Scottish Political News

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. Looks fine so far. Anything broken? Do tell.

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. Looks fine so far. Anything broken? Do tell.

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. Looks fine so far. Anything broken? Do tell.

The Royal Air Force is 90 on the 1st of April 2008. To mark this there are two charities that deserve our support directly related to the RAF: RAFA RAF BF And of course we should all think about Combat Stress

CHEESE SANDWICH I kick over a whole mug of coffee!!! Yes, that's right. Most of you would reach for some sort of rag and mop it up. Curse and swear. Rightly so. But not here. No. Not in my house. In my house the coffee soaks so very much more than carpet it stands on. The new Nokia phone manuals, to name just two things. Recent. But that's not all. Deeper and deeper I delve into the new

Pal of mine has a new blog with free mp3's and cultural coverage http://www.pontiacdream.blogspot.com/ Blogged with Flock

Pal of mine has a new blog with free mp3's and cultural coverage http://www.pontiacdream.blogspot.com/ Blogged with Flock

With the SSP in tatters and Solidarity plagued by accusations of nicking wee bottles of bevvy and shagging all the wrong people - who is it that will carry the Red Flag forward? Who can carry on the great Scots tradition from John Maclean and into the 21st C?
Er, according to Wendy Alexander, its New Labour.

In a desperate attempt to regain control and support in Scotland Wendy has come up with the hilarious idea that Labour is somehow 'socialist'! Read the whole thing here.

Yes the party that has just about finished privatising the NHS and our schools by PFI and who has just announced another attack on the poor and those on benefits, the party that has brought you Iraq, Trident 2 and new nuclear, now has the cheek, the gall to posture as 'socialist'.

As Iain McWhirter points out:

"It was the SNP government, elected in May, that finally ended private sector involvement in the Scottish health service, after Scottish Labour put it there under Jack McConnell. This minority SNP administration has also abolished prescription charges, saved local A&E units, backdated the NHS pay award, abolished student fees, cut class sizes, begun a pilot for free school meals, given equal rights to the children of asylum seekers, rejected nuclear power, doubled the international aid budget, ended ring-fencing of council spending and condemned the Iraq war. This "right-wing" party seems to have done more to further social democratic values in 10 months than Labour managed in 10 years."
Full article here.

With the SSP in tatters and Solidarity plagued by accusations of nicking wee bottles of bevvy and shagging all the wrong people - many of you will be asking, who is it that will carry the Red Flag forward? Who can carry on the great Scots tradition from John Maclean into the 21st C?

The answer, is, apparently, Wendy Alexander.

In a desperate attempt to regain control and support in Scotland Wendy has come up with the hilarious idea that New Labour is 'socialist'! Read the whole thing here.

Yes the party that has just about finished privatising the NHS and our schools by PFI and who has just announced another attack on the poor and those on benefits, the party that has brought you Iraq, Trident 2 and new nuclear, now has the cheek, the gall to posture as 'socialist'.

As Iain McWhirter points out:

"It was the SNP government, elected in May, that finally ended private sector involvement in the Scottish health service, after Scottish Labour put it there under Jack McConnell. This minority SNP administration has also abolished prescription charges, saved local A&E units, backdated the NHS pay award, abolished student fees, cut class sizes, begun a pilot for free school meals, given equal rights to the children of asylum seekers, rejected nuclear power, doubled the international aid budget, ended ring-fencing of council spending and condemned the Iraq war. This "right-wing" party seems to have done more to further social democratic values in 10 months than Labour managed in 10 years."
Full article here.

This despite facing electoral meltdown. As Seamus Milne (possibly the mainstream medias finest writer) writes today, Red Wendy's newly found socialist streak isn't replicated by her sugar daddy South of the Border:

"But in a week during which the chaos of Heathrow's Terminal Five has provided a timely lesson on the absurdity of New Labour's private good, public bad catechism, Brown has been determinedly hammering home his message that better public services - in health, welfare and education - can only be delivered by handing over yet more of them to the private sector.

And while Labour MPs across the country report growing hostility from core voters over the impact of migration on pay rates and housing, he continues to resist steps that could offset those pressures - such as giving equal rights to exploited agency workers - for fear of upsetting the CBI. In the words of a former loyalist, Brown has "hit the rewind button", returning to the well-worn tracks of the Blair years and picking yet another fight with his backbenchers, this time overextending pre-charge detention for terror suspects. Even some Blairites complain he's going too far: as one ancien regime luminary remarks with some chutzpah: "His universe revolves around the Sun and the Daily Mail. He's got to start standing for something he believes in - it almost doesn't matter what."

More here.

1820 predicts a Labour wipe out North and South of the Border, from Oor Seamus to Oor Wullie, as the infamous Sunday Post reported at the weekend: 'THE SNP is ahead of Labour in voting intentions for a Westminster election for the first time. An analysis of the last three UK opinion polls shows the SNP on 36 per cent and Labour four points behind on 32 per cent. Just last month the two parties were neck and neck in Westminster voting intentions. One MP predicted to lose his seat is Defence and Scottish Secretary Des Browne. The polls predict 23 SNP MPs would be returned, with 26 for Labour. The Conservatives on 18 per cent would have three MPs and the Lib Dems on 10 per cent, seven.' Imagine 23 SNP members sitting in Westminster...

This is our 500th post!

Mary Turner Thomson from Newington has written a book about her 'marriage' to a bigamist. Her website can be found here and you can read an article based on an interview with her here.

From Holyrood Magazine (The Scottish Parliament's version of Westminster's 'House Magazine', only more interesting) - an interview with Wendy Alexander. Go on - don your crash helmet and take a read.

Before getting involved in politics, I had no conception of how people's words could be edited sympathetically for TV and radio, or polished up by journalists and stenographers before they reach the public domain. Wendy's clearly been left to perform unplugged here by the magazine, and boy does it show.

What shines through is how the interviewer, Editor Mandy Rhodes, seems desperate to try and give Wendy as fair a crack of the whip as she can, yet in the end, just gives up. That in itself is as revealing as anything which Ms Alexander manages to say, or not to say, in the course of the interview...

Readers may recall that the Council took legal action to remove Paul Nolan and his friends from the Craigmillar Community Council after improprieties. Subsequently Paul Nolan was elected as Branch secretary of the Craigmillar, Duddingston and Prestonfield Branch of the Labour Party in what some described as an 'organised coup'. At the same time a call was made for local Labour Councillor Ian Perry to quit his post as deputy leader of the Labour Group in Edinburgh Council. The appointment of Paul Nolan as branch secretary was called in but a re-run has confirmed him in that post.

Meanwhile, having announced he would stand down at the next election, MP for Edinburgh East Gavin Strang has now changed his mind. Could it be there is a connection between the troubles of the local branch (Prestonfield et al) and concerns about who might succeed Gavin Strang as Labour candidate?

Meanwhile I understand the report from the Standards Commission on local Labour Councillor Ian Perry is due to be released soon. He apparently enjoyed a Council funded job whilst a senior member of the Council that made the financial allocation to fund the post. He failed to declare the conflict of interest.

Hurray for GCHQ! That's not a sentence you've read very often here on 1820. But the doughnut-shaped complex, near Cheltenham racecourse has come up trumps forthe beleagured incarnations of Avalokiteśvara. Some wags have pointed out that the struggle in Tibet is akin to the Archbishop of Canterbury saying he wanted to rule, say, Yorkshire, and is more of a feudal - religious anomaly than a nations struggle for self-determination. But given the choice between Maoist-Proto Fascist Capitalists (talk about the worst of all worlds) and some monks, we know where we stand:

"Britain's GCHQ, the government communications agency that electronically monitors half the world from space, has confirmed the claim by the Dalai Lama that agents of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, the PLA, posing as monks, triggered the riots that have left hundreds of Tibetans dead or injured.

GCHQ analysts believe the decision was deliberately calculated by the Beijing leadership to provide an excuse to stamp out the simmering unrest in the region, which is already attracting unwelcome world attention in the run-up to the Olympic Games this summer. For weeks there has been growing resentment in Lhasa, Tibet's capital, against minor actions taken by the Chinese authorities. Increasingly, monks have led acts of civil disobedience, demanding the right to perform traditional incense burning rituals. With their demands go cries for the return of the Dalai Lama, the 14th to hold the high spiritual office."

Now that the 5th Anniversary has come and gone the US/UK propaganda has calmed down and we can see some reality peaking through from the desolationin Riaq. Here from ICH is Five Things You Need to Know To Understand The Latest Violence in Iraq...

"Heavy fighting has spread across Shia-dominated enclaves in Iraq over the past two days. The U.S.-backed regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has ordered 50,000 Iraqi troops to "crack down" -- with coalition air support -- on Shiite militias in the oil-rich and strategically important city of Basra, U.S. forces have surrounded Baghdad's Sadr City and fighting has been reported in the southern cities of Kut, Diwaniya, Karbala and Hilla. Basra's main bridge and an oil pipeline connecting it to Amara were destroyed Wednesday. Six cities are under curfew, and acts of civil disobedience have shut down dozens of neighborhoods across the country. Civilian casualties have reportedly overwhelmed poorly equipped medical centers in Baghdad and Basra.
There are indications that the unilateral ceasefire declared last year by the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is collapsing. "The cease-fire is over; we have been told to fight the Americans," one militiaman loyal to al-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor's Sam Dagher by telephone from Sadr City. Dagher added that the "same man, when interviewed in January, had stated that he was abiding by the cease-fire and that he was keeping busy running his cellular phone store."

1. A visible manifestation of Iraq's central-but-under-teported political conflict (not "sectarian violence")
Iraq, which had experienced little or no sectarian-based violence prior to the U.S. invasion, has been plagued with sectarian militias fighting for the streets of Iraq's formerly heterogeneous neighborhoods, and "sectarian violence" has become Americans' primary explanation for the instability that has plagued the country.
But the sectarian-based street-fighting is a symptom of a larger political conflict, one that has been poorly analyzed in the mainstream press. The real source of conflict in Iraq -- and the reason political reconciliation has been so difficult -- is a fundamental disagreement over what the future of Iraq will look like. Loosely defined, it is a clash of Iraqi nationalists -- with Muqtada al-Sadr as their most influential voice -- who desire a unified Iraqi state and public-sector management of the country's vast oil reserves and who forcefully reject foreign influence on Iraq's political process, be it from the United States, Iran or other outside forces.
2. U.S. is propping up unpopular regime; Sadr has support because of his platform
One of the ironies of the reporting out of Iraq is the ubiquitous characterization of Muqtada al-Sadr as a "renegade," "radical" or "militant" cleric, despite the fact that he is the only leader of significance in the country who has ordered his followers to stand down. His ostensible militancy appears to arise primarily from his opposition to the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.
3. "Iraqi forces" are, in fact, "Iranian- (and U.S.-) backed Shiite militias"
Every headline this week has featured some variation of the storyline of "Iraqi security forces" battling "Shiite militias." But the reality is that it is a battle between Shite militias -- separatists and nationalists -- with one militia garbed in Iraqi army uniforms and supported by U.S. airpower, and the other in civilian clothes.
It has always been the great irony of the occupation of Iraq that "our" man in Baghdad is also Tehran's. Maliki heads the Dawa Party, which has long enjoyed close ties to Iran, and relies on support from SIIC, a staunchly pro-Iranian party, and its powerful Badr militia.
4. Colombia-style democracy
Basra has been engulfed in a simmering conflict since before the British pulled their troops back to a remote base near the airport and turned over the city to Iraqi authorities. But the timing of this crackdown is not coincidental; Iraqi separatists -- Dawa, SIIC and others -- are expected to do poorly in the regional elections, while the Sadrists are widely anticipated to make significant gains. It is widely perceived by those loyal to Sadr that this is an attempt to wipe out the movement he leads prior to the elections and minimize the influence that Iraqi nationalists are poised to gain.
The United States, for its part, continues to take sides in this conflict -- in addition to providing airpower, U.S. forces are enforcing the curfew in Sadr City -- rather than playing the role of neutral mediator.
5. Chip off the old block: Maliki's attempt to criminalize dissent
It's unclear whether Sadr has lifted the cease-fire entirely, or simply freed his fighters to defend themselves. He continues to call for peaceful resistance.
Whatever the case may be, it's not entirely accurate to say that he "chose" this conflict. The reality is that while his army was holding the cease-fire, attacks on and detentions of Sadrists have continued unabated. Sadr renewed the cease-fire last month, but he did so over the urging of his top aides, who argued that their movement was threatened with annihilation. He later authorized his followers to carry weapons "for self-defense" to head off a mutiny within his ranks.

More on propaganda and the surge here.

Planning. Trouble at t'mill

Its good to know that our very transparent planning system sometimes seems to work: Cognoscenti should once again visit:

http://eplanning.scotborders.gov.uk/publicaccess/tdc/DcApplication/application_searchresults.aspx

and look at the 2nd application under the Hutton and Paxton Community Council bailiwick: House at Hutton Castle Mill. Bloggees with average memories will recall how popular response has led to an unpopular planning application for four new houses, just down the road, being withdrawn. People power in the form of an angry (but reasoned) comments recorded on this website helped to ensure that with the developer having second thoughts.Does not often happen but good sense prevailed.

In the HCM case the 'associated documents' are worth a read. In support of an application to build a house for a gamekeeper on site to look after the pheasantery, Guinea fowlness, salmon and trout fishing, self catering converted mill on behalf of the main agent for a syndicate who lives in Paxton-excellent idea. But wait- this document is dated November 2004! And we can recall that there actually is a house, recently built and lo and behold the occupant is no other than the gamekeeper who has been in occupation of a very pleasant dwelling for a couple of years. All the other papers, including the formal
application relate to a new house-bungalow- for, yes, a gamekeeper (indeed the same self guy), with exactly the same justification as the original application three and a half years ago. Urgency is stressed as the agent in Paxton really needs some one on the spot to look after his interests in the depths of the Whiteadder valley.

One can only speculate. And one does.

The Planning department at mediumheidyins level, at least, don't seem too impressed and having pointed out that there is one house there already -not a bungalow as it happens- (a fact omitted from the application and its supporting docs) reminds the applicant that permission was given for that house on the understanding that it was for just one building and for the purposes (tied to a gamekeeper) stated in the 2004 application, wonders,politely, what in earth is going on, and suggests equally politely that it might be best if the application be withdrawn.

It might indeed.

Strike one for the Planners.
For once.

In the meanwhile the Guinea Fowl at the mill peck on happily, seemingly not caring if they are to have a two house gamekeeper, or not.

Two weeks ago we reported chaos in the election for the next President of the Edinburgh University Students Association when the winning candidate was disqualified by the returning officer. It is now reported that Adam Ramsay has won his appeal against the disqualification. More details here.

Two weeks ago we reported chaos in the election for the next President of the Edinburgh University Students Association when the winning candidate was disqualified by the returning officer. It is now reported that Adam Ramsay has won his appeal against the disqualification. More details here.

Two weeks ago we reported chaos in the election for the next President of the Edinburgh University Students Association when the winning candidate was disqualified by the returning officer. It is now reported that Adam Ramsay has won his appeal against the disqualification. More details here.

First things first. I have upgraded to WordPress 2.5. The new admin panel takes a bit of getting used to, and it is a little bit buggy for my liking. But then again that is probably because I am using so many plugins.

For the first time I upgraded using the astonishing WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I’ve been meaning to use it for a while, but forgot about it until James O’Malley reminded me. So thanks for that James. Upgrading vee8 and doctorvee was flawless, although something funny happened to Scottish Roundup. Fixed it in the end (I hope), but it did make me scratch my head, especially as the other two upgrades went so smoothly.

Another thing to point out is that I have finally got that OpenID plugin installed. It doesn’t work exactly how I’d like it to, but it will do. Don’t be freaked out by it if you leave a comment and you don’t know what OpenID is. You can leave the OpenID field blank.

You might be wondering if it was even worth me upgrading this blog. It is rather shit of me to have posted next to nothing for the past three weeks and come back with a dull admin post. Well here’s what’s happening.

Last week in the comments of this increasingly quiet blog, a very public sociologist wrote:

Looks like F1 has stolen you away from us.

It’s kind of true. When I launched vee8, originally I had every intention of posting here (almost) as often as before.

What I was forgetting was that because of my mad hectic busy important 24/7 lifestyle and / or laziness, I was blogging less and less here anyway. In all seriousness, I am in my final year at university. And while I still have luxuries such as not having to get up before lunchtime, it does mean that I get shards of guilt searing through my conscience every time I write a blog post or open Google Reader. After all, I should be studying.

For around — ooh, let’s see — the past year, I have had hardly any time to blog, or indeed read blogs. Google Reader always has 1000+ items for me to read. I think I’ve only got it down to zero about twice in the past year.

Plainly, even pretending that I can keep on top of all my RSS feeds is a nonsense. I have come to realise that I don’t have the time to read blogs in the same way as I used to. I have probably gone for weeks without even reading blogs actually (excepting Scottish blogs which I have to read for the Roundup). And the thing is that I don’t really miss the blogosphere — especially the politics blogs. (My years at university studying politics have ironically made me deeply apathetic.)

“Boo, hiss,” I hear you cry. But that’s the way it is. Once I got fed up with Guido et al, it was just the start of the ball rolling and reading hundreds of posts like this is no longer my idea of fun.

This is not to say that I will retreat from politics or political blogging — and definitely not blogging as a whole — altogether. But I have to face up to the fact that as a student I have increasingly found that I do not have enough time to engage in it properly.

So many of the posts I have written over the past few months have been about topics that were lingering in my head for weeks or even months. For instance, the one about road tolls was written in my head in December as a response to Calum Cashley. I didn’t get the chance to actually write it until March. See if you can spot more (a fun game for long journeys, I’m sure)!

And that’s what it’s like when I am a lazy student bum! So what on earth is it going to be like when I actually get a proper job?!

At the same time, last month I launched vee8, a dedicated Formula 1 blog. The original intention was to spare the many readers here who do not like F1 from having to read what can at some points during the year become a blog almost exclusively about F1.

But in its first month I think vee8 has quite unexpectedly taken a life of its own. I am enjoying every minute of it. It is such a refreshing feeling to be blogging about something that actually matters rather than that politics nonsense! Seriously though, I have been staggered by how much fun I am having with it and how successful it has been.

I try to avoid talking about stats because inevitably someone takes offence at the showing off. So I’ll say this up-front. The following may be a reflection of how bad this blog is. Readership here has, after all, stagnated over the past 2 or 3 years which shouldn’t really happen (as someone once told me, telling me off for showing off my stats, “it’s a viral thing”).

But at vee8 — which, I remind you, is little over a month old — I am already getting as more “returning visitors” than I am on this blog. As I say, that is probably partly down to the fact that I post here far less often than I used to, while there is usually daily content at vee8. But I’m still amazed at how quickly it has got a solid readership. Obviously it helps that I had plenty of F1 fans reading here originally, but boy — if only I found it this easy to get readers the first time round!

Long story short. I am now running three major blogs. Scottish Roundup has to have a new post every Sunday, so a lot of my Fridays and Saturdays are spent making sure that happens. vee8 is fresh, new and exciting and this season looks like it’s going to be a corker, so a lot of my attention is now focussed there. This one is my personal blog, so I don’t feel like I owe it much attention.

Just two years ago this was my only blog. Now it is just part of my wider blogging activity. With that fact along with impending adulthood, I am having to steer a new path for this blog.

I am probably being melodramatic (it is 4am), so I will say that probably not much will change. In fact, the changes have already happened and I just need to adapt to it.

I stopped being part of the conversation in the wider blogosphere a long time ago without ever meaning that to happen. I just don’t have the time to follow it. So that probably means writing fewer, more in depth posts on a miscellany of subjects.

You might well have noticed that already. The previous five posts here were about coffee, Autechre, income tax, Freeview and Radio 5 Live — quite a mixture. And that takes us practically to the beginning of March. To think that I used to write an average of six pithy posts per day about the day’s current subjects!

It won’t pick up any time soon. Those shards of guilt will be extra painful as it’s exam time. But I have just three exams, and then it will all be over! The difficult part comes after that — looking for a job. (My status as a person, incidentally, is another thing that it making me more reluctant to blog here… Google and all.)

I just remembered that almost a year ago I hilariously joked about giving up blogging. Now I am looking back on the past year thinking it was actually quite prescient.

Anyway, please forgive the navel gazing. I am planning to return tomorrow with another post here, but whether it will interest you is a different matter.

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First off, there's a photograph of a nice sunset I took from my terrace a few evenings ago: Sunset - Mazarron Country Club27 March 2008 Then there is a photograph and a brief video taken last night at the beach in Puerto de Mazarron, where a firework display rounded off the celebrations for Easter 2008: Puerto de Mazarron - Fireworks - Semana Santa Easter 2008 - 30 March 2008(

It's not always the case but sometimes I wonder if the popularity of blogs is in inverse proportion to how interesting they are.

For example:

Since he decided to stop blogging, this man has never been so busy, which is welcome.

Consistently funny and this is hilarious.

And this is really quite gorgeous:

"There are plenty of blogs that reflect the orthodox left lunacy and ones that use seductively more 'reasonable' language to reach similar conclusions. However, there are two other broad categories of sites that can be found. Firstly, there are those that are firmly anti-totalitarian but have little or no critique of domestic politics. They have made their peace with the establishment and the legacy of Thatcherism. However dramatic their declarations of human rights, they are Tom Paines abroad but Edmund Burkes at home. Whilst the finely tuned English ear is quick to pick up the contented cadences of the privilege of class.

As for the other, it is a, sometimes fractious, cacophony. There are humanist Marxists, left libertarians, social democrats, Old Labour diehards, those who would combine Marx with Mill, querulous liberals, and others who place human emancipation at the centre of an ecological understanding of the diversity of the natural world. It is where I feel most at home and where the more interesting, and idiosyncratic, writing is taking place."

Now wouldn't you rather read stuff like this instead of some fucking liberal making a 'stand' about something? They always stand. Don't they ever get tired? They wear me out, that's for sure.