‘Significant’ UK Scientific Breakthrough

Reuters - Details are still sketchy, but, in an astonishing scientific breakthrough, it appears that British scientists have finally discovered the gene that actually prevents Scots from governing themselves.




If confirmed, the project, completed in the final days of the last UK Labour administration, will amount to nothing less than the Holy Grail for those Scots who argue that an independent Scotland would be a violation of the laws of nature. As such it will also be a godsend for those in the UK Labour Party and the Scottish and British media – especially the BBC, the Scotsman, Glasgow Herald and Daily Record – who until now have been forced to argue this without evidence.

Called traitors by their own countrymen, these Scottish ‘unionists’ – an assorted rabble of politicians, hack journalists and second rate economists, all with a vested interest in keeping their jobs in the UK political machine – were last night jubilant that they could finally explain why Scots were able to act as British prime ministers, British Empire governors, founding fathers for the United States, New Zealand and Canada, heads of banks and corporations around the world today, and yet be strangely incapable of running their own affairs.

A visibly shaken Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland and champion of Scottish independence, was devastated at the news.

“It’s a total bombshell. Think of all the years we’ve wasted campaigning for something that was always beyond reach. Of course, we’ll be disbanding the Scottish National Party within a few days. I feel like we’ve let every North British person down. There was just no way we could have known.”

When asked if he had any specific comment on the findings, Salmond was reflective.

“Och, well,” he sighed. “At least this solves the puzzle of what Labour’s Scotland Office was actually doing with its £7.2 million budget. We thought it was trying to prove the existence of alien life, but now we know.”

An ecstatic ex-Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy last night explained the true significance of the discovery, on a hotline from the wilderness:

“It’s what we’ve been saying all along. We’ve finally proved beyond doubt that Scots need exposure to English culture to learn governance, which is England’s gift to the world. Thank God Gordon Brown and I got our English culture from our wives. Without that contact, our genetic makeup would have put us at a serious disadvantage. We’d both be wife-beating alcoholics by now.”

When asked about Scots’ solid record of leadership over the centuries, Mr. Murphy was defiant:

“Yes,” he yelled hoarsely, struggling to be heard over the tundra gale, “but England gave those countries their culture. So indirectly, it’s the English context that Scots needed to succeed, not our genes, which in fact hold us back. It’s only our acquired English culture that allows us to succeed.”

And the fact that Scotland was an independent nation for over eight centuries before the Union, and as such one of the oldest nations on earth? At this point Mr. Murphy seemed to grow irate.

“Look pal, don't give me that medieval pish. We were never a real country. And any real leaders we had all left to settle the Empire. It’s only the genetic dross that’s left.”

When asked if he included himself in this category, Mr. Murphy abruptly terminated the interview.

From the Mouths of Babes

With a cross party UK Parliament committee last week recommending that Britain should adopt Scotland’s price control plans to curb alcohol consumption – the same plans recently voted down by the same parties in the Scottish Parliament – the Scotland Office today hailed the breakthrough as a brilliant example of how the United Kingdom Union still works.

“It’s obvious, when you think about it,” announced Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy. “As everybody knows, Scotland is the only nation in the world lacking the political maturity to govern itself but, like an intelligent child, its parliament does occasionally have good ideas. It makes perfect sense for the legitimate government of Britain to vote down such half-baked legislation in Scotland and to bring it south to the big table and apply to it the intellectual and legal rigour that only the UK legislature can provide.”

Medical experts lined up to back the move. A spokesman for the Scottish Medical Association confirmed his organization’s support for the proposal:

“Without having British legal status, Scots would have ignored the inflated prices imposed by the Scottish legislation, knowing full well the extra money they were paying was not imposed through taxes, but by the crude device of minimum pricing. They would have seen right through it and kept buying booze just as much as before.”

As Murphy explained last night from his spectacular London office:

“Through the Scotland Office, the British government has empowered me to have a watching brief on proposals we routinely vote down in Scotland, in case some of them actually make sense. Westminster has never been shy in adopting good ideas from the regions, and this is the perfect example of how the Scottish devolution settlement makes Britain stronger. By the way, what do you think of the view from my window? Isn’t it super?”

Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish Minister for Health and Wellbeing, reluctantly agreed with the move:

“In spite of what some claim south of the border, this episode has proved how valuable the Scottish Parliament still is to the British Government. We are currently drafting a white paper to present to the Danish, Swedish and Dutch governments to recommend they cease pretending to be real countries with climate summits, Nobel prizes, and international courts of human rights and start drafting legislation that Germany might find useful. It’s such a powerful argument, we’re seriously considering dropping our central policy of independence. I don’t know what we were thinking.”

Is Scottish Unionism Treachery?

Treachery has been a reviled and despised quality as long as history and literature have been recorded. In his Inferno, Dante went so far as to reserve the ninth and lowest circle of Hell for traitors.



The question is: is the language of treason entirely appropriate in a supposedly healthy debate on Scottish independence, considering that the Scots in the Labour Party are not technically betraying their own country by opposing Scottish nationalism?

Nationalists may argue that it is their own people and the nation of Scotland they are betraying, but to the paid-up Labour Unionist, his or her country is the United Kingdom.

What about ‘Vichy’ and ‘Quisling’? Are these charges too strong, considering Scotland is not yet an independent country, and not at war? In the online forums of the press, we often hear these words leveled against Labour politicians – those who would aid and abet London’s continuing colonial control of Scotland for their own personal gain. Personally, I consider Scotland’s SUKCUP press fair game.

But do these words alienate undecided voters, rather than persuade? How much does this level of invective hinder rather than help the cause of Scottish independence?

To help answer these questions, I thought it would be useful to summarize the different forms of traitorous accusation, putting them in their original historical context, to determine if indeed they are appropriate to Scotland today, or simply over the top.



1. Judas


Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus to the Romans soldiers for thirty pieces of silver by identifying him with a kiss. He died alone, probably by hanging himself.

Not particularly relevant to Scotland, since Unionists are quite open in their allegiances. They do not see themselves as traitors to a country which they deny even exists.

Fair enough, I say.

In the same vein, Judas betrayed a friend, whereas Unionists are utterly loyal to their London masters. They may be servile colonial lickspittles in the eyes of nationalists, but they are not betraying any friendships by their actions.



2. Benedict Arnold

American Colonial War of Independence (I refuse to call it a revolution). Arnold was a successful general in Washington’s army who switched sides. Still regarded in American history as the embodiment of treachery. Even though he lived out the rest of his life in Britain, he was never entirely trusted by anyone. He had, after all, fought on the other side first. A reformed rebel is still a rebel.

And the reason he switched sides? Wait for it…he had been passed over for promotion and ordered to repay expenses.



3. Fifth Columnists

Spanish civil war. Not strictly traitors (although they were opposing the elected government in a civil war) but rather an enemy within. In 1936, as four columns of Franco’s fascists approached Madrid, Fascist radio claimed that a ‘fifth column’ of supporters inside the city would help them take it. The campaign failed, and the Spanish government forces held off Franco for three more long years.

The term gained currency during WW2 in relation to the Germans living in Britain. Fearing a ‘fifth column’ within, Churchill gave his famous ‘collar the lot’ command and they were rounded up and held on the Isle of Man until the end of the war. The term is often used in Israeli press today to describe Israeli Arabs, whose loyalties lie with the Arabs in the occupied territories.



4. Quislings

Norway’s greatest ever traitior, Vidkun Quisling, led the Norwegian Nazi Party, and was set up by Germany as Norway’s puppet leader during their occupation. His fate? To be found guilty of high treason and shot as a traitor after the war.

His greatest grammatical achievement was to be both nouned and verbed. One can be a Quisling, or one can quisle. This is a verb that should be revived.

Incidentally, ‘Quisling’ sounds a lot like usling in Norwegian – a slippery, deceitful, slimy person.



5. A Vichy Regime

Also from the Second World War. Still a sore point in French history, and one that excites much scholarly debate. After surrendering in 1940, France agreed to become a client state of Nazi Germany and the central and southern region was left to run its own affairs, unoccupied by German troops, run from the small spa town of Vichy. De Gaulle tried to rally the Resistance from London, but the indisputable fact is that many French collaborated with the Nazis.

I got an interesting take on this from one of my French amis: if France had fought tooth and nail for every centimeter of la patrie, all those pretty French villages that we love to visit on our driving holidays would have been destroyed. He believes that surrender was the best policy at the time to save France’s architecture and culture, given the overwhelming odds stacked against it.

Cheese eating surrender monkeys, or the pragmatic rationalizers of the military reality at the time?


Are these terms appropriate?
From a nationalist perspective, the fifth column idea of an enemy within seems most relevant to the role Unionists play in maintaining Scotland’s position within the Union, but since the relations between Scotland and the rest of the UK are peaceful, it is still too strong.

Indeed, none of these terms would therefore seem suitable for the debate on Scotland’s independence, considering (1) Unionists happen to believe in a different identity, and do not see themselves as traitors, and (2) there is no secessionist war between Scotland and the UK.

That is why I believe that the most appropriate historical equivalent for our Scottish Unionists friends – be they Scots in the Scottish Office, members of the UK government, or Unionists employed by the Scottish TV and print media to talk down Scotland – is that of a besieged colonial elite in its last days of colonial rule.



The Colonial Elite
No colonial power in history ever ruled without the help of a local elite in the subjugation of its own people. The key to understanding their essential bridging function is that the colonial power cannot do it without them, and that once the colonial relationship is over, they are without exception despised by all sides – by both their own people and by the ex-governing power. They are usually remembered by the ex-colonial power as failed flunkies, and by the newly independent country as former collaborators in their own people’s subjugation.

For these reasons, this is the group that always fights hardest for the colonial arrangement and their colonial privileges to continue: they know full well that once independent comes, the game is up. They will become pariahs, despised by all, with no part to play in either the new domestic political scene or in future diplomatic relations between the ex-imperial power and its newly independent former colony. In summary: useless, washed up, redundant.

If there is a violent transition to independence (as there was for the United States, Ireland, Algeria and Kenya) they tend to die either at the hands of their countrymen, or like Benedict Arnold in exile as old men in the imperial homeland, trusted by no one, hated by their countrymen from a distance, passing away in obscurity and exile as bitter, friendless, alcoholics, ‘unwept, unhonoured and unsung’.

If on the other hand the transition is peaceful (as it was for Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and as it will be for Scotland) former Unionists can quickly become absorbed into the political structure of the newly independent country and play their part. The challenge in forming new states is in incorporating all the former factions into the newly independent political spectrum. They are usually intelligent men and women who have much to offer a fledgling nation.

Whether or not they choose to depends a lot on the level of rhetoric used against them in the run up to independence.

It also depends on whether the newly independent nation can ever bring itself to trust them, based on how vehemently they opposed independence as Unionists in the colonial regime.

The Scotland-UK Coalition of Unionist Propagandists (SUKCUP)

The campaign by the Scotland-UK Coalition of Unionist Propagandists (SUKCUP) to discredit the Scottish Government for its compassionate release of Mohmed Al-Megrahi continues apace.

First we had The Herald telling us that the whisky industry would collapse as a result.

Then we had Glen Campbell's BBC Scotland coverage of the release exposed as partisan and rabidly anti-SNP.

Imagine the surprise.

Continuing the pattern, last week The Scotsman ran with this piece on Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill. Apparently, his criticism of Labour hypocrisy on the matter was somehow deemed to be taunting the families of the Lockerbie dead. The Sun would be proud.

Then just yesterday, and plumbing new depths in so-called Scottish journalism, The Scotsman reported that ‘Megrahi outlives six other criminals released on compassionate grounds.’

Think about what this last one means.

Somewhere in The Scotsman offices there is a journalist with a computer spreadsheet listing all the prisoners released on compassionate grounds from Scottish prisons, alongside the number of days since they were released. Each time one of them dies, Al-Megrahi moves up the list and this journalist punches the air and shouts ‘Yes!’, exchanging ecstatic thumbs-up with his boss in the corner.

The SUKCUP minions are now praying he lives as long as possible, if only to prove the Scottish government was incompetent in its decision to release him. Preferably not long enough to clear his name, but maybe just till the referendum, when his on-going ability to breathe will no doubt be useful as an argument against independence.

This continuing campaign on Al-Megrahi got me wondering. Given all these dire predictions about what would happen to us as a result of the release, just how has the decision affected Scotland?

First, and contrary to widespread expectations, it would appear not to have led to US carpet-bombing of Scotland with B52s after all.

Nor, apart from the FoxNews whack-job minority, has it led to much animosity towards Scotland in the US. In fact Susan Boyle seems to be doing just fine.

Nor indeed has it led to a US boycott of Scottish goods. Luckily, no one knows the oil is ours. (Just think how much we would have lost if it were. Whew.) Similarly, our salmon is still in huge demand, and Scotch whisky sales have not plummeted. Considering that the majority of export whisky sales are to non-US markets – with France our biggest customer and China our fastest growing market – this should come as no surprise.

Not that business should have anything to do with such matters. Those worried about the whisky industry should be more concerned about London-based multinationals closing their Scottish whisky plants. The whole Diageo saga - and many others like it - might have been averted had Scotland been independent and able to offer concrete tax benefits for corporations to remain in Scotland. But I digress.

The point is this: not one of the their predictions has come to pass, and yet it continues.

So what is going on?

If it wasn’t clear before it should be now: the distress the SUKCUP flunkies felt most about Al-Megrahi’s release was not that the Scottish Government made a bad call and released a convicted bomber, nor that it didn’t do as the White House demanded and let him rot, not even that it forced UK Labour’s Scottish branch into mental contortions as it condemned what its London masters secretly desired in order to close Tony Blair's dodgy deal in the desert.

As we knew all along, the true source of their discomfort was the fact that the decision was left to Scotland at all.

Once you understand this thinking it all makes sense. You realise that had the decision gone the other way, we would now be getting regular updates on the health of a dying man in Greenock Prison, the Scottish Government would have been portrayed as callous Presbyterians lacking in compassion, but simultaneously labelled as weak for having caved into US pressure to keep him locked up.

That’s the problem with the Scottish Unionist media: they’ve forgotten how to think for themselves. Servitude and obsequious grovelling to London, combined with knee-jerk opposition to everything the Scottish Government does solves every problem.

What these gits don’t get is that fewer and fewer people are listening. If the answer to everything is simply ‘it's the nationalist government of Scotland wot did it,’ people anticipate what you’re going to say before you open your mouth, compensate in advance and work it out for themselves.

It's not working any more.



Coming soon: the Federal UK Coalition of Unionist Patriots.

Why Do People Dislike the English?

I like most English people a lot – especially northerners. To be perfectly honest, though, I can understand why many other nations might not. And I think it’s time Englishmen faced up to why this might be.

Quite simply, I think you bring it on yourselves.


Don’t get me wrong: I have English friends and family who I like very much and consider to be good people. They can be cold fish at times, but are usually ok once they’ve got a drink in them and caught up with the rest of humanity. They accept my patriotism and I accept theirs. They have their history, sports and culture, and we have ours. They like cricket, I prefer golf. Each to his or her own. Most are the salt of the earth and I respect the pride they have in their identity, just as I do for the Dutch, Irish or French.

The key is mutual respect.

I shall stay in contact with my friends and cousins after Scottish re-independence, and expect Scotland and England to remain close, when the hurly-burly’s done.

OK so far? Good.

So what prompted my question at the top of this post?

A couple of days ago I was waiting for friends in a quiet Scottish pub when I overheard three English students at a nearby table putting down Scotland. They didn’t see me and obviously thought the bar was otherwise empty.

Their main grievances were essentially that:

1. Scotland’s cheaper university degrees are subsidised by the English taxpayer. [much frowning and nodding agreement]

2. They shouldn’t have to listen to a heavy Scottish accent on TV – it’s completely unintelligible anyway and comes from ‘somewhere back in the throat.’ [laughter]

3. There is Gaelic content on TV here, and ‘how many people want to see that?’ [more laughter]

4. Scottish TV stations did not show an England football game recently. [incredulous outrage]

5. Why do immigrants in Scotland choose to speak Scottish? ‘As if they’re not at enough social disadvantage already.’ [wise shaking of the heads all round]


These students seemed well-presented and fairly intelligent, so this was not the idle alcoholic ranting of knuckle-dragging lager louts. If I were to categorise them, I would say they were they were the fortunate sons of comfortable, middle class Tory families from the English Midlands. I’d guess they were in first or second year, as they had not yet lost their regional accents (with all their English class associations), one of the principal reasons I believe many English people go to university.

Their opinions got me thinking though: how many English students in Scotland feel this way?

I should mention that there was a Scot in the group. At first he tried to counter these arguments diplomatically, but eventually he lapsed into silence, presumably because either he could not believe his ears or because he didn’t want to fall out with those he considered his friends.

It’s always fascinating to watch the painful transformation of Scottish Unionist into uncompromising patriot, the normal state of affairs in every other country in the world.

It’s like watching an epiphany.

As the time passed, he began to look increasingly uncomfortable. The look on his face became one of quiet, stony rage. Eventually he made his excuses and stood to go. At the doorway, he paused and looked back one last time, and then with an incredulous shake of the head pushed open the door and left.

Yesterday I related this little tale over the phone to my English cousin in Yorkshire, and his reaction was one of ‘you’re kidding’, mixed with cringing embarrassment for the behaviour of his countrymen. Another phrase that sticks in my mind: ‘it’s a bit rich.’

So together we compiled this message to all English students in Scotland who agree with the above sentiments:

1. You come to our country as guests to exploit our lower cost degrees, then complain that you are subsidising them anyway. In effect, you are complaining that you were forced to come all this way north to claim what is rightfully yours. The idea that maybe England should change its own higher education system back to what it was before New Labour fucked it up doesn’t enter your heads. The words ‘hypocrite’ and ‘ingrate’ spring to mind. And by the way, we're subsidising you. Scotland has not received one penny of oil revenue since the discovery of oil in our waters.

2. Why would immigrants to our country not try to fit in and sound like they’re from here? Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings but the Scottish nation and its tongue are outside your medieval forelock-tugging English social hierarchy.

3. Let’s put this into perspective. Having moved to another country, you stick together like flies on shite, then try to change that place to be more like England. And then have the temerity to complain when immigrants from other countries come to England and try to do the same.

4. So the telly wasn’t showing an England football game? Boo fucking hoo. Sorry, but you’re in Scotland now, not England. If you want to watch English games on the box, maybe you should have chosen an English university and paid your self-imposed English university fees.


English students are more than welcome in Scotland, as you will be after Scottish re-independence. Perhaps by then students like you will have learned how to show a little more respect and gratitude, like our Dutch, French and Irish friends.

I’m not holding my breath though. Nor do I wish you to change your behaviour just yet. Because deep down I know that people like you are doing Scotland an invaluable service, converting as you are so many Unionists like your friend to the cause of nationalism and independence.

Keep up the great work, boys.

Are Independence Polls to Be Believed?

In my experience, many Scottish voters are incapable of arguing why they wish to remain British, except to say ‘I just am’: a sentiment I respect, even though I understand their British identity to be a construct.

Originally a compromise to persuade the Celtic fringes of these Isles that they were not being absorbed by England, (No, Britain would be something new, we were told) ‘I just am’ is a measure of the success of both direct and insidious programs of acculturation: of a constant reinforcement of British national identity via the media, newspapers, Battle of Britain movies, sporting events and air-shows on the one hand, and, on the darker side, of officially sanctioned sectarianism. And, it must be acknowledged, the result of so much Scots blood being shed for the British flag in two world wars. It’s not easy giving up a flag if someone in your family died for it.

This must be respected and will only be changed if the British identity becomes devalued, while at the same time the Scottish Government brand is demonstrated to be a viable, credible, inclusive alternative.

Whatever your identity, it must be acknowledged that this is happening.

‘I just am’ is certainly a better argument than any of the half-baked economic, historical or legal bullshit I hear from Unionist politicians and the media.

‘I just am’ explains why it is pointless to try to argue by reason or logic with relatives who are Scottish Unionists – it only ends in tears.

‘I just am’ also explains for me why the few Scots I know who wish to remain part of the UK – non-political types who hate/mistrust the SNP and Alex Salmond for whatever reason – wish to avoid a referendum at any cost: they know it might succeed. They understand perfectly that the avoidance of a referendum is undemocratic, but believe strongly that their fellow Scots are subject to a form of mass delusion from which they must be saved.

Which is why I don’t understand the oft-quoted disparity between those who desire independence and those who demand a referendum. These are the latest figures:

1. Those who really want Scottish independence – 38%

2. Those who really want a referendum on Scottish independence – 60%


So what on earth is going on?

If non-political, pro-UK Scots fear a referendum, how do we account for the more than 20% who want one but do not want independence? Is there a colony of deluded Wendy Alexanders out there I haven't met who want to 'bring it on' thinking they will easily win, or do nationalist-leaning Scots consciously change their answers when polled about their voting intentions?

The most dramatic example I know of this was the Hamas victory in 2006. The polls predicted a Fatah victory, but Hamas supporters had been primed to lie about their voting intentions to pollsters. Result: Hamas were returned as the legitimate government of the Palestinian people in an unforeseen and unopposed victory, and the Israelis and Americans were left stunned.

I am not saying this is happening in Scotland, only that there certainly is a tendency for unassertive Scots to deny they are nationalists, especially when asked by an English or a pro-UK Scottish friend, knowing that it causes friction. I know I used to do it. It’s similar to the tendency of Englishmen to watch their words when a Scot is in the room, saying ‘Britain’, ‘British’ and ‘the UK’, etc., when they really mean ‘England’ & ‘English’. (Don’t deny it!) It’s only natural. We watch our words to avoid controversy.

My question is, is this a factor in the disparity of the numbers above? Do some Scots instinctively play down their patriotism, so as not to offend their English/Unionist friends? Does this mentality spill over into polls on independence? Is Scottish nationalism much more popular than we are led to believe?

And, more importantly, is this what the UK authorities are afraid of?

(Many thanks to the Scottish Patient for the appropriated image!)

Operation 'Scorched Earth': Progress Report

Another fresh leak from my source in Westminster: this was received in the form of a typed memo, printed off on a blank white sheet of paper with no letterhead. The italics refer to handwritten notes made on the page.






Status of Operation 'Scorched Earth'
July 31, 2009
PRESENT: GB, AD, JM.

Only Lurch and Ali-D could make it. Fat George is too busy making bloody FOI requests!

Original Action Plan from July, 2007:

1. Starve Scotland of funds, making it look as if the Scottish Govt {^Executive} is picking fights and always asking for more.
STATUS: Ali-D says he is tightening the screws. It might backfire and lead to independence, but ok so far – and what the hell have we got to lose, anyway? Role of subservient Scottish press proving crucial.

NOTE: Talk to secretary about not using the phrase 'Scottish Govt'.

2. Work with other Unionist parties to block all Nat legislation in their pathetic minority government.
STATUS: Not working! Bastard Tories, Greens and LibDems won’t play ball, and seem to be making deals with the Nats to pander to their electorates.

3. Maintain UK policy of keeping the West of Scotland poor, maintaining Labour loyalty from section of population on benefit.
DANGER. Strategy seems to be failing – no longer possible with Nats in power. Seem to be getting their message through that Glasgow could be better off without us. Nats’ populist health and transport policies a blatant attempt at giving Scotland better services than England!
FURTHER ACTION: Lurch to continue to reveal the cynical nationalist agenda that lies behind the Nats’ economic strategy. If all else fails, see next point.

4. Keep a tight hold of by-elections in Scotland, using ‘enabling’ machinery to win every by-election, regardless of the result.
STATUS: Screwed up in Glasgow East, but Lurch says Glenrothes proves we’ve got it under control.
FURTHER ACTION: Lurch says Nats may be onto our methods, but putting Glasgow North East back to November should give us time to do whatever it takes to ‘take care’ of things.

5. Use influence to persuade UK Electoral Commission to turn a blind eye to postal vote anomalies in Scottish by-elections.
DONE.

6. Ignore all demands for transferring control of Scottish elections to the Scottish Govt. {^Executive}
STATUS: WORKING.

7. Keep the Scottish press churning out our press releases verbatim, with a Labour & Unionist slants on all other news. Impossible in England, but relatively easy in Scotland with fewer outlets and almost no Tory press.
STATUS: NEEDS ATTENTION. Lurch says the blatant Unionist slant in the Scottish press is becoming too obvious. Editors of the Scotsman, Herald and Daily Record are apparently complaining that their unswerving Unionist bias on every subject under the sun is becoming ‘tediously obvious’, alienating traditional readership and causing their circulations to ‘freefall’.
FURTHER ACTION: Lurch to have a word with the editors to explore further ways to secretly subsidise them via advertising.

8. Fund Scottish Unionist bloggers to counter Nat lies about Scotland’s self-sufficiency or any successes of the Scottish Govt {^Executive}.
STATUS: NEEDS ATTENTION. Unionist bloggers complaining they aren’t getting any advertising revenue, which is dependent on their sites getting a high number of hits, which are almost non-existent.
FURTHER ACTION: Lurch to increase subsidies via ‘consultancy fees,’ and find ways to increase hits without more actual readers.

9. Build infrastructure to allow the UK to take the oil direct to England in case the Nats pull off independence.

DONE.

Should teach Scotland not to betray Labour, and prove once and for all that Scotland isn’t a viable state – exactly what we said all along!

10. Grab Scotland’s lottery money so that their Commonwealth Games in 2014 look like mince compared to England’s {^Britain’s} Olympic Games in 2012.
DONE.
NOTE: tell my secretary again the difference between England & Britain. I'm sick of explaining it to the dozy tart!

11. Put pressure on Scottish Sportsmen and women to declare their Britishness. Use press, TV and honours to bring them to heel.
STATUS: WORKING: Pretty Boy Hoy and Murray under control. No longer upsetting the English with their Scottish identity.
FURTHER ACTION: Some sports apparently already separated. Doesn’t seem to be any rule about which ones we compete in as British. Talk to MCG about possibility of England cricket team competing as 'Britain'.

12. Explore ways to get polling companies to issue doctored polls on lack of Scottish desire for independence.
STATUS: BBC seems to have remembered which side their bread is buttered and now pulling their weight. Last poll looked good. Shitting themselves that the Tories will get in and cut them back to just BBC1 and Radio 4! Would serve the back-stabbing bastards right!

13. Scottish press to persuade Scots they don’t want independence, and that a referendum is a waste of time in such difficult/ bountiful economic times (delete as appropriate). Demoralise ordinary Scots into accepting the status quo.
DANGER: Lurch warns that a general engagement in politics in Scotland is growing, and that the message that the referendum is a waste of time is starting to fall on deaf ears.
FURTHER ACTION: Lurch to talk to Fat George about continuing to sow FUD on separation/ isolation/ building barriers /dependency via Scottish press to counter the Nat’s cynical message of re-entering the world community of nations/ removing barriers to dealing with the world directly/ ending oil subsidies to England / Scotland's wealth in natural resources.

14. Spin news to make Scots believe their economy is dependent on British military contracts.
STATUS: NOT SURE IF WORKING. Scottish press playing the game but the Nats are on to us. Lurch recently tried to make it look like he saved a big contract, but Nats successful in showing that Lurch did bugger all. Lurch says Nats got the message through that the Tories could still cancel it.
FURTHER ACTION: Lurch to stay on message. Those with defence jobs might still vote Labour from fear of losing them.

Additional Item

15. Respond to Calman Commission findings.
STATUS: Lurch reassures me his fancy footwork to distance us from calamity Calman is working.
FURTHER ACTION: Delay response to findings until it is forgotten. Leave the Tories to deal with it, which means it'll never happen.

Special Note: All meeting actions henceforth to be approved by PM.
Still waiting for the Pink Baron to grant me an audience. Said he was too busy with all his committee work for ‘stupid Scotch stuff.’ Have left him four messages. Secretaries Brett and Hans say he’s tied up in an important debriefing.

Misc Personal Stuff

1. Talk to EU about possible presidential role after election/referendum defeat.

2. Get CV up to date.

Scotland: The Last Jewel in the Crown

George Monbiot is a thinker with a global perspective I like to follow, and he recently wrote an excellent piece on the long-term reasons for the Britain’s mounting woes. In summary, his scathing theory is that empire-less Britain has run out of foreign peoples willing to be exploited.

“The current political crisis has little to do with the expenses scandal, still less to do with Gordon Brown’s leadership. It arises because our economic system can no longer extract wealth from other nations,” he says.

It’s a plausible hypothesis, both academically honest and one that is sure to make uncomfortable reading for many of those who proudly call themselves British. Many who consider themselves Scots rather than British might take issue with it too, not only with Monbiot’s assertion that the metropolis has run out of colonies, but with his conclusion that the United Kingdom is the final stage of its disintegration. They might argue that – with Scottish independence a real possibility – the UK’s demise still has further to go, and that what remains of London’s imperial structure is now squarely focused on asset-stripping Scotland of her oil revenues while it still can.

The question is, are they right? Has Scotland become little more than a colony for the Southeast of England? Surely, with her own parliament, any argument for Scotland being a colony should now be dead. So what evidence is there for this outlandish claim? As one might expect, their argument hinges on the London’s relentless extraction of Scottish oil and gas wealth and its repeated refusal to reinvest a penny of this windfall back in Scotland. (1) This is a fact whether one agrees with the policy or not, but is it enough to justify calling Scotland a colony?

Most counter-arguments to the argument that Scotland is a colony are poorly thought out and predictable. “What rubbish!” the Scottish Unionist defiantly retorts. He (it’s usually a ‘he’) will tell you how well Scotland’s economy did from the Union (eventually, anyway, after the forty years of ensuing economic stagnation), and how many Scots achieved positions of power in the imperial apparatus which, he will be at pains to point out, was most certainly NOT exclusively English.

Indeed, the Scottish Unionist’s hackles can always be relied upon to rise when an Englishman lazily cites the imperial achievements of England. If the British nationalist (giving the Scottish Unionist his proper name) knows his history, he will explain to the patriotic Englishman that Scotland was in fact on the ‘executive committee’ of the Empire, and remind him politely of imperial power-wielders such as Henry Dundas, key colonial governors like Australia’s Lachlan Macquarie, accomplished military leaders such as Colin Campbell, and great explorers like Alexander MacKenzie, James Bruce and David Livingstone. Desperate to prove his British credentials to his fellow Brit, he will no doubt remind the yawning Englishman of the Thin Red Line at Balaclava, of Colin Campbell’s relief of Lucknow, of the Highlanders who gave Wolfe his victory in Quebec, and of the Lowlanders and Highlanders facing Napoleon as one at Quatre Bras. “Sure,” the Englishman will reply, glancing at his watch. “That’s all very well, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned, they were fighting for England.” And he would be right.

Explorers, governors, missionaries, bureaucrats, merchants, soldiers: this is the glorious (if anachronistic and irrelevant) imperial history to which the Scottish Unionist clings in his denial of Scotland’s need to be a nation in her own right. Having felt some pride in this imperial history myself, it’s hard not to feel at least some sympathy for his predicament: emotionally – and logically – it must be difficult to proudly and patriotically boast to Englishmen and foreigners of Scotland's imperial record, only to deny in your next breath that this pride is in any way nationalistic. Something doesn’t add up.

It’s because it is the rhetoric of the servant.

Scottish nationalists (as opposed to British nationalists - it's a matter of identity, not legitimacy) take a different tack. If anything, they say, Scotland’s magnificent imperial history only proves how far we have fallen, and that Scotland has become a colony since the end of Empire. Some scholars go even further, arguing that – regardless of our leadership role and the personal success of individual Scots in the Empire – Scotland became a colony the day the Treaty of Union was signed. They point to the forced nature of what was an incorporating Union (2), the broad patriotic character of the 1715 Jacobite Rising – following as it did hot on the heels of the Union (3), the expendable nature of the Highland regiments (4), the brutal persecution of Scottish nationalist radicals like Thomas Muir (5), the financing of the Sutherland Clearances from English industrial profits (6), the excessive Scottish war dead throughout the imperial period – including almost a fifth of Britain’s death toll of World War One (7), and Churchill using English soldiers against Scottish strikers in Glasgow in 1919. (8)

All fair points, diehard Unionists will say, balanced by the success Scots enjoyed as equal partners in the Empire. Many Scots may have suffered – as did many of those who Scots helped subjugate (9) – but enterprising Scots did very well from the Empire too.

Perhaps. The role of Scots throughout the imperial period is a complex one, and your opinion on it is probably as much a reflection of your perceived national identity as of your politics, or your opinion of empires in general. That the Scots were enthusiastic participants in colonisation – of our own people as well as others – is undeniable. Let’s just say that there were many shameful aspects in the roles of Scots in the Empire, which may be balanced by philanthropic and benevolent roles played elsewhere. Time and healthy debate will tell.

The problem is that whereas during the imperial period there was a semblance of balance between gain and loss, benefit and detriment, coloniser and colonised, today we see only Scotland’s exploitation. In addition to:

A. The continuing grand larceny of £32billion in tax revenues every year from Scotland’s oil (10), we also see:

B. The pre-meditated, concerted and sustained campaign by the British Government to conceal the true scale of Scottish oil revenues from the Scottish people, using consolidated national tax revenues and the rendering of key government documents ‘Secret’, only recently unearthed by FOI requests. (11)

C. The continuing adversarial attempt to control Scotland via a colonial Governor-General acting as ‘Scottish Secretary’ – in spite of Scotland supposedly having her own government (12),

D. The relocation of ALL British nuclear submarines to Scottish waters near Glasgow (13) – rendering it the principal target in the event of any nuclear strike,

E. The blatant attempt at manipulation of Scottish election results (14),

F. The attempt to dump toxic waste from London’s Olympics in Scotland (15),

G. The seizure of £150 million of Scottish charity money for the 2012 London Olympics – despite Scotland needing the cash for its own 2014 Commonwealth Games (16),

H. The appropriation of Scottish sportsmen and women as British when they succeed – while Englishmen can proudly compete as Englishmen without criticism (17), and

I. The tight control of the Scotland’s print media to deliver an endless subliminal stream of confidence-sapping and contradictory lies about her being better off as part of Britain and her non-viability as an independent state. (18)


Individually, each item may not in itself be sufficient to prove the point, but together they form a strong case that Scotland’s pocket-money parliament in Edinburgh has in fact changed little. Indeed, without any real power to defend the interests of Scotland and her people, it is largely symbolic. And try as they might, it is impossible for Scottish Unionists to blame any aspect of Scotland’s current economic woes on independence: any blame must lie squarely with the status quo, and our on-going membership of the United Kingdom. One well-timed announcement of a ‘saved’ defence contract does not a case for Union make. (19)

That’s why Monbiot is right when he connects the UK’s current troubles with the end of Empire. His only error is to see the process as over, and the lingering mini-Empire of the British state as the smallest unit of post-imperial disintegration. The reality is that the Empire is still alive and kicking, and that Britain’s decline still has one more step to go – the independence of Scotland.







References

(1) Tom Gordon, ‘Alex Salmond Fuels Flames of Oil Crisis,’ TimesOnline, June 1, 2008.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article4040115.ece?token=null&offset=0

Even the Calman Commission’s recent report recognised that 90% of British oil revenues belong to Scotland.
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2009/06/calman

(2)The riots that occurred in 1707 in the streets of Scotland with English forces standing by at the border are testament to the forced nature of the Union (Magnus Magnusson, Scotland: The Story of a Nation, HarperCollins, London, 2000, p548), a fact which Scottish Unionists can only dismiss with bland statements such as ‘our leaders chose it.’ This is a disingenuous argument. If Scotland signed up for a voluntary union, then surely it is equally acceptable to leave it. And if she is part of a forced union, then why the Scottish Unionist pretence of friendly federalism? Which is it? If the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath was an assertion of the sovereignty of the Scottish people, then our leaders agreeing to the 1707 Act of Union was clearly a violation of this.
See Paul Henderson Scott’s excellent summary of the background to the Act in The Union of 1707: why and how?, The Saltire Society, Edinburgh, 2006.

(3) See Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History, Pimlico, London, 1992, p328.

(4) As (later Major-General) James Wolfe wrote in his private letter to his friend William Rickson in June 1751:

“I should imagine that that two or three independent Highland companies might be of use; they are hardy, intrepid, accustomed to a rough country, and no great mischief if they fall. How can you better employ a secret enemy than by making his end conducive to the common good?”

This statement, as expressed by their eventual commander, clearly reveals the cold, expoitative calculation that lay behind the recruitment of Scottish Highland regiments into the British army post-Culloden, even though it was the Earl of Albemarle who was to eventually suggest the idea to William Pitt.
See Stephen Brumwell, Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe, McGill-Queens University Press, Montreal, 2007, p123, 125

(5) For reading out a letter of support for Scottish independence from the United Irishmen, Thomas Muir was in 1793 given transportation for fourteen years to Botany Bay. In the letter, the United Irishmen rejoiced that ‘you do not consider yourselves as merged and melted down into another country, but that in this great national question you are still Scotland – the land where Buchanan wrote, and Fletcher spoke, and Wallace fought.’
See Kenneth R. Johnstone, ‘The First and Last British Convention,’ Romanticism, Edinburgh University Press, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2007, pages 104-105 & 114

(6) Some scholars argue that the first Duke of Sutherland in fact made a loss on the enormous personal investment he made in the destruction of Sutherland's Highland society, as if the failure of his financial venture somehow made him the victim.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/immig_emig/scotland/highland/article_6.shtml

(7) Murray G.H. Pittock, Scottish Nationality, Palgrave, New York, 2001, p103

(8) Some may say ‘so what?’, but can you imagine the English reaction to Scottish troops being used to quell political demonstrations on the streets of London, Leeds or Liverpool?
http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/redclyde/redclyeve14.htm

(9) The Chinese, for example, suffered greatly from the opium trade, to which Scottish opium barons such as Sir James Matheson contributed significantly.
See Arthur Herman, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World, HarperCollins, London, 2001, pages 342-3

(10) This uses an oil price of $60 a barrel, the price as of July, 2009. This is quite conservative, considering that just one year ago it reached $145/bbl.

http://www.nyse.tv/crude-oil-price-history.htm

(11) The best summary of this process is the recent BBC documentary Diomhair. I’ve given a link to part 1 below, but due to the BBC’s repeated attempts to prevent its availability via legal writ, this may not work after a while, so the best way to locate it is by a simple Google search on either YouTube or GoogleVideo.




(12) Eddie Barnes, ‘Role of Scottish Secretary Will Survive Reshuffle,’ Scotsman, September 28, 2008.
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/politics/Role-of-Scottish-Secretary-will.4535883.jp

(13) On May 6, 2009, Bob Ainsworth, Armed Forced Minister, announced to the British Parliament that the entire nuclear submarine fleet would be based in Scotland by 2017.
http://www.banthebomb.org/ne/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1158&Itemid=95

(14) Angus MacLeod, ‘Election Shambles Verdict: the voters lost,’ TimesOnline, October 24, 2007.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article2726440.ece

(15) http://apps.sepa.org.uk/disclosurelogs/pdf/F0130268%20released%20correspondence.pdf

(16) Eddie Barnes, ‘Olympics robs Scots of Lottery cash,’ Scotland on Sunday, November, 23, 2008.
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/londonolympics2012/Olympics-robs-Scots-of-Lottery.4722417.jp

(17) Joan MacAlpine, ‘British if you win, Scottish if you lose,’ TimesOnline, July 5, 2009.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6637179.ece

(18) This humorous YouTube video is an excellent summary of the knots British Unionists get themselves into in their quasi-religious nationalist zeal for the British State:

(19) Daily Record, ‘Defence contract guarantees Clyde work for 15 years,’ July 2, 2009.
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/2009/07/02/defence-contract-guarantees-clyde-work-for-15-years-86908-21489650/

Nine Ways to Stop Scotland Breaking Free

As Scotland’s minister for the Constitution, Mike Russell’s job is to deliver a successful independence referendum in late 2010. This will not be easy. In the second part of this series, we look at what he will be up against, and what tactics PM-to-be David Cameron might use to hold together what’s left of the remnant of Empire we call the UK of GB & NI.


Over the next two years, the fate of Scotland will be decided in the following three polls:


A. The next British General Election on or before June 3rd, 2010.

B. The planned referendum on Scottish independence, planned for late 2010, and

C. The next Scottish parliamentary elections on May 5th 2011 - if indeed there is still a devolved Scottish parliament by that date: if the above referendum goes ahead and is successful, there won’t be any more elections for a devolved Scottish parliament. The electoral cycle for a newly independent free and democratic Scotland will have begun.


Getting a referendum bill through the Scottish Parliament will be no easy matter. It will be met by the full arsenal of British Unionist resistance: the combined opposition of the British Unionist parties in Edinburgh (Labour, Tory and LibDem), the relentless pro-Union bias of the foreign-owned Scottish media, the death throws of the out-going Labour administration in London, the continued surreptitious spoiling tactics of Britain’s faceless minions in Whitehall, and the full might of the next Tory government at Westminster with its massive English majority.

But now that Labour is facing annihilation at the next British election, surely the task facing Scottish nationalists becomes simpler? Won’t there be a Scottish backlash against the Tories, once they take power at Westminster?

You would think so, but we can’t write off Labour yet. Their plan is to hang on long enough to fire off their last deadly Parthian shot: proportional representation in UK elections. With the prospect of at least a dozen years in power, the Tories will oppose it, but Gordon Brown (or his unelected Labour successor) will push it through as the only thing standing between his party and utter oblivion.

How will this affect Scotland? The referendum is the key, but with an impotent Tory administration in Westminster (as a result of a new PR system), there might not be the backlash against the Union that the SNP is counting on in the coming referendum.

The signs are indeed ominous, and Scottish nationalists might be getting a strong sense of déjà vu. Haven’t we been here before? For those too young to remember, current events bear more than a passing resemblance to 1979, with the SNP calling for the dissolution of the British parliament, Scotland being dragged down by the UK’s increasingly precarious finances, the IMF breathing down the British Government's neck, the Labour Party on the ropes, the Tories waiting in the wings of Westminster, and a referendum on Scottish nationalism in the pipeline.

When the '79 referendum was finally held, Scotland voted YES in a contrived question that would have granted an almost meaningless form of devolution, only to be told the answer was NO on a trumped-up technicality.

It was Europe that eventually forced London to concede real devolution to Scotland via another referendum in 1997 after – despite Tony Blair’s claims of spontaneous generosity – a secret group of Scottish nationalists had pointed out to Council of Europe diplomats that Brussels was in no position to dictate forms of democracy to Eastern Europe when those self-same forms were being denied within Scotland. London was promptly told to get its house in order. Quickly.

It was the supreme irony of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy. Having lobbied for full EU membership for the emerging democratic states of Eastern Europe (to counter attempts by the French-German axis to create a ‘United States of Europe’) her actions led to Scottish nationalists then using her success to seek the same levels of democracy, levels she had been so instrumental in preventing in Scotland.

So what can we expect this time around? Another loaded question in a fixed-up referendum? Twenty more wasted years? What tactics will the combined might of the British establishment use this time to hang on to Scotland for the few remaining years it needs to extract the last of her oil?

To answer this question, and to anticipate the desperate Unionist rearguard action about to be unleashed on Scotland, I’ve decided to put myself in David Cameron’s shoes - assuming he wins the next election. What follows is a step-by-step battle plan, ready to roll for the newly elected Prime Minister of this morally and financially bankrupt British state:

1. Announce English votes for English laws. This should head off English demands for devolution and act as a good band-aid for the inherent unfairness of England not having her own parliament.

2. Make ‘Respect for Scotland’ the Tory mantra north of the border. Buy off the Scottish elites and nationalist-leaning Scottish entrepreneurs with knighthoods and peerages. Move some of the nuclear subs from Scotland to ports in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Re-form the Scottish regiments. Divide et impere.

3. Strict Scottish media management. Control the flow of all non-internet information. Pull the plug on award-winning Newsnight Scotland. Encourage pseudo-intellectual Scottish writers to attack the idea of Alex Salmond’s ‘arc of prosperity’ while ignoring the stunning success story of Norway (1), the closest match to Scotland, and the complete meltdown that is UK Inc. Continue to support blanket pro-Union media coverage via the BBC and the Scottish press. Spoon-feed ‘lobby journalists’ with inside stories, ostracising any journalist – English or Scots – with nationalist leanings. Increase funding to BBC Scotland for pro-Union news and current affairs programming. This could never happen in England, but with Scotland’s well-established, anti-SNP, rabidly pro-Union press and media, it would be business as usual, with a new piper calling the tune.

4. Derail economic arguments for full Scottish independence. Avoid granting full fiscal autonomy, allowing instead the Calman Commission recommendations on Scottish government borrowing. Then go further and announce a fair share of all taxes raised on oil revenues will now be paid directly to Scotland, proportional to its current ratio of the UK population: 8.5%. (2) The nationalist Scottish Government will appear greedy as it condemns the niggardliness of the windfall while spending it on hospitals, roads and schools. The Scottish people will probably settle for this as an acceptable result, allowing the British Government keep the rest for IMF repayments, more London infrastructure, the Olympics and the replacement of Trident.

5. Form an unholy alliance with Labour in Scotland to get access to its up-and-running electoral fraud machine. They too will be playing an end game for their survival as a party, just as you will be for the British state. They will hope to stage a comeback from their old Scottish heartland, and will be willing to try almost anything. Imaginary Scottish Labour supporters voting for the Union in a referendum are better than real ones.

6. Once all this is in place, announce a British-run referendum on Scottish independence to take place before the Scottish Government one, with the pretext that you want to make sure it is run fairly, being such an important issue.

7. Make the referendum question loaded, something along the lines of: ‘Should Scotland break all ties and separate from the rest of Great Britain, or remain within the United Kingdom?’ YES – break all ties; NO – remain in the United Kingdom. The psychology of this is that most referendums tend to vote ‘No’, regardless of the issue, when it is contrived as a vote for the status quo. (3)

8. Hold the referendum on a work day or, even better, a holiday weekend so that the aged and unemployed – those currently dependent on British government handouts – will be over-represented, and more independent professional people will be too busy to vote, or away on holiday. (4)

9. Once the NO vote occurs – as it surely will if all these steps are taken – declare the matter of Scottish independence closed for a generation, at least until well past peak oil, when an asset-stripped Scotland can finally be cut loose.


In this way, despite the unprecedented levels of autonomy granted to Scotland, you, David Cameron, will still be able to claim that you are Prime Minister of a UK that includes the land and seas of Scotland. The UK will then retain its relative importance within Europe, its geopolitical importance in the world, and its seats on the UN Security Council, G8, and NATO, allowing you to continue with the myth that Britain is still a world power.(5)

This will also give your government continued access to 91.5% of Scotland’s oil revenues, essential if bankrupt Britain is to have any chance at all of paying off the unprecedented levels of debt accrued on the watch of your predecessor, the unelected Scottish Unionist Prime Minister, James Gordon Brown.





UPDATE
Brown signals end to ‘first past the post’ voting at Westminster



References

(1) “On the government's estimates, the [2009 Norwegian Government] surplus will more than halve as a share of GDP from 18.9% to 7.4%. That would still be a remarkably good outcome in comparison with the budgetary problems being faced in other European countries, although it is also dependent to some extent on the revised macroeconomic assumptions underlying the forecast.”
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13709932

(2) The current proportion of the UK population living in Scotland is 8.5%, taking Scotland’s latest population as 5,144,200, and the UK as 60,943,912.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/uk.html
http://www.scotland.org/about/fact-file/population/

(3) This has been the case in Australia, where the option for change has always been tied to the YES choice in any referendum. In this way only 8 out of 44 referendums have been carried since Federation in 1901.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Australia

(4) Labour tried this in Glasgow East in 2008 and still lost. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7522153.stm

(5) Jack Straw revealed the true value of Scotland to the UK during BBC Question Time, September 28 2006: “A broken-up United Kingdom would not be in the interests of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, but especially not England. Our voting power in the European Union would diminish. We'd slip down in the world league GDP tables. Our case for staying in the G8 would diminish and there could easily be an assault on our permanent seat in the UN Security Council.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/5388078.stm

English vs. Scottish Press Freedom

The recent exposure of MP’s expense perks is destined to go down as one of the greatest moments in English media history. I suspect the Telegraph felt that they had to win back the middle ground of relevance after the blogger Guido reminded them what their job is supposed to be.

I particularly loved Frank Skinner’s comments as he mused aloud on why on earth MPs need second jobs:





Yet again, it takes a comedian to talk truth to power (see my post on Jon Stewart).

Then I had a look at the expenses claimed by region and noticed a common factor – nearly all of the MPs had claimed for an assistant.

It would appear that the primary purpose of the political assistant is to free up the MPs’ time to earn more money outside Parliament. It’s certainly not to make them more accessible to their electorate.

The thing that impressed me most was the Telegraph’s new-found willingness to attack the system, of which it is very much a part. Then I remembered something I stumbled across when I was putting together another post recently:

Media freedom is well established in the UK and media coverage of the [2005 General Election] campaign was extensive. There are many print and electronic media outlets that freely and actively cover election campaigns, and the electorate is generally offered a range of views and information. (1)

Anyone who has bought a newspaper in Scotland in the past few years will probably think that a piece of political black humour. The Scottish Parliament might seem squeaky clean compared to the British one, but as far as press freedom goes, the English are putting Scotland to shame.

The behaviour of the Scottish press throughout this British expenses scandal has been deplorable. (See Moridura’s post) Day after day they find something negative to say about the Scottish Government alongside the British story, rather than simply report the truth – that their beloved Union of Great Britain is falling apart at the seams.

What does it take for a team of patriotic Scots millionaires to join forces to create a half-decent Scottish newspaper? Do I have to name names? Yes, it could have a Scottish perspective on what is going on in the world, but what on earth is wrong with that? Every other country in the world has. And I'm not talking about being pro-SNP.

If the group's first act were to take over the Herald and the Scotsman, it would inherit their established distribution networks, and would have access to an army of ex-journalists, freed from the shackles of British Unionist management, no longer prevented from saying what they really want to say. With the Herald and Scotsman eliminated, it would quickly establish itself as Scotland's national newspaper.

Once it has built a readership, it could switch to a tabloid format to win over the Daily Record readers with sport, and could cover national (i.e. Scottish), European and international news, entertainment and movie stars, and have a section on what Scots are doing around the world. I’d bet that even bloggers would be willing to contribute the odd opinion piece for free, or some original research - now that Guido has made us respectable. The important thing is that it would contain real news and original research. Anything is better than the zombie Labour spin we are getting now.

There are strong moral reasons for doing this too, and, as my father used to say, “Ye cannae tak it wi ye.”

Gentlemen, it's time to play your part. You know who you are.

Your country needs you. And it will be remembered.







References

1. This is an excerpt from the EU OSCE/ODIHR observer report on the 2005 General Election, p13
http://www.osce.org/odihr-elections/15922.html

Nine Ways to Steal an Election

In a former post, we looked at some of the many loopholes in the UK’s democratic system. Turning this around, let us now look at the many ways the British electoral system may be successfully exploited by a party sufficiently determined to seize power - or hold it at any cost.



Combining the findings from a number of recent investigations into electoral fraud in Britain (1,2,3,4,5), it is absolutely clear that - despite the current government's lip-service to electoral reform - all of the following means of electoral fraud remain relatively easy to execute across the whole of mainland UK (6):

1. Nominating people as postal voters without their knowledge, for the fraudulent use of their vote by a third party. The first voters know of this is when they turn up at the polling station and find they have already voted. (7)

2. Family voting by the householder on behalf of everyone in the house. The householder is in total control of the household voter registration, both in terms of who is registered and who is not. If he or she doesn’t approve of how someone will vote, they can delete them from the household register, or vote on their behalf by post, knowing their date of birth. (8)

3. Registering bogus voters on a household’s voter list. The householder can make up as many names/birthdays/identities/signatures as he/she wants. (9,10) This is particularly effective if a party persuades the householder to vote for it by post as a block. According to the Council of Europe inspection team, this is “very difficult to detect”. (11)

4. Registering to vote in multiple electorates. Many people do this legally, for example students who live away from home. But since there is no central electoral register, there is no limit to how many constituencies in which a person can register. Using postal voting, it is “childishly easy” in a General Election to send off multiple postal votes in plenty of time for all the constituencies where you are registered. (12)


Although illegal, routine collection and handling of postal votes by party activists (‘If you fill it in now, I'll post it for you.’), enables each of the following three related forms of electoral fraud:

5. Intimidating or bribing socially vulnerable voters to vote for the party that is collecting the postal vote, or to leave it blank for the party activist to complete later. This is devastatingly effective if the household is a student dorm or an old folks’ home, giving the activist enormous voting power. (13,14)

6. Altering completed postal votes. It’s as easy as crossing out one choice and replacing it with another. There are very lax rules about this. The party activist doesn't even have to match the pen colour.(15)

7. Destroying postal votes for the opposing parties. (16)


In addition, the UK Department of Justice (17) wants to bring in e-voting and e-counting, both of which are wide open to the same kinds of abuse to which all forms of remote voting are vulnerable: impersonation, bribery and intimidation.(18,19,20). If the Opposition objects to their use, this also creates a clear conflict of interest for the IT suppliers of the systems, and a strong commercial incentive to extend the incumbent Government’s tenure by:

8. Programming or changing results for electronic counts of postal votes. This is relatively easy to achieve, especially when observers are kept away from the computers doing the counting.(21) The Open Rights Group findings make it clear that for the systems so far deployed there is absolutely no way to verify the results produced. (22)

9. Hacking, programming or changing results of e-voting (online voting) totals. Again, there is absolutely no way to verify the results produced, particularly when the e-voting computer servers are locked away in data centres remote from the scrutiny of observers in the counting rooms. (23,24)


Thus, if e-voting and e-counting are deployed for the next General Election (as they were for Scotland’s elections of 2007), there will be in place nine separate ways for committing serious electoral fraud across the length of Britain.

Interestingly, of all the recommendations in the various reports, the UK government chose only to focus on the checking of personal identifiers on returned postal ballots, which is now mandatory.(25) Unfortunately, the potential fraud is not with who is voting by post, but the pressure brought to bear on those who voted, the handling of these votes, the corresponding destruction of postal votes for other candidates, and in whether the voter exists at all. (26) So this does absolutely nothing to eliminate any of the problems inherent in the concept of remote voting. What is more, this reform was in place before the highly dubious Glenrothes by-election result of November 2008 (27), and so had no effect whatsoever.

Whether intentionally distorting the truth by careful choice of words, or astonishingly unaware of the realities of electoral fraud, the report by the Electoral Commission on Glenrothes contained the following gem:

“A full check of all returned postal voting statements is the only way of checking that postal votes are returned by those who applied for them. Full checking will also remove actual and perceived loopholes in the system and can be expected to deter further attempts at malpractice. We therefore commend the Returning Officer and his staff for undertaking 100% verification on the first occasion of the Regulations being in force in Scotland.” (28)

Considering that all the Returning Officer was doing was checking unverifiable names and dates of birth on postal votes against a list of equally unverifiable names and date of birth on the electoral roll, this is utter nonsense.

Everyone seems to be missing the point. Even the author of the latest report from the Committee on Standards in Public Life seems to argue that the only issue at stake here is one of the public's faith in our democracy:

“Electoral fraud is not a trivial matter. It is an affront to the democratic principle of one-person one vote. Left unchecked it will eventually undermine trust and confidence in the democratic process and by implication the electorate’s consent to the outcome of elections.”(29)

But it’s even more serious than that. If ever there was a perfect time for a determined political party with a ruthless political machine to seize and hold the British state by massive electoral fraud, this would surely be it.

With Scottish independence looming and an increasing number of English demanding their own assembly, the danger is that some might see this as the only way of saving Britain, ironic as that may sound.



UPDATE 25-5-09

Since I wrote this, the expenses scandal has broken, and the BNP look like it might be seen by many as the alternative English party in the coming election. If you add immigration levels to the mix of why many think Britain needs saving, the BNP look particularly dangerous - especially if they get their act together on electoral fraud. It will indeed be ironic if they do, considering the EU - born in the wake of fascism - had the chance to clean up Britain's electoral system in 2005. And blew it.

References

(1) The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) report on the May 2005 UK General Election, August 5, 2005, p18:
“The ODIHR is the lead agency in Europe in the field of election observation. It co-ordinates and organizes the deployment of thousands of observers every year to assess whether elections in the [Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe] area are in line with national legislation and international standards. Its unique methodology provides an in-depth insight into all elements of an electoral process.”
http://www.osce.org/odihr-elections/15922.html

(2) UK Electoral Reform Society (ERS), Policy on e-Voting and Counting, April 2008.
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/downloads/Electronic%20voting%20POLICY.pdf
From its website : “Since its foundation in 1884, the Electoral Reform Society has worked for the development of democracy not only in the United Kingdom but also abroad, promoting, organising and monitoring elections."

3) Open Rights Group (ORG): report into the May 2007 English and Scottish elections, June 2007, p63: “The Open Rights Group is a fast-growing NGO focused on raising awareness of issues such as privacy, identity, data protection, access to knowledge and copyright reform.”
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/e-voting-main/

(4) Council of Europe (CoE), Venice Commission report, ‘Application to initiate a monitoring procedure to investigate electoral fraud in the United Kingdom,’ January 9, 2008. http://www.assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2008/electoral_fraud_UK_E.pdf
From the CoE website : “The European Commission for Democracy through Law, better known as the Venice Commission, is the Council of Europe's advisory body on constitutional matters."

(5) Committee for Standards in Public Life (CSPL), 12th Report, April 2008.
http://www.public-standards.gov.uk/Library/OurWork/AnnualReport2007.pdf
From website: “The Committee on Standards in Public Life is an independent public body which advises government on ethical standards across the whole of public life in the UK.”
This is the first report by the new chairman Sir Christopher Kelly. His predecessor, Sir Alistair Graham, was sacked by Tony Blair in April 2007 after criticism of his government’s attitude to standards of integrity in public life as having ‘a low-priority’.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1545488/Anti-sleaze-watchdog-in-attack-on-Blair.html

(6) As a result of the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act of 2002, the UK Government closed some of these loopholes, but only for Northern Ireland: individual voter registration replaced household voter registration, and the requirement for photographic proof of identity in the polling station was brought in. UK Electoral Commission: ‘Electoral Fraud Act 2002: an assessment of its first year in operation,’ December 2003. http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/election/electoralcommission1203sum.pdf
As a result of the tighter identity checking, the number of voters fell by 10% as the bogus identities dropped off the electoral roll. CoE report, note 68, p10

(7) CoE report, note 21, p5

(8) Open Rights Group, ‘Observer Handbook (ORG Handbook): May 2007 Elections’, April 20, 2007, p2
“Unsupervised voting includes postal voting and Internet voting. Such remote methods can be done in unsupervised areas such as home or work where others can influence or steal votes. The secrecy of the ballot cannot be maintained and there is the potential for ‘family voting’ whereby the head of the family casts the entire family’s votes on their behalf.”
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/org_observer_handbook.pdf

(9) CoE report, note 85, p12-13: “The main underlying weakness of the electoral system in the Great Britain is the current household registration system without personal identifiers. This system makes it extremely easy to add bogus characters to the voters’ lists. All a head of household has to do is to add a number of names on the yearly canvas form. The Registration Officers have only limited power to check these names and the absence of personal identifiers makes any checking of these names an all but impossible task. Therefore, as long as the names on the registration form are not overly frivolous, and the number of bogus entries is not unrealistically large in comparison to the residency in question, all names will be de facto accepted on face value and added to the voters’ list."

(10) CSPL, p10: “In the Committee’s view, the safeguards introduced by the Government in the 2006 to combat electoral fraud are easily bypassed because of the fundamental weaknesses in the current system of electoral registration. In most cases the information supplied on completed electoral registration forms is taken at face value, and few checks are carried out at polling stations to verify a voter’s identity."

(11) CoE report, note 89, p13

(12) CoE report, note 91, p13: “The fact that a person is legally allowed to be registered on the voters’ lists in more than one locality offers another opening for electoral fraud. Although its is illegal to vote more than once in the same national election, the onus on not doing so is completely on the voter itself. While it would be physically difficult to vote in person in multiple polling stations in different localities, the postal vote arrangements make it childishly simple to do so, and equally difficult to detect.’ "

(13) ODIHR report, p8: “Postal voting presents challenges with regard to the secrecy of the vote, and the possibility of undue pressure on voters at the time of marking the ballot. This may be of particular concern with regard to perceived as being most vulnerable.”
See also CoE report, note 100, p14

(14) CoE report, note 32, p6: “Multi occupancy households, such as student dormitories and caring homes for the elderly, are also considered to be single households for the purpose of voter registration."

(15) CoE report, note 98, p14

(16) Times Report on Labour advising it student canvassers to destroy opposition votes in Leeds: ‘Get the votes and we can win, but don't get caught with them,’ TimesOnline, 29 April 2007. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1719968.ece
The Council of Europe report, p5, note26, also states that when the police found the two Labour candidates in the Birmingham warehouse with the thousands of completed postal voting packs they were either altering or destroying votes for other candidates.

(17) The Department of Constitutional Affairs became the Department of Justice on May 9, 2007 after assuming some of the duties of the Home Office.

(18) ERS report, p3: “When votes are cast outside a polling station the secrecy of the ballot cannot be assured and there can be no guarantee that the elector did not suffer intimidation or was offered a bribe while voting."

(19) ORG Handbook, p2

(20) ERS report, p4: “Being a form of remote voting, it compromises the secrecy of the ballot, significantly increasing the risks of voter intimidation, bribery and impersonation. The Society therefore opposes the introduction of internet, text and telephone voting at present."

(21) ORG Report, p13: “In most locations computer screens were positioned too far away from barriers to be observable or were turned away from view so they couldn’t be observed."

(22) ORG Report, p3: “ORG is concerned that the lack of reliable audit trails, the actions of some vendors that left no audit trail and a general reluctance to perform manual counts to confirm the results of e-counting mean that there is no meaningful way to verify that voters’ intentions had been accurately counted."

(23) ORG report, p1: “E-voting is a ‘black box system’, where the mechanisms for recording and tabulating the vote are hidden from the voter. This makes public scrutiny impossible, and leaves statutory elections open to error and fraud.”
p20: “No matter what access was provided, fundamentally the servers are opaque to the human eye. No observer would be able to examine what the server was doing, what data it was sending and receiving or whether problems were occurring, without detailed technical access to the software and its operating system, yet it would be inappropriate and is clearly against guidelines for observers to handle anything to do with the running of the election. Hence ORG must conclude that the servers and their operations were—and will remain in future elections—unobservable."

(24) ERS report, p4: “The use of internet, text message and telephone voting seriously compromises the security of an election, both because: It is vulnerable to hackers and other attacks on the electoral system by those who might want to influence the outcome by interfering with the equipment or software"

(25) Among other things, the UK Electoral Administration Act 2006 allowed independent observers at UK elections for the first time, in line with most democracies. It also brought in identity-checks on all postal votes, checking date of birth and signature against those provided (but not verified for authenticity) at the time of voter registration. There is nothing to guarantee that any of these identities are real.
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2006/pdf/ukpga_20060022_en.pdf

(26) CoE report, note 84, p12: “It does not take an experienced election observer, or election fraudster, to see that the combination of the household registration system without personal identifiers and the postal vote on demand arrangements make the election system in Great Britain very vulnerable to electoral fraud. The 2006 changes to the electoral law only partially addressed this vulnerability."

(27) David Maddox, ‘SNP raises doubts on Glenrothes as inquiry launched into by-election,’ The Scotsman, February 4, 2009.
http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/SNP-raises-doubts-on-Glenrothes.4943446.jp

(28) Electoral Commission Report on the Glenrothes By-Election, p13.
http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/news-and-media/news-releases/electoral-commission-media-centre/news-releases-reviews-and-research/glenrothes-election-report-published

(29) CPSL, p10