Mike Small's blog

Last weeks announcement by the MoD that Scotland would now be the location for the entire nuclear submarine fleet couldn't have come at a worse time. The Scottish people don't want it, the military doesn't want it, now even the Tories don't want it! So why as they face meltdown in the polls are Labour, pursuing  a policy opposed by four out of five of the Scottish electorate?

This week the MoD announced:  ‘Ministry of Defence documents suggest that the seven Trafalgar class submarines currently based in Devon will be relocated to Faslane on the Gare Loch near Glasgow by 2015′. But earlier in the same week another general, Sir Hugh Beach, the former deputy commander-in-chief of UK land forces, summed up the UK's Trident missile system succinctly: "It's no bloody use. Let's not waste money on it." (letter to The Times on 16 January 2009)

Another of the top brass, Lord Bramall, has also recently  stated: "Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently face or are likely to face, particularly international terrorism. Our independent deterrent has become virtually irrelevant except in the context of domestic politics."

This has been a packed month of intrigue and shifting sands in UK constitutional politics, starting with news that polls show support for Independence stiffening not collapsing in recession - and culminating in this weeks (conspicuously under-reported) visit of the First Minister to the USA , and today’s strange conversion of all political parties around ‘Devolution Max’ or is it ‘Independence Lite’?

The much traduced Calman Commission has been faced with the
conundrum of being meaningless or being a thorn in the side of Brown’s
attempt to rule Britannia.

Just as the ‘downturn’ – the euphemism we are all still coyly
clinging to - has revealed the relations between us and the banks, the
‘regulators’ (sic) and the State, the ongoing constitutional
disassemblage is revealing the relationship between Labour, the media
and the British Establishment.

Today as Radio 4
reported the meeting between Gordon Brown and the leaders of the
devolved nations, here’s how David Thompson reported the scenario:
“All sides taking part in today’s meeting say it won’t be about banging
tables or banging heads together. But while there may be a desire to
reach consensus, significant divisions do exist. Gordon Brown wants the
UK Govt to make efficiency savings worth £5 billion pounds. The SNP
Govt says that would mean £500 million in Scotlands budget and would be
economic madness. The other devolved administrations are also opposed.
The Scottish Govt is also talking about greater - and ultimately - full
control of Scotland’s finances, a demand rejected by Gordon Brown.
Todays meeting in Downing Street will test whether Welsh, Scottish and
Northern Irish leaders can put party politics to one side and work with
the British Govt to protect the UK as a whole from the global economic
crisis.”

You’ll note that in BBC Editorial analysis the leaders of Wales,
Northern Ireland and Scotland don’t represent the democratically
elected will of their nations but narrow party politics. Britain is the
one and only common arena, and to think otherwise is regressive
parochialism.

It’s worth transcribing in full because it exposes an extraordinary
level of anglocentricity in our notionally ‘national’ media (paid for
by us all). The view given by the Today programme is of course
jaundiced in the extreme, but is also overtaken by events. How will
today’s emerging consenus between all parties in Holyrood square with
this mornings report? As the Scotsmans Political Editor Hamish McDonell
wrote: “Radical changes to the Scottish Parliament – including
the addition of sweeping new financial powers – appeared inevitable
last night, after both Labour and the SNP announced major reviews of
their approach to the devolution settlement.”

The SNP are clearly thinking fiscal autonomy will be further
stepping stones to independence, while the Liberals and the Labour are
presumably assuring themselves it will assuage nationalist fervour.
What does Gordon Brown think, and how will this play with his ongoing
if incoherent Britishness project?

Death of the Scottish Press
The role of the media in all of this is crucial, and not just the
haplessly English Radios 1 through 6 and Televisions equivalent. This
week the Scottish Press, a bastion of Unionism, announced to anyone who
was still interested that it was folding like a discarded Sunday Post.
As Christopher Harvie wrote presciently
in the Guardian not so long ago, “High time to assist the slump in
taking a meat-cleaver to the established media and its daft cults of
celebrity…With any luck, the present downturn will last long enough to
wreck the economics of the conventional press and its ganglions.” Too
true.

Things may get worse not better, as Kevin Williamson points out at The Scottish Patient looking at the new editor of the Scotsman.

This week the Sunday Mail and Daily Record reported job cuts of 70, just after the unthinkable – the merger of the Scotsman and the Herald
was seriously suggested by a former editor of the Edinburgh paper. The
Scottish Press may be suffering the same crisis of the digital age but
it suffers too from having no owner or publisher willing to back the
independence line suported by – at last showing a growing 44% of the
nation.

The Times - to its credit – ran a story last week that exposed one
of the greatest myths of British Politics, that the Labour Party ‘gave’
Scotland devolution. This is a nonsense. The Labour Party and the
British State opposed it since the early 1970s and were forced to
concede devolution by a realist faction within the party and an
overwhelming civic society movement. The story, ‘Secret plan to deprive independent Scotland of North Sea oil fields’ written
by Magnus Linklater and George Rosie exposes documents detailing secret
government plans in the 1970s to prevent Scotland laying claim to North
Sea oil.

The lengths to which the British State and the Labour Government
were to go to prevent the will of the Scottish people being expressed
makes extraordinary reading, for anyone not familiar with this history.
One Treasury official even proposed that a local campaign for
independence in Orkney and Shetland should be encouraged so that
Scotland would be denied access to more than half the North Sea oil.

In a neat contemporary twist, among those advising Labour ministers
was Sir David Walker, who is investigating the banking crisis for the
present Government. As assistant secretary at the Treasury, he wrote in
May 1975 that “progress toward devolution should be delayed for as long
as possible”.

The Times story about the UK Governments plot to derail the SNP’s
“It’s Scotland’s Oil” campaign during the 1970s - actually appeared
first on BBC Alba. ‘Dìomhair’ (Secret), produced by independent TV
production company, Caledonia TV, was written by George Rosie. Dìomhair
revealed how, for more than half a century, successive Conservative and
Labour Governments set aside their antipathy to share a common agenda:
stopping the march to independence.

As one nationalist commentator wrote: “If you missed it first time
around, you can see it again on BBC Alba, (if you can receive it) on
March 6th at 9PM. What chance Newsnight Scotland doing their own
special investigation, like the one they did recently about the rise of
Anti Englishness? Don’t hold your breath.” The point he is making is
that BBC Alba, Scotland’s Gaelic channel, isn’t available on Freeview,
unlike such cultural necessities as Smile TV, Heat and QVC.

Plus ca change. Dirty Tricks are more subtle these days.

* Secret

Mike Small (Fife, Bella Caledonia): Last week's lost cause is this week's cause celebre. Mr Bean - virtually laughed out of office two weeks ago - is this week's giant of fiscal rectitude bestriding the world stage like a colossus of economic management. Inconvenient truths like the role New Labour played in the deregulation of goods and services, the 'liberation' of the Bank of England or support for the policy of basing your economy on spiralling housing prices, are swept aside in the glib wave of back-slapping that is sweeping the political commentariat.

The media is fickle, not feral.

Gleefully Jim Murphy the new Scottish Secretary mocks the SNP with reference to the 'arc of insolvency', a reference to the 'arc of prosperity' that the SNP have used to describe Iceland, Ireland and Norway. The problem with Labour's new found chutzpah is that they are treading on thin ice. The markets are faltering, the terrain unpredictable. Just as the SNP's original triumvirate of Ireland, Iceland and Norway was a too-convenient set, it equally fails as an example of why Scotland must be held to the Union. Norway is doing fine in the financial crisis, Iceland is not. The scale and impact of crisis has little or nothing to do with the size and constitutional make-up of the country involved.

Mike Small (Fife, Bella Caledonia): Yesterday the date for the Glenrothes by-election was (finally) announced.As last week there was near unanimous approval amongst the commentariat that Brown was doomed, now, after a wee snog on stage he's (apparently) safe as houses.

Commentators huddle together in packs, and the swing is not contained to Westminster groupies.

BBC Scotland's own Brian Taylor writes: 'The prospect that defeat in Glenrothes might finish off the PM seems to have receded. Not because anything has changed in Glenrothes but because things have changed inside Labour. Few expect a challenge to Mr Brown, given the economic climate, whatever political triggers are made available by the electorate."

Mike Small (Fife, Bella Caledonia):The collapse of the financial markets, industries and associated ‘businesses’ presents us with a great opportunity as a world society. As the veil is lifted revealing the reality behind the fictional economy on which our lives are dependent, a number of compelling options emerge.

The first, and most appealing is to continue as if nothing has happened, perhaps offering some minor regulatory tweaks, some admonitions to a few naughty individuals and ‘move on’. This is the systemic response. This is business as usual, and is the most likely, though the least credible outcome. Almost everyone at a UK level, Tory-Labour, Liberal, minus a few squawks here and there is coalescing around this brutally inadequate consensus.

Mike Small (Fife, Bella Caledonia): One of the problems for Labour in Scotland is that daily civic society experiences some cultural debate about our future. This week those compiling the next Scottish census proposed that people should be asked to choose between Scottish or British in the section on ethnic background. On Wednesday it was announced that, in a cost cutting measure, all Scottish rolling stock would be re-branded in a saltire livery whatever their parent company, to stop expensive makeovers.