Dot Scot is the campaign to get Scotland its own domain name on the internet. It shouldn't really be too difficult, with the proliferation of .nets and .orgs.
Catalonia already has its own, which is great for business, culture and tourism. It's a big world wide web out there and the more distinctive you are the better. It's also a great way of uniting the Scottish diaspora, linking a world wide family with affinity to the country.
If the campaign is successful then this site's url could be www.golassiego.scot
That would be a particular boon to me as the .com version of golassiego has been snapped up by an Irish tourism initiative. (the site's current url is www.joanmcalpine.com)
To celebrate St Andrew's Day the campaign Dot Scot Registry has launched a new website to track support. The site also answers the most frequently asked questions about '.scot'.
The Scottish parliament debate on the Tartan Tax was dispiriting to watch. Far from seeking clarification in the interests of the people they serve, the opposition parties all indulged in point scoring about an issue they didn't actually care about. Far from "allowing the Scottish tax powers to lapse", it seems that the SNP in 2007 inherited a system which was inoperable, at least according to what HMRC told them at the time. I think the word used was "mothballed". But rather than address this rather important new fact, the opposition ploughed on with pre-prepared spontaneous hysteria.
It is pretty obvious from John Swinney's statement that there was a long and protracted row between his officials and those at HMRC over the latter's demands that the Scottish government should pay for a portion of the upgrade of the tax authority's IT systems. The convention normally is that when a Whitehall department makes a change that affects devolved administrations, it is the Whitehall department who pays for it. There are important issues here. To concede to HMRC demands would have set a dangerous precedent. For example can HMRC think-of-a-number any time they like in relation to Scotland? What will they charge to implement Calman, which is based on income tax collected in Scotland (not, of course the important stuff like corporation tax, whisky and oil revenue). So the London Treasury continues to rob us blind and then charge us whatever they like. If Scotland moved to full economic powers with taxes still collected by HMRC, would they hold us over a barrel again? The Revenue is clunky, confused and tangled - and will fight to control every twisted tentacle of its operation.
Perhaps the opposition parties believe you do business by gifting your opponent a gun to hold to your head. After all, that's how Labour and Liberal Democrat gave us a parliament building which over-ran its original cost by several hundred million. The contract was open ended. Same goes for the Edinburgh trams, another Labour/ Lib Dem pet project. Nor did Labour, Liberal Democrat and Tory have any problem handing public contracts to PFI consortiums who will charge us from here to eternity for schools and hospitals. Good Housekeeping is not their strong point.
The other completely duplicitous aspect of opposition argument today was the accusation that Swinney had somehow conspired to strip the parliament of its miniscule tax power and then stage a cover-up. What on earth would the nationalists have to gain from this? What could their motive possibly be? As the opposition well know there was no ulterior motive. Going public would have been a winner for the SNP politically. But Swinney is not in the business of picking fights and breaching confidential negotiations for political gain. Even when the row culminated in a £7m demand by London this year, Swinney felt it would have been discourteous to speak out on the disagreement, clearly hoping it could be resolved. This says a lot about the man and how he operates. He earned the nickname Honest John for a reason. It's something his opponents today could learn from. Calling him a liar is totally unacceptable and will be seen as such. Swinney's budget statement contained a formal phrase about the SVR. So did the budget statements of Gordon Brown, Alastair Darling and the Comprehensive Spending Review of George Osborne. All mentioned the tartan tax as an option. If Swinney was "lying" so were they, as they too knew about the HMRC position. They were all telling the truth because the tax power still exists, it has not lapsed. London is refusing us the machinery to exercise that power (if we wanted, which we don't).
The Scottish Secretary Michael Moore proved himself a far less honourable man than Swinney when he delibrately triggered this row with his "open letter". Ostensibly, his job is to represent Scotland in Westminster - something he has done singularly badly as he is about to present a Scotland Bill that will cut our budget by another £900m a year. But this pretendy part of the job is a figleaf anyway. Moore's raison d'etre is to undermine the Scottish government at every turn, no matter the level of duplicity involved. Moore is trying to distract attention from the cost and flaws of Calman. On several occasions Tavish Scott has tried to spin tartan tax row into an attack on fiscal autonomy eg "the SNP, which bangs on about giving more powers to this parliament, give away the one it already has etc etc..." Given that fiscal autonomy is about taking full control of the economic levers in a way that benefits the people of Scotland, there is no comparison. The tartan tax is so small, that some estimate the cost of implementing it would cancel out any money it raised.
This week the Liberal Democrats had an even more pressing embarrassment than Calman to cope with - the student demonstrations against tuition fees in England. Tavish Scott fulminated away about SVR as students in London were prevented by massed police lines from demonstrating outside the Liberal Democrat head quarters. (Didn't hear much LibDem talk of civil liberties then, eh?)
This was one occasion to be pleased that the BBC national news led with an England-only issue. Nick Clegg's hypocrisy was the big UK story of the day. They even demonstrated on his home turf of Sheffield where at the General Election, students had queued outside polling stations for hours to back him. Then came Reporting Scotland whose viewers must have wondered what on earth was going on in their own parliament. All this sound and fury about nothing more significant than an obsolete, tax...which Labour and The Tories never wanted the Scots to have in the first place.
Any viewer who persevered may have been more struck by Swinney's edited highlight - he didn't want to hand £7m of Scotland's money to HMRC, an organisation whose incompetence had lead to tens of thousands of people paying the wrong amounts of tax. Sounds reasonable to me...and millions of others I imagine.
For a detailed narrative on how the tartan tax story has been distorted day-to-day please go to Moridura
Alan Trench at Devolution Matters has just filed an excellent explanation about how The Treasury deals with devolved governments inadequately. Trench is an academic and politically non aligned. He is incredibly knowledgable about the detail of how government works and this piece is invaluable.
I have a piece in The Guardian today responding to the Scottish budget statement by John Swinney. It was originally commissioned as a post for Comment is Free, but they then promoted it to the main paper. Bear in mind it is written for a readership unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of devolved politics...but I was pleased that Libby Brooks, the paper's deputy comment editor, tweeted it as Scotland showing what a progressive budget could look like.
There is a more detailed look at the budget, explaining the agreement Swinney has reached with local authorities, at Newsnet Scotland. It also usefully details some percentage cuts across various departments. On a related topic, Peter Curran at Moridura looks at how the budget was explained on television and asks pertinent questions about interviewing techniques.
John Swinney's assertion that Scotland must get full fiscal powers was the most important part of his statement for me. The finance secretary made a good a fist of what he got, but we're worth more than that. Anyway here is the McAlpine Budget, as outlined in a Scotsman column published on Wednesday morning before the speech to parliament. I think Mr Swinney's job is safe, but the point is to illustrate how flexible and creative we could be with real economic power. Let's face it, Britain is bankrupt. What do we have to lose? It would be great if others could suggest alternative budgets of their own for an independent Scotland. Five policies that would make things better.
There’s little point in a pocket money parliament when the pocket money runs out. That line got resounding cheers for Alex Salmond at the SNP conference. But for John Swinney, who must today eke out the sweeties from that reduced allowance, those words must be as bittersweet as a bag of soor plooms.
The cabinet secretary for finance is a meticulous man, and we have already had some hints as to how he will manage the hand-out from Big Daddy down south. Further speculation is pointless, as you will know the details some time today.
If Scotland is treated as a child under the current arrangements, it’s more like the successful teen star whose earnings are appropriated by controlling parents “for the good of the family”. The Government Expenditure and Revenues Statistics showed national income from Scottish sources in 2008-9 (the latest figures available) exceeded all state spending here by £1.3bn. That is a budget surplus of 0.9% of GDP (including contributions to bailing out the banks.
In order to cover up their embarrassment, the most recent unionist tack focuses on Scotland being profligate under devolution. We are Britney Speirs or Michael Jackson, too flaky to manage our own considerable wealth. It’s an absurd analogy designed to mask exploitation – and besides, John Swinney is no Britney Spiers.
In a Scotland with economic powers – independence or full fiscal responsibility – Swinney’s budget would look completely different. It’s an interesting exercise to imagine how a Scottish Chancellor of the Exchequer might operate in the grown up world.
My list is entirely personal, I couldn’t second guess Mr Swinney. However you have to start with those oil revenues, which give a Scottish chancellor more money to play with. They account for a fifth of all UK corporation tax - £6.4 billion in 2009 according to the industry body UK Oil and Gas. This only covers production, the supply chain is estimated to raise another £5-6 billion.
The Scottish government’s stated intention is to build up an oil fund like that of Norway, which has reached $518 billion. But we could immediately use oil revenue to move our economy away from the distorted UK model built on City of London speculation, property and services. We must develop renewables, skilled manufacturing, engineering, life sciences and digital industries. We need to encourage entreprenuership, and create a friendly environment for the small and medium sized enterprises that account for most private sector employment.
Diverting some oil revenue towards building an infrastructure for renewables would be an important first step – no hanging around for the UK Green Investment Bank. We wouldn’t have the problem of Scotland’s share of the fossil fuel levy being chopped off our block grant. Indeed we could design a completely different model of transferring cash from carbon fuels to green energy.
Given Scotland’s ambitious targets for renewable electricity generation, it’s not unreasonable that an Edinburgh chancellor would feel able to reduce the cost of petrol at the pump. We have some of the highest prices in the world. It affects all business, not just in rural areas. So let’s use fuel duty, vehicle excise duty and air passenger duty to address any logistical problems we face because of geography.
Specific industries could benefit from a chancellor whose first loyalty is to Scotland. Take the digital industries – everything from mobile phone apps to computer games. Digital Inspirations, a report for Scottish Enterprise 18 months ago, found the sector employed 42,000 in Scotland and generated £3.16 bill. It predicted this could double by 2012 with the right support. Scotland is strong on creativity, but weaker on building commercial value. Digital Inspirations suggested tax breaks or the creation of an industry hub in Dundee. The coalition government in Westminster refused tax breaks and announced a gamers’ hub in London. That’s the sort of thing a Scottish chancellor could fix.
Of course all industries depend on digital infrastructure. The Royal Society of Edinburgh recently pointed out that Scotland was falling behind in high speed broadband – an area that is reserved to London. Westminster shows little inclination to act, other than offering a limited pilot scheme in The Highlands. The RSE urged the Scottish government to fill the gap but admitted the £100m cost could not be met by the block grant. A Scottish chancellor with priorities closer to home, would not struggle to find the funds to upgrade broadband. What about a text tax to pay for it? It would please the parents of teenagers. This might sound like a flippant suggestion, and it is. But the substantive point is, that with imagination and flexibility, any government can use the tax system to transfer money to where it will bring most benefit.
A Scotland in surplus could improve all infrastructure more easily if it had access to that surplus. Full fiscal autonomy would also give us the ability to borrow to invest – but not the crazy forfeiting of our future to the banks, which was the model of the Public Finance Initiative. We might choose to emulate the Catalans, who recently issued a government bond worth 1000 euro and offering an interest rate of 4.75%. Ordinary citizens snapped up 1000 million euros worth in the first week of sale.
It’s not just other governments that a Holyrood chancellor might look to for ideas. The Scottish Green Party turned to the land reform campaigner Andy Wightman to develop an alternative to council tax and business rates. Wightman’s proposal, the Land Value Tax, proposes an annual valuation on unimproved land so property owners would not be penalised for improving their home. The idea is to redistribute the 80-90% gains enjoyed by property speculators - and stop the kind of craziness that cause the crash. It’s untried and new, but an example of the kind of imaginative proposal we could consider. One recent report said LVT could subsidise affordable housing.
The need for minimum alcohol prices would no longer exist with a Scottish exchequer – we could raise the price of drink through duty without waiting for the UK. We could emulate the Danish experiment in taxing junk food at higher rates, then invest the revenue in free nutritious school meals. It would save the NHS by reducing illnesses such as diabetes.
Myriad options come with full economic power. These are just a few. Others might have better ideas. The important thing is that they are tailored to Scotland’s needs. It beats squabbling over the bag of sweeties.
Some of the most exciting things happening in Scotland are happening online. That's what I took from the Political Innovation Camp today at The School of Infomatics in Edinburgh. I already knew one of the main speakers, Pat Kane rather well. It was great to put faces to some bloggers I hadn't met in person, such as James MacKenzie of Better Nation, Peter Curran of Moridura, David Farrer from Freedom in Whisky and of course the redoubtable Caron of Carons Musings. Also caught up with an old colleague from the Herald, David Milne, who is now heading STV's hyperlocal service. It was heartening to meet the young women behind mypolice.org, a tool that allows the public to give their feedback to the force in their own area.
I met some new people who impressed me greatly, such as Peter Geoghegan, an Irish writer living in Scotland who edits Political Insight and another Irishman, Mick Fealty of Slugger O'Toole, the Northern Irish politics, community and culture blog who organised the event along with Paul Evans. Slugger O'Toole is a blog that manages to engages all sides of the debate in Northern Ireland, which is quite an achievement - and something we have not managed to replicate in Scotland to date. Much of the discussion was about this - whether we could have a Scottish hashtag that would link disparate online content - like a permanent scotlandspeaks, the twitter campaign that tried to get Scotland's voice heard during the last general election. At the PI Camp, there was a lot of enthusiasm for establishing so-called "aggregated sites" . It seems to me that this desire to create online communities is already happening naturally. Like minded bloggers are grouping together on aggregated sites such Bella Caledonia and Better Nation. Two sites, Scottish Review and newsnetscotland take this further and strive to create online sites that hope to compete with the mainstream. Kenneth Roy at Scottish Review has broken stories. Or these sites highlight news overlooked elsewhere - such as newsnet's campaign on the anti Scottish episode of Any Questions. A couple of weeks later I was invited on the Newsweek on Radio Scotland to discuss the rise of anti-Scottish outbursts.
As I pointed out in the PI Camp plenary session, many bloggers in Scotland have gone online in frustration at the mainstream media failure to engage positively with the independence debate. At least a third of Scots favour full independence and more than half, according to polls, think real economic power for the Holyrood will help Scotland out of recession. Despite this, and the Campaign for Fiscal Responsibility attracting many high profile names, our public discourse continues to frame the debate in UK terms, seldom challenging the block grant system or exploring alternatives.
Bloggers challenge this manufactured consensus. But as a mainstream journalist who now blogs as well, I worry that online activists only reach others with similar views. Established broadcast and print media offer entertainment, fashion, sport, business, breaking news that attracts a wide spectrum of people including, crucially, voters who have yet to make up their minds. And while many of my independista facebook friends would claim that the MSM is completely without merit, it is material generated by these newspapers and broadcasters that they share and comment on. Often this is original material that you need professional journalists to create. The Scotsman, for example, has devoted a lot of resource to exposing the tram debacle in Edinburgh. Newsnight Scotland was the first outlet to think of interviewing Professor Joe Stiglitz and asking specifically about oil in a Scottish context. And Newsweek, the Radio Scotland Saturday morning show, ran a long interview with Professor Andy Hughes Hallett explaining how Scotland was subsiding England. The reason we know about Stephen Purcell et al, and the scandal about Strathclyde Partnership for Transport, is because my previous paper, The Sunday Times Scotland, put a lot of resources into exposing Labour clientism in greater Glasgow.
Now, of course, the Sunday Times Scotland has been effectively closed down. Other newspapers struggle to keep afloat. Circulations continue to shrink with alarming speed. Investigative journalism, in particular, requires resources. Scotland does not have an philanthropic organisation such as the American propublica which funds public interest reporting. When activists complain about newspapers simply "reprinting political press releases", as can happen, it is often a matter of resources as much as prejudice. A hard pressed reporter with an FOI handed to him on a plate, especially if it's "exclusive" and makes for a strong headline, will likely take it to his or her newsdesk. Real, self generated stories take much longer. They require you to speak to lots of people in the first place, really get to know the subject and spend hours on research. They might also require you to ditch the story given to you by a political contact when you realise that the facts just don't stack up...
Bloggers unhappy with the perceived bias of the mainstream media shouldn't crow too loudly about the troubles of print though. We desperately need more quality public discourse in this country. Can we afford to lose the space we do have? Where are the online spaces that attract Scots who are not necessarily political junkies? Some of the self described young geeks I spoke to at the PI camp yesterday confessed they got a lot of their news from the BBC website and The Guardian - but they also complained that they couldn't get coverage for their own digital projects in the shrinking Scottish media...a vicious circle. If we get more news from UK wide sources, do we risk becoming Scotlandshire, North UKania...?
I don't think this will happen, phew! I left the PI Camp today feeling pretty optimistic about the future of blogging and political social media in Scotland. Ideally the rise of aggregated sites would be backed by investment to allow them to break more original stories and attract readers from outwith the politically consumed classes - Huffington Post is a good model. It set out to create an online liberal voice for the US but used entertainment to help drive traffic. Even without this largesse, I predict the blogosphere in Scotland will increase its influence, a view shared by the majority of those at yesterday's event. The thing about all media, old and new, is that it is interdependent. Currently, the agenda of newspapers feeds into radio and television. If the circulation of newspapers continues to decline, bloggers and online aggregated sites will become more powerful influencers. The evidence? A man from the BBC checking out the PI Camp, keen to meet as many bloggers as possible. I already get invited onto the radio occasionally as a result of Go Lassie Go. Social media helps too. The simple act of sharing a story creates a buzz that cannot be ignored. Content producers will take note.
At the PI Camp, Peter Geoghegan was very informative on how independent online commentary already shapes the agenda in Ireland, where economists have taken to the blogosphere to explain the financial crisis. In Scotland, we have a good recent example of blogpower re the Dimbleby debacle. The Question Time from Glasgow which excluded Scottish discussions caused immediate anger that was articulated first through the blogosphere by myself, Gerry Hassan, Scot Goes Pop and Alex Massie among others. I predict that such incidents will become more common. The traditional media are beginning to understand the power of the blogosphere, and cannot ignore what it is telling them.The rise of aggregated sites will accelerate this. If such sites could attract enough investment to fund some original journalism...well who knows where it might go...
The non-aligned Northern Irish blog Slugger O'Toole is inviting Scottish bloggers, political activists and ‘hacktivists’ to a conference on social media and politics at Edinburgh University’s ‘School of Informatics’ on Saturday 13th November – 10-4pm. It is for all political persuasions and none, and the organisers are particularly keen to get people along who want to find out more about social media and campaigning.
The impact that Twitter, Facebook, and blogs will have on Scottish politics will be explored in a series of workshops. And best of all it's FREE to attend thanks to the backing of NESTA and Channel Four.
Slugger is organising the event in association with Left Foot Forward, Lib Dem Voice and The Daily Telegraph. It's designed to help politicians and social media experts understand how politics is likely to change in the face of new media developments.
Organiser Paul Evans of Slugger O’Toole said:
“This event is for anyone who has ever asked themselves “why is politics still done like this?” No matter what your allegiance is, there are lots of innovations that we can all welcome and support that could restore trust in politics and politicians – as long as politicians understand how they can work.This event is for people who are active in politics as much as it is for social media activists. We’ve got innovators from all over the UK who have posted ideas that they’d like to bring to Edinburgh for this event. But it is an ‘unconference’ event – we don’t have many fixed speakers or agenda items – at our conferences, the attendees shape the event.” [seehttp://politicalinnovation.uservoice.com/forums/84565-help-us-create-an-agenda-for-edinburgh-political-i]
That means you suggest ideas and if enough people are interested, it's a goer. I've asked to discuss whether bloggers can ever compensate for the failure of the mainstream Scottish media to positively engage with ideas around independence.The event will include discussions between politicians, bloggers and journalists about the future of democracy in a networked age.
For more information on this event please call Paul Evans (07973 714206) or Mick Fealty (07984 150399) or email [email protected] – tickets are free of charge and can be booked using the website at http://www.politicalinnovation.org/events
There will be a few raised eyebrows at the news that the campaign photographer used by UK Prime Minister David Cameron is to join the civil servants' payroll. At times of austerity should the state pay for more intimate-yet-flattering pics of Dave and his lovely family? (The government insist the photographer will work across all Whitehall departments).
My view on this might surprise readers. Given that all governments employ politicised advisors [SpAds], often to present policy in the media, I cannot see why this appointment should be any more controversial. We live in a visual culture in which the image often gets more attention than the written word. An official photographer with special access also plays a role in laying down a historical record. Nobody thought twice about informal pictures of Barack Obama and his family as they prepared for inauguration day. In fact, the Whitehouse has its own flickr photostream. These days it seems to show endless pictures of a troubled President on the telephone...
An embedded snapper will never show the whole picture. An unposed picture can be more misleading that the old fashioned formal handouts. It was selected by PR people. The photographer may have been directed. We are unlikely ever to see Sam Cam or the Obamas having a row. These images have the power to manipulate us. They do have worth, but we must remember the circumstances and power-relationships behind their creation.
This is why it remains so important for press photographers to do their jobs, even if that occasionally risks intrusion. One of the best political pictures of the last two decades was taken in a public space by a snapper surrounded by newspaper colleagues who failed to get the same shot. He glanced up at a gauze curtain in time to to see - and capture - a tearful Margaret Thatcher take her last look from the Downing Street window the day she left office. I once worked with the photographer on a less glamorous job. He was freelance, and told me the Number 10 picture earned more money than every other shot he took that year. Despite its impact at the time, I have been unable to find a link to it. The internet means we have an infinity of images at our disposal. But how many are memorable?
The Independent group plan to launch a new compact daily newspaper costing just 20p. Called the i, it will combine "intelligence with brevity" and is aimed at "lapsed" readers of quality newspapers - of which there are quite a few. The Independent group's managing director Andy Mullins said he expects many of the readers to be commuters. He told The Guardian:
"Time-poor newspaper readers, and especially commuters, have been telling us for years that they are inundated with information and just don't have the time to read a quality newspaper on a regular basis," he added. "We are creating a newspaper for the 21st century that is designed for people who have a thirst for information and entertainment in the limited time that they have available."
The Independent is not a big seller in Scotland, and fewer people commute by train here than in the South of England. Still, I imagine a number of publishers will be watching the i with interest. I have long thought that newspapers were too expensive. For the last ten years, particularly in the "regional market" in the UK and America, prices were hiked up by corporate owners determined to screw unfeasible profits out of products they believed had no long term future.
Newspapers have also grown in size. They offer a wide array of material, which the individual readers will dip into selectively and then perhaps feel short changed paying for what they do not read. Say you have a real passion for Scottish politics, current affairs and business - that will only constitute a small part of your daily newspaper, which will also carry sport, culture, news of crime and entertainment. And nowadays there's the challenge of recycling all those sections.
As the i-pad becomes ubiquitous, (Apple has just announced record profits of $4.31 billion for the last quarter) the same time-pressed readers can go to websites covering the niche areas that interest them - note the rise of Newsnet Scotland which in a short period of time achieved 2 million page views. Or they might effectively construct their own newspapers using tools like Google Reader. They can also dip into established newspaper websites for a summary in headlines and intro paragraphs - then click on what really interests them if they want more.
Still, there is a residual fondness for print which, unlike the internet, readers are prepared to pay for, especially if the price is right. And you cannot take the i-pad into the bath, though Steve Jobs is surely working on that one...
It's fast becoming a social media cliche, but the Random List still pulls in the page-hitters. My last one on the Papal Visit was well read, and the biog bullet points proved strangely popular. In that spirit I give you Day Two of the SNP Conference in Perth. It's a particularly attractive blogging option because (a) there's a lot of material to get through and this is a fun way to summarise the best bits, and (b) The time is now 2am.
Viral video. The new SNP viral video features a young rock band - Jakil - playing a version of the old Canned Heat number Let's Work Together. It shows Scots from all walks of life doing just that. Someone suggested I might wish to share it on my social media networks "if you like it". I do, and so here it is. I'm particularly looking forward to the classic soul version featuring my hero Al Green....
Smouldering John Swinney no, really.... I don't want to damage his reputation for frugal moderaton, but John Swinney's speech was - whisper it - somewhat passionate. At the end he suggested that Scotland could no longer afford to remain in the UK Union. We have been in surplus for four years while UK was in deficit. You can read the whole speech here.http://www.snp.org/node/17386
I always thought the Fair Maid of Perth was invented by Sir Walter Scott to add romantic interest to an extremely complicated plot line in his novel. But I see that her house is being restored right opposite the multi-storey car park I am using. Historical dramatisation is all the rage again so who cares if Sir Walter took a few liberties with the fair maid? Cultural tourists don't..
While waiting for coffee I meet the leading soprano Alicia Hayes, who has just started working for Bruce Crawford MSP, the parliamentary business manager. Alicia has sung with opera companies all over the world, often playing the romantic lead. She's staying closer to home on account of her baby daughter these days, we will surely see her on the political stage before too long.
I meet Liberal Democrat Andy Myles, a facebook friend who's fair scunnered with some of the compromises made by his party leaders in coalition at Westminster. He's here in his professional capacity as a lobbyist for Scottish Environment Link which represents dozens of individual groups. I am particularly interested in the human ecology of the countryside - eg preserving its people as well as flora and fauna. Turns out he is very keen on repopulating the highlands and breaking up sporting estates. He offers examples of mixed use tenure. Environmentalists encourage cattle being wintered outside when possible, especially in woodland. Would love to taste some of the beef that spends months grazing in pine forests around Abernethy. Is it aromatic?
Lunchtime fringe meeting. But which one? The SNP conference has grown considerably in recent years with lots of groups like the charity mentioned above keen to influence policy makers. One of the downsides is that a lot of interesting fringe meetings are scheduled for the same time. At 12.30 today you could chose to learn more about Victim Support, Scotland's Colleges, the challenges of Foster Care, the difficulties older women have in accessing the right breast cancer care and a Scottish Social Enterprise seminar on how communities can buy their assets. I was tempted by a Reform Scotland/NESTA discussion on reforming public services but went instead for...
Dragons' Den. Sponsored by the Centre for Public Policy Research, Stewart Stevenson the Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Minister lead a team of dragons listening to pitches for a new Forth Crossing, upgrading the Glasgow Subway and introducing a smartcard for all public transport. All three had merit. Was particularly impressed with Jonathan Findlay the Labour councillor who chairs SPT, who was brave enough to come before the nationalist audience. He was applauded too. It is surely something of a scandal that the Glasgow Subway (rebuilt in 1970) and the Forth Road Bridge, are major postwar engineering projects that have scandalously failed to pass the test of time. If we must invest billions to replace or renew, let's take a tip from those sustainable Victorians and make our bridges and tunnels last longer than a few decades.
Angus Brendan MacNeil, the MP for the Western Isles and hard-working Barra crofter, has sacrificed the Mod to attend conference. He directs me to this funny exchange from Hansard on the Arc of Prosperity. How many times do you hear that Ireland and Iceland still enjoy standards of living far higher than our own...?
Fantastic fringe meeting on the creative industries with Jim Mather, minister for Enterprise, Andrew Dixon, of Creative Scotland, Jackie MacKenzie, Head of Innovation Programmes Scotland at NESTA and Rob Woodward at STV. One of these meetings that you really wish had been webcast. Andrew Dixon has had a few knocks but I was very heartened by his presentation. He seems genuinely enthused by what he has found here - and keen to grow audiences for artists in Scotland. The more local something is, the more compelling it can be to a global audience. Is the word glocal? He has identified music as a vibrant cultural resource that doesn't get enough attention. Jackie had interesting things to say on education - the divide between art and science, in both school and university, is damaging our competitiveness in computer games. Artistic kids need the maths skills to programme as well, say developers. Breadth is supposed to be the rock on which our educational system stands, so Scotland should be able to find a way around this. On a positive note it's a shame Jim Mather is retiring, though he will be 68 at the close of the next parliament and has many other plans. Until next May we should celebrate having as Enterprise Minister a highly successful entreprenuer who quotes Hugh Macdiarmid And Richard Florida. It doesn't get better really...
Chat to representatives of The Police Federation who say they have more access to government since the SNP took power than under any previous Scottish administration. They are not the first group to say this. I wonder why previous ministers were so remote - did they fear contradicting London policy by accidently promising what they could not deliver?
Media reception in the evening, hosted by Scottish Power. Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is in good humour. She gives the diarists a nice story about her own social networking slip. Recently married, she tried to change her relationship status to reflect this and link to her husband Peter Murrell. Unfortunately the predictive language married her off the party press officer Paul Togneri. It took a few desperate phone calls to undo her cyber-bigamy, without a puzzling broken heart appearing on the profile...
Alex Salmond arrives at conference today (Saturday) fresh from Dehli where he joined Glasgow Provost for the "handover" ceremony fo the Commonwealth Games. The question on everyone's lips is: "Will he bring the hat?"
If you have a young teenager you might be familiar with the term PWNED! (pronounced poand) When my daughter uses it - often - it usually indicates that she has bettered her mother in argument, or so she thinks. Inject a note of triumph and a pointing finger and you get the general idea. But last night the cry of PWNED! was directed at the telly, as she watched me watch FMQs. She hasn't quite got to grips with rates revaluations yet, but still reckoned that Lewis MacDonald, Mary Scanlan and Jackie Baillie were well and truly PWNED! by Alex Salmond.
A consultation in the ever-useful Urban Dictionary reveals that PWNED! has its origins in the popular computer game called Warcraft. This, I admit, is bad news for those who lament the adversarial, macho nature of political discourse today. Anyway, the game's map designer once misspelled "owned." So when the computer beat a player, it was supposed to say you've been "owned." Instead, it said you've been "pwned." Somehow, it caught on, being considered more emphatic than the tamer "owned".
Urban dictionary says it means: "dominated by an opponent or situation, especially by some god-like or computer-like force."
Was rather flattered - and a little perplexed - to find Jimmy Wales following me on Twitter the other day. The founder of Wikipedia is one of Time magazine's most influential people in the world, but not know for taking a close interest in Scottish politics. Until now. Wiki has entered the row over anti-Scottish comments on the BBC's Any Questions programme on Radio Four. Someone tried to include Baroness Deech's broadcast comments about Scots in her wiki entry. Wales objected because he argued that it unbalanced her short entry and that this one incident did not justify that. (The discussion provides a fascinating insight into how wiki checks material ) Wales, and some other wiki editors, also questioned whether this really was a row since nothing had appeared in the mainstream media. This struck me as fascinating given that wiki itself has had to fight for recognition. Certainly the web is jumping with conspiracy theorists and unbalanced commentary so must be treated with caution - especially when it comes to serious allegations. However in Scotland the internet is increasingly used as an outlet by a significant section of the population who feel the media does not represent their point of view. It was also disappointing that the wiki editors took the audience response to the comments by Deech and her fellow guest Douglas Murray to be evidence of approval - and confirmation that they were uncontroversial. Wiki editors clearly do not understand that the approval of an English audience in Sutton Coldfield, a leafy suburb of Birmingham does not reflect Scottish opinion - something even the BBC seems to acknowledge in its standard reply to complaints here.
I was caught up in the wiki discussion as the only MSM journalist to comment on the story - in The Scotsman - and am cited as a reliable source confirming that some folk are not too happy with Deech, Murray and the BBC. Alas, because I do not (yet) have a wiki entry, there is some debate over the significance of my intervention. I felt obliged to correct details of my CV, on the wiki discussion page, but resisted the temptation to get really petty and point out I have 870 Twitter followers compared to Baroness Deech's paltry 104. Jimmy Wales has 18,655 so is unlikely to be impressed...
If you still don't know what all the fuss is about, here is an abridged version of my Scotsman column. I should, however, point out that the story was first highlighted by Newsnet Scotland and then shared extensively around the web.
Greg Dyke once described the BBC as “the glue that binds the nation together” But can that really be the case? For the last ten days or so, a protest has been building on the internet, and social networks like facebook and twitter, as a result of an extraordinary outburst of intolerance on Any Questions, the flagship Radio Four current affairs show. One of the panelists who caused the most offence was Baroness Ruth Deech, a former governor of the corporation. The other was Douglas Murray a polemicist whose precocity is matched only by his talent for self-promotion. They were discussing the release of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing when Deech launched into what can only be described as an rant. She is an academic and lawyer best known for chairing the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Yet her language was intemperate in the extreme, like a Jeremy Clarkson column without the jokes: “It’s been very embarrassing for the rest of us. And it started me thinking along these lines, if Scotland wants to be independent, OK, be my guest, go ahead.....go off on your own, because actually, we're all subsidising them I think, by way of benefits and all sorts of reasons."
Murray a young neocon who is expected to shock, went further: “There is not very much to do if you are the Scottish Justice Secretary in a devolved Scottish Assembly. You can at least read the one important bit of news that comes across your desk in the last five years. The problem that I think the most galling thing about this whole thing is this pretend, horrible, charade building in Edinburgh called the Scottish Parliament and the horrible charade politicians who inhabit it and who occasionally crawl out of the darkness and explain something to the rest of us, as if we’ve never thought of moral questions before." He went on to describe Kenny MacAskill and Alex Salmond as “horrible grandstanding, Mickey Mouse politicians,” and mocked suggestions that the Scots were a compassionate people.
If Britain really was one nation under the flag, it didn’t seem that way in the Birmingham suburb from where the show was broadcast. These were not the comments of maverick oddballs. The audience cheered, applauded and laughed with Deech and Murray. It was the aural terrain more often inhabited by shock jocks and went further than attacking Salmond, MacAskill or the devolved settlement. It was Scotophobia writ large. Can you imagine a serious Radio Four Show getting away with similar comments about the Irish Dail? Would it be acceptable to describe the Major of London as “crawling out of the darkness”? It would be unthinkable because, from a metropolitan perspective, Boris presides over the centre of the universe. Edinburgh and Scotland are on the dark side. Compare the silence over this incident to the blanket coverage, in England and Scotland, of any anglophobic incident during the World Cup Finals, where the word racist is often bandied about. Where are the phone in shows devoted to Scotophobia?
Given that 90% of the population of the UK resides in England, it is, perhaps understandable that the views (prejudices?) of the majority will be indulged, even on Radio Four. Two YouGov polls, one in 2007 another earlier this year, showed that around two thirds of English people think Scotland is subsidised by the rest of the UK. Only 12% of Scots agree. There is an alternative version of Scottish English power relations that is very seldom heard on "national" talk shows, even north of the border. It would include the fact that Scotland is entitled to 95% of the oil revenues that have made Britain rich these last 30 years – a fact pointed out most recently by the Nobel Prizewinning World Bank Economist Joseph Stiglitz. There is the 1970s government-commissioned McCrone Report which predicted an independent Scotland could become fabulously wealthy. It was classified and kept secret for 30 years. There is the fact that the official government statistics GERS, published earlier this year show Scotland in surplus by £1.3billion in 2008-2009.We can argue the details, or course. But we seldom get the chance because a consensus appears to have been manufactured suggesting that Scotland is the poor, ignorant sponger up north. It is strange, isn't it, that neocon and anti-Scottish views like those expressed by Deech and Murray seem terribly familiar. The alternative, Scottish nationalist view, seems radical and unusual because it is so seldom given a platform. It is kept outside the mainstream, separate from the manufactured consenus. Note the decision to exclude the SNP from the leaders debates with dominated the General Election. It’s difficult to see how the BBC, so heavily weighted towards the centre of population, can tell two opposing stories at once. As a national glue, it's getting a bit tacky.
