A HECTIC WEEK IN SCOTTISH POLITICS

I don’t like writing too much about the Unionist parties, but this past week has been so full of interest and activity that I can’t resist.
 
First up is Ming Campbell, leader, for the time being, of the Liberal Democrats. Ming has always been a basically decent politician, with but one great drawback – he does not believe that Scotland should be independent.  He was like that as a student and he has not changed.
 
Now, of course, he is his party’s leader at the age of 66.  While he is still impressive when interviewed on foreign affairs, he seems to have lost confidence in his ability to stand up and make a speech without being tied to his notes.  I put it down to the mess he made at his first attempt at Prime Minister’s questions, when as he spoke he failed to understand a joke running round the back benches and became flustered.  From then on he has failed to command the rabble that is the British House of Commons.

At his party’s conference last week there was all sorts of rumour and infighting. This led to Ming making a quite aggressive and angry speech, and it all sounded so false.
 
My sister, who was at the same school as Ming at around the same time, who is a constituent of his and who has supported him in the past, made a very telling comment recently: ‘Poor Ming!’
 
When voters start feeling sorry for you, you know that your days are numbered!
 
 
Second up is new New Labour leader in the Scottish Parliament, Wendy Alexander.  I haven’t seen Wendy much, although I did see her the other day in a Glasgow park with her young children.
 
But the one time I really did come across her was when a few years back she came to speak at a lunchtime meeting at an SNP conference in Inverness.  “Good on you, Wendy,’ I thought, ‘coming to speak to the opposition and have a discussion.’
 
What a disappointment!  Wendy was aggressive, intolerant, and opinionated and rammed her views down the throats of her listeners.  What a golden chance was thrown away to have just a little bit of give and take and for a civilised and tolerant exchange of views.  Wendy gave the impression that she did not really have much time for tolerance or civil discussion!  She says that with motherhood she has changed, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Her first go at First Minister Alex Salmond last week seems generally to have been regarded as very disappointing, to put it mildly.

Then it was announced that Labour’s Holyrood press officer Brian Lironi had resigned after only two months in the job.  Mind you, Labour MSP George Foulkes had just called him an ‘idiot’, which would not have helped to boost his confidence.
 
But there is a bit of interesting history here.  In 2001, when she was Enterprise Minister, her then press officer asked to be moved after frequent clashes with her.
 
To sum up Wendy after a couple of weeks in the job in the words of Iain MacWhirter in the Herald newspaper: ‘The headlines told of resignation, internecine warfare, cronyism and incompetence … There are tales of lost tempers, late-night texting furies, recrimination and confusion.’
 
Wow!

BROWN’S SPEECH TO LABOUR CONFERENCE 

Fantasy, unreality, arrogance and cheek – for me, those were the main characteristics of Gordon Brown’s speech to the New Labour Party gathered last week at Bournemouth.

Thank goodness Brown avoided the maudlin sentimentality of Tony Blair’s farewell speech to his constituency party workers shortly before he resigned. You will no doubt remember: ‘The British people are special … the rest of the world knows it’ etc etc – yuck!  as they say, pass the sick bowl.

How wonderful flattery is to make people believe almost anything!  Brown used the words ‘Britain’ or ‘British’ 81 times in a 63-minute speech.  He spoke of the virtues of resilience and courage and hard work and playing by the rules and he praised such good things as strong families and education and the Health Service.
 
But just as the wretched George W Bush misled the American people by cynically conflating in speech after speech Sadaam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, so Gordon Brown has tried with equal cynicism to conflate these universal virtues and values and Britishness.
 
To hear him talk, you would think that other nations were ignorant of such virtues and values. Maybe he thinks that Britain has a copyright on them – perhaps we should charge other nations fees if they believe in hard work or resilience.
 
In fact, the values Brown discusses are universal – they belong to all religions, all nations, all decent people.  To identify them as peculiarly British is a piece of arrogance and presumptuous cheek.

Not only that, but to speak as if these virtues and values define the British state today is to live in a world of fantasy and unreality.
 
The fact is that most other small north European nations possess these virtues and values and moreover act on them to a far greater extent than Britain does.
 
Almost any table you care to look at with regard to quality of life - life expectancy, doctors per head, money spent per pupil, gender fairness and fairness of income distribution, control of inflation, corruption perception – shows that Britain lags way behind in putting many values into practice.

Moreover, Britain at the moment, after a decade of Labour rule, still has an appalling record when it comes to such things as binge drinking, crime, teenage pregnancy, work-shyness, personal debt, unaffordable housing - and the sheer lack of political courage to confront such problems head on.
 
Little wonder that more people than ever before are choosing, if they can, to live abroad, while others from the poorer eastern European nations are arriving here to snap up jobs too many of our people are not interested in.
 
And one last thing.  Gordon Brown made a great virtue of Britons working together to overcome terrorism, flood, plague and economic crisis.  Well of course we work together to overcome such problems.
 
But  we work with the Americans and Canadians, with the French and Germans, and with any other nation when we have to. That does not mean that we have to be in some unitary state dominated by a political centre beyond our borders.
 
Gordon Brown well knows that Scotland is a distinct nation with our own ways of implementing the values of which he speaks.  He is after all the son of a minister of the Church of Scotland – he surely doesn’t want it to become the Church of Britain!
 
Our own parliament has already – initially under Labour! – gone its own way on smoking in public places and  has - thank goodness! – introduced a form of proportional representation for Holyrood elections and the best form of PR for local government elections. (Well done, Jack McConnell! You never got the praise you deserved for that!)