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.

Jenny Hjul's demonic toys

Discourse analysts are going to have a whale of a time unpicking the referendum campaign, when it is all over.  Both campaigns have exhibited an acute awareness of the power, and perils, of language. It is no accident, for example, that all the Better Together bods alighted on the term "separation" for independence, and have employed it relentlessly.

After all, in ordinary usage, the concept of independence has an unforgettably positive ring to it. Your children flee the nest, live independently, find freedom in the big wide world. Independence summons up sturdiness, self-reliance, freedom from the interfering lets and hindrances of others. The concept of separation, by contrast, recalls the bitterness of the end of a relationship; the lovelorn soldier, casting longing eyes back to Blighty having been conscripted overseas; the involuntary loss of your favourite toe on a rusty spike.

The phenomenon of the cybernat has been summoned and taken on substance from a puff of imagination, transforming your online, off-colour pub style conversation and inevitable internet zoomers into a homogeneous, integrated and organised campaign of hate, allegedly unique to the independence movement. The Yes campaign has gone, hook line and sinker, for the sunshine language of affirmation: hope, opportunity, change -- though increasingly, you're struck but the emergence of tougher lines on the implications of continuing union (presumably the "must" dimension, of the Nationalists' tripartite mantra that we can, should and must be independence).

But one of the weirder discursive constructions in the campaign - usually exhibited by your ultramontane, black-hearted Unionist - is the refusal to countenance the idea that anybody could possibly be in favour independence without being a member of the Scottish National Party. In the latest of her string of fevered diatribes, La Passionara of the Better Together campaign (and La Cochrane), Jenny Hjul, knocks up a classic of the genre. 

Having overcome her irrational aversion to proximity to the mild, pro-independence David Hayman, Hjul wonders "have the Scottish Nationalists taken over the Edinburgh Fringe?" No, this isn't a tale of the organised, malevolent ranks of Salmond's army descending on the capital to force Britain's artists to perform endless renditions of Flowers of the Forest, and Freedom Come A' Ye, late into the night - though as ever with Hjul, you suspect the anxiety simmers just under the surface.

Today's missive from the house that reaction built ponders the ghastly poseurs and talentless, insufferable pro-independence artistes deluging Edinburgh during August (I paraphrase), and throughout, uses capital N "Nationalism" to characterise anything and everything associated with support for independence. (Sacrificing felicity of expression to the overriding desire to be on-message, Hjul suggests that Alan Bissett is "a leading light in the artists for separatism movement" - an unhappily cumbersome sentence if ever one was hammered out).

So we are told, for example, "Scottish Nationalists have long claimed to have a monopoly on passion," though helpfully, no evidence is adduced to substantiate this claim, nor is it clear who these mysterious Scottish Nationalists - and Hjul uses the term indiscriminately to cover anyone from Nicola Sturgeon to the most dyed in the wool pro-independence Labour voter - might be. 

From my perch, plenty of those intending to vote No seem pretty enthusiastic about their cause, but who am I to interfere with Hjul's sweat-beaded parallel reality? She also tells us that the man behind All Back to Bowie's - David Greig - is a "Nationalist playwright." This is, I fancy, information which will be news to David. What luck that there are helpful strangers like Hjul on hand, to diagnose what one really is.

In point of fact, I have it on good authority that David Greig is actually an elaborate SNP front. Conceived of by Alex Salmond's inner circle in the early 1980s, with the assistance of a Mrs Doubtfire style latex mask, wig and body suit, Alex Neil has been moonlighting as the playwright for the last three decades, squeezing in his ghostwriting between his parliamentary duties.

Oh. And National Collective. All of those sprightly young things and separatist hipsters are also an SNP front. That Alex Neil is a talented mimic. Oh, and I'm an SNP front too. And if you're reading this while supporting independence, chances are that you're one too, you silly sausage Scottish Nationalist you. Your unsolicited membership chit is in the post.

Unlike Greig, I am a member of the SNP, but this determination - in the teeth of all the evidence - to find Scottish Nationalists everywhere in the independence campaign is profoundly odd. Why is it so difficult to conceive of the idea that those who find nationalistic sensibilities do little for them politically might sympathise with a Yes vote in September? Or that the case for independence finds support from across folk of different political proclivities? Salmond has better things to be doing, that plucking on the strings of thousands of guileless marionettes.

It is remarkable, even down to the level of language, how far folk like Hjul are prepared to go, to hang onto the idea that self-government is a pathological enthusiasm, limited to a tiny band of vaguely disreputable Scottish eccentrics. If you can't find your preferred opponent in the real world? Use your imagination. Project them into existence. Conjure them, in language, from the ether. Like demon toys.

The Scottish Tories: the new "party of devolution"?

One of the most grating and familiar lines to emanate from Scottish Labour politicians is that theirs is the "party of devolution".  This proprietorial claim is at odds with both the history of devolution, and the People's Party's own chequered and divided attitude to the idea of home rule. But it's an amateurish politician who lets fairmindedness and truth arrest the telling of a good tale. Ultimately, I suspect it's just another of the opiating but essentially debilitating myths to which the party seems increasingly determined to succumb. Yet on a range of fronts, Labour's idea that la décentralisation, c'est moi is being challenged.  

As a sagacious soul recently pointed out to me, come May 2015, the party will have been out of power in Scotland for longer than Dewar, McLeish and McConnell served in it between 1999 and 2007. Johann Lamont's recent devo scheme was an incoherent calamity, born of short-term thinking, naked partisanship, and a lack of intellectual application to the legal and political tensions and opportunities represented by redistributing power away from the centre. Another opportunity missed. But when one player forgoes a diamond chance, a window of opportunity opens for another to sneak in and race off with the ball. There are signs - some scuttlebutt - that the Strathclyde Commission may prove surprisingly ambitious, its devo offer comfortably overtaking Johann's plodding proposals.

For an independence supporter to countenance the possibility of further devolution after a No vote isn't exactly popular. The orthodox line is that we'll get nowt, and the turncoat betrayals of 1979 will be repeated by the current generation of neo-Thatcherite centralisers. There are certainly good reasons to be skeptical about (a) whether warm but vague words will really be delivered on, and (b) the extent to which any of the mainstream UK parties (with the potential, but irrelevant exception of the Liberal Democrats) are profoundly committed, in their guts, to distributing power away from Westminster. 

To adapt Better Together's rhetoric of choice, if we bracket the powers coming down the line under the Scotland Act 2012, there are no guarantees that Holyrood will win additional powers. And it looks quite likely that the powers the parliament might win would represent theoretical and illusory gains, rather than practical and effective levers allowing us to follow a distinctive tack on taxation, social security and so on. 

But I think we can afford to be a wee bit more relaxed about admitting (a) the possibility of further devolution while (b) still maintaining that independence has advantages which a tricky negotiation of powers across the UK can't rival. Firstly, none of the devo-schemes on offer come anywhere near the mythic devo-max, which is to say, none of them incorporate the extensive tax and welfare powers Scotland needs if it is to meaningfully follow its own course within the confines of the United Kingdom. And over and above these questions, the No campaign can continue to argue about the virtues and competences of UK foreign affairs and defence policy if it fancies. It's not a record whose recent big ticket items I'd care to defend.

Yet the possibility of an unexpectedly beefy Tory devolution offer throws up any number of unusual political issues and dynamics. Potential ironies abound. One of the major reasons why folk might want devolution of great swathes of domestic policy is Tory governments, but a future Conservative government might represent the best mechanism for delivering the maximum-possible devolution within the UK. It may not be a message which Tory-disinclined Scots are inclined to hear or credit. As a consequence, it may secure few short term advantages for Ruth Davidson, or "detoxify the Tory brand", but it would represent a remarkable reversal in our politics - and an audacious gambit by David Cameron and his colleagues. 

It would also represent an historic opportunity for the Nationalists and the Tories collectively to kick Scottish Labour to the margins of Scottish politics, its status of "the party of devolution" blown to bits, and its conceit of itself as the natural party of Scottish government thoroughly undermined.  You needn't be tartan Tories to find force in the logic that my enemy's enemy is my friend.  Despite their disagreements with the SNP's ideology, I dare say a few Tory corks popped in 2007 and 2011, when Jack McConnell and Iain Gray took their respective drubbings. 

The centralism of Ed Miliband's "One Nation" Labourism, with its vision of uniform social and economic rights, and "pooling resources" across the country, can't accommodate devolution with any comfort. You can't cut a deal for substantially strengthened powers with that vision of the United Kingdom. Pragmatic Toryism, by contrast, confident in its Unionism irrespective of different policy outcomes in different parts of the country, can probably accommodate these divergences. Lightly beguiled by ideas of decentralisation but unsystematic in its vision, the Conservative Party can find resources within itself to get behind devolution. 

Not the whole crew, perhaps. The ultramontane wing will never be persuaded, but it can be left gradually to die out and leave no heirs. There's nothing necessarily incoherent about the idea that devolution was a mistake which emboldened the Nationalists and undermined the stability of the Union, while arguing that the Union can find a new stability in a better settlement for Scotland. The thought may tighten Alan Cochrane's sphincter, an undeserved sop to the Nationalists, but Cochrane's miserablism is an infertile branch of Tory unionism. No green shoots can grow out of the withered stem of that political ideology.

For devo-enthusiasts in the party, the calculation is presumably that the Tories can be coaxed into travelling wherever the leadership ordains that it should go. That the blue rinsers won't cut up too rough. And the siren voices of old time reaction in Westminster will do what they're told, or be sufficiently isolated in parliament for Cameron coolly to shrug off their dissent. What right-thinking soul gives a ha'penny toss what Darth Forsyth thinks anyway?

And if the price exacted in this transaction is the loss of a few Scottish Labour MPs? So much the better. Leave those Scotch communitarians to the folly of their nannying state. If a strain of English nationalism produces Tory indifference about an independent Scotland, surely that sentiment can be mobilised - at least to some extent - to extend the level of self-government which we enjoy within the Union. That, I imagine, is the theory anyway. Quietly. Behind the shutters. 

If the rumour and speculation about the (relative) ambition of the Strathclyde Commission proposals are borne out in practice, and the Tories take the opportunity to try to o'erleap the commitments of their Labour opponents, the response of most Nationalists and pro-independence campaigners can be pre-scripted. Remember 1979. It'll never happen. You can't trust the Tories anyway. Thatcherism. Perfidious Albion. 

And fair enough - to some extent.  Why rely on the uncertain business of securing the consent of a majority of UK MPs, when you can guarantee that the Scottish Parliament will enjoy all of these powers with independence? Why not exercise your sovereign choice in the ballot box on the 18th of September, instead of waiting for our sovereign parliament in London to devolve powers which it has consistently declined to transfer, despite golden opportunities to do so as recently as 2012?

But if September yields up a No vote, and the SNP are required rapidly to reverse-ferret on the idea that the UK's capacity to reinvent itself is spent, the jockeying for position as "the party of devolution" promises to be fascinating and unexpected scrap. Lord Strathclyde and his colleagues may be poised to give the kaleidoscope of Scottish politics a vigorous shoogle.

Cochrane's Paradox

A recent entry from the Scottish Dictionary of National Philosophistry (2004) (OUP). 

First identified by the onyxo-unio-cardiolist Alan Cochrane in or around Auchtermuchty in 2007, Cochrane's Paradox remains one of the thorniest politico-logical puzzles of contemporary Scottish philosophy. 

Extending Erwin Schrödinger's famous thought experiment in quantum theory from the feline to the functionary, Cochrane sought to find a basis in reason for the claim that civil servants working for their democratically-elected governments could be both a scandal and a disgrace, and celebrated and proper, at the same time. Although Cochrane's primary focus was always theoretical, contributing to humanity's understandings of higher order concepts, this uncharacteristically political theorist of physics chose to express this paradox in terms of the constitutional controversies of his own day.  

 Just as a fluffy kitten in the fuzzy bloom of youth cannot be both lively and dead simultaneously, the richly face-furnitured philosophist struggled to reconcile the claim that the UK government's use of its bureaucrats' time, talents and authority to promote its constitutional preferences was simply splendid, while the perfidious Scottish Nationalist insurgency's use of the self-same civil service resources to make the case for independence amounted to a disgraceful abuse of power and a subversion of a key pillar of the state hinting at dark designs on the liberty of the subject. 

But how could both propositions be true simultaneously, the same practices being both right and proper when undertaken by civil servants under the superintendence of UK ministers and a scandal and an outrage when simultaneously engaged in by their Holyrood counterparts? Cochrane's paradox was formed.  Only fully worked out in his late writings, Cochrane's early work in the field anticipated the thought experiment which would make his name. 

In an early pamphlet, he considered the perils of a senior Scottish civil servant "going native" in service of his Nationalist masters.  A subsequent scholarly review, Cochrane poses the question more starkly: "have Scotland’s civil servants become an arm of the SNP?" Cochrane, whose prose style was strongly influenced by his early readings of Professor Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (1927) concluded in a celebrated passage that: 

"Civil servants are paid by you but in Scotland they work for a separatist government even though they’re members of the British Civil Service."

To date, no subsequent theorist has been able to resolve the basic logical tensions in Cochrane's position. Emotionally and intellectually exhausted by his many failed attempts to resolve these issues, Cochrane abandoned advanced political quantum thinking in 2014. Selling his Perthshire home, the onyxo-unio-cardiolist is understood to have invested in a supply of gunpowder, a veteran crew of rum-soaked ex-lobby correspondents and a small brigantine. 

Flying under the traditional Cochrane Maggie-Thatcher-spearing-a-heart-while-quaffing-champagne flag, the ship has been implicated in a recent series of raids on fishing villages and towns along the Banff and Buchan coast. Locals have returned to find their homes despoiled of copies of the Spectator and Royal Jubilee branded tea sets, large numbers of which now flood the London black market.

See also: Dr John Charity Spring pp. 138 - 9.

A Stooge Writes

I'm a sort of academic. I'm completing a doctorate, teach public law in a couple of universities, and with any luck will be able to continue doing so in the future.

A year or so ago, I had the good fortune to be invited to appear on BBC Newsnicht to speak to the legality of Holyrood's independence referendum. This was in the heady days before the section 30 order had been agreed and passed by Westminster. In public, the SNP was holding unflinchingly to its line that there was no question that calling a referendum was within Holyrood's legal powers, will or nil the UK government.  

South of the Border, the London government took the diametrically opposed line: the independence referendum was clearly ultra vires and could expect to be struck down in court.  Not to be outdone, the Labour MP Ian Davidson and his colleagues on the Scottish Affairs Committee composed their own report to the same effect. Unless Westminster gave the nod, he argued, the referendum couldn't happen.

As long-term readers of the blog will recall, along with others, I dissented from both extremes. The independence referendum was neither clearly within or clearly outwith Holyrood's powers under the Scotland Act. It was, I suggested, arguable either way and it was difficult to predict what the courts might do if it popped up on their docket.  In their blithe confidence about the outcome, both the Scottish Government and the Scottish Affairs Committee were being disingenuous, doubtless for political reasons.  In public at least, both embraced the legal reading of the case most congenial to their own constitutional preferences.

On the night, Ian Davidson made waves with his brash handling of Isabel Fraser. The next day, I found myself in the headlines "after it emerged an apparently neutral constitutional lawyer interviewed by the programme was an SNP blogger", to quote Magnus Gardham's article in the Herald. Ian Davidson and Alan Cochrane more or less explicitly suggested that I lacked any academic integrity, and had been acting as a Nationalist stooge, taking the leadership line on the referendum's legality, and in cahoots with a partisan BBC Scotland, tried to hoodwink the Scottish people. Or at least that small segment of the Scottish people who watch Newsnicht.  

Neither of these weighty sages paused for a moment to consider whether what I had actually said mirrored the SNP line-to-take on the legality of the referendum.  If they had done so, they'd have quickly discovered that it wasn't. If I was put up to play the stooge, I played the role but poorly.  But a Nationalist stooge served their purposes, so they measured me up for the costume and the pointy hat. 

At the time, I thought all this was rather droll, and par for the course given the pepperiness of the constitutional debate, but I suppose I ought to have been angrier about the gratuitous way the  politician and journalist felt free to slate my intellectual credibility, by cynically conflating political sensibilities with the outright lack of independence of mind or honesty of character.  

It is with these experiences in mind, that I approach the latest referendum hoo-ha, around Shona Robison's reported questioning of whether Professor Chris Whatley chairing of a Better Together meeting in Dundee was compatible with his role chairing the University's Five Million Questions project, whose platform notes that:  

"...in what is an impassioned and partisan debate the objective neutrality of academia is ideally placed as a forum for illuminating discussion."

Better Together have, predictably, blown a gasket, throwing around super-heated allegations of gagging, and peddling ludicrous victim-fantasies of an oppressive Nationalist state. I'd take this humbug rather more seriously, if there was the slightest chance of the No campaign keeping its peace, had Professor Whatley been detected chairing a pro-independence meeting instead.

But you can bet your bottom groat that such an affiliation would have seen the Professor flayed across a guncarriage, as Cochers gleefully recounted "grave concerns about the fair-mindedness and balance" of Dundee's Five Million Questions referendum project. Perhaps with a little soupçon of SNP totalitarianism and political fixing, for larks. To my considerable amusement, the People's Black-Hearted Unionist now keenly feels the need to uphold the integrity of those in the academic field against their political detractors.  

"Threatening the integrity of academics, especially over their right to freedom of speech, is not the way of civilised societies. Those charged with the responsibility of educating a nation’s future should have the untrammelled entitlement to say what they like when they like and about whatever subject they choose."

We have a right to expect honesty and rigorous treatment of the evidence from our academics, whatever their discipline, but we have no right and no reason to expect them to be without political and constitutional convictions. The "neutral academic" Davidson and Cochrane demanded a year ago, and used to duff me up, is an unhealthy fantasy. Certainly, not every academic will be a party political partisan.  I expect most wont be.  But each of us carries our political and theoretical freight.  

I have no idea how Professor John Curtice intends to vote in 2014, but I do know that he approaches political analysis in psephological terms, seeing politics primarily through the medium of opinion polling. Some - many of us - do not share this theoretical lens. An economist will be disposed to analyse constitutional politics in economic terms, a sociologist or a lawyer could be expected to take a different tack, appealing to radically different views and understandings of the world.  

We needn't resort to the crude ad hominem language of political bias or stoogery to make the case that academic contributions to the constitutional debate should be welcomed, but should also be treated gingerly, assessed on their merits, their assumptions probed.  We aren't a priest-caste, bestowing knowledge from on high on a credulous people. We're in with the bricks of the political and constitutional and social debate like everyone else.  

Ruth's Pushmi-Pullyu routine...

Just a brief thought today. Yesterday, Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson gave a speech entitled "Scotland First". critically reviewed this morning by Alan Cochrane for the Telegraph and Alex Massie in the Scotsman.  Both more or less agree that the address served at least two functions. Firstly, it represented an attempt to distinguish Davidson from her colleagues in England and Wales and to assert a distinctly Scottish Conservative identity and agenda. No longer stooges for southron masters, no more mere peripheral scoffers on the Scottish political scene, tomorrow's Scottish Conservatives, she insists, must be right-trusty guardians of the Scottish interest, no longer seen as "London’s party in Scotland".

As Alex rightly recognises, this sort of the rhetoric has the nasty habit of re-enforcing rather than subverting the very stereotypes which Ruth hopes to assail, but for now, let's take her argument on its own terms.  The second string on her fiddle was devosomething. Ruth took the opportunity of the speech to slap a boot into the dunes, and in the stinging fug, attempted a pretty outrageous constitutional volte face. Well, probably attempted. As Sieur Cochrane notes, detail there was little. You may remember that on launching her campaign against Darth Murdo in September 2011, Davidson insisted that

“The Scotland Bill currently going through Westminster is the line in the sand. The time for arguing about the powers the people want is over. It’s time now to use the powers that we have.”

Just a few short months later, all's change it would seem. Or rather, all's-apparently-enthusiastically-but-vaguely-guesturing-towards-change. "Viewing devolution only through the prism of the threat of separation has been too one-dimensional," she says. Having hoodwinked her party's anti-devolutionist hardliners into supporting her candidacy agin the perfidious Murdo, she now declares herself devolution's friend, shoots admiring glances towards North Carolina in the United States, envisioning, albeit in a vague manner, yet another bout of "arguing about the powers the people want". Quoth she:

"... once the debate has been won, the threat of separation has receded and Scotland’s place in the Union is secure, we can take a serious and considered look at a new spread of responsibilities within the UK."

All well and good, you might well think. But I find myself wondering, is it really possible to serve these two ends simultaneously, at once to distance yourself from your colleagues down south, while dreaming up proposals for further constitutional change that will be at once practicable and credible? Consider a few simple facts. While the precise ambit of proposals for more devolution need not be made in Westminster, ultimately, it is the politicians in Westminster who must endorse and adopt them. In this ledger, the Scottish Tories are notoriously of paltry scope. Just the less-than-robust David Mundell with a vote and voice in the House of Commons for the last two parliaments. Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, a No vote in 2014, the Tories won't go into the Westminister general election of 2016 suffused with confidence that a host of colleagues will be joining Mundell on the blue benches.

As a consequence, if the Tories are going to be the party of further constitutional reform in the short to medium term, those reforms will have to be carried pre-eminently by the party's MPs representing English constituencies.  Of course, the party might well attempt to cobble together a consensual coalition across the Liberal Democratic and Labour parties, but ultimately, a Conservative-led government must rely on its own representatives, few of whom seem won-over to the virtues of devolution, or more than tepid proponents of innovating substantially to alter the balance of power in this country. Ruth Davidson's practical answer for realising more devolution can't be "vote Labour or Liberal Democrat instead and they might take care of it".

In this situation, you might well think that a Scottish Conservative leader would need to emphasise their close ties with her colleagues in Westminster rather than the distance separating them; her ability to bend arms, to convince the skeptical on her own side, to be Scotland's representative in the Tory councils in London, rather than a semi-detached figure, commanding little to no influence with them. Pushmi-Pullyu can't clop north and south simultaneously.

Cock-eyed Cochers cocks a snook...

Devolution is "a motorway without exit" to a separate Scottish state. So contended Tam Dalyell. I've long found the Telegraph's Alan Cochrane's lapses into this mode of thinking rather befuddling. What does a Unionist politics look like, if you subscribe to this sort of devolution determinism? If you are travelling on Dalyell's motorway - you may accelerate, decelerate - but cannot u-turn. Onward ever onward you vroom, however unwillingly, with no prospect of changing your direction of travel. Strictly speaking, I suspect he and others like him may well entertain fond dreams of flattening Holyrood and "repatriating" devolved powers to a restored Westminster - but for the foreseeable future, the engine has fallen out of that political project, leaving the old banger wheezing far back on the hard shoulder.  

Many - and I share their skepticism - would write off Dalyell's metaphor as whizz-bang rhetoric to underline his anti-devolution argument, rather than a serious sociological diagnosis that independence is rendered inevitable by the mere existence of a Scottish parliament. But for the black-hearted Unionist who does hold this curious deterministic position, the fatal moment has come and gone. The Union may not have gasped its last, but is certainly lying on its bed of death. Care at this point can only be palliative, all hopes of a cure perishing with the "yes" vote in the 1998 referendum.  For old time's sake, you may strive to keep the patient alive for as long as possible, deferring her dissolution by bloody-minded but purposeless interventions in public life. On this theory, Dalyell and Cochrane and their ilk are reduced to murmuring their Dylan Thomas - "Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage against the dying of the light" - ever more world-wearily. As politics go, this is a macabre business. The perplexity and dissatisfactions of this position were called to mind, hearing Cochrane's response to a recent speech from John Major. The former Tory Prime Minister argued that ...

"Why not devolve all responsibilities except foreign policy, defence and management of the economy? Why not let Scotland have wider tax-raising powers to pay for their policies and, in return, abolish the present block grant settlement, reduce Scottish representation in the Commons, and cut the legislative burden at Westminster?"

Predictably enough, Cochers is appalled to hear such sentiments expressed by a man who once stoutly opposed devolution on the grounds that Scots were "sleepwalking towards independence" and that it represented "a stepping stone to separation".  On Newsnicht, Cochrane sputtered his astonishment: "I found this the most incredible intervention in recent years - months. For John Major to say this, is absolute havers." The BBC journalist who put the piece together styled Major's proposition "moving towards a weaker Union" - a profoundly problematic proposition, baldly to advance. Indeed, it is precisely the Union strengthening qualities of more radical devolved powers which is at issue between these conservative characters. For Major, and Darth Murdo Fraser - and as I understand him, David Torrance - the rationale for embracing a much more extensive, settled and federal devolution settlement is precisely that it will end the "unsustainable" situation we currently occupy, characterised by political instability and the slow "appeasement" of nationalist demands.  Baillie Bill Aitken's appeared in the same edition of Newsnicht, arguing that devolution is a process, not an event.  It is this endlessly parroted phrase that Major is seeking to expel from our political vocabulary, tying down the open ends of devolution into a settled federal structure.

For Cochrane, by contrast, the Calman Commission, Scotland Bill and prospect of much more extensive devolution of powers - are sops that enervate the Unionist soppers without soaking up Nationalist feeling. While I'm sure old Cochers does not count Maximilien Robespierre amongst his intellectual influences, his views echo a speech made by the latter in the Jacobin Club after the King's abortive Flight to Varennes in 1791. Said Robespierre:

"What frightens me is the very thing that seems to reassure everyone. And here I need to be listened to until the end. Once again, what frightens me is the very thing that seems to reassure everyone else: it’s that since this morning, all of our enemies speak the same language as us."

In Cochrane's case, the logic is precisely inverted. What concerns him is that his friends speak the same language as his enemies, not just conceding but adopting the Nationalist political logic of an ever-empowered Holyrood. For Cochers, they do Salmond's work for him and win no appreciable benefit for the Union in the process. For him, any concession is a defeat, weakening the Union. Victory is curbing Nationalist ambitions by bluntly telling us to sod off. For what it is worth, my own feeling is that Cochrane's response is quite wrong-headed and that Major's two propositions, while superficially contradictory, are not incompatible. It is perfectly plausible to hold (1) that you believe devolution is and was a "a stepping stone to separation" but (2) if voters reject argument (1) and you end up with devolution, preserving the Union may behove finding ways to stabilise the devolution settlement, to extinguish, or diminish the demands of self-determination.

Devolution was never just about relocating decision-making powers from institution A to new institution B after all. Politically, it doubtlessly empowered the SNP, transforming them from a very small handful of MPs in a very large House of Commons to a party of primary opposition, then minority government in 2007 and a majority in 2011. More broadly, it created the possibility of a distinct public sphere in Scottish politics around Holyrood. Although this outcome may not have been foreseen by those voting on the Scotland Act 1998, it ought to have been clear that devolution would displace Westminster's monopoly on "official" political life and fundamentally alter the character of - and in the short to medium term, strengthen - the SNP.  As a Unionist, one can conceiveably oppose the emergence of a distinct Scots political agora, and nevertheless recognise that once such a public space exists, think about ways to reconfigure the powers exercised by the institution and its creatures, better to serve your aim of preserving the Union. Cochrane, by contrast, seems to see no such distinctions.  Which, given his lapsing into the Dalyellesque logic discussed at the outset, is something of a curiosity.

Discussing the same topic of "the Conservatives, the Union, Scotland and the British State", Gerry Hassan notes...

"The Tories are moving on the union, doing what they do best, being pragmatic and conciliatory on the surface, while doing all they can to maintain the union which is central to their politics and identity, and just as crucially, maintain the bastardised nature of the British state. It won’t work, because constitutional change has consequences for the political centre, but don’t write off the Tories genius at reform to postpone more fundamental reform. They have been at it a rather long time." [My emphasis]

For what it is worth, I think Cochrane is right on the Calman process and the current Scotland Bill. It stabilises nothing and settles nothing. An unprincipled trimmer's expedient rather than a settling and principled architecture for the future, mute but determining, the Scotland Bill's rank ad hockery is fundamentally driven by a policy of preserving the political centre and tinkering with the periphery. Gerry is absolutely right. It is the reflexive, transforming implications of federation for the British political centre which will make it intolerable and unworkable. A federal politics requires a federal mindset that is basically incompatible with the Westminster status quo and its cherished constitutional nostrums.  Either the old pieties of the "pragmatic", sovereign constitution must yield, or federalism cannot prosper. Contra Dalyell, there is nothing inevitable about Scottish independence, once devolution is conceded. However, if independence is achieved, I'm convinced that it will be owed in no small part to the refusal of British politics to countenance its own transformation.

The Campaign for Fiscal Responsibility ...

It must have been difficult picking the name. The Solemn League and Covenant (2) - This time its  for Mammon, I understand, was never really in the running. A pity. In the spirit of presentist modernity, they decided on the more workmanlike title of The Campaign for Fiscal Responsibility. Coordinated by Reform Scotland, the campaign insists that it is time for a new fiscal covenant for Scotland and the devolution of most taxation. Any "Independence" implied here should be read "with a small i". Eck's pulpy eminence can only be detected in dappled outline, lurking in the foliage. The responsibility and autonomy the Campaign have in mind is more in the spirit of the rugged liberty of a yeoman farmer and the self-reliance, self-subsistence of Lockean fantasy rather than denoting secessionist political tendencies per se. We'll return to this theme. First a bit of the detail. Opening with a declaration, sympathetic souls can subscribe their names. At the moment of writing, 146 signatures have been collected. Before turning to the queer coalition of opinion which is suggested by those who have already signed, its worth tarrying over the text itself ~

 THE DECLARATION

A Scottish Parliament with far greater responsibility for raising the money it spends would lead to better government in Scotland. It would make politicians more accountable for the financial decisions they take while giving them both the incentive and the fiscal tools necessary to achieve improved public services and faster economic growth - vital in the current economic circumstances. Further, it would help to foster a healthy relationship between Westminster and Holyrood.

All of the main Scottish and UK parties agree that the Scottish Parliament should have greater financial powers. The debate is now about which powers should be devolved and when.

Much has changed in the last year and the opportunity now exists to go further than the limited financial proposals outlined in the Calman Commission report.

Therefore, we are calling for the control of most current taxes to be devolved to the Scottish Parliament as soon as possible.

Implicit themes of the sickliness of dependency and doubts about what these rich fellows mean by better government might well evoke a certain justified discomfort in some of you. You may wonder if you've accidentally strayed into David Cameron's office in Downing Street, while George Osborne whets his razor and whispers sour fiscal nothings into the PM's shell-like. The list of signatories include some familiar faces from the Scots blogosphere - Gerry Hassan, Joan McAlpine - Tartan Tory historian and journalist Michael Fry, professors, economists, directors of various companies - and so on.  The Campaign has received plenty of press coverage, including a series of grim prophecies and Unionist declamations from that black-bearded, brass-throated Old Testament prophet Alan Cochrane ~ 

“The truth is that this is a huge issue on which there is no overall national agreement but Mr Salmond is using the CFR for his own separatist, political ends to claim that there is now a consensus of Scottish opinion in favour of full fiscal freedom. Those who say they support Mr Thomson’s organisation should be aware of this. Unless they are already.”

Like Nationalist opinion of a certain stripe, Cochrane is an inevitablist on independence. Concessions are largely conceded as a mistake, Tory collusion in whipping up such sops invariably the object of critical scorn. It is interesting, however, to see the Campaign in the context of Scottish Tory self-doubt and self-analysis.  At times, the "absence" - or more properly, muted voice - of the centre-right in Scotland is imagined as a sort of pathology among Scotland's many neurotic constitutional tendencies. Incompleteness in the political field can become conceived of as a sort of sickly repression, a fundamental denial of some natural tendency to balanced polity. I'm not sure that I find this sort of reasoning terrifically convincing - but there is no question that it is the way many folk conceive of and talk about our enfeebled and hobbling forces of Conservatism. Among his various cherished theorems, Pater Peat Worrier firmly believes that Scottish Tories or some offshoot of that species will shed their Unionism before the Labour Party. While this Campaign may not be toddling up that merry high road just yet, that it is mapping such terrain and forming a like-minded coalition along those lines seems to me undeniable. Its economic vocabulary and the Campaign's quiet inferences are expanded on in an acute piece by Iain MacWhirter, cautioning us that with full fiscal freedom, we may be given reason to fear most the very thing we desired. Here's the nub of his contention:

“But here’s the twist: the CFR supporters want fiscal federalism, not to get a better financial deal for Scotland, or get their hands on oil revenues, but to “end Scotland’s benefits culture”. Thinking Conservatives now realise fiscal autonomy is not an inherently socialist proposition but is actually quite Thatcherite, in that it implies a reduction in the size and scope of the state in Scotland. Reducing public spending to something nearer what is raised in tax would almost certainly slim down the public sector and would certainly enforce rigid fiscal discipline on the Scottish Parliament. No more giveaways on bridge tolls or prescription charges.”

MacWhirter must be right - up to a point - but it seems to me that the essential point of contestation at stake here is this. Many will, I suspect, be content enough to enter into this odd coalition, sustained by the sense that agreement on setting up new structures is and can be kept distinct from what we do, having secured those powers. Thus, while there may be those in the campaign who wish to devolve taxation powers to dismantle the public sector's gear and tackle and trim - there is no inevitability about this economic agenda pursuing full(ish) fiscal responsibilities for Scottish institutions. It is a skirmish for another today. We cooperate now, content to cross cudgels tomorrow. MacWhirter's point, as I understand him, concedes that Scotland's tax revenues will be lower than the amount presently spent through Westminster administered block grants. Full fiscal responsibility would, therefore, very necessarily result in a pairing back of public spending to some degree. 

That the animating reasoning behind this campaign differs substantially from the "social union" thematic of Calman is worth reflecting on. Although rubber-faced media jobgobbers like Jammy Paxman or Andrew Neil don't always realise what they're doing by appealing to brute equality arguments about spending across the United Kingdom - here meaning all  parts of the country should get the roughly the same amount - they are advancing a very particular theory about what fair spending looks like. Such arguments from equality (denoting "sameness") tend to ignore features like geographic dispersal and indeed the care which might inform other political movers and shakers - assessments of the relative needs of different parts of the country. MacWhirter's point is that such UK-wide "fairness by need" spending goes out the window, once taxation and the application of those revenues is undertaken separately. Just like idea that Unionist equality is the same level of spending displaces more nuanced assessments of what is an equitable distribution. Fiscal responsibility takes this one stage further. Instead of baking a single cake with the diffuse fiscal ingredients yielded up by taxation and distributing it slice by equal slice - suspicious eyes turn to the ingredients and even equal spending becomes problematic, if contributions of eggs and flour don't mirror the equality in distribution. On this logic, each to your own, earn what you spend takes on a deductive inevitability. It is the only taxation version which is not easily assailable on the critical reasoning employed at the very beginning.

None of this need be necessary however. Alternative notions of equality and fairness in spending can certainly be justified, on incompatible premises. However, an idea of justifying spending along the lines of differential need presses against the grain of contemporary metropolitan commentary. We're all used to hearing about we bloated Scotch slurpers, milk dribbling down our flabby chins and pooling in our folds, slimy slug-lips pressed to the wasted teat of English spending. If it is true, such a position could still cogently be defended, but crucially, not from the position of spend what you earn, if we also assume Scotland's tax intake is less than its spending. Interestingly, it may be that the Calmanesque notion of the social union may well furnish a hostile Scottish Labour Party with a cogent basis to criticise and oppose the  innovations of full fiscal responsibility while arguing for the continuing relevance and virtues of the Union. I am not saying I would agree with the argument - indeed as a supporter of independence and enhanced powers for Scottish institutions I'd reject it - but it is undeniably an articulated and reasonable position to adopt.

If any of that appeals to you, you can add your name and make your own solemn fiscal declaration here.