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.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
Naughty Words
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 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.
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
Entitlement
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.
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.
Tuesday, 7 June 2011
A Friend of the Family
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.
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.
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
Asking for it?
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.
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.
Sunday, 15 May 2011
The Liberal Beef
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?
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?
Wednesday, 11 May 2011
Holyrood Leadership Blues
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.
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.
Tuesday, 10 May 2011
First They Came For The Homosexuals
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.
Saturday, 7 May 2011
Minority Report
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.
Friday, 6 May 2011
O Labour, Where Art Thou?
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
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.
Wednesday, 4 May 2011
Electoral Underdogs
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)