More Than A Shrug

It is a delicate thing, writing about someone else's sexuality, with many pitfalls and opportunities for bumptiousness and embarrassment. I approach the whole thing gingerly, and I hope, humanely.

As many of you will have noticed, this week, Kezia Dugdale told the Fabian Review that she is in a relationship with a woman. “I have a female partner. I don’t talk about it very much because I don’t feel I need to,” the Scottish Labour leader said, in the midst of a wide-ranging political interview, which has gone on to cause her trouble for different reasons. 

The public reaction to Dugdale's personal aside has been overwhelmingly positive and supportive, which is a grand and excellent thing. No doubt some dismal Free Church minister is boiling away on the hob about it -- but most folk will be quite content to judge Kezia Dudale on her relative political and personal merits, and not her sexuality. Good. This is a historical achievement -- but still, something about how the story has been reported makes me a little uneasy.

First, the background.  The truth is, it has taken Dugdale a substantial period of time to come out to the general public, although all the hacks and the political world have known about her domestic circumstances for a lengthy period of time. Hell, even I'd heard tell. As hawk-eyed folk might have noticed, Telegraph Scotland editor Alan Cochrane carelessly - and I assume, quite accidentally - outed the Scottish Labour leader some months ago, by muddling up the number of LGBT leaders in Holyrood, and clumsily incorporating Dugdale into his copy. This faux pas went by, unremarked, but not unnoticed.

To be absolutely clear - I mention this as no criticism of Kezia Dugdale. She is entitled to expose as much - and as little - or her personal life to public scrutiny as she cares to. But it is an eloquent illustration of how much times have changed, that the Holyrood press pack - with only a little befuddlement about the delay - left it to the Scottish Labour leader to come out to the country, in her own terms, at her own time.

But I wonder if we aren't doing Ms Dugdale some kind of injustice, to say that her terse, carefully coordinated and long-germinating public profession of her sexuality should attract only a general shrug. I'm reminded of Alex Massie's essentially kind and humane thoughts, on David Mundell's public recognition of his sexuality (which like Kezia's, came after a lengthy period of speculation, in that odd space, between the public and the private). Massie's slogan was; "so what?" And "so what" indeed.

In one sense, this emancipated public indifference to the personal lives of our politicians is much to be wished. Who cares? But let's not overlook the emotional trouble - the heartsick struggles - which it may have taken for both Dugdale, and Mundell, and Davidson and Harvie before them, publicly to avow these aspects of their personal lives.

As recently as the early 2000s, the Daily Record disgraced itself, spearheading Brian Souter's vile, sleazy and neurotic campaign against informing young people in schools about the realities of LGBT sexuality. Give the self-appointed spokesmen of God an inch, and they will still say the most remarkable, illberal things. Just this year, I had my young law students read through what the Kirk and the Scotsman had to say in the 1960s, when the decriminalisation of same-sex relationships was first proposed in the United Kingdom.

Their horrified reactions about the rigidly righteous moral judgements of their ancestors remains one of the most memorable moments of 2015. My band of thoughtful 20 year olds simply couldn't contemplate that their parents and grandparents had adopted to cramped, so illiberal, so unimaginative a point of view. They looked at the past with naked, almost universal, disbelief. While England swept away the great part of its discriminatory law in the late 1960s, Scotland continued to criminalise the great part of ordinary homosexual activity until the 1980s. This was before I was born -- before my students were born -- but only just.

If your inclination is to shrug about Kezia Dugdale's considered aside about her sexuality -- I salute you. But spare a moment to salute her too. For her courage. For her strength. For her indefatigability. Even in Scotland's now more open political culture, it is no mean thing that she, and Ruth Davidson, and Patrick Harvie, and David Mundell, have done. They deserve - all of them - more than just a shrug.

Old Habits

This may be a record. The first full week of the Holyrood campaign has whizzed by, and already - already - Scottish Labour figures are making headlines by briefing the press against their leader.

In the Sunday Times this morning, under the legend, "Labour at war as Dugdale gaffes," ubiquitous and available "senior figures" in the party are quoted. Their verdict on Kezia Dugdale's week isn't terrifically healthy. She is, they suggest, "badly damaged" as the result of her muddled comments on how she might vote in a future independence referendum. One even described it as her "Subway moment", recalling the moment when Iain Gray sought refuge behind a meatball marinara, waylaid by Sean Clerkin in Glasgow Central Station in 2011. 

Now, Dugdale has not had her troubles to seek this week. There has been indiscipline. There have been mispitches. But surely there are enough folk like me in the firmament to point this out, without her comrades gleefully piling in, breathing unholy life back into a bad news story which would otherwise be on its last legs. The killer quotations:

“This is an almighty clusterf**k,” said one senior Labour source. “It just plays into the Tory line that they are the true defenders of the Union, even though that’s not true because it’s the Tories who introduced English votes for English laws and caused the EU referendum. Kez should have been landing blows on them, not on the Scottish Labour party.” 

One said Dugdale had “handed a massive gift to the Tory party” at a time when they were under pressure as a result of a backlash against the chancellor’s budget. “Kez has again let them off the hook.” 

Another said it was Dugdale’s “Subway” moment — a reference to the defining moment of Labour’s ill-fated 2011 Holyrood campaign when its leader Iain Gray sought refuge in a sandwich shop after his election campaign launch was hijacked by a protester.

As a hardened partisan, and no friend of the party, I suppose I ought to meet news of this utterly gratuitous infighting with an evil chortle. But Scottish Labour's capacity for indiscreet and poisonous internal briefing remains a thing of wonder and horror to me. Even electoral calamity - apparently - can't wean the party off its old habits of backbiting and internecine conflict.

After disaster has engulfed the party in Westminster, as it fights for its life in Scotland, as its untried leader faces a little turbulence along the way, as all election campaigns must -- you decide to spill the beans to the press, well knowing that an article of this kind is the only logical outcome? Jeezo. You wonder which bored and embittered former MP might be responsible. "If we must lose, let's lose in the most internally divisive and publicly exposed way possible." Just a little lick of the cloak and the dagger, for old time's sake.

Their analysis may be perfectly sound, but quite what they imagine they're achieving is beyond me. Snark of this kind provides a little entertainment for folk like me on a wet Sunday morning. It adds to the gaiety of the nation. But if these "senior sources" are true friends of the Scottish Labour Party, their shadowy, counter-productive interventions are - fundamentally - crackers.

Ruth Davidson's damaging rookie error

I was out last night, tripping the light fantastic, and so conspired to miss STV's leaders' debate and David Coburn's splendid periscope broadcast in parallel. Having read this morning's notices, and caught up on last night's highlights, you can't help but be struck by the clatter Nicola Sturgeon gave Ruth Davidson. As is often the case, it all began with an innocuous question.

The combative STV format gave political opponents the opportunity to cross examine one other in detail. While the First Minister is put on the spot every week, the Scottish Tory leader generally benefits from asking the question. Her own agenda has been generously sheltered from equivalent scrutiny. I make no complaint about that. Decisions taken by Nicola Sturgeon's government impact on people's lives. Ruth Davidson's policies, with the best will in the world, are tomorrow's chip wrappers, influential only in the sense that they propel her ailing party forward or are smuggled into the governing agenda of other parties.

Harsh, perhaps. But there it is. But an election campaign suspends this obvious point. Instead, we have to pretend Ruth Davidson might, somehow, seize Bute House and find herself in a position to enact her ideas. And trapped in this parallel reality, we saw a different, faltering version of the Scottish Tory leader, contrasting rather sharply with the bluff, affable version which has dominated the headlines hitherto.

So what did Nicola ask? The Nats have already excerpted and punted the key exchange with Davidson.

"You've said you would tax graduates of university education and restore prescription charges. So will you tell us tonight exactly how much your graduate tax would be, and how much people will have to pay for their medicines, if you get your way?"

This is an evil question on a couple of fronts. Firstly, contrast the simplicity of the SNP's position with the complexity of her opponent's. Sturgeon has asked about two separate schemes here, which have their universality in common. Every student, fees covered. Every prescription, paid for. If we dig into these policies, there are more challenging trade offs and implications. But if we remain on a superficial level? It is an easy sell.

Inevitably, Ruth Davidson's position on these questions will be more complicated, and accordingly, harder to explain. She will want to argue that the absence of tuition fees and prescriptions doesn't represent the best and fairest distribution of limited resources, which should be targeted and means tested, towards those with least, while those with greater disposable income make their contribution. She will want to argue this is fairer.

But even in summary, this is a complex message. And even worse, even if she manages to impart this message clearly, she hasn't begun to explain the detail of her own scheme, and the precise rules about the winners and losers it will create. These challenges would apply if Sturgeon had only asked about tuition fees or prescription charges. But by pressing Davidson for a detailed answer on both, with no time to develop her case and explain her thinking, Sturgeon laid down two bear traps for the Tory leader.

And entertainingly, Davidson blundered into both of them.

"Well, first of all it is not a graduate tax. it is a contribution after you've graduated --""How much?"" -- once you're earning money. We expect it to be  - erm - within the region of [swithering gesture] just over - eh - just over £1,500 per year. So that's a lot less than England."

And on prescriptions, again harried for precise numbers, a now rattled and embattled Davidson said:

"We will raise it over the course of the parliament, up to about £8."

"About", "in the region of" and "just over" are not phrases which instil much confidence. But let's not overemphasise that. Davidson was knocked off beam and struggled to think on her feet, as many folk would in parallel circumstances. That's what these debates are for: a chance to shine, and an opportunity to stumble.

But what struck me particularly about this exchange is how politically maladroit Davidson's response to Sturgeon's specific query really was. She offered a sketchy defence of both policies, and left the hard-sell bottom lines ringing in electors' ears. Inevitably, these bottom lines were picked up in the media this morning, without much explanation of why Davidson is pursuing these goals. This is not, I fancy, how she envisaged selling her tricky education and health policies in this election.

Sturgeon's question tempted Davidson into anticipating her manifesto in a way that was both fuzzy on detail, and nevertheless, simple and clear enough to be damaging.  She might have responded to Sturgeon's question evasively, and answered the question in terms of general principles while skirting the detail. In the moment, this would have had some costs. Imagine Davidson had said the following instead:

"We'll be publishing our detailed plans shortly in our manifesto. I won't anticipate that detail here tonight. But what I can tell you, Nicola, is that any Scottish Government I lead will be focused on the interests of the worst off in society. I'll prioritise investing in bright young Scots with potential, not in subsidising rich Scots who can already afford it to send their kids to university. I'll protect the funds available for cancer victims and those suffering from long term conditions -- not subsidising the viagra of merchant bankers from Edinburgh or featherbedded NHS managers from Glasgow. Why won't you?" 

Sturgeon's response to this would have been predictable -- "why won't you be straight with us now? Give me numbers!" Davidson might have suffered a boo or two for such evasions -- but she could have turned the the rhetorical tables on the First Minister and prevented her policies on these two highly visible topics from being presented, from the outset, in a muddled and easily caricatured way. Once her plans had been produced, in a day or two, everyone would have forgotten her early diffidence and evasion in the debate.

But Davidson didn't make that calculation. Instead she blundered in with rough and implausible sounding numbers, and neglected the more important bit -- foregrounding and explaining why she believes these policies are better for Scotland. Feart of a few noises off in the debating hall, Davidson has allowed the political initiative to slip from her, handing her opponents a loudhailer with which to characterise - and crucify - her education and health policies.

Davidson had her moments elsewhere in the debate. Asking Kezia Dugdale if she’d stand “shoulder to shoulder” with her again in the event of a second referendum was extremely funny. But overall? This was a sucker punch from the First Minister, and from the young and untested Tory leader, a damaging rookie error.

Just As Planned

I'm fond of John Dryden's line, that "even victors are by victories undone." It contains a germ of hope for those who find themselves defeated, and it cautions those who appear to have carried away the prizes that a scorpion may lurk somewhere, undetected, in the silverware. Life, and politics, rarely work out just as planned.  

Our recent experience throws up too many examples of the best laid plans going agley fully to relate, but you can detect a few major threads in recent political surprises and disappointments. Measures adopted in the hope of weakening your opponents end up perversely strengthening them in unanticipated ways. You sometimes find short term measures which boost your fortunes lay down the railway tracks which ultimately engulf you in calamity. A swing which brings your opponent onto the punch might give you a welcome opportunity to draw some blood - but it isn't worth it, if the satisfaction of inflicting a little injury leaves you vulnerable to a knock-out blow in response. The art of politics can be deuced tricky. There are some black and white days in politics, some palpable setbacks and some undeniable triumphs. But as Dryden saw, all too often, our victories and defeats are two-edged. Most swords are. 

I approach the Scotland Act 2016, and the Holyrood election debate which it has prompted, with this kind of attitude. There is an intelligent debate to be had about the limits of the current devolution settlement, and the economic wisdom of a new model Scottish Parliament, whose tax analysis and decision-making is focused disproportionately on income. Economics is not my forte, and I'm not your man for that discussion. But let's look at the politics of this. 

Although Holyrood has, for some time, enjoyed a little theoretical wiggle room on taxation, since the SNP's abortive "penny for Scotland" policy in the early days of the parliament, Holyrood's tax raising powers have been posted missing in our election campaigns. Decisions on spending have predominated. Already, as the new Scotland Act powers march slowly towards us, serious questions of income taxation and welfare are colouring and directing the 2016 race. Bracket the economic question of the wisdom or unwisdom of devolving income tax in this way, what are the political consequences of this shift?

One analysis would see this as a cunning Unionist trap, designed to expose the SNP government to the kind of scrutiny it has allegedly long avoided. The argument goes something like this. Look at those cunning Nationalists, claiming credit for their spending decisions, but avoiding responsibility for hiking income taxes to pay for them. They claim credit when devolved Scottish services prosper, and blame Westminster when cuts are imposed.

Now, the new powers ensure Scottish ministers will take their share of potentially unpopular decision-making, which creates obvious winners and losers. Their hands are - finally - being dipped in the blood. Although income tax makes up a smaller percentage of the overall tax take than most folk probably assume, save for your council tax bill, your PAYE deductions are the most visible form of taxation going. 

If Nicola Sturgeon hikes your rate, you'll know about it, and hold her government responsible for its choices. See how long your popularity survives in the rougher winds which will blow then. Devolution might also have opened a window on the right wing for Ruth Davidson to champion lower rates. In the event, she seems to have retreated entirely to an "I agree with George" position on the rights of disabled people and the rates and bands of Scottish income taxation.

And - who knows? - this cynical argument may have something to it. Income tax devolution has already altered the political debate, and exposed the First Minister's government to some awkward choices. On one interpretation, the teeth of the trap are closing.

But for myself? I remember my Dryden, think like a calculating gradualist, and take a slightly different view. Might income tax devolution create headaches for devolved governments? No question. Might it expose the SNP to new and uncomfortable situations, inviting missteps, and making some parts of the population unhappy? For sure. But the creation of Revenue Scotland and a distinct agency to administer devolved benefits for the disabled are classically gradualist nationalist innovations. They help to bridge the chasm between the status quo and a future independence. They shorten the "leap in the dark" it might be seen as representing.

Many of the more critical, post indyref postmortems have focussed on questions of policy. How does the slump in global oil price alter the economic strategy and thinking? Does the currency policy need reappraising, in the light of hard experience and defeat? What about Europe? This is all well and good, and important, but I was to make a dumber, perhaps more obvious, point. For independence supporters, contemplating the situation in which we find ourselves, wanting usefully to bide our time, bridging that chasm isn't just a question of institutions and policy -- it is also a question of political culture and political capital. 

Yes, income and most welfare devolution will expose Nicola Sturgeon's government to sometimes harsh and unforgiving headwinds. But much more importantly, it will gradually acclimatise our political culture to talking about tax and spend decisions much more seriously, on a peculiarly Scottish economic scale. Comparisons with England and Wales are likely to continue. But given sufficient time to percolate and mature -- this has the potentially radically to revise the status quo, building greater fiscal capacity in our politicians, and among the wider public of electors. This may also build skepticism towards the Scottish Government from some quarters, but collectively, it has the capacity to build confidence too. And as a calculating, gradualist Nationalist, this seems to me a fine and useful thing.

One aspect of the devolution settlement which long concerned me was the limits it imposed on our politicians' policy visions and their industry. MSPs and ministers have an incentive to focus on questions within their competence, and to give only scanty and superficial thought to issues falling outside them.  The SNP were, for the greater part of the last two decades, uniquely exposed to this tendency, as first-past-the-post Westminster elections ensured that only a very limited cohort of Nationalist politicians were in place in the palace, scrutinising and thinking about reserved matters day to day. 

2015 represented a radical break with this modest representation. You can't expect six souls with limited support and funds at their command to engage in a comprehensive and thoroughgoing operation on critical reserved questions of taxation and welfare, foreign policy and defence. This observation is intended as no criticism of the folk composing the SNP's Westminster delegation in earlier years. There are only so many hours in a day, and only so many briefings a small cadre of advisers can assemble. 

Being the minor opposition, grounds can always be found to oppose the government of the day. But this kind of deconstructive, oppositional mode of thinking about reserved matters is not conducive to state building and advancing a considered and positive programme of your own. If the extent of your public scrutiny of government policy is a single question at PMQs, you're not going to try to present your own comprehensive plan. You'll look for the more focused, stinging, laugh line. Meanwhile, in Holyrood, as an MSP, you have no real incentive either to pick up the slack, and ponder the detail of social security or tax policy. It is a reserved matter, and your party will never be in power in Whitehall. Why bother? 

But this kind of dynamic should strike serious minded independence supporters as potentially pernicious. If the principal party of independence neglects to build its thinking beyond opposition to particular measures, and the formulation of superficial but superficially winning soundbites about Westminster perfidy, you're goosed. From this kind of material, winning campaigns for Scottish independence are not made.  

But I'd argue these two recent developments offer a route out of these understandable historical cul de sacs and leave the SNP simultaneously more politically exposed, and ultimately strengthened. In contrast with the handful of representatives whose minds are set to the analysis of reserved matters, the SNP now benefits from a massive Westminster delegation whose resources it must deploy with cold-eyed intelligence. Some of the new parliamentarians are plodders. Others stars. But aided by its short money war-chest, the party's serried ranks of MPs, and the little elves and sprites which surround them, are gradually intensifying their understanding of reserved matters, and the depth and complexity of many of the issues involved. This is unprecedented.

But I wonder if the Scotland Act "trap" might not make its own significant contribution to sharpening Nationalist thinking, focussing minds, and forcing Scottish voters to think about tax and spend - and greater independence - in a more comprehensive and programmatic way.  As you cackle as Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues are put on the spot - think on that. And remember Dryden. And wonder if it is all, really, going just as planned.

"She wore a blue collar..."

Every politician has their schtick, their story. Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson's, is that she is a ‘good, old-fashioned’ working-class Conservative, seasoned with a good pinch of socially liberal, unstarchy modernity.

As Peter Ross' Times profile puts it this morning, "Ms Davidson grew up in two traditional small towns, Selkirk and Lundin Links. She went to Buckhaven High and lacks silver spoons and old school ties." And there is clearly a good deal of truth to this. Davidson is not one of the born to rule brigade. She seems amiable, ordinary and doesn't take herself too seriously. She wasn't privately educated. Flattering profiles tend to describe her as a "champion of blue collar Tories" - which is just an Americanised way of saying - working class Tories. 

And yet the foundations of all this remain remarkable shaky. Bark at Ms Davidson that the Scottish Tories remain a party devoted to the service of the wealthy, of established privilege and property, and she'll almost inevitably dip into her biography rather than her policy catalogue to try to refute the point. The election campaign represents an admirable opportunity for Ms Davidson to move beyond an immature identity politics, and to produce some policy calculated to benefit the workers of "middle Scotland" who she says uniquely preoccupy her.

But thus far? All we've really seen is the same old, same old. Her education agenda seems authentically felt. But on tax and spend? Recent developments in SNP policy have represented a calculated provocation to Davidson’s party. And damagingly, if she wanted to prosecute a consistent blue collar agenda for her party, her troops are proving either indisciplined or ill-led. Mr Osborne’s upper rate tax cut, cancelled. Local taxation, hiked on the Georgian villas of the New Town and the corniced apartments of Pollokshields and Kelvinside. Threats and menaces continue about the additional rate of taxation. 

Each provocation has been met with the same old unreconstructed response on behalf of interests Tories have long represented: the high earners, the landowners, the large homeowners, the prosperous middle classes. And for the real “middle Scotland” – squeezed or unsqueezed, delete as preferred? For "aspirational" folks, taking home between £20,000 and £30,000 a year, and hoping to bump up their salaries over the coming years? Next to sod all, as far as I can see. Certainly nothing distinctive from what the more traditionally patrician leadership of her party in Westminster has come up with.

We await the party manifestos for May's elections with interest. But we're gradually getting a clearer picture of where the parties will stand on key issues, including taxation. And if the speech Ms Davidson gave this morning is anything to go by, beyond the warm words and the attractive biographical annotations, Ms Davidson seems most exercised by the pocketbooks of the richest 5% to 10% of Scots. Here's the key section of her speech: 

Last week, we learned the full cost of the SNP’s plans. Firstly, middle earners in Scotland will be forced to pay £3000 more in tax than people in England over the next five years. By the turn of the decade, the difference in take home pay for someone touching£50,000 will be £800 a year. And secondly, the additional rate may go up too. On Wednesday, the First Minister rightly declared she would not be increasing the additional rate of tax – because we know Scotland will lose money if she does. But by Thursday night, we learned that, actually, she’s had second thoughts – and that she may do so in future years. In short, we now have a Government which we know will make middle earners pay more – and which may make higher earners pay even more too.

We can discuss the merits of tax banding. We can have a meaningful debate about when the 40% banding ought to bite, and what the consequences of higher taxation at the upper and additional thresholds are likely to be. There was some good discussion below the line in last week's blog on this. But for all the Daily Mail's wishful thinking - which Ms Davidson appears to have swallowed whole someone earning £50,000 is not a middle earner.  

The point cannot be underscored often enough. The median full time income in this country is £27,000 a year. Someone earning £50k a year may sit midway between the very rich and the very poor in our society, but most working people do not. In Ms Davidson's Edinburgh region, the median salary is higher - £35,784 - but still well short of the figure £50k figure she cites in her speech today.

If this is Ms Davidson's definition of a "blue collar" Tory, good luck finding many of those outside of Edinburgh's more prosperous enclaves. In fairness, you can understand the politics of this. Ms Davidson has a core vote to whom she must also tend. The Conservative Party - like all big, governing coalitions - has competing forces and inclinations within it. I'm sure Davidson is sincere - in a fuzzy way - about wanting to give a leg up to those who begin life with few advantages. But if your main policy objectives are to protect those who are already well off? If you offer sod all to those you claim to champion? If you claim you have a working class agenda, but all you talk about is protecting the pocketbooks of a relatively small minority of higher earners at the top? 

Then, to be honest, I don't give a fig whether you've pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, or whether you are the first person in your family to go to university. Your autobiography has become a convenient mask, to distract the people - and perhaps, to distract yourself - from the gulf separating your political ideals and the priorities you are actually pursuing. 

There was an interesting, human moment when Andrew Marr interviewed Iain Duncan Smith last weekend. The former Work and Pensions Secretary was confronted with the gap between his stated aspirations and what the government of which he had been part had actually achieved. Duncan Smith found his passion, defended his principles, and ultimately - failed credibly to bridge the gap between what he said he wanted to do, and what the record showed about his term in office. 

When pressed in a similar way, Ms Davidson has also got into the habit of retreating into her personal story, just as Iain Duncan Smith retreated to his principles. The former Work and Pensions Secretary invites us to judge him, not on his failures and his achievements, but on his good intentions. In Ruth Davidson's empty "blue collar" Toryism, we can already almost hear the dull echo of the Quiet Man's aspirations, and his regrets.

John Deighan: sans class, sans gorm, sans everything

I have a confession to make. Among the great shifting and disputatious tribes of Scottish public life, the sinners and the redeemed, there are relatively few people for whom I feel absolute, crushing contempt. In brash newspaper columns and in stressed television appearances -- we only see a glancing, partial depiction of the whole soul. But one of the few characters I've come to despise in the public life of this country is Mr John Deighan. I don't know the man personally. He may be a loving father, and a loyal friend. A faithful husband and a benevolent ally. He may engage of countless acts of kindliness and charity. He may be gentle and thoughtful. He may have a heart full of love.

But since Mr Deighan has swum into my consciousness, he has been this country's most consistently nasty and consistently nit-witted spokesman of wounded Christian feeling. Mr Deighan was formerly Parliamentary Officer for the Bishops' Conference of Scotland, in which role, you might have encountered him prosecuting the case against gay marriage.  He is now chief executive of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children ("SPUC"), Scotland’s pro-life organisation".  Today, CommonSpace report Mr Deighan's latest nittwittery which, even by his high standards, outstrips all recent efforts by some measure. It is all there. Prosecuting women who secure abortions. Crackpot pseudo-science. Magic condoms. LGBT teen suicides used as "a rhetorical device to gain sympathy."

Now, as long-standing readers will recall, I was a supporter of equal marriage. I don't share his view on abortion. I'm godless. I don't share Mr Deighan's understanding of the cosmos and the moral plan etched by some higher power in its essential fabric. But being an academic sort, I am perfectly prepared to sit down and listen to arguments with which I fundamentally disagree. If you're prepared to use your imagination, and enter into a Christian theological world view, you can sketch out logical arguments, arguments which make complex and interesting claims about what human flourishing really means.  You don't have to take it personally, even where you profoundly disagree. 

But what do we get? Who is the natural law's spokesman on earth? Who brings hard won human reason and tradition to a doubting world? Who is to act as the moral tutor to a wayward people, deaf to the Lord's word? John Deighan. Fucking John Deighan. John Deighan: a man incapable of formulating a coherent sentence, never mind sketching a nuanced point. A man who manages, somehow, to be both vulgarly tabloid, and crushingly pretentious. A man whose public remarks suggest a mind of such bluntness, of such nastiness, of such mendacity -- well, Saint Anselm would blush. The heavenly doctor, Thomas Aquinas, garbled by this poisonous, illiberal, thick-as-a-stump jobgobber? You weep.

I have intense, immense respect for the intellectual traditions of the the Christian and Catholic tradition. There is a crude, and often self-satisfied atheistical vision of the intellectual history of Europe, which seems the dawning enlightenment as the first flourishing of skeptical, searching, intellectual life after the collapse of the great Grecian republics and a long uninterrupted darkness of ignorance and superstition. This is nonsense. I reject it utterly. 

Within their cosmological frameworks, great Christian thinkers were above all great thinkers. They scrutinised their beliefs with emotional and intellectual energy and doubt. The doctrines of natural law are rich and considered, complex and nuanced. In terms of my intellectual development, one of the most important books I ever read was Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. MacIntyre is a wonderful bag of contradictions. A Marxist Thomist Aristotelian thinker, born in Glasgow, but who made most of his career in the United States, in Notre Dame. 

He embodies the key point. Catholicism is a pensive, rich, self-aware and intelligent tradition. It is a tradition which I, to a great extent, find myself in disagreement with. But that this semi-literate toad is its spokesman is an insult to its history. This is a - perhaps uncharacteristically - harsh appraisal. Perhaps he is - somehow - a grand man in private despite it all. But from his public echo? Ignorant, inarticulate, mendacious, unpleasant, John Deighan is a man sans class, sans gorm, sans everything. Read the piece. Reach your own conclusions.

Notes from "Middle Scotland"

Who are Scotland's "squeezed middle", and what, precisely, are they supposed to be in the "middle" of? The right wing press have begun to do their collective dingers about Nicola Sturgeon's hints yesterday, that George Osborne's decision to hike the threshold for paying the higher rate of tax looks unlikely to apply in Scotland once the Scotland Bill powers are enacted. 

In the current tax year, individuals across the UK pay 40% tax on earnings over £42,385. Come 2017/18, the chancellor intends to shift the threshold for the higher rate to £45,000. The First Minister has said cutting income taxes for "those on the highest incomes at a time when support for the disabled is being cut and at a time when our public services are under pressure, is in my view the wrong choice.”

For Alan Roden, and the Scottish Daily Mail, this is an outrage and a scandal. "Middle Scotland will pay highest tax in UK" their headline this morning screams, a "family tax grab". Mr Roden goes on to flesh out his indictment of this supposed Scottish Government larceny. 

"Nicola Sturgeon yesterday confirmed that Scotland's squeezed middle will be punished with the UK's highest taxes to pay for the SNP's vote-winning policies. The First Minister said George Osborne's tax give away for nurses, teachers and police is "not a choice I am going to make."

With the paper's characteristic combination of sentimentality and nastiness, this opening paragraph summons up a ghoulish mental picture of the SNP government, persecuting the ordinary bobby, picking the pocket of self-sacrificing and industrious ward sisters, and shellacking that lovely, soft-voiced primary school teacher you cherished as a youngster. It implies that fairly ordinary workers, earning fairly ordinary pay cheques, will be "punished" if John Swinney decides not to make the richest sections of this country even richer. Even a little rummaging shows that this a breathtaking distortion, a falsehood, a flat out, old-fashioned lie. 

First, start with the basics. The latest official figures suggest that the median annual earnings of a Scottish worker before tax is £27,045 - a mighty £15,370 short of any liability to pay the higher rate of income tax. Most Scottish workers need a pair of binoculars to see the upper rate of tax, never mind to benefit from Mr Osborne's unnecessary cuts. And what do you know? Precisely the same thing goes for each of the professions Mr Roden mentions in his forked-tongued news report. Nurses, teachers, police officers - the overwhelming majority of these public sector workers won't gain a single penny from Osborne's upper rate hike and won't lose a single penny if John Swinney refuses to play copy cat. 

First, take nurses. The NHS in Scotland helpfully publishes workforce information, including data on the salary bands of its staff. Even more helpfully, they break down the data for nursing staff and midwives. So what does it tell us? At the end of December 2015, the NHS employed 59,287 nursing and midwifery staff. These staff are paid on nationally negotiated pay scales, running from £15,385 at the bottom of band 1 to £100,431 per annum at the top of band 9, depending on their seniority. 

But the overwhelming majority of nursing and midwifery staff are employed on contracts of band 7 of lower.  And - yes, you've guessed it - the highest point in band 7 for nursing staff in Scotland is a salary of £41,373 - still just  over £1,000 short of paying the higher rate of income tax at its current level. In fact,  according to official stats, at most, only 2% of Scottish nursing staff are in a position to benefit from Mr Osborne's upper rate tax cut. 58,111 staff are employed at band 7 or lower compared to just 1,176 above that, while the overwhelming majority of nurses and midwives (36,570) are employed on salary bands 5 (£21k - £28k) and 6 (£25k - £35k). Point to me, I think, Mr Roden.

So what about the teachers Nicola Sturgeon is supposedly "punishing"? Oopsie daisy. Same problem. Scottish teachers have their own nationally negotiated bands of pay, running from £22,416 for probationers, up to £35,763 at band six. Different rates apply for principal teachers, and for the higher ups in the head-teachers' offices, some of whom would benefit from the chancellor's upper-rate tax cut. But the overwhelming majority of Scotland's 48,000 teachers? Not a sausage. Even without a hike, they're still earning £6,622 a year shy of the current threshold to pay 40% income tax. 

And police officers? Surely Mr Roden must have called at least one of these right? Surely the bollocks cannot be entirely unmitigated? Alas, alas. First, look at Police Scotland's pay and grading rules.  Police constables take home £23,493 on their first year on the job, increasing to £36,885 over long service. There are no higher rate tax payers here. But what if you are promoted to sergeant? Then your pay jumps from £36,885 to £41,451 per year. Even on the current threshold of £42,385, police sergeants still wouldn't be paying a single penny of the higher rate of tax. By contrast, the Chief Constable (salary, £212,280), and his higher ranking subordinates would have to contribute more if Osborne's cuts are not implemented north of the border. 

But just like nursing staff, and just like teachers, the overwhelming majority of police officers are not employed in senior positions, earning fatter pay cheques. The most recent statistics suggest that over 90% of Scottish police officers serve and are paid at constable or sergeant level who will not pay a penny more income tax, even if Osborne's tax plans are not implemented by the Scottish government. English police forces show a similar breakdown, by the by, with 93% of officers holding commissions as sergeants and constables.

So let's summarise. Reality, according to Alan Roden, is that George Osborne's tax cuts for the top 10% - 15% of highest earners represented a "tax give away for nurses, teachers and police" and that "Scotland's squeezed middle will be punished" by the SNP if a matching cut is not made to Scottish rates of income tax. Reality, according to the evidence, suggests that 90% of police officers would not be worse off, 98% of nurses would not be worse off, and the overwhelming majority of Scottish teachers would not be worse off, if the higher rate of tax was simply maintained at its current rate. Misinformation doesn't cover it.

So where do we find this fabled "middle Scotland"? If the Daily Mail's analysis today is anything to go with, wedged deep, deep in the midst of naked self-interest, rampant delusions, lies about our economy and and a fog of utterly misplaced self-pity.