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Independence First March – 31 March

Details here: http://independence1st.com/Flyer2B.htm
 

Train Kept A Rollin'

I spent last weekend in London out on the lash with an old friend of mine from Scottish Widows. We both bailed out of the company at around the same time, myself to go and work for the SNP, while Rich moved to London to be a mortgage broker. As he's just bought a house in deepest, darkest Beckenham, I'm guessing he did the right thing by moving on when he did too! 

The original plan was to watch the England-Scotland women's international, due to be played on the Sunday at the new Wembley Stadium. Although the English FA got the keys to the stadium just in time, the game itself was moved to Wycombe Wanderers ground instead, which would have been a bit of a hassle for us to get to. For that reason, the girls just had to do without our support while we went out to get alcoholically inconvenienced instead. Ochone, ochone etc.

Anyway, I went down first-class by train, getting free coffee refills; getting online thanks to GNER's free wi-fi; no-one caring if I had a set of nail clippers or a bottle of water in my bag; sitting in a big comfy seat with plenty room to stretch my legs; and was delivered slap-bang into the centre of London in just 4 and a half hours and all for under £40. I'm racking my brains just now to come up with a good reason why I used to always fly down from Edinburgh, but right now I'm damned if I can think of one. 

Get the Edinburgh-London rail journey time down below 4 hours, and I can guarantee that the airlines and their shareholders will really start worrying. Now, remind me again, why was it again that the transport review conducted by former British Airways Chief Executive, Rod Eddington, concluded that high-speed rail travel was such a non starter? All answers on the back of an airline boarding pass, please, to the usual address.

With friends like these... 

The capacity of the Scottish Tories to self-destruct never ceases to amaze. After the wipe-out of 1997; David McLetchie's little confusions over expenses; Annabell Goldie's reluctant leadership and persistent attempts by a grassroots minority to throw the current MSP group overboard; it was difficult, although by no means impossible, to see how they could slip any further.

With an election coming up, the party high-heidyins must have been praying that everyone would just stick to the script and stay gaffe-free until polling day. The last person they would have been expecting to pull the plug on their campaign would have been Shadow Scottish Secretary, David Mundell MP. Alas, on the eve of their Scottish Conference, the Daily Record published a memo sent by Mundell to party leader David Cameron, containing a damning assessment of his erstwhile Holyrood colleagues. 

According to Mundell, the MSP group suffers from a "simple lack of thinkers". They are 'incapable of coming up with new policies', while "there are more obvious problems than solutions emanating from Scotland from a party point of view." The replacement of Scottish party chairman Peter Duncan should be an "immediate priority". And while "key personnel need to be identified to take on strategic roles...nobody obviously comes to mind".

With friends like these... by all accounts, there was an orderly queue of delegates, all anxious to get their chance to shake Mundell warmly by the throat. I think if I were a Tory activist, though, I'd be arranging my holidays to coincide with the elections so I could be as far away as possible from the impending carnage in May.

There's a place for a party of the centre-right in Scotland - but the prospects of anyone being able to hew it from the rotten timbers of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party now look not so much slim as positively skeletal. Independence and cutting the apron strings to the party in London must now be their only hope for recovery.

Age Shall Not Weary Him

'What is the point of Menzies Campbell?', is a question with which I've been wrestling for quite a while now. In many ways, it's a question I never thought I'd ever be asking myself, since I'd long had a kind of sneaking regard for him. Sure, whenever matters SNP reared their head, I'd always found his knee-jerk patrician sniffiness to be absolutely insufferable. Otherwise, though, he earned my respect for both looking and sounding like a thoroughly competent MP who knew exactly what he was talking about.

I see in retrospect that mine was quite a rose-tinted view. That sure-footedness, demonstrated in matters of home and international affairs, has never quite been there when it comes to the equally important arenas of economic, health and education policy. In fact, it seems that the very qualities that made him appear so well cut out to be a Home or Foreign Secretary - his dispassionate aloofness and cultivated appearance of somehow being above the vulgar posturing of lesser mortals - are the very same qualities which are now rendering his stewardship of the Lib Dems such a becalmed and uninspiring affair.

Oddly, he seems to have diminished in stature since assuming the Lib Dem leadership. His perceived lack of support for Charles Kennedy tainted him from the start, as did his many fluffed appearances at Prime Minister's Questions. But never mind the recent fuss about whether he'd dump PR to get into government with Labour. To me, it is his apparent inability to connect with voters or to articulate any kind of coherent policy agenda, which should be causing the most discontent in Lib Dem ranks just now.

They are dropping, slowly but surely, in the polls. Where people liked Charles Kennedy even if they didn't necessarily respect him, Campbell seems to suffer from the reverse. Concerns about his age are raised, to which he now responds with an unbecoming prickliness. Watching him try to address this irrelevant jibe is becoming an increasingly painful sight. Like Gordon Brown trying to convince Middle England that he would make a good Prime Minister, the more Campbell tries to stress his youthfulness, the less it convinces.

Let's be clear, his age is largely irrelevant if we regard it as being an attitude of mind rather than a physical characteristic. In fact, I get the feeling that Campbell was probably middle-aged by his early twenties. And as one of the many politicos spawned by the Glasgow University Union Debating Society in the 1950s, it would have been surprising if he'd turned out any other way.

For all his protestations of having grown up in a Glasgow tenement, Campbell is a politician from the upper-middle classes, imbibed with a paternalistic and slightly patronising sense of noblesse oblige. But what once reassured about Campbell now just grates. And it is this, I think, which is what is hampering him and his party, rather than any questions about age. Like Gordon Brown, a section of voters has decided that they don’t particularly like him. And while voters cite Brown’s ‘Scottishness’ as being his prime draw-back (something which doesn’t seem to affect John Reid), it is Campbell’s age which is being held against him.

Highlighting the most obvious perceived flaw of someone we dislike is an instinct we develop in the playground. It might not be fair and it might be as base as it gets, but as Neil Kinnock, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith all found out, if the voters won’t take to you then electorally-speaking, both you and your party are toast.

The Lib Dems, while often confounding the pundits, have for the past while seemed like a party in search of a role. The charisma of a Paddy Ashdown or a Charles Kennedy has always in the past allowed them to escape the scrutiny they deserved for being all things to all people. With a revitalised Tory Party in England under David Cameron, also no slouch at appearing to be all things to all people, the days of the Lib Dems being able to hoover up the votes of the disenchanted now look to be numbered.

"Jack McConnell is totally out of touch with the debate on Trident.  The decision on renewal is being taken now, as the Westminster Government has made clear.  Labour want to dump a new generation of weapons of mass destruction in Scotland, and the First Minister is trying to wash his hands of the whole issue. This is one more reason why Scotland needs a new First Minister in Alex Salmond, who will stand up for Scotland's interests."