Just how solid is Scottish Labour's list vote?

Amid all the process and horse race stuff in this Holyrood election, there is one rather important question going conspicuously unasked: just how solid is Scottish Labour's list vote anyway? 

All the mischief has focused on the loyalty of folk likely to vote SNP in the constituencies. Will they stick with "Nicola Sturgeon for First Minister", or split their tickets, lending support to some other party for the regional calculation? This is all well and good. But the endless, circular conversation about the virtues and vices of #BothVotesSNP overlooks the fact that it is Kezia Dugdale's party whose fate will largely be determined by the d'Hondt calculations and the weight of support she can command on the regional ballot. 

And Scotland's electoral history being what it is, I wonder if Scottish Labour aren't more vulnerable to - potentially catastrophic - leakage in regional support than we've generally noticed. As countless commentators have pointed out, for years, in the wake of devolution, Labour didn't have a second vote strategy - they didn't need a second vote strategy - being comfortably returned to office on the back of the first-past-the-post constituencies and their reliable confrères, the Liberal Democrats.  

In this model, if Scottish Labour's electoral fortunes were to improve, you'd expect this to express itself in constituency gains rather than regional progress. But if the Holyrood map broadly follows Westminster's this election, the whole basis of Labour support will have been rearranged on a regional basis. In fairness, Scottish Labour are pushing their own #BothVotesLabour message. I'm sure old time Labour supporters who have stuck with the party will heed this and maintain a disciplined ticket. But the party aren't going great guns with the message. Which seems a decidedly strange thing, considering how critical a solid, loyal regional ballot is for the party's standing in the next parliament. 

Look at this historically. Take 2011. Alex Salmond's SNP secured 902,915 constituency ballots, and 876,421 in the regions. We shouldn't understand this as a straightforward 26,494 drop. The regional tally will include a decent whack of folk who voted for other parties in constituency contests. My favourite 2011 illustration of this dynamic was Ayr. A straightforward SNP vs Tory runoff, Conservative candidate John Scott secured 12,997 constituency votes, and a 1,113 vote majority over his SNP opponent. But in the region, the folk of Ayr gave the Tories only 8,539 votes, a drop of 4,458 on their constituency figures - and the SNP were the obvious beneficiaries of the Tory regional slump. Chic Brodie took 11,884 constituency votes, but Ayr's regional tally gave the Nats 14,377, an increase of 2,493 which put them 5,838 regional votes ahead of the Tories who'd routed their constituency campaign.  

So what about Labour? In 2011, Iain Gray took 630,461 constituency papers and just 523,559, losing over 100,000 votes between ballot papers. Like the SNP picture, we shouldn't oversimplify what was going on under Labour's grand totals. It almost certainly wasn't a tit for tat drop. Voters will have moved in, and out of, Labour's constituency and regional columns. But this was a discernibly squishier performance than the Nats in a closely contested campaign. In the event, Labour holds in constituencies in their traditional heartlands staved off some of the harsher consequences of this "voter promiscuity" in 2011. But if all does not go well for the party in its constituency battles in Glasgow and elsewhere - a gap of anything like 100,000 people is seriously going to hurt. And this, before we get into questions of differential turnout.

Part of me wonders if the electoral map in 2016 doesn't encourage an awkward dynamic for Kezia Dugdale, likely to encourage opponents of the SNP to lend her their constituency ballots, while distributing their regional votes elsewhere.  

Imagine you are a Labour voter of what we'll call the Alex Massie tradition. You voted No in 2014. You don't much care for the Nats. You live in a constituency where the Tories or the Lib Dems cannot prosper, where they're not even in the running. What do you do? Option One: damn the arithmetic and vote for what you believe in. If the local Tory or Liberal Democrat gains only a couple of thousand votes? Well, you salute their efforts. Alternatively, you might consider Option Two: use your constituency vote tactically vote for the Labour candidate most likely to frustrate the SNP. In Leith, say, you might support Lesley Hinds. In Glasgow, you might take a punt on Johann Lamont against Humza Yousaf. 

If Option Two seems attractive to you, however, there is a snowball's chance in hell that you're going to stick with the Labour party in the regions. You might also have a soft spot for one of the smaller parties who are only really in contention in the regional list. Perhaps you favour Brexit, and want to see a David Coburn, rolling around Holyrood, blaggarding the European Union. Perhaps Patrick Harvie seems like a sound character, and you want a decent Green delegation in Holyrood, advocating environmental concerns.  In local elections in areas in which they do well, the Greens are pretty transfer happy from a curious range of sources, including Scottish Tories. Perhaps you'd like RISE, modestly, to rise.

Given the parts of the country where Labour remains strongest against the SNP, I'd suggest the calculating anti-Nat and the floating, unpartisan, split-ticket voter is far more likely to cast a - perhaps doomed - constituency ballot for them rather than the vital, life-giving regional support Dugdale needs to survive. In fairness, recent polls suggest Labour's performance across the two ballots is pretty solid, at a (dismal) 18% to 19%.  A squishy list vote may be the least of her concerns. Time will tell.

Nicola's Assumption

Is the SNP campaign of 2015 the mirror image of the campaign Scottish Labour wanted - and thought it was running - in 2011? Unconvinced? Appalled at the apparent illogicality of the proposition? Understandable, on the evidence -- but please bear with me. 

Over the last few days, I have been struck by the unexpected similarities in the logic of the two campaigns. The one a calamity - the other a seeming success - but both effectively rely on mobilising similar feelings and logics in the electorate. Where Scottish Labour crashed and burned, the SNP look likely to net a healthy share of Westminster constituencies. Certainly more than the six we managed to secure in 2010. 

By 2011, Scottish Labour had admittedly shed two leaders and acquired a third. This was unedifying, messy, and characterised by its awkward marches and countermarches of policy. But the polls were initially friendly. In 2010, from Gordon Brown's bloodied and defensive crouch, the electorate had handed Labour a stonking victory. The Nationalists were confounded. Our ghastly "More Nats less Cuts" slogan had all the ferocity of a butterknife. The "local champions" riff -- a dud. The punters weren't listening, and backed Broon in the face of David Cameron, and his allies in the reactionary media. 

It was a cruel misdirection on our part, appealing to the lizard brained part of the People's Party, which told them that their current predicament in Holyrood was like an April shower -- soon melted, evanescent. The sturdy old oxen logic of tribalism, loyalty, and dogged adherence to the cause would soon revive. The people would repent of their error, and return. They would, as Margaret Curran said at the time, "come home to Labour", sheepishly, prodigal, but forgiven their trespasses. The old benedictions - interrupted but not forgotten. 

In my experience, the best way to lie to people is to tell them something which they desperately want to be true. And Scottish Labour seemed only too delighted not to collapse into any self-reflection, and to tell itself these gentle, convenient stories about the predicament which Jack McConnell had blundered into. 

After the narrow forty-seven to forty-six face off with the SNP in 2007, Iain Gray led his party into the Holyrood election on a platform of minimal difference. If the SNP wanted to freeze council tax? So do we (only slightly less so). The abolition of tuition fees? That too is here to stay. We're on students' side. Extra polis? A national boon. We won't reduce the numbers. But just think -- just think -- how much you would prefer to hear these policies from a Labour minister for finance, under a Labour first minister? 

Your deid grandpappy would be proud. His grave would have no occasion to birl. The natural order of things would be restored. Labour's policy distinctiveness in 2007 came down to an uncosted, illiberal, irresponsible plan to introduce mandatory prison sentences for everyone caught in possession of knives. But at its core -- it was an SNP manifesto, reframed in a Labour voice. This is not interesting in itself -- but it is telling about how Labour strategists thought about the electorate they thought they were appealing to. They recognised the allure of a number of "big ticket" items in the Scottish Government's first budget, but assumed that, given a contest, people would prefer hearing these policies from a Labour First Minister, cabinet, and Scottish executive. 

The assumption was that -- by borrowing the SNP's clothes, with an admixture of old Labour tribalism and loyalty -- the electors would come flocking back to the People's Party, remember the old hymns, and vote as Donald Dewar once intended. They judged folk wanted to back them. The unholy aberration of 2007 would be upended. The hated, temporary regime would be consigned to oblivion, and the old order would be restored. Difficult questions need not be asked. Fundamental change in the organisation was unnecessary. It was a quirk of the numbers and, as Euan McColm recalls in today's Scotland on Sunday, a few iffy, wet ballots from Arran. 

It's always tempting to compare Scottish Labour to the Bourbon monarchs of France, and their ideological hangers on and adherents. As the old snake Talleyrand once said, after their decapitation and dethronement, "they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing". There is something strangely of the west of Scotland, Labour municipal cooncillor or parliamentarian about the portly, self-assured and slightly glaikit figure of King Louis XVIII.

As is so often the case, it is our unquestioned assumptions which eventually get us crucified -- and the central assumption of  Gray's 2011 campaign proved faulty. There was the sandwich shop, of course, Gray's own limitations, and a shaky statistical basis for the knife policy -- but it was the assumed allegiance and the assumed preference for a Labour government in Holyrood which proved devastating. It turned out that the Scottish electorate of 2011 had learned to disregard their fealty to the ancien régime. They looked at Gray, and at Salmond and Sturgeon, and found they preferred the SNP incumbents they had only very modestly backed in 2007. Like his campaign, Gray's assumptions imploded.

Scottish Labour's 2007 manifesto was defined by their opponents. 2015's SNP manifesto could only have been published after Labour's 2015 proposals. It calculates, with caveats, that the SNP is now regarded as better placed, and better trusted, to realise and extend these aspirations than the UK Labour party. The 2015 SNP campaign effectively reverses and pursues Iain Gray's 2011 logic. 

Of course, the parallels are not exact. The context is different. One some very big ticket items - public spending, the constitution, and Trident - the SNP is seriously at odds with Labour. The referendum has also helped to create a different, broader constituency for Nicola's message and a constituency which is justly vexed with Labour, its performance in office before 2010, and its often cautious and uninspiring performance in opposition since. But at bottom, the First Minister is now exploiting a logic of minimal different with her main opponents in precisely the same way in which Iain Gray hoped, in 2011, to lead Scottish Labour back into Bute House.  

Only Thursday night and Friday morning will tell us whether Nicola's judgement -- that the Scottish people would now prefer to take this old social democratic medicine from her lips -- will be vindicated.  

Lost: Labour's love

I can understand those of you who feel a significant measure of cynicism about the Smith Commission process and its capacity to deliver meaningful new autonomy for Scottish institutions. I'm cultivating pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will. There are real gains to be secured here, but they will only be won by the deft application of political pressure, exploitation of our opponents' anxieties, and some cold-hearted lawyering.

It won't be an uplifting process. It can't really be participative. Given the tight timetable, the body is doomed to be dominated by the political parties, and in particular, by the aftermath of the Better Together coalition. That coalition is committed to delivering devosomething only, and nothing like the maximalist vision of autonomy articulated in the Scottish Government's submission to it.

The trick will be bridging that gap - to the advantage of the vision articulated by Nicola Sturgeon. The signs are not without promise on this score. The Vow stoked higher expectations, and seemed to suggest a commitment to more thoroughgoing change. The Tories have since characterised their proposals as a "floor not a ceiling." The Liberal Democrats have historically wanted to further than their allies, towards a federal Britain. Labour ... well, we'll come onto Labour in a minute.

These are green shoots, to be cultivated. But I can understand also why many folk approach that task without enthusiasm. The vernacular dominated many people's experiences of the referendum campaign. Folk got involved, felt emboldened. It was accessible, engaging, even exciting. Technical discussions about how Schedule 4 of the Scotland Act might be amended to extend Holyrood's social security authority while preserving Westminster's reserved prerogatives -- well, they light no bonfires in the soul.

The devolution debate can seem a colourless, lifeless thing by contrast to the lively days of late September. But the detail of what the Commission agrees will be of profound significance for how this country is governed, and what the Scottish Government and Parliament can and cannot do. If the case for independence was about achieving powers for a purpose, we cannot, credibly, be indifferent to an opportunity to redistribute those powers across the United Kingdom. If the case for self-government was rooted in a desire for greater self-government, we cannot treat an opportunity to achieve greater self-government like a sideshow. We may fail to secure what we want, but we cannot afford to be or to seem to be indifferent to the difficult questions which will animate Lord Smith and his fellow commissioners from the SNP, Labour, Green, Tory and Liberal Democrat parties.

If the wheeze is going to go anywhere, and achieve anything, it needs constructive suggestions from those of us who agitated in favour of independence before the 18th of September.  To that end, and with my academic hat on, today I sent this submission to Lord Smith, focussing on two areas which have already been highlighted on the blog: (a) securing greater autonomy for Holyrood in the field of social security and (b) giving permanent recognition in the Scotland Bill to the basic democratic principles, expressed in the referendum process, and accepted by the UK government.

This submission focuses more on the doable than the desirable, and offers a few detailed ideas about how these proposals could be realised in a new Scotland Bill. I caution you now. It isn't interesting, or uplifting. Ian Smart was complimentary earlier, in describing it as "very boring and very interesting at the same time." I hope so. It is practical-minded, narrow, focussed. There is no great rhetoric in it, or a smouldering first-principles case for maximum autonomy. The Scottish Government has already made that case effectively. Hopefully these more limited, and more achievable plans, can contribute usefully towards the discussion.

Heaven knows, the Commission could do with a helping hand. This weekend's developments shuffled another wild card into Lord Smith of Kelvin's deck. Behind the Brownite waffle, the "home rule" rhetoric and and the invocation of federalism, Labour are in a directionless mess. Nimble as ever, the party decided to submit their widely derided and watered-down proposals to the Commission entirely unamended last month. No updates, no restatement of more ambitious plans, zip.

While there are noises off, encouraging the party to embrace a more substantial platform of powers, it is far from clear who is calling the shots, or is to be persuaded, if Labour is to be coaxed into a bolder offer over the next thirty days. With the implosion of what might politely be described as Johann Lamont's "leadership" of the Scottish party, and the outbreak of internal factionalism, denials, turf wars and recrimination in Labour's ranks, it is far from clear who might be coordinating the party's response, or who is giving the party's two delegates to Smith - Iain Gray MSP and Gregg McClymont MP - their marching orders.  Nobody seems terrifically sure.

Labour hope to appoint a new leader by the 13th of December. The interregnum continues till then, under that hefty visionary and elder statesman, Anas Sarwar. On the current timetable, the Smith Commission hopes to cut a deal by the end of November: two weeks before the next chieftain takes over the stone bonnet and the flogging stool.

Perhaps the Eds hold the whip hand till then, as usual. Perhaps Sarwar. Perhaps any number of competing grey eminences, scheming for influence and power, behind the scenes, Will any of these people feel emboldened - or even entitled - to depart from or to elaborate on the party's lukewarm offer of last year? It is an open question. If the party looked vulnerable to stumbling blindly into a bear trap before Johann's ill-tempered departure, now without a leader, and without a plan, in their headless disarray, the pitch of the Labour Party's engagement with the Smith Commission is anybody's guess.

Will they retrench, stubborn and oppositional, clinging onto Westminster's welfare prerogatives for grim death? Will the nasty surprise of Lamont's departure focus minds on a more fundamental rethink? Can those of us advocating a more substantial level of autonomy be able to take advantage of their bewilderment, to railroad the reluctant?

There are everywhere snares and pitfalls -- and opportunities all too easily missed in the melee. I imagine it is difficult to focus on the detail of radical constitutional change when your footsoldiers are busy forming a circular firing squad. It is difficult to be strategic when your leadership decapitates itself, without even a credible puppet dauphin to plonk on the throne. Worse, in the very midst of a politically sensitive, time-pressured and internally fraught process. Every crisis is also an opportunity, as they say. But it remains to be seen which of Labour's warring tribes - the one keen on more devolution, the other deeply sceptical - owns that opportunity.

But Johann has lobbed a primed grenade - plop - straight into the septic tank. Take cover, comrades. The blowback won't be pretty.

You can read my whole Smith Commission submission here.

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.

Ed's energy-freeze: “something for nothing”?

"Something for nothing culture." (Eng.) Political Idiom. Origins: A rightist, typically Tory, critique of the "idle" or "undeserving poor".  Often invoked to garnish, or to impose more onerous conditions on the receipt of, social security rights and entitlements. Related terms: "scroungers", "slackers", "benefit dependency", "ripping off hard-working taxpayers".

"Something for nothing culture." (Scots) Political Idiom. Usage limited to a small, isolated community of Scottish politicians. Origins:  A Labour critique of universalism, with specific reference to "middle class welfare".  Invoked to justify the introduction of means-testing. Target: income taxpayers paying the higher, 40% rate, maybe.  Related terms: "millionaires with bus passes", "the investment banker's frozen council tax bill", "the spoilt wean of some rich bastard lawyer, idling around university studying something pretentious, which your frozen granny, living on pennies, is required to pay for."

These definitions in mind, what do you think Johann Lamont makes of Ed Miliband’s proposals to freeze energy prices for all domestic and corporate consumers, if elected? Her colleagues in Holyrood have all warmly endorsed it, demanding the Nats dance along with the tune. Anything less, Baillie and Gray argue, puts the plastic social democrats of the SNP government in hock to the greedy corporate purveyors of electricity. It's knockabout political stuff. What I am struggling to understand, however, is how this palpable enthusiasm for Ed's proposals fits with their Scottish leader's recent policy wheeze and hostility to universal measures.

You may remember, last year, the Scottish Labour leader railed against Scotland's “something for nothing culture”. Taking the slogan in itself, you might be under the impression that JoLa was inveighing against feckless folk who sook and sook away at the public purse, without “giving anything back”. But she wasn’t. The target of her critique was not the idling indigent, but wealthier Scots who were benefiting from universal benefits, their kids escaping tuition fees at Scottish universities, able to access prescriptions free at the point of need, whatever their disposable income, and the council tax charged on their homes, frozen.

Whatever you think of the merits and demerits of these policies, whatever costs you might think they impose on the public purse, only the wrongheaded would imagine – or argue – that taxpayers are getting “something for nothing”, having 40% income tax levied on earnings over £32,011 a year. By all means, let’s have progressive taxation, Johann, but the idea that these taxpayers are all mooching idlers is just bizarre, and without any discernible connection to your petty sloganising. As Salmond said in his speech yesterday, at the very least, these local government funding, education and prescription policies represent "something for something".

But let's take you at your word, and assume you're an intellectually honest, consistent soul. You oppose all measures, when we have a limited pot of public money to spend, where universalism trumps more focussed redistribution according to need. That's an interesting argument. So how the devil can you do anything but condemn Miliband's energy proposals as anything but middle class - and worse - big corporate welfare?

Miliband’s proposal will freeze energy bills by cannibalising the profits of energy companies, and consequently, decrease the UK exchequer's tax-take from those profits via corporation tax. Ed has not sought to finesse his proposal, distinguishing between the rich and the poor, businesses large and small.  All energy consumers, corporate or consumer, loaded or impoverished, will benefit from the scheme your leader has proposed.

Through a decrease in general taxation, we'll all collectively, indirectly, subsidise the energy glut of the richest individuals and corporations, while reducing the pot of money available to alleviate other social ills. And in the process, we'll do little to demonstrate the importance of government, or cultivate the critical social democratic values of universality and solidarity. Bracket any questions about the scheme's practicality. Ideologically, Johann, for you, isn't this just the sort of "something for nothing" scheme, privileging the privileged while reducing the money for targeted aid to the poorest, which you were so recently railing against? Lest you've forgotten, let me remind you. You said:

"Well, I have to ask, what is progressive about a banker on more than 100,000 a year benefiting more than a customer on average incomes from the council tax freeze? What is progressive about a chief executive on more than 100,000 a year not paying for his prescriptions, while a pensioner needing care has their care help cut? What is progressive about judges and lawyers earning more than 100,000 a year, not paying tuition fees for their child to follow in their footsteps at university, while one in four unemployed young people in Scotland can't get a job or a place at college?" 

Well, I have to ask you, what is progressive about bankers and chief executives and lawyers on more than £100,000 a year, living in the big hooses and leaving the lamps burning late into the night, benefiting more than customers on average incomes from Ed's energy freeze? What is progressive about the wealthy laird ratcheting up the heating in his castle, while the struggling Dunfermline granny still fears to ignite the second bar of the fire in her flat, despite the winter chill, as her care-budget is threatened as UK taxation falls?

What is progressive, in your terms, about a Labour government subsidising the energy costs of the massive corporate headquarters of companies recording stonking profits - computer screens glowing, lights shining out - while our small-town businesses continue to struggle in a difficult economy, and for whom this freeze will be of far more marginal financial benefit?

Or does your dismal vision of our "something for nothing country" end at Gretna?

Lamont's tale of sound and fury

Seeing as it is the SNP conference weekend, a modest partisan gloat.  Since taking over the good ship Scottish Labour after Iain Gray's iceberg captaincy of 2011, Johann Lamont has made good use of her petted lip. Teacherly, scornful, Lamont has used her two year headship to ravage the SNP's record and motives, striving to puncture the credibility of key figures in the Scottish Government by liberally scattering barbed allegations of incompetence and dishonesty like caltrops. Such is the business of opposition.

Her colleagues have also been worrying away at another partisan meme: "Scotland on pause". Look at these dotty, constitutionally-obsessed Nats, neglecting the governance of the nation to pursue their weird, abstract pipe-dream of independence. We're the bread and butter army. Insert quotidian but touching tale of struggling ordinary folk here. Vote Labour.   

So how's that story going? If Lamont's master strategy was paying off, six years into the Scottish Nationalist administration, we'd expect to find a disgruntled public, still on balance against independence, grousing about how the SNP are getting on with their second term.  After all, it is almost inevitable that the magic fades. That folk become restless and fancy an alternative. But instead? According to the latest Ipsos-MORI poll, canvassed over the middle of September, a thumping majority of folk are still satisfied with how the Maximum Eck and his colleagues are faring in Holyrood.

Entertainingly, it appears that Lamont cannot even persuade her own voters that "Scotland is on pause" and that Eck is seriously bungling his second tour of duty.  Canvassing those who voted Labour in the constituencies in the 2011 Holyrood election - a head on smash with the SNP - the pollster found that a majority of Johann's supporters are satisfied too.

If you can't even persuade your sympathisers and fellow-travellers to share your political diagnosis, you're in a sorry way. As much fun as Holyrood commentators have, chortling over Johann's occasionally droll bruisings of Salmond at First Minister's Questions, strutting and fretting her hour upon the stage, out in the country, it remains a tale full of sound and fury - signifying nothing.

On Labour's "cybernat" problem...

Living in England as I do, and consorting with opinionated souls with decent conceits of themselves, being an “out” Scottish nationalist isn’t always terrifically easy. On hearing of my political convictions via a crony during dinner, one left-leaning Oxford don who shall remain nameless cried “Oh God no! Really?” before scoffingly explaining to me that Scottish independence was “a ludicrous little notion” I would do well to abandon. Decades of political argument and development summed up in that witty and encompassing saw, he toddled off to enjoy his second dessert, quite satisfied with his summary. Although drink had been taken, this fellow is not a general boor, and is I’m sure generally committed to promoting a questioning, thoughtful analysis of the world we live in.

Fascinating, then, that he felt able to make such a glib Nationalist exception. I note this in no spirit of rancour or slight. I’m far more interested about what it might tell us about the reflexive (unthinking but not untheoretical) images and (mis)understandings of Scottish nationalism and nationalists in parts of these islands. It’d be a mistake – an under-interpretation – to understand his dismissive posture as subjective condescension on the don’s part.

Socially, historically, it’s always interesting to see whose views can be offhandedly dismissed, whose political convictions can safely and concisely be written-off as crankish, loopy, atavistic or unserious. (In Scotland, by the by, I suspect the folk most familiar with this sort of flippancy will be your average Tory). For a version of it, all one need do is fire up Democracy Live during a contentious Scottish Questions day in Westminster. You encounter it in England. Despite the SNP being in government, and heedless to the party’s re-election by a large margin, you can still experience it in parts of (particularly bourgeois) Scotland. Whether understood as a moonshine radicals or atavistic clowns clinging to the withered, taloned hand of nationalist folly, the pathologised image of the Nat continues to enjoying a lively if crudely conceived conceptual life.

Unbidden, this little Oxfordian vignette came to mind last week, as I sat reading Lord George Robertson in the Scottish Review. The Labour peer and former MP takes as his subject the frumious “cybernats”. Having relayed his sufferings at the hands of perfidious Nats during the 1990s, he relates how an article he had written was received by the hoaching mass of commenters who adorn the Scotsman website. These “cybernats”, Robertson temperately defines as:

“... demented, screwed-up untypical bigots sitting in the middle of the night abusing their opponents but they do show a sordid underbelly to the debate that good people in all parties and none should condemn and revile”.

Yesterday, of this article Jim Murphy tweeted:

"A stunning insight into the world of SNP supporters online. Their abuse is endless."

One cannot help but be struck by the curious keenness various Labour politicians have on this relatively novel concept. Remember, if you can, that just prior to Iain Gray’s demission from office as leader of his party, the concept so excited him that he committed a substantial section of his valedictory address to it, following up with a Scotsman column, arguing that he was:

"... increasingly worried about it undermining the decency of the country I love, damaging the freedoms its citizens enjoy, and poisoning the vital debate we now face on the future of that country."

Such histrionics wildly exaggerate the influence, impact and - frankly - the public exposure of your average soul, bent on denouncing the "great Unionist conspiracy" and its creatures. While Labour politicians may entertain clear conceptions of the Cybernat, and strive to promote them, the concept is not, I fancy, common currency with the public at large. What strikes me as interesting, however, is why the idea of the cybernat seems to resonate so attractively with Scottish Labour politicians? What function does the concept serve? It would be a misunderstanding, I think, to see their pushing of the figure of the cybernat as purely an attempt to gain partisan advantage, conscious, knowing and manipulative. There will be a bit of that, certainly.

However, the ‘cybernat’ isn’t a given. He (and it is almost always a he) has to be created, and has a very limited conceptual history. I’m not arguing that there aren’t folk online slagging off Lord Robertson as an “unelected hypocrite”, but we have to ask ourselves, at what point does an abusive individual become generalised, no longer merely a git with a keyboard, but suddenly one of many, an instance of a category we are invited to understand homogeneously, as representative of "the world(!)" of SNP supporters online? The answer seems to be some time around 2008. A search on LexisNexis’ archive suggests that the word ‘cybernat’ was first seen in newsprint in Scotland on the 10th of February 2008, in the Sunday Herald letters pages, attributed to our old chum, Lord George Foulkes. As of yesterday, the term generates 108 articles. Of the total, the Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday are by far the most prolific users, constituting a third of instances (36), as compared to the Herald and Sunday Herald’s more modest count of 20.

Far more than strategy, the character of the "Cybernat" is a way of hanging on – increasingly desperately – to the "pathologised" figure of the Scottish nationalist. It is a concept to be peddled on and for the Scottish market, and if the mainstream SNP didn’t exist, the Cybernat would not have to be invented.  Even the name implies a merely technological development – a shift of scene. Remove his online platform and the Cybernat becomes a plain old Nat.  Again, none of this is to deny that there is plenty of online correspondence informed by vitriolic feelings, Quisling rhetoric, unyielding partisanship, a personally indicting, indelicately expressed approach to political discourse with those with whom you might disagree. Fire up any popular news site or blog in any part of the world, and you encounter a birling tempest of ordure.

The crucial thing, however, is that figure of ‘the cybernat’ has no interest or utility, conceived as individual and personal. For the Labour politician, that utility is curiously self-involved. The "cybernat" none-too-subtly reassures the existentially wracked Scottish Labour figure that the Nats remain, in the fundaments, loopy as the rings of Saturn, their civic nationalist masks concealing their essential, suspected, gut-rending hatred of the Other. Behind the prose of Robertson and Gray, you can almost feel the mad zeal of the paranoid detective, who, having discovered some marks which confirm a cherished thesis about whodunnit, wildly rejoices to find his hunches confirmed: "I knew it! I knew it!"

Although keen to promote the idea that "Cybernats" are a problem for the SNP, it strikes me insofar as it helps sustain a delusional political identity that pathologises their Nationalist opponents, the Cybernat represents far more of a problem for the Labour Party.  No longer able to imagine itself as the crucible of Scottish sentiment, the once and future right ruling political outfit enjoying especial access to the true public will and feeling, their "Cybernat" fetish feeds Labour addiction to self-flattering suspicions, which cannot see the Nats as anything but perfidious usurpers and secret racists, who have illicitly snatched the crown.

"And great was Labour's Lamontation..."

Rubbernecking on the internal politics of one's political opponents is rarely appreciated.  However, since the Sunday Herald saw fit only to report Labour's leadership election on the fourth page of today's issue, I dare say Johann might welcome the attention, from whatever source. As you'll certainly have heard, Lamont saw off Ken Macintosh, while Tom Harris' hopes of being anointed LOLOTSP ("Leader of Labour outside the Scottish Parliament") were comprehensively disappointed. 

So at last, it is farewell to Iain Gray, the Snark, LOLITSP.  Farewell also, to Labour's suspended animation since May's election? Mibbes aye and mibbes naw.  After the announcement of a Lamont victory at noon yesterday, much muttered was the fact that she appeared to have attracted only 12% of Labour members' votes. Quite reasonably, some folk wondered where the devil the other 88% had disappeared to.  Welcome to Labour's electoral college, made up of three sections. The first, parliamentarians, includes MPs, MSPs and MEPs.  The second is the ordinary membership of the Labour Party, while the third are votes cast by affiliates, including members of affiliated trade unions and socialist societies. Despite the numerical imbalances between them, all three groupings are of equal weight when it comes to awarding the leadership.

While not quite as wonderfully arcane as the process the Venetians used to elect their Doge, for those of us more familiar with one-member-one-vote leadership elections, Labour's approach can seem a bit esoteric. Others are more critical. In today's Scotland on Sunday, Kenny Farquharson describes it as a "flawed, antediluvian antique that needs to be unceremoniously ditched". Whatever its merits or demerits, the process and its results are all rather straightforward if sympathetically presented.  To start us off, three tables showing the percentage of their total support which each candidate attracted from the three voting sections - and where Johann's winning votes came from.

 

And in second place, Ken Macintosh...

 

And bringing up the rear, poor Tom Harris...

For clarity and interest's sake, it is also worth separately pulling out how each of the sections cast their votes.  For example, you'll see that the 12% support from the membership being bandied about with respect to Johann is both true and a truly misleading statistic, seen out of context. While members did prefer Macintosh and Lamont's victory was substantially down to affiliate votes and a more modest lead amongst parliamentarians, Lamont attracted around 37% of the membership vote, compared to Ken's 53%.

 

 

In addition to the leadership election, Labour was also voting on a new deputy, with my tender tyro MP, Anas Sarwar, winning out over Ian Davidon MP and Lewis Macdonald MSP with 51.10% of the vote across the college.  Here's where Anas' found his support in the party. You'll notice, in stark contrast with Johann, that Sarwar only managed to attract a modest percentage of affiliates' ballots, while very comprehensively carrying both Labour's parliamentary delegations, and ordinary members.

And amongst the three sections of the college, support for the three candidates for deputy divided as follows...

 

Source.