Nato: wrong - Trident: gone!

NATO: wrong – Trident: gone!

As many of you will know the SNP recently changed long-standing policy and adopted a position of an independent Scotland being, or remaining if you wish to follow the EU analogy, a member of NATO.

I’m against nuclear weapons. No matter how you dress them up. I always have been and always will be. The sooner Trident, a weapons system of mass destruction and murder, is removed from our country the better. 

So that’s where I come from.

You can disagree if you like, arguing that “we” need them to deter some undefined threat from some undefined source, but I’m afraid as far as I’m concerned their use cannot be justified. They didn’t stop the airliners in 9/11 and there just isn’t any other credible threat elsewhere.

I’m old enough to remember the Cold War. Over a third of my adult life has been spent under its shadow. I actually remember, unless it’s some figment of my imagination, having drills in Primary School about what to do if the air raid sirens (which were only decommissioned in 1993) went off. We were told to crouch down under our desks in the same position you see in the airline safety brochures when you fly anywhere: precious good that would have done us with the Leuchars airbase a mere 7-8 miles across the Tay!

And make no mistake about it Dundee as Scotland’s 4^th city with its port facilities would have been on the list of targets for those incoming missiles of mass destruction and wanton slaughter.

Glasgow too, where I now live, as a major population centre and with at the time its extensive ship building industry would have been wiped from the map with as much ease as you might swat a fly. Easier in fact – unlike the fly, a city can’t get out of the way.

As a student I remember going to see a film in the students union – almost certainly The Day After, released to a TV audience of 100 million in the USA in 1983. It’s well worth a watch if you are in any doubt as to the outcome of a nuclear exchange. Scroll forward and watch from around the 50 minute mark if you just want to see those effects, but the film itself, although long, is very watchable.

So taking all that into account I don’t see the benefit of an independent Scotland being in an organisation which would still permit the FIRST use of nuclear weapons. Not retaliation: the FIRST use.

But isn't everyone else is in it you may ask? You’d be wrong to think so. Many European countries such as Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Austria are not. They participate in the Partnership for Peace Programme but are not NATO members.

I’ve always believed that independence for Scotland will give us a chance to be different. We already have  health and education systems diverging widely from the rest of the UK and there is no reason why we should go down the same road as other nations.

A couple of statistics I came across whilst researching this blog took my breath away.

The first is that the combined military spending of the NATO countries makes up 70% of the world’s defence spending. The second is that the percentage of GDP spent on defence by the UK is second only to the USA and at 2.6% is a full 0.5% (and that’s a lot of money) ahead of the country in 3^rd place.

Who are we trying to kid here? Why are we spending so much of our money in this manner?

A quick read of some of the comments on any SNP/Independence stories in the likes of the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and even sadly the Guardian will soon reveal the answer.

Down south they still haven’t grasped the fact that 2/3 of the globe is no longer coloured pink and that there is no British Empire.

There is of course another way. The way an independent Scotland, no matter its political make up,  would undoubtedly follow. A small compact defence force, comparable with the likes of Norway and Denmark, nations of similar sizes, available to the UN for peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.

But to participate in NATO in its present form is simply morally wrong.

So for all those reasons I think the SNP got it wrong at their conference, perhaps making the decisions for what it thought were all the right reasons, but still wrong. In all my years of campaigning not ONCE has anyone on a doorstep asked me what our policy on NATO was.

For that matter the two MSPs who resigned from the party afterwards got it wrong too. They were elected on a party list not an individual platform. The policy of the party they represent has changed. Get over it, admit you made a mistake, ask to come back and let’s move forward together. There are mechanisms for changing party policy – it was done once and it can be changed again. But not this side of independence.

Moving to Trident and the nuclear submarine “fleet” (another post-Imperial hangover to call four submarines a fleet of course) with a projected cost of £20 BILLION – at 2006/7 prices. Faslane, their base, is of course another reason Glasgow would have been obliterated in a nuclear strike.

Post-independence these submarines would of course be inherited by “rumpUK “or whatever they wish to call themselves. I have no inherent problem with the remainder of the UK pursuing this make-believe Imperial identity, but if it comes complete with a Scottish dartboard, bullseye Faslane, well they can have that all to themselves. The Thames would seem a nice new home for them – it would certainly concentrate a few minds down south on the matter as the awful truth of the matter is that all three rumpUK political parties are in favour of spending that £20 billion.

How many hospitals and schools could that money build? How many much needed homes? How many jobs could an investment of that scale produce? Put it however you like it’s a scandalous amount of money.

Going back to the jobs and you often read, usually with Jackie Baillie’s name writ large in the article, much like the rest of her you might think, that thousands and thousands of jobs are at risk if Trident is either scrapped or moved south.

Not so – an article published in the press this week, incidentally hot on the tail of another one suggesting Scotland’s defence spending would be over £1 billion LESS than our share of the UKs total (largely but not entirely due to not squandering cash on Trident), gave the lie to that statistic. 520 jobs directly depend on the nuclear submarine fleet.

520 jobs is still 520 jobs. But £1 billion a year is a lot of money to play about with to create new ones!

Scotland has a chance to take its place in the world – let’s make it a place we would want our children and grandchildren to grow up in!

 

Citizen or sir?

Now I have to say at the start of what I see, now that I have finished writing, has turned out to be a bit of a rant, that when I was a teenager, George Reid was one of my political heroes.

As one of the 7 and then 11 MPs in the SNP’s breakthrough in the two 1974 elections he was in the vanguard for Independence, which many of my generation believed was just round the corner.

A generation and a half later in 1999 I was delighted when he was elected to the newly formed Scottish Parliament. And my delight was doubled in 2003 when he was appointed as the Presiding Officer of that body. And superbly well he performed in that role. Always fair. And honourable if that word must be used.

But my feelings this morning when I woke up to discover that he should now be addressed as “Sir” George Reid were altogether different.

I have no problems with an “honours” system to reward publicly those who have contributed to the fabric of our society. I’m sure most countries have one: a modern one.

But the whole concept of an honours system based on some 19^th century long since defunct Imperial power quite frankly leaves me cold.

“Knights Bachelor – Knighthood”, “Knights Commander of the Order of the Bath”, “Companions of the Order of the Bath”, “Knights Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire”....I gave up reading the list at that point in abject disgust.

Apart from a few scattered islands of value simply as bases for our American “allies” in their never ending quest to impose their warped idea of democracy on the rest of the planet there simply ISN’T a British Empire any more. The days that half the globe were coloured pink are long gone!

And even if there was, what on earth is an SNP politician accepting an honour as part of it? Our whole ethos as an Independence movement is surely to break away from the outmoded 19^th century London-centric United Kingdom and all its accompanying layers of patronage and hat tipping etiquette!

There has never been an SNP member of the House of Lords for this reason, and indeed rumour has it Donald Stewart turned down such an offer on more than one occasion being a man of some consistent principle.

When you boil it down to the basics what on earth is the difference?

I mean no personal disrespect to George Reid. As I have said he inspired me and many of my generation to commit ourselves to the Independence cause; a cause that two years away from the 2014 referendum looks like coming to fruition at last.

But to accept this “honour” is to disrespect me and many, if not most, supporters of the Independence cause, striving as we are for a Scotland fit for the 21^st century – a beacon of social democratic, green or socialist (depending on your view point) egalitarianism in a world crying out for such models.

Ex- SSP MSP Rosie Kane put it better than I could ever hope to do this morning when she tweeted:

“The only title I would accept is citizen, and I’d be taking it no being given it”.

Two weeks off - next time for sure

Well the dust has settled, the counting machines have been locked up, the pundits have crunched their numbers (and much has been said about that elsewhere so I’ll not repeat it) and all over the land politicians’ cars are returning to a state of normality. Talking of cars I was most impressed how Alison Thewliss managed to get two of us in the back of hers at one stage, as I feared we’d need to hail a passing rickshaw, of which there are more in John Street than Bridgeton I have to say, to get us to our leafleting area.

Having bravely dipped my toe back into the political water at last year’s Scottish Parliament elections by stuffing some letters into envelopes, I felt inspired, for a variety of reasons, to do a little more this time round. Having once, long ago it now seems, lived my life fully engrossed in politics, it felt more than a little strange standing at Bridgeton Cross one Saturday afternoon, having dragged along my friend Allan for moral support, waiting to see who would turn up. After what seemed an eternity the two candidates and a couple of others arrived and off we went, into parts of Glasgow I never knew existed, although as it turned out we were probably never more than half a mile from our starting point at any stage.

 One of the problems explaining  my lack of political involvement these days is that I have never identified myself with Glasgow in the same way I did with Hamilton all those years ago and even yet I have no real grasp of the area covered by the Calton ward where I now stay. It’s a very diverse area and some of the flats we delivered leaflets to were seemed worlds apart from the affluent pocket of housing I stay in on one edge of the ward. Having been challenged to use two words in this blog (and I’ve used one already) I think I could safely say that some of the gardens we trudged through to deliver our leaflets through worn out letter boxes, in even more worn out front doors, could safely be summed up by that excellent Scots word “midden”. It was distressing in the second decade of the 21^st century to see filthy children’s toys languishing in unkempt gardens in what had clearly once been if not quite “des-res” then an improvement on the tenement slums of the area in the 1950s.

Council elections, perhaps strangely for a Nationalist, are always what have interested me the most, partly I think as back in the late 80s and early 90s, the era of my previous political involvement, they were the one area where with a big of hard and concentrated work it was possible for the SNP to do well.

My first ever election campaign was helping out in Bellshill where a dedicated team of workers saw Duncan McShannon win the seat in a council by-election. I stood as a candidate myself in 5 council elections, twice for the now thankfully dismembered Strathclyde Regional Council, twice for Hamilton District Council, and lastly and the time I finally got elected, for the new South Lanarkshire Council. And I have to say I really enjoyed the campaigns and all the organisation that went into them.

There’s a lot of work involved in an election campaign, much of it unseen by the voters, whether of the planning variety of which splitting a ward up into manageable leaflet runs is but one, and that’s the main difference I think between Hamilton and the area we were in. There were no manageable leaflet runs – a hotchpotch mixture of lanes and alleyways, tenements with and without controlled entries (I’m sure the Labour candidate at the polling station swore that 2/1 was the lucky buzzer to get in), and all in all nothing like the leafy suburb of Silvertonhill with its mass of Wimpey houses.

Then there’s the STV voting system itself with all its nuances, not least of which is the influence played by the alphabet on your chances of election. Calton was one of the few wards in the city where the SNP candidate with a surname starting with T beat the other one whose surname had the fortune to be nearer the start of the alphabet. I do think that is something that should be looked at, whether by grouping candidates of the same part on the ballot paper, or my totally randomising the order the names appear in.

Well having survived my first venture back onto the streets I managed to help out another couple of times before Polling Day itself. Now back in the day I’d have taken a fortnight off work for the whole thing, but I’m not quite back at that stage just yet. But I still found myself out at 7am delivering, or rather failing to deliver (those dreaded controlled entry doors again – clearly the postmen have long since stopped arriving at that time) a “Good Morning” election leaflet. Then it was off to work, and I have to say that by mid-afternoon I was twitching to get away and both vote (it’s always been a recurring nightmare of mine that with our antiquated voting system I’ll arrive to discover someone else has already done so in my name) and stand at a Polling Station.

And that was an experience and a half. Having divested poor Alison of her rosette I spent the next three hours representing the party to those few electors who actually bothered to turn up. There were the usual smiles, growls, winks and nods as I handed out our reminder leaflet as they went in leaving me I have to say with no concept of how we’d done at all.

The independent candidate and his hand-held megaphone were the light entertainment for the evening and I have to say that the Labour candidate and her father were pleasant company and full of friendly banter for what became an increasingly chilly evening, and by the back of nine were winding me up no end when anything remotely looking like Alison’s car came along the street, as by then I was in desperate need of a quick dash home to collect the jacket I should have brought to begin with.

I also had the pleasure of meeting our SNP MSP John Mason for the first time, although I didn’t quite know what to make of him saying, “Ah you’re Nic – I’ve heard all about you”!

But before long Alison did appear, a jacket was obtained in time to avert hypothermia, and the polls closed. And that was that. The counting wasn’t to take place till the next day so off home I went to put my feet up after what I have to say was an enjoyable experience.

Will I do it all again? Roll on the referendum in 2014 – I’ll be taking 2 weeks off work for that one!

Do Council Elections matter?

In just under a fortnight voters go to the polls to elect councillors to Scotland’s 32 Local Authorities. A ridiculously large number of councils for a nation of just over 5 million people in my view but that’s an issue for another blog altogether.

Just how important are these elections? Historically turnout has always been low – on the whole well under half the registered voters making what is hardly an arduous trek to their local Polling Stations to cast their votes. So are they important at all?

I’ve always had a keen interest in local elections. Many moons ago – in 1986 to be precise, I stood for what turned out to be the first of five occasions as an SNP candidate in Ward 64 (Hamilton West) of the now deservedly defunct Strathclyde Regional Council.

As campaigns go it wasn’t one that set the heather on fire, and compared to later elections was a tame affair – the SNP in Hamilton had imploded in the early 1980s and our team of activists was small to say the least. But we were keen and soon were pounding the streets leafleting almost the entire ward, which was quite a task in itself.

Subsequent campaigns proved more substantial, starting with the 1988 Hamilton District council elections, when employing new campaigning techniques, we caught the Labour Party totally on the hop and managed to snatch victory by a margin of 47 votes in the Cadzow ward, held by Labour at the 1984 elections with 83% of the vote!

I was honoured to be election agent for Jim Smith in that campaign, and stood myself in the Low Waters ward, increasing the vote there too. I will forever remember the Returning Officer’s long pause when he told the assembled candidates and agents the result. He was clearly waiting for someone to say “recount please” but there was merely a shrug of the shoulders and the result was announced!

Sadly Jim was to lose the ward at the next elections in 1992 as Labour mounted a campaign of Parliamentary bye-election scale, but two years later he slashed into the Labour majority in the Regional seat, and although only coming second, obtained the 4^th biggest swing to the SNP in Strathclyde Region as a whole.

A year later in 1995 in my 5^th and last campaign I was successful at last and polled almost 50% of the vote, winning the Silvertonhill seat on the new South Lanarkshire council from an astonished Labour party, who made a clean sweep of the other 19 seats in Hamilton that night.

But turning away from my potted electoral history and back to the subject of this blog – do these elections actually matter?

On a global scale perhaps not, but the impact local councils have on peoples’ lives is substantial. They run nurseries and schools, clean away our rubbish, light our streets and resurface the roads. They regulate the licensing affairs of our clubs and pubs, and provide Police and Firemen to keep us safe. They work with local organisations such as residents groups, housing associations, youth and pensioner groups.

They are in essence about your local community and can make your streets a better place to live.

And in common with all but one kind of election in Scotland they are held under a system of proportional representation so that your vote does count! A far cry from 1986 which saw Labour hold all but a handful of seats under a shameful and antiquated first past the post system that distorted most elections in Scotland right up until the first Scottish Parliament elections in 1999.

Councillors do make things happen. They may be small in scale but they are significant to the people concerned. Getting half a dozen pavements resurfaced and getting double yellow lines painted at a street junction may not sound much to you but I can assure you that they mattered to the residents concerned!

So when it comes to Polling Day on May 3^rd your vote is important, no more so than here in Scotland’s largest city, where for the first time in almost three generations voters have the opportunity to sweep away decades of one party rule.

That opportunity has provided the impetus to get this ex-activist back on the streets putting out leaflets for the two SNP candidates in the Calton ward in Glasgow, candidates who if elected WILL make Glasgow a better place to live!