Uncle Ken's Guide to STV Voting

The UK goes to the polls on the 4th May 2017 to elect councillors across the country. For people in Scotland that means working out the intricacies of the single transferable vote system which is used here at local level. It looks complicated, but fear not, 'cos once you get the hang of STV it becomes dead easy.

Each ward is multi-member with three or four candidates being chosen to represent it. The voters cast their ballots by writing a number next to a candidates name, starting with "1" and going as far down the ballot paper as they choose, or until they run out of candidates. So as far as we, the punters, are concerned it's just a case of listing the candidates based upon how much they appeal to us.

The easiest way to get elected is to have more first preference votes than the number set by the quota, and before your eyes start glazing over, lemme quickly explain how the quota is set. 

Right, you create the quota by dividing the number of eligible ballots returned by the number of seats to be filled, plus one. Then you take that number and add another one to it.

You eyes are glazing over, so let's have a concrete example: a ward has an election and one hundred ballots are returned that have been correctly filled in. Four councillors are to be elected, so you get the quota by dividing 100 into five, that being the four seats plus one. A hundred divided by five comes to twenty, so you take twenty, add one to it and get twenty-one. So twenty-one becomes the quota needed to get elected on the first round of counting in this mythical election.

A candidate who got thirty first preference votes would obviously be elected, but the beauty of STV is that the nine votes that he got above his quota of twenty-one would be distributed to his second preference candidate and could help that man be returned as well.

Once no other candidates can be elected via the first round, we go onto the second which is when the candidate who finished last is eliminated and his second preferences are distributed. If seats still need to be filled, the candidate who took the second last spot is then eliminated, and his second preferences are doled out, and so on until all the seats have been filled.

Sadly, the parties seem to think that they should only run two candidates in four seat wards, with Labour even trying to get its voters to cast a first preference for one candidate in one half of the ward, with a first preference for the other in the other half. There is no reason to do that under STV, since the system helps political parties. All Labour needs to do is tell people to vote for the party list, and if the first candidate goes well over quota, his second preferences are given out. If that candidate is then elected with votes to spare, the surplus is then given out to the third preference and so on.

Luckily for the left, a certain David Jacobsen is standing for the Socialist Labour Party, and hopefully Labour's activists will ask people to vote for him as their third preference.

Labour alone of all the parties has a very efficient electoral machine and activists who are willing to go and knock on doors to jolly the punters along. The other parties can mount street stalls, but that is not enough to get the vote out. Besides, people like it when candidates knock on their doors and at least go through the motions of trying to persuade us that they really do give a shit about our concerns.

All good fun that is coming our way on the 4th May 2017!

Calls Grow for the SNP to Govern, Not Play Games

A rather amusing photo that plopped into my in-box today. Nicola Sturgeon is still head and shoulders about the opposition, but she has managed to make Ruth Davidson's Tories look as if they are not completely insane. All Davidson had to do was remind people that this is a government, and not a collection of student union activists, and that she has done rather well of late, helped by the SNP.

The problem is that the SNP really is a campaigning outfit, which exists to push for independence. Its members seem to have little or no interest in governing the country, which is a pity because when they set their mind to it the SNP can govern rather well. However, when they balls it up, they do that quite spectacularly as well.

Today I went along to a conference that discussed the Named Person wheeze, which was recently declared unlawful by the UK Supreme Court. Jim Sillars was one of the speakers, and he made the point that this lunatic bit of authoritarian legislation was passed by a parliament that sits for only three days a week, from 9.00am to 5.00pm. This flawed legislation, which aimed at putting parents under the thumb of the social work industry, was passed by the SNP dominated Holyrood with minimal objections to its poorly drafted wording. Sillars went on to say that in Westminster every line of a bill is considered, but in Holyrood there was not the requisite amount of time needed to do that, with the result that flawed legislation was passed.

You can bet that the SNP will dedicate even less time to sorting out disasters like this now that they are back into full campaigning mode for IndyRef 2.

Bella Caledonia is on the verge of closure

Back in June 2016 yours truly predicted that Bella Caledonia, the nauseatingly trendy website that hardly anyone reads would close sooner rather than later. Up popped the editor Mike Small to state: "I'm sorry to disappoint you Ken but we'll be around for a very long time." A long time turned out to be just seven months, as Mike Small is now job hunting and the site looks as if it will close any day now. For that reason I have saved the page that earned my ire just a few short months ago, and which includes my prediction that the train was about to hit the buffers.

It's nice to be right about things, isn't it?

For Scotland, the future will be a process, not an event

As I said in my last posting, I am very happy to see the SNP remain in power, but without having too much power. A lot of people are not happy, but that's politics for you, and it does not mean that the road to either independence or maximum devolution is blocked. Rather it means that the future will not be marked by a major event, such as a referendum that leads to an independence day, but a process that will in the fullness of time lead to the same end.

Many countries have followed this road over the years, with Canada being the prime example. The country in its modern form was created thanks to the British North America Act 1867 that was passed by Westminster. That act gave the new entity certain powers, but many more were reserved to Westminster. In 1914 when the United Kingdom went to war against Germany, Canada was automatically at war herself. A generation later, when the UK again went to war with Germany on the 3 September 1939, Canada declared war on the 10th of that month, as the power to do so had been devolved between the two wars.

The right to declare war is one of the powers that only sovereign states have, and it took Canada many years to obtain that central sovereign right. Indeed, the last bit of Westminster control over the Canadian polity was not relinquished until 1982,  over a century after the process had begun in 1867.

At no point during that long period of time did anyone in Canada talk about unpacking the rifles and declaring independence as the 13 British colonies to their south had already done. It was accepted in both London and Ottawa that the process would reach it own conclusion in its own good time, which it did.

Scotland embarked on a similar journey, starting as early as the 1880s when administrative devolution was granted to the country. By the 1930s the whole of the Scotland Office had been moved to Edinburgh, with only the Secretary of State for Scotland remaining in London with his small staff. 

Political devolution took rather longer, thanks to the intervention of the Great War, but when it came in 1999 it was quickly followed by two further Scotland Acts in 2012 and 2016, with the result that today the bulk of the decisions that effect people in their day to day lives in Scotland are decided by Holyrood, and not Westminster.

Looking to the future, Scotland does not need to continue with the constitutional debate, because that was settled in the 2014 referendum, a matter that was confirmed yesterday when the people of Scotland said that they wanted the SNP to have power, but not too much power. 

This is an opportunity for Holyrood to legislate for Scotland, and by doing so it will slowly but surely continue the process of breaking up the United Kingdom. That cannot be avoided, if Westminster continues to enact legislation that will not apply to Scotland, and Holyrood passes its own legislation in its areas of competence that diverges from what exists south of the River Tweed.

Much of this process does not actually need legislative change to take place. Until 2007, Scotland was run by the executive, not a government. In that year the SNP decided to quietly start calling their administration the Scottish government, and London did not object, so the matter was settled. One could imagine the office of First Minster becoming that of Prime Minister, or Premier, along the same lines. Similarly, the Presiding Officer who chairs Holyrood could also be replaced. Historically, the pre-1707 body was chaired by a Chancellor, and as far as I can see there is nothing to stop Holyood changing the Presiding Officer for a Chancellor.

What's in a name? That will be London's attitude, just as it was in 2007, but the symbolism of such markers on Scotland's road to the future is the most important thing here.

Returning to the legislative arena, if Labour finally drops nonsense such as the Baine Principle which held that whatever the SNP proposed they would oppose, and starts to work with the SNP government in areas of mutual interest then that would be a step in the right direction. Labour badly needs people to stop believing that it is a Westminster stooge, which is why the party now opposes Trident. That policy is a gesture, but it may have been enough to stop yesterday turning into a complete route.

Labour, the Liberal-Democrats and the Greens are all in favour of higher taxation, whereas the SNP have suddenly got cold feet over what was until recently one of their flagship policies.One can imagine a trade-off, with the SNP agreeing to some opposition polices, in return for those parties agreeing to support the replacement of the First Minster with that of a Prime Minister.  Its is a small constitutional change, which London may not even care about, and the taxation issue is fully devolved so it is not their problem.

The Tories in Holyrood will howl that this is further evidence that everyone else wants to break up the UK, but they can be sidelined and left to bang their Lambeg drums in impotent rage, if all the other parties can agree.

They are right, of course, but the process will be so long that it is unlikely that anyone who is an adult today will live to see its end. Thus is is not an issue that we need to discuss, and most people won't. This is just about using Holyrood's powers to their fullest extent.

Let the process begin!

Time for Scotland to look forward and not backwards

Had Scotland voted for independence back in September 2014 then today would have been the country's independence day. It didn't, so it isn't, but that has not stopped Unionist and Nationalist commentators from raking over its cooling ashes to show that they were right all along. 

The problem is that you cannot have a healthy polity when everyone is arguing about what might have been. The Southern United States and the Republic of Ireland behaved in just that way for almost a century after their respective civil wars were over, and the end result was a stagnant political culture that looked backwards instead of forwards. Scotland needs to reject that approach.

Thanks to a very high turnout in 2014, with a Yes vote that almost carried the day, the Smith Commission was created by a rattled Westminster. Out of that debate came the Scotland Bill, which became the Scotland Act 2016, having received its Royal Assent the day before what would have been independence day.

From now on the bulk of the things that impinge on people's daily lives will be decided in Holyrood and not Westminster. 

It is now time to start arguing about just what type of Scotland we want, within the overall framework of the United Kingdom.  

Holyrood has the powers: we need to push it until it uses them.

It's official: Holyrood's new powers are on their way

It went right down to the wire, but the UK and Scottish governments finally compromised on the fiscal framework that will underpin the new powers that Holyrood will get later this year. I don't want to over-egg this pudding, but it does mean that Holyrood will be one of the most powerful devolved legislatures in the world. Not as powerful as a Swiss canton, certainly, and maybe no as much of a heavyweight as Quebec is within Canada, but certainly it puts Scotland up there with the other Canadian provinces or even the American states. 

The hold-up came about owing to different interpretations of the no-detriment clauses of the Smith Commission Report. Actually what both sides were doing was pretending that there is only one such clause, when actually there are two.

The UK government argued that they were meeting clause 95(3) in full by transferring powers without causing any loss of income to Scotland at the point of transfer. The Scottish government said that this was all very well, but clause 95(4) was the problem as that bit states that there shall be no detriment as the powers are used by Holyrood.

In a nutshell, since income tax will be fully devolved, if the population in England continues to grow with high levels of immigration, then the tax take for Westminster will rise. However, Scotland does not have large numbers of immigrants, so her income tax levels would decline over time. Under the existing system that was not a problem, since all the revenues raised in Scotland went to Westminster, there to be put through the formula known as Barnett, and returned to Holyrood with a nice top-up. However, with income tax now being a matter purely for Holyrood, that sum will be removed from the future block grant that London pays to Edinburgh. In simple English, unless a deal could be done, Scotland would get less money from her own income tax than she would had she remained under the pure block grant system.

When these negotiations began, the UK government wanted to cut the block grant by £7 billion, that being the amount, more or less that Scotland raises with her own income tax and other incidentals that will also be devolved. By Monday of this week they had dropped that to £3 billion, then on Tuesday morning they asked for a £2.5 billion cut, before in the afternoon reducing it to £2 billion.

Then Cameron seems to have stepped in and shrugged his shoulders, with the result that there will be no cuts at all. The matter has been kicked into the long grass with a joint promise of a review in five more years, when all the current teams will probably be out of office. Besides, five years is a long time and we can expect inertia to kick in when it all comes up for renegotiation, with the result that it will get rolled over again for the next generation to worry about.

Scotland is very, very lucky with the timing over this. All Cameron cares about is winning the EU referendum. The last thing he wants is to have an outraged Scotland making waves. Far better to provide us with a rather nice bung to go away and shut up. 

To be honest, that suits me down to the ground. I voted Yes in the IndyRef because the thought of continuing to live in a country that was dominated by scummy Tories and their odious hangers-on in ratholes like Nuneaton left me feeling in need of a bath.

Looking ahead, pretty much everything that affects the day to day life of people in Scotland will be decided by Holyrood, a chamber far more responsive that the two that exist in Westminster. 

All with a nice bung courtesy of HMG!

Labour council tries to avoid paying people for flood damage by blaming the SNP

I was planning to enjoy my break from blogging for a while yet, but tales of local government stupidity are just too good to miss, so let's hear it for Dumfries and Galloway's attempt to avoid paying people for the recent flood damage and then blame the SNP government for that.

The government set aside £700,000 to pay the victims of the New Year floods, but D&G Council decided not to tell any of their residents about that fund. Then, when people began to make claims, the council brushed them off with the excuse that the fund was only for the victims of the earlier flooding the month before.

Unfortunately at least one victim of the December floods came forward and told her MSP that when she had applied for the compensation the council had told her that they knew nothing about any fund that the government had set aside to compensate anyone for any flooding at all!

Things became entertaining when Labour decided to make political capital out of the cock-up, which led to John Swinney, the Finance Minister, losing his rag completely and  handed out a dose of the old heavy manners:

Joan McAlpine, who sits in Holyrood for the South of Scotland region posted the full, sorry tale to Facebook on the 11 January, and needless to say, the council promptly altered its website and is now advertising the fact that people who suffered in the floods can get money for repairs to their property, but it's a bit late for all that now, isn't it?

This has nothing to do with Jeremy Corbyn, Momentum, the takeover of the Labour Party by Trotscum, or any other fantasy that the political right wants to come out with. This is the old story of Labour incompetence at its worst, with local councillors sitting back in the members' bar and leaving matters to the council's officers to run. You could not make shit like this up if you tried.

In just over four months Scotland will have a general election, and Labour are going to need a miracle to save them in the South of Scotland.

Labour & Tories present a joint guide to losing an election

It's rare to have a weekend when both Labour and the Tories drop electoral bollocks, but by God this weekend was one to remember for such an event.

First up was Diane Abbott, pictured above stuffing her gullet with something or other. The Hockney Hippo appeared to stick the boot in her own party when she airily claimed, “I mean, it is too late now to rebuild the position in Scotland in time for May." 

Now parties may suspect that they are going to be left with their arses hanging out the electoral window, but rule one of politics is that you don't say that publicly before the election. 

If you break that rule then it makes you look like a bunch of incompetent losers, something which David "Fluffy" Mundell should have remembered before he went on the break it himself.

Fluffy is the last surviving Tory MP in Scotland, and his contribution to the weekend's joint train crash was to tell the good people of Scotland that they should vote Tory to avoid the country becoming a one party state run by the SNP.

That's right: he wasn't saying how great his party was, or what it would do for the country, merely that we should cast as sort of sympathy vote for his ramshackle outfit just to stop the government that most of us actually quite like from getting too many seats.

So an own goal apiece for both parties, but then Labour came along, dribbled the ball from the half way line right into their own area and scored a blistering goal into the back of their own net. You don't believe me: meet the Labour candidate for the Glasgow Southside seat in next years Scottish General Election:

No, it's not a bloke, it is actually a bird that answers to the name of Fariha Thomas. This woman is so unknown that she has not yet had an insulting nickname bestowed upon her. She has sat as a Glasgow councillor for all of three years, is from London originally and is a convert to Islam.

Glasgow Southside, in case you were wondering, is Nicola Sturgeon's seat. Now I accept that Labour has little chance of winning it, but did they have to choose a candidate who is so far removed from Glasgow, not to say Scotland's, mainstream?

I try to understand what if going through the minds of the two old parties, I really do. The problem is that they come over as two little bunny rabbits caught in the blazing headlights of the SNP truck that is charging down the road and will soon squash them

Tommy Sheridan's Solidarity may be no more

Friday the 13th was unlucky this month for Tommy Sheridan's Solidarity - Hope Over Fear party when the Herald newspaper rang up party secretary Gordon Morgan, and told him that his party no longer existed. Morgan had until the 31 October to confirm with the Electoral Commission that the party was still active. Since he couldn't be bothered doing, Solidarity was de-registered on the 4 November.

At first Morgan tried to bluster by saying that he would correct "the mistake," but when told that the only way to do that was to start the process of registration all over again and pay £150 for the pleasure of doing it, he just said: “Oh for fuck’s sake. Oh shit.” 

He then went on to admit that the Hope Over Fear slogan had only been registered to stop other people using it, before the penny dropped as he uttered the immortal line: “If we’ve lapsed anyone could fucking use it.” 

Much as I like Tommy Sheridan, the man who did more than almost any other to rally opposition in Scotland to the Poll Tax during the Thatcher years, if you mix with Trots then things like this will happen, given that Trotskyism is less an ideology and more a mental deficiency.

It might be an idea for Sheridan to run as an independent in next year's Scottish General Election. He can't do any worse than he has surrounded by Trotscum can he?

Abortion law in Scotland must be a matter for Holyrood, not Westminster

The Labour Party shrugged its shoulders at the defeat of their amendment to devolve tax credits to Holyrood, but have now decided to use the House Of Lords to try and stop the devolution of abortion law. Please don't ask me what is going through their little minds - the party seems to be having another one of those head up arsehole moments.

As things stand the whole of Great Britain is covered by the 1967 Abortion Act, which in theory allows abortions up to 24 weeks. I say in theory because in Scotland the de facto limit has always been 18 weeks.

The reason for this is that Ground C of the 1967 act which states that a woman's mental health will suffer if she continues with the pregnancy is not accepted as providing sufficient grounds for a late abortion in Scotland. Thus a pregnant woman who has reached 18 weeks gestation either has to have the child or go to England to abort it.

Looking at the line put out by the Labour figures who want to keep abortion law firmly under Westminster's control it seems to me as if they do not actually know that the two countries already differ when it comes to abortion provision. Their argument is thus confused and confusing, and seems to boil down to the fact that they that they genuinely believe that democracy just means people voting for a set of policies that have been created at elite level in Westminster.

Politics is about having the power to allocate resources. That means that in every political debate there are going to be winners and losers. In an ideal world, such  compromises  as are necessary will be made to ensure that the losers walk away with something, and leave them hoping for better luck next time.

The whole of the public health political arena has already been handed over to Holyrood, save that of abortion law. It is an intellectually incoherent anomaly that Labour, for perverse reasons of its own, wants to keep this one issue under Westminster's wing.

All of this leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, suggesting as it does that Labour really does not trust the northern provincials to run things properly.

Labour needs to be aware of that if it wants to save itself in Holyrood from the near extinction that befell it in Westminster, then those arrogant, elitist attitudes need to be dropped.

Hopefully, the Scotland Bill will pass the House Of Lords unchanged, but if it doesn't then the fact that Labour has amended the bill will help ensure that the party is wiped out at next year's Scottish General Election.

Welcoming the new Scotland Bill

 

By and large I am satisfied with the Scotland Bill that should be enacted into law early next year. We need to see how the negotiations over the new fiscal framework pan out, but the Westminster bill is certainly in tune with what was agreed at the Smith Commission talks last year.

Scotland has come a very long way since 1998, and is a far more civilised country to live in than the England that I left just over two years ago. I would hope that this process continues and that under the new powers, Scotland will continue to improve as a country where ordinary people can feel at home. As that happens, the differences between it and the Tory land to the south will become more and more apparent.

Scotland does not need to push for another referendum, as all it needs to do is continue along its current path and the Union will either disappear with a whimper or it will cease to have any relevance to most people and their lives even if legally it continues.

Consider the enormous differences that already exist. Council houses are no longer sold, and the bedroom tax is not applied. Claimants do not have to pay any council tax at all, and 16-18 years old students still get Education Maintenance Allowance. If they go to university then they get a grant, and the fees of all students are paid by the state. Finally, Stamp Duty on house sales has been abolished and replaced by a kind of transaction tax that does over the upper middle class far more than Stamp Duty ever did.

All that and more is under the current dispensation. Now just imagine how things could become when the new powers come into force as we head into 2017 or 2018.

Control of income tax rates and bands will pass to Holyrood, which means that the middle class can be taxed at much higher levels. If Scotland is serious about repairing the economic and social damage that has been done to the country since 1979, then taxing the middle class to start the process of repairing the damage that their votes caused in the first place strikes me as being what the Americans call a no-brainer.

Scotland has come a long way in less than twenty years, which shows that the country does not need to be fully independent to be free of that shower of two-legged cockroaches who run the show in Westminster. It just needs to use the powers that it has, and negotiate new ones. Then set it own course towards making this part of Britain a better place for the majority rather than the few.

What's not to like?

Labour starts to climb out of its Scottish electoral hole

The TNS monthly Scottish polls are starting to show that the country now has a two party system with the SNP and Labour way ahead of all the minor parties. The SNP are obviously still dominating Scottish politics, and are riding high on around 60% in the constituency voting intention section and 50% in the list, but Labour are slowly climbing out of their hole and has reached just under 25% in both sections.

Labour still has a long way to go, but there is now clear blue electoral water between them and the Tories, who are the largest of the minor parties. Cameron's followers have been in steady decline since these polls began in May and now stand at just 12% in the constituency voting and 11% in the list. Given this, it seems plausible to speculate that more than a few Tories outside the border region might decide to grit their teeth and vote Labour as the only real Unionist outfit on offer.

The also-rans also include the Greens, who will not run in the constituencies, and I am pleased to see that their share of the list vote has fallen from 10% in May to a derisory 6% by August when the fieldwork for this latest poll was conducted. The election of Jeremy Corbyn should help Labour complete the kicking that the Greenies need and deserve and if that happens then it should add another couple of points to Labour's tally.

The Liberal-Democrats are the last minor party to feature, and they appear to be stuck at around the 5% mark in both constituency and list. If those scores represent their actual vote next May then the party would not hold any seats in Holyrood.

That the SNP will have an overall majority next year is still odds-on, and certainly I will vote for them in the constituency. However, if Labour continues to climb then it might be possible to envisage that majority being smaller than the SNP are dreaming about at present. In fact, Labour could very well end up by surprising a lot of people by holding on to some of their constituency seats.

To a great extent, Labour's future is out of its hands and in those of Jeremy Corbyn. If he can persuade people that Labour has at its heart the interests of the people in Central Scotland who have been left behind by the forward march of globalised capitalism, then it is quite likely that Labour will start to take bites out of the soft underbelly of the SNP vote. 

All that is for the future. For the present, Labour is now clearly the only credible challenger to the SNP, and Tories are invited to swivel on that fact and suck it up.

If this is the best that the opponents of Jeremy Corbyn can do...

The thing I like about the Labour Party in Scotland is just when you thought that they had turned a corner, out comes the old semi-literate bile to demonstrate that they really do not understand why so many people rejected them.

The temptation to send an e-mail to Michael McMahon MSP to point out the difference between "your" and "you're" is pretty intense, but will be resisted.

The achilles heel of Scottish nationalism is the whine of the loser

 

What do you think of this cartoon from the Guardian's Steve Bell? I must admit that it is moderately amusing, but not one of his best efforts. The reader's eyes take it in, his lips smile and he then passes on to the next item.

Unless, of course, the reader is a part of Scottish nationalism's Achilles heel; namely sanctimonious, self-righteous gittery of the highest order. As I write, the web is full of outraged protests at this latest example of waycism, and English bigotwee that is all directed at the poor Scots who labour under the heel of the wicked colonial rulers in London. Even Wings Over Scotland has fallen for this nonsense and its owner is usually far better than that.

Pathetic, isn't it? Not only is it pathetic, but these are the cries of losers, and by definition, life's little losers never get anything. Scotland is better than that.

Let me be honest, and remind you that I only moved up here two years ago. My first night in Edinburgh consisted of a chippy meal and then my first, but by no means my last, pint of heavy in the pub that would soon become my haunt. 

The chips tasted delicious and I asked the bloke behind the counter to explain the secret. The answer was that they use beef dripping to cook with. That's right, proper beef dripping that I haven't seen in England for over a generation is still regularly used north of the River Tweed. 

As for the pub, what can I say? It was and is a working man's swill shop, with a great masculine atmosphere and I was in the seventh heaven. England I am sad to say has poncified far too many of her pubs, but Scotland keeps them alive and kicking on almost every street corner. (By the way, if you have never glugged a pint or three of Scottish heavy then you cannot call yourself a drinking man. I recommend 80/- from the Caledonian brewery.)

The point here is that Scotland is the part of Britain that did not change after 1979, and refuses to change to this day. Northern England had to make its compromises with the South, because the bulk of the population is based down there, but Scotland is dominated by her central belt of industrial towns and cities. Put another way, Manchester had to accept changes through gritted teeth because Mancunians are a small minority in England, but Glasgow could give the two-fingered salute because Weegees are an almost dominant proportion of the whole country. So it's the middle class who will have to make concessions in Scotland to get some of what they want, not the working class.

So why the whining? Why the pretence that Scotland is a colonial territory made up of natives who get their arses kicked by English district commissioners? It reminds me of the whine put out by Hungarians in 1919 when they tried to distance themselves from Austria-Hungary's actions in the Great War. Or post-1945 Austrians who did their very best to convince themselves that they had actually not been enthusiast participants in Greater Germany.  A friend of mine likes to tell the story of his late father-in-law who was a Dunkirk veteran. (Pause for effect) "He served in the Das Reich division of the Waffen SS." (Pause again) "But he was still at Dunkirk; just playing for the other team." So they are not all whiners, but there are enough of them around to irritate.

Once upon a time, Scottish nationalism did not adopt this whining tone of loserdom. Time was when members of the SNP would make it plain that Scotland was just as much a Mother Country of the British Empire as England. Maybe more so, when you think about all those Scottish administrators and soldiers who knew how to handle natives.

I am old enough to remember July 1967 when Lt. Col. Colin Campbell Mitchell ordered his Argyll and Sutherland  Highlanders to march in parade dress into Crater, a district of Aden where some British soldiers had been killed the month before. The tune they played was Mony Musk:

Then Argyll Law was imposed on the town.The Standard Bank was taken over as regimental HQ and renamed Sterling Castle. Snipers were placed on the roof with orders to shoot anyone who looked even remotely dodgy. Years later a still  stunned BBC reporter remembered asking Mitchell about that at the time and being given the insouciant reply: "It was just like shooting grouse - a brace here and a brace there."

Clearly the empire cannot be restored, and nor do we want it to be: it cost far too much money to run towards the end, anyway. However, back then there was more than enough common ground to keep the British together under one roof. That has changed and if Scotland wants to repair the damage done since 1979 - and have revenge for it, let's be honest - then it is time for a divorce.

However, Scotland must not appear as the pathetic wife who whines about her husband's behaviour because all she will get is everyone's pity and nobody's respect. Scotland should take the view of the outraged husband whose wife has changed whereas he is quite happy to stay the way that he always has.

In other words: the best of the Britain that we all love is to be found north of the River Tweed!

Another nail in Labour's Scottish coffin

Another nail was driven into Labour's Scottish coffin today when the Morning Star, of all papers, found a video of John McTernan singing the praises of capitalism and Margaret Thatcher. Trust me, the SNP will be running with this one from now until election day:

Who is John McTernan? Well, he is Jim "Spud" Murphy's chief of staff, and Spud, in case you have forgotten, is the leader of the Labour branch office in Scotland. In fact, bringing McTernan in was Spud's first decision, once he became leader in January this year.

Back in late September 2014, McTernan was invited along to the Tory conference to take part in a panel discussion on popular capitalism, whatever that is.

Speaking about Thatcher, he has this to say about the old slag: “She changed the economic structure for good. As in forever. But also for good. It’s a good thing she did what she did.” He then went on to sing the praises of privatisation, saying: "There’s a far wider range of assets that are currently owned by the government which I would privatise. I would have privatised London Underground if I could have done."

If that hasn't made you cough up your coffee, then consider his opening remarks where he bemoaned the fact that half the population of Britain think that big business is a threat to the country, whereas only nineteen percent blame the unions.

Think about all this for a moment. In Scotland, a country that rejected Thatcherism root and branch, the Local Labour Party leader chooses a man like McTernan as his chief of staff. What does that say about Labour, and its plans for Scotland?

Simply that Labour are on the right side of the Tories and the wrong side of public opinion in Scotland.

The National becomes permanent

Now that it has been announced that the National will continue indefinitely beyond its initial five day test period which ended today, I wonder how long it will be before people start calling it the Nat? That way the on-line version can be dubbed the Cybernat!

I thang you...

The National hits the stands: here's my take

Did you hear the one about the Englishman, the Scotsman and the American woman who all went looking for The National at about 7 o'clock tonight?

I'm the Englishman who had been thinking about getting off his bum all day to wander round to the local newsagents to pick up the first edition of the new Scottish daily which will editorially support Scottish independence. The Scotsman was the bloke who got there a minute before me to snaffle up the last copy, before holding it up with a downward tilt to his mouth to show how thin it was. The 32 page tabloid is skinny indeed, and at 50p a bit overpriced, but we both agreed that a new paper is just a good thing these days, and then we wandered along to the next newsagent on the street to see if I could get a copy. For his part my new friend wanted to buy as many as he could to give to his friends, but he agreed to scamper on ahead of me with a promise that one copy was for me.

An American woman had gone into the shop just before him and when I arrived he announced that all the copies had gone. That was when she announced that she had bought the last three, and completely unbidden gave one to me. She even refused payment, saying "war all have to stick together on this one," so I not only got to read The National, but it came as a freebie as well.

So what do I think of it? My first reaction is that it is a bit preachy. Most of the stories are seen though the eyes of a committed, fire-breathing Nationalist, and more of the Yes voters are now people who want to get on with their lives. We fought a good fight, but there is more to our lives than trying to turn the referendum into a neverendum.

Secondly, I am dubious about the exclusive story which claims that Rangers and Celtic have combined to undermine the government's anti-sectarian drive. The point here is that Prods and Papes may enjoy hammering seven bells out of each other, but that does not mean that they are anti-independence. It means that they have a different set of cultural values to the ones propounded by the hacks who write for The National, but that is not the same thing. If the paper wants to attract the type of people who stuff a tabloid into the back pocket of their jeans then the self-righteous, bourgeois gittery needs to go.

Staying on the same theme, I could have done without the two page spread that profiled Hassan Rouhani. That's OK, as I had never heard of him, either, but he turns out to be the President of Iran...

Overall, the paper gives me the impression of something that has been knocked out in haste, so much so that the website is nothing more than a holding page at the time of writing. That in itself is not a major problem as the committed will buy the paper in the same way that Labour activists bought the News on Sunday back in the 1980s. However, does Scotland really need a paper that is only bought out of a sense of duty by the ideologically pure at heart?

If The National is to succeed then it needs to attract readers from the Daily Mail and its similar middlebrow competitors such as the Daily Express. The paper is obviously not aimed at the Sun's readership as there are not enough tit, bum and celebrity pages to attract that market. The problem is that as a mid-market tabloid it is not chatty enough to bring those readers over, and the air of pulpit pounding seriousness may put them off as well.

It's not the end of the world, and I hope that The National succeeds in its aim of giving Scotland a new daily paper that looks at the country through a nationalist lens. If it can acquire a character all of its own, one that appeals to a nationalist-leaning readership that is made up of people who have other things to do that talk about politics all the time, then it should do well.