The ambush

Something was bothering me about the incident involving a nurse and Nicola Sturgeon during the Leaders' Debate broadcast by BBC Scotland on the evening of Sunday 21st May.

Enough - much, much more than enough - has already been written and said and tweeted about the nurse, much to my dismay, as expressed here. This is not about her.

The consternation about her on social media, while being deeply inappropriate, also served to distract from other pertinent issues, not least of which was BBC Scotland's deliberate framing of the debate around devolved rather than reserved issues, to focus debate on the Scottish rather than the UK Government's record, even though the forthcoming election is for a UK Government, not a Scottish Government.

But this is not what was bothering me. I am sure the nurse's concerns were perfectly legitimate and her opinions were sincerely held and deserved to be heard. It's the nature of the apparent ambush by BBC Scotland of Nicola Sturgeon, in which the nurse was an unwitting pawn, that bothered me.

I'd seen something similar before.

The nurse had been asked back by BBC Scotland, having been unable to ask her question on a previous edition of Question Time. However, I don't think it was the sincerity or urgency of the nurse's point that was the reason BBC Scotland invited her back. It was the opportunity it provided for them to replicate an event from history.

In 1979 a confrontation between a nurse and a Prime Minister (rather than First Minister) over a similar issue - pay - on a similar format of programme involving questions posed to the leaders of political parties by a studio audience, played a material part in the downfall of Jim Callaghan. It seemed to me that BBC Scotland were deliberately trying to emulate that occasion to damage Nicola Sturgeon politically.

Consider this, from Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair, by Jon Lawrence:

"On Granada 500 in 1979, Callaghan fell into the trap of appearing to bully a young nurse critical of his Government's pay policy. Techniques that had stood him in good stead in set-piece interviews looked bad when they were turned on an underpaid health worker. Predictably the audience reacted sharply, with even the Labour supporters judging Callaghahn's performance harshly" 

Or this, from The British General Election of 1979, by David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh:

"The Granada current affairs programme World in Action avoided the election until the Monday before polling day, when Granada 500 was given an hour of peak viewing-time in order to show the three main party leaders responding to questions from a representative sample of 500 voters from Bolton East. Both Mrs Thatcher and Mr Callaghan were occasionally cutting in their treatment of the questioners. Whereas the Prime Minister was somewhat hectoring, and commited the surprising error of bullying a nurse, Mrs Thatcher struck a populist note on the issues of capital punishment and immigration. The audience responded warmly, and an opinion poll showed that she scored over Mr Callaghan." 

Or this quote from Gordon Burns, presenter of Granada 500, as recorded in Granadaland - an Oral History of Granada Television: 

"Sitting in the front of the audience, were these nurses [...] And there was a dispute with the nurses about how poorly they were paid [...] and they were threatening, I think, to strike. And one of them asked a question, and Jim Callaghan turned on them and really went to town on them about being irresponsible and all the rest of it – he really tore into them, which was the wrong thing to do. You don’t attack nurses – they are the darlings of the community! And yet he went into them – and it was a big mistake. And he then left and that was it, and then we all got on the train and went back to Bolton [...] And I remember touring each carriage on the way back [...] and I asked them all [...] who was the most impressive of the leaders to you? [...] and they didn’t like Callaghan, and they didn’t like the way he went at the nurses. And so came the election, which is history now, Thatcher won it to become the first female Prime Minister [...] I was later told by somebody within the Labour ranks that when they carried out their post-mortem of what went wrong, one of the areas pinpointed was Callaghan’s performance on that Granada 500 programme." 

I suspect BBC Scotland were hoping a similar confrontation would ensue between a nurse and Nicola Sturgeon which would damage Sturgeon politically. Although she didn't fall for the trap, strenuously finding common cause with the nurse and agreeing with her complaint about pay, the media accused the SNP of having smeared the nurse, hoping desperately to make history repeat itself.

The irony is, the BBC Scotland chairperson for the debate who conspicuously steered the agenda away from reserved issues which would have subject the Tories to intense and uncomfortable scrutiny, and towards devolved issues which put the SNP in the spotlight, was Sarah Smith, whose father, John Smith, former leader of the Labour Party, served in the very Callaghan government to whose fall the earlier confrontation, which BBC Scotland were trying to replicate, had contributed.

Tories for Independence

Imagine the Duke of Rothesay ascending the throne of Scotland actually in Scotland rather than in Westminster Abbey. The Stone of Destiny is solemnly conveyed a few hundred yards down the Royal Mile from Edinburgh Castle to be placed under a suitable seat in Saint Giles Cathedral. Charles (presumably) takes his place and is acclaimed, by the Grace of God alone, Charles III, King of Scots.

We already have a well developed left wing vision of that "better country" whose early days we want to live in, that Independent Scotland we are trying to achieve. I am in no way an advocate of right wing politics, however I understand the need to include Scots with right wing sympathies in that vision. We have a radical version of that vision already. We need to develop a conservative one too if we are to bring the whole country with us on this journey.

An Independent Scotland will not be a utopia, and so will require a mature and nuanced politics. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the unionist strategy is to try and stunt the development of a nuanced public discourse by polarising our politics into narrow monolithic arguments around which people can rally to form an immovable mass, encouraging the development of media bubbles and echo chambers into which we can retreat and converse with like minds. But we need to remember that what unites us as people is not our shared values, nor being right about some proposition we all agree on. It is being wrong. Everyone is wrong most of the time about most things. When we disagree, there is the possibility that one of us is right, but the liklihood is we are both wrong. If progress is possible it is only through respect and compassion in the knowledge of our mutual fallibility. If Scotland has a future as an Independent country, it has to be one people can disagree about.  

So, instead of celebrating Scottish inventors of the Victorian era, whose achievements formed the foundations of the industries of empire, we need a right wing perspective that supports today's innovators and entrepreneurs spinning the disruptive technologies of the future out of our universities. We need businessmen with an appetite to promote their interests in the EU rather than Empire 2.0. We need a right wing, conservative vision of an Independent Scotland to which pragmatic profit-oriented interests can subscribe, one where they see themselves thriving rather than just surviving.  

As in any healthy parliamentary democracy, the Left in Scotland needs scrutiny and criticism from a right wing point of view (and vice versa). But at the moment the Left finds itself attempting dialogue with a zombie. This is not healthy for the Left. Ruth Davidson subordinates every consideration to her British nationalist obsession with the Union. It is becoming a morbid fascination with an imperial and supremacist past. The requirements of future prosperity are ignored in favour of a Brexit fantasia that is indulged for no other reason than the maintenance of the Union. The most jingistic insistence on flags and ceremony in Scottish politics comes, not from pro-Independence voices, but strident British nationalists currently holding the right wing of Scottish politics hostage.

Scottish politics needs Tories for Independence.

Cannon fodder

Various commentators have placed recent terrorist acts in the broader context of male violence in general. A spectrum of male violence can be described, on whose extreme these incidents lie, but which includes other acts of violence against, for example, women and the self, both lethal and sub-lethal in outcome.

According to this thesis, acts of violence such as recent terrorist atrocities should not just be interpreted in the narrow context explicitly described by those claiming responsibility for it or by those directly responding to it. That context is contrived to serve a particular agenda and offers no ultimate explanation of events. Similar atrocities committed by young men in the name of other causes (and therefore within other narrow contexts in pursuit of different agendas) provide a broader, more unified context in which they can be considered in relation to male violence in general.

Male violence is often discussed as a response to threats to male privilege. In general, if privilege of any sort is allowed to persist sufficiently long it transforms and metastasises into a spurious sense of entitlement. It is no longer a temporary condition conferred on a contingent basis for some limited well-defined purpose, but begins to serve its own purposes. In in the end it seeks only to preserve itself without reference to any utility or justification. Where power remains unchallenged it is no longer held in trust, but becomes self-perpetuating. Economic privilege generates fascism when threatened. And with male privilege, we see that spurious sense of entitlement develop which, when thwarted, erupts in violence at the individual level, as rape, spousal abuse, sexual harassment, and so on.

This is understood well enough already, but it is only half of the story.

Hate felt towards others must also be balanced by a degree of loathing directed against the self if it is to be acted on. The toxic cocktail in which male violence is brewed includes self-loathing as a key ingredient. Just as we must love ourselves to be capable of loving others, just as it is not selfish or petty to be able to love and forgive ourselves, but crucial if we are to be able to understand the love and forgiveness of others and extend love and forgiveness towards them in return, just as all love and forgiveness is reduced to an enigma, utterly incomprehensible to an individual, if they do not feel it already on their own account, so hatred towards others is built on a foundation of self-disgust and shame. The way we see ourselves is the prototype for how we see others, and every outrage and insult we commit against others is ultimately based on a judgement we made on ourselves. Every act of violence towards others is also committed against the self irrespective of the intended target. We cannot hate others and feel motivated to attack them as a consequence without first hating ourselves.

So understanding male violence requires an understanding of male self-loathing. A potentially uncomfortable ramification of this is that we have to consider all forms of male violence, including violence against the self and violence that is conventionally celebrated as an act of self-sacrifice. We need to include acts of heroism as well as acts of villainy within the scope of our analysis. We need to consider acts of male violence society conventionally approves of as well as those acts we abhor if we want to try to tell the whole story.  

It is important that we understand the limitations of some commentaries on masculinity if we are to appreciate the big picture here. Feminist commentary is concerned with male behaviour to the extent that it impacts on female experience. We must avoid attributing more universal or general significance to these observations than their scope warrants. While a perfectly legitimate concern, this is not what I am addressing here. Feminist commentary, by definition, is not concerned with the aspects of male experience that can only be fully appreciated by men. For example, if there is a particularly masculine form which a sense of worthlessness takes which contributes to the violent response we observe, our analysis must go beyond the limits of feminism. This is a discussion that men need to have with each other, not one they can rely on women to take the lead in. Men cannot piggy-back dealing with this on feminist discourse. I think they need to start from scratch on their own terms and without cribbing from women.

One particularly unhelpful concept men sometimes adopt from feminist discourse when discussing male violence is the idea of "toxic masculinity," which I would like to dispense with entirely. So, to be clear, when I talk about male self-loathing and worthlessness, I am not talking about the consequences of recent economic changes which have changed the role of men in society, resulting in a transient sense of dislocation and frustration. I am not talking about something that is "toxic" or "fragile" or in "crisis." These terms are used to describe certain masculine pathologies in feminist commentary, indeed they reduce masculinity to a pathology of modernity. I am not talking about modernity. Male violence is not a modern phenomenon.

I consider the phrase "toxic masculinity" to be no less oppressively performative than traditional gender roles conventionally criticised by feminism. It is as performative as any description of what is "suitable" or "unsuitable for a lady."

Of course, I am trying to diagnose, not excuse, the behaviour that normally attracts this characterisation of toxicity. Describing masculinity as "toxic" or "in crisis" or "fragile" as though masculinity itself were a pathology of modernity, and subject to the same kinds of crises, is a serious misrepresentation and limitation of masculinity. Which is to say, I personally feel limited by this characterisation even though I believe my own behaviour eludes this description. I find my ability to describe my own masculinity constrained because whatever I do, this concept requires that I still characterise it as non-toxic. I do not want to have to contrast my masculinity with anything. I should not have to share a category or a spectrum or a range of behaviours and attributes used to describe my masculinity with something I do not consider a valid form of masculinity, because it invalidates me to have to do so.

Men need to reclaim masculinity from patriarchy and its spurious entitlements and restrictions, its misdirections of male frustration, its fabricated deprivations. It is patriarchy that is (quite properly) in "crisis." It is patriarchy that is "toxic," not masculinity.

Feminism has led the way because women are most obviously and immediately negatively impacted by unacceptable male behaviour and male violence, but it is men that need to step up and reclaim masculinity because it is ultimately up to them to perpetuate acceptable male behaviour. Rather than consider the possibility that there are "toxic" variants of masculinity, men need to reject entirely the counterfeit masculinity offered by patriarchy and reclaim the authentic masculinity that this conceals, one that does not need to be detoxified. I am much happier with the ideas of "counterfeit" and "authentic" masculinity than the idea of "toxic" masculinity because I feel contaminated by the latter, by the possibility of it, even if I am not subject to the actuality, while the former preserves the idea of a pristine condition that has never been compromised by patriarchy, and a condition to which a man can aspire.

I have, in the past, been (somewhat condescendingly) informed on numerous occasions that the phrase (of course) does not apply to all men. I would point out I am fully aware of the "not all men" argument. When I have made a distinction between the intended meaning of the phrase (which does not apply to "all men") and the effective meaning it acquires (that masculinity is intrinsically toxic) when misconstrued in a situation that makes this likely, I have been informed that I only think this because of my own "toxic masculinity" and "insecurities." I'm afraid I cannot engage with a feminism that would ensnare me in logic so circular. It is not toxic to criticise the concept of masculine toxicity.

The point is, the assumption seems to be that I am somehow let off the hook because the phrase is not supposed to apply to me. But it does, because it describes all masculinity in terms of its degree of toxicity. The phrase puts all men on a toxicity spectrum, from those whose masculinity is considered highly problematic, to those at the other extreme whose masculinity raises no objections. The point is, it's not reassuring to find I am at the nice end of the spectrum. I don't want to be on it at all. I don't want to be defined by this spectrum against which my masculinity is being assessed. It is as though I am being put in a police line-up and them I am expected to be glad I am not identified as the criminal. The point is, I am appalled I was ever considered a suspect. So we see it is as easy to argue that the concept of "toxic masculinity" corresponds to the statement "all men are rapists" as to the statement "not all men [are rapists]." Under these circumstances, it has ceased to be a useful and meaningful concept.

The concept does more than distract from the underlying problem of the male sense of worthlessness, in imposes a misleading analytical framework that inhibits productive discussion of it, and in some instances may even contribute to it.

A sense of worthlessness underwrites the use of man as disposable cannon-fodder in all eras. It is the flip side of needing to make yourself useful. It is in self-loathing and worthlessness that we find man's incipient criminality.  It is about having nothing more to offer than your love but believing that's not enough. It is about being denied the transformational quality of tenderness and intimacy because you believe your touch is tainted.

Men need to somehow do the impossible. They need to be able to forgive themselves. Not in some trite exculpatory way, but embracing all their capabilities and culpabilities and forgiving themselves in a meaningful way that melts and disintegrates the bars of the cage of self-loathing and worthlessness whose narrow confines kettled their frustrate rage and made them pace and howl. They need to learn to believe they are something more than just cannon fodder. Then their rage may abate and they can step forward, liberated and able to participate in life with all the love and joy and tenderness their sense of worthlessness previously denied them.  

Venus

The cave is cool and complex.
Stones, furred and pillowed with moss,
gently soothe and smother the sibilant whisper
of a somewhere subterranean stream
as its drunken echoes stagger and glance
against the dark's hidden crystal obliquities,
stumbling into the assassin arms of shadow,
to be attenuated in its obsidian opacity.

Vast galleries are stacked with secrets.
Their walls recede into silence,
and a black bureaucracy of time
raises a finger to its lips in admonition.
The exhalation of every breath
is a paper dart, tossed,
and lost in the depths of the tarry mirk,
trapped, pressed flat forever between pages
that fold and turn at a glacial pace
reckoned by strata filed and thumbed
by indolent geology.

Stalagmites rise behind you
as you penetrate the darkness.
They bar the passage of the light.
Day may not follow you into this night.
Unseen emeralds are embedded in the walls,
like lidless reptilian eyes
whose constant and incurious gaze
is always on you,
and all your lovers' hearts are garnets,
strewn, glistening, on black magnetite sand
on which the river runs, its path a serpent
that leads you back to seams of virgin gold
that were their source. You travel

deeper into the cavern,
lose yourself in its maze,
pass the point of no return, and go on,
until at last you find that secret chamber
whose still air has stood unstirred by breath
for forty thousand years, and there,
in the deepest recess of the cave, an image.

With doppelganger shock
you stop before an image of yourself
that never left this place, that remained
when we stole the shaman's half-heard charms,
his obscure, misunderstood riddles, the chants
that let him endure your presence in this place,
and ran outside to whisper them to a world we feared,
to trick and tame it, in the broad daylight, so long ago,
and when at last we built our caves of glass in the sky
to make a home for the sun we now revered,
we forgot that all we brought of you with us
was a mask, and a memory,
and you were never truly with us
all that time.

And so, in the space of a single beat
of your brittle hard carbonado heart,
in the time it took to see yourself
standing there in the dark,
you are re-united, and understand
you can never leave this place.
You slip aside the mask you hid behind
and become the image, and wait:
for another two score millennia now must pass
before you meet yourself again.

#NurseGate

Last night the Leader's Debate on the BBC was a scandal. The BBC framed the debate around devolved issues, rather than reserved issues, despite being concerned with a Westminster rather than a Holyrood election. This meant the Tories were not required to defend their record in office and their policies and manifesto were not properly scrutinised. Attention was focused on the Scottish Government instead, even though the election will not impact its composition. This was a blatant and deliberate attempt by the BBC to distract the audience and protect the Tories. The context is their ongoing efforts to manufacture a Tory revival in Scotland.

Not that you would know anything about that online.

Because at one point in the debate a member of the audience asked a question that some people took exception to. This prompted a Twitter storm and Facebook posts going into the individual in question's background to undermine her veracity.

Two things about this:

1. Well done. No, really, well done. Those of you who participated in this witch hunt managed to divert attention from the real story of the night, which was the BBC's continued blatant bias in favour of the Tories. This was an open goal, so it is disappointing that you find a private individual an easier target. You were perched on the six yard line, the goalie was off his, and you still managed to blooter the ball into the face of someone in the crowd. Round of applause for all concerned. 
2. This personalisation of a political issue was bang out of order. I don't care if the person disagrees with me. I don't even care if they were lying. As a publicly funded organisation the BBC can be held to account in a way that would be deeply intrusive for a private individual. If you have a problem with what happened, take it up with the BBC, don't trawl social media accounts for evidence about someone's personal life. That is worse than the worst gutter journalism. You are cheapening our discourse and doing the tabloids' job for them. So the person claimed to be in poverty, but seems to be doing alright? I don't care. I don't care what food or wine she likes. I don't care where she goes on holiday, or what school her children go to. That is literally none of my business. I don't need her to perform her poverty for me and abstain from all pleasures in life for her to qualify to comment on poverty. So she said something you consider controversial? So what? Have you ever said something controversial? Would that justify all the details of your life being openly discussed and raked over for the public to disapprove? Take a good look at yourself, guys. Don't let your accusations of hypocrisy blind you to your own.   

I have deliberately not named the individual involved or the issue she raised because I am not going to contribute to this discussion about her input to the debate last night other than to say how utterly appalled I am at the behaviour of people online towards her. We need to be much, much better than this. We don't deserve Independence if this is how we act.

"Everyone knows"

I'm fed up of people stating opinions as fact. It gets particularly bad at election time. "Everyone knows that [insert unsubstantiated speculation]." All it shows is you don't want your limited knowledge and the even more limited extent you have reflected on it up for discussion. "Everyone knows" is what you say when you are telling people what to think, rather than inviting them to think.

So I was surprised this morning when listening to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 to find James Naughtie justify statements by prefacing them with the phrase "everyone knows" in a piece on the fabled Tory resurgence in Scotland's fishing communities, to confer spurious certainty on his assertions. Apart from anything else, this is terrible journalism: if we know already, why are you telling us?

This is of course Angus Robertson's turf, and it is the second time (so far) this week the Today programme has taken an interest in his constituency, reporting with their now blatant bias that has become so customary as to barely merit comment anymore.

It's almost as if Angus Robertson's performance at Westminster has so discomfited the PM that he has been marked out for special attention, making his Aberdeen-shire seat worthy of not one, but two attack items on Radio 4's Today programme (so far) this week, while the disintegration of Labour in Aberdeen itself seems worthy of none.

I say "almost as if" rather than "everyone knows" of course, because I am just speculating.

UDI: Unilateral Declaration of Irrelevance

As the dust settles on the local elections we can see that Labour voters continue to drift away. There is no core Labour vote in Scotland any more. The unionist vote is inexorably coalescing around the Tories. While the appetite for Independence grows, unionism is reduced to cannibalism.

As predicted, the unionists have succeeded in polarising Scottish politics. This is because they want to reduce it to a negative contest without any nuance. They don't want people's vote particularly. They want voters to disengage entirely. They want politics to be fatiguing rather than exciting. They want paralysis. Don't give them what they want.

Remain focused on articulating a positive, inclusive vision for the future. Remain engaged. Concentrate on expressing and reinforcing our common values of human decency, tolerance and justice for the whole of society, not just those who agree with you on a particular policy issue. Be grateful that in this age in which these values are being assaulted and eroded we still have the opportunity to make them a credible political platform. Let your opponents wallow in their bile if that is their choice. You do not need to join them. Declare them to be irrelevant.

Labour has marked its decline with its own Unilateral Declaration of Irrelevance. The saddest political suicide note of our times has to be the once mighty Labour in Scotland celebrating Tory gains at their own expense in the local elections so they can use them as part of their anti-SNP rhetoric. Which begs the question: what are Labour for, if their objectives are as easily achieved by Tory victories as Labour ones. They may as well just campaign directly for the Tories from now on.

Few things are more tragic than watching Labour politicians like John McDonnell and Blair MacDougall hailing the electoral successes of Tory candidates in a Scottish local election as some sort of achievement. They are effectively now openly admitting their own irrelevance. They are openly campaigning on an "anyone but the SNP" basis, where this now means "Tory."

When stars die they collapse under their own weight until quantum degeneracy pressure halts this process. They become a dwarf or a neutron star. If they are sufficiently massive their own weight will overcome even this degeneracy pressure and the collapse will continue indefinitely, until their surface passes a radius below which escape velocity exceeds the speed of light - the event horizon - and they become a black hole. Labour in Scotland were very massive. The local elections were its event horizon. They have now been destroyed under the weight of their own sense of entitlement. In their eagerness to spin the result in any way possible against the SNP, the London media have missed the real story, which is the destruction of Labour in Scotland.

There are other dead parties, however, which are still considered relevant in some quarters. UKIP have openly acknowledged that the Tories are now delivering the programme they have advocated for the last twenty years, thereby making their own Unilateral Declaration of Irrelevance. Nevertheless, the lifeless corpse of UKIP can still serve some purpose it seems. Their opinion is still sought by our media.

The conspicuous prominence the BBC continues to give UKIP should be considered a scandal. Consider this: UKIP has no MPs, one councillor, and 39,000 members; the Greens 1 MP, 40 councillors, and 55,000 members. Yet UKIP are afforded not one, but two BBC election specials, numerous Question Time appearances, and are constantly asked to comment on the topics of the day. BBC coverage of the Green party? Effectively nil. This is not just deliberate bias towards UKIP anymore, it is so blatant now that we need to wonder what on earth is going on. It is a scandal. It is up to us to Unilaterally Declare UKIP Irrelevant. The BBC don't seem to be able to recognise it.

For years now the BBC has been one continuous party political broadcast on behalf of UKIP. Why? There is a pattern here. Their coverage of the French election worryingly pro Le Pen. To the BBC, every right wing insurgent, like Le Pen or Farage or Nuttall or Trump, no matter how irrelevant, is a remarkable and long-awaited saviour, while each left wing one, like Corbyn, no matter how urgent or compelling their critique, is a ridiculous fool. Notice the palpable disappointment in a BBC announcer's tone when reporting a poor result for a far right group like UKIP or FN. Notice how every poor result for the far right is reported as though it was a temporary set back, while every poor result for the left is portrayed as a crushing defeat.

It seems the BBC has been captured by one of the same factions that has infiltrated other aspects of public life. These factions steer it away from common cause and towards private profit on behalf of secretive plutocrats. They guide the public away from democratic scrutiny of their circumstances and towards trust in strength and unity. These factions have secret turf wars which have replaced the old Cold War as the framework on which our peace and security is determined. Their private squabbles steer public policy on every continent, while the media, including the BBC, is used as a weapon of mass distraction. Their turf wars explain the progress one moment and frustration the next of investigations into historic sexual abuse or into human trafficking, which are merely devices by which one faction may put another at a disadvantage behind the scenes.

These factions have no ideological litmus, their conduct conforms to no criteria of decency, they have no moral compass. They can mobilise the world's alienated, traumatised children with a nihilistic credo of pure destruction and unleash them to fill up every comment thread with pure hate like a digital freikorps. They are immune to any examination imposed on them by our discourse because they have nothing to prove. They are not interested in being persuaded because they are not interested in persuading us. They engage us at a baser level, through the ways our data indicate we can be manipulated, the way our instincts and reflexes can be simulated and distorted and turned against us.

These factions meet where organised crime rubs shoulders with national security, in villas in Tuscany and the Caribbean where old Etonians discuss toppling regimes with mercenaries and arms dealers over sundowners by the pool. These factions form our New Byzantium. Fundamentally, that is why the BBC are still promoting UKIP so heavily. Because these factions are not finished with them yet.

These are the forces we declare irrelevant with every respectful, reasoned debate. Every time we discuss issues with someone who disagrees with us, but who shares with us a belief that together we can determine how to proceed based on a rational appraisal of the incomplete evidence available to us, we render these factions irrelevant. Every time we adhere to shared values of decency and respect that enable us to disagree without being at each other's throat, we declare them irrelevant.

Let them stew in their own bile. Declare their appetite for unproductive argument irrelevant. Do not respond to their invitation to participate in an undignified knife fight that will only turn voters away from the polling booth. Excite and engage the electorate with ideas. Celebrate your disagreements, knowing you are united in purpose: how do we make this world a better place for our children. No-one knows everything but everyone knows something and we can never predict what we will learn from each other. Today we offer interim answers only so that someday we can ask genuine questions and each embrace our interrogators as partners in discovery.

And once Independence is achieved, every nuance of Scottish politics can be restored. Defunct or currently irrelevant parties can be resurrected to give voice to multiple viewpoints in a politics that is a pageant of voter engagement. Rehearse the spirit of that age at least, while maintaining the narrower focus necessary to achieve it, and the day will finally come when we give our dreams substance.

Ravenscraig no more.

Some of the most multi-deprived wards in the local council elections, those with the least to gain from tory administration, have returned a tory among the councillors they have elected today.

Ferguslie Park no more.

The tories are thirled to an ultimately self-defeating spiral of hypocrisy, contempt and brutalism. It will end them eventually, but we must limit the damage done in the meantime. Containment or catastrophe.

Shettleston no more.

They have now successfully recruited and weaponised an alienated freikorps whose only doctrine is destruction, for whom a ballot is empowering only as an act of political vandalism, the mark with which they make their vote no more significant to them than the sectarian grafitti they spray on the walls of the schemes in which they are kettled by poverty and hopelessness.

Calton no more.

Scotland is approaching a moment of danger.

The need to reintegrate our poorest and most marginalised communities into the realm has never been more starkly demonstrated. We need to return hope as a viable alternative to those for whom only hate has reliably delivered results before.

We started the job, but it remained half done and our laurels have turned to ash beneath us even as we rested on them.

Ravenscraig no more.

Bealltainn / Beltane

Bealltainn

Fad a' gheamhraidh dh'fheith sinn ri an latha,
nuair a chur i snàithlean dhan t-snàthad.
Shiolp i gath-gréine tro an sùil aice bho dheireadh,
agus is urrain dhi tòiseachadh ri fial solais a dh'fhigh,
an cuir seilleanan a-nis air blàth an ubhail àillidh
mar éideadh na dreuchd.

Beltane

It took all Winter

but finally she threaded the needle.

She slipped a sunbeam through its eye

and can begin to weave her veil of light. 

which bees now drop like robes of state

upon bright apple blossom. 

Vote for a queue, not a candidate

Today the Scottish local government elections are held.

People have a problem with the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system used in Scottish local government elections. They have to rank candidates on the ballot in order of preference. However, there may be some candidates to whom you would never give your vote, and so the idea of allocating any kind of preference to them just feels wrong.

The way to think about it is not to imagine you are voting for a candidate at all. You are voting for a queue for the seats available.

This is the principle which some have called vote 'til you boak: the idea that you have to keep listing preferences right up to the point you find yourself making a mark on the ballot paper next to a candidate whose policies make you feel physically sick, a candidate you would never dream of voting for under any other voting system, like First Past the Post used in Westminster elections, or the D'Hondt method used in elections to the Scottish Parliament.

There are a finite number of seats in your ward, and there are more candidates standing than seats for them to occupy. The STV system counts votes so that, effectively, candidates are organised into a queue to occupy those seats in accordance with people's preferences. When you fill in your ballot, you are listing the candidates in the order you think they should stand in that queue. STV transfers votes to ensure the queue that is eventually used best represents people's preferences. So when you indicate the candidate whose policies you find sickening is the one you prefer least, you are in no way endorsing that candidate. You are sending them to the back of the queue.

In any election there is a threshold number of votes someone can get that guarantees them a seat. For example, if there was one seat, 50% + 1 of the votes cast is the threshold a candidate needs to exceed to win that seat. If there were two seats, a candidate would need 33% + 1 to make sure they are in the top two. Similarly, if there were three, 25% + 1 is required, and so on.

When the votes are counted, once a candidate exceeds the threshold, they are elected. The remaining votes cast for them are transferred to those voters' next preference. The queue for the seats is the same as the queue for those votes. By indicating the candidate that sickens you most is at the end of a queue longer than there are seats, you make it impossible for your vote to be counted on their behalf. You are not voting for them, you are sending them to the end of the queue.  

If you marked fewer preferences than there are candidates, because there are some whose names you simply can't bring yourself to write next to, you are effectively giving everyone you didn't indicate a preference for an equal chance of having your vote transferred to them. You are not making them last equal. You are making them whatever-position-in-the-queue-you-got-up-to equal. So you are making it more, rather than less, likely that your vote could be transferred to the candidate that repulses you.

So remember, you are not voting for a candidate, you are voting for a queue for the seats available.