Rules are rules, but not when they don't apply

With the starting-gun for the UK general election finally about to be fired, it's a bit rich to see Labour's Paul Martin in the Herald demanding that the SNP government should not break the 'purdah' rules in the forthcoming weeks - ie. that major policy announcements should not be made in an election period. The first problem for Martin is that it's far from clear that such rules even apply to the Holyrood administration during a UK campaign. The article notes -

"As a General Election approaches, Whitehall goes into so-called purdah and the machinery of the Civil Service can no longer be used for making announcements which could be construed as electioneering.

The same applies to the Civil Service in Scotland ahead of a Holyrood election.

However, the rules are less strict when it comes to what each administration can do during the other’s election period, amounting only to advice from the heads of the Civil Service."

And can anyone seriously imagine the UK government bothering to adhere to these 'rules' during a devolved Scottish election? If anyone complained about the timing of a government announcement, they'd get a familiar haughty response along the lines of "perhaps the SNP feel that the governance of the whole United Kingdom should shut down for a few weeks just for their convenience".

So there's equally no reason why the governance of Scotland should grind to a halt for a month just for Labour's convenience. And frankly, given the outrageous stitch-up that threatens to completely exclude the SNP from much of the highest-profile TV coverage of the election campaign, I'm not going to be terribly impressed by any sanctimony provoked by the SNP making a little use of the one very small advantage they have over the London-based parties during the campaign period.

Borders of the 'good enough'

I'm extremely heartened to read in Scotland on Sunday that the SNP are failing to obediently genuflect towards the narrative that "everything has been settled" on the televised leaders' debates (how can 'everything' have been agreed by 'everyone' when the majority of parties with parliamentary representation weren't even involved in the discussions?). To start with there'll be an appeal to the BBC Trust, and the article strongly hints that if all else fails, legal action still remains very much a live option -

"The letter, which will arrive on the trust's desk tomorrow, represents the SNP's last attempt to get the BBC to change its mind on the issue before the party resorts to legal action."

Some people (mostly, it has to be said, those who can't seem to understand what the issue is here) have suggested that the SNP would be making a tactical blunder if they took the matter to the courts - better, they contend, not to 'make too much of a fuss'. However, the stakes are simply too high to treat this as a game of cricket - crucial precedents are about to be set for future Westminster elections. My own view is that legal action only becomes unnecessary if one of the following occurs -

a) The broadcasters agree to the additional fourth debate suggested by the SNP and Plaid.
b) The broadcasters make space for special programmes to compensate the SNP for the bonus coverage their three rivals will be receiving. For the avoidance of doubt, these must be programmes featuring the SNP only - the Scotland-specific debates that would have happened anyway are utterly irrelevant to this question.
c) The SNP and Plaid are given some kind of direct access to the main debates, even if it is not on an absolute par with the other parties.

Of course, none of these options would represent anything like fairness and balance, but they would - in an imperfect world - perhaps be just about enough to be worth settling for. However, if none of them are agreed to, there would be little doubt left that the requirement for balanced coverage of the election campaign has been flagrantly contravened, and in those circumstances the SNP would be crazy not to test the matter in court.

In other news in the same paper, it seems there's some truly bizarre political cross-dressing going on. There was a time when the easiest jibe in the world to make against the SNP was that they wanted to "erect border posts at Gretna Green". The SNP's pro-Europeanism has of course long since consigned that prospect to history, but now, jaw-droppingly, it's Labour who seem utterly hellbent on imposing unnecessary passport controls at the border. It's really not a great side of the argument to be on. I hope for Labour's sake this is just yet another case of Chris Bryant unilaterally shooting his mouth off - but I just wonder.

Does Clegg know the meaning of the phrase 'hostage to fortune'?

Just about the only crumb of comfort I took from the depressing triumph of Labour's politics of fear and smear at the Glenrothes by-election eighteen months ago was that, weird though it may seem, the outcome made Nick Clegg look a bit of a fool. Just a few months earlier he had tried to jump on the bandwagon of the SNP's spectacular victory in Glasgow East by declaring (in the middle of what must surely have been one of the world's most tedious ever webcasts) that "Labour will lose every by-election they fight in the remainder of this parliament". It was always a very silly prediction to make, because even if Labour's level of unpopularity had remained constant, there was simply no way of knowing what seats were likely to fall vacant, and what the local circumstances would be.

Well, now Clegg has come out with an even more rash claim. The Herald reports that he has branded the SNP an "irrelevance" at Westminster elections - on the grounds that the Liberal Democrats, not the SNP, are "Scotland's second party" at Westminster. In the literal sense, the latter point is of course perfectly true - the Liberal Democrats were in second place in 2005 both in terms of votes and seats, with the SNP in third on both counts. The trouble for Clegg is that there's almost no-one outside his party who seriously expects the Lib Dems to maintain that position this time round - their success in the popular vote in 2005 was almost certainly a one-off caused by Iraq and the 'Kennedy factor'. The latest YouGov poll shows the SNP firmly back into second place on 24%, six points up on 2005, while the Lib Dems languish in a dismal fourth, with their vote having virtually halved to just 12%. It looks near-enough inevitable that Clegg's definition of what constitutes an 'irrelevant party' in Scotland will be coming back to haunt him in only a few short weeks.

Comment is free, but frequently frustrated

I seem to recall leaving a couple of comments on the Northern Ireland politics hub Slugger O'Toole in the past without any problem, but when I tried to comment tonight on Brian Walker's piece The wee parties won't weigh in the Westminster balance (predictably he's talking more about the SNP and Plaid Cymru than the considerably 'wee-er' NI parties) I encountered all sorts of difficulties. Apparently I now have to wait until an administrator manually approves my registration on the site before I can even submit the comment, so instead I'll just post what I was going to say here -

"'Fair funding' in this context categorically does not mean "no cuts". In Wales it means the replacement of the Barnett Formula with a new mechanism that recognises the true needs of Wales, and in Scotland it means full fiscal autonomy for the Scottish parliament, which would also render Barnett redundant.

The line 'too late now' in relation to the leaders' debates is a bit odd if it's meant to indicate that the SNP have in some way been slow on the issue - they've been trying to get even the slightest access to the negotiations for months now, and have had the door repeatedly slammed in their face. It's not, of course, too late for legal action. I've no idea if the SNP and Plaid are taking that option seriously, but given the high-handed way they've been treated, I don't see how anyone could blame them if they were."

Alan Johnson revels in being 'right-wing' Home Secretary

The most jaw-dropping moment of Question Time this evening was when Alan Johnson claimed that the Tories had "got it wrong" by not "staying right" on the DNA database - in other words, he was unashamedly boasting that Labour are more right-wing than the Tories on the issue. In many ways this is, of course, similar to the familiar Blairite conceit that in modern politics the distinction is no longer between right and left, but instead between right and wrong. Naturally, the 'right' policy on any given issue was the Blairite one, with all the myriad alternatives being the 'wrong' policies, regardless of where on the political spectrum they came from. No wonder Mr Blair found the basic nature of Catholicism so much to his taste.

In reality, most of us recognised that the distinction between the two meanings of 'right' was in reality remarkably thin, with this nominally 'democratic socialist' government being identified as one of the most - perhaps the most - right-wing administration in western Europe. But where Alan Johnson has broken new ground tonight is in brazenly acknowledging that truth, rather than adhering to the now-traditional doublespeak.

So should those of us on the left take any comfort from the fact that even Labour acknowledges that an incoming Tory government would not be quite as far to the right on certain issues as the current administration? Hardly. Looking at the broad sweep of policy - law and order, immigration, the economy, taxation, education, human rights - there is no doubt that, on balance, the Tories would represent a significant shift still further to the right. They would also block long-overdue progress on constitutional reform, notably extra powers for the Scottish Parliament, democratisation of the voting system for the House of Commons, and an elected upper house. So it seems to me the only rational thing for voters to do is to look beyond the false choice between a rubbish incumbent government, and an even more rubbish alternative. We're fortunate in Scotland to have the SNP to turn to, and in Wales there's Plaid Cymru, but even in England there are other options - most notably the Greens (who have a great chance of winning their first seat) and Mebyon Kernow, who memorably humiliated Labour in Cornwall in the Euro elections last June.

Blue Bella?

British politics seemed to have crossed a subtle psychological threshold a few weeks ago when it emerged that Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate Anna Arrowsmith had been a director of 'adult films' in a (not very far distant) past life, and yet survived completely unscathed. Even the Conservatives' Andrew Lansley seemed relaxed about her candidature when asked about it on Question Time. The more cynical side of me did wonder if Arrowsmith would have got off quite so lightly if she hadn't been both a woman and an avowed feminist, but nevertheless it did seem to be a small signal that Britain is leaving some of its traditional hypocrisy behind. Nevertheless, if the rumours swirling around the blogosphere about an unnamed senior female MSP are correct, it now seems that Arrowsmith may merely have been a kind of 'John the Baptist' figure, preparing the ground for an imminent and much greater revelation - the potential consequences of which are truly mind-boggling. The suggestion that the politician concerned may not merely have been involved in the same industry as Arrowsmith some twenty-five years ago, but that the involvement may have been of a more 'in-front-of-the-cameras' variety, truly takes us into uncharted territory.

But what really made me splutter on my corn flakes was reading a couple of dark hints that the MSP in question may in the mid-1980s have been known by the screen name of 'Bella'. Just a piece of blogosphere mischief? Or pure coincidence? Surely????