Michael Kelly in the Scotsman, referring to the prospect of a Devo Max option in the independence referendum -
"As Lord Wallace put it on Newsnight on Tuesday, leaving a club is a matter for you alone. If, however, you want to remain in the club but change the rules, all
the other members are entitled to a say. That shuts that one off."
Well, no it doesn't, actually. Rule changes in a club are often rather good things, and they generally come about because one or more members of the club propose them. Nobody is disputing that the details of Devo Max would have to be negotiated with the UK government after any referendum vote, but what putting the issue to the electorate does is recognise that it's Scotland as a nation (ie. a member of the club) that is allowed to put its hand up and say it thinks the time has come to change the rules. In what sense is that inferior to leaving matters to back-room discussions between politicians?
Because it makes it easier for Wallace and his colleagues in the UK government to circumvent the popular will, presumably.
Incidentally, neither is anyone disputing that the UK government could completely ignore a consultative vote in favour of Devo Max - although if it did so, the Scottish people would then be free to draw their own conclusions about whether their democratic aspirations are any longer consistent with membership of "the club".
Kelly goes on -
"But a more sinister aspect to the platform on which the referendum will be fought by the nationalists emerged this week from the musings of Pat Kane. “Hue” (or is he “Cry”?) tends to use rather too many words for what he wants to say. Through the obfuscation, what I took from it was that the institutions, policies and practises of the post-independence Scotland that the SNP will sketch out in their referendum manifesto need simply be no more than a working drawing. This can be subject to major revision or even scrapping after we find ourselves cast loose from the UK.
Thus, while he condemns the First Minister’s scheme to fiddle with the SNP’s stance on Nato as “not a principled or honourable position”, Kane does not see it as fatal to the pro-independence camp. That is because – and here is the sleight of hand – everything would be up for grabs at the general election in Scotland that would follow independence.
That has been my concern all along. While the SNP are busy amending what voters have seen as its traditional stances – on the Queen, the euro, the pound, Nato, currency regulation – removing anything which might scare the voters, they cannot deliver on these promises even if they want to."
It seems that the 'concern' Kelly is expressing here can be summed up as follows : that an independent Scotland will, shockingly, be a democratic state. In other words, if the majority of the electorate vote to leave NATO in a post-independence election, that vote will actually have an effect. Crikey, what could be more 'sinister' than that? Presumably Kelly would prefer "Labour conference" style democracy, in which delegates are free to vote for higher pensions or nuclear disarmament to their hearts' content, because it won't make a blind bit of difference to actual policy.
Curiously, Kelly seems to feel that voters ought to be deeply concerned that they themselves will make the wrong decisions in years to come, and should therefore vote to deny themselves the ability to commit those future blunders. However, if he really wants the SNP to guarantee that certain proposed features of an independent Scotland's constitution will be guaranteed for all time and will not be revisable by so grubby a process as a democratic vote, this has some interesting ramifications. Presumably when Labour claim that Scotland must stay in the union to ensure a social democratic future of milk and honey for the whole UK, we're entitled to demand they actually 'deliver' that future by altering the UK constitution to ensure that the electorate in middle England isn't allowed to vote for anything other than social democracy? Because it has to be said that, as things stand, UK elections have rather a habit of producing right-wing governments.
Showing posts with label Michael Kelly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Kelly. Show all posts
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Friday, January 6, 2012
Dragon-fire and moon-howlers
This blog is in severe danger of turning into @Admin4TheYoonYoon Tweet-Watch, but here goes anyway...
Tom Harris : Comment 22 under Michael Kelly's Scotsman article really makes you feel positive about Nats: "GTF back to Ireland"
Joan McAlpine : Poison is endemic on internet. I get plenty of it from unionists whether Lab, Con or Lib Dem.
Tom Harris : Yes, Joan - the biggest problem is with unionists' comments on newspaper sites...Good grief.
Well, as it happens, Tom, I'm in a rather good position to comment on this subject, because I'm a Nationalist whose name is Kelly (for good measure my middle name is Michael) and I have been repeatedly and 'robustly' informed by a delightful unionist poster over a period of months that I cannot possibly be a Scot, on the grounds that my ancestry is Irish/American/French-Canadian. The 'name' of the poster in question is Moniker of Monza, and he posts at Political Betting. There are dozens of his ilk at that site, and elsewhere online. So don't try telling me there isn't a massive 'CyberYoonYoonist' problem.
Oh, and the fact that I don't know the real names of any of those CYYs brings me neatly onto this -
Tom Harris : Calling all Nat moon-howlers: You want to be another "Braveheart"? Well "brave" doesn't equate to writing poison under a pseudonym.
A sentiment with which I can just spot the one minor problem, Tom - namely, why have you posted your 'less constructive' Labour Hame pieces under the pseudonym 'Admin'? Or at least that was your practice until the leadership campaign was safely lost. Is 'bravery' a quality that only Nats should ever be expected to aspire to?
To turn to the Michael Kelly article itself...well, perhaps the best way of summing it up is that it bears an uncanny similarity to the irate letters Norman Hogg used to write to Scotland on Sunday circa 1995, and even in those days it was like entering a time-warp. Exhibit A -
"He [Salmond] remembers taking Mrs Thatcher on, while the rest of us recall that it was the SNP that started the Thatcher era. By bringing down the Callaghan government in 1979, the SNP forced a general election at the time most propitious to the Tories, and thereafter they ruled the UK for the next 18 years."
My money's on 2543 (for the year that Labour will finally dispense with that particular chip on their shoulder). But let's run through the actual sequence of events yet again for Kelly's benefit. The facts are these - the SNP propped up an extraordinarily unpopular Labour government for years in the late 1970s, and did so because they believed that Callaghan was acting in good faith on Home Rule. But after Scotland voted Yes to devolution in March 1979, Callaghan refused to honour that mandate. So what exactly was the SNP supposed to do - carry on propping up a lame duck government in exchange for absolutely nothing? It's true that they didn't achieve anything by bringing the government down, but neither would they have achieved anything by taking the alternative course - there would still have been no Scottish Assembly, and Mrs Thatcher's rise to power would in all probability have been delayed by only a matter of weeks (five months at the absolute outside). The idea that Labour could have overturned a 20+ point deficit if only they'd been given an extra few weeks is risible in the extreme.
Besides which, it wasn't the SNP that brought Mrs Thatcher to power. It was the people of the UK who did so by voting for her in a general election. The most sacred belief of unionists like Michael Kelly is that the will of the people of the whole UK must hold sway in Scotland - this is known as 'maturity'. Callaghan's defeat in a vote of no confidence (in which Labour folk-hero Gerry Fitt's abstention was just as decisive as the SNP's votes, let's not forget) merely facilitated and mildly accelerated the process of the UK electorate choosing a government that was more to their taste. So why isn't Kelly able to celebrate that? Isn't the fact that he feels unable to do so (especially after thirty-three years, for heaven's sake!) a rather strong indication that he is on the wrong side of the constitutional debate?
"And he [Salmond] is trying his best to fix both the timing and wording of the referendum question – the former on the grounds that he promised it would be held late in this parliament: a promise for which there is as little evidence as for a dragon’s fiery breath."
You mean, apart from the footage from the leaders' debates, and from several high-profile interviews? If both I and Hugh Henry imagined all that, then clearly we both believe in dragons.
"However, the Thatcher stopper deserves credit for being so honest in the assessment of his role. It is further to his credit that he kept quiet about his heroics for so many years, allowing us to believe that it was Tony Blair and New Labour that finally lanced the Tory boil."
Please don't try to change the subject, Michael - Alex Salmond was talking about his role in the downfall of Thatcher in 1990, not the Tory government in 1997. And if we're being strictly accurate, she was actually brought down by fellow Tories. Indeed, there's more than a grain of truth in the old joke that the Tories won the 1992 election because they'd succeeded in doing what Labour had tried and failed to do for over a decade - remove Margaret Thatcher from office.
* * *
I must say I disagree with Subrosa on her call for an entirely new national anthem to replace Flower of Scotland. It seems to me there's a disconnect between the people and elites (including the SNP elite) on this subject - the people have already made their choice of anthem, but the elite simply can't leave it alone. My guess is that if a new song was commissioned, it would be a repeat of what happened in Russia following the collapse of communism - the public wouldn't take the new anthem to their hearts, and we'd have to revert to the old one again after a few years.
It's true, though, that the use of Flower of Scotland at sporting events needs a bit of imagination - it should be played fast, and definitely not by a pipe band.
Tom Harris : Comment 22 under Michael Kelly's Scotsman article really makes you feel positive about Nats: "GTF back to Ireland"
Joan McAlpine : Poison is endemic on internet. I get plenty of it from unionists whether Lab, Con or Lib Dem.
Tom Harris : Yes, Joan - the biggest problem is with unionists' comments on newspaper sites...Good grief.
Well, as it happens, Tom, I'm in a rather good position to comment on this subject, because I'm a Nationalist whose name is Kelly (for good measure my middle name is Michael) and I have been repeatedly and 'robustly' informed by a delightful unionist poster over a period of months that I cannot possibly be a Scot, on the grounds that my ancestry is Irish/American/French-Canadian. The 'name' of the poster in question is Moniker of Monza, and he posts at Political Betting. There are dozens of his ilk at that site, and elsewhere online. So don't try telling me there isn't a massive 'CyberYoonYoonist' problem.
Oh, and the fact that I don't know the real names of any of those CYYs brings me neatly onto this -
Tom Harris : Calling all Nat moon-howlers: You want to be another "Braveheart"? Well "brave" doesn't equate to writing poison under a pseudonym.
A sentiment with which I can just spot the one minor problem, Tom - namely, why have you posted your 'less constructive' Labour Hame pieces under the pseudonym 'Admin'? Or at least that was your practice until the leadership campaign was safely lost. Is 'bravery' a quality that only Nats should ever be expected to aspire to?
To turn to the Michael Kelly article itself...well, perhaps the best way of summing it up is that it bears an uncanny similarity to the irate letters Norman Hogg used to write to Scotland on Sunday circa 1995, and even in those days it was like entering a time-warp. Exhibit A -
"He [Salmond] remembers taking Mrs Thatcher on, while the rest of us recall that it was the SNP that started the Thatcher era. By bringing down the Callaghan government in 1979, the SNP forced a general election at the time most propitious to the Tories, and thereafter they ruled the UK for the next 18 years."
My money's on 2543 (for the year that Labour will finally dispense with that particular chip on their shoulder). But let's run through the actual sequence of events yet again for Kelly's benefit. The facts are these - the SNP propped up an extraordinarily unpopular Labour government for years in the late 1970s, and did so because they believed that Callaghan was acting in good faith on Home Rule. But after Scotland voted Yes to devolution in March 1979, Callaghan refused to honour that mandate. So what exactly was the SNP supposed to do - carry on propping up a lame duck government in exchange for absolutely nothing? It's true that they didn't achieve anything by bringing the government down, but neither would they have achieved anything by taking the alternative course - there would still have been no Scottish Assembly, and Mrs Thatcher's rise to power would in all probability have been delayed by only a matter of weeks (five months at the absolute outside). The idea that Labour could have overturned a 20+ point deficit if only they'd been given an extra few weeks is risible in the extreme.
Besides which, it wasn't the SNP that brought Mrs Thatcher to power. It was the people of the UK who did so by voting for her in a general election. The most sacred belief of unionists like Michael Kelly is that the will of the people of the whole UK must hold sway in Scotland - this is known as 'maturity'. Callaghan's defeat in a vote of no confidence (in which Labour folk-hero Gerry Fitt's abstention was just as decisive as the SNP's votes, let's not forget) merely facilitated and mildly accelerated the process of the UK electorate choosing a government that was more to their taste. So why isn't Kelly able to celebrate that? Isn't the fact that he feels unable to do so (especially after thirty-three years, for heaven's sake!) a rather strong indication that he is on the wrong side of the constitutional debate?
"And he [Salmond] is trying his best to fix both the timing and wording of the referendum question – the former on the grounds that he promised it would be held late in this parliament: a promise for which there is as little evidence as for a dragon’s fiery breath."
You mean, apart from the footage from the leaders' debates, and from several high-profile interviews? If both I and Hugh Henry imagined all that, then clearly we both believe in dragons.
"However, the Thatcher stopper deserves credit for being so honest in the assessment of his role. It is further to his credit that he kept quiet about his heroics for so many years, allowing us to believe that it was Tony Blair and New Labour that finally lanced the Tory boil."
Please don't try to change the subject, Michael - Alex Salmond was talking about his role in the downfall of Thatcher in 1990, not the Tory government in 1997. And if we're being strictly accurate, she was actually brought down by fellow Tories. Indeed, there's more than a grain of truth in the old joke that the Tories won the 1992 election because they'd succeeded in doing what Labour had tried and failed to do for over a decade - remove Margaret Thatcher from office.
* * *
I must say I disagree with Subrosa on her call for an entirely new national anthem to replace Flower of Scotland. It seems to me there's a disconnect between the people and elites (including the SNP elite) on this subject - the people have already made their choice of anthem, but the elite simply can't leave it alone. My guess is that if a new song was commissioned, it would be a repeat of what happened in Russia following the collapse of communism - the public wouldn't take the new anthem to their hearts, and we'd have to revert to the old one again after a few years.
It's true, though, that the use of Flower of Scotland at sporting events needs a bit of imagination - it should be played fast, and definitely not by a pipe band.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Michael Kelly's insinuations of fascism
Apparently having failed to spot that his comrades have made utter fools of themselves by claiming there is some kind of 'moral obligation' on Scotland to sacrifice its tourist industry by accepting joint ownership of riots that have nothing to do with us, Michael Kelly has belatedly decided to join in -
"Nationalism as a political philosophy has too many overtones of authoritarianism and discrimination to sound attractive to anyone who has studied the history of Europe in the 20th century. Supporters of the SNP would, no doubt, point to the number of legitimate struggles for independence from overbearing colonial power waged on other continents during the latter part of that period. But in those countries there were deep, just grievances as indigenous peoples saw their resources exploited for the benefit of the foreign conquerors.
Scotland is suffering no such enslavement, ill-treatment or bleeding dry."
Translation : any nationalism that is not borne out of brutal oppression is automatically fascism, but I'd really rather not utter such a demonstrably silly sentiment directly, so I'll just say it by insinuation.
Not good enough, Michael. I can do no better than to quote the words of the former Presiding Officer George Reid -
"Each nation has its own private place in space, time, history, social and economic development. Any attempt to link the SNP and the Nazis, as happened in the Kinross and Perth by-election, is as foolish as lumping John Smith and Stalin together because both were socialists. Similarly, while all democrats will rejoice in the re-found freedom of the peoples of Eastern Europe, any attempt to make direct comparisons with where they came from, and where we are, would be offensive. And any association of the SNP with violence is absurd, given the party's 60 years of absolute dedication to pacific, civic nationalism."
"Nationalism as a political philosophy has too many overtones of authoritarianism and discrimination to sound attractive to anyone who has studied the history of Europe in the 20th century. Supporters of the SNP would, no doubt, point to the number of legitimate struggles for independence from overbearing colonial power waged on other continents during the latter part of that period. But in those countries there were deep, just grievances as indigenous peoples saw their resources exploited for the benefit of the foreign conquerors.
Scotland is suffering no such enslavement, ill-treatment or bleeding dry."
Translation : any nationalism that is not borne out of brutal oppression is automatically fascism, but I'd really rather not utter such a demonstrably silly sentiment directly, so I'll just say it by insinuation.
Not good enough, Michael. I can do no better than to quote the words of the former Presiding Officer George Reid -
"Each nation has its own private place in space, time, history, social and economic development. Any attempt to link the SNP and the Nazis, as happened in the Kinross and Perth by-election, is as foolish as lumping John Smith and Stalin together because both were socialists. Similarly, while all democrats will rejoice in the re-found freedom of the peoples of Eastern Europe, any attempt to make direct comparisons with where they came from, and where we are, would be offensive. And any association of the SNP with violence is absurd, given the party's 60 years of absolute dedication to pacific, civic nationalism."
Thursday, May 12, 2011
An independent Scotland would just be far too modern for Michael Kelly's taste
NOTE : I'm reposting this (backdated) because it vanished when Blogger was down.
A curious line of thinking from Michael Kelly on Newsnight last night. He claimed that the SNP's stated intention to retain the monarchy in an independent Scotland was worthless, because it's inevitable that a modern, 21st Century nation would want an elected Head of State. Given that he evidently regarded this as some kind of 'warning', it seems we can draw three rather extraordinary conclusions -
1) The UK is not a modern, 21st Century nation, and this is a GOOD THING.
2) An independent Scotland would, on the other hand, be a modern, 21st Century nation, and that would be a BAD THING.
3) Kelly feels that Scotland's much-vaunted affection for the Royal Family is so shallow that there isn't even the remotest chance of us wanting to follow the example of Canada, New Zealand and more than a dozen other independent countries by retaining the monarchy. And yet he's inviting us to 'fear' the loss of something we supposedly don't really care about.
There's Labour logic for you.
Also on the same programme, we had Angus Macleod reassure us that the SNP has long since moved on from the dark days of the early 90s when it believed in "separatism and compulsory kilt-wearing". Well, that's a relief. But does anyone else suspect that he might just be getting the early 90s mixed up with either a) the early 50s, or b) a figment of Alan Cochrane's imagination?
And don't get me started on Paxman and his sudden urge to know all about the "nuts and bolts" of independence - but only if condensed into sentences containing no more than three syllables. Apart from anything else, it doesn't seem to have even occurred to him that the shape the SNP would like an independent Scotland to take, and the shape it actually would take, are not necessarily one and the same thing. For example, the SNP don't want Scotland to be part of NATO, but they would just be one of many players in a democratic decision-making process that would take place after independence, not before.
A curious line of thinking from Michael Kelly on Newsnight last night. He claimed that the SNP's stated intention to retain the monarchy in an independent Scotland was worthless, because it's inevitable that a modern, 21st Century nation would want an elected Head of State. Given that he evidently regarded this as some kind of 'warning', it seems we can draw three rather extraordinary conclusions -
1) The UK is not a modern, 21st Century nation, and this is a GOOD THING.
2) An independent Scotland would, on the other hand, be a modern, 21st Century nation, and that would be a BAD THING.
3) Kelly feels that Scotland's much-vaunted affection for the Royal Family is so shallow that there isn't even the remotest chance of us wanting to follow the example of Canada, New Zealand and more than a dozen other independent countries by retaining the monarchy. And yet he's inviting us to 'fear' the loss of something we supposedly don't really care about.
There's Labour logic for you.
Also on the same programme, we had Angus Macleod reassure us that the SNP has long since moved on from the dark days of the early 90s when it believed in "separatism and compulsory kilt-wearing". Well, that's a relief. But does anyone else suspect that he might just be getting the early 90s mixed up with either a) the early 50s, or b) a figment of Alan Cochrane's imagination?
And don't get me started on Paxman and his sudden urge to know all about the "nuts and bolts" of independence - but only if condensed into sentences containing no more than three syllables. Apart from anything else, it doesn't seem to have even occurred to him that the shape the SNP would like an independent Scotland to take, and the shape it actually would take, are not necessarily one and the same thing. For example, the SNP don't want Scotland to be part of NATO, but they would just be one of many players in a democratic decision-making process that would take place after independence, not before.
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