Gerry Hassan's blog

In a series of four newly commissioned essays to mark the opening of the SNP's Annual Conference in Inverness, the party's 75^th anniversary and the publication of the first ever study of the contemporary party, ‘The Modern SNP: From Protest to Power' this week, OurKingdom brings together four commentators on the changing nature of the politics of Scotland and the UK.

An OurKingdom symposium: see also articles by James Mitchell, David Torrance and Gareth Young

The SNP Annual Conference opens in Inverness on Thursday with the party in good mood: two and a half years into the first SNP administration, seen by most as competent and successful.

The party has a sense of purpose. Alex Salmond is a popular First Minister, leading a talented ministerial team - Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney, Fiona Hyslop, Kenny MacAskill, Mike Russell and others.

Underneath this sense of success and progress what has the SNP achieved, what has it not achieved, and what future challenges await it in office?

The three UK party conferences have now passed and the parties laid out their stalls. The countdown to the election has begun with only seven months to the start of the formal campaign next spring.

Cameron, Brown and Clegg all stressed their character, vision and engaged in the sort of political cross-dressing that has become the fashion following on from Tony Blair.

What was more revealing than what they said was what they didn't say. We know Gordon Brown can't say ‘sorry', but Tony Blair never apologised for Iraq and sort of got away with it. David Cameron could not find it in himself to mention once ‘bankers', ‘markets' or the phrase ‘market failure'.

All three party leaders said little of substance on the domestic crisis which erupted a few months ago, namely the crisis of our political system begun by the expenses scandal. This should be natural territory for the reforming Lib Dems, but Clegg isn't bursting with rage. Brown commented in passing, while Cameron devoted the most words, but neither dwelt on it, or saw the all-encompassing nature of it.

Brown declared that ‘politics need morals' and made a series of proposals such as allowing voters to recall MPs and a referendum on the Alternative Vote, which may have begun a serious debate if he had made them when he first became Prime Minister, but look opportunist ‘window dressing' now.

Cameron talked in a more rhetorical style of the age of ‘political disillusionment' and his remedies, cutting MPs pay, pensions and their numbers, a clarion call even more threadbare than Brown's, but with populist sensibility.

"Do you like Phil Collins? I've been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, Duke. Before that, I really didn't understand any of their work. Too artsy, too intellectual. It was on Duke where Phil Collins' presence became more apparent. I think "Invisible Touch" was the group's undisputed masterpiece. It's an epic meditation on intangibility. At the same time, it deepens and enriches the meaning of the preceding three albums.

Christy, take off your robe. Listen to the brilliant ensemble playing of Banks, Collins and Rutherford. You can practically hear every nuance of every instrument. Sabrina, remove your dress. In terms of lyrical craftsmanship, the sheer songwriting, this album hits a new peak of professionalism. Sabrina, why don't you dance a little. Take the lyrics to "Land of Confusion." In this song, Phil Collins addresses the problems of abusive political authority. "In Too Deep" is the most moving pop song of the 1980s, about monogamy and commitment.

The song is extremely uplifting. Their lyrics are as positive and affirmative as anything I've heard in rock. Christy, get down on your knees so Sabrina can see your ass. Phil Collins' solo career seems to be more commercial and therefore more satisfying, in a narrower way. Especially songs like "In the Air Tonight" and "Against All Odds." Sabrina, don't just stare at it, eat it. But I also think Phil Collins works best within the confines of the group, than as a solo artist, and I stress the word artist. This is "Sussudio," a great, great song, a personal favorite."

(Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho, Paladin 1991)

Dave Cameron has already created a bit of a controversy with his remarks earlier in the year that he was a bit of a Smiths and Jam fan in his youth and to this day. He realised that this might be his equivalent of a Clause Four moment, commenting about his love of Morrissey and Paul Weller, ‘I'm a big fan, I'm afraid. Sorry about that'.

This brought a fascinating set of responses. Weller got irate asking if Dave was ‘thick', while Morrissey was more diplomatic refusing to comment. The indie establishment and cognoscenti - who define themselves around two watersheds, post-77 and 1980s indie - were outraged.

They have already lost the battle to maintain the purity of post-77 and ‘Year Zero', the ubiquitousness of the Sex Pistols and Clash diluting their meaning. Still they thought they had 1980s indie as their own and could still act as the guardians of the Holy Grail of this era.  They can thus feel horror at this latest Tory onslaught!

This was their decade and their counter-story to the mainstream Tory account of the decade being taken from them. It was whether Cameron knew it or not a direct act on the self-importance and identity of such people. First, the miners, next the NME version of the 1980s. It is so insensitive!

Cameron's comments show that people could just listen to music and groove to it, get their air guitar out, swing their hips and sing along and have a good time. They can do so, and no matter the earnest intent of the artist to convey a certain meaning, they can completely understand it, or understand it in another way. That's not right or wrong, just kind of natural.

Then along comes this week's, ‘When Boris Met Dave' (More 4), a pretty poor, aimless, meandering and in places quite funny ‘drama' about when David Cameron and Boris Johnston were at Oxford University together, in the posh ‘bad boy' club, the Bullingdon Group - of the famous photo of Dave and Boris arrogantly standing in their coats and tales.

It is not often that you come across an essay so wrong-headed, opinionated and inaccurate that it is worth drawing attention too - in part because the writer is one with an influential past, and because it validates English and centre-left xenophobic traditions of Scotland and these isles.

That sadly is the fate of Tom Gallagher's The Scottish Piazza Echoes to the Liberation Beat, published on Harry's Place. Gallagher has written several books on Scottish society over the years, albeit all of them twenty years ago, but his Glasgow: The Uneasy Piece (Manchester University Press, 1987) - a book on the scar of sectarianism and its interface with politics - was in my mind an undoubted masterpiece.

Gallagher's essay is to mark the publication of his The Illusion of Freedom: Scotland under Nationalism (Hurst and Company, 2009) - an ambitious, if fatally flawed book that I will return to at a later date and more fully review. Suffice to say his book is in his own words an attack on the SNP and Scottish nationalism. It is a book which tries to cover far too much ground, as if Gallagher wanted to cram everything into one book. Thus it tries to be a complete history of ‘Scotland's status as a managed society' since 1707, and the SNP's complicity in this in the present day.

Independence would be ‘deference to a governing class and to newly invented traditions' in a ‘relatively poor nation' which would be ‘the equivalent of a multi-cultural left-leaning London borough having a seat at the United Nations'.

These above quotes are just from the introduction to the book, which he wrote he claims to ‘encourage debate about the political future of Scotland'. Sadly Gallagher has weakened any argument he has about Scottish society and democracy with such inflamed rhetoric and polemic flourishes.

His essay, obviously playing to the prejudices of the London dinner table circles he frequents goes even more over the top than the book. Gallagher is filled with fear of Scotland heading ‘towards a post-British future', and sees Alex Salmond as a populist demigod who is a cross between Hugo Chavez and US President Andrew Jackson with the style of Hughie Green and Jonathan Ross.

Just as British Labour is gearing itself up as best as it can for the forthcoming election, without money, resources or much hope - the Scottish Labour Party is doing the same. The attack lines are being drawn and the old battle cries dusted off and rehearsed.

The Monday of Labour Party Conference saw addresses from Jim Murphy, Scottish Secretary of State, and Iain Gray, technically, ‘Leader of the Labour Group of the Scottish Parliament' lay out the ground of Labour versus Conservative and the supposed irrelevance of the SNP in the forthcoming Westminster elections.

Murphy's address reflected his part reflective, part fighting talk, part gallows humour that he has been showing these last few months, a mood that does allow you on some level to make the best of a bad situation. Murphy has survived three times in a once Tory and heavily marginal seat - East Renfrewshire (current Labour majority 6,657) and proclaimed 'I quite enjoy being the underdog', in Mandelson style - only with a bit more conviction.

Gordon Brown's latest ‘fight-back' began with his interview with Andrew Marr this morning on the opening day of Labour Conference. It was fitting that as the two Scots sat in one of the Brighton seafront hotels the main backdrop between them was the withered wreck of the Brighton West Pier.

A more fitting symbol of post-war Britain it would be hard to find. The West Pier was damaged in the Second World War, had a seedy post-war afterlife, was finally shut in 1975, and was the victim of several fires which finally destroyed most of it in 2003. Its redevelopment plans have been the focus of interminable planning and development disputes, and its future, if it has one, is as some Richards Rodgers style ‘i360' tower.

Brown shares many characteristics with the West Pier, having weathered great storms and turbulence over the years, while his future is openly in doubt. The Marr interview showcased the best Brown can aspire to in his late post-New Labour phase, ragged, tired, but trying his best in his tone and smile to adapt to the personality driven, celebrity politics which his predecessor did so much to entrench. Even Brown at his best though cannot do sweetness and light, and what he certainly still can't do is humour or self-depreciation that Blair was so adept at.

If this isn't an attempt at a complete overhaul and reinvention of Brown, much time, effort and rehearsal has been spent on Brown's new lines and themes. He had new proposals to get tough on bankers' bonuses with a new Business and Financial Services Act and recognised that one of the failures of the past twelve years had been that there had been ‘too little regulation' and there should have been ‘more'.

His plans he claimed ‘represent the toughest action of any country in the world', a recognition that ‘enough is enough' and that large parts of the banking sector just didn't get it! Several times he referred to not going back to ‘the bad old days' and ‘terrible old days': those being ‘the old days' of the Blair-Brown dual monarchy of lecturing the world on ‘the British economic miracle' which turned out to be a mirage.

Michael Portillo, once arch-Thatcherite and now permanent member of the chattering classes and the world of TV luvvies, themed an episode of his ‘Dinner with Portillo’ series on ‘Why Should We Care About Scottish Independence?’.

Drawing together seven middle-aged, middle class men like himself for some fine food and wine and the occasional conversation, the group hardly embodied ‘social inclusion’ - ranging from members of the British establishment such as Timothy Garton Ash and Vernon Bogdanor to media wannabees such as Rod Liddle and Hardeep Singh Kohli. Making up the numbers were Henry McLeish, briefly First Minister of Scotland, Michael Fry, historian and Tom Clougherty, of the Adam Smith Institute. With the exception of the last person, this was a world of aged, comfortable, arrogant men, undisturbed by the tiresome tirades of any opinionated women.

Portillo opened by proclaiming his ‘Scottish credentials’, his mother being from Kirkcaldy, the home of Adam Smith and adopted home of Gordon Brown. He declared himself unbothered and unphased by the whole idea of Scottish independence.

The discussion then staggered into a non-conversation which showed the problems and limitations of a pan-British discussion about Scottish independence. This then got stuck on misapprehensions of what the UK is. Garton Ash and Bogdanor, whatever their liberal establishment views, vainly tried to draw lessons from history, while Fry played his troublemaker role. Kohli and Liddle felt content to make playful, ignorant or inaccurate comments hoping to provoke, entertain or just earn their food and fee!

Another indication of the unravelling of the British political system as we have known it is the crisis Welsh Labour has found itself in - along with Scottish Labour. Both of these were two of the main pillars of the British Labour Party and hence the Labour story of Britain, and with it of course, ‘the British dimension' of Labour.

The crisis of Welsh Labour is the subject of a short, revealing piece by Martin Kettle in Wednesday's Guardian. He explores the declining politics of Welsh Labour hegemony - which saw the party win a majority of votes in more than half post-war contests in Wales, and as recently as 1997 55%.

Welsh Labour used to know how to construct a pan-Welsh coalition, admittedly concentrated in the urban South, but speaking for all Wales. The party did have numerous limitations in its politics: the dominance of the Taffy Tammany Hall tendency, a problem with pluralism which saw it resist PR for the Welsh Assembly, and a nervousness and resistance to many aspects of ‘Welshness'. Yet for the most part, the party managed to straddle these problems, and speak for ‘the three Wales', of the South, North and West.

At a time when the eyes of the world have been upon Scotland, its government and Parliament due to the al-Megrahi case, it is an appropriate moment to ask what happened to the Scots tradition of radicalism.

Scotland once had, and still has to an extent, a reputation as a left-wing land, a place of radical politics and possibilities, and is still talked about by some as being a ‘socialist country’.

Yet if this were the case where are the current generation of Scottish radicals who would give vent to such ideas, questioning those in power and vested interests, slaying orthodoxies and complacencies and exposing our silences and omissions from the past and present? Who are today’s radicals, not necessarily of left or even right, but of free spirit and mind?

Who are the modern day equivalents of such titans as Adam Smith and David Hume, Keir Hardie and John Maxton, Patrick Geddes and R.D. Laing? Scottish Labour had an explosion of talent in the 1970s and 1980s, as the old city fathers were challenged by a new generation of talent of the likes of Robin Cook and Gordon Brown. Since then the party has ossified and burnt out with exhaustion on the twin pillars of becoming the Scottish political establishment and twelve years in UK office.

The Nationalists have tapped into a generation of people who would previously have found a natural home in Labour but they have made it their business to be respectable and a party of government. The Scottish Tories are still earning their spurs back after the long shadow of Thatcherism; the Lib Dems are more a collection of individuals. The implosion of the Scottish Socialists lost a whole spectrum of radical opinion a voice, while the Greens are too small and polite to be radical and serious.

The world of politics and history sometimes throws up by complete accident fascinating and revealing coincidences. So it proved on the 70th anniversary of Britain and France reluctantly declaring war on Nazi Germany after Hitler had taken the decision two days previously to unleash his war machine on Poland. On such a day laden with history the SNP administration fired the first official shots in the referendum on Scottish independence. Alex Salmond, First Minister, committed his administration to bring forward a bill to hold a referendum in the next year.

More than the date of September 3rd connects these two separate events for they tell us something profound about the nature of Britain, what it became, the state it is currently in and what fate awaits it in the near-future.

The idea that the British government and the Libyan government would sit down and somehow barter over the freedom or the life of this Libyan prisoner and make it form part of some business deal ... it’s not only wrong, it’s completely implausible and actually quite offensive.

Peter Mandelson, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council (quoted in the Sunday Times)

Nobody doubted that Libya wanted BP and BP was confident its commitment would go through. But the timing of the final authority to spend real money on the ground was dependent on politics.

Sir Richard Dalton, former British Ambassador to Libya (quoted in the Sunday Times)

The al-Megrahi affair has just entered a new phase – revealing the character of the British state, its brutal pursuit of realpolitik defined by the promotion of what it sees as UK business interests, and a shameless perfidy whose accompanying protestations of propriety scarcely veil its ethical vacuum.

The British Government has been shown to be more than willing in bending over to Libyan and British commercial interests and the business of doing business, putting this well above principle, human rights concerns and even any sense of consistency in its own position in negotiations.

The leaders of the British state have been exposed as cynical and debased. The events which have been revealed today should shock a genuine democratic system, lead to a national outcry, high profile resignations, and an inquiry motivated by the recognition that things need to change. This being Britain where its political, media and corporate classes have a brazen shamelessness, none of this will happen.

The fallout after the al-Megrahi case continues to show that devolution – and Scottish devolution in particular – has the capacity to show the limited understanding that many have about the current constitutional state of the UK. Worse than that for many this boils over into resentment, anger and rage, which at points is directed at the Scottish Government and Parliament, and sometimes ‘Scotland’ as an entity.

James Macintyre’s short piece in today’s New Statesman, ‘The Folly of Devolution’, is a breathtaking example of incomprehension falling into anger and hyperbole. He states of the al-Megrahi release decided by the SNP administration:

This is precisely the sort of decision that should be taken – and be seen to be taken – at a national level by the British government, not by nationalists in one part of the UK

This is part of the typical British/Westminster gaze that the ‘little platoons’ and troublemakers are nationalists, while the big, grown-ups are serious and statesmanlike, rather than British nationalists. Macintyre’s next sentence is a gem:

But devolution has led to a grave failure of accountability.

This sentence in its assumptions does not understand the nature of the UK or Scotland’s place in it. The Scottish legal and judicial systems, indeed Scotland as a place of autonomy which has often escaped or put itself beyond Westminster’s reach, did not arrive with devolution. As long as the parliamentary union between Scotland and England has existed, Scotland has had such a position in the UK.

The decision by the Scottish Government to release the convicted Libyan bomber Abdulbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person who has been found guilty for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 which blew up over Lockerbie, has had huge consequences, both domestic - in Scotland and the UK, and internationally.

The ripples and waves caused by the Scottish Government's release of al-Megrahi are manifold, and show how Scotland, its statehood and nationhood are misunderstood - from Scotland, to the UK and further afield.

Firstly, the recall of the Scottish Parliament on August 24^th - only the third ever such occasion (the other two being the deaths of Donald Dewar and the Queen Mother) was filled with drama. Kenny MacAskill's statement was simple and factual; his tone appropriately sober.

He declared that he would ‘live with the consequences' of his decision, which he had taken ‘without reference to political, diplomatic or economic considerations'. None of the three main opposition party leaders laid a killer punch on MacAskill. Iain Gray, Scots Labour leader, droned on in his charisma free way, talking of the shame of seeing ‘our flag' used in celebrations in Tripoli. Gray managed to combine low-keyness with before hand going over the top, calling for Alex Salmond's head and leaving no place to retreat if he does not next week table a vote of no confidence.

Annabel Goldie, Tory leader, affirmed that MacAskill's decision was not made in the name of Scotland, but of the SNP administration, and Tavish Scott for the Lib Dems noted the harm done to Scotland internationally. All three seemed content to make cheap political points rather than gather more political information about the decision, and while the reliably out-of-touch Magnus Linklater bemoaned MacAskill's ‘solid if uninspiring performance', MacAskill came out with his reputation enhanced.

OurKingdom on Lockerbie and the devolution of justice: see also Tom Griffin on Justice devolved and Guy Aitchison on Tory reactions

Scotland’s Government arrived on the international stage with the announcement by SNP Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the one person convicted of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 and the death of 270 people over the Scots town of Lockerbie on that fateful day, December 21st 1988, was being released.

MacAskill took his responsibilities seriously and appropriately, realising the importance of his decision with the eyes of the world on him. In his demeanour, statement and subsequent interviews, MacAskill seemed to display a sense of acknowledging all this, choosing his words carefully, avoiding populist rhetoric or playing to the ‘Daily Mail’ brigade (more of which later) – in the way Westminster Home Secretaries and New Labour Home Secretaries in particular – have done.

He did not buckle under considerable international pressure. The US administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and seven US senators including John McCain and Ted Kennedy, had piled pressure on the Scottish Government.

MacAskill made his decision on ‘compassionate grounds’, releasing a man who has been convicted of a heinous, horrid crime, but who has always protested his innocence. His release may prevent any further investigation into what really happened with Pan Am flight 103 and an examination of the doubts about al-Megrahi’s conviction.

Vernon Bogdanor, The New British Constitution, Hart Publishing, 319 pp., £17.95.

James Mitchell, Devolution in the UK, Manchester University Press, 216 pp., £60.

Anthony King, The British Constitution, Oxford University Press, 432 pp., £25.

Peter Kellner, Democracy: 1,000 Years in Pursuit of British Liberty, Mainstream, 540 pp., £25.

As a theoretical proposition the United Kingdom would probably win few converts because it seems such a fragile concoction. Imagine the reaction to a political scientist who proposed to create a country from the following design: three and a half nations, multiple religions, a number of languages, two separate legal systems and the whole thing ruled by a highly centralised government in the city in the south of the largest nation.

Kevin Morgan and Geoff Mungham, Redesigning Democracy: The Welsh Labour Party and Devolution, 2002, quoted in Mitchell, p. 219.

‘What is the United Kingdom?’ Despite a decade of incoherent devolution and constitutional change this question is seldom asked inconventional political or mainstream public discussions. Even the related debates on Britishness often seem to take as given the nature of the UK.

David Cameron has promised a new kind of Conservative politics: compassionate, ‘voting blue, going green', concerned about poverty and the ‘broken society'.

Pivotal to this has been a ferment of ideas in Conservative circles and in particular debates about ‘Progressive Conservatism' and ‘Red Toryism'. The two strands were brought together, the former a high profile project at Demos, the UK think tank, and the latter, an intellectual excursion by Phillip Blond, theologian and thinker, who headed the former, and was identified with the latter. Last week the two separated as Blond parted company with Demos.

This has significant wider consequences, weakening the ground for those pushing for a radical Tory agenda and gives more clout to those calling on Cameron to not be too explicit about any of his plans and policies pre-election. It also exposes the chasm between the two variants of Toryism.

Progressive Conservatism has been one of the defining credos of Cameron Toryism. At the launch of the project of the same name at Demos earlier this year, Cameron laid out four progressive principles at its heart. These were a fairer society, one where opportunity is more equal, a greener society, and a safer nation. Cameron explicitly said that these progressive values were ones many people could unite around, showing that ‘in politics most of us are actually fighting for the same things'.

Where he did identify grounds for difference was in the means to advance these - which for Conservatives included decentralising government, using government to strengthen civil society, founding economic and environmental progress on economic growth, and government living within its means.

British politics are in exceptional times. So everyone says. Democracy is in crisis say some; parliamentary democracy is in crisis say others; while others more accurately say that the entire British political edifice is tottering on the point of collapse. Comparisons fill the airwaves: 1832, the Glorious Revolution, the loss of the American colonies, none of which work and just underline that these are indeed unprecedented times.

There is a widespread sense of historical amnesia and a state that doesn't understand itself or its history. Vernon Bogdanor writing in The Guardian on Tuesday states in the second sentence that the last speaker to be removed was John Trevor in 1695 - as indeed the whole commentariat have been saying this week - oblivious to 1707, the creation of the United Kingdom and UK Parliament. What does it say about the UK that one of its leading constitutional experts does not know that Michael Martin is the first speaker of the UK Parliament to be removed?

Then we have the mainstream political classes' suggestions that they could re-order and rewrite the entire political system in the fag-end of this Labour Government as simply as making a Pot Noodle. Labour's playing with the idea of a written constitution has seen this work developed by Jack Straw and a Cabinet Sub-Committee. This shows the complete lack of comprehension of the political class and system on where we are, the scale of change needed and how it might come about.

The week the British political system creaked and cracked under the strain and embarrassment of the self-serving financial actions of politicians across the political spectrum saw David Cameron take his constituency roadshow to the county town of Arbroath.

‘Cameron Direct' (follow link to Tory video of the entire evening) is a Blair-like initiative which sees the Conservative leader tour the country - or the marginal seats of it - offering voters the chance to see him up close if not as he puts it ‘in their living room'.

Arbroath is situated in Angus, a Tory seat until 1987, and now a key Conservative target (no. 39 on their list) which they need to win to form a government and have any respectable representation in Scotland (i.e.: up to a maximum four seats out of 59 where they currently have one). This is a constituency held by the SNP's Michael Weir with a mere 1,601 majority which the Conservative candidate, lawyer Alberto Costa hopes to overturn at the Westminster election.

Held in the Old and Abbey Church Hall nearby Arbroath Abbey, long associated with the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, a packed audience of 180 turned out, mostly retired, respectable good folk of Arbroath, along with a sprinkling of younger fortysomethings and fiftysomethings and the odd one or two even younger.

"The contrast [over the last 25 years] has been between a determined (if stricken) agent of history and a mere sleep-walker. In 1977 the Cold War political palsy still prevailed, a profound inertia favouring all the tropes of states, parties and intellectuals I have described. By 2000 most instinctive allegiance to ‘establishments' had drained away, leaving hollow routines and vacant symbols behind. A combination of official servility with violent socio-economic changes led to universal ‘apathy'; but such withdrawal is also a still voiceless wish for better political things - for democratic nations that peoples can more honourably call their own."

Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, 2003 on the difference between the context of the first and latest edition

Breaking Up Britain summons in its introduction The Break-up of Britain, Tom Nairn's powerful and controversial thesis, written over the course of a series of inter-lapping domestic and global crises in the 1970s and originally published in the year of the Queen's Jubilee.

Here in part lies the problem for the outset. Nairn's thesis was not just a blast from a northern outpost about Scottish nationalism, but a counterblast about the whole edifice. Nairn examined and took apart the English, Welsh and Northern Irish dimensions, while addressing the problematic nature of the British state and irrevocable way in which the European project challenged this and the small nation, little islander British left..