no longer believed in the danger they were being cautioned against, so instead of reacting with trepidation, they reacted with anger. As Labour's campaign grew more negative (and increasingly seemed to parody itself), more voters were put off them. They read that reliance on old tactics as symptomatic of arrogance. Labour didn't know that they were really on the verge of being dumped, so they became more possessive, which only made the voters want to get further away from them.

In this context, and given the collapse of the LibDem vote caused by resentment of the Westminster coalition, the only real surprise is that the scale of the SNP's impending landslide didn't become apparent sooner. In simple terms, the Scottish people have had enough. They want out of the old politics. That doesn't mean they're wedded to the SNP now, and in future there will be everything to play for. It does mean that they will not vote for a party which they don't believe treats them with respect. No more loyalty. No more love. Scotland has grown up, and whatever direction it ultimately chooses, it is ready to decide its own future.

Electoral Underdogs

2011-05-04T12:08:00.000-07:00

A lot has been written about the big five parties in the Scottish elections: Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives and the Greens. But what about the minority parties and the independents? There are a considerable number of them standing across Scotland. Some of the candidates are well known names; a few might even get elected. Others will be lucky if their own families vote for them. Who are they, why do they do it, and what does their presence have to say about Scottish politics?

There are some names here that will be familiar to you no matter where you live. UKIP have a presence in Scotland, as do the BNP, though, ironically, both are frequently subject to aggressive suggestions that they should "go back to England" when on the campaign trail. Scotland has a Pirate Party which will be campaigning in the western part of the country, looking to secure support for a civil liberties agenda - it's unlikely that the marvellously named Finlay Archibald will actually be elected but a large Pirate vote could have an impact on decisions taken in the next Parliament by way of showing where public sympathies lie. In northern areas where voting Pirate is not an option, there's a Liberal Party (distinct from the LibDems) which offers traditional liberal policies together with a left-of-centre social agenda.

There is also a Scottish Communist Party, apparently enjoying a minor resurgence in support after the election of a right wing government at Westminster, but its focus in this election is primarily on campaigning against public service cuts - a practical way to use a minority voice in parliament, perhaps, but not distinctive enough as an agenda to give it much chance of getting one. Suffering from a similar problem are the Scottish Socialist Party and Socialist Party Scotland, the remnants of a group which enjoyed brief success in the early years of the Scottish parliament but has since fallen prey to infighting with sympathisers left unsure who to vote for. The iconic figure of Tommy Sheridan is, of course, absent from the fray this time, being detained at Her Majesty's pleasure following a high-profile perjury trial, but his Solidarity Party will be led by his wife Gail. Whatever you think of Tommy, he was always a fantastic orator; the missus may have the tan but she's shown little evidence of having the talent.

One thing that unites many of those on the left is George Galloway; there is massive opposition to voting for him. Galloway, who ousted Oona King in London with his Respect party and who will be standing on an anti-cuts, anti-war ticket, is widely regarded as a publicity-seeking opportunist more interested in satisfying his own ego than helping his constituents, and there are rumours of dodgy connections to the Iranian government. Galloway is, however, a colourful figure (the image of him wearing a leotard and pretending to be a cat is, once seen, distressingly difficult to erase from one's brain), and he's bound to attract sympathy from some.

In the other corner, with candidates standing across all eight Scottish regions, the Scottish Christian Party is presenting itself as a serious player, though polling figures do little to support this. Its slogan is 'Proclaiming Christ's Lordship', which you would think it could do without the need for seats in parliament, and its manifesto makes a lot of rather vague promises about Biblically-inspired policy (ignoring the fact that the Bible is frequently interpreted, by Christians, in very different ways). Its policies are a curious mixture of apparent concern about civil liberties with an aggressively punitive approach to tackling crime and passionate commitments to keeping the GMT time zone and protecting us all from the dangers of overgrown hedges. Meanwhile, the smaller Christian People's Alliance, which struggled to find candidates for the two regions it is contesting, wishes primarily to challenge the perceived creeping secularisation of Scotland, which it compares to the actions of the Taliban. It is also concerned about social justice issues, especially in relation to housing.

As you might expect, the issue of Scottish nationalism also attracts political forces from outside the mainstream, but you may wish to approach them with caution. Intensely pro-Scottish but anti-SNP, the Scottish Homeland Party seems to want to take advantage of desire for independence without directly addressing it. Its social policies may seem appealing to many and it explicitly bills itself as non-racist (perhaps a warning sign) but there are some unpleasant implications made about Muslims on its website - this would seem to be the non-inclusive form of nationalism with which outsiders sometimes inaccurately associate the SNP. Meanwhile, the Scottish Unionist Party is not only anti-independence but actively campaigns for the dissolution of the Scottish parliament, arguing that power should instead be distributed on a regional basis; it is standing in the central belt.

This leaves the one-candidate Land Party, whose main argument is for a Land Value Tax (also proposed by the Greens and increasing attracting support from economists); and the independents. Of these, Margo MacDonald, formerly of the SNP, looks likely to win her seat. Much-loved locally, she has been a strong advocate on feminist and disability issues, and though much of her work has been controversial she enjoys widespread respect even among her opponents. She's standing on the Lothian list alongside Merv Brown, a former soldier who has dedicated much of his life to working with homeless people and is standing an (another) anti-cuts agenda. Ken O'Neill, also on this list, says he's standing on a distinctly different ticket, but it seems to be much the same thing; what distinguishes him is his determination to promote the Lothians, which would presumably mean more centralisation in Edinburgh.

On the Central list, Hugh O'Donnell combines a pro-business agenda with a strong commitment on access to education and an interest in disability issues; his manifesto is laid out in an unusually sober way for an independent and it's difficult to see why he isn't standing with a party, giving him some real chance of success, though perhaps his principles get in the way of that. Glaswegians have the option of voting for Caroline Johnstone, who shares Labour's concerns about knife crime but is considerable to the right when it comes to more general criminal justice issues. Her policies on business and education are determined but vague and she combines concern for the disabled, carers and the elderly with a populist commitment to tackling those nasty welfare scroungers (how she would identify them is not covered). Finally, on the West of Scotland list, there's Richard Vassie, who thinks education and employment and the NHS are important (hands up if you don't) but who doesn't seem to have any actual policies, laying out his website as if he's applying for an ordinary managerial job.

There are also several independent candidates standing in constituencies. I hesitate to name all of these because, whilst it's always entertaining to laugh at bizarre policies which have no chance of becoming law, I get the impression that some of them might actually be mentally ill. The system of deposits in elections was established to discourage people from standing on a trivial basis but, of course, it doesn't discourage obsessives whose commitment to their delusions is so intense that they are ready to dedicate all their resources to doing what they believe is the right thing.

Some independents, however, may be worth considering, depending on your individual concerns. George Rice is standing in Dumbarton defend the Vale of Level hospital; he acknowledges that he doesn't have much experience but he is educated and seems to have thought about things. Marie Boulton in Aberdeen South & North Kincardine and Alan Haigh in Midlothian North and Musselburgh both have fairly well thought-out policies across a range of issues and are standing because they feel established politicians have been letting people down. And Billy Fox in the Shetland Islands has no manifesto as such but is standing on a locally-focused environmentalist ticket. All sound reasons or raising an independent voice, even if they're unlikely to be heard by many.

Their chances, however, are significantly better than they would be if they were standing at Westminster. Scotland's proportional electoral system makes it much easier for smaller parties, and even individuals, to influence politics, as the Scottish Greens have demonstrated. This has yet to lead to any of the tyranny-of-the-minority desperate deal-brokering that seems to feature prominently in the nightmare of those who dislike proportional representation, but it has broadened the dialogue that goes on across our nation, enriching the debate. The obviously delusional candidates don't tend to get very far. Unlike Westminster, our parliament has yet to include a member who believes that blood won't clot at the full moon.

Scottish politics, for all its disparate voices, is much more about cooperation and working together for the good of the country than Westminster tends to be. That may not be apparent during the current fury of electoral sparring, but things will settle down soon enough, and we're likely to see a minority government which, with the support of smaller parties, can still take our country forward. As a diverse country, we should celebrate the enthusiasm of the small parties and independents, even if some among them might inspire us to bang our heads off walls. They are, after all, illustrative of a level of interest in politics that is vital to a truly health democracy.

Democratic Alternatives

2011-05-03T10:33:00.000-07:00

May people find themselves a bit lost when it comes to politics. Awareness of this is a good start, of course, especially if you're being bombarded with arguments that seem convincing but you can't be sure of the facts behind them. Most people in the UK vote once every five years and do nothing intentionally political otherwise, so it can be hard to get up to speed when the big moment comes, even if you're genuinely interested and committed to getting it right.

This means that ordinary elections can present enough of a puzzle. Along comes something like the AV referendum and you're understandably flummoxed. Outside of political and academic circles, few people have previously given AV much thought. How does it work? I'm not going to go into that here, but I recommend you check out this site, put together by a statistician who knows his stuff - it's one of the very few politically neutral ones out there.

What I'm interested in looking at is the way this issue has been distorted and manipulated - the way that political self-interest from various groups has interfered with your right to receive the clear information on which you might make a decision. Chris Huhne, an advocate of the Yes campaign, is so incensed about this that he brought it up in Cabinet today and apparently caused quite a fuss - everyone though cabinet ministers talking back to the prime Minister had gone out with John Major. But of course it's not only the No campaign who have been up to mischief.

Let's get some facts straight from the start:-

AV will not cost ￡250M. This figure has been calculated by including the cost of the referendum, which we're paying for anyway.

AV will not lead to losers winning. In most cases it won't make any difference to the result. Where it does, it will simply prioritise candidates most people think are fairly good over candidates some people think are excellent but others loathe.

Voting for AV will not make a horse cry.

It is not better to be gunned down on a beach in Normandy than to live in a country with an FPTP voting system.

Voting for AV will not let in the BNP.

Voting against AV will not let in the BNP.

You do not have to choose between AV and the lives of children.

Dinosaurs are cool. Lay off dinosaurs.

Right, that's that out of the way. The question is, how have these lies been allowed to propagate? Most of them have done so insidiously, through the use of hint, suggestions and images that give us a certain impression - sometimes subconsciously - without overtly stating anything that isn't true. Some have come straight out and declared themselves. They may yet be subject to legal challenges, but by then, of course, the vote will be over and they will have done their job. Any fines will be trivial to the campaigners. Because this isn't a battle between political parties it's difficult to punish anyone effectively over the longer term.

Not a battle between parties? But wait! I hear you say. Isn't the No campaign funded almost exclusively by Conservative Party donors? Aren't the LibDems entirely pro-AV? Well, that's largely true, but the Labour Party is divided pretty neatly down the middle, and there are outliers in both camps. These actually provide the most interesting case studies. They are, after all, putting their political careers on the line. This is a fairly good guarantee that they actually believe what they're saying and are not just trying to rip you off. David Owen, for instance, is against AV despite his longstanding support for electoral reform (he wants a proportional system, which AV is not, but which it could arguably lead to). Tory activist John Strafford is pro-AV and has accused his party of stifling internal debate on the issue. You'll note the difference between their arguments, based on political reasoning, and the arguments of the official campaigns, based on appealing to the emotions.

One unpleasant tactic used by both campaigns is stigma. Each posits its favoured system as so irrefutably superior that only a really stupid person would fail to support it, and you don't want to be stupid, do you? Of course, the best way to be stupid is to allow yourself to be blindsided by this kind of tactic. A smart person always asks questions, especially when things are presented as obvious. Given that, it's depressing how successful this campaigning tactic seems to have been. Notably, it's most useful to whichever side of an argument is in the lead - in this case the No campaign - because most people are more confident that they've picked the smart side to be on if it's also the most popular. A smaller proportion of people will go the other way and feel happier siding with the underdog in this kind of case because it gives them a sense of being part of an intellectual elite. Something to bear in mind during this kind of debate is that this, in the end, is just a voting system, and whichever way you make your choice it won't make you Einstein. Don't give way to flattery or threats of humiliation - they're insincere or bullying and you as a voter deserve to be treated with more respect.

Given the context in which there is so little to lose, each side has boiled down its campaigning to the sort of shock headlines and sensationalism one might expect from the shoddiest of red top newspaper stories. It's like a distilled form of what journalism and marketing perpetually threaten to become, and it should function as a cautionary example for anyone who thinks we don't need press regulation or more effective media funding models. Exaggeration has reached a point where the truth is at best distorted if not completely lost. The result is something almost anti-democratic in nature, the antithesis of what a referendum ought to be about.

There is no point in having one person one vote (which, incidentally, is what happens under AV too) unless people are adequately educated and able to make informed decisions. Providing this education is the duty of the state. In this case, however, the state seems to have absented itself entirely, giving the impression that the larger party in government (a different thing entirely) is somehow fulfilling its role by defending the status quo. Of course the Conservative Party has a right to take a position on AV but it is important for voters to realise that there is no 'official' position, no state sanctioned proper way to vote. Tradition doesn't come into it. There is simply one system, or another system. Forget about the horses and the dinosaurs and the sick children.

So how should you vote? I'm not going to tell you to choose yes or no - you need to make the decision that's right for you. Don't be ashamed of voting in a self-interested way. That's your democratic right. If you're a Conservative supporter, it's perfectly reasonable to support a system (FPTP) that favours them. Likewise if you're uncomfortable with multi-party politics or you like the idea of strong leadership within parties, with MPs who stick to the party line. Alternatively, if you want to be able to vote for the party of your choice without 'wasting' your vote in a constituency where it isn't very popular - for instance, if you live in a Labour/Conservative marginal and want to vote LibDem but don't want to risk letting the Conservatives in - then AV may be for you. And as far as short term ramifications go, you can look at it like this: a vote against AV will hurt Nick Clegg whilst a vote for AV will hurt David Cameron (the coalition takes a boot up the arse either way but of course both parties have vowed it will carry on regardless).

Vote for what is best from your perspective. But please don't vote against AV because it seems too complicated, or for AV because some famous people said you should. Give yourself more credit than that. This isn't really very complicated and those who claim it is are only doing so to pull the wool over your eyes. This is your vote, and your democracy, and your choice.

The Letter of the Lore

2011-05-02T15:46:00.001-07:00

Just three days to go until the election here in Scotland. So far I've ignored the leaflets that have come through my door - I'd already read the party manifestos and interviewed several of the candidates, so they hardly seemed important - but today I decided it was time for me to take a look at them. I have, after all, been commenting on the various election broadcasts over on my Twitter account; and let me tell you, that's been a depressing process.

Whatever you do for a living, I'm sure you can sympathise with that feeling of discomfort at watching somebody else do it badly. I'm a writer and my partner Stuart is a photographer, so election leaflets often instil in us a sense of professional dread. This is accompanied by a desire to take certain candidates under our wings and fix their problems for them because, damn it, nobody should be presented that badly... but of course, where that would involve helping out those whose policies we are also at odds with, it quickly becomes uncomfortable.

As is always the case in these situations, some parties have been trying harder than others, and some have had more advantages than others. I haven't seen a single Green Party leaflet despite having heard in painstaking detail about how they were made and distributed, a process designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible. Perhaps they biodegraded naturally before they got to me. Alternatively, recycled paper may simply have made them extra tasty to our house rabbit, Murphy. He eats quite a lot of unwanted mail. Last month he particularly enjoyed ripping up the BNP leaflet, with the result that I am not able to give it a proper review here. I recall it featuring one of those wide-eyed little girls ubiquitous in yoghurt adverts, fortifying my subconscious association of the BNP with yeast infections. I wondered offhand where they got the girl's photograph from, as they have in the past faced several legal challenges due to helping themselves to images of folk not in the least desirous of being associated with them. I suppose the upside of this is that one thing we don't have to worry about with the BNP is the encroachment of overstringent copyright law.

Also on what seems to be recycled paper, and therefore lucky to have survived are the SNP's leaflets. One features a smiling Nicola Sturgeon; the other, bigger one (naturally), Alex Salmond doing his serious face. The former is addressed to Donald, the latter to Karine (nobody knowingly submits ammunition like this to me). I wonder vaguely if they're intended to have sex appeal. I do hope not. I am amused to see how they emphasise that they are an experienced government, a gentle swipe at those who, last time around, said they could never be trusted with power because they'd never had power. Um...

Anyway, Nicola's leaflet presses a lot of key buttons - there's emphasis on words like 'fair', 'Scotland' and 'future'. Nice use of lists, rhythmic language, party colours balanced without looking too horrible. Nicola has, thankfully, lost her Lego-style haircut and both she and Alex benefit from reasonably good professional photos (far too many candidates still think they can get away with snaps their grannies took at Christmas). Alex's look is too dark and will feed those critics who try to present him as an evil schemer, an unfortunate approach which leads to the promotion of overt stupidity as if it were a political virtue. His leaflet has the whole of the SNP top team on the back trying to look cheerful but actually looking surprised and curious, as if they've just spotted a chance of winning in the distance. It also uses lists with tick marks next to them. They should watch that. It'll only encourage their dimmer voters to put ticks on the ballot papers where they should put crosses, and many returning officers regard such papers as spoiled.

Anyway, the SNP leaflets are not bad over all - considerably above average as pieces of low-budget propaganda go. Similarly impressive is the Conservative leaflet. In Scotland the Conservatives are definitely up against it but they're likely to win a few list seats and in Glasgow Kelvin they have the advantage of a photogenic candidate, Ruth Davidson. Nicely photographed - even the make-up looks professional - she smiles out of a leaflet so attractively laid out that one can almost (almost) forgive its cheesy 'eighties-style use of lateral lines and its failure to understand how capital letters go. Naturally they want to distance themselves from the unpopular Westminster party and the word 'Conservative' doesn't appear here without the word 'Scottish' preceding it. 'Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party' is highlighted on the reverse (good use of space) to stress what is, oddly, still seen as the party's unique selling point; although Labour spout a lot of anti-Nationalist rhetoric the Conservatives seem to be the ones who make real gains from it.

Every policy here is entirely Scotland-focused - fair enough, you might say, but a cautious piece of work all the same. Like the SNP they use the risky trick with ticks. Their achievements look pretty good listed like this - until one recalls, of course, that they didn't develop them alone, simply nudged others and voted along with them. Nothing wrong with that but they seem to expect a lot of credit for it. I'm also amused that they are one of three parties trying to claim credit for a Council Tax freeze they spent some time arguing against.

The only way to fight the Westminster Conservatives, another leaflet tells me, is to vote Labour. "The SNP don't have the clout." Oh dear. Stuart's immediate response was, "By 'the clout', do they mean Iain Gray?" They keep walking into these things. Anyway, this small shiny leaflet features a nice, simple design with boxing gloves (tacky) using primary colours (well done) to sell us the old image of two party left versus right politics. It'll appeal to many of the old faithful.

This is certainly much stronger than their other leaflet, dedicated to the re-election of Pauline McNeil. Pauline is a great constituency MSP but there's too little focus on that here. Plain ordinary paper would have looked better than this cut-price glossy stuff and, though Pauline is not an unattractive woman, the blurry cover photo does her no favours. It also situates her in Buchanan Street, putting the focus on the city centre where it should be on the constituency. In the cluttered interior we are told that jobs and schools are nice and cancer is bad, mmkay? It also makes sure to mention those naughty bankers. Parts of it read as if it's been search engine optimised. The internal pictures are all poor and, really, this is an object lesson in how to get it wrong. At least it respects capital letters.

Alongside this is a letter to Stuart from Iain Gray. Yes, that guy from Central Station. This letter mentions the Tories six times and also name drops David Cameron and Thatcher (in the iconic sense, without first name or title). To put this in context, it only mentions Labour eight times. There are a couple of unsubstantiated swipes at the SNP, curiously rendered in bold type. Policy commitments are mostly vague which does a disservice to the stronger ones, and they would have done better not to mention their knife crime policy, which is getting them into more and more trouble as time goes on. Should have stuck with that first leaflet, guys.

This brings us to the LibDems (I'm sure most of you won't have read this far, but then, most of you won't do more than glance at the leaflets anyway, so I'm assuming some degree of special interest). Natalie McKee is another photogenic candidate (this is starting to look suspicious; do other constituencies have exclusively ugly ones?) whose earnest look just about gets her away with the twee soft-focus image on her promo postcard. The images on the reverse side make it clear she's going for the youth vote. This doesn't excuse the use of a handwriting font, which is not only tacky but will make her policy commitments completely illegible to voters with vision or reading difficulties. It's a shame as one or two of these are strong but others mirror the Conservative leaflet in claiming too much credit for activities in which the LibDems were only one contributing party. None of them does anything to substantiate the claim that Natalie is 'experienced'. Hmm. A larger, glossier leaflet (surely not recycled, making its green pledge look dubious) tells us that, being local, she knows our lives are marred by crime. Um, what? I live at the dodgier end of it, but overall Glasgow Kelvin is one of the safest constituencies in the city. This is pandering to hysteria, not advocating useful local policy. At least this leaflet commits fewer font crimes and is, for the most part, actually legible.

Finally, there's a leaflet from the Respect Party, headlined simply 'How To Vote For George'. Anyone familiar with the redoubtable Mr Galloway will immediately smile at this. It's illustrative of that characteristic arrogance which means that, decades after he dated Donald's aunt, he is still the butt of family jokes at Christmas. The leaflet has been printed by Clydeside Press, a great little outfit who have really done their best but are hampered by, well, the content. Among other things is assures us that George will "defend your basic principles and interests". I suppose he must be telepathic as well as vague. Later it quotes him as saying "I will combat every injustice." Gosh, George, but how will you find time to sit in Parliament?

George "is leading a very strong list of candidates," we are told. None of them have recognisable names. Three of them are students. They may very well be secretly brilliant, but there's nothing here to confirm that.

All in all, it's a better collection of rabbit food than some other elections have provided, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. Will any of these leaflets win your vote? If so, don't forget to put big ticks beside the names of your preferred candidates.

The Leading Edge

2011-04-29T14:04:00.000-07:00

He's the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, at the forefront of opposition to the SNP government for the past three years, yet remarkably few people seem to know who he is. Famous mostly for running away from elderly hecklers and hiding in a sandwich shop, Iain Gray has struggled more than most leaders to make the right impression – or, indeed, any impression at all. It's unfair, say the party faithful. Gray is an honest man who deserves better than to be sidelined in an age of spin. His personality is neither here nor there, and the forthcoming election should be decided on the issues.

They're quite wrong, of course.

The problem with approaching party promotion this way is that they're missing the fact that personality is one of the issues. Consider the perennial problem of parties that have been out of power for a while. We should be wary of them, their opponents always say, because they have very few people with top level political experience. What this really means, more often than not, is that we the voters have little experience of them. We're not familiar with their skillsets and can't be sure they're up to the job of government.

In order to establish themselves in this situation, parties have to demonstrate that they have capable individuals with specific areas of expertise – Nicola Sturgeon on health, for instance; or, at Westminster, Vince Cable on economics. The presence of a competent individual makes voters more confident that the party will be able to handle that area of government without disasters.

Then there is the job of leader.

Like it or not, a leader is not just there to coordinate activities (with the possible exception of the Green Party, who have a convener rather than a leader per se, but they have no prospect of forming a majority). A leader is there to lead. A leader may become a First Minister, at which point they will have to speak on behalf of the country and carry an air of authority; they will need to be able to stand up to the leaders of other nations, to do business with them on equal terms, and to inspire confidence in the Scottish people. We need to know, when we cast our votes, that we are electing a party whose leader can represent us all.

It is hardly inspiring if we struggle to remember who that leader is.

Iain Gray may very well be an honest, decent man, but he carries himself like an unpopular schoolteacher, hectoring when he should be persuading, forever on edge. At times he bears an unfortunate resemblance to The Rocky Horror Picture Show's Man With No Neck. It is difficult to imagine him commanding respect on the international stage. This is unfortunate for Scotland whichever way you look at it. Labour members are already whispering that he's cost them the election, and even those who support the SNP should appreciate that governments function at their best when they have a strong opposition.

What seems to have occurred is an oversight within Labour ranks, a failure to appreciate what politics is really about. It's all very well to be idealistic but policies alone are not enough. That's like trying to promote a band with great lyrics and a charisma-free singer, or serving a nutritious meal with no discernible flavour. There is more to government than white papers and number management. Charisma matters. Leadership matters, because this is a context in which style is part of the substance.

Whose Flag is it Anyway?

2011-04-29T10:18:00.000-07:00

It may seem odd to see a post from me about Britishness. Like many people in Scotland, I rarely think of myself in those terms; less so on a day like today when the British media is presenting an image of the country which I can scarcely recognise. But that's why this is important.

There are many reasons to feel uncomfortable about the royal celebrations. For many of us, the royal family is an embarrassing anachronism, a feudal relic by nature racist, sexist and bigoted. I have nothing against the two young people who tied the knot in Westminster Abbey, but I dread to think what sort of life they've got to look forward to or, indeed, what one of them has suffered already. Strangers' obsession with the intimate details of their lives (and, let's face it, the whole pornographic fixation on the fate of the bride, a kiss standing in for the now less acceptable hoisting of a bloodstained bedsheet) has creepy stalker overtones that would surely see them sectioned were their attentions focused on anyone else. Pandering to it seems, at best, deeply unhealthy.

These are not, however, at the crux of the matter.

What appalls me more than anything else is that this tawdry show, dubbed by one supporter as 'the greatest reality TV show on Earth', and the very antithesis of class - is being touted as the epitomé of Britishness, of what being British is about.

Britishness, today, involved the pre-emptive arrests of dozens of people, most of them entirely non-aggressive, on the presumption that they might breach the peace. They included a middle aged professor who had hoped to perform a piece of street theatre; a student who intended to shout sarcastic comments; and a man who sang 'We all live in a fascist regime' to the tune of Yellow Submarine. A group of people who had assembled peacefully in a park to protest the fact that gay people do not enjoy the liberty to marry in this great nation were told to move on before, essentially, too many people saw them.

Britishness, today, includes an arrangement with several major broadcasters to the effect that no jokes will be made about the monarchy. Last night it included replacing Question Time with an insipid, hastily-produced biopic every critic has savaged. Perhaps that shouldn't be such a big deal, but the thing is, we have an election coming up in Scotland. There's also the impending AV referendum. How cheering it is to see democracy demoted in favour of fawning allegiance to inherited rulers.

I once sat down with a sociology class and tried to think of things that are British (not just English, the two often being confused). All we could agree on was tea (thanks, China and India). Yesterday a friend suggested red telephone boxes, which probably also fit. But today has prompted me to think of a few other things.

What is Britishness about? Do we really have shared values? I think that somewhere, beneath all the artificial ones, we do. I think that most of us believe in democracy, in freedom of speech, in freedom of association, in respect that is due to every citizen no matter the circumstances in which they were born. I think that we believe accused people are innocent until proven guilty; I don't think we believe in precrime.

I have a couple of friends who have gone giddy with delight over the royal wedding, and I don't want to bring them down. They're not doing the stalker thing and I appreciate that, for them, it's just a bit of harmless fun, not so different from the Oscars or the Eurovision Song Contest. But that freedom to express oneself should belong to everybody, including those who don't accept the royal line, those who resent having to pay for an extravaganza which they see as nothing to do with them.

In a fascist regime, people have been eagerly pointing out, one would not be free to discuss these things (this isn't strictly true, as a quick perusal of the blogosphere will show you, but never mind). But they're missing the point. Being able to talk about it doesn't make the loss of our liberal freedoms okay, any more that being able to complain afterwards makes a punch in the face okay.

What has happened today is about as far removed from Britishness as I can imagine, though it has plenty in common with the British dystopias of early twentieth century fiction. It's not patriotic to wave a flag at the royal carriage and politely ignore the fate of the protestors. That's a betrayal of the very values that give this nation cohesion. Britain deserves better. Britain can be better, but we'll have to acknowledge the rot before we can cut it out.

Now, I'm off to have a cup of tea.