Bannockburn Day

This coming Saturday, June 25, sees the SNP’s annual Bannockburn Day celebrations take place. Although I used to be a regular attendee when I was a student, like many nationalists it’s been a few years since I last went along. For this reason, it was a bit of a start for me to learn that while working at SNP Headquarters, it was now my job to organise the arrangements for the day.

There’s been a fair bit of grumbling down the years, including from yours truly, that Bannockburn needed x, y and z done to it to make it a better day out for those attending. However, in the midst of an election battle, these considerations went out the window as I sought to work out exactly what needed to happen to make the event happen at all.

The first hurdle was finding a pipe band. There’s no shortage of them in Scotland usually, but the 25 June is also the day of the European Pipe Band Championships in Banbridge, Northern Ireland. However, I’m pleased to say that the Vale of Atholl junior pipe band have agreed to lead us down our traditional route through Stirling town and having heard a tape of one of their rehearsals for the day itself, those attending should be in for a treat.

Over the last few weeks the final pieces have fallen into place. We now have permission from Stirling Council and Historic Scotland to hold the march, while other things you might not think of immediately as being necessary, like a silenced diesel generator, have been tracked down.

So, to the day itself. We’ll be assembling in Lower Bridge Street, Stirling, from 1.30pm onwards, marching off at 2pm. Alex Salmond MP and Stuart Hosie MP are to address the marchers at the Bannockburn site, and will be introduced to the marchers by Nicola Sturgeon MSP.

Meanwhile, new SNP recruit Jimmy Reid will deliver the Alan Macartney memorial lecture after the rally, at 4pm in the King Robert Hotel, right next to the Bannockburn site. And for those looking for a refreshment afterwards, the indefatigable Alastair Walker has once again organised a social event at the Tartan Arms pub in Bannockburn Village from 5pm onwards, featuring folkies Cairdie's Brig and Gaberlunzie.

With only a few days left until the event, just one critical question remains unanswered. Who’s going to lead the assembled masses in a rendition of ‘Scots Wha' Hae’ at the end of the rally? Form an orderly queue, now…

On the subject of the Allan Macartney memorial lecture, I remember the tale told by the minister at his funeral service in Aberdeen about a time Alan led a delegation of SNP folk to the Basque country, where they had met up with some moderate Basque nationalists.

The evening had gone really well, with the drink, politics and fraternal greetings being exchanged freely. However, when it was time to leave, the Basques seemed somewhat indifferent to the group's departure, with only one person seeing the Scots to the door.

As they walked down the street, someone wondered aloud if they'd perhaps offended their hosts in some way. Alan just commented that he was sure it was fine. After all, maybe they just didn't like to put all their Basques in the one exit!

The Westminster Elections

Now that I’m back job hunting and winding down my contract at SNP HQ, I’ve been taking a bit of time to reflect on the election campaign just past. Although I’d been involved in plenty campaigns before as both footsoldier and candidate, this was the first time I’d helped to conduct a campaign from the centre.

It was an eye-opening experience in many ways. It certainly felt strange not being involved directly in the leafleting and campaigning on the ground. While the vantage point this offered on the SNP has given me some pause for thought, what I’d like to concentrate on here are some perceptions on how the election campaign developed.

I don’t pretend that this is a comprehensive overview of the campaign. Being honest, knowing I’d probably be more of a Charles Pooter than a Benn or a Crossman, I didn’t keep a diary. All this represents is some of my thoughts to date (such as they are) on the last few weeks of the national campaign and how it affected the final result.

There was a perception in the press, even before the campaign started, that this wasn’t going to be the SNP’s election. After all, this was a Westminster election, so in a unionist reprise of the 2001 campaign, what was the point of voting SNP? Hadn’t we also seen the SNP vote slip back at previous elections? With this background, it was important for the SNP to be seen to have made progress and to avoid these doom-laden predictions from becoming self-fulfilling prophesies.

In contrast to 2001, the party came out fighting, arguing that since devolution, it was the unionist parties which were making themselves irrelevant to Scots. With pledges coming daily from London parties regarding law & order, education and health, which did not apply north of the border, this became the ‘except for viewers in Scotland’ election.

Pleasingly, the media corps which had swallowed the Labour line in 2001 that the SNP was ‘fighting the wrong campaign for the wrong election’ (whatever that meant), took up the ‘except for viewers’ argument with gusto. Still, that’s not to say that everything was wonderful in the coverage afforded to the SNP.

‘Except for viewers’ worked on another level as well – the lack of relevance of the main UK news broadcasts to the debate in Scotland. It’s not fair to expect BBC network bias to be corrected by the output of BBC Scotland, which was excellent on its own terms. However, it seemed that our press team had to spend a disproportionate amount of time on the phone to London newsrooms just to get a paltry 10 seconds of coverage for the SNP on the networks.

ITV was, if anything, poorer than the BBC in its attempts to balance its coverage. Their sop to the differing Scottish and Welsh agendas was to put together a special Dimbleby programme. Entitled ‘Meet the Nationalists’, as if we were somehow strangers to the public at large, this offering went out in the graveyard shift, well after most sensible people had gone to bed.

Since Scottish and Welsh nationalists want the same thing (don’t they?), this meant that the 1 hour afforded to each of the 3 UK party leaders could be split happily between Alex Salmond and Plaid Cymru’s Elfyn Llwyd. With the Jocks and the Taffs sharing a broadcast, they could then record it somewhere equally inconvenient for both parties – like the Granada TV studios in Manchester.

Since there could only be a small number of people from each country in the audience, instead of taking a representative sample of voters or letting the leaders be questioned by ‘undecideds’, why not make up the numbers with those possessed of the most base anti-nationalist saloon bar prejudice? That should liven it up. Well, liven it up it did, in the process creating the most tendentious apology for a political broadcast it has ever been my misfortune to watch. Perhaps the late broadcast time was a blessing in disguise after all.

We also had a rogue poll to contend with from our old friends at the Daily Record. Coming just days into the campaign, this showed a huge Labour lead, with the SNP crashing down to around 14%. Thankfully, most of the press were sceptical to say the least, so coverage of the poll was more limited than it might have been. Nonetheless, it still for a time threatened to derail what had been until then an excellent week for the SNP.

Luckily, the SNP had its own poll, conducted by a company better regarded by most pundits than the pollsters used by the Record, which we could release to contradict the earlier poll and reassure our supporters. However, I have no doubt that the SNP campaign was damaged and that this was the intention of the Record all along. After all, the same poll run in the final week of the campaign showed the SNP closing the gap on Labour to just 10 points. Mysteriously, flicking through your Record you would probably have found the astrology and cartoons page long before you did any coverage of this survey.

This environment helped the UK parties enormously at the expense of the SNP. Particularly so in the case of the Lib Dems, who were blown along in Scotland on the hype and expectation that they would eclipse the Tories in England. On this count, reports of the Tories’ demise were greatly exaggerated, as they outpolled Labour across England. Meanwhile, in cities such as Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, where the Lib Dems had made recent breakthroughs in local government, the party fell well short of expectations.

The fact the Lib Dems lost seats to the Tories in England without making corresponding gains from Labour means they now face a huge tactical dilemma. I can remember David Steel’s hubristic rallying cry from the early 1980’s, urging Liberals to go back to their constituencies and prepare for government. Perhaps it’s more in keeping with Charles Kennedy’s understated style that following the election, he’s advised his troops to go back to their constituencies and prepare for a policy review.

However, it was this sense of being a party on the move which helped the Lib Dems in Scotland. Seats where Lib Dem activists delivered barely a single leaflet or knocked on a single door recorded large swings for their party. I don’t think there was any significant transfer of support from the SNP to the Lib Dems. My gut feeling is that some habitual Labour voters, looking to punish the Blair government, compared the SNP and Lib Dems and didn’t see much to pick between the parties on key issues like pensions, student funding and the Iraq war.

Although party activists could list many differences between the SNP and the Lib Dems, the public don’t take as close an interest. With the Lib Dems being perceived as the party ‘most likely to’, especially in a UK election, some Labour ‘switchers’ probably found themselves in sympathy with the SNP but chose instead to give their votes to the Lib Dem candidate.

But haven’t we been here before? The last time a UK ‘third’ party threatened to break the mould was in 1983, when the SDP/Liberal alliance looked like they might leapfrog both Labour and the Tories down in England. On that occasion, their vote in Scotland went up like a rocket. While it didn’t exactly come down again like the stick, the Lib Dems were still on a steady path of decline in Scotland between 1983 and 2001.

This time, however, there is a Scottish Parliament, from which the Lib Dems help form a government. Also, today’s SNP is a different beast. There is none of the factionalism now which buffeted the SNP in the early 1980’s. Furthermore, the SNP is now better prepared politically, organisationally and, in spite of some justifiable post-election belt tightening, better financed than it ever was in the early 1980’s.

And so to the result. Well, from a personal point of view I was disappointed that the SNP slipped to 3^rd place in terms of the share of the vote. However, I’ve listened for years to pundits lecturing the SNP that piling up votes in the absence of winning seats did not represent meaningful progress. For that reason alone, I’m happy to regard going from 5 seats out of 72 to 6 seats out of 59 as progress for the SNP.

My first parliamentary campaign as an SNP member was the Perth & Kinross by-election in 1995, followed by trying to get George Reid elected as the MP for Ochil at the 1997 election. Having spent so many years working for the SNP in that part of Scotland, I was gutted that we missed winning Ochil and South Perthshire from Labour. However, consolation came with Stuart Hosie’s win in Dundee East and Angus MacNeill’s tremendous victory in the Western Isles.

It shows that we are continuing to make progress in the crucial battleground of first past the post seats. As I’ve said before in these pages, we do better as a party in areas where we are well organised and tend to do less well in areas where we are not. That’s why we won in Dundee, and that’s why we held on in Angus and in Perth and North Perthshire, despite the local Tories chucking nearly £100,000 at these seats in terms of canvassing, direct mail and DVDs. I hope in the aftermath that their Monegasque sugar-daddy still feels his money was well-spent!

The last few years haven’t been easy for the SNP, especially for those of my generation who were reared on the successes of the late eighties to mid-nineties. Perhaps the party has been guilty of navel gazing since the ‘disappointment’ of 1999, which only now seems a disappointing result in comparison to the hype which preceded it.

However, with the introduction of one member one vote, a centralised membership system and a modernised party rule book, the foundations have been laid for the SNP to move from being a party of protest to a party of power. This election saw some momentum come back to the SNP. While clearly there’s still much to do between now and 2007, I think that for the first time since the heady days of 1998’s opinion polls, conditions are right for the SNP to make an advance.

I’ve written before in the ‘Flag’ about what I consider to be the flaws in Labour’s devolution ‘settlement’ (see http://www.scotsindependent.org/2004/041119/index.htm). Despite needing the votes of MPs representing English constituencies, devolution was still implemented at Westminster thanks largely to the indifference, rather than the consent, of English voters.

Although Labour won a majority of seats in England this time, the Tories still won the English popular vote by a margin of 64,000. While the Tories can’t complain legitimately about this for so long as they refuse to support proportional representation, this can only help English grumbles over being governed by a party they didn’t vote for, the number of Scots in cabinet and the ever-present West Lothian question, to grow in volume and rancour over the next few years.

Looking towards the next Westminster elections, it’s possible to foresee a situation where a Labour Prime Minister might only be able to govern in England because of their Scottish and Welsh MPs. Or indeed to see the Tories returned at Westminster, while parties of a different hue are in power in Edinburgh. Under these circumstances, just how long would it be before it was decided that, politically at least, the Scots needed to be put back in their place in some way?

Either way, the recent travails of the SNP look only to have represented a temporary breathing space for Scottish unionists. They already have a titanic struggle on their hands for the soul of Scotland. Perhaps an even greater challenge will come for them in persuading not just the Scots, but also those south of the border, that 300 years of shared government within the Union really is something worth maintaining.

Taxi for McLetchie?

It’s with a degree of Schadenfreude that many Scots, some Tories included, are looking at David McLetchie MSP and his current difficulties over taxi bills. For those who haven’t been following the story, it has emerged that McLetchie, first elected in 1999, has run up a series of taxi bills over that period costing the Scottish taxpayer more than £10,000, a sum over five times greater than the next highest bill for a Lothians MSP.

McLetchie was until recently a partner at Edinburgh legal firm Tods Murray. What has really piqued people’s interest in this case is the suggestion that he made several taxi journeys to the offices of Tods Murray to undertake paid legal work, while charging these trips to the Scottish Parliamentary taxi account.

The reason we can’t be sure whether or not this has been happening is because the Scottish Parliamentary authorities are withholding full details of the journeys. McLetchie himself has refused angrily to fill in the blanks, adding fuel to the growing flames. In the meantime, Scottish Information Commissioner Kevin Dunion has been asked to rule on whether details of the journeys charged to the taxpayer should be made public.

Perhaps it’s revealing that no-one speaking for McLetchie has yet denied outright that journeys were made to Tods Murray at the taxpayer’s expense. To date, we have had the rather feeble twin defence that all the journeys were made on parliamentary or constituency business, and that his overall expenses are low, a situation helped by not using the official car to which he has access as the leader of an opposition party.

I have a certain amount of respect for McLetchie. He is an able and by all accounts likeable man, who has made claiming to be on the side of the Scottish taxpayer his party’s stock-in-trade. After this, though, the next time McLetchie or one of his colleagues starts to beef about waste and spiraling costs in government, people rightly will smell humbug and hypocrisy.

However, it is through his corrosive attacks on the Parliament and its failings, real and imagined, where he has done more than perhaps any other figure to damage the esteem in which Scots hold home rule. Having built much of his reputation on exposing the shortcomings of the Scottish political classes, would it not be a delicious irony if he were to be humbled for showing that sometimes even he fails to live up to the standards he sets so enthusiastically for others?

I have one piece of advice for Mr. McLetchie. Get the information on your journeys out in the open quickly. That way, if you haven’t used taxpayer’s money for personal benefit, everyone can calm down and focus on the still damaging but less serious issue of the size of your bill. On the other hand, if you did use taxpayer’s money to travel to Tods Murray by taxi, you probably also know that the pressure on you to resign will become impossible to resist.

The ‘missing’ information will emerge one way or another in the weeks ahead. If it has to end this way, it will be better for you and your party to go as quickly and quietly as possible. The alternative is to go down in a tabloid hail of fury and indignation, which would only further demean the political process in the eyes of the Scottish voting public.

I remember hearing a story about an Anglican Bishop, who found himself being berated one Sunday morning by a worshipper concerned with what he saw as the declining quality of the priesthood. The Bishop responded by agreeing enthusiastically with the man, before delivering a sting in the tail. The trouble, confided the Bishop, was that when it came to appointing priests, the church only had the laity on which it could draw.

If one good thing can come out of this, I hope it is a growing realisation that politicians are human too, and therefore share the failings of the rest of us. If this helps bring an air of reality to the expectations which we have of our parliament and MSPs, McLetchie may unwittingly have done a service to all of us interested in building a more mature Scottish democracy.