Shuggy's Blog

Supply in short supply

2012-01-21T10:48:00.002Z

Teaching is one of those jobs where, "just be yourself", has to be about the worst possible advice you could give someone. As anyone with any experience will tell you, teaching is a performance. It's only right and proper that it should be so. If you went around saying what you really thought, the average school switchboard would be jammed with phone calls from justifiably indignant parents.

But the role-playing can become a little wearisome at times so those rare moments when you get to say what you think is true to someone who matters are a liberating experience. One such moment for me was when I was selected along with a few other colleagues to give our thoughts to Professor McCrone (pbuh) and his team who were doing a little fact-finding before making their recommendations on teachers' pay and conditions. We were all there to represent staff in different stages and positions - with myself as someone new to the school, having recently gained a contract after being on the supply circuit.

We were asked other than money, what did we think would improve our working arrangements. It was at that point I got to suggest that something might be done about the dismal experience of teachers on temporary short time supply. Often you get treated like shit, frankly. I actually used that form of words. Dunno how Prof McCrone felt about it but for me it was an uplifting moment.

Because I can tell you from experience that temporary supply teachers have a hard shift. It's an insecure job in which often sporadic work oscillates between enormous stress and pulverizing tedium. You might find yourself taking classes not necessarily in your own subject, frequently with no or insufficient work for them to do. And it's not unusual to find that you're dealing with this in an environment where some staff are a wee bit less helpful than they could be, to say no more than that.

Still, at least you get paid the same as everyone else. Or at least you did, until recently. The shabby deal agreed to by the EiS means that some supply teachers have taken a 47% nominal cut in their wages. I haven't worked it out in any detail but this plus the wages freeze must mean a drop in real disposable income of something approaching 60%. I can't believe some people are still prepared to justify this. The rationale was that staff in this position don't have the burden of marking and preparation. True but this has to be the sole advantage of a job that has rather more disadvantages. And in any event, I don't think marking and preparation constitutes 47% of the job. It certainly isn't supposed to.

In any event, it's an academic discussion because the market has now delivered its verdict: temporary teachers simply aren't willing to sell their labour at this price and now there's a staffing crisis. That this should be so during the worst economic recession since the interwar period should be enough to demonstrate to Mike Russell that 'monitoring the situation' isn't going to be good enough. As for Labour and the EiS, my erstwhile colleague Hugh Reilly nails their recent hypocrisy on this issue with some panache here. This was a tawdry deal where the interests of the most vulnerable of our profession were sold out. Everyone involved in the negotiations should be ashamed of themselves but on a more practical level they should be conceding that it isn't the first time that an unjust policy turns out to be economically-inefficient too.

Some notes on 'canny' Salmond

2012-01-12T00:08:00.008Z

Canny is a word often used to describe Salmond by journalists who seek to impress on an audience who have hitherto not paid too much attention to our First Minister or the the political threat he represents. The description is not entirely without foundation. Salmond is an impressive political operator who has consistently wrong-footed his opponents on the political scene in Scotland. One of his advantages is that he has simply been at it longer than the leaders of any political party in the UK. To borrow a Bushism he has been 'misunderestimated' and it has now become customary for hacks to declare that they would decline to bet against Salmond, who is now seen as the consummate political gambler.

But his talents have also been greatly exaggerated. This is partly big fish, small pond syndrome: Scotland is a small country which is bound to have a narrower pool of talent than the UK as a whole - and it is made smaller still by the fact that the ambitious in the unionist parties have historically sought to build their careers in Westminster. It is also partly on account of hagiography within the nationalist movement. If anyone troubles themselves to become acquainted with their history, they have moved from being an eccentric minority to commanding a majority in a legislature which adopted a voting system that was supposed to prevent such an event from happening. For the believers, Salmond is the political colossus who made all of this possible.

It might be worth reminding people - or informing for the first time in some cases - about the other side of Salmond, the political leader who also has an impressive record of calling it wrong, and doing so on some of the most significant political and economic issues of our time.

For example, he described the Kosovo campaign "an act of dubious legality, but above all one of unpardonable folly." The intention of reminding people of this is not to invite debate on the merits of the NATO intervention. I was in favour, I remain of the view that it was the right thing to do - and I have an emotional interest in the case, having taught students who had come to seek shelter in Scotland from Milosevic's army. But I appreciate that good people opposed this intervention in good faith. Rather it is that Salmond's predictions of the outcome that were completely wrong, as was his belief that he would gain political capital from this at the ballot box. And his comparison to the bombing of Clydebank by the Luftwaffe was too absurd to dignify with an argument.

Then there was the whole 'arc of prosperity' thing that Scotland was invited to join. As this doesn't distinguish him from the UK political mainstream, I would be disinclined to make too much of Salmond calling the Euro wrong - were it not for two factors. One was that he is an economist and should therefore have been more alert to the possibility of failure than most. The other is that his attitude to this is frustratingly like that of the Tories to education in that both seem to pick exemplar countries that have absolutely nothing in common except one bare point that politicians wish to identify themselves with. So we get Tories citing Sweden and China (!) as models of educational excellence to follow - and nationalists offering Ireland, Iceland and Norway as case-studies in successful small-country nationalism, happily ignoring the fact that membership of the Euro is central to the argument one day but not the next. And not today, for obvious reasons.

What do that Nationalists envisage for us now with the present Euro-troubles? Membership of a currency with putative fiscal rules that would give rightwing Republicans in the US wet-dreams, or do they want the 'government by fax', which we are led to believe is the fate of Norway, a country outside the EU but which has to conform to its practices anyway? Questions that will be asked and will be more difficult to answer than the foot-soldiers of nationalism have led us to believe.

Finally, there is the Salmond tendency to pick on firms in the way he seems to choose countries. Forget the details, they are examples that can bolster the nationalist case. A significant howler in this regard is the attitude of this former economist with the Royal Bank of Scotland to his erstwhile employers. "Good luck with the bid", he wrote to the now disgraced Sir Fred Goodwin in relation to his intention to acquire the Dutch banking enterprise ABN.

Despite all this, Salmond is seen as some kind of invulnerable political demi-god. Might it not be the case that at least some of this could be attributed to the palsied state of the political opposition in Scotland and also to a media that simply isn't doing its job properly? If Salmond is some kind of hero of mythic proportions, the one I'd chose is Achilles. There's always the hope that someone with a straight bow will hit the target, which is why - while gambling is the one of the few vices I don't understand - I won't be placing a bet on Alex Salmond in the next couple of years.

On the prospect of a referendum on Scottish independence: initial thoughts

2012-01-09T20:14:00.002Z

The first is that nothing has happened so far in the debate provoked by Cameron's high-risk, and previously occluded, plan to play Call My Bluff with the Nationalists in Scotland to disabuse me of my view of referendums. I would suggest that the reason the arguments over the timing and the form of question are already overheated is because the actors involved understand perfectly well that plebiscites are exercises in manufacturing consent for projects that have already been chosen by political elites.

The second is that I'm in a minority in arguing that there is a certain logic to the position of the Westminster government. The situation as it stood was allowing the agenda to be set by Salmond & Co alone. "We the Scots" should decide the timing and question of a referendum, say the Nats. By "we" they mean of course the SNP who claim exclusive rights to determine when we should be asked, and what form of question - and why shouldn't they extend the franchise if it is deemed useful to their purposes? Disagree and you're lining up against Scotland.

However, my opinion of the Westminster attempt to seize the initiative doesn't differ much from what numerous other commentators have been saying. For one, it's too late. The unionist parties have resisted a referendum for too long to now say with any conviction that not only do we favour it but we're now in more of a hurry than you.

Nor do the arguments for the urgency make much sense. It'll be 'legally-binding' if it's held within 18 months but merely 'advisory' after that? I wouldn't know but I doubt it makes legal sense - and I'm absolutely certain it makes no political sense.

I doubt whether it makes much economic sense either, this idea that uncertainty is crippling confidence and deterring investment. I wouldn't want to say too much about that because while the arguments both for and against independence are often couched in economic terms, the reality is the position on both sides of the argument are akin to the attitude of creationist believers to science.

And even if any of these argument did make sense, the intervention already looks unhelpful in the extreme. You can have your referendum but on our time-scale and only in a form of our choosing: so said the European Commission to the British government, arguing that continued uncertainty over British commitment to the EU was damaging economic confidence in the UK and the wider region. You wouldn't want to push the analogy too far since Britain is not a member of the EU in the way Scotland is a member of the United Kingdom - but it helps, nevertheless, to catch a flavour of how such intervention might be interpreted north of the border.

Finally, Cameron et al need to get better advice on Scottish matters. I've thought, and not for the first time, that they could do worse than pay some heed to Alex Massie:

"Of course, were I David Cameron I'd accept that Salmond, bugger it, has the ball and the right to set the conditions for the game. This may be inconvenient or sub-optimal but there it is. And then I would ask just this: do you really wish to make foreigners of your English friends and relatives? I would trust the people to make their own minds up and I would do little to get in the way of that."

Although whether referendums have much to do with trusting the people is an idea of which I'm highly sceptical.

The Stakhanovite Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

2012-01-05T22:53:00.005Z

Ruth Davidson, the newly-elected leader of the Scottish Tories, is seeking to revive the fortunes of the party by arguing that we don't understand the importance of hard work and this is because of 'socialism':

"We are a resourceful people, responsible for many of the world’s greatest inventions. Our ingenuity and endurance has built business empires and spread commerce across the globe.

Decades of socialism have dampened our natural capacity for enterprise and hard work, but the flame still burns.

We can rise again if we learn from recent events and decide that we are determined to make Scotland work."

Well, good luck selling that one on the doorsteps. We'll ignore her conflation of socialism with a large state as well as her ignorance of who has been running the country for most of the time since 1945 to ask the question: what evidence is there that a large state is damaging to the work ethic?

It interested me because my honours dissertation was on the subject of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis, applied to 19th Century Scotland. One of Weber's central arguments is that the work ethic - the notion that hard work per se is a virtue - was seen as irrational in terms of individual utility to early modern man and that capitalism benefited from the the peculiarly protestant inner-worldly asceticism that saw hard work as something that certificated salvation.

I'm not even going to attempt to rehearse the arguments here - except to say that there is, I think, something in this notion that there is a disutility to hard-work, which therefore requires some kind of ideological support.

You might disagree with this in the 19th century context but I'm interested in this idea as applied to the people coming to Britain from the former communist states of Eastern Europe. I don't want to indulge in stereotypes but can we at least agree that there is possibly good empirical reasons behind the reputation that, for example, Polish emigrants have for being at least as hard-working as indigenous workers?

In other words, coming from countries where the state has been as large as anywhere in human history does not appear to have damaged either the work ethic nor the entrepreneurial spirit of east Europeans. I'm wondering if perhaps there isn't something like a Protestant ethic going on - the ghost of dead secular, rather than religious, beliefs prowling around in people's lives? Because, one should stress, the notion that hard-work is virtuous isn't as obvious as one might think, if you look at it with a utilitarian eye.

This got me to wondering: perhaps it is capitalism itself that is damaging to the work-ethic? There is no certificates of salvation to produce, no sense of Stakhanovite heroism to be had, but a rather more limited notion that with hard-work one can succeed and enjoy the fruits of one's labour in a meritocratic society. The disadvantage with this is that it is a more easily, and more immediately, falsifiable notion than either the protestant or communist ideas of work as an ascetic tool used in the pursuit of salvation. Here I think Eric Hobsbawm was on to something where he argued that capitalism during the long boom from 1945 to the seventies benefited from the fact that people hadn't yet followed the idea of utilitarian individualism to its logical conclusions. Because to the rational utility-maximizing individual, hard work seems more positively irrational than the unthinking supporters of the capitalist system would have us believe.

Schools and alarm bells

2012-01-05T21:03:00.004Z

I don't mean fire alarms. I'm referring to the sense you get when you go into a school and there's certain indications that the establishment you've walked into might prove to be a little 'challenging'.

They are too numerous to list but one stood out to me and it was when I was given a school handbook and one of the first things I was directed to was where the panic button on the classroom telephone was.

Anyway, on a completely unrelated matter, here's a report about how many of the findings of the Commission on School Reform were rejected by Education Secretary Mike Russell.

He was right to do so, although I should stress that my reasons for wholeheartedly agreeing with Mr Russell are unrelated to the anecdote above. That I just felt like sharing.

On Kindles

2011-12-30T23:47:00.002Z

Ooh, finally caved-in and got one. Aren't they good? But first impression is they won't replace books and for a reason that is stronger than with the whole music download thing. A CD box might be aesthetically-pleasing and have a wee booklet in it with lots of information that someone might want to read - but they can never be as gorgeous as a book, can they?

Anyway, downloaded a whole lot of classic books, either for free or pennies. So excited I had to share. You know the sort of things I'm talking about - the books people claim are the best they've ever read when asked on one of Norm's profiles. "Oh, well it has to be Ulysses by James Joyce." Aye, right. ;-)

The trouble with Ed

2011-12-30T21:18:00.006Z

Some good people have been defending Ed Miliband of late. This isn't something I feel able to do. When Ed Miliband was elected leader, I thought, "Oh no - here we go again..." Another leader who can't win elections yet regardless of how dismal a performance they put in, we'll get calls to 'pull together' and stop sniping.

Whether these carry any weight with party members, I couldn't say but as a mere supporter, I don't feel obliged to pay any attention*. There's too many problems with Ed, all of which combine to make him unelectable. Most of them fall into two categories:

1) No-one's listening to what he has to say. In fairness, part of this has to do with the intrinsic difficulty in framing a distinct and coherent message in these present circumstances. If the government says they are taking the steps necessary to avoid the economy going Greek-shaped, how are people to judge whether this or the Ed Balls analysis is correct?

But the most important problem is one people seldom mention. So seldom, I wonder if this is because if they do so, they would be concerned that this would signal a superficial interest in politics that has to do with personalities rather than policies? I don't know but I'll put the problem in the most basic way I can and you can accuse me of being superficial if you wish. It doesn't matter what Ed Miliband's policies are because he's never going to be Prime Minister. And the reason he is never going to be Prime Minister is because he reminds people of Wallace from Wallace and Gromit.

Or someone else... Point is, I don't understand why people put so much energy into pretending this sort of thing doesn't matter. FDR was in a wheelchair, Ike was bald. One of the ironies of today is that while we're all so much more PC nowadays, I think everyone knows the USA will never have another President who is either in a wheelchair or bald in an age of instant mass-media. Britain isn't so different. One of my mother's postwar anecdotes was that while she could remember what he looked like from newsreel at the cinema, she could never recall hearing Atlee speak.

These days have gone. Miliband isn't in a wheelchair and he has lots of hair - we know what he sounds like so we also know he doesn't talk like a Prime Minister, he doesn't walk like a Prime Minister and he sure as hell doesn't look like a Prime Minister.

Saying it should be about policy and 'the ishoos', as Tony Benn used to say is just empty moralising. I dare say it should be but it just isn't. The question is, what are people who come out with this line seriously intending to do about it? Because the pretending it doesn't matter strategy isn't working.

2) Does Miliband have anything to say anyway? It's a genuine question because I don't listen to what Miliband has to say about anything after he said this, which is actually the only thing I can recall him saying that stuck in my mind:

"While out campaigning during the local elections, not for the first time, I met someone who had been on incapacity benefit for a decade.

He hadn’t been able to work since he was injured doing his job.

It was a real injury, and he was obviously a good man who cared for his children.

But I was convinced that there were other jobs he could do.

And that it’s just not right for the country to be supporting him not to work, when other families on his street are working all hours just to get by."

He was convinced. I thought, why is he convinced? Because he had knowledge of vacancies going in this poor bugger's area? Tesco specifically looking for people with dodgy backs who hadn't worked for the best part of a decade perhaps? And if he knew of actual vacancies, did he get any of his staff to do anything to help get this man get one of these jobs he knows about? Of course he didn't - because he had no knowledge. It was only the sort of thing someone who's never had to do any heavy-lifting in his life would say. Pious catch-phrases without any practical help. So I stopped listening and joined the ranks of those who never started.

*If you're thinking this status disqualifies me from having an opinion, you might want to question an election procedure that gave me a vote by virtue of being a member of a trades union...

Cameron and the King James Bible

2011-12-22T00:49:00.003Z

One of the aspects of his speech that I haven't seen commented on was his praise for the poetry of the King James version:

"One of my favourites is the line "For now we see through a glass, darkly.

It is a brilliant summation of the profound sense that there is more to life, that we are imperfect, that we get things wrong, that we should strive to see beyond our own perspective.

The key word is darkly - profoundly loaded, with many shades of meaning.
I feel the power is lost in some more literal translations.

The New International Version says: "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror"

The Good News Bible: "What we see now is like a dim image in a mirror"

They feel not just a bit less special but dry and cold, and don't quite have the same magic and meaning."

Hmmm, here's a passage from James in the KJV:

"Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.

Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.

Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.

Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth."

And here's the same in the NIV:

"Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you.

Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes.

Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days.

Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. "

I dunno. Which translation d'ya think best conveys the point that Cameron is missing when he goes on about "values and morals we should actively stand up and defend."?

Scottish school league tables 2011

2011-12-15T23:47:00.004Z

They haven't changed that much - so I don't have much to add to what I said last year.

Couple of things about the publication of data though. I agree with the criticisms people make of league tables and their tendency to produce perverse incentives to narrow the curriculum - but not publishing them hasn't helped.

For one thing, some people seem to have got the impression that school exam results aren't published at all. They are - just not in a, well, league table format. You can find quite detailed information here if you can be bothered searching through schools individually - but most people can't so rely on the press to do it for them. Problem here is that this is even cruder than the tables the government used to publish.

For example, the Scotsman data linked above has two key indicators, one of which is the proportion of the roll who get 5 or more Standard Grades at General level. My old PT used say rather unkindly that if you were a sentient being, you should be able to get a pass at General 4. It's a bit harsh. Pupils may have difficulty at this level for a number of reasons. However, given that it is normal for students to take eight Standard Grades and that it indeed the case that getting five of them at General level is no great academic feat, all this statistic does is identify those who are doing really quite badly. Whereas the other statistic - those passing Highers - has to do with those staying on and then doing really rather well.*

In other words, while league tables are crude measures, I'm not sure it's an entirely good idea for the Scottish Government to leave it to the media to make them even more so.

*Just occurred to me people might not know what I'm on about here. The legal school-leaving age in Scotland is still 16.

Reformation and witchcraft

2011-12-14T00:12:00.005Z

When Princess Anne (of Denmark) was popping over to Scotland to meet her husband to be, James VI of Scotland, she was forced by bad weather to stop off in Norway. The cause of the storm? Well, witchcraft obviously - which is why James VI personally presided over a witchcraft trial in 1590.

This is the dark side of the 'elimination of magic' which Max Weber rightly identified as a defining feature of protestantism; in the early modern period of European history, the elimination of magic was accompanied by the physical obliteration of those who were believed to practice magic. It won't surprise many people to learn that the Edinburgh University survey estimates that about 84% of these 'witches' were women.

It is for this reason, amongst others, that those who call for a Reformation in Islam should be careful what they wish for. They've had a Reformation and while it is a controversial point, I'd argue that this is part of the problem.

That Europe thing

2011-12-11T16:26:00.018Z

I had a much longer and even more boring post in the pipeline but I realised I'd lost the plot when I found myself writing a sentence about how difficult it was to disaggregate the contribution the EU had made to the expansion of world and European trade since 1945 from the general reduction in world tariffs.

Instead, I'll restrict myself to a few observations. The original post was asking whether a too vivid memory of history wasn't something of a problem in the European debate and to what extent this contributes to the hyperbole that we see when it comes to the EU?

The misnamed 'Eurosceptics', for example, rather give the impression that the outcome of the Second World War is in some way undecided, hence the ludicrous comparison of a pre-veto wielding Prime Minister to Neville Chamberlain, made in a popular tabloid newspaper that I won't link to.

But the ghosts of history haunt the Germans, the French and the east Europeans too - all of whom respond to the past in a way that prefers containment, rather than 'splendid isolation', as a way of burying a European past characterised by conflict interrupted by economic depression.

For the Germans it is the Weimar hyper-inflation that keep them awake at night. This is the only conclusion one can draw from their reluctance to allow the ECB to carry the debt of Eurozone members. It's understandable, but I think it was Chris Dillow who said, in his day job, that there's not a lot of point in taking steps to preserve the value of a currency if it means that the currency ceases to exist.

As a number of people have pointed out, it was not hyper-inflation but rather deflation and unemployment that provided the economic backdrop for the capture of the German state by the Nazis. But here the ghosts of the Great Depression are being evoked in an inappropriate way. It is the crudest form of reductionism to attribute the rise of fascism to this. Moreover, there are reasons to think that while one could argue some of the mistakes of the thirties are being repeated, rather more lessons have been learned than one would gather from reading some of the more apocalyptic commentary. These are as follows:

1) The Great Depression was characterised by both fiscal and monetary tightening. No-one thinks we have the latter now - but also the former has been more relaxed than it was during the thirties.

2) The 'outlawing Keynesianism' aspect of the proposed and misnamed 'fiscal union' isn't good in my view but there's two reasons to think it might not be as bad as supposed: a) We've been here before: it looks pretty much like son of Stability Pact to me - and if it's anything like that the European powers will simply ignore it if they deem this to be necessary, b) It might pave the way for the ECB to step up to the plate and issue Euro-bonds. I agree this looks unlikely just now but on the other hand, one shouldn't underestimate the political capital invested in the Euro project (see 'historical ghosts' above).

3) The American economy appears to be growing at a surprising rate. No student of the interwar period would underestimate the role that American contraction played in those circumstances. Nor their response to it, which brings me to the final point...

4) Protectionism: as far as one can gather, there has been no tendency for this to be seen as a solution or even a damage-limitation exercise in the way it was in the interwar period.

This last point should underline the importance of the survival of the Euro. For what's the alternative? For the Greeks to say, "Ok, we'll pay our debts - in drachma, if that's ok with you?" And then what? A Europe of competitive devaluations, which is protection by another name but with the same consequences. It is for this reason that while I was never a fan, I hope the Euro survives. On the UK stance, one is inclined to say that if Cameron is sincere in his professed belief that its survival is in our interests, he has a rather eccentric way of showing it.

Finally, on a parochial point, if David Cameron has an interest in the survival of the Treaty of Union, the same verdict applies. The SNP's 'independence in Europe' was looking a little threadbare in the wake of the Euro crisis. His behaviour in Europe has given it a new lease of life.

Jeremy Clarkson, technology and freedom

2011-12-01T19:59:00.003Z

First they came for the apologists for terrorism. I did not speak up because I was not an apologist for terrorism. Then they came for disagreeable cretins with an internet connection - and I did not speak up because while I have an internet connection, I flattered myself that I did not belong in that category. But now they're coming for people who make shit jokes in poor taste, I have to confess I'm feeling distinctly edgy...

As Padraig Reidy says, this is just Clarkson being Clarkson - his point being, would anyone have even cared in a pre-Twitter, pre-YouTube age? His is an interesting take which asks whether democratic access to the means of communication might have inadvertently shrunk our liberty by creating instant publicity for outrageous behaviour that would have in a time of slower and more primitive communication be confined to a smaller audience?

There is something in this. There's two effects of technology that are bound to make anyone of a liberal disposition uneasy. One is that by removing the boundaries of bad behaviour, it also removes the more limited context in which such behaviour might have been more appropriately dealt with. For instance, the racist tram woman would and should have been barred from using the service on which she has demonstrated she is unable to behave.

Beyond this, perhaps a minor punishment for being drunk and disorderly or for breech of the peace. But the extensive publicity has created a climate in which this kind of limited action might be deemed insufficient, which brings me to this: extensive publicity for misdemeanors makes it increasingly likely that individual cases are more often to be treated as examples. "This is exactly the sort of thing we've been talking about and we must send a message here." Beware those who think the function of the law is to send messages. You'll be uncomfortable with this if you're uneasy as I am about the symbolic nature of punishment that is intrinsic to utilitarian theories of criminal justice.

But all of the above lends too much weight to the role of technology here. We have to make a clear division between detection and punishment and insist that what makes many of us really uncomfortable is the frankly draconian sentences being dished out for simply being a loud-mouthed fuckwit these days. Imagine a world where absolutely everyone who parked in the chevrons outside a primary school got a ticket. Police state? Only people like Jeremy Clarkson would argue this. The rest of us, I imagine, would think, "You don't want a forty quid fine? Well don't park there then!" Ok, I should speak for myself... But arrest and possible jail-time every time someone says something stupid and offensive? Maybe this should be a liberal rule of thumb: imagine a situation where there's a hundred per cent detection for a given crime. If the force of the law that is meted out in this thought experiment looks too draconian, then the law as it stands probably is.

Some thoughts on N30

2011-11-27T19:28:00.004Z

I doubt whether I've anything to say to this matter that hasn't been dealt with by others rather better and more comprehensively than I could but I'm finding the remorseless repetition of what have already become rightwing cliches has created an itch that demands to be scratched. Here's some of them in no particular order:

1) Low turnouts being used as a reason to cast doubt on the legitimacy of strike action and as an invitation to threaten more anti-union legislation.

The conclusion we can draw about people not voting is that they didn't vote and nothing else, since the procedure affords no opportunity to record why they didn't vote. I would have thought the reasons why politicians should refrain from going beyond this and casting themselves as the interpreters of the will of the silent would be obvious, but apparently not. All one can say is that if they insist that low turnout undermines the credibility of ballots, any rule that they propose to enact to remedy this should be applied consistently. Would any MEPs retain their seats if this were done, I'm wondering?

2) The strikes will cause disruption.

Um, well, yeah - that's generally the point of strikes. Next...

3) Day after dreary day we get some hack arguing that private sector workers would love to get pensions like wot we do in the public sector so why should they fund ours out of their taxes?

That it is often beeb jounos posing this question would tend to indicate that irony has taken a holiday from Auntie. I'm sure it's true that a lot of private sector workers would indeed love a pension scheme like ours. Yet amazingly they still continue to work in the private sector. While there are obviously a host of likely reasons for this, some of them presumably have to do with the fact that there are benefits to this that are absent in the public sector. A number of possible reasons suggest themselves but one might be that the relative stability and security of public sector work is traded off against higher rewards in terms of present income in the private sector?

Anyway, all this ignores the fact that the present arrangement forms part of a prior contract that the government is trying to shuffle out of. For the right it seems that the legal conventions of a contract shouldn't apply, if one of the parties in the agreement happens to be a trade union.

4) Public sector pensions are unaffordable

We've been down this road already with the tuition fees thing and it isn't a better argument now. If 'the country can't afford it' a sub-set of tax-payers can't afford it either. But the reality is that public sector pensions are declining as a proportion of GDP. I'm not really taking the deficit-reduction argument seriously anyway. No-one's suggested that once the 'structural deficit' has been eliminated, the original arrangement will be restored, are they?

Having said all this, I personally regret that my union along with all the others has focused narrowly on this issue. In my own case at least I wish they'd taken issue with the general package, which has to do with managers using the present situation to carry out a more general erosion of the wages and conditions of workers. In our case, this has been demonstrated in pay freezes for us (i.e. real wage cuts), nominal pay cuts for temp staff (i.e. real wage cuts with bells on), demands for useless rituals of presenteeism and the insistence that we should be 'flexible' and do tasks that we never stopped doing - as well as the raid on our pension schemes, which are just deferred wages, after all. It's for all of these reasons I'm going on strike on Wednesday. I appreciate many will disagree with this but I'm sure we can find some common ground...

5) Strikes will cost the UK economy £500 million!

Given that this claim is being made by the sort of people who routinely dismiss the public sector as 'unproductive', surely we can and must insist that they can't have it both ways?

Scots schools risk being left behind by other nations, teachers told

2011-11-24T00:07:00.002Z

They were told this by Prof McCormac. The reason for this is photocopying. Elsewhere teachers are expected to do this whereas in Scotland the mere hint of the suggestion that we do our own is met with a demand to down tools.

Meanwhile, back in the real world can we agree that academics have to be amongst the most spaced-out people on the face of the planet? (As I'm sure I've said before, my late father was one of these so you may find something Freudian in this if you wish.)

I photocopied stuff today, btw. Stapled and on coloured paper and everything.

On the McCormac review

2011-11-08T23:59:00.007Z

Apologies in advance because this is for a narrow audience. McCormac is a review into the pay and conditions of Scottish teachers and the reassertion of managerial control therein is, I would suggest, an added factor behind the now almost certain industrial action on the 30th of November.

That the aforementioned review should come up with proposals that, amongst other things, codify presenteeism and represent a deterioration in teachers' conditions of service shouldn't surprise anyone who's paid any attention to the make-up of the panel. It consisted of: one academic, one former head of HMIe, two Headteachers (one retired), one retired Herald hack, one chief executive from Edinburgh City Council, and one businesswomen/lawyer. Amazingly, the findings of the review were generally considered to be anti-teacher - who would have thunk?

But I wouldn't want to over-personalise the process; they're just channelling the Spirit of the Age, which is anti-public sector, anti-union, pro-employer, pro-management and therefore in favour of the mechanisms by which these demonstrate their power - hence the enthusiasm for presenteeism and 'flexibility'. This is the case even when the aforementioned advocates wear tartan, as is the case with Nationalist blogger Burdz Eye View who asks, "Am I missing something?":

"I am sure there are some nuances in the detail that pass this layperson by. But if that is the case, then be warned unions, for they will pass the average person, and indeed parent, in the street by as well.

So teachers will have to stay in school all day? Some of us will be surprised to learn they can and do leave. What, do they take themselves off to Starbucks when they have no contact time?!"

Space and the attention of the reader disallows an exhaustive list of what the 'Burd' is missing here so I'll restrict myself to a couple of points - the first relating to the above. The present relatively liberal arrangement is that when we are not teaching, we can work at a time and place of our own choosing. For example, while my present timetable doesn't actually allow me to leave early ever, if it did I could spend my time in Starbucks doing what I spent a fair chunk of Sunday doing, which was marking and reading about the Scottish Reformation. You'd think the Burd might be pleased I was brushing up on my Scottish history. But apparently it doesn't count unless I do this in a specified location at a specified time.

It doesn't count because teachers can't be trusted. Except if they're in management, of course. In this case, obviously they should be given more power. Hell, giving more power to Headteachers is like uniforms and religion: seems like all the hacks - amateur and professional - agree these are Good Things and that there should definitely be more of them in schools. I appreciate I'm only someone who actually works at the chalkface but I'm afraid I must demur. Take the following sentiment, for example (please):

"Do unions not trust headteachers to make the right judgement call?"

Don't be silly - of course we don't. Only someone who has had schools described to them could wonder why.

EiS members vote to strike

2011-11-05T10:39:00.004Z

Yes we did. Hootsmon commentators speak they're branes:

"Teachers go too work after the traffic jambs are over, leave too go home before they begin, don't work week-ends, have great holidays and retire early on ill health...

From someone calling himself 'McNasty', who is apparently too McStoopid even to know what time school starts. And Pa Broon?

"I certainly won't be loosing any sleep over the teachers strike...

I blame the teachers, myself.

You don't really need a date for the last time teachers went on strike, do you?

Update: I like this one too:

"Exam scores keep going up yet educational attainment keeps going down. Not much of a system. Lets hope they strike for a long time so the educational system can be retooled."

Well, Alan Craige, you're certainly a tool - perhaps you might consider yourself a candidate?

A short note on Nationalist economics

2011-10-30T13:02:00.002Z

First it was John Swinney now we have Nicola Sturgeon saying the same bollocks about the state of Scotland's finances - this in a piece that purports to be myth-tackling:

"To take one of the most repeated, pernicious and damaging myths head-on, there can no longer be any doubt that Scotland more than pays its own way in the UK. The latest Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) reports shows that Scotland has run a current budget surplus in four of the five years to 2009-10, while the UK was in current budget deficit in each of these years, and hasn’t run a current budget surplus since 2001-02."

Uh huh? Three quick points:

1) There was a thing called the bank-crisis, which accounts for the rather large budget deficit that the UK has. Think you'll find that as a part of that there was a couple of Scottish banks that received humongous wads of UK tax-payer's cash. You know the ones: they were Scottish when they were doing well, but British when the whole house of cards fell down.

2) To say the Scottish Government has been running a balanced budget is to make a virtue out of necessity because the devolution settlement does not include borrowing powers. I wouldn't dream of accusing Swinney and Sturgeon of being disingenuous on this point - perhaps they just forgot?

3) I'll take their word for it that the Scottish Government has run a surplus for four years. It raises the question of why the hell they think this is something to brag about? There's a recession on, dammit! Running a surplus in such circumstances is just plain stupid.

Prejudicial inversions

2011-10-25T21:01:00.003+01:00

Find what: Jew. Replace with: Zionist. Result? Through the power of this handy editing tool, you have an article ready for posting on Comment is Rancid. On this occasion it happens to be courtesy of Deborah Orr on the subject of the Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange deal.

I would reiterate Norm's rebuttal of her prejudical inversions - but in rather less subtle and understated terms than the ones he has chosen.

It works something like this: imagine Hamas offered to exchange Gilad Shalit for one Palestinian prisoner. Then imagine the Israelis respond by saying, "This is absolutely unacceptable to us! We absolutely insist that we release many hundreds more of your lot. We are, after all, the Chosen People and such an exchange would be a more accurate reflection of our true value."

Can you imagine such a thought experiment corresponds to reality? Welcome to the world of Deborah Orr. Norm doesn't think it needs spelling out like this. I hope he's right but I fear the opposite.

I've been wondering what it is about this concept of being Chosen - the Elect - that some people seem to find so offensive? By asking this, I trust it is understood that I am in no way conceding that this was a motivating factor in the case discussed above.

The contribution of Christianity to anti-Semitism is well-understood. Or rather, it should be well-understood. But beyond what is familiar about traditional Christian anti-Semitism - the Blood Libel, the conspiracies - there's an aspect that is rarely discussed but which I'm convinced is historically enormously significant, which has to do with this concept of the Elect. For it is not an idea that is unique to Judaism but which is shared by all the monotheistic salvation religions. Given that Christians and Muslims - if they are in any way remotely orthodox - also consider themselves to be the Chosen Ones, why should it cause so much offence when it appears in Jewish thought?

I'm wondering if the answer doesn't lie in a paradox that exists in Western liberal thinking? Because for the modern student of history, proselytizing zeal is something that carries connotations of cultural arrogance, imperialism, domination and genocide - and for good reason. But one wonders if some Christian ideas aren't prowling around the minds of modern Western men like the ghosts of dead religious beliefs? In Christianity the invitation to join the Elect is universal, as it is in Islam. Not so with Judaism. Could it be the problem some people seem to have with the concept of Judaic election is simply that they haven't been invited?

So, what might be considered to be a virtue of Judaism - the absence of a desire to convert - has this, is this, held against the Jews? Unsure but surely it's plausible? What is certainly the case historically is that Jewish disinclination to convert has been bitterly resented - a feeling that has been expressed with fire on numerous occasions in European history.

Whatever the heart of the historical matter, there's another inversion that is being played out in front of our eyes. As an explicit and genetic result of a disposition to proselytize, in human history the responsibility for blood-letting in the name of winning souls for the One God can surely be ranked in an order that no reasonable person would contest? It's Christians first, then Muslims, then Jews. But when it comes to being the subject of prejudice and persecution? This is obviously more contentious but I'd argue that it has been exactly the other way around.

Two problems with plebiscites

2011-10-24T22:10:00.005+01:00

Democracy is like liberty, choice, accountability, tolerance and justice; these are Good Things that one should be seen to support, lest your credentials for membership of polite liberal-democratic society be called into question. It is because this is well-understood that hucksters of all political persuasions have learned the rhetorical trick of identifying their desired policy outcome with one or more of the above sanctifying concepts.

The ease with which they are able to do this is something I find frankly terrifying. It doesn't seem to matter how ill-conceived, narrow or vainglorious the project is, declaring it to be about 'freedom', 'choice', the 'will of the people' is astonishingly effective. Which brings us to the topical subject of referendums. The Tory rebels want one - and the SNP want one. While obviously different in a couple of respects, they are both about 'constitutional' issues and both groups of protagonists feel the sense of having the wind at their backs. Because referendums are 'democratic' means by which the 'people' express their 'view'. You disagree with this? At best you're an 'elitist' - but in reality probably something much worse.

There's obviously more than two problems with this nonsense but I haven't written anything for a while and don't want to make assumptions about your attention - so I'll restrict myself to two:

1) Are we allowed to say short-termism is a problem inherent in democracy? Because I wonder how many people who like to quote Churchill's maxim that, "Democracy is the worst system, except for all the rest", actually accept its implication that democracy does in fact have one or two problems. I'd have thought this is obviously one of them - and it is a problem magnified to frankly grotesque proportions with plebiscites.

It is received wisdom that referendums are appropriate for 'constitutional' questions but these are precisely the kinds of questions they are least appropriate for because they involve decisions concerning the membership of institutions which, if they are designed properly, will endure for generations. That this shouldn't be so - that it is the proper function of politics to revisit these questions of membership every generation in a plebiscite - represents nothing less than proposing the institutionalisation of crass egoism, as well as an appalling lack of any sense of history.

And understood like this, aren't referendums a waste of time by their proponents own definition? If the 70s referendum on EEC membership isn't binding now, why shouldn't people apply the same ephemeral criterion to any plebiscite-based decision to withdraw from the EU now?

2) But this is to concede too much to the notion that there's some kind of consistent principle being applied here - in the name of the 'people', naturally. Fact of the matter is, referendums are a mechanism by which party politics takes perhaps its most dishonest form.

I've said it before but it bears repeating: the only time governments and opposition parties call for referendums is when they think they'll yield the result they want. If they don't think this, they avoid them.

Occasionally circumstances - those consisting of internal irreconcilable differences - impose it on them, as was the case with the one on membership of the EEC. But the general pattern is clear - and should a miscalculation occur, regimes usually draw a little inspiration from the legend of Bruce and the spider: if at first you don't succeed...

It's this dishonesty at the very heart of all known referendum projects that really sticks in the throat. It is, I would argue, substantially more mendacious than the more mundane 'bundle' voting discussed by Chris Dillow. Why has the SNP - despite their thumping majority in Holyrood - not set a date for a referendum on Scottish independence? Because they don't think they'll win. They are right to think this, in my view.

They are also right to think that no matter how unpalatable the status quo might be, it would still win in a straight fight against a nationalism that proposed a new head of state, border control, currency and armed forces - hence the multi-option proposal. I don't mind the Catalonia model being the nationalists' preferred option but do we really have to endure all this bluster and posturing merely for it to remain the already badly-kept secret that it is?

These preposterous parties, presidents and politicians of all persuasions with their populist posturing pretending with their propaganda to be at one with the populace through their professed preference for plebiscites? Pretentious pish - of a much more sinister kind than that demonstrated in the last sentence...

Loch Ness Monster Raving Loony Party

2011-09-04T16:54:00.002+01:00

The title is one of the suggestions for new names the Scottish Tories might adopt if leadership favourite Murdo Fraser is successful in persuading the faithful that effectively disbanding the party is the only possible means of reviving the right as an electoral force in Scottish politics.

While I trust this re-branding will be unsuccessful, the proposal at least has the virtue of attempting to confront the fact that Tories in Scotland really are an endangered species. The story caught my attention because I was told a few months ago by one of the aforementioned dwindling band that this was the way that Murdo Fraser was intending to go. According to him, Fraser is not entirely unsympathetic to the idea of something approximating full fiscal autonomy for Scotland, or even actual independence because he thinks that having to raise the taxes which they spend is the only way the Scottish Parliament will be confronted with the fact - or as we might say, the view - that the state is too large in Scotland.

One of the interesting features of this is the way that the parties who were the most sceptical about devolution seem to have been quicker to grasp its implications. For the Nationalists, devolution did not go far enough but the basic political position of their party means that they had by definition no issue with forming a distinctly Scottish electoral identity.

The Tories were fundamentally opposed to the devolution project in its entirety, yet it's worth remembering that while they are obviously in a fairly dismal state, proportional representation has actually revived their representation compared to where they were after the pre-devolution 1997 Blair landslide.

Whereas one could argue that Labour and the Liberal Democrats, despite being ostensibly the most pro-devolution parties, are the ones that have fared the worst because of their failure to distinguish themselves from their respective Westminster machines. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Liberal Democrats. It really is impossible to over-state the extent to which mere association with the coalition has brought them to the edge of electoral oblivion north of the Border.

This last point illustrates the scale of the problem Murdo Fraser faces - for while he grasps the dire straights the Tories are in, it does not follow that his suggested remedy is tactically wise or likely to be successful.

For one thing, while some Tories have made generally approving noises about this proposal, others will see it as an admission of defeat and will be implacably opposed. Dividing an already small party in this way doesn't strike one as being a very good idea.

The other more fundamental point that most of us would argue is that the problem is not primarily one of poor presentation. Rather, the Nasty party is seen as such because we think it really is quite nasty. There's something about the Scottish - and the Welsh, and the Northern English - experience of de-industrialisation that I think people living somewhere like London simply cannot grasp. Because here recession changes the very landscape. Towns dominated by a single industry become full of ghosts as now idle industrial enterprises acquire the eerie desolation that one associates with dystopian sci-fi. Like the way the grass breaks through the concrete that still carries a memory of the days when ships were built there.

But it isn't my purpose to indulge in sentimentality. While I wouldn't do so personally, one could reasonably argue that such a process was inevitable or necessary - or both. But what you don't get to do is sneer about it - not if you want people to vote for you again, that is. It's this, I would suggest, that is the Tory problem in Scotland.

On the 'squaddies to teachers' programme

2011-09-03T19:33:00.005+01:00

The Phoenix free school in Manchester is planning to employ a staff entirely solely of ex-soldiers. I wouldn't imagine getting approval for this idea from the DofE was too difficult as it fits perfectly with Gove's belief that ex-military can provide the strong discipline and positive male role models that are supposedly lacking in English schools.

Now there's a number of fairly obvious criticisms anyone could make of this particular plan but I'll restrict this to one or two. The first thing that occurs to me is that this will be presented as a welcome shift away from wet liberal 'progressive' educational practices that seeks to rationalise bad behaviour rather than dealing with it. But in as far as this stereotype has any bearing in reality - and it does to some extent - this is merely a species of the same problem. It is the hard-nosed side of the same coin that sees schools primarily as agencies of socialisation rather than learning.

The other point is that in as far as there is Tory support for this, it strikes one as being rather hypocritical. Because those who take a rightwing position on education - and I include amongst these a depressingly large number of supposed lefties - are always complaining that advocates of comps are supporters of schools they wouldn't dream of sending their own children to. In contrast, the average Tory would be absolutely delighted to send their child to an enterprise of this nature? Aye, that'll be right. It's a personal prejudice on my part but apart from anything else, it's the name. Whenever I hear of a school with 'Phoenix' in the title, it gets mentally filed in the same category I reserve for those with 'community' in their name - under 'too crazy'.

Fear and incentives

2011-08-26T01:28:00.002+01:00

Whilst reading Chris Dillow on incentives, I was reminded about Mr Letwin's remarks a while ago about the need for the discipline of fear amongst public sector workers. I was wondering what kind of world does he live in where fear of losing one's job necessarily makes people behave well, by which we mean in this context: more productively?

I was also wondering what kind of world does he live in where public sector workers don't already fear for their jobs? Being more productive is not necessarily, or even usually, the thing that will get one noticed by management - particularly in jobs where productivity is rather difficult to quantify. As a consequence, workers - in my experience, teachers - will focus on more general matters as well as trying to ingratiate themselves to their managers.

This tends to encourage sycophancy, beggar thy colleague competition, and conformity expressed in the spouting of managerial jargon - rather than a focus on the more narrow specific skills one needs to be good at one's job but which will pass unnoticed by managers who often only understand what you are doing on the basis of memories. And increasingly, they don't even have these. Not an edifying spectacle.

Independence within the UK?

2011-08-21T11:53:00.005+01:00

According to Scotland on Sunday, the SNP is backing off from its long-standing policy of Euro membership. Significantly, they have also appear to have rejected the idea of creating a new Scottish currency and would retain Sterling as the currency in an independent Scotland.

It's hardly a shock. For many observers this is not only the best, or the least worst, option but the only one that makes any kind of economic sense. Apart from the present travails of the Eurozone, what appears to have put a nail in the Euro-membership coffin is the realization that if the Euro is to survive, it will require some kind of common fiscal policy.

The question is, where does this leave the independence project? To my mind there is no reason why the SNP shouldn't now talk about 'Independence within the UK' but I doubt they will for a couple of reasons:

1) One would imagine that when the real-world economic restraints are discussed in terms of a relationship to London rather than Brussels, there'll be a lot of rather disgruntled Nats.

2) It would be rather difficult, and almost certainly too late, for them to be doing so, given the rhetoric of previous years. Alex Salmond could be made to look rather foolish if he is reminded of his previous statements on the position.

It's unfortunate for the Nationalists because 'Independence within the UK' doesn't make any less sense than 'Independence in Europe' in terms of the monetary and fiscal restraints that come with being a member of a common market with a single monetary policy - but the latter didn't make much sense in the first place anyway, at least not in the way that it was sold by the SNP.

I'm repeating myself but I think it's a point worth driving home. It's been suggested to me that the SNP are rather enjoying themselves at the moment. I wouldn't know but I doubt it. They certainly shouldn't be because there are some uncomfortable times ahead for them as the rhetoric of the past collides with the present reality - and the more thoughtful members of the party, I think, realised this some time ago.

David Cameron on the riots and the general moral degradation of our society

2011-08-15T22:19:00.002+01:00

Courtesy of the Gruaniad, edited selectively - but not entirely inaccurately:

"Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort.

Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control."

Sentences without verbs. Typical PR-man bullshit. Like Blair - only worse. Despite - or perhaps because of - expensive private education.

Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off!

Oh, slipped a verb or three in there - on account of my bog-standard comprehensive education. The only sentence I lifted that broke continuity was this: "Behaving as if your choices have no consequences." Bankers? Uh, no. Anyway, what's this crime without punishment shit? I'm sure I read somewhere that some sad fucker got jailed for six months for nicking some water?

Cameron.

Gaping asshole.

Yes he is.

(Verb again - sorry!)

#ukriots: Defending Alex Salmond

2011-08-11T00:39:00.005+01:00

Difficult thing for me to do, what with not being a nationalist and taking the view that Salmond is not a political colossus who towers above the Scottish body politic but in fact something of an asshole. Still, he has a point in his comments about the English riots. Perhaps his mistake was to complain that the description of them as UK-wide was unfair. Rather, it is simply inaccurate.

I'm not sure what Salmond means by Scotland having a different society but the criticism of his comments is absolutely absurd. It has been described as the 'worst face of nationalism' by the Scottish Lib Dem leader - a man in need of some remedial history, if ever I've seen one.

It's not even the worst in terms of the tedious exchange of accusations that passes for debate in Scottish politics. Blaming all your own country's problems on a historic connection to another is boring, stupid and can get fairly unpleasant at times - but what Salmond is saying isn't even this. What he is saying is perfectly accurate. These are English riots. They have not happened in Scotland yet all the conditions that have been cited as factors are present here, not least in sunny Glasgow. So why not here? It is others who are too parochial and narrow-minded to ask why this is. World doesn't revolve round London, y'know.

Reflections on the English riots

2011-08-10T15:05:00.004+01:00

Like many people, I've been following the mayhem on Twitter. First it was the #Londonriots. Then as they spread, they became the #ukriots. Last thing I noticed on the beeb rolling strapline was more accurate: these are the English riots, with Scotland being trouble-free.

Now I'm going to look a bit of a knob if it kicks off in Glasgow tonight but I don't think it will and the mere fact that it hasn't yet should, I would have thought, prompted people to put down their broad-brushes, step away from their keyboards and think about about they are saying. Because regardless of the position on the political spectrum people occupy, if they had correctly identified the 'root causes', it should be happening in Glasgow.

For many on the left, the riots are a function of austerity, poverty, shit housing, unemployment and lack of opportunities. Or more specifically for some, the closure of youth clubs. Some people have had faith in the magical properties of youth clubs for as long as I can remember. Well, it's not as if we have full employment here with all our youths happily playing ping-pong so these factors are at best incomplete explanations.

Same goes for the right - with lack of discipline, a 'dependency-culture', family break-down and shortage of press-ups being identified as the usual suspects whenever something bad happens. But we have all this in Glasgow too.

The commentary rather gives the impression of being a wee bit like that which followed the Norwegian tragedy. Loads of pundits who claim to have identified the causes in the very things they've been banging on about for years and reading into a situation exactly what they want to see. Probably the most absurd and pathetic example of this is those internet-Tots presently finding something Arab Spring about a bunch of fuckwits stealing trainers.

And like the Norwegian tragedy, one gets the impression that people would be deeply unsatisfied with narrower, more mundane explanations. So why not Glasgow? Perhaps it's the weather? I'm not being entirely facetious. You don't get long hot summers of discontent in Scottish cities because you don't get long-hot summers. But more likely, these English riots have at their root stuff to do with gangs, ethnic minorities and their interaction with the police? Wouldn't claim to know what the answer is, but looking at more specific practical things is likely to be more helpful than people just whipping out their prejudices?

Not that I'm free from these myself, obviously. I want to vomit when people start bleating about the need to find out why people involve themselves in acts of 'communal self-harm', like they need therapy or something. My own view is that there's an amazing amount of bullshit smuggled into arguments under the cover of 'community'. Maybe if the rioters had been torching their own homes, it could be seen like this - but they haven't, have they? So it shouldn't. Why do people go on the rampage? Really have to insist that the right doesn't get a monopoly on having a pessimistic view of the human condition. People do this sort of thing because they are arseholes and because they can. As Chris says, you need structures where the the costs of rioting outweigh the benefits. The difference between left and right is the former traditionally does not see the costs solely in terms of punitive criminal justice. But the left has traditionally seen a role for criminal justice and it's a tradition worth maintaining. Or alternatively you could pretend a bunch of feral scumbags stealing DVD players are at the vanguard of the English revolution - if you want to go on looking like a complete tit, that it.

Civic vs cultural nationalism

2011-07-29T10:36:00.004+01:00

There was a curious article in Better Nation last week where Pete Wishart, the Nationalist MP for Perth and North Perthshire declares himself 'proud to be British' and will continue to be so even when (if) Scotland gains independence.

What he has in mind is the idea of Britain continuing as a notion of identity in much the same way Scandinavians see themselves as sharing aspects of a common culture, as well as a history and a geography, but have independent political institutions at the national level.

It's curious because this unequivocally is not what nationalism has been about historically, with Scottish nationalism being no exception. Simply put, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy that maintains the boundaries of the nation and the state should be congruent - and that what makes a nation has a great deal to do with culture.

Scotland does not have the different language that most nations have had as central to their sense of identity, which has led Scottish nationalists to focus on other aspects of culture, such as art, religion, literature, music, customs and so on.

Now Pete Wishart deserves credit for not maintaining the absurd suggestion that Scots have a completely different culture from the English but without this, one is left wondering why he has chosen to undermine what is arguably the central tenet of the nationalist credo?

My guess is this is just Wishart's way of addressing the SNP's elephant in the living room, which is that in all probability the Union will continue in some form or other and at an institutional level, not merely a cultural one.

In any event, even if we did have the more distinct culture of the nationalists' fantasy, I would still be left with the frustration also felt by the late Ernst Gellner who pointed out that despite the fact that the homogenous 'nation-state' has been more theoretical abstraction than historical reality, nationalists take their political theory of legitimacy as a given and assume that the business of explaining one's position is the sole responsibility of the other side. Being British means different things to different people. For me, one of its benefits is that I don't feel the need to insist on this fiction.

I think it's about time the argument was shifted. It's about time nationalists made the case for the Scotland they want to see - and they might start with a definition of what independence actually means. Warm words about a brave and exciting future are simply not good enough. People are, one assumes, going to be asked to express an opinion on practical policies. It isn't difficult to see why the SNP might want to avoid this issue because when you break it down, you are very quickly confronted with the limits that 'independence' is likely to operate within.

For example, the issue of monetary policy raises an interesting paradox here. Arguably the present Euro difficulties highlight the limits of both internationalism and nationalism. The former because the strains on the Euro are exacerbated by the fact that the EU has a supranational monetary policy but with no equivalent budget to obviate the inflexibility this brings. And the reason it doesn't have a common treasury is because the electorates in member states would not support it.

But it leaves the Nationalists with a question to answer. Do they really still think it's a sensible idea to join the Euro? One would hope not. But given Scotland's size, a completely new currency would simply become a satellite of another. The most sensible thing would obviously be to maintain monetary union with the UK for the foreseeable future. But this was not what the Nats imagined they were fighting for during the long years of opposition.

We could do with some sensible answers to problems like this, rather than going on about identity. Someone suggested to me that the Nationalists are really enjoying themselves at the moment. I'm not so sure. Sometimes collectively they strike me as a bit like Robert Redford in the Candidate. Having won against the odds, they're now saying, "So what do we do now?" That they're wasting time proposing legislation on sectarianism and alcohol and discussing identity rather than answering the big questions is telling.

___________

As a footnote to Wishart's notion that it's now ok to acknowledge a shared British culture, I noted with amusement that as well as minor details like the Industrial Revolution, he includes cultural achievements such as "great rock and pop bands." I hope he doesn't mean Coldplay - but it raised a smile because a friend of mine was at T in the Park recently. Coldplay were described as dreadfully pretentious and anodyne, as you might expect. The band he enjoyed most were Primal Scream playing in one of the big tents. Bobby Gillespie and the boys playing pumping rock and roll like it should be played to crazy Scots, most of whom were nearly as wasted as the lead singer. You couldn't get a more typically Scottish musical experience than that but for obvious reasons the Nats have preferred to pretend they spend their time listening to Runrig. Or maybe they really do listen to Runrig, which is almost as uncool as liking Coldplay.

Mass murder in an age of instant punditry

2011-07-28T23:08:00.006+01:00

On the Norwegian tragedy, Chris Dillow writes that, "[C]omment about Breivik tells us more about the commenter than Breivik."

If so, these terrible events and the response to them has something very depressing to tell us about the state of the average commentator.

First up, there was the instant imputation of this to Al-Qaeda or some other Islamist terrorist group. Now obviously this shouldn't have been done and one would hope that the 'experts' that did so have the grace to be a little embarrassed by now.

But the corresponding reaction wasn't exactly the model of reason either. "Ooh, they've blamed jihadists, the Islamaphobes!" - as if Islamist terrorists wouldn't dream of doing such a thing.

I was also surprised that no-one thought to make a point about the nature of our 24/7 rolling news culture. Someone sticks a microphone in front of some academic who researches this sort of thing, says something like, "So, Professor Anorak, you're an expert on all things that explode: who do you think might have been responsible for this?"

Did people really think he was going to say, "Don't have a clue, mate - we'll just have to wait and see, won't we?"

Then when it emerged that this was Oklahoma, rather than 9/11, 7/7 or Madrid? Let's be clear about this: in the face of such carnage and grief, what moved most people to hit the keyboards was the impulse to use human suffering to score points against their internet enemies. "The Oslo terrorist cited Melanie Phillips in his manifesto", declares Liberal Conspiracy.

Yeah - but as Chris Dillow points out, even if these sorts of massacres weren't so vanishingly rare, it would still be difficult to establish cause and effect: does reading Mel make you lose your damn mind, or do you read her and find yourself nodding in agreement because you're already fucking metal? (I'm paraphrasing, naturally.)

But so far, the prize for most tenuous link to the Norwegian massacre goes to Chris Bertram below one of the Flying Rodent's characteristically objective posts. On the whole 'creating the atmosphere where homicidal rampages are more likely' theme, thus saith Mr Bertram:

"The "decent left" shouldn't be let off the hook either since they legitimized some of these lunatics by linking to them, giving interviews to FrontPageMag etc, and generally making them look more respectable than they are. Case in point: Professor Norm, who took down his blogroll link to Gates of Vienna some time shortly after the Norwegian massacres."

So check your links list, boys and girls; you never know if you might be inadvertently killing people with them.

Or alternatively, have a little decorum - and think before you speak, or rather type. To my mind, this from David Osler is one of the very few offerings on the subject that shows any evidence of someone who has done just that. You may disagree but I don't think that necessarily makes you a Nazi.

Privacy and liberty revisited

2011-07-15T12:14:00.006+01:00

Gratifying to read so many articles for so many days referring to the 'scandal now engulfing' News International. The closure of the News of the World looks like what some called it at the time - an act of desperation. I've nothing particular to add to what has already been said but I have been struck by what has not been said, which is that invading privacy is no big deal or indeed that privacy doesn't really exist in the modern world.

Because this was the line from some on the left when it was HM Government that was doing the snooping. Here's two articles from that ilk, which I distinctly recall being linked in an approving way in various quarters.

Rafael Behr made the absurd argument that since we invade our own privacy all the time, it cannot have any real value to us.

Connor Gearty took a similar line with a couple of rather unpleasant add-ons, which included the ad hominem notion that only posh people trying to protect privilege could possibly be concerned with such bourgeois and passé notions like privacy.

I took issue with these nasty and ahistorical articles at the time but I'm wondering if they are still prepared to repeat this 'fetishizing of liberty' cant or be so dismissive of privacy when it News International rather than a 'progressive' Government that has been doing the spying?

Sectarianism and the National Secular Society

2011-07-03T20:57:00.008+01:00

From newsnetscotland.com:

"The National Secular Society (NSS) has submitted papers to Holyrood demanding an end to taxpayers’ money being used to fund religion-based education north of the Border.

Officials have insisted a separate schooling system for Catholic children is helping to fuel religious divisions and the kind of tensions witnessed during Old Firm matches.

And, in written submissions to two parliamentary committees, they said it was now time to stop children being segregated in school because of their faith."

Exactly the sort of thing you might expect me to support. I do in general principle but I have a couple of concerns with this particular campaign.

One is the naivety. If you suggest that there is a connection between separate Catholic schools and religious bigotry in Scottish society, you might as well stand up and shout, "I am Oliver Cromwell." As noted in the piece...

"John Lamont MSP, the Scottish Tory justice spokesman, sparked anger after accusing the west of Scotland school system of overseeing 'state-sponsored conditioning of sectarian attitudes'.
[...]
"[T]he Catholic Church rejected the remarks as 'inflammatory and insensitive'."

But my main concern is that while the NSS is trying to bend it towards its own agenda, at base it just accepts the logic of Salmond with his distinctively Scottish version of a 'Dangerous Dogs' moral panic legislative agenda. Keith Porteous Wood is quoted as accepting that, "Sectarianism is getting worse." But where is the evidence for this? A couple of bad-tempered Old Firm games, lunatics sending bullets in the post? Football is getting worse, perhaps but sectarianism is in long-term decline. The Orange Walk in Glasgow is, I'm happy to say, a shadow of its former self. Again, as the original piece reports...

"Police made 32 arrests yesterday for a 'variety of offences' at an annual Orange Order Parade. Only six were for sectarian offences as 8,000 people from Glasgow’s 182 lodges marched through the city."

I'm not sure if utilitarian arguments are the best basis on which to argue against religious schooling anyway - but if the National Secular Society are determined to used them, they should come up with better ones than the one they're using here.

Update: Bish Joe Devine then...

"Catholic education is "divisive" and contributes to the problem of "sectarianism", according to a Scottish bishop.

But Joseph Devine, Bishop of Motherwell, told the Sunday Herald newspaper it was sometimes "a price worth paying"."

And now...

""The claim that Catholic schools are the cause of sectarianism is offensive and untenable," said the bishop, also president of the Catholic Education Commission.

"There has never been any evidence produced by those hostile to Catholicism to support such a malicious misrepresentation."

Take your pick.

Via: The Flying Rodent

An interview with Johann Hari

2011-07-02T23:42:00.004+01:00

My goodness, the memory space on this computer is groaning under the weight of articles about the Johann Hari plagiarism debacle, I fear the thing's going to give out on me. They range from the more forensic allegations of cut and paste to the more wide ranging "J'accuse Hari of being a lazy bastard who doesn't do any research" variety.

I sought to get to the bottom of this so I tracked Hari down, now holed up in a high-security compound on the outskirts of Greenock. Johann, looking disheveled and twitchy - but much slimmer than he had been the last time I saw him on Newsnight Review - agreed to this interview.

"Awlright, big chap - how's it goin'?", I said in the Glasgow dialect. I was trying to put him at ease. I remembered his mother was from Glasgow, Or was she? Hmmm... Anyway, he directed us to the lounge, I sat and he poured drinks.

"Would you like to smoke?", he asked.

A rare courtesy in this politically-correct age, I thought.

"Don't mind if I do", I replied - and whipped out a Cuban cigar the size of Havana and started puffing away like a maniac.

"Soooo - what d'ya want to ask me?", asked Johann, tugging at his bottom lip pensively.

I said, "Well, I'm really not that interested in a whole lot of the stuff that's been written about this case, to be honest. This might be a bit of a relief to you? Or perhaps not. No, not really that interested in whether you took ecstasy or not. No point in going over old ground, know what I mean 'nat?

"There's really one question that sums it up for me. You're a big Chavez fan, yes? Can't say I share this view but each to their own and all that. No, it's really this: yer pal has cancer, apparently - and has had a wee operation.

"Now, this is a matter of no small importance, given the nature of these regimes and the problems they have with succession, as I'm sure you know. So the question is this: if you went to interview him now, how the fuck could we possibly believe a goddamn word you're saying?"

Johann caught my gaze and then looked away saying nothing, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

Was it, as he claimed, the piles that made him squirm so - or was it the guilt? I'll let the reader decide...

SNP: Fast-tracking stupidity

2011-06-22T00:34:00.006+01:00

From the Herald on the Scottish Government's proposed 'anti-sectarianism' laws:

"The estimated costs of introducing new laws targeting hate crime at football matches are "way off the mark", according to a leading police chief."

Yeah, but suggesting that the problem with the proposed legislation is the cost is a criticism that rather misses the target as well.

The problem with this proposed legislation is that it is stupid, illiberal and unjust. Kick someone's head in and you'll get eighteen months, if the judge was feeling particularly strict; say you're going to kick someone's head in because they're an Orange/Fenian bastard and you could get five years in the 'New Scotland'. Actually, seems you don't even need to go that far:

"Football supporters could be jailed for singing God Save the Queen or Flower of Scotland under the SNP's new law to crack down on sectarianism.

Making the sign of the cross or singing Rule Britannia could also be regarded as an offence under certain circumstances once the legislation comes into force next football season.

Community safety minister Roseanna Cunningham yesterday said that such songs and gestures could be regarded as offensive acts when she was questioned about the SNP's anti-sectarian bill being fast-tracked through parliament."

Community safety minister? Jesus wept! But the purpose of this is not to make an easy point about free speech; support this and you obviously don't believe in it - period. But if it wasn't this it would be something else, will be something else, just as stupid and illiberal in a constitutional framework where a voting system that was supposed to avoid overall majorities has delivered one in a unicameral system with no revising second chamber.

The other point is, why has our new strident majority government opted to make a priority of this and excessive drinking? For these are both problems that almost everyone agrees are Bad Things yet at the same time are features of Scottish life where it is doubtful that government has the ability to change without very drastic measures.

I would doubt, for example, that Salmond & Co would go ahead with restrictions on alcohol consumption of Scandinavian proportions. As for sectarianism, it is in any event a much-exaggerated problem. Glasgow 'Belfast without the guns'? Please don't be mislead; the sort of people who say this are exactly the same kind of people who describe only moderately authoritarian politicians as 'Nazis'. But in as far as it is a problem, we already know the Nationalists are unwilling to countenance measures that might actually do some good - such as eliminating religion from schools.

So what are the SNP playing at? I have to confess, I don't know but it seems to me that they're behaving like Blair did when he was first elected; huge majority yet still falling into the opposition default? Or in the case of Salmond, like he's still in minority government. Or maybe he's playing the long-game, avoiding controversial issues like the local income tax and keeping his powder dry for the forth-coming constitutional confrontation? But whatever happens, one is beginning to suspect that in the 'New Scotland' being Scottish will be elevated as a virtue above boring conventions such as the independence of the judiciary or legislative scrutiny.

Michael Gove and school standards

2011-06-19T15:42:00.003+01:00

It's a dispiriting time to be a teacher in Scotland at the moment. CoSLA, the umbrella group that represents the local authorities who employ those of us who work in the state sector, are engaged in a concerted onslaught on teachers' pay and conditions. That some of the changes to the latter will not save local government a red cent rather reinforces the impression that budgetary restraints are simply being used as a cover for teacher-bashing.

Meanwhile, 'union militancy' is, sadly, in rather short supply. The main teachers' union rather gives the impression of having completely lost sight of whose interests they are supposed to be defending. Being not very good at one's job is one thing but one really does despair when we are being represented by people who don't even appear to know what their job is.

Represented by people who don't know what their job is and working for people who don't know what my job is; CoSLA explicitly state here (p 12) that they do not consider that the main job of a teacher is to teach children. It's grim stuff, which was why I was beginning to wonder if some of the ideas coming from down south might not turn out to be rather better? It's certainly difficult to get all misty-eyed about local government if you live in this part of the world, I can tell you - so maybe schools being released from council control might not be such a bad idea?

I don't know but the problem with autonomy from local control is that it leaves the institution with nothing standing between it and central government - and the latter is at least as capable of being as stupid, capricious and belligerent as councils, which brings us to some of Michael Gove's remarks over the last week or so.

First he suggested that schools have 'tough targets' for GCSE passes imposed on them. Those failing to reach this new hurdle will face regime-change. Even one of Gove's most uncritical groupies has argued that this is arbitrary and unfair.

Then more recently he has suggested, at the most inappropriate time imaginable, that standards at the exam board aren't good enough.

Now, I have no idea whether exams in England are getting easier or not but that Gove can't see the obvious contradiction between these two positions is profoundly depressing. We can identify schools as 'under-performing' by the proportion of their intake who pass GCSEs, says Gove. However, if they improve on this record, we already know he would take this as evidence that examination standards have fallen because 'rigorous' exams can be identified by the proportion that fail them.

Here the attitude of Gove towards standards in schools is typical of the general Tory view, which in turn very much like their attitude to crime. Academic standards are falling and crime is rising - and whenever some objective statistical measure suggests this might not always be the case, the veracity of the measures themselves are called into question because what we are dealing with here are positions that are articles of faith rather than observations of how the world actually is.

On Rambo movies for Guardian readers

2011-06-15T19:56:00.004+01:00

I was watching another in this genre, this time with Hillary Swank in Freedom Riders.

You may not have seen it but you know the script: naive but enthusiastic teacher takes on a job in grim inner-city gang-ridden hell-hole and wins her charges over with the power of commitment and the ability to see their true potential. Meets the usual resistance from cynical establishment. 'Based on a true story', yet almost completely unbelievable. You know the sort of thing.

Now I've discussed this before but neglected to mention an absolutely crucial ingredient to this genre: ever noticed these teachers only ever seem to have one class?

University fees and the celebrity premium

2011-06-07T00:24:00.003+01:00

For a university education, it is being suggested that it should be 100% more than those English universities who choose to go for the maximum possible under this government's new tuition fee regime.

I don't have too much to say about this except to point to one or two rather good pieces elsewhere in the blogosphere.

There's some perfectly calibrated contempt from David Osler:

"MOST reviewers considered ‘The Expendables’ to be a pretty mediocre film, as action flicks go. But there was no arguing with the box office pulling power of a cast that included Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke.

I detect something of the same thinking at work when I read the names of the academic rock stars lined up to teach at the New College of the Humanities, which opens up in London next year. Students will benefit from one to one tutorials from the likes of AC Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Niall Ferguson.

Short of raising Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell back from the dead, it is hard to imagine how the founders could have assembled a more bunch of profs more attractive to a target demographic of extremely bright rich kids."

A small point of disagreement, though. Rich kids this project may appeal to. By definition, it can only appeal to rich kids - but could we really describe them as bright? (Or 'Brights', in Dawkins' deeply cringe-inducing epithet.) I take leave to doubt it, which brings me to Paul's comments on the subject:

"Big famous names are not the same as good, serious educators of university minds. If you go to TDU thinking you’ll get a good education just because some famous people are there, you’re a fool. "

A fool and his money are soon parted, indeed. But to strike an optimistic note, I'm wondering if it might turn out that there aren't so many of these as one might suppose. My father was an educational academic and used to talk contemptuously of private schools that were 'schools for thick rich-kids'. Now, the experience - in Scotland anyway - is that these schools have struggled to survive, many having suffered death by amalgamation. I'm wondering if the fate of this enterprise might not turn out to be something similar? They may find that there are simply not enough thick rich kids to go around? If I'm wrong, it would be a profoundly depressing development - this X-Factor meets academia.

Labour in opposition

2011-05-25T00:30:00.002+01:00

Are not doing very well. Given that the single biggest issue is the economy and the government's fiscal response, they have failed to make plain one very simple point: reducing government borrowing and cutting government spending, while closely related, are not the same thing - as is becoming increasingly obvious.

On the Strauss-Kahn case

2011-05-22T22:12:00.005+01:00

In the corner of this Time cover, you'll see in tiny black print that this story is about the accused bomber Timothy McVeigh - published as it was prior to his trial and subsequent execution.

That the crimes which Strauss-Kahn has been accused of bear no comparison to this goes without saying but I'm using it because I don't believe for a minute that the 'discomfort' that so many people have told us they're feeling in relation to the indictment of Strauss-Kahn have much to do with a general discomfort with the experience of suspects and their treatment by the media or the American criminal justice system prior to a criminal prosecution.

It is difficult to avoid the impression that it is the position that Strauss-Kahn occupied in the French hierarchy and in world politics when this allegation was made that is the source of all this 'unease'. Henri Bernard-Levi has made himself ridiculous in the eyes of many, but he has done so by merely expressing what I suspect a number of people really feel:

"This morning, I hold it against the American judge who, by delivering him to the crowd of photo hounds, pretended to take him for a subject of justice like any other. [Emphasis mine]"

Imagine doing such a thing! Regardless of the outcome of this case, it's worth considering the possibility that this represents a kind of progress? I feel the need to share this because I've read a fair bit about the case and have been struck by the sheer scale of 'unease' out there. It hasn't quite reached Bin Laden proportions - but still... A friend of mine put it to me this way. Say what you like about liberal-democratic capitalism; is there, or has there ever been, any other system where the word of a chambermaid would have been taken seriously in a case like this? Or, one could add, where a chambermaid would have even dared? I'll leave you with Lord Acton's most famous phrase - with the interesting bits left in...:

"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. [Emphasis mine]

'Independence-lite'

2011-05-14T13:01:00.003+01:00

The problem with education in this our two countries...

2011-05-13T21:27:00.004+01:00

The answer to this varies a great deal, depending on whom you read, although those taking a regular interest in this will note that there's always one single big problem rather than numerous small ones - the latter being altogether too mundane and demanding on the attention for the average online pundit.

For some the core of the problem is the dead hand of the state. 'Producer-capture' has given us schools controlled by unions who are invariably described as 'Jurassic', or some other epithet used to indicate the state of being on the wrong side of History, and 'trendy teachers' who distribute condoms to teenagers in a value-free environment and think all must win prizes.

Or it could be the influence of ideologically-driven reactionaries who want to pursue the twin objectives of returning to the 1950s whilst turning the school system into a supermarket - contradictory goals reconciled with the assumption that the liberated consumers will use their new-found freedom to make the right choice.

Or it could be a bit of both but I'm increasingly of the view that it is neither for reasons I'll attempt to explain in my usual cack-handed way...

My country first. Unlike my own pusillanimous union, I see that the SSTA has decided not to take the line of least resistance to the Scottish Government's plan for pay cuts and reduced conditions of service for teachers. And amongst the grievances are included a criticism of the new curriculum as not being 'fit for purpose'. This is a repetition of a previous line, which was echoed by one of the curriculum's architects, Keir Bloomer:

"Keir Bloomer, a member of the team that created the Curriculum for Excellence, described it as "not good enough". The former council leader and director of education was particularly critical of the literacy element, calling it "complete nonsense".

Complete nonsense it undoubtedly is but to reproduce it for your amusement might distract from what is for me the most important piece of information in the excerpt above.

This is that the gentleman making these remarks is a former council leader and director of education. He had nothing to say when he was doing the job. Perhaps he only formed this opinion when he was approaching retirement but the more likely explanation is that he didn't say anything earlier for the same reason everyone doesn't say anything if they are in a similar position. You don't spend all that time climbing a hierarchy in order to say things that would immediately identify yourself as not belonging there.

This is the problem with projects like the Curriculum for Excellence. They will be a mixture of good ideas and bad, will have elements that work and some that will not. It is not that these are difficult to distinguish, it is that the institutions through which changes like this are mediated simply do not allow for this process.

Because it gains a bureaucratic momentum that is difficult to stop and, above all, they become projects in which people have invested political capital to the extent that the practical functioning of the initiative becomes secondary to survival of it as a partisan political project.

What is happening south of the border with the whole 'free-school' plan illustrates this point. As a way into this, I'll make a token effort to be even-handed. There are in Gove's plans one or two things that strike one as being reasonable ideas. For example, the idea of having five core subjects is from a Scottish perspective uncontroversial since this has been the practice here for many years.

On the other hand, from what this outside observer can gather from any concrete proposals suggested thus far, there's more than one or two elements of the free school plan that don't make any sense to me at all. Perhaps it's not representative but there seems to me to be an obvious contradiction between insisting that free-schools will have no academic entry requirements and suggesting - no, guaranteeing - that the "vast majority of...pupils will get 5 grade Cs at GCSE in academic subjects", as Ms Birbalsingh does for her proposed "Michaela Community School".

However, to focus on this would be to miss the point I am trying to make. This excerpt is from an article entitled, "How to dispel the myths surrounding free schools". Even if this were possible, I somehow doubt the pages of the Telegraph is the place where this is likely to happen, being as it is a space to preach to the choir rather than the unconverted.

In some respects it has already ceased to become important whether free-schools are a good idea or not because they have become a partisan political project and people will, have already, assumed positions accordingly. People will oppose this Conservative plan because it is a Conservative plan, with rightwingers occupying the defensive trench for exactly the same reason. Political capital has already been invested in this and its survival has likely already become more important than whether it actually works or not. Wheels looking a little wobbly on the NHS reform wagon so better make sure this one stays on course... But the felt need to maintain this course necessitates the sidelining of those voices that might carry the practical knowledge that might come in handy if they want to avoid the potholes that would impede the journey.

Enough with the clunking metaphors. Education in our countries has been a political football for as long as anyone can remember. Some of this is unavoidable in a representative democracy but in Britain it is felt more acutely than elsewhere in Europe. At the risk of producing my own monism to replace those on sale elsewhere, I would suggest this is simply because our educational systems are more centralised than in most other countries. Any proposed reform would work better if there was genuine decentralisation at almost every level. Central government should back away from local government, who in turn should back away from the management of individual schools. I would go on to suggest that school managers should also desist from attempting to micro-manage individual departments but they are but creatures of a system that gives them little incentive to do so.

When the music's over...

2011-05-09T23:40:00.003+01:00

It bears repeating that it is difficult to underestimate the scale of the SNP's victory on Thursday. Now that Annabel Goldie has decided to quit, this is an election rout that has toppled the leaders of the three main parties of opposition in Scotland. The interesting question is what is Salmond and the SNP going to do with all this power?

I don't mean to rain on their parade... Actually, I do. I am Scottish, after all - and despite what a number of commentators would have you believe, the SNP forming a parliamentary majority on less than 50% of the popular vote might represent a number of significant changes in the Scottish polity but taking it as indicative of a transformation of our national character is a little premature, to say no more than that.

When the music's over, there will be a number of challenges that will present themselves to the nationalists sooner or later.

They will no longer be able to blame inaction on some of their 'flagship' policies on their minority status. The reality of the situation is that the much hailed 'competence' of the previous administration was based on cautious, crowd-pleasing measures. Now that this is no longer the case, I'll be interested to see if they press ahead with some of their more controversial plans.

For instance, policies like a local income tax and the minimum pricing of alcohol may or may not be a good idea in and of themselves but I would have thought that their most immediate effect if enacted would be to take money out of the pockets of the median voter. The council tax is unfair but the local income tax, as well as being very costly to introduce, is likely to squeeze couples with children. They'd be wise to let this one slide, in my view.

There is also the question of how their policies are going to be paid for. The election campaign was notable for the way all parties, with the possible exception of the Conservatives, avoided this issue. Regardless of how desirable, how sustainable within the current fiscal framework are free tuition fees, for example?

But a re-arrangement of the fiscal framework forms only part of the SNP vision, which brings me to their most serious challenge. What do they actually mean by independence? While it would be unwise to predict the outcome of a referendum and foolish, as numerous people have already suggested, to underestimate the political cunning of Alec Salmond, it is surely extremely unlikely that Scotland would become an independent nation-state after the pattern of the 19th and 20th century model with the accompanying trapping of a separate monetary policy, army, border controls and head of state?

No matter how effective the SNP machine is, I still can't imagine the Scottish electorate being persuaded to disengage from institutions which - no matter how much people might wish it otherwise - they have a certain degree of affection for. I doubt this would even be offered as a choice. The model of 'independence' that will be offered is likely to include the retention of the Queen as Head of State, monetary union with England and, much more controversially, continued participation in the British Armed Forces. The question is, will this satisfy the nationalists who imagined separation to conform more closely to the picture of 'divorce' painted by Labour's scare-mongers? It remains to be seen.

The woes of Scottish Labour (addendum)

2011-05-08T10:53:00.002+01:00

Here's a couple of pieces reinforcing points made in the previous post.

As well as losing the election in general, Labour have lost a few of their more experienced (I decline to call them 'heavy hitters') MSPs.

This needn't have happened if they had entered their names on the list as well as standing as constituency MSPs - but they didn't because they took their re-election for granted:

"Labour also made one other mistake leading to the demise of some of their heavy hitters such as Andy Kerr and Tom McCabe.

They are so used to winning first-past-the-post in places like Glasgow and Lanarkshire, they do not put their names on the regional list. They might want to review the policy and take a lesson from their arch-rivals.

Nicola Sturgeon was a comfortable winner in Glasgow Southside but she would still have returned to Holyrood as number one on the party’s Glasgow regional list."

And on the notion that Labour still see Holyrood pretty much like a large version of the old Strathclyde Regional Council:

"A herd of wild rhinoceroses would not get Jim Murphy or Douglas Alexander to give up their careers at Westminster. I really don't see that happening," the source said.

"We have failed as a group in the Scottish Parliament and it is up to us"."

In any event, I wouldn't have thought Murphy or Alexander would have helped matters much.

The question for me isn't so much, who will lead Labour in Scotland but who on earth would even want to?

The geeks shall inherit the earth - but not yet

2011-05-07T21:37:00.006+01:00

In the world of IT, for example, they already rule - but when it comes to the reform of the voting system, it seems they're a little ahead of the zeitgeist. Now the referendum debacle is over, they'll be reaching for some kind of explanation. Here's Tom Clark, for example, with 10 reasons why the Yes2AV campaign lost.

It's a surprisingly long article that at no point mentions some of the unbelievable toss-pottery coming out of the Yes camp as a mitigating factor. Keep telling yourselves you only lost because your opponents fought dirty if you must - but in the meantime I trust we've seen an end to posts that conform, more or less exactly, to the following template:

"I'm a supporter of AV. However, my enthusiasm for democratic renewal has not blinded me to the obvious fact that most people, and especially those who disagree with me, are substantially less intelligent than I am - so I'm going to explain how AV works so that even a simpleton could follow it.

Imagine there's a group of friends who during discussion when they're slightly sauced in the pub on a Saturday afternoon come up with three options of what they could do in the evening. The two from Liverpool want to drink more, get a gramme of coke and then if they can't pull on their own merits, get a couple of hookers. The three from Islington would rather go for a meal and discuss the future of the Middle East. It's difficult to know what the four Glaswegians want because they're already so pissed they can hardly talk but it seems they want a kebab, and then vomit in a mini-cab.

So here's what they do: they order their preferences..."

Oh fuck off! Honestly!

Ed Miliband won on AV, for crying out loud. That should have been enough to end the argument. But since I feel the need to hammer the nails into the coffin of this ridiculous affair, consider this: Salmond has won an overall majority within a system specifically designed to prevent such a thing happening. Imagine what things would look like today if we Scots had adopted AV, with its well-documented tendency to exaggerate landslides, as a mechanism for choosing our representatives. Scotland said no to AV too, by the way. Despite suggestions that we were more likely to favour reform in general, turns out that we could tell the difference between the PR we have already and the slightly different majoritarian system we were being offered as a sop to Tory supporting Liberal Democrats.

#SP11 The fallout

2011-05-07T16:49:00.008+01:00

I'm increasingly of the view that the notion of a 'progressive' or centre-left majority amongst the British electorate is a dangerous myth but in any event what is beyond question is that the centre-left unionist parties in Scotland were dealt a crushing blow in the Holyrood elections.

Naturally both parties will need to ask themselves what went wrong and I see the leaders of both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have decided to quit. Given that no-one believes that this in itself is going to be enough, there remains the question of what to do next?

A number of possibilities will present themselves to both parties. Some of these will be more sensible than others but for Labour there's one I sincerely hope they immediately reject as absurd, which is to simply pretend that it hasn't happened.

I doubt they will, doubt they can - but there's enough rumblings from Labour supporters that are indicative of a failure to grasp the scale of what has happened here. Such as protesting that the Labour vote didn't fall that much from the last election. You wouldn't have thought it needed pointing out but apparently it does: Labour lost the last election and has now lost this one more spectacularly than anyone imagined possible. Salmond's party has won an overall majority within an electoral system that was specifically designed to avoid one party dominating the legislature.

Labour has failed to improve on its already inadequate share of the national vote and crucially has failed to win over disgruntled Lib Dems who seem to have transferred their support to the SNP almost wholesale.

I'm concerned about the manner in which commentators treat Labour and Liberal Democrat voters as a near homogeneous block because it should be clear by now that people vote for these parties for different reasons and when they switch, or stay at home, this is for different reasons also.

Having said that, while both unionist centre-left parties have different problems, many of them are attributable to the fact that they are unionists. I don't mean this in the way a nationalist would. All the evidence thus far would suggest that while the SNP won the election, most Scots do not favour independence. Rather it is the way their experience as unionist parties has influenced their structure and dynamic.

This is obviously easier to explain in relation to the Liberal Democrats. Their near annihilation on Thursday is largely on account of the national party entering into coalition with the Conservatives in Westminster - a party never popular in Scotland at the best of times and even less now.

It is unfair in as far as it has not been the Scottish Lib Dems MSPs who have done this. In Scotland they have stuck to their policy on no tuition fees for students, for example, and have been in coalition with Labour twice.

But they can't be cast as victims entirely. In the unforgiving world of electoral politics it would have been strategically wise for them to distance themselves from Westminster Liberal Democrats and their official policy on the constitution of the UK should have provided them a context in which to do so: they are supposed to be a federal party; they should have cast themselves as the Scottish alternative to the Westminster Yes-men to whom so many voters have said no.

Labour's problems as a unionist entity have a longer history and deeper structural roots. Where to begin? The Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray during the election campaign bleated that it should be about 'policies and not personalities'. Unfortunately, Labour in Scotland has a poverty in both of these rather useful electoral commodities. It is certainly true that the SNP ran an unashamedly presidential campaign; the list entry on the ballot invited electors to vote for "SNP: Alec Salmond for First Minister".

Here it is important for opponents of the SNP to take account of just what a substantial politician Alec Salmond is. Jeff from Better Nation reminds us that as a party leader he has out-lasted Thatcher, Ashdown, Major, Blair, Brown... And now he has a parliamentary majority. If he's feeling a little like Moses today, who could blame him?

But Scottish Labour would be unwise to listen to the likes of Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian who while rightly identifying personality as something of increasing importance in politics, rather overstates his case, at least with regards to Scotland. If personality is so important, why didn't the Greens do better? Pat Harvie is an attractive personality who has performed well. So is Anabel Goldie - but the Tories did badly on Thursday too. Or if you were feeling cruel you could ask: if personality matters so much, why did Labour do so well?

Because Gray was a disaster but here's the problem Labour needs to address itself to: they were unable to do much better than him because of the historic path of ambition taken by people within the Scottish Labour movement. Pre-devolution the brightest and the best went to Westminster, the also-rans ended up in Strathclyde Regional Council.

Strathclyde is no longer with us and now we have a parliament in Edinburgh but with the notable exception of the late Donald Dewar, Scottish Labour politicians have behaved pretty much as if nothing has changed.

And as for policy? Dear Lord. I hope there is as we speak a few standard textbooks being revised with footnotes. FPTP leads to coalition government while one elected under AMS gives the first party an overall majority. As for the stuff about campaigns not affecting the outcome of elections that much; Labour were slightly ahead when it started but lost because said campaign was largely a disgrace.

Let me give you a personal example. Mandatory jail terms for people carrying knives is not doable. No need to take my word for it; according to my colleague, Frank McAveety MSP said the same to a class when he was invited to speak to students at the school where I teach in the East End of Glasgow.

Whether the class remembered the lesson I can't say but I do know the Labour party did not because I received through my door a leaflet with this given as the sole reason why I should vote Labour and not SNP.

When you combine this with the other more general constitutional scare-mongering, I think it would be fair to summarise Labour's 2011 Holyrood campaign as follows: vote SNP and your granny will need a passport to travel to England and in the interregnum if you vote SNP, it's much more likely your granny will be stabbed.

To describe Labour's campaign as 'lacklustre', as some have, is too generous. I think lazy, nasty, mean-spirited and just downright stupid would be better terms. I have to be perfectly honest and tell you that while I voted Labour - in the constituency vote only - I'm slightly embarrassed about it.

Labour have promised to 'listen'. They said that the last time they lost. I'd rather they do some arithmetic and worked out that they have never had, nor are ever likely to have in the future, what they assume they should have, which is the support of the majority of the Scottish people.

This assumption of the right to rule is Scottish Labour's problem. It is this, the Scottish contagion, incubated under the long years of opposition to the Conservatives in the eighties and nineties, that Brown imported into the Westminster situation and lead ultimately to the downfall of Labour at the last election. I'm wondering if there isn't some of this behind Labour's interest in constitutional reform? This never used to concern the party - until they started losing elections. Rather than addressing the problem, they played the nationalist card with a small 'n'. It's a matter for another post entirely but those who support voting reform because they prefer to imagine that the constitutional arrangement is somehow fixed against them, rather than confronting the simple fact that they're just not that popular, play this game at their peril. Labour did it in the long years of opposition to Conservative rule and now the chickens have well and truly come home to roost. Scottish Labour needs to address themselves to this or face a slow grinding decline into electoral oblivion.

Election post-mortem (snack-size)

2011-05-06T19:56:00.004+01:00

I'm hearing that it's a somewhat mediocre result for Labour in England and good in Wales. But in Scotland it's a disaster. The SNP have an overall majority - elected under a proportional system.

I'm getting the sense that people in England haven't grasped the scale of the rout here. Some both sides of the border have pointed out that the share of the Labour vote hasn't actually fallen that much since last time. You know, the time when they lost...

Imagine African-Americans and Jews started abandoning the Democrats in droves and you'll begin to have an idea of the earthquake of re-alignment taking place here. The problem for Labour is that proportionately they rely on working class voters more than the Democrats do on African-Americans and Jews.

I'll leave this for now because I'm going to the pub before the SNP raises the price of alcohol.

P.S. Voting reform? I'll have something rational and considered to say later maybe but I don't feel like that now and I apologise in advance for any offence caused but you proponents of AV have just been wasting everyone's fucking time!

Bin Laden, legality, 'execution' and proportion

2011-05-06T00:32:00.005+01:00

Bin Laden was 'executed' - and because this is the case, according to a whole lot of people who weren't there, it makes the Americans as bad as those they are supposed to be fighting. Well, if they'd hijacked a couple of passenger jets and flown them into Bin Laden's compound, possibly...

The execution commentary was as predictable as it is copious but this one from Dan Rodricks caught my eye where he quotes Geoffrey Robertson QC approvingly:

"Justice means taking someone to court, finding them guilty upon evidence and sentencing them," Mr. Robertson told an Australian television network. "This man has been subject to summary execution, and what is now appearing after a good deal of disinformation from the White House is it may well have been a cold-blooded assassination."

For an educated man to give such a narrow legalistic definition of justice is quite surprising. Well, maybe not - he is a lawyer, after all. But because he is, the internal inconsistency here should have been obvious, surely? An assassination is, amongst other things, a summary execution so Geoffrey Robertson is basically saying Bin Laden was definitely executed in what may well have been an execution.

There's a lot one could say about this and the whole loss of proportion surrounding the notion that the entire moral fabric of the American republic defends on the pristine legality of this operation but I'll confine myself to one observation at this stage: isn't the burden of evidence supposed to fall on the accuser?

(And in case anyone seriously imagines a capture followed by a trial would have made any difference to those for whom America can do nothing but evil, check this out - and note the date.)

Pre-election thoughts

2011-05-04T23:53:00.006+01:00

The cause for AV seems set to lose - deservedly so, in my view. I think perhaps one of the most mystifying comments I've read on this topic is Norm's suggestion that supporters of AV may well be defeated but can draw consolation from the poor quality of the arguments made by the No campaign. If the No campaign has made such poor arguments, what does this say about the Yes campaign? That they made even worse ones? Or perhaps they think opponents of AV are merely stupid? I suspect the latter but either way, how this could be a source of consolation is beyond me. (I accept there's one or two other possibilities that I'll leave for now...)

The arguments have been fairly appalling on both sides - which is why I hope the ultimate winner is the No2Referendums campaign. A whole lot of issues that have nothing to do with the matter in hand have been collapsed into the question? That's what happens with referendums. A polarised argument with exaggerated and downright false claims made by both sides? Artificially simplifying and then polarising a debate is a well-documented feature of referendums - why did anyone think it was going to be different this time? Other features commonly associated with them have been present here too, such as an attempt to paper-over fundamental fractures within a Cabinet. If there's any consolation to be had from all this, it is for me that this shabby and demotic strategy clearly hasn't worked.

When proponents of voting reform aren't busy being patronising themselves, they like to accuse their opponents of doing the same to the electorate. How patronising to Scots, I heard Chris Huhne say, to even imagine changes in the voting system might confuse voters. I'm wondering what other explanation he has for the astonishingly high proportion of spoiled ballots there were in the last Holyrood election?

Labour also seem set to lose in this election. Again, deservedly so, in my view. I have had literature from the Labour party posted to me that is so populist, scaremongering and mean-spirited that it would probably make Norman Tebbit blanche. I'm minded not to vote for them were it not for the raft of nationalist candidates on the ballot - although I have a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that there's not a few Scottish unionist voters who will cast their votes for the SNP this time round.

Last, and least, we have the carnival candidate for the Respect party, Mr George Galloway. Here's his election pitch:

His concern for the state of Glasgow's roads is expressed with a certain degree of hyperbole, as we've come to expect. It's not that this concern isn't justified - but it is precisely this kind of mundane issue that hasn't been the sort on which he has built his reputation, to say no more than that. Let them eat windy rhetoric...

His ability to speak, if you can bear to view the clip, seems pretty much the central plank of his election campaign. (It's all location, location: in Westminster, before the US Senate, on the radio, on TV, in Saddam's court... Oh hang on - inexplicably, he failed to mention the last one.) Now, I don't think even his most trenchant critics disagree that Mr Galloway has a way with words but I think it's worth reminding ourselves of the causes to which he has applied his often impressive rhetorical skills:

"George Galloway has praised the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, for his dignity, referring to him as the last of the Arab leaders and his country as the last fortress against western aggressors.

In a speech that will incense Syrian democracy campaigners, the former Glasgow MP urged Syrians to take pride in the Baathist authoritarian, who inherited rule from his father, Hafez Assad.

An anticipated UN report into the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, would "frame" Syria, Mr Galloway told an audience at the University of Damascus in a highly charged lecture.

"All dignified people in the world, whether Arabs or Muslims or others with dignity, are very proud of the speech made by president Bashar al-Assad a few days ago here in Damascus," he said.

"For me he is the last Arab ruler, and Syria is the last Arab country. It is the fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs, and that's why I'm proud to be here."

Thought it might be worth mentioning, what with Syria being a bit topical and all. See ya tomorrow...

Hand-wringing

2011-05-04T21:12:00.002+01:00

Courtesy of... you really need to ask?

"While many nations suffered from al-Qaida's terrorism and few in the world will mourn Bin Laden's death, the United States is the only place where it sparked spontaneous outpourings of raucous jubilation."

Oh, boo hoo...

Meanwhile in sunny Glasgow...

"Not even a week has passed since the riots in Kelvingrove Park and yet another party is said to be kicking off this weekend. The celebration theme this time? Osama Bin Laden’s death.

Revellers are being warned against attending yet another unofficial street party in the West End park which, once again, been organized on Facebook.

Glasgow City Council condemns the plans and is warning people not to attend the 'dangerous' event."

Well, ok - I agree it isn't exactly spontaneous. This has nothing to do with "muscle that converts shared citizenship into a form of national genius [being] well-trained" and the other stuff Gary Younge goes on about; we're just mental like that.

[Disclaimer: this is a joke, ok? You really shouldn't go if you value your safety.]

Against faux Scots - especially in print

2011-05-03T22:20:00.006+01:00

Like this election coverage in the Herald, for example:

"Scotland, exactly – as if we’d sell a massive tree tae the Conservatives tae make a stake that we’d then get burnt oan. No on your witchy nelly! In any case, Tavish, if you kent that they were capable ay being that radge then why are you kickin aboot wi thum noo?"

Now I'm Scots myself. I've lived between our two biggest cities all my life, as well as having travelled around in our little rain-soaked corner of the world a wee bit. So I shouldn't need a translation - but I find that I do. Who talks like this? Nobody talks like this! If you're that uninterested in how people actually speak why don't you just say, "It'll be a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht" and complete the cliche?

Then there's James Kelman who gave us the literary equivalent of being stuck with some annoying drunk arsehole on the last bus from George Square on a Saturday night and wins the fucking Booker Prize! Here's a review:

"You're gony have to read this book. There's nay doubt about it, nay doubt.

Of course, if you're easily offended by strong language aye, then it's probably no for you.

For a potty mouth like me it was aye a bit of a shock like."

Also, if you're a fan of things like punctuation and books that aren't really really shit, you probably won't find it's your bag either. Och aye the noo! Last, and least, there's this truly dispiriting piece of nonsense I've linked to before from some unmentionable MSP who has so much time on his hands it's almost inconceivable:

"A Nationalist politician has written to supermarkets demanding that they translate the English names of fresh produce into their Scots equivalents, such as "tatties", "neeps" and "brambles"."

Here's what to do, all you professional Scotsmen: pop into town, nip into Ann Summers, buy yourself a giant dildo and go take a fuck to yersels. Now that's how people in Scotland talk.

EiS union members accept revised teacher pay offer

2011-04-30T00:53:00.008+01:00

Shame on them.

It's not the pay freeze that's the problem. Teachers' pay fluctuates over time and inflation is one of the mechanisms by which this happens. It isn't very realistic to expect our pay-packets not to take a hit in this time of more general fiscal squeeze in Scotland.

It's the change in conditions. Supply teachers are to take a nominal, not just an inflation-induced, salary cut.

Meanwhile those presently* on 'conserved salaries' are to be ring-fenced, from what one can make out.

Shorter: those actually doing the job get a pay cut while others continue to be paid for a job they are no longer doing.

I'm not so naive and understand that one of the historic functions of unions is to preserve wage differentials - but I'd like them to do two things for me:

a) don't make it quite so fucking obvious...

b) spare us the rhetoric about equality and solidarity, comrades.

*But not in the future. A cause not worth fighting for, as Hugh Reilly points out.

Miliband: out of touch?

2011-04-28T23:13:00.002+01:00

Ed has warned of 'disaster' for Britain if the SNP's rise in the polls should lead to victory in the Holyrood elections on the 5th of May.

There was a time when I would have been inclined to agree with him but I now no longer associate an SNP win in Holyrood with independence. Anecdotal evidence would suggest I'm not alone. Devolved politics in Scotland has become a little more practical and mundane and consequently less absorbed with the constitutional question. I would suggest that this is one of the reasons that Labour is doing so badly. On the constitutional question, most Scots agree with them - but as for presenting themselves as an alternative administration that could be more effective than our present one? Oh dear, oh dear. I get the sense people don't believe the constitution is what is at stake in this election. While this might be complacent, I think they're probably right. The nationalists would, after all, still have to win a referendum.

Miliband doesn't get this because he isn't particularly interested in Scottish politics. I'm wondering if this doesn't mean the 5th of May will be a bad day for him because it looks increasingly like it's the day when he'll be seen to have backed two losing causes: Labour in Scotland and AV. I'm for the former and opposed to the latter but take the view that neither deserve to win. Both thus far have failed to persuade because their advocates don't feel the need to persuade. Instead they treat their opponents like disagreeable schoolchildren. If people were more familiar with the Scottish political landscape, they'd appreciate the assumption of a right to rule is not an exclusively English and Tory phenomenon. You should see just how uneasy Scottish Labour are with the whole business of persuading people to vote for them. They're not used to it, you see. How they squirm...

On republicanism

2011-04-28T21:32:00.005+01:00

With a Royal Wedding in the offing, it is entirely predictable that the online contrarians on the blogosphere should take the opportunity to make the republican case.

It's the sort of thing where I end up taking issue with the people I ostensibly agree with because I find them annoying. What annoys me about my fellow republicans is the way they assume the case for it is self-evident and unarguable. This failure to make an effort is perhaps why they don't make any converts.*

While obviously more rational, modern, and democratic as an idea, there seems to me a few obvious objections to the idea of a British republic:

1) The 'brand' has been historically 'toxified' though the experience of Cromwell. Our experience of republicanism was too soon before the 18th century window where it could be associated with liberty and equality. As it is, the English republic is remembered for banning Christmas and killing Irish. That in the 20th century republicanism was more likely to be associated with Irish terrorism serves to illustrate that there's something in this cause that can piss most people off.

2) The shift from monarchy to republic is normally linked to a regime-change of some kind; revolution, defeat in war, or cessation from an empire. Surely no reasonable person could argue that having none of these in our recent history is entirely a bad thing? Let me put it another way: Germany is a republic and you could argue it is better for it. But you wouldn't want the path to modernity that Germany has taken.

3) The record of republics with regards to liberty, equality, human rights or even basic regime-stability isn't very good. The 20th century was the most violent in human history. Think you'll find the American, Russian and Chinese republics played not an insignificant role here. And to keep it contemporary - Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Libya? The republican form of government is fairly well represented in the Middle East - as it is in Africa, as it is in Latin America. Hardly regions that were noted for their stability in the 20th and now 21st century.

I wouldn't have thought that the experience of finding British Royal pageantry more than a little kitsch and irritatingly inescapable was an overwhelmingly heavy weight to put on the other side of the scales in this argument. Neither is the technical description of our status in the UK. We're called subjects but in practice are citizens, whereas the difference between being a citizen and a serf in various despotisms throughout the world both past and present is difficult to discern.

*Or the wrong sort of effort. See this, for example. Nice attitude.

On sectarianism

2011-04-24T17:10:00.003+01:00

Came across two rather different articles about this today. The first from Tom Devine:

"We should all be clear that the world is now fully aware about our sinister little secret."

Ho hum. Then there's this from Steve Bruce in CiF:

"Most Scots are not football fans; most fans do not support Rangers or Celtic; most Rangers and Celtic fans are not religious bigots. That some Rangers and Celtic fans wind each other up by falsely claiming to have strong religio-ethnic identities which are offended by the equally false religio-ethnic identities of the other side is not a reason for the rest of us to take such ritual posturing as the basis for judging the polity, society and culture of an entire country."

Felt like someone had opened a window. The Old Firm game was nil-nil today. Who give a fuck? Not me - nor do a majority of Scots.

Update: The Scotsman reports that there were...

"[N]ine people arrested after the game, with six arrests made in the grounds and another three immediately outside.

A police spokesperson said all arrests were for "minor offences", such as being drunk inside the stadium and breach of the peace."

The horror! Lennon makes a gesture. Not even a rude one. Police involved. We've got our hands full up here.

Nick Clegg: he's not the messiah; he's a very naughty boy...

2011-04-23T18:42:00.004+01:00

"It would be barmy and blasphemous...to seriously compare Nick Clegg with Jesus Christ." So says Martin Kettle - who then goes on to do just that:

"The thing we really hate, I suspect, is the difficulty of getting hard things right rather than those who grapple with them. Yet we take it out on the hate figures. This only makes the difficulties greater, not least by implying that there is some obvious solution to hand which the politicians are wilfully ignoring. Handel's Messiah, quoting the Book of Isaiah, speaks to this collective failing with unrivalled power: "The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." Once again though, they could be talking about the increasingly hapless Clegg."[Emphasis mine]

Uh huh? The idea, if you can bear to read the piece, is that Clegg is suffering vicariously for our own flaws like the 'leper messiah' - an interpretation of Isaiah 53 which was subsequently incorporated into Christianity and applied to Jesus.

I wouldn't have dreamed of making the comparison myself, but Kettle started it so I thought I might continue... The New Testament accounts are obviously a source of debate but I don't think anyone seriously doubts that solicitude with the poor, the despised and the marginalised was central to the kerygma of Jesus of Nazareth. I like the edge to the Beatitudes that you find in Luke's account; blessed are not the 'poor in spirit' of Matthew's more ethereal account - just the poor.

What is more debatable is Jesus' attitude to power. I don't mean the disputes that focus around Jesus' injunction to 'render unto Caesar what is Caesar's' but rather whether he wanted power for himself.

For there is an interpretation of the events leading to the Crucifixion that have Jesus as the leader of an armed insurrection against Roman occupation. Against the historical background, it is by no means absurd. In traditional Jewish theology, the Kingdom of God ushered in by the Mashiach was a this-worldly affair. But the injunction to 'sell your cloak and buy a sword' notwithstanding, I don't think the gospel accounts bear this out. The promise of earthly power was one of the Devil's temptations that he resisted in the desert. That the messiah should indeed enjoy earthly power was what was behind Peter's incredulous response to the notion that Jesus would not seize power but die the death of a common criminal. That the writer of the gospel has Jesus rejecting this with the same form of words is obviously no accident.

How unlike Clegg who strikes a number of people, including myself, of being rather the opposite. For did he not succumb to the temptation of worldy-power? And for the poor - has he not passed by on the other side? His toe-curling 'alarm clock Britain' homily contains one reference only to the unemployed; he talks about those who have 'opted-out of work'. No mention of those who have been evicted from their jobs and have nowhere else to go in this undoubted echo of Osborne/Cameron rhetoric about the 'benefits culture'.

One would have thought this would be enough to explain why some people don't like Mr Clegg very much but if Martin Kettle feels there's some kind of mysterious superabundance of hostility that needs accounting for, he might want to factor in Clegg's piety prior to assuming power and his transformation into an imploding bag of poisonous self-pity afterwards.

Martin Kettle thinks 'Clegg-hatred' says more about us than it does about him. Allow me to demur. That his sympathies lie with the rich and the powerful says rather more about him. It suggests someone locked into a Westminster media bubble that has long since lost any sense of how the shoe pinches - not for the 'squeezed middle' - but for that growing minority who live their lives on the edge of desperation. If Mr Kettle was looking for people who suffer vicariously like the leperous messiah, like the scapegoat of Leviticus, for people who have become a lightening rod for our own discontents, he might have spared a thought for them this Easter.

Clothing and liberty

2011-04-14T21:41:00.003+01:00

As with a number of commentators, I don't really think the French burqa ban is a terribly good idea but I'm intrigued by the way people argue against it. What I have in mind is this idea that liberty has to do with 'controlling your own appearance'. I'm not saying this isn't so but if it is then liberty isn't very advanced, even in those societies thought to be the most free.

Whilst not being in favour myself, I have a couple of problems with some of the arguments made against the state enforcing dress codes:

1) Why is it only a problem when the state does it, when even in the freest societies workers and school-children regularly have to conform to some kind of dress-code imposed on them by their schools and their employers?

2) Why do even secular liberals insist that exemptions made on religious grounds are better than those made for any other reason? Freedom of religion is being infringed by the burqa ban, we are told - but a freedom infringed that was argued on any other kind of basis would be unlikely to attract the same level of pious indignation, I would guess.

SNP launches manifesto

2011-04-14T19:58:00.002+01:00

Shorter version: lots of stuff for everyone and you won't have to pay for it.

Sadly, it's probably a vote-winner.

NB: Education bullshit watch: "On education, the party said it will "look first to maintain the recent improvement" in reducing class sizes before going on to reduce them further."

That'll be why they're increasing class sizes in s1 & 2 English and Maths and making dozens of teachers surplus then?

Turkeys and Christmas

2011-04-14T13:24:00.003+01:00

The Green Party is backing a voting system that would make it more difficult for their sole Westminster MP to retain her seat, which shows either a refreshing lack of self-interest or an ignorance of how AV actually works?

I have to say I don't really get the rationale - that it would show an 'appetite for change'? Surely it's not change per se they're interested in but a change to the voting system they actually believe in, which isn't AV?

I'm interested in the way some proponents of voting reform pooh-pooh any suggestion that voters might be confused by complicated voting procedures yet simultaneously seem to be suggesting that being opposed to AV because you're in favour of PR would confuse the issue by sending mixed-messages or something?

Yoof of today

2011-04-14T11:28:00.004+01:00

Had to laugh at this survey which "found that a surprising majority—almost 60 percent—of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable".

Laughed because I take it we're supposed to be shocked but the only people likely to be so are those who never talk to any actual teenagers. Teenagers are, as James rightly reminds us, mostly idiots - and tend to be, in my experience, fairly bloodthirsty.

For example, discussions about the death penalty in your average class are usually quite illuminating. Opinions will usually break down as follows: some against, some in favour, and some in favour of slow lingering torture before the death penalty is administered. "What was that thing called that they did to William Wallace? Hung, drawn and quartered? Yes, that - we should bring that back."

But at least you get a debate - whereas with a bunch of graduates, opinions on matters like this tends to be much more homogeneous. Better in some respects, one could argue? But definitely less interesting.

Education and the paranoid style of politics #1

2011-04-05T12:21:00.004+01:00

I see this largely, but not exclusively, as a rightwing phenomenon where people with power and influence strike a pose - apparently in all sincerity - as oppressed outsiders. I was reminded of this when reading the following by James Delingpole on the state of education:

"Britain’s state school system is a conspiracy against the public on an epic scale."

A nice piece of understatement, I think you'll agree. I found this via Ms Birbalsingh on Twatter who adds the comment that this hysterical nonsense does a "fab job of saying exactly what I'm trying to say!"

Now, I'll return to this in more detail later because the whole 'debate' about schools in England has become extremely silly indeed. I'll confine myself to a couple of observations just now:

1) I refer to schools in England advisedly because despite what Ms Birbalsingh and Mr Delingpole would have us believe, there is no such thing as 'Britain's state school system'. I hope you don't think this is too pedantic a point to make. I'm not doing it on nationalistic grounds. It's just a plea for simple accuracy and one I think is worth making to those whose criticisms of education include the idea that learning facts is underrated in today's system.

2) I was reminded of the paranoid style after reading Mr Delingpole's line about "a period of at least three decades" where "generations of children have been sacrificed on the altar of an entrenched ideology". The question of whether and to what extent the criticisms of 'progressive education' have any validity is one I intend to return to later. I'll restrict myself for now to asking the question: even if this were so, who on earth do these people think have been running the country during this time?

Three decades ago Thatcher had been in power for two years and the Conservatives did not return to opposition until 1997. Then we had Blair and his notion of 'progress' seemed to draw a good deal of inspiration from Gladstonian Liberalism - this being amongst the reasons that Mr Gove declared himself to be such an admirer of him.

One would have thought at the very least those who complain about the progressive takeover of education, and liberal elites controlling the media and so on, would have drawn from this a lesson about the limits of what can be achieved by having their lot in power?

Koran burning

2011-04-04T17:40:00.005+01:00

Two short points on this:

1) It shows, again, that those most likely to engage in acts designed to outrage people of a religious disposition are other religious people.

2) There's been the usual pious nonsense about free speech not meaning a right to offend and the need to respect other people's religious traditions.

One should be clear here. Those responsible for the murder of the seven UN workers think a particular book is more sacred and valuable than other human beings.

This represents a long tradition seen in most religions at various times in their history where the invisible deity or deities, along with physical objects, places or buildings that are taken as being sacred because of their proximity to, or actual possession of, the divine material, must be protected from desecration to the point of shedding blood.

Respect that if you must but I don't think you should. And I personally find the suggestion that I should very offensive. You could go as far as to say it hurts my feelings and strikes to the core of what I believe. But I won't be killing anyone because of this.

[See also this. Filed under, Making My Point For Me.]

AV and minority parties

2011-04-04T16:18:00.004+01:00

In a previous post, Norm rightly argued that AV can't make it easier for minority parties to get elected because the hurdle required by this system is higher. Now with this post he addresses the question: what if it did?

"But if your commitment to democracy means anything, is an electoral method to be rejected just because it accommodates results which you don't like? What's the difference between this and simply outlawing the party whose influence you don't wish to see grow? What I'm asking is, how much weight should we give, anyway, to the consideration that an electoral method might increase the influence of a party or parties we judge to be pernicious?"

It's a reasonable point, although I would have thought the difference between banning an extremist party and simply having a system that makes it difficult for it to flourish was fairly obvious. But I'm not happy with Norm's choice of words. It's not a question of what parties I don't want to see flourish; the concern with some voting systems is that they can allow extremist parties to exert disproportionate power and thereby produce situations that the majority, by definition, did not want. I don't quite see how taking this into consideration is indicative of a shallow commitment to democracy.

But this isn't, in any event, the issue with AV when it comes to the question of extremists. It is right to suggest that it will almost certainly be more difficult for minority parties to win under AV but their second preferences will matter more. They must matter more simply because at the moment they don't matter at all, as FPTP has no mechanism to record them. What I'm not clear about is why people are so convinced that they should matter. This is not confined to the issue of redistributed BNP votes, although I think this is a legitimate concern. Why is a potential situation where parties of the right might vie for these and where a winning candidate could easily get less first preference votes than the person who comes second so obviously superior to what we have now?

#Libya

2011-03-18T00:14:00.002Z

The UN has voted 10 to zero in favour of intervention. China and Russia have not used their veto as permanent members and prior to this the Arab League gave their support.

Slow and possibly too late - but fast by UN standards. So now the die is cast, the planes should be in the air now. Not a decision that was as obviously easy as some have suggested it should have been - and the outcome is uncertain. But that this is so doesn't mean we shouldn't conclude that the UN is on the right side of this one.

On being 'appropriate'

2011-03-17T19:40:00.004Z

Unsure whether it is necessary in the world of Facebook and Twitter to point to someone else's stuff but this by Chris Dillow on Jamie Oliver's 'Dream School' contains an observation that is so true it hurts:

"The use of [the] word (inappropriate) is a hallmark of a particular character that thrived under New Labour. It’s someone who is enough of a moral relativist not to want to use the terms “right” and “wrong”, but not so much of a relativist that they are prepared to forego the power and wealth that comes from passing judgment upon others. Egalitarianism only goes so far."

Sounds familiar. I'd like to modify the observation just a smidgen. It is indeed a term for people unwilling to take the step of placing their criticism on an objective level on which one could then take issue with on a rational basis.

But it is also for those too pusillanimous to claim responsibility for what are usually subjective, and aesthetic, preferences. These people, it goes without saying, are usually management - or management wannabes*. That way they avoid conversations like this:

"~~Do you think that was appropriate?~~ I don't approve of what you did there, Mr McGlumpher."

"Thanks for sharing, Mr/Ms Repetition of Meaningless Jargon, but I'm not looking for your approval. Now run along; unlike yourself, I've got work to do."

Isn't difficult to see how the semantic Third Way developed when you see it in these terms...

*Imagine having such a dismal ambition - and then failing...

Saving the EMA

2011-03-16T21:39:00.007Z

There's arguments one could make for this but there are two that don't particularly appeal to me - both of which can he found here.

One is an argument from authority, which is even less convincing than usual because it is 'leading economists' whose authority is being invoked.

The other is an ad hominem argument about the background of the Coalition ministers responsible for this measure:

"We have a cabinet of privately educated politicians who do not understand how ordinary families in the 21st century need support to get on in life."

I assume we are being expected to believe the 'leading economists', in contrast, are horny handed sons of toil who went to comprehensives?

I doubt this but it is irrelevant. What matters is whether what is being said in favour of retaining the EMA makes any sense.

Some of it doesn't. Like all this stuff about increasing 'participation rates'. The increase doesn't strike me as being particularly impressive. According to the IFS it's 4% for 16 year olds, 7% for those aged 17. But the most important point is that 'participation' here just means they turn up, which isn't a good in itself. What matters is whether any learning is happening when they get there. Here the evidence doesn't overwhelm either:

"This (IFS) study was not able to examine the impact of the EMA on the likelihood of getting qualifications, but a subsequent report by IFS researchers found that in areas where EMA was available, students as a whole were around 2 percentage points more likely to reach the thresholds for Levels 2 and 3 of the National Qualifications Framework."

So why not make more straightforward, less bullshit arguments for EMA? Here's two:

1) While it might be difficult to identify much in the way of concrete gains, EMA is a more progressive and efficient way of maintaining 16-18 year olds in education than child benefit, which is paid to families regardless of their incomes.

2) In the grand scheme of things, in the War on the Deficit, savings of around £560 million mean slightly less than fuck all. I can't help wondering whether arguing the toss about this level of spending at all doesn't rather concede some of the territory that those who profess to be opposed to the cuts are claiming to occupy?

Saudi Arabian troops enter Bahrain

2011-03-15T00:48:00.004Z

But everyone was too busy venting about the hypothetical intervention in Libya to notice, let alone comment on and condemn, this actual foreign intervention.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the US does not consider this an invasion and has urged 'restraint' - like they did in relation to Egypt, like they did in relation to Libya.

Much of the aforementioned commentary from the laptop anti-imperialists seems to have been based on the assumptions that Western intervention in the affairs of Libya would either be the incarnation of oil-interests or the relatively more charitable interpretation that it would be merely a very stupid knee-jerk response to the impulse that 'something must be done'.

The possibility that it is inaction that might be motivated by oil-interests or 'geo-political' concerns doesn't seem to have occurred to them.

AV, preferences and likely outcomes

2011-03-12T21:33:00.006Z

I'm inclined to agree with Norm when he argues that the twenty-nine historians who have written to the Times opposing AV on the grounds that it violates the principle of one person, one vote, are rather overstating their case.

However, I think Norm overstates his own case by using an argument I've heard for AV before. This is that it is like the ballot system as used in French Presidential elections and formerly used by the Conservative Party in leadership elections, which does elections in rounds that knock out contenders who come last, only AV does this automatically:

"Every voter got to express their full preference-ordering and it's as if two ballots took place, in which each voter got to have their say. In the first round, they all voted with three candidates standing; and in the second round they all voted with two candidates standing. Each voter had the same two 'turns'."

It doesn't help that Norm uses as an analogy some vote about which country singer is the ~~least excruciating~~ best out of Emmylou Harris, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Lyle Lovett. I wouldn't know but I would have thought the outcome of this contest would be less certain than, say, a by-election in Glasgow.

I could be wrong about this but in any event it doesn't affect my point, which is that people will order their preferences according to their perception of likely outcomes. If people's perceptions proved to be wrong, they have the opportunity to change their preferences in the ballot system, as they did, for example, in the French Presidential election that saw Jospin pushed into third place behind Chirac and Le Pen. In this situation, left-leaning voters held their noses and voted Chirac in the second round to stop Le Pen. It would be unwise to assume AV would always be able to deal with a situation like this automatically.

It isn't difficult to see how this could become a problem in UK elections. If we get AV, where I live I would assume that my vote for Labour will never result in my vote being considered in terms of my second preference so I am unlikely to give much consideration to my second or third preferences. But a Tory voter would be reasonable to assume this would be fairly likely so would give their choices more consideration. In these circumstances, it isn't too far-fetched to talk about some people's votes carrying more weight than others. And if we were both wrong, it gives rise to different problems. If, for example, the BNP turned out to be stronger than we imagined possible, we probably wouldn't have ordered our preferences in the way we did. With the ballot system, we could change our minds to accommodate the new situation; with AV we can't.

AV represents the death of one person, one vote? Well, no - but I fail to see why people think this would be a vast improvement on what we have now. I have to say I'm getting a little tired of people saying AV isn't PR 'strictly speaking'. There are two kinds of voting systems: majoritarian and proportional; AV isn't proportional at all - not even a little bit. I've yet to read a convincing argument to support the notion that it's a staging post to PR and even more sceptical about the notion that AV is an obviously superior majoritarian mechanism to the system of plurality we have now.

IDS on unemployment

2011-03-08T23:48:00.003Z

Ian Duncan Smith argues that, "It's not the absence of jobs that's the problem. It's the failure to match the unemployed to the jobs there are."

But according to the government's own statistics, even if the problem of matching workers to jobs was overcome and every single vacancy in the UK were filled, there would still be rather a lot of people unemployed.

Supply-side enthusiasts would argue that this is because workers are pricing themselves out of the labour market. Leaving aside the minimum wage, in the UK there were 5.2 people unemployed for every vacancy in Dec 2010. Does anyone seriously imagine it is possible for people to absorb the sort of pay cut that firms getting five workers for the price of one would entail?

If I'm missing something please explain in the comments below.

Via: FR

Pragmatism vs Ideology

2011-02-20T21:25:00.008Z

There comes a stage in relationships where the frivolity is over and you've both decided this is probably a Serious Relationship. You know it's at the Serious stage when one party brings out the Behaviour Modification Programme and starts to explain to the other where they've transgressed the Rules.

There's been one or two occasions where I've found the Rules surprisingly difficult to follow. This, in retrospect, was on account of the fact that they weren't actually rules by any accepted definition of the term. Explanations as to why the sort of things I did were so outrageous whereas similar things done by them were totally understandable, acceptable and even virtuous were so convoluted they made my head heart. I appreciate you may find this already heart-breakingly naive... I was, of course, missing the universal caveat into which all these nuanced interpretations of our respective behaviours could be collapsed - this being, "It's ok when I do it."

Don't mean to be sexist: girls will have had the same problem with their guys, or girls, or guys with their guys - but the experience is the same; you get a couple of people pretending to talk about, or scream about, abstract principles when all they're really doing is defending their respective corners.

I was reminded of this weighty truth when I read Nick Cohen's puzzlement at the Tories' failure to condemn large wads of tax-payers' cash being spent on feckless bankers:

"Tories of all people ought to hate the bank bailout. Their every fibre ought to revolt against the state using public money to reward failure.
[...]
Why can’t you stand by your principles?"

I take it the question is rhetorical but we'll assume it actually requires an answer. It is because it's ok when they do it - which is another way of saying they don't defend their principles because they haven't got any.

By this I mean the Conservatives have historically been a pragmatic party and it's perhaps the Thatcher experience that has clouded a proper picture of the longer-run tradition. I liked the story - told by Ian Gilmour, I think - of an occasion when Thatcher struts into a Cabinet meeting, pounds a copy of Freddie Hayek's Constitution of Liberty on the table and declares, "This is what we believe!", to the assembled Ministers who were now looking rather bemused, having been hitherto under the impression that they didn't believe in anything much.

It's something of a cliché but this pragmatism has generally been understood to be a feature of British politics in general. No need for Labour to have a Bad Godesberg, for example; they never were believers that way in the first place.

This is an over-simplification but there is some truth in this? Yet William Keegan's comments today reminded me of one area where this pragmatism doesn't seem to hold and that is in the area of economic policy:

"Britain has a reputation for pragmatism, but when it comes to economic policy, one finds that our policymakers generally are in the grip of some dogma or obsession."

There's some truth in this too. What William Keegan is referring to is the way that the British establishment has had a long history of fixating on particular targets - such as the value of the pound in the Gold Standard or the ERM, or inflation via the eighties' monetary targets - in the most doctrinaire fashion, only to see these blow up in their faces.

This is really a long-winded way of posing a question to people who know more about this than I do. Is this fair and if so, why is this? Sidney Pollard in this slim volume published nearly thirty years ago leaves space in his list of culprits responsible for the state of the British economy (a list which includes just about everyone, if memory serves) for economists themselves. His suggestion was that the often doctrinaire position of the 'Treasury view' could partly be attributed to the fact that it was, with all due respect to our Austrian friends, the English-speaking world that gave the world the 'dismal science'. This formed part of the reason why Britain found itself fetishizing things like the exchange rate while the Germans and the French just got on with making stuff that people wanted to buy.

I can't say I find this very convincing - and it probably doesn't do justice to Pollard's argument anyway. But there is perhaps something that requires explanation, which could be restated in a more circumspect way: the Conservatives' economic policies of the last thirty years have been a little short of their supposed pragmatism, especially in practice. Is this because the ideas of Freddie Hayek and Milton Friedman have had a profound and lasting impact on the Conservative Party and that what they believe is just narrower than more comprehensive ideologies? Or are they being doctrinaire when it suits them and not when, for example, their friends in the banks are getting a hand-up and a hand-out? Because ideology is ok when they do it, even when they do it inconsistently.

Welcome to the "I dunno about AV" campaign

2011-02-18T12:44:00.005Z

The forthcoming AV referendum is only the second to be held throughout the whole of the UK in history. In this case, it doesn't follow the familiar pattern of referendums everywhere with governments holding them only when they think they'll get the result they want - for the obvious reason that the government doesn't agree on this. But this outsourcing of Cabinet deliberation to the electorate is also a common function of referendums; it was the case in 1975 as it is with this one too.

If you don't like referendums, you could always abstain or spoil your ballot paper - but this wouldn't distinguish you from those who weren't interested or who were unaware. So what to vote for? I'm surprised that the No campaign isn't doing better. You would have thought that those favouring the status quo along with those who favour a properly proportional system would easily be able to muster a majority. This was, after all, a system that no-one originally wanted. That there are signs that this might not happen might be down to an 'anti-politics' mood, as some have argued.

The only thing I'm certain about on the whole issue of voting reform is that too much is claimed for it and two of the most common claims have appeared in the Yes campaign that specifically touch on this issue of voter disillusionment:

1) By creating fewer safe seats, elected representatives would be less inclined to be complacent and corrupt.

Leaving aside the possibility that AV can sometimes increase the bonus for the winning candidate, surely only the most insular of political observers could possibly conclude that there is some kind of correlation, never mind causation, between voting systems and levels of corruption?

2) Voting reform would increase voter turnout.

That AV has improved turnout in the sole country that uses it is impossible to demonstrate since Australia has compulsory voting. Rather the unsubstantiated claim rests on crude comparisons with other countries that have properly proportional systems. Germany has AMS, German voter turnout is higher, ergo voting reform will improve 'voter engagement'.

These non sequiturs abound when people make the mistake of assuming to know the mind of people who stay at home on polling day. I don't know any more than anyone else why nearly half of the Scottish electorate didn't vote in the 2007 election but since Holyrood is elected by AMS, we can rule out the supposed disenfranchising effect of FPTP as a factor.

Given that turnout at local elections is pretty dismal across the UK too, is it possible that voters have a fairly clear perception of where power lies in the British constitution? If so, simply changing the mechanism by which representative arrive at their respective assemblies looks a much more conservative measure than its advocates claim, which brings me to this:

One of the problems with the No campaign is that it is by very definition a negative one. This isn't helped by adopting narrow claims about how much it will all cost. Now, some oppose AV on the grounds that they want a proper proportional system. I'm agnostic about this too but their reasoning makes sense and one that doesn't seem to have been considered by pro-PR people in the Yes camp. What reason is there to suppose that AV is a 'stepping-stone'? One of the functions of limited constitutional reform is to deflate demands for more far-reaching change. While not entirely comparable, this was the case with many of those who accepted the case for devolution. Why should this not turn out to be the case with AV too?

Another thing: If referendums and AV are good things, why are we not to be offered a multi-option referendum with FPTP, PR and AV on the menu? People could express their preferences as easily as 1, 2, 3...

For Gary Moore

2011-02-06T18:59:00.003Z

Very sorry to hear the sad news that the Belfast-born guitarist of Thin Lizzy fame Gary Moore has died this morning.

I'm cursed to be only good enough at the guitar to be able to recognise people who actually know what they are doing. Gary Moore was one of these. As well as being a great blues player, I have a special affection for him because he provided the theme music for one of the more dramatic episodes of my life, the details of which I won't bore you with.

Here he is playing a song also covered by the great Peter Green. The tipping of the hat to Peter's riff in 'Need your love so bad' is a particularly nice touch. RIP Gary Moore...

Schools face 4-day-week?

2011-02-06T11:06:00.002Z

It is, apparently, one of the options seriously being considered by North Ayrshire Council:

"As Scotland braces itself for the full impact of spending cuts, officials from a cash-strapped local authority have put forward proposals to save money by introducing a four-day week in all primary and secondary schools."

The piece goes on to tell us that "critics have slammed the move as "stupid" and "a sad state of affairs"."

They're always 'slamming' things in newspapers. Why is this? Anyway, it has been inaccurately described as thinking the 'unthinkable'. What rubbish. Some of us have been thinking about abolishing Monday for ages and have long been of the opinion that it is an excellent idea. Yet it is absurdly described as a 'doomsday senario'. Hmph!

They won't do it, of course. I have a serious idea that would no doubt lose friends and alienate people in the teaching profession. Just about everyone seems to agree that small classes are a Good Thing. While I would agree that all other things being equal, they are usually better than big classes, I'm not convinced that they are all they're cracked up to be.

So I was wondering: rather than simply lifting the statutory maximum, is there any reason why we couldn't have flexible class sizes? Apparently the cost per pupil rises as they move up the school. But it is with these senior classes that I've often thought that the style of teaching you use could easily be applied to much bigger classes. You could do that for a few periods and then have one or two where they break down into smaller groups, perhaps?

David Cameron on British values

2011-02-05T18:42:00.004Z

One or two points to agree with in Cameron's speech. Agree, for example, that one shouldn't accept the notion that there's a "dead-end choice between a security state and Islamist resistance."

But the big wrong note he struck was with this notion that being British means subscribing to liberty, tolerance, equality between the sexes etc. "To belong in Britain is to believe in these values"? No - one of the essential elements of a liberal society is that the state doesn't require its citizens to believe anything. After all, we have within our borders people who not only don't believe in these values which Cameron is claiming for Britain, we seem to be able to cope with a fair number who don't believe Britain should exist at all.

One one hand, he's right to suggest that some are afraid to confront people with frankly fascistic views if the proponents of these happens to be brown people. On the other, given that there's something of a rainbow coalition of non-violent people who do not subscribe to Cameron's version of 'British values', it isn't difficult to see how his speech might be misconstrued, to say no more than that.

Another thing: The use of the phrase "state multiculturalism" is perhaps revealing. The problem with this is while 'multiculturalism' is a rather elastic and ambiguous term, in the hands of the Tory right 'state' is not. It is always used to denote a Bad Thing.

Democracy and scepticism

2011-02-05T16:29:00.004Z

Chris Dillow argues that being sceptical about democracy in its present form does not mean one needs to be persuaded that it is superior to dictatorship:

"Those of us who are sceptical about democracy do not deny that democracy is superior to dictatorship
[...]
Instead, our concern is that there are trade-offs between democracy and other values such as liberty or justice. These trade-offs are not a big problem in benighted nations, as these are so far from the efficient frontier of values that they can (possibly) achieve more of every one. But they are more pressing in liberal democracies."

He argues further that 'empty sloganeering' about the value of democracy only serves to distract attention from this difficulty.

The idea that democracy can collide with other values is one I happen to agree with. It simply is not the same thing as liberty: in relation to the exercise of power, democracy is concerned with its source, liberty with its scope, as Isaiah Berlin pointed out.

But, as is often the case, Chris's post got me thinking: yes, democracy and liberty are both in theory and practice two different things - but historically they have been closely associated and it left me wondering if expressing the possibility of a collision of values in terms of a 'trade off' could lead people to infer, even though it's not implied, that the relationship between the two is a zero sum game?

If so, this wouldn't do justice to the more subtle and organic relationship here. These values collide but that they depend on each other, that the historical association is no mere correlation, on one level is not difficult to demonstrate. With a smattering of notable exceptions, when given the chance, the demos has consistently shown itself adverse to choosing governments that would oppress them. The confidence that this is likely to remain the case for most is what was missing from the remarks that the well-known enthusiast for democracy Tony Blair made about Mubarak. I don't know about anyone else but the case of the Egyptian insurrection for me reinforces the importance of not being too sceptical.

Yet examples of where institutions that are impeccably democratic produce illiberal results are also fairly easy to produce. They tend to occur when the majority of the demos are unconcerned about restrictions in liberty because they don't affect them.

Is there then some kind of Laffer curve for democratic participation? That something like this is what goes on is, I'm assuming, what is behind Chris's suggestion that the problem of our forms of representative democracy colliding with the values of liberty, justice and equality might be overcome by finding ways to make democracy more deliberative. While it may well be possible, I can't say I'm entirely convinced with most of the suggestions, which left me wondering whether this supposed scepticism about democracy isn't simultaneously too sceptical and yet not sceptical enough? Berlin's argument was, after all, not limited to observing that values collide; he denied that it was possible to fit them into a harmonious pattern at all.

Public Relations - FAIL

2011-01-30T02:02:00.002Z

Ironically, PR is one area in which the performance of schools has unquestionably improved in recent years - except in this case, it would seem:

"Katharine Birbalsingh, who received a standing ovation for her attack on the “broken” education system, is being blamed for the sudden closure of the inner-city academy where she was deputy head.

St Michael and All Angels in Southwark, south London, has been declared “non-viable” after applications fell dramatically in the wake of Ms Birbalsingh’s remarks.

Canon Peter Clark, the chairman of the school’s governors, said that her attack on incapable teachers 'blinded by Leftist ideology' had dealt a fatal blow to the school. “The publicity that she generated was very unhelpful, which certainly didn’t help in terms of pupil recruitment,” said Canon Clark.

He added that an inspection of the school held shortly before Christmas had shown that “nothing that she said was right”."

School choice in action? Those who favour this should celebrate. Perfect competition requires, as every A Level economics student knows, perfect knowledge. Potential customers of St Michael and All Angels were able to obtain this from Ms Birbalsingh and also via the power of the blogosphere. If they'd read Mr Chalk, for example, they would have understood that, "[E]verything she says is completely true."

Rational utility-maximising education consumers have as a result taken their custom elsewhere - so an excellent result all round. There's no need to worry about Ms Birbalsingh finding another gig since we also know from her now defunct blog that she is a much better teacher than her colleagues on account of the fact that they are, for the most part, blinded by leftist ideology.

The Egyptian Insurrection

2011-01-28T22:26:00.002Z

For those of us of a certain age, the comparison with what has happened in Tunisia and now Egypt prompts an immediate comparison: shades of 1989? The Berlin Wall wasn't so much knocked down but rather crumbled under its own weight.

The present situation feels like that; the sense that the game's up, the Emperor's in the buff, his bluff has been called and he'll sneak off on a plane like Ben-Ali before him to cover his nakedness. Hope so - but I'm concerned that people are forgetting the response of China to a similar insurrection.

There is a tendency to assume in a vaguely Marxist sense that there's something irresistible about revolution but arguably this is where Marx was at his least realistic. States, following the classic Weberian definition, are about claiming a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence - and given that they generally have the equipment to reinforce this belief, they cave in only if they are opposed by another state with superior firepower or if they themselves lose the resolve to use it. People power needs the ruling elite to lose its nerve in order to be successful.

This is indeed what happened with the USSR in 1989: a regime that had via glasnost delegitimized the means of its own survival and in any event gave the impression of being simply too exhausted to continue. The CPC, on the other hand, was not and was prepared to use any means necessary to crush the insurrection.

Egypt feels, smells, more like the former than the latter but I don't know enough about the situation to be confident. You'd think maybe the Americans getting off the fence very quickly might be an idea - but perhaps this would be futile. I'd imagine most Egyptians would view this as something of a death-bed conversion. It would be a difficult one for them to make, anyway. I think I'm right in saying that Egypt is in the top three recipients of military aid in the region along with Israel and Turkey. An investment that certainly is not enough to ensure the survival of the Mubarak regime - but the significance of this as a variable shouldn't be underestimated.

Wondering also whether for the second time in my life, academics of the social science fraternity will be left with very little to do other than shake their heads, trying to work out what they're for. Little Tunisia - who would have thought, eh?

People losing their damn minds #28

2011-01-28T19:22:00.009Z

Now there's always the possibility that someone will join the dots and I'll get into trouble for this but it's just too insane not to share. The following email regarding an erstwhile pupil has been forwarded to me. Names have been deleted to protect the guilty:

"Hi folks

As you may be aware, _____ _______ S3 is currently on the big screen in a cinema near you. He plays the lead character as a young boy in the film NEDs which is on general release. This is quite an achievement and a performance and I'd urge you to go along and see the film if you get a chance. ________ _______ S3 also has a small part in the film.

Enjoy your weekend!

[From DHT in unspecified Glasgow school who is intelligent and reasonably effective but who has, sadly, clearly gone and lost her goddamn mind.]"

Given that one can experience exposure to this pupil during the course of one's working day for free, you think we should use our spare time to pay for this privilege why, exactly? The only plausible explanation I can come up with is because you are completely out of your gourd.

[NEDS: a film that I have absolutely no intention whatsoever of going to see. Likely to be popular amongst Guardian readers and other people who's lives are so comfortable, they feel the need to go out and purchase a little grit for recreation in order to feel more authentic.]

Taking a gap year expands the opportunities for being tedious

2011-01-09T23:10:00.004Z

Liked David Mitchell's rather melancholy reflections on the whole business of students taking a 'gap-year' from their studies.

My reservations are slightly different. It is one of the top three experiences people have that seem to convince them they know more than they actually do. These are:

1) Travelling widely.

2) Taking a lot of drugs.

3) Doing some academic psychology but not enough to get you to the stage where you realise no-one knows anything.

Often people have more than one of these going on in their lives. This can be quite trying.

On the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords

2011-01-09T21:06:00.002Z

There is, as is the custom, the search for the wider implications of a tragic incident.

I'm neatly divided in two on this one. On one hand, one is very reluctant to implicate the Tea Party/Sarah Palin axis of small-government advocacy tipping into paranoia because you're aware that this follows a more general pattern of blaming a wider culture for the actions of individuals who may well be simply insane.

On the other, one wonders if there wasn't something in what Eric Hobsbawm said when he remarked that the social divisions that one sees in American society today are acute in a way that has not been since the post-Civil War period. You get the impression sometimes that partisanship has become so sharp that it threatens the legitimacy of decisions made by the various institutions of the republic, if those institutions don't yield the desirable result.

But you can take either of these interpretations and still come to the conclusion that throwing easy gun ownership into the mix is unlikely to help.

'Nudge' economics

2011-01-05T00:06:00.004Z

I think I'm getting a handle on this now. It goes something like this? To lose weight, overweight people should eat ~~less~~ (oops!) fewer pies - according to Prof McGlumpher, a nutrition expert at the University of the Useless and the Overpaid.

Or binge drinking:

"Richard Thaler, a professor at Chicago University, suggests that groups of three or more should set up a tab to be split at the end of the evening to stop each member of a party feeling obligated to buy a round for everyone."

Three. He said a party of three or more. Only an American could think having three pints constitutes binge-drinking.

Did I mention he's a big influence on our Prime Minister?

Anyway, lemme try another one:

To avoid injury, people should not attempt to iron their clothes whilst still wearing them.

See, you were thinking of doing this but now you've been 'nudged' in the right direction. It's all very 'Big Society'. Think I'm getting the hang of it now. It's like the small society, only more stupid...

On going to live in George Monbiot's house

2011-01-04T21:43:00.002Z

A number of commentators have, rightly in my view, ridiculed George Monbiot's plan to tax my mum for having excess capacity in her house unless she takes in lodgers:

"The next step is to reverse the UK's daft fiscal incentive to under-occupy your home. If you live by yourself, regardless of the size of your property, you get a 25% council tax discount. The rest of us, in other words, subsidise wealthy single people who want to keep their spare rooms empty. Those who use more than their fair share should pay for the privilege, with a big tax penalty for under-occupation. If it prompts them either to take in a lodger or to move into a smaller home in a lower tax band, so much the better.

If under-occupation is a symptom, rather than a cause, of inequality - why not suggest sensible ways in which the latter can be dealt with? But it isn't even that all the time. Monbiot takes one of the obvious injustices of the council tax system - taking house size as a proxy for wealth - and not only endorses it but suggests it should be reinforced. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance of the real world could come up with numerous examples of where under-occupancy does not correspond to increased wealth. My mum's case is unlikely to be unusual; 'under-occupation' here is partly as a result of one wage-earner now being pan-breed. She does have a widow's pension, to be fair - but I doubt it matches what Moonbat earns writing shite for Guardian.co.uk. Anyway - and I appreciate some might find this an unsettlingly rightwing argument - the house isn't part of some 'common stock'; it is hers because she bought it.

But I'm also intrigued by the way Monbiot seems to have adopted the sort of economistic reduction so beloved of the Tories when they're talking pants about marriage and the levels of welfare benefits. They think having the 'incentive' of a few measly extra quid makes couples split up. Now Monbiot thinks getting a 25% reduction in your council tax means people turf out flatmates/partners/offspring? I wouldn't mind so much but the figures don't even add up. Two earners split council tax, they separate, both now pay 75% meaning they are now paying 50% more for local... Oh, what's the point? I'm personally incensed by a greater injustice in the world: Monbiot makes arguments that he admits he can "find no research or figures either to support or disprove" them; I do exactly the same thing on this blog - then when I've done that, I have to go and work for a living. It's so unfair!

Sex, lies and perjury: the strange case of Tommy Sheridan

2010-12-29T20:41:00.005Z

There are obvious differences between Vince Cable and Tommy Sheridan and the state they've got themselves into - the most obvious being that Cable at least had the sense to lie in an election campaign rather than under oath in a court of law. But they also have two similarities: both cases raise serious questions about the conduct of our media - and both cases leave me shaking my head in wonder, asking how it is possible for supposedly intelligent men to be that stupid?

It's difficult to identify the exact point of Tommy's downfall, but I don't think anyone would put it after the moment he arranged a liaison with a tabloid journalist in circumstances that have become excruciatingly familiar, apparently working on the assumption that he could count on her discretion!

Some people have suggested that the story breaking provided an opportunity for Sheridan to declare himself unbound by the constraints of bourgeois morality. This was never a very realistic strategy for a politician who was hitherto happy to portray himself as a paragon of this very morality when the tabloids - non-Murdoch ones, of course - required it from him. He would have been better advised to ignore it altogether. Instead he decided to sue for defamation. That he did so knowing that the allegations were in substance true is a foolishness that has been widely noted. That he did so in the knowledge that his comrades in the SSP did not see perjuring themselves as part of their revolutionary shift is indicative of a recklessness that can only be borne of sheer hubris.

Ego worked for the SSP as there can be no doubt that it reached the level of electoral success that it did largely out of the sheer force of Tommy's personality. But now only the deluded deny that his ego made a significant contribution to its nemesis. Pride cometh before this... There remains only to ask the inevitable question of what all this means for the broader left?

I don't know but I'm not sure that any lessons one might draw are particularly encouraging. One aspect of this case that has stood out is the marginal propensity of the far left to believe conspiracies as a default position. People lie in court all the time - why Sheridan? Dark forces at work, clearly...

But why not Sheridan? Most people don't get £200k as a consequence of their perjuring themselves. But I'm wondering if there isn't a more unpalatable truth that people find difficult to accept. Don't be paranoid: they might be out to get you, if it wasn't for the fact that you're just not that important. Well, not as a politician anyway. Celebrity is a different matter...

One keeps reading that the SSP at their high watermark of 6 MSPs made them the most successful hard left party in Europe. Apart from the fact that it's not exactly a strong field in which to compete, what did this actually mean in reality? About 5% of the seats in a provincial Parliament with no tax-raising powers. And Sheridan himself, despite standing in Pollok where he was raised, only gained his seat on the list vote. While I wouldn't rule out a conspiracy, or some kind of vendetta, one is inclined to assume that conspirators behave rationally and doing this raises the question: what would the conspirators hope to gain? Nothing much, as far as I can see. Maybe if people could dispense with the egoism that is an often unremarked but nevertheless essential ingredient in the conspiracy theory of society, they would be better placed to answer the question of why it is that the message of the SSP did so poorly at the ballot box, the rhetorical gifts of their leader not withstanding?

I've also been wondering if there is a wider message for Scotland. Gerry Hassan certainly thinks so:

"But Scotland made Tommy Sheridan. He springs from our political and public culture. He was only possible because of it and ultimately because of us. We the people of Scotland made Tommy Sheridan possible; we gave him power, potency and status.

And because of this today, as Tommy Sheridan faces the prospect of a life behind bars, while he seems incapable of self-reflection and self-knowledge, we should not go down the same route. We should instead pause and reflect on our own inadequacies and the flawed tribunes and demagogues who we choose to believe in."

I'm inclined to say, speak for yourself - especially given the evidence in the previous paragraph. Still, there's something in what he says. There is something quintessentially West of Scotland man about Sheridan - the machismo, the swagger, the uncompromising rhetoric, the sentimentality. People saw something they recognised. Beyond that, there was an apparent contradiction that Hassan also notes: although ostensibly radical, there was something strangely comforting about Sheridan's rhetoric. He gave them the old-time religion and people felt an affection for what is familiar.

While some insist his Olympian credentials are more or less intact, for many Sheridan has gone from hero to zero. Others who perhaps never held either opinion regret that our public life will be duller without him. While agreeing with this last point, I'm wondering what it is about us that needs to be entertained by our public life and whether this isn't part of the problem? What is certainly part of our problem is this need for heroes - although whether it can be dispensed with, I couldn't say.

Weather and climate

2010-12-22T01:00:00.003Z

George Monbiot in Jan 2010: Weather is not climate. "Is this really so hard to understand?"

George Monbiot in Dec 2010: Weather is climate. "The snow outside? That's what global warming looks like."

Knowing nothing about this subject myself, I'm quite prepared to go with the scientific wisdom of crowds. But the case needs a better spokesman than Monbiot, what with him being something of an asshole.

If you disagree with this, you are an asshole-denialist and almost certainly a Nazi.

WikiLeaks and one from the archives

2010-12-19T11:56:00.007Z

Like Paul I find myself changing my mind about all this. They are exactly the sort of documents that are of immense interest to the historian when the usual 30 year secrecy period has elapsed and some of the present ones being leaked out reminded me of the 2004 British government papers that revealed Nixon and Kissinger considered invading Saudi Arabia after the OPEC price hikes, which followed the Yom Kippur War.

Since they clearly thought better of it, I wondered what good would it have done for this to be known at the time? But as I was clicking around looking for links, I discovered that the Sunday Times had run with the story as early as 1975. This I did not know. I wouldn't know how much attention was given to the story at the time either, what with only being 9-years-old.

But perhaps with WikiLeaks we can say there is nothing new under the sun - it's just the sheer scale of the document dump that makes it different from previous leaks? Dunno - would be interested in your thoughts...

How 'stupid' is the 'war on drugs'?

2010-12-17T01:12:00.004Z

I see Ed Miliband has 'rebuked' Bob Ainsworth for suggesting that the liberalisation of drugs should be considered as an alternative to the 'disastrous' policy of prohibition.

I'm more inclined to agree with Mr Ainsworth than his critics but I'm not comfortable with the way in which people who take my view seem to suggest that the argument for liberalisation is unarguable and that to insist on the continuation of prohibition is merely stupid.

The language of the 'war on drugs' was certainly a fairly silly semantic trap to fall into - involving as it does the declaration of hostilities on inanimate objects, and then being seen to lose.

But laying so much weight on unfortunate rhetoric is hardly taking on the policy of prohibition at its strongest point and it involves itself the formulation of arguments that are themselves rather weak. Amongst these I would include the following:

1) That the 'war on drugs' demonstrably 'hasn't worked'. No, obviously - but I think people are taking their cue from the rhetoric that they have already dismissed as nonsensical. It wouldn't make anymore sense to say that the 'wars' against rape and murder have been lost and should therefore be abandoned either. They wouldn't say this because they are making an implicit distinction of harm to self and harm to others. The argument against prohibition should rest on a more explicit formulation of this point.

2) The argument that prohibition empowers criminal gangs as they flourish as suppliers of a product that people want but are unable to obtain through legal means. I don't really disagree with this - I just think people should be a little more circumspect. Criminal gangs are also heavily involved in enterprises that are perfectly legal, such as nightclubs and private car hire firms, as well as illegally supplying legal products such as tobacco. Also, if a move away from prohibition is to be 'evidence-based' there should be some kind of assessment of how the harm caused by criminal gangs supplying drugs compares to the potential harm that might arise from new crimes. There is, after all, a colossal crime problem associated with the legal drug of alcohol. Do gangsters cause more misery than these?

3) The argument that prohibition doesn't limit supply. Here you often get bloggers and journalists waving their street-wise credentials. Drugs are easily available to them and people they associate with and since they obviously move in a very narrow circle, they universalise the experience. "Is there anyone who doesn't know where to get drugs?" Well, I think my mother, even if she were so inclined, would find it a bit tricky. But the point is, even when people don't, it is not just the lack of availability that limits demand. There is the (admittedly small) chance of detection, which people might not want to risk - and there's constraints imposed by the relative inconvenience of acquiring the product and the inability to guarantee the quality of the product, which deters potential customers.

The 'war on drugs' obviously 'doesn't work' according to its own definition but it doesn't follow from this that it doens't work in some other more realistic sense. Better to argue more straightforwardly that it isn't justified from a liberal point of view. The utilitarian case can be made also but I don't understand why people make it with such certainty, which brings me to the weakest point in the pro-liberalisation argument:

4) The argument for complete legalisation makes an assumption about a future that cannot be known from the pre-Misuse of Drugs Act days and is therefore by definition not 'evidence-based'. This is why liberalisation, were it to be attempted, should be done - and argued for - more carefully.

This is not to say I find the arguments for prohibition any more convincing than I did. They certainly aren't in the hands of James Brokenshire, the crime prevention minister:

"Legalisation fails to address the reasons people misuse drugs in the first place or the misery, cost and lost opportunities that dependence causes individuals, their families and the wider community."

When looking for a 'cure' for behaviour they disapprove of, people often over-rate the importance of finding the motive. Even if you do discover them, they can often disappoint. I think it was Irvine Welsh who said, "People take drugs because they like them. Everything else is sociological window-dressing."

Other people's stuff

2010-12-11T10:49:00.003Z

Time is pressing so just a wee pointer to a couple of excellent posts, in case you missed them.

There was a time when opposition to the inflated salaries of CEOs was anger at what it represented. You could take it off them and redistribute but you might end up with only enough to buy all the workers in the company a couple of pints. Emotionally satisfying but essentially symbolic.

With the bankers and their bonuses this is no longer the case. That they have fiscal implications is one of the points made here:

"The government currently under-writes one industry, which is about to pay £7bn in bonuses to individuals. Meanwhile, it is withdrawing less than half that sum from another 'industry' (on which our 'competitiveness' is, by the government's own estimation, no less important), and is prepared to endure the worst civil disorder in 60 years to do this. It's hard not to conclude that political excess, ultimately manifest in violence, is now a normal part of our governing logic, and not an exception."

The 'other industry' is of course higher education. The merits or otherwise of increasing fees is, I'm afraid to say, something I haven't paid a great deal of attention to but it increasingly looks to me like another example of how successfully this government has shifted, as Samuel Brittan put it in June this year, the debate from 'whether' to 'how'. The problem isn't an £850bn bailout that nationalises risk but privatizes profit, it's people cheating on social security; it's students expecting everyone else to pay for their education? Hang on. There may be debates to be had on any of these sort of issues but a little fiscal context is surely called for?

One implication of this that I really need to return to is that the issue of student fees has shown the devolutionary settlement in Scotland to be unsustainable. Having a lump of money and just moving it around - taking the credit when the Treasury is feeling flush and then blaming London when it isn't - is not a recipe for political accountability. The fees issue will bring this into sharp focus because Barnett means a corresponding reduction in funding for Scottish education. It is an overstatement to describe the present devolution settlement a dead-duck? Hmmmm...

On the issue of the student protests, you could do worse than have a look at Paul Sagar's space. The latest is here. Read it and tell me it doesn't feel like someone's opened a window in a really fusty room. That young man will go far, I tell you...

Winter miscellany

2010-12-09T21:34:00.005Z

Sorry for dearth of posts. Been suffering from a) seasonal bout of crippling self-doubt, b) inhumanly cold fucking weather.

Schools were closed for children for three days but teachers were instructed to attend our nearest school. We were informed that failure to do otherwise would result in our pay being docked. Being unable to absorb any further loss of income, I attended our local primary school. The one with no children in it.

Mentally filed under: what's the fucking point?

Anyway... There's been a run on petrol stations here because people are worried that they'll run out of petrol. Then they do. Who would've have thunk? Honestly!

I have no sympathy for the SNP but I'm an old man and I have never, ever, seen such a large amount of snow fall out of the sky so fast at this time of year - yet there's people who are convinced that this is somehow someone's fault and heads must roll? They might want to consider the possibility that something completely out of the ordinary that is difficult to cope with might just happen to them, if and when they come to power...

WikiLeaks: Don't quite know what to make of this, to be honest. The issue has been overshadowed by the arrest and incarceration of Assange. On this, there's been a rather depressing cyber-spat that I won't link to between feminists who, despite protestations to the contrary, seem to take the traditional view that all men are potential rapists against fans of the conspiracy theory of history. Given that both of these take default positions that are essentially impervious to evidence, the 'debate' has been as unedifying as one might expect.

Refreshingly, Johann Hari suggests a combination that all reasonable people should at least be prepared to accept is logically possible; just because you think WikiLeaks is a good thing, it does not follow that Assange is personally innocent of what he's been accused of. Johann does think the latest WikiLeaks revelations are a good thing on the grounds that they make us safer. How he can possibly know this isn't something he explains - although maybe I'm missing something.

I really don't know what to make of them. They're the sort of things that a historian is very interested in when the usual statute of limitations on secrecy runs out so it seems churlish of me to turn my nose up at them now just because they're an early release, as it were. But I'm not sure. Everyone keeps going on about how they expose 'hypocrisy' - that politicians and diplomats say one thing in public and another in private.

But normal social intercourse, never mind diplomacy, requires this kind of 'hypocrisy' to function. There's a trade-off here: yes, information exposed allows governments to be held accountable - but on the other hand, the fact of the matter is that liberty also requires a little privacy because people need to be able to reveal themselves selectively - and I'm by no means convinced that this shouldn't apply to state officials as well as private citizens. Or to put it another way, one outcome of this might be that representatives of states will be less frank in their private dealings as well as in public. I don't know what the implications of this might be but at this stage I'd just want to record my scepticism that this is necessarily a positive development. It is surely at least possible that more freedom of information now may very well mean less in the future?

Student tuition fees: Another thing I should have strong opinions about, I dare say - but I don't. I am interested in the political implications for the Lib Dems, though - given the way they nailed their 'no tuition fees' to the electoral mast to gain support prior to the election. Over a third of Lib Dem MPs rebelled. I've seen it suggested that such a tight vote early on is indicative of a fractured coalition that is unlikely to last the five years. I'm not so sure. This was the divisive issue, yet the government won the day. If a majority of the Liberal Democrats can accommodate such a screeching U-turn as this, what further humiliation could they not endure?

I'm thinking it depends on how masochistic they actually are? All the available evidence suggests they are very masochistic - but it might not last if they get nothing in return. Certainly the electorate is unlikely to reward them, with successive opinion polls showing they, rather than the Tories, are taking the hit for all this austerity. Why this is shouldn't be a mystery. Historically people have voted Tory, not because they think they are nice people who support communities and cherish the NHS. They think, know, that the Tories are pretty much bastards but that they're bastards who at least know to run the economy. Liberal voters, on the other hand, didn't sign up for this - thinking as they did that the Lib Dems were really rather cuddly. How much shit they're going to take is an open question - as is how much shit the Liberals themselves are willing to endure. Time will tell. Meanwhile, here's one from the archives...

Significantly more embarrassing than the Who singing, "I hope I die before I get old", I reckon...

Snow Day!

2010-12-01T11:10:00.002Z

Hooray!

Show support for the striking workers

2010-11-26T19:32:00.012Z

Whenever there's a strike, leftist bloggers adopt the default position and recommend that people support it. There has, in fact, never been a strike where a leftist blogger has said, "Hang on - maybe this isn't such a good idea".

Yet when an abused and unfairly maligned group of workers - that would be Scottish referrees - decide to go down tools, what do we get? Nothing, nadda, not a peep.

This despite the intolerable position they find themselves in. As if spoilt-brat, greetin' faced millionaire footballers diving all over the place and arguing the toss wasn't enough to endure - now the clubs, especially the bottomless sense of grievance that is Glasgow Celtic, have pitched in. This on top of fuckwit fans harassing refs in public and hassling them in their places of business.

Football needs rules and it needs someone to administer them on the field. If you disagree with this, you sup with the devil - who most recently has taken the form of The Lord Reid of Cardowan.

Up the workers!

Update: From the Guardian...

"[Y]esterday evening the Portuguese referees who had flown in performed a dramatic U-turn at Glasgow airport almost as soon as they landed, apparently not having been briefed on why they were required in Scotland. And it emerged last night that Israeli officials might also head home. The officials from Portugal headed straight for departures almost instantly on arriving at Glasgow airport..."

Shit meets fan.

Michael Gove and the concept of the 'failing school'

2010-11-24T00:39:00.003Z

Hitherto to 'failing school' could be recognised as the one where less than 30% of pupils gain five GCSEs at A* to C. Now in a great leap forward it's going to be 35%. Those at 34.99% face regime change.

Good luck with that - but I have always wondered where this notion of the 'failing school' comes from and why so much importance is attached to it? The state of 'failing' is by definition transitory and applies only to a few schools. The way that people keep repeating this phrase is just another example of a public discourse that contains very little I recognise.

Here's a new category for those who want to acquaint themselves with reality. This is the failed school. Failed so long ago that when it was anything other is but a folk memory. Here 'management' is essentially an exercise in pretending that this hasn't happened. There's not that many of them, in my experience, but they're scary places for a number of reasons but chief amongst these is that there is very little space to breathe for those who decline to accept that tractor production is up.

With schools it breaks down like this:

1) Excellent

2) Very/pretty good

3) Ok

4) Institutionalised surrender

Between 3 and 4, for a short period in time, is the 'failing school'. Focus on them if you want but I've yet to hear or read anything in the general conversation about education that even acknowledges the existence of 4, never mind have any practical suggestions as to what to do about them.

On Ireland and the case for Scottish independence

2010-11-21T11:03:00.022Z

One wonders whether in the future small and medium-sized countries will begin to worry when commentators start using their economies as case-studies: whom the gods of economic history wish to destroy, first they make them examples from which wider lessons should be drawn?

Everyone remembers that this was the case with Ireland and its apparent economic miracle. For free-marketeers, Ireland showed the virtues of providing a business-friendly environment with its competitive cuts in corporation tax. Young George Osborne, for example, saw it as nothing less than a "shining example of the art of the possible in long-term policy-making".

He was less keen on the lesson drawn by European enthusiasts. For them, Irish growth rates had made the case for membership of the single-currency unanswerable.

The present travails have led people to draw rather different conclusions. It has become the misfortune of Ireland to now serve as a warning. For some it has vindicated the argument that European monetary union, in the absence of fiscal union, is incapable of absorbing 'asymmetric shocks' in the Eurozone countries. For Keynesians the current meltdown shows the folly of fiscal retrenchment in times of recession.

One can agree with both of these up to a point, although with the latter I wonder what Keynesian solution is open to Ireland with its debt reaching the prices it now has on the markets? A more important qualification is that these are both policy variables that have exacerbated, rather than caused, Ireland's present economic woes.

But if you'll forgive me for being parochial, the purpose of this post is to wonder what conclusions the Scottish nationalists are now drawing from all this? While Alex Salmond in particular would frequently use a variety of small European countries as exemplars, it is practically impossible to exaggerate the extent to which he linked the political aspirations of the Scottish nationalists to the economics of the 'Celtic Tiger'. For example, in his 2008 lecture, "Shaping Scotland's Future", no-one in the Dublin audience could have been left with any doubt over the future shape that Alex Salmond thought Scotland should take:

"Scotland looks out to an Arc of Prosperity around us. Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Finland and Denmark. All small independent nations. All stable, secure and prosperous.

Of all these nations, no example is more impressive and inspiring than Ireland. And none is more relevant to the decisions that Scotland faces today."

It is important to point out that Salmond and the SNP have consistently argued that not only would an independent Scotland be economically prosperous, it would be so because it was independent. Given that this is the case, it is entirely unsurprising that he should have taken particular interest in the Irish model. First politically independent from Britain, then economically through membership of the EU and later the Euro, for Salmond Ireland's growth rates served as an example of what was possible if the dead-weight of the British state could be removed from Scotland's shoulders.

The identification with the Irish model was practically absolute. Membership of the Euro was to form part of the 'Independence in Europe' policy - and even post-credit crunch he was inexplicably arguing that membership might prevent one in the future.

Scotland should also adopt the Irish policy of competitive cuts in corporation tax to attract inward investment, pointing out that the excruciating 'Braveheart' was partly filmed in Ireland. I think we were to take it that this was a bad thing.

Most crucially, as far as I am concerned, the former economist for the RBS was as uncritical as anyone else of the 'light hand on the tiller' approach to banking regulation and at no point gave the slightest indication that he was concerned about the weight of the financial sector in the Scottish economy:

"And of course we Scots are lucky enough to have the one of the best brands in the world - a global recognition and affection for our culture that money cannot buy.

Take financial services. With RBS and HBOS - two of the world's biggest banks - Scotland has global leaders today, tomorrow and for the long-term."

That Salmond and the SNP should have been a little more careful with their choice of comparators goes without saying. The Herald's Ian Bell was prescient enough to point this out over two years ago:

"[I]f a property market failure - with 270,000 construction jobs at stake - leads to negative equity and mass unemployment during a global recession, the Irish beast may seem a little less glamorous. Close study need not imply unthinking imitation, in any case, and nor should it, on the evidence. Yet you would not guess as much when Mr Salmond connects independence with the "arc of prosperity" across northern Europe, and when he holds up Ireland as an exemplar. Best stick to Norway, for now."

Salmond has belatedly followed this advice with Norway now serving the exemplar function. It is a clumsy shift in emphasis that only the amnesiac would find convincing. But I'm wondering what the political consequences of this will be for the SNP? It's too early to say but they might not be as profound as they could be or, as some of us would argue, should be.

Apart from the weakness of the Scottish opposition, there are two reasons for this:

1) From the outset of the banking crisis, I have been astonished at the impressive ability some people have to pretend that absolutely nothing that could even dent their world-view has happened at all. In public at least Salmond gives the impression of belonging to this group - although whether this is so privately, I couldn't say.

2) When economic disasters on this scale hit, they tend to shatter a consensus view that has been more widely-shared than some people care to remember. What has happened to Ireland is a species of the more general meltdown in the world banking system, affecting countries large and small, some who are part of the Eurozone and some who are not. Not even all of the opposition parties in Scotland can claim distinct policies on the Euro and Scottish independence and even those who did cannot claim to have many Jeremiahs in their ranks.

Nevertheless, nationalists have some difficult questions to answer. The experience of banks being 'too big to fail' is one that has not been unique to Ireland but the reality is that smaller nations are by definition more likely to experience this, as well as being less able to cope with it. Salmond is right to suggest that we have seen two of the biggest threats to the independence of small nations - territorial acquisition by larger states and lack of access to markets - effectively removed over the last twenty years or so but in his assumption that globalisation was an entirely benign development for small countries he failed to take account of this one.

I would imagine it is dawning on the more thoughtful supporters of Scottish independence already: while it is obviously possible for small countries to have both, prosperity is not the same thing as sovereignty, the latter does not guarantee the former and, most importantly, if we had followed the trajectory drawn by Alex Salmond and the SNP, it seems highly probable that Scotland today would have neither.

Political Innovation

2010-11-16T21:15:00.003Z

I attended this event on Saturday in the freezing town of my birth. Lovely to meet for the first time bloggers whose writing I was familiar with - gentlemen such as David Farrer from Freedom and Whisky, Martin Kelly, Duncan Stephen aka Doctor Vee, and our gracious host, the Slugger himself - as well as one or two who had previously been unknown to me, from Better Nation, Bright Green, and journalist slash blogger, Joan MacAlpine.

I left this event feeling like I usually do on occasions like this; slightly exhausted by the effort it takes to avoid making a complete tit of myself. Self-assessment is pointless so I won't speculate as to whether I achieved even this rather lowly goal. A couple of impressions: the event was dominated by nationalists - and everyone seemed to agree that the nationalist line isn't given an airing in the MSM.

I would agree with this, but only up to a point. It is true that the case for outright independence isn't taken seriously in the Scottish press - but it does not follow that the position being taken here is 'deeply unionist', as our friends over at Bright Green would have us believe. Rather, the Scottish media has been pedaling nationalism with a small 'n' for as long as I can remember - along with the Scottish Labour party, when it thought it suited their interests - which is, I would argue, one of the reasons why we are where we are politically in Scotland today.

Furthermore, while it is indeed true that the case for full independence isn't given a fair hearing in the Scottish press, nationalists should be at least partly grateful that this so because otherwise people might be able to examine the wreckage that is the SNP's economic argument for independence.

Uncritical support for the preponderance of the financial sector in the Scottish economy, along with advocating membership of the Euro and the adoption of beggar-thy-neighbour cuts in corporation tax: Salmond billed this as a distinctively Scottish policy and it is only because the Scottish press are completely uninterested in the economics of independence that he has, astonishingly, got away with promoting the very policies that have brought Ireland to its knees.

I'd be interested to have a conversation with any nationalist who has a reasonable answer to these points - which brings me to another point that stood out for me at Saturday's event: how to avoid bloggers simply having conversations with people who agree with them? All the evidence would suggest that comments threads are not the forum on which to have rational discussion. Could I suggest that a possible solution would be an aggregated blog that is based on region, rather than ideology, might be the way forward? This is how newsprint journalism - in contrast to the more ideological stratification of papers in England - has traditionally been done up here.

Arithmetic and unemployment

2010-11-15T00:26:00.007Z

Clearly neither irony nor self-examination is Melanie Phillips' strong point as she has accused the left of 'foaming with rage' - adding that this has clouded our use of basic arithmetic when it comes to the problem of unemployment and the coalition's suggested medicine of workfare:

"[T]hey don’t even realise that their own claims don’t add up.

[...]

The fact is that much worklessness results from people calculating they are better off on benefits than in low-paid jobs. It’s that calculation that IDS is trying to reverse."

Much worklessness? How much? Mel doesn't say. The fact of the matter, according to the government's own figures, is that there are 5.2 people unemployed for every vacancy in the UK today. Perhaps I'm missing something but doesn't that mean that regardless of the morality of the unemployed, there simply are not at present jobs available for them all? I appreciate this is an average and doesn't reflect the imbalances in the labour market. Some sectors will still be struggling to fill vacancies in areas where specialist skills are required. But it would seem that the demand for ranting former-left journalists who prefer moral condemnation to empirical data is depressingly inelastic...

Reports of the introduction of the Curriculum for Excellence have been greatly exaggerated

2010-11-14T18:42:00.002Z

Our Education Secretary Mike Russell claims the introduction of the Curriculum for Excellence has confounded the critics and proved to be a resounding success:

""There were doubts that schools were ready and there were predictions, mainly from the opposition benches, of catastrophe," he said."

I would agree catastrophe has been avoided - but I'll let you into a secret: this new curriculum, billed as the greatest shake-up of Scottish education in a generation, has wrought a change so imperceptible that one could be forgiven for thinking it hadn't happened at all.

Standard Grade remains until 2014. It is still being taught and kids are still picking their options for this at the end of their second year of secondary school. We still haven't even the vaguest idea as to what its replacement will look like. But we're all guessing it'll look like son of Standard Grade. In the interregnum, we're merely tweaking our existing courses - knowing that we shouldn't expend too much energy doing much more than this because it is the exam structure that drives the content in the preceding years. And we are, of course, still waiting for an English translation of the crash of jargon that is the Curriculum for Excellence.

New booze rules

2010-11-11T19:41:00.002Z

The Scottish Parliament passed a number of new restrictions on the sale of alcohol but stopped short of approving a minimum price.

It's a typically Parliamentary compromise - and one that's unlikely to satisfy anyone. What stood out for me was that they implicitly accepted that it is a legitimate function of government to limit alcohol consumption by rationing it through the price mechanism - hence the ban on discounted deals - but had not the courage to follow this to its logical conclusion.

This is not to say I'm in favour. I feel about alcohol prices in much the same way as I do about companies charging people for the use of plastic bags: producers are trying to pre-empt taxes by introducing price increases all on their own. A more honest way for society to raise the price of these 'bads' would be a simple increase - or in the case of plastic bags, an introduction - of taxation to choke off consumption.

IDS and the Road to Serfdom

2010-11-08T23:55:00.005Z

A number of people have commented, summarised handily here, on the coalition's on-going progressive journey to the 19th century - this time with regards to the plan to force the unemployed to perform ritualistic acts of manual labour in order to retain their benefits.

Some people don't want to work? As a former welfare rights officer and employee of what is now called the DWP, I would respond - no shit, Sherlock. Followed by the question: so what? Even if all the unemployed had a strong work ethic - or a suitably docile attitude, depending on your view - there still wouldn't be work for them all.

It's a fairly easy matter to demonstrate that the relative generosity of a country's welfare system doesn't even correlate, still less prove causation, with unemployment levels. While estimates vary, America's current unemployment rate is higher than Britain's, which in turn is higher than Denmark's.

Unemployment is higher in times of deficient demand but it always exists in a capitalist system, simply because it lacks any mechanism to prevent it. In this sense, the unemployed are carriers of an inconvenient truth: capitalism might work after a fashion but it doesn't require everyone to work to do this. This is why the unemployed must be punished and made servants.

Against team sports

2010-11-06T21:02:00.005Z

Mixed feelings about this story about a boy who shot his teacher because he hated rugby. Shooting people is wrong, I would agree - but PE teachers, despite their best efforts to pretend otherwise, are Nazis who enjoy humiliating fat people. And even if you're weren't fat, they made you participate in what seemed to me then, and still do today, completely insane competitive sports.

I'm not really a weegie; I was born in Edinburgh and went to a comprehensive, but it was one of those typically Edinburgh establishments that still liked to think it was a private school. So we played rugby and cricket. To this day I find both of these activities utterly incomprehensible. Picture this: it's winter 1978 and we're playing rugby in fucking shorts in sub-zero temperatures on perma-frost. But the PE teacher ain't wearing no shorts - he's got a tracksuit, jumper, gloves, scarf and hat on, barking instructions - prick that he was.

Shorts in the pitiless East Coast winter - but when the summer comes along, you play this sport called cricket where it is customary to wear long trousers and the option of a jumper is available. This makes sense how, exactly?

I know people imagine team sports are supposed to be character-building and all that but my own view is that if you internalise the logic behind this lunacy, you'll end up losing your goddamn mind. To this day, I hate competitive sports. It took me to my late thirties before I realised you could actually exercise and live healthily without participating in these deeply stupid activities.

Remembrance and the pity of war

2010-11-01T19:27:00.003Z

It was Stanley Payne who coined the phrase 'semantic virus' for the way that the term 'fascism' has been spread, and thereby diluted, in the hands of those who use it as shorthand for anything they find oppressive.

It goes without saying that what people find 'oppressive' today are experiences that are by historical standards - or even contemporary ones - rather light and trivial. I can't think, for example, of a better example of Payne's point than the fact that people can actually imagine it is appropriate to use the epithet 'fascism' to describe the supposed pressure of conformity that people feel around this time when we look forward to Remembrance Day.

Especially when you live in a world where even this doesn't exist - which I do now.

This wasn't always the case. When I was at primary school, we we told what Poppy Day was all about, the token fee we were expected to donate and how you were expected to wear it. (On the lapel of your blazer.) Clearly some would find this - do find this - unbearably stifling of their individuality but then it was simply the done thing. Now there is only one's own thing - and I feel a little nostalgic for this act of collective conformity and a little sad that so many people find it difficult to participate.

From Edinburgh to Glasgow and to the present day. A couple of years ago I found myself in Glasgow's - Europe's, apparently - largest secondary school, which happens to be Roman Catholic. By wearing a poppy, I might have well worn a sign with 'protestant' around my neck. I appreciate those of Catholic Irish origin have no love for the British army but this is not what Remembrance is about. It is not the glorification of war or the military. The title of this post contains an allusion to a book by the (unfairly, in my view) maligned rightwing historian Niall Ferguson. How successful his 'counter-factual' approach to historical questions is beyond the purpose of this post. His contention is that what the allies achieved was not justified by the costs they incurred. There are many historians and students of history that have arrived, from rather different perspectives, to the same conclusion - and even those who don't, recognise the enormous tragedy of this war that set the 20th century in motion.

It is not to celebrate victory or 'militarism' but simply to remember the fallen that one wears a poppy. It is difficult to comment upon the experience of those who feel pressurized into wearing one because I live in a world where no such pressure exists but even so, it is comparing this experience to 'fascism', rather than not wearing one at all, that strikes me as being disrespectful.

The management of a household

2010-10-22T00:24:00.002+01:00

Tories seem particularly keen on making comparisons between the economy as a whole and how a family might run their household - hence Thatcher's remark about how the British economy couldn't survive by 'taking each other's washing in', or Cameron's criticism that the previous Labour administration should have 'fixed the roof while the sun was shining', or more general stuff about 'belt-tightening' and most recently Gideon's remark about how this present administration would live within its means.

Now, every economist - or even anyone interested in economics - would immediately recognise the fallacy of composition that is being made here - the understanding of which lay behind the paradox of thrift, an idea popularised, but not invented, by Keynes.

But the word 'economy' has in its Greek roots the idea of the management of a household, after all - and it occurred to me that perhaps Labour needs to find some homey analogies of its own. Here the present make-up of this government could serve as a guide. On this, Johann Hari is in good form:

"It can't be coincidental that this is being done to us by three men – Cameron, Osborne, and Nick Clegg – who have never worried about a bill in their lives. On a basic level, they do not understand the effects of these decisions on real people."

I don't think it can be a coincidence either. Only people completely removed from the reality of life as it is lived by ordinary people could possibly imagine that borrowing per se is indicative of irresponsibility.

Here's an example from my own experience, which I'm frankly embarrassed about and wouldn't normally share with you, but it rather illustrates the point. I found myself a bit short recently so I had to borrow some money to put petrol in my car so I could go to work. It seemed a prudent thing to do since it has maximised my income in the long-run.

What would Gideon and the rest of these rich fuckers have me do instead? 'Living within my means' here would have involved not going to work, sitting in the house with no heating on and foregoing the income I have now earned. I understand Alan Johnson also has experience of how the shoe pinches - so perhaps he would do better to work some of this into his rhetoric, rather than stuff about 'ideological cuts', which while true doesn't necessarily resonate with people who were skint before these cuts.

The CSR: prophesy more quietly, please.

2010-10-21T00:53:00.007+01:00

I'm thinking outside the box here but what we really need is some new cliches. Or rather, we should dispense with them altogether because, drawing as they do from the past, the use of cliches have a tendency to fall into the trap of hyperbole. Like, for example, the tiresome way in which any public misdemeanour by politicians today comes reported with the suffix 'gate' - regardless of how trivial. ('Bigot-gate', indeed!)

I'm concerned that too many of us who are opponents of the Conservatives will fall into something like this trap when responding to this 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review. Where were you when the Osbourne Axe fell? asks Paul Sagar, with the suggestion that this spending review will, like 9/11, come to be seen as an epoch-changing event.

I think this is unlikely in the extreme. Budgets, never mind spending reviews, are rarely events of great political theatre. The so-called People's Budget was, but that was the precursor to a constitutional crisis. And even with this - did anyone remember where they were that day? This is a process with uncertain outcomes and while I share the view that they are unlikely to be good, it is unwise to hold hostages to fortune by being so emphatic about it - especially in language that evokes the ghost of Geddes. Whatever British society and economy looks like in the next five or ten years, it is not going to be a duplicate of the interwar period.

And if resting a political programme on a prediction about the shape of the British economy is unwise, how much more so is one based on assumptions about what people's reactions are going to be? Political Betting ask, will Johnson's 'ideological charge stick'? I wouldn't have thought so. A majority of people seem to have been convinced that the cuts are being made out of necessity and are therefore only likely to be influenced by how poor they feel as a result of them rather than what motivated them. Now, Polly Toynbee is already convinced that the "comfortable 70%" will care when the cuts bite. "You bet they will". No, you bet if you want to; I'm not gonna because here's a paradox: the extent to which this will be true depends on how evenly public spending reductions are felt - but from what we can gather so far, what the same critics insist on, is that they are not going to be spread evenly.

Mass public disquiet tends to be prompted by issues that effect almost everyone and here I'm concerned that this government's opponents haven't spotted how they've tried to avoid this. Services that most people use, like health and education, have come off relatively lightly. The rest are targeted, as far as we can tell, on groups whose disadvantage is unlikely to produce mass rebellion. Most people don't live in 'social housing'; people aren't going to riot because higher earners aren't getting child benefit anymore; and the influence that mass unemployment, and the poor treatment of said unemployed, has on political opinion is often exaggerated by people with hazy memories. The Thatcher regime survived years of mass unemployment with contemptuous ease; the poll tax, which affected everyone, was another matter.

In short, even if the most dire predictions of this government's fiscal strategy are vindicated by events, it is the fact that we are not 'all in this together' that should cause us to eschew the perils of making political prophecy.

Bloggers' bad manners and other myths

2010-10-12T17:10:00.007+01:00

Here's one or two critical comments in response to Andrew Marr's denigrating generalisations about bloggers and blogging.

But the question I was left with was not why does Marr think it's such a bad thing to be single, as Chris Dillow asks - but why does he seem to think bloggers represent a distinct sociological type at all? For he doesn't provide much in the way of evidence, if you think about it. Bloggers have pimples, stay with their mothers and they're bald? You were left wondering if he's met any at all. For where would he meet them? The socially-inadequate by definition tend not to attend social functions.

I suppose it depends what blogs you read but there doesn't seem to be any particular type to me. Academics and students are pretty well-presented - as are journalists, let's not forget. And then there's political activists and a few MPs. The sort of people who are interested in politics, in other words. I'd have to add that while I haven't met many bloggers and would have no way of knowing whether the ones I have are at all representative, none of them have been particularly young and all of them, without exception, have been a damn sight better-looking than Andrew Marr.

I'm trying to get at the notion that bloggers are a different species and I think something that illustrates the point I'm reaching for is this issue about manners and the tone in which conversation is conducted online. Marr says:

" Most of the blogging is too angry and too abusive. It is vituperative.

"Terrible things are said on line because they are anonymous. People say things on line that they wouldn't dream of saying in person."

Sure but so what? This isn't evidence that bloggers are either psychologically or sociologically different from anyone else. I'm afraid this is how people behave when they feel insulated - just like they do when they're in their cars. Two people get in each other's way in the street and they're the model of politeness - but in a traffic jam? How much more when people feel even more insulated and are talking about those things - politics and religion - that are most likely to stir strong emotion?

Andrew Marr: If I was meeting him in person, I would be the epitome of charm. But since I'm sitting in my flat in Glasgow, instead I'll say, "Hey fuck-face, where do you get off making remarks about the appearance of people you've never met? Do you actually own a mirror? If you do, I'd be surprised - it certainly makes your comments about baldness rather difficult to explain."

John Lennon

2010-10-09T19:12:00.003+01:00

I'm not the world's greatest Beatles fan but there were pretty damn good - before they degenerated into St Pepper self-indulgence, that is. Unquestionably the whole was greater than the sum of the parts because these taken individually were fairly dreadful - and none more so than John Lennon, who would have been seventy today, had he not got himself shot.

I wish he had lived because without his untimely passing, his woeful solo output would have disappeared into the obscurity it so richly deserves. All of it was utterly dismal but the song that deserves special mention is Imagine.

The melody is moronic, the facile lyrics make you weep for all the wrong reasons - plus it is badly-performed. Also, this great steaming turd of a song was at No. 1 for what seemed like an eternity when he died. All this prompts me to ask the question, hoping against hope that I am not alone: was there ever a more excruciating song in the English language than this appalling dirge?