We're fluffy really

Yesterday Nigel Farage made a speech to UKIP's party conference in Margate.  Why is this relevant to Scotland?  Because UKIP intend to stand around 40 candidates in Scottish constituencies in the coming general election.

Unfortunately Mr Farage didn't have a manifesto to promote, as the party hadn't got it ready in time,  so instead he called on his party to take a positive line on immigration, by which he means promoting the benefits of his party's proposed points system, based on skills and similar to the system in Australia, rather than blaming immigrants for all of the UK's ills.

It's a nice thought, but not one that his adherents seems to be prepared to follow as yet.  From the article above:

Steven Woolfe, the party’s migration spokesman, used his speech to suggest the rising population caused by immigration could put pressure on food security, water and the sewage system.
“Schools are full, hospitals are troubled, healthcare – it is difficult to be seen in many areas of this country,” he said. “Roads need to be built. We need to look after the way we feed ourselves because we’ve got a growing population. What about our water and sewage systems? All of these matter.”
Stuart Agnew, Ukip’s agriculture spokesman, said that 3 million extra immigrants over the next 10 years could put food security at risk and the “terrorists would know it”, leading the country to buckle.

So not quite there with the positive message on immigration then. But they weren't the worst.  Apparently UKIP have a Christian group now, who were heard to proclaim that schools were to blame for

allowing the sexual grooming of our primary school children for same sex attraction

and said "the LGBT' were trying to recruit more children because

such people cannot reproduce their own kind

Swivel-eyed lunacy is alive and well within UKIP then.

One thing Mr Farage did say was quite interesting, though not for the reason he thought.  He said

UKIP wants an “amicable divorce” from the EU, wants to “re-embrace the Commonwealth”

Substitute 'Scotland'  for 'UKIP, 'the UK' for 'the EU' and 'Europe' for 'the Commonwealth' and it pretty much sums up what Yes supporters want.  Mr Farage was against that for Scotland, but it's apparently OK for the UK. Somewhat hypocritical one might even say.

Book review

I have finally managed to finish '100 Days of Hope and Fear' by David Torrance.  It consists of his diary over the period of the referendum, and it's a bit of a turgid read.  If you want to know where Mr Torrance had breakfast, lunch and dinner and with whom over the referendum period, then this is the book for you.  If you're looking for incisive analysis, not so much.

Most annoying was the constant name-dropping and the condescension ('Had a quick drink with Adam and a bright Labour activist called Cat Headley', 'Allan Price from BBC Scotland (very bright and now producing Jim Naughtie')).  It certainly gives the impression that Mr Torrance has a guid conceit of himself.  Most amusing was Mr Torrance constantly being butt-hurt that people want to invite him on TV panels as a No voter, since he himself says he has been studiously neutral.  However, given that he constantly refers to 'Yes propaganda' and 'lines from the Yes playbook', one can't imagine why the inviters would think that he's on the No side.

To be fair, the book does give a good impression of what that period was like for the politically active, and does capture something of the energy of that time.  The Kindle edition could do with a good editor though - 'dough-eyed', really?

In summary, not a book I would recommend unless you are suffering from insomnia.

Mony a mickle

Today's big news story is of the two MPs who were secretly filmed discussing payment for using their influence for what they thought was a Hong Kong-based company.  Former Foreign Secretaries Jack Straw (Labour) and Malcolm Rifkind (Conservative) have both been suspended from their respective parliamentary parties and are being investigated.

I have to say that my first reaction on hearing about Malcolm Rifkind was to think 'Is he still an MP?  I thought he retired years ago'.  Well, as it turns out he seems to think he retired too, given that he says that he doesn't get a salary, something his constituents in Kensington and Chelsea might beg to differ about. He was recorded saying that

I am self-employed – so nobody pays me a salary. I have to earn my income.

The £67,000 a year plus expenses he gets from his position as an elected MP clearly just slipped his mind then.  Mind you, he thinks that expecting MPs to live on 'just £60,000 a year'is 'unrealistic'.  Well, yes, there are unrealistic expectations there, but I don't think it's the electorate who have them.  £60,000 a year would be a huge increase in income to a large percentage of the population.  Cry me a river Mr Rifkind.

Mr Rifkind also says he has plenty of free time, which he spends reading and walking.  Glad to hear his employer is quite lax then.  If I tried that, I'd get the boot pronto and would be down the Job Centre with no time off for good behaviour.

Mr Straw has taken a different approach and is employing the Scooby Doo defence - 'I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you skillful journalists'.  He is mortified at having fallen into the trap apparently.  That is, he's embarrassed at having been caught.  He says he suspended himself from the parliamentary party, but one has a feeling it was a case of he fell before he was pushed.

Both Labour and the Conservatives did not need a scandal of this nature so close to a general election, and I think we can expect to see a lot of spin and noble speeches over the next few days about how Westminster is going to clean up its act, probably by insisting on a large pay increase for MPs to prevent this sort of thing.  You've got to pay suitable salaries to attract the best talent, they'll cry, shoving their snouts even further into the trough.

Enter, stage left

This week has seen the Scottish Conservatives' annual conference in Edinburgh, and the gloves are off.  First we had a speech by David Cameron, in which he said that:

The SNP and Labour are halfway up the aisle together already. They’ve picked out the wedding list. They’ve booked the honeymoon, probably in North Korea. They’ve set up the joint account – unlimited overdraft, obviously.

 The we had David Mundell, who said that:

Let’s face it, Labour and the two Eds are a real and present danger who threaten all this country has achieved.  They would plunge us back into the dark days – our worst nightmare.  Or so we thought, but just when you thought it was safe to return to the polling booth, enter stage left Alex Salmond, the self-styled puppet master.  He’ll be pulling the strings of both Nicola Sturgeon and Ed Miliband.  And I say stage left because the dangerous economics of socialism are shared by Miliband and Salmond.

It's clear from this that the people the Tories are most scared of in the coming General Election is the SNP.  Why should that be?  After all, they won the referendum, albeit by a smaller margin than they anticipated.  However, they got what they wanted - one big happy family of nations together.  So what's the problem?

One factor in this is that Labour and the Tories no longer have a great deal to differentiate them.  Sure, Ed Miliband tinkers around the edges, with his promises to stabilise energy prices and so on, but fundamentally they're both singing from the same hymn sheet.  Austerity is the only way forward.  Labour feel really bad about the people who are suffering from the effects of these policies, the Tories less so, but hey, what can you do?   Enter Nicola Sturgeon, with an anti-austerity agenda shared by Plaid Cymru and the Greens, and no fear of expressing it.  We can't have that.  It gives the lie to everything the two big parties have been saying for the past few years.  Got to discredit her before the proles catch on.

Then there's the apparent opposition to Scotland having any form of power within Westminster.  There have been Scottish minsters in the past, usually Labour party members, but they knew how the game worked and wouldn't upset the apple-cart.  A large block of SNP members would definitely upset the apple-cart and frighten the horses into the bargain.  They are going to be looking after the interests of Scotland first, UK second, thus threatening the cosy life to which Westminster MPs have become accustomed.  Next thing their constituents will be insisting that their MPS start looking after their interests, and then where will party politics be?

Finally there's the actual bogey-man - Alex Salmond.  Despite the fact that Mr Salmond resigned after the referendum and has rarely made the news since then, he still scares the living daylights out of the other party leaders.  Thus, they paint him as the evil genius, the man pulling all the strings to bring about the ruination of all they hold dear.  Next thing they will be telling us he eats babies for breakfast and slaughters kittens and puppies on a whim.  Coming to a front page near you soon - 'Alex Salmond ate my hamster'.

People dislike change and it's understandable.  Big changes are stressful and mean learning new behaviours.  Our brains prefer what we know as it takes less effort to process things we have dealt with in the past and know what to expect.  It's a problem that becomes more apparent as we get older, and explains things like lack of success in dieting, going to the gym and so on.  Your brain is your own worst enemy when it comes to changing habits.  Voting Labour or Tory in a General Election is a habit, and it will probably prove hard to break for many people.  After all, better the devil you know.  Labour and the Tories have a long habit of running Westminster and have things off to a tee.  It's no wonder then, that they are trying to scare people off voting in a new way this time round.  For them, change is scary, and we're going to see a lot more of them trying to frighten voters away from doing something different.  This is just the beginning.

Facts and figures

It's not been a good week for Labour.  First we had Jim Murphy and the disappearing video on NHS waiting times.  Then yesterday we had Kezia Dugdale making a schoolgirl error during First Minister's Questions when attacking the SNP government on its record in childcare.

There's been a distinct carelessness in Labour pronouncements this week.   Maybe all their researchers have gone on holiday at once.  Maybe they've decided that any publicity is good publicity.  Maybe they just get overexcited when they see something they think they can attack the SNP with.

It's almost as if Labour have given up on this election and are aiming towards next year's Scottish General Election.

Meanwhile, the SNP made a error of their own, when they stated that Sir David Gararrd had donated £1,570 to Jim Murphy's leadership campaign, when in fact no such donation had been made.  However, as it turns out,. the truth is fairly complex and it's easy to see how the mistake was made.  The SNP reacted by issuing the following statement:

The SNP press release incorrectly said that Sir David Garrard had donated to Jim Murphy’s leadership campaign. The online version has been amended, and we apologise for the mistake.

 Compare and contract with Labour's mistake on NHS waiting times, where sorry appears to be the hardest word, and blaming your mistake on your opponents is the way to go apparently.

Omnishambles

And things just get worse for Labour in Scotland, with today's news that Mr Murphy has had to remove a video from YouTube and delete a tweet on the subject of Scotland's NHS having a cancelled operations level four times that of NHS England.  They have statistics to prove it.

Except it isn't and they don't.  It's all been a giant misunderstanding.  Some stupid minion didn't read the statistics properly and now Mr Murphy has egg on his face to match his shirt.  No doubt the minion is currently on the receiving end of a size 9 propelling them towards the door.

And then there was the 'Yes for Labour' fiasco.  Having told the Sunday Herald that he wanted to turn Labour into the party of Yes, and having registered several domains for it in January, it is now being swept under the carpet.  Never happened.  If you trying looking for the domains you'll find most of them have been suspended.

Labour in Scotland really need to get to grips with this new-fangled internet thingy.  They need to realise that deleting videos and tweets doesn't mean that they disappear and no-one any the wiser.  Perhaps they should concentrate on things like policies designed to appeal to the voters and canvassing, rather than these inevitably embarrassing stunts.  Or maybe that's just a step too far?

Fashionistas

The other day at the gym I met an acquaintance, a retired man and a passionate supporter of independence.  We got to talking about the upcoming general election, and he was very vehement on the subject.  Having been a Labour voter all his life, he will be voting SNP in the forthcoming election and in every other election in the future.  His anger against Labour was almost palpable.  He feels that they have utterly betrayed the working people they were supposed to represent, and the final straw was them teaming up with the Tories during the referendum.  In this he is typical of what seems to be a large number of ex-Labour voters.

I have also this week been trying to get through David Torrance's '100 Days of Hope and Fear', and am finding it hard going.  It's in the format of a diary covering the period of the referendum campaign.  Normally I can get through books fairly quickly, even if they turn out to be not as interesting as they sounded.  However, this one I am struggling with.  Mr Torrance comes across as a middle-class lad (although probably not by birth) with a penchant for name-dropping.  The use of the word 'bright' to refer to people he appears to consider his social inferiors is a bit of a giveaway.

What has this to do with my angry pensioner friend?  Mr Torrance's entry for Sunday 15th June contains a throwaway sentence which I think holds the key to the anger. He attends a debate between Michael Forsyth and Jim Sillars, and he says this:

Predictably, the debate - although engaging at times - didn't lead anywhere terribly useful.  Both Forsyth and Sillars are undoubtedly big beasts, albeit from a bygone age, but banging on about socialism and 'Great' Britain belongs in the 1980s.

And there, I think is the crux of the problem.  Jim Sillars came from the working classes and had direct experience of the working and living conditions of the working classes, hence his passion to do something about it, a passion he has never lost. 

During the late 70s and early 1980s I was a student at Glasgow University.  I remember well how fashionable Labour politics was in the Thatcher era among students, especially middle-class students.  They would organise bus tours around the poorest parts of Glasgow (poverty-porn has a long history) and would endlessly debate about the finer points of political theory.  It was the same at most universities at the time.  Think Rik from The Young Ones.

Now those same students are leading the Labour Party.  But for them, the working class struggle is at one remove.  They sympathise, they try to empathise but they have never experienced it directly.  For them, a change in the policy direction of the Labour party is simply a change in political theory, and there is a level of incomprehension as to why the working classes can't understand that.  The Labour party is simply seen as one more route to a lucrative career in politics.  Whether you choose to go the Tory route or the Labour route is purely a matter of taste.  And socialism is so 1980s, darling.

This is, I think,  why Labour have lost a large amount of support in Scotland - the party was taken over by a bunch of Riks.  The SNP have gathered up that disaffected support because they have actually done some things to help all of Scotland's people - free personal care, free prescriptions, no tuition fees.  And actions count for a hell of a lot more than fine words and political theories.