PRINTER FRIENDLY

Our more observant readers may have noticed a new link when they arrived at the Flag webpage last week.  No, it doesn’t take you to Brigadoon.com – that one isn’t due for another century yet. Instead, in our quest to make the flag ever more accessible, we now have a ‘printer friendly’ version available.

But why, I hear many of you ask? Well Jim Lynch, just like I’m sure a few of you do, likes to print the Flag out before reading it. However, the formatting of the text makes it difficult for some printers to cope without missing out chunks of the right hand margin. So, thanks to the wonders of modern technology (or rather, webmaster Alastair putting a second version on line), this problem is no more.

I haven’t tried it out yet due to some PC problems (see next article), but Jim assures me it works wonderfully. However you decide to read the Flag in future, I hope it continues to show the qualities which keep you interested, prompting the always interesting fan mail (and occasional hate mail!) which we receive each week.

PRINTER UNFRIENDLY

Despite being part of the Flag team, you couldn’t describe me as IT literate. Frankly, I’m fairly ignorant as to the wizardry it takes to get us on line. Whenever its my turn, I email it to Alastair, who then finds suitable images to wrap the text around before uploading it to the site. Once its left my inbox, the next time I see the Flag is through gaps in my fingers after its gone on public view. 

So far, I have put together all my Flags on my trusty but increasingly creaky 4 year old laptop. But times move on and demands increase, so last week I bowed to the inevitable and invested in a faster self-assembly machine to work alongside the laptop. Since to me the little boxes on the desktop are all made out of ticky-tacky and all look just the same, the only catch was finding someone prepared to put everything together for me.

Luckily, my übergeek friend Russell agreed to help and from 10pm last Friday, performed miracles of open hard-drive surgery with little more than a set of mini-screwdrivers and some cans of Tennent’s Lager. By 3am, we had a whirring box with a wireless network connection to let it communicate with the laptop and the outside world.

However, we also had a TV card which had taken the hump and refused to work because we had the cheek to install something else before it, and a printer which wouldn’t connect to the computer at all. Worse was to come on Sunday when the monitor, which was working perfectly when I left the flat, committed suicide before I returned 3 hours later.  

Anyway, if you’re reading this online, its only in part because my technology has survived the upheaval of the last week. Mostly, its thanks to the efforts of folk like Alastair and Russell, who have the unique talent of being able to get machines to be able to talk to each other when all around everyone else is tearing their hair out. Thanks, guys.

HOW WILL IT TURNOUT?

One of the things the Scottish chattering classes spend time wringing their hands about is the low turnout at elections, particularly amongst the young. I realise it’s a bit lame at the age of 28 to try and pose as the voice of youth. However, hopefully I still qualify to venture an opinion on why young people might be disaffected with the political process.

Like most things, I suspect it starts at school where the mantra of ‘parent’s rights’ is trotted out with regular monotony. In Scotland, girls can consent to or refuse medical treatment at age 12 (boys have to wait until 14). Despite being allowed in law to make life and death choices from an early age, the parent and the teacher still have primacy over the direction and chances a pupil will have in high schools, even past the age of 16.

The overriding ethos of a Scottish education is that you are there to be taught, not to question or, perish the thought, to challenge. The message is rammed home by authority figures from an early age that ‘we ken best’. Nowhere is that demonstrated more forcibly than when it comes to politicians fighting over the moral high ground on law and order.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, there is a perception that crime is on the increase. In our image obsessed society, perception is what counts so our political leaders fall over themselves to be seen to be the toughest on the supposed perpetrators of this non-existent crime wave.

Of course, most teenagers either can’t or don’t vote and in actual fact are the group most likely to themselves be victims of crime. The congregating of young people in the groups which adults find most threatening is itself often a defence against this threat. The elderly on the other hand are most likely to fear crime and also the most likely to vote. Since the young often lack the articulacy or the organization to stand up for themselves as a group, they are the easiest to scapegoat and are therefore the ones who are targeted.

The police, to their credit, understand this and realise the need not to alienate law abiding youngsters by heavy handed enforcement. Most officers believe they already have adequate powers to deal with disorder, although when they say so as Scottish Police Federation leader Doug Keil did last week, they are accused by Jack McConnell of being out of touch.

The point of this is that we place great obligations and expectations on our teenagers without allowing them balancing rights to reinforce their responsibilities. We seem to live in fear of them, yet it is our response to that fear which ultimately makes it harder for us to socialise the young into what we regard as acceptable norms. In this climate, can we really be surprised if many young people enter adult life lacking confidence and carrying with them a fatalistic acceptance that ‘they’ will determine your fate and there’s nothing can be done to change it?

While it didn’t feel like it at the time, with my subsidised mortgage, company pension scheme and opportunities for further learning, in retrospect I’ve been one of the lucky ones.  When it comes to setting out in the world and putting a roof over your head, even borrowing 4 times your salary isn’t enough to buy houses which sell routinely for a fifth over their valuation in Scotland’s cities. While I graduated with around £7,000 of debt, today’s students can expect that figure to be closer to £20,000, starting to repay their deferred fees once they start earning as little as £5 per hour.

Repayment of student debt erodes the income required to pay a mortgage. Given that it is more expensive to rent than to buy, just how do we expect young people to get a foot on the property ladder in our cities? A shortage of affordable housing used to be the scourge of our rural areas. Now even in our cities, some will be staying at home until well into their 20’s or 30’s.

It gets no better in work. Young people today are starting employment at a time when secure final salary pension schemes are being wound up at record rates. While older generations have benefited from spending all or at least some of their working lives in such schemes, future pensioners will have to entrust their savings to stockmarket fluctuations right up to the day they retire.

Looking to the state for help is no good. Since the link between pensions and earnings was broken in 1980, its relative value has dropped by 30%. At this rate, the basic pension will be next to worthless when today’s schoolchildren come to retire. In any case, if repaying student debt and paying over the odds for housing, how do we expect the young to start saving for their retirement, let alone start planning a family of their own?

Then there is the PPP, or Public Private Partnerships, much excoriated in these pages for passing on debts to future generations. Invariably, PPP schemes have been instigated by here today, gone tomorrow politicians who want the glory and votes which come from opening a new school and who will be long forgotten by the time the costs start to rack up on future generations.

Free personal care for the elderly is a laudable policy, allowing our older folk dignity and a chance to stay in their own homes for longer. However, set alongside making students pay more for their education, the contrast in the government’s approach to these groups couldn’t be more stark.

A generation of 40 to 60 somethings, brought up in the shelter of the welfare state and at the peak of its earning power is now shirking its responsibilities to the upcoming generation. A selfish ‘me’ generation with Blair as its poster child, everywhere now kicks away the ladders of opportunity which they themselves benefited from.

My generation is the first since WWII which can expect to see its living standards decline. Living in the shadow of an exaggerated case for war where truth is a scarce commodity in our public figures, life just got harder. This, allied to being on the receiving end of the cheap populism which scapegoats youth for society’s ills has bred a generation deeply cynical about politics and the motivation of its practitioners.

However, in this the young are often their own worst enemies. Thousands were content to march against the war in Iraq and against tuition fees, yet we largely abstain (or even worse, vote Labour) when the election comes. The belief that conventional politics changes nothing quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy when expressed through abstention at the ballot box. Lacking coherent opposition amongst the electorate, this self-serving middle-aged generation thus perpetuate their values.

From Thatcherism to Blairism, young people have had it rammed down their throats that there is no such thing as society, that might makes right and that the only way to survive is to look after number 1. The biggest threat to what can still (just) pass for a social democratic society is that as they grow, the abstentionist generation will shift their apathy from the ballot box to the society that has shaped them.

With an ageing population voting in its own interests, will young people stick around to pick up the tab for a spendthrift older generation which hasn’t kept its side of the bargain? In spite of this, I remain optimistic for Scotland. But who really could blame the brightest and most ambitious if in a devolutionary torpor of rising taxes and declining growth they did decide to opt out altogether and emigrate, just as their forefathers might have done decades before them?

JUST ‘COS (With apologies to Paul Sinclair)

Its not often I give a genuine laugh when reading Scotland’s best selling comic (AKA the Daily Ranger). However, I couldn’t help myself when this week they summed up Tony Blair’s reason for going to war in Iraq as “just ‘cos”.

The longer time passes, the more it looks like Hans Blix was correct in his assessment that Saddam Hussein probably didn’t have weapons of mass destruction when he was ousted by coalition forces. The Hutton enquiry is also due to report shortly and despite his reputation having taken a battering, BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan’s infamous reports on the government’s ‘sexed up’ Iraq dossier still stand scrutiny as being largely accurate on all substantive points.

It’s conceivable that if exposed as being less than truthful by Hutton, Blair could be forced out. With a much-vaunted backbench revolt looming over English tuition fees, the pressures of having a young family and his recent high profile health scare, who could blame Blair if he decided to walk away from it all?

If he’d quit while he was ahead last year, he could have walked away with his head held high having introduced the most sweeping constitutional reforms in a century, made progress in Northern Ireland and carved out a position as a politician of some stature on the world stage. Often accused of being little more than an actor, while Blair knows how to make an entrance he has never learned the art of knowing when its time to leave the stage.

Early in his premiership, we were given signs of Blair’s estrangement from the truth. Remember his appearance on ITV’s ‘Des O’Conner Show’, where he claimed at age 14 to have stowed away on a flight to the Bahamas from Newcastle airport? This despite the fact that in the history of Newcastle Airport there have never been flights to the Bahamas!

Interviewed on radio in 1997, he spoke of his love for football and reminisced about watching his favourite Newcastle player, Jackie Milburn, from a seat behind one of the goals at St. James' Park. Unfortunately for Mr Blair, seats were not installed behind the goals until the 1990s and whoops! Jackie Milburn left the club when the Prime Minister was just four years old.

This Walter Mitty behaviour might be endearing in Blair if he kept it to his personal reminiscences – after all, who hasn’t embellished an anecdote to make it funnier than it actually was? However, when it comes to leading a country to war and young men and women to their deaths under false pretences, this kind of behaviour from our Prime Minister is simply repugnant and reprehensible. 

Serial fantasist or serial liar? I suppose it depends how charitable you feel.  Do we really want either to be running the country, though?

POLICY POSTCARDS

We continue our publication of the SNP Policy Postcards; we will publish a new one every week, each one dealing with a different aspect of SNP policy. The full list can be seen on the SNP website under "Vision" and "Policy".

Higher Education

Investment in Higher Education is an investment in an educated work-force, and therefore the future prosperity of our country.

The Scottish Executive has failed Scotland’s students by failing to scrap the tuition fees imposed by New Labour in London. The Lib Dems have failed to deliver on an election promise, thus betraying Scottish students.

The SNP will use the current powers of the Scottish Parliament to scrap tuition fees (Graduate Endowment.) Independence will allow us to secure the resources to improve the maintenance grant, and the powers to examine the Cubie Report recommendations on the restoration of student entitlement to state benefits.

The average Scottish student leaves University with £12,000 worth of debt, while 1 in 5 are considering dropping out due to financial pressures.

The Lib-Lab coalition has failed to scrap tuition fees. They have merely moved the payment date. A tuition fee is a tuition fee, whether it is paid at the start or at the end of your course.

In the last 3 years, core public funding for Higher Education in Scotland has fallen from 61% to 52% of total income.

SYNOPSIS

EXECUTIVE FORCED TO U-TURN OVER FISH DEAL
Thu 8 Jan 04

Shadow Fisheries Minister Mr Richard Lochhead MSP today welcomed news that Ross Finnie is to seek the re-opening of the recently agreed EU fisheries deal. Commenting, he said:

"The Executive has been forced to admit that far from being a victory, this deal is a disaster for our fishing industry. Ross Finnie is now talking of re-opening the deal. Whether he calls that a renegotiation or a tidying up really doesn't matter. What is important is that he dumps this disastrous deal and allows our fishing communities access to our traditional fishing grounds.

"The Executive's failure to even understand the basics of the deal they agreed were starkly revealed by the First Minister himself today. He has been forced to admit that he had misled Parliament over Haddock quotas. I don't think he meant to do this; he simply didn't know what he was talking about. That is frankly unforgivable."

Ireland's EU Presidency welcomed by Welsh and Scots
Wed 14 Jan 04

Scottish and Welsh nationalist Euro-MPs have warmly welcomed the Irish government's Presidency of the European Union, whose programme was set out today by Irish Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern at a keynote speech in the European parliament. Euro-MPs Jill Evans (Plaid Cymru) and Ian Hudghton (Scottish National Party) praised the Irish premier's speech as a 'breath of fresh air' after the 'arrogance' of Silvio Berlusconi's leadership under the previous Italian EU presidency.

Ian Hudghton MEP (SNP) commented:

"The Irish presidency, viewed from a Scottish point of view, demonstrates very clearly why Scotland would be better off independent. Ireland, a smaller country than Scotland will be setting the agenda and leading the EU decision-making process, while Scotland does not even have a vote in the Council of Ministers.

Ireland will lead the process of welcoming ten new member states - many smaller than Scotland - into the EU. These new members will have full rights of participation including votes on Fisheries Policy, while Scotland is a mere observer.

I wish Ireland success in its presidency and look forward to the day when an independent Scotland takes its rightful place in the world - better off independent!"

EWING STUMPS PM ON TUITION FEES
Wed 14 Jan 04

During Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons today , the Scottish National Party's Westminster Education Spokesperson Ms Annabelle Ewing MP challenged Tony Blair on the issue of top-up tuition fees.

Ms Ewing asked Mr Blair:

"The Prime Minister will be aware that Ireland abolished tuition fees in the 1990s, and indeed is one of the countries with a higher education participation rate of 50 per cent. If the Irish can do it, why can't the Prime Minister?"

In response, Tony Blair said that: "Each country has got to make up its own mind" - and cited examples of other countries, but failed to refer to Ireland.

Ms Ewing said:

"Tony Blair had no proper answer to the question - "If Ireland can do it, why can't he?"

ABBEY SHUNTS 900 JOBS TO GLASGOW
Wed 14 Jan 04

Shadow Enterprise and Economy Minister Mr Jim Mather MSP has called for greater tax powers for the Scottish Parliament to grow the Scottish economy following the announcement today that 900 Scottish Provident jobs will be shunted from Edinburgh to Glasgow by the finance giant Abbey.

Mr Mather said:

"I am sure that this was never the way that Glasgow hoped to grow its international financial services district.

"While I am sure that we should be grateful that these jobs are to remain in Scotland, we can also be sure that relocation will cause massive upheaval and be deeply unattractive to many Abbey staff, who face a much longer commute or a disruptive home move.

"We have the skills, the international reputation for integrity and reliability and a world full of people well-disposed towards Scotland. So there is no shortage of opportunities if the conditions are right.

"Therefore, if these decisions bring us a little bit closer to a majority of Scottish people realising that we would be better off with the full powers to compete and grow, there might be some good come that will come out of this painful period".

SALMOND PAYS TRIBUTE TO TAM DALYELL
Tue 13 Jan 04

The Scottish National Party leader Mr Alex Salmond MP today [Tuesday] paid a warm tribute to Linlithgow MP Tam Dalyell on the news that he is to retire from the House of Commons at the next General Election.

Mr Salmond - who was born and brought up in Linlithgow - said:

"Tam is one of the outstanding parliamentarians of his generation. He is very much a one-off, and as a parliamentary performer he has had few rivals.

"Although we have disagreed on many things over the years, we have agreed on a great deal more. And I have never been in any doubt about the absolute integrity that Tam has brought to his job as a Member of Parliament, and the fearless way he has been prepared to pursue the issues in which he believes.

"I have known Tam first as a constituent and subsequently as a parliamentary colleague, and I wish him and Kathleen well for the future."