Jim Murphy Shows Scotland The Stick…So Where’s The Carrot?

Tomorrow, St Andrew’s Day, is the first time in 70 years that the SNP have seriously had the goal of independence within their sights. For the party and the activists, it will be a long remembered day, despite the likely outcome of the bill falling in Holyrood.

However, Jim Murphy has made a rather bizarre last ditch attempt to prevent the publication of the White Paper on the Independence Referendum. From PoliticsHome:

“For Scotland’s sake just shelve the plans, we can have this debate another time.”

“Even if we had a referendum it would not stop the SNP being the SNP. They’d just start again and Scotland would be so much worse off.”

Now, given the comments made about Murphy in recent days, I am loath to simply lambast him, lest I end up on the wrong side of a certain Sunday paper. However, I feel comfortable enough to say that I get the impression that Jim Murphy has little respect for his opponents and seems to execute his job with a level of zealotry that would be worthy of the SNP back in the ’90s, otherwise I doubt he’d have felt able to make such a plea. The man very clearly loves his country and despises the thought of the SNP or the Tories running it. He, of course, also has a long-standing reputation as being ‘a party man’, toeing the Downing Street line and is no doubt an astute politician.

Murphy has already handed both Scotland and the SNP a carrot to vote Labour – the promise of more powers should Labour be re-elected to Westminster. This last plea looks a lot more like the stick – if the SNP go through with this then bad things will happen to Scotland and the SNP. Of course, the carrot and stick don’t really line up. The SNP has no real incentive to drop the referendum bill – it’s likely failure to pass through parliament will give them extraordinary political capital come May by allowing them to position themselves as Scotland’s only genuine voice. This can, and will be used against Labour – this is why Wendy Alexander supported the referendum and why Jim Murphy and the Unionist party leaders are quite so annoyed about it. They’ll be even more annoyed in 2011 – if Labour are out of government, having failed to capitalise on the Calman Report, the SNP campaign materials write themselves.

If Labour wanted to stop the referendum, then they could have gotten round the table before now. The SNP has taken a lot of heat off them in the last year, being heavily criticised over the Year of Homecoming and defending the Labour plan, continuing with the Curriculum for Excellence and taking the blame for releasing Megrahi when that decision could have been passed off to London, avoiding a lot of flak. .

On Scotland, Politics and Blogging

The politics blogging community in Scotland, and possibly Britain as a whole, forms an interesting island of the internet.

I deliberately use the phrase ‘island’, because this collection of single interest blogs seems unique compared to other communities on the Internet. Take the example of crafting blogs, which I do not participate in, but have observed. This community consists of a massive number people from around the world. When blogs are successful, they are often encouraged to move from the (admittedly free) confines of Blogspot, WordPress, Tumblr and LiveJournal to the more open and liberating self-hosted blogs. This path allows a writer to build a community through the mechanisms of a confined website and then graduate to using tools such as Search Engine Optimisation to climb ranking in Google and other search engines. This is a pretty standard growth pattern and is generally what the ‘internet marketing gurus’ will try and sell you.

At the same time as growing the individual sites, there are also growing communities. These are often established by a small group of websites, but open to others. They engage in projects where everyone carries out a task or discusses a subject and then compares with others. It’s a good way to allow new blogs to build up readers and to allow the spread of advice between bloggers.

With political blogs things work very differently. For example, unless you are a very high profile American or EU blogger or focus on a global issue such as the environment, I suspect it will be difficult to build the same size of community. Logistics alone interfere here – depressingly there are some internet forums which have a higher population then Scotland does. Given that the majority of the population aren’t particularly interested in politics, let alone making the effort to find the often cryptically named blogs (a-hem…), building a community as a Scottish blogger in Scotland is potentially an uphill struggle and getting the message beyond that community is even harder.

There are some sites which make it easier. The politics magazine/webzine Total Politics maintains a directory of blogs, arranged by category, party allegiance and geographical location. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be very well maintained – a number of the sections a good few dead links. Despite reporting several of these via the handy form, they are still there several weeks later.

I do have a few thoughts on what else could be done to supplement this possibly over-rated attempt at merging traditional and digital media.

• Encourage better blog design – This most certainly doesn’t apply to the majority of the blogs I read, however there are several politics blogs who deck their sites with so many fonts, colours and annoying adverts that they become near unreadable. The mantra of website design is Keep It Simple, Stupid with very good reason and an attractive blog will keep visitors.
• Create Aggregator Websites –  These are not uncommon amongst other blog communities. They collect RSS feeds from a number of thematically similar websites and publish the first couple of sentences and a link to the originating website. No content is fully reproduced and it gives people one RSS feed or site to visit instead of 30.
• Create a Community Website or Group – Politics and webforums are not known for their co-existance. On the other hand, if you keep politics off it (directly anyway) they can be used to help encourage bloggers and share tips.
• Preserve Anonymity – There has been talk about bloggers being tracked down by the press and hounded out of their hobby. If you manage to successfully rock the boat, and get picked up, your doing something right. If this is going to affect your life, then preserving anonymity as best you can is a good step forward – maintain separate email address and twitter accounts, make sure your domain isn’t publicly registered, keep your passwords long and complicated. You might as well make it difficult for people who do want to find you.
• Make Clear and Rational Arguments, Not Basic Attacks – As has been seen today, there seems to be an image problem with Nats and the web. There are equal problems with Labour, the Tories and a host of smaller parties (for some reason I’ve seen no Lib Dem attack blogs), but the Nats are what I’m concerned about seeing as I’m one of their number. It is important to respect one’s opponent. Call a man a cunt if you will, but make sure you can and do back it up with anatomical charts, otherwise resort to something more sensible and less pithy. It’s not difficult to construct a good argument and back it up with evidence – for a start all of the blogs linked to on this site are capable of doing it. It’s certainly worth doing it, even if it’s just so you can see opposition fans struggle to answer your argument and resort to their own attacks based responses.

In addition to all of this, much needs to be done by all of the political parties. I don’t believe any of them have a clear, unified political strategy, and I suspect that none of them have a skilled activist pool large enough to ensure that every branch has it’s own website that it’s some drab, generic effort provided by Central Office (not that such a wide reach is necessary). If the next electoral battleground is to be the internet, as it was in America last year, then all of the political parties need to prepare to fight there – encourage more candidates to interact positively, encourage bloggers to avoid attack tactics and formulate responses to online attacks, as well as potential slip ups from their online supporters.

Communication has changed since Alastair Campbell spun-up in ’97. It was strange that the BBC and Sky News had stories before they were announced then. In the future, it’s going to be the blogs which get those stories first. The final scene in tonight’s The Thick of It was telling when it repeatedly made reference to the blogs.

Solve Britain’s Rail Problems

Scotland, luckly, doesn’t have too many problems with the railways. The main ones are pretty much as follows:

• Excessive Fares
• Lack of Investment in New Railways
• Lack of Service Provision to Outlying Areas (ie Oben, Fort William, Wick)
• Infrastructure is managed on a UK-wide basis, service provision is (and some infrastructure) is not.

All this adds up to a reasonably good service. In nearly ten years of regularly using the railways in Scotland, I’ve been delayed five times. Once outside Perth due to unknown reasons, twice on the Glasgow-Edinburgh line due to the ongoing weekend engineering works and a couple of times on the Glasgow-Aberdeen train on a Sunday when over-crowding caused problems. All in all, I’m a pretty satisfied customer.

If we look at trains in the UK as a whole, we start to get a different picture however:

• The East Coast Mainline is one of a handful of companies to be nationalised in the past thirty years
• The West Coast Mainline has been plagued with faults, over-runs and poor management
• RailTrack (the former infrastructure manager) was nationalised in the early 2000s after the Government relised that handing essential infastruce to private companies was idiotic
• London Underground was made part of a horrific PFI scheme and then taken back into public control
• There have been more then 20 different companies running train companies in the UK since the 90s. Nearly half of them have had franchises suspended. Nearly all of them have received Government subsides despite increasing customer numbers and rising railfares.
• A High-Speed Mainline from London to Scotland won’t be complete until 2030 at least.

The mixture of state-level, devolved-level, quango and business control does not work. It didn’t work in the ’80s when British Rail was disbanded and it doesn’t work now. Instead it saps money with increasingly poor returns for all parties.

Contrast: Germany has the most efficient railway system in the world. Their railway operator is Deutsche Bahn AG (DB). It has operations in more then 10 countries, it owns Britain’s main rail-freight company, it moves a third of the world’s population every year, it makes a consistant profit.

And it’s 100% state owned. That’s the second largest freight operator in the world, just in case you missed the emphasis on how successful DB are.

So, what relevance is DB to Britain’s railway woes?

Quite frankly, at this point, we’ve messed up enough.

Deutsche Bahn has already expressed interest in taking over parts of the rail system if it can get decent franchises. I suggest we cut out the middle man: create a new company, combining ownership of all aspects of the British railway network. Give DB a 50% stake in it and operational control. Give the Department for Transport, the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament positions on the executive of the company, power to mandate construction of new railways and the right to fund and commission the new British Railways to carry out work as required.

Effectively, it’s a quango with a degree of state intervention and some ‘private’ ownership.

The idea could be taken further. For example, instead of a 50-50 split between DB and the UK Government, it could be smaller portions with a number of shares being sold to the public. You could also add representatives from the passenger and environmental groups to the executive.

The important thing is to give as much operational control as possible to people who are capable of running a railway well while allowing the Government to influence wider strategy – such as railway building.

What Does Minimum Unit Pricing Mean For Me?

Minimum Unit Pricing is one of the current big SNP policies. In fact, it’s the only policy that’s really being pushed just now apart from the Referendum Bill (due out on the 31st) and the creation of a new Forth Bridge, Scotland’s only foreseeable mega-project.

I still find myself very unconvinced by the policy however. I’m continually faced with good evidence on both sides of the debate, so this post is pretty much an effort to help me come down on one side or the other.

Let’s start with an example:

Of a Friday night, I can often be found in a friend’s flat. The plan normally involves splitting a crate of whatever Tesco has going cheap, watching TV and arguing about politics. Generally, the beverage of choice is Mr Tennent’s Finest Lager, which goes for £10 for 18 cans or 24 cans depending on the offer that’s on during that period. We usually get through 6 or 7 cans each (on top of a few drinks in the pub beforehand). I am happy to admit that this is not particularly healthy behaviour and probably had a negative effect on my short-term memory, weight, liver health and so on.

A standard size can of beer in Europe contains 500ml and Tennents is 4% alcohol by volume. That equates to roughly 2.3 units of alcohol per can. That’s a total of 41.4 units in an 18 can crate or 55.9 units for a 24 can crate.

Half an 18 can crate represents nearly a the whole of a man’s recommend maximum weekly alcohol intake (which is 21 units)

That’s pretty good value for money.

Price-wise, it works out at 24 pence per unit for 18 cans or 18 pence per unit for 24 cans.

Now, there are two prices being floated for minimum unit pricing: the SNP’s proposal of 40 pence per unit and an expert panel’s recommendation of 60 pence per unit. How much would the crate of 24 cans cost under these price points?

24 cans = 55.9 units x £0.40 = £22.36

24 cans = 55.9 units x £0.60 = £33.54

I have to be honest and say I’ll definitely be drinking less at either of those price points. While I’m scraping my way though a Masters degree, I certainly can’t afford to drink more then a few cans at that kind of price.

On the other hand, we might just try splitting something better instead: Tesco normally does a few good malts for £20. These include Laphroaig, Glenlivet and Jura.

According to various websites, a 700ml bottle of 40% spirits contains 34.5 units of alcohol. Bottle-size and ABV vary from whisky to whisky, but I’m happy to accept this as an average.

34.5 units x £0.40 = £13.80

34.5 units x £0.60 = £20.70

So, at the 40 pence price limit, a bottle of good whisky can actually be sold for much cheaper then it goes for now. The 60 pence price point also seems much more reasonable here, especially because I generally pay at least that for a bottle of whisky.

A more useful comparison is the price of a bottle of cheap vodka or whisky. Famous Grouse, Bells and Smirnoff can all be found for sale for around about £10 for 700ml. The 40 pence price point barely changes these, while the 60 pence price bracket changes it a lot. Given that the aim of this legislation is to prevent alcohol abuse and a £3 price rise seems a bit low to have a real effect, I wonder if the Government might aim a bit higher?

Overall, these sums reinforce the claim that this is targeted at those from a poor social background, young drinkers (who are more prone to binge drinking I believe) and those who take advantage of rock bottom prices. If you are prepared to pay £20 for a bottle of whisky or up-market beer, then you probably won’t notice anything (unless the booze companies force up these prices to avoid price association with ‘low end’ brands).

I am becoming more convinced that this will have a positive effect, and probably that desired by the Government, which is to reduce the number of alcohol related crimes, illnesses and deaths.

On the other hand, there are a lot of factors that I haven’t explored. These include the pricing effects on Alcopops, Fortified Wine, White Lightning ‘Cider’, alcohol sold in bars and the effects on the Pub trade in general.

I am much more convinced in favour of Minimum Unit Pricing then I was when I started writing this. However, the SNP proposed minimum of 40 pence per unit seems too low. If they want to see Scotland have the same results as the Scandinavian countries, then I would follow the expert recommended 60 pence per unit limit.

Glasgow North-East Autopsy

Some rambling (and largely non-partisan) thoughts on the election outcome:

I’m not surprised by the overall result. The SNP would have needed a hell of a campaign to take Glasgow North-East and they were hobbled from the get-go by the minor scandals regarding both their first and second choice candidates.

It is true Labour heartland. It also has a widely documented history of ‘tribal Labour’ voting and Willie Bain is a local candidate and comes across as having his head screwed on well (the same things John Mason had going for him last year). It makes for a some fascinating sociology reading, in particular if you look at the whole of Glasgow – ‘tribal Labour’ voting occurs in all parts of Glasgow and at all levels, however I digress.

The degree of Labour’s majority is surprising. At a time when Labour are faced with a strong opposition in Westminster, quite a lot of media hatred and an SNP government in Holyrood, I would have expected a much smaller majority, reflecting dissatisfaction with the economy, employment, the war and so on. Instead, the dis-satisfied seem to have stayed at home.

This is fascinating. I am no expert at political prediction, but I think it’s clear that the SNP, Lib Dems and Tories will face very nasty odds in Glasgow in 2010. I suspect the SNP may well lose Glasgow East. On the other hand, it will be interesting to see if they make in-roads in the South-Side of Glasgow, building on Nicola Sturgeon’s win in Goven in 2007.

Regarding the BNP, there seems to be something funny going on here. In 2005, the BNP fielded 119 candidates in the Westminster election. They polled on average, 1,620 votes each. In Glasgow North-East specifically, the BNP achieved 920 votes. The result of 1,013 votes does represent a nearly 2% increase on that result. I may well be taking this too lightly in this case, but there does not appear to be sufficient data to indicate a trend in support of the BNP yet (this may change in 2010). I will say, however, that I don’t think we should under-estimate the potential of the BNP, but I’m not sure the amount of coverage the BNP is getting, dealing with the problem that the party poses is justified. It may be much better for the parties to work together to deal with the problems that cause people to look to the BNP – low employment, social deprivation and poor education.

I am still slightly surprised by the performance of the Socialists (SSP, Solidarity and Socialist Labour) and the celeb candidates. I was expecting Jon Smeaton to do better, thanks to putting Glasgow on the map as the only city in the world where a burning terrorist is likely to be headbutted and sat on. It’s disappointing that there is no sign of a real socialist alternative coalescing in Scotland again. The SSP and Solidarity are continuing to just split what few votes they get.

Finally, a very poor show for the Tories and the Lib Dems. However, Glasgow constituencies are generally a two-horse race between Labour and either the SNP or the Lib Dems. It’ll be interesting to see if the Scottish Lib Dems make in-roads in Glasgow in 2010 – they were ahead of the SNP in some constituencies in 2005 and could well build on that with a good campaign. Taking some Glasgow constituencies would also help replace the more northern constituencies which the SNP are slowly chiseling away from long-term Lib Dem control.

An interesting result in all, and I’ve not even touched half of the issues involved. I predict that the 2010 election may will make for some interesting viewing. I’m not sure that Big Eck will get his 20 seats, but I don’t think David Cameron will get his 8 seats either. I think the biggest loser in Scotland come 2010 will be the Lib Dems as the face competition from the SNP, the Tories and Labour. We’ll have to wait and see…