We Need To Talk About: Budget Underspends

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 39 Comments

Victoria Quay

Q. When is a surplus not a surplus?
A. When someone is talking down the Scottish Government.

Today the Auditor General published its annual report detailing an independent opinion on how well the Scottish Government is managing its finances (or how badly it is failing to do so).

This year, as last, there have been howls of anguish from those opposed to the Scottish Government at the fact highlighted by the Auditor General that the Government spent £350 million less last year than it was given in the Block Grant.

As the opening question suggests in most normal countries when your government spends less than it has available to spend then it is running what is known as a budget surplus. This is, especially in today’s economic climate, generally considered to be a “good thing“. Not so in Scotland, apparently, where the phrase to be used instead is “budget underspend”.

How this has occurred, is due to the peculiar way by which the Scottish Government is funded and is constrained to spend its money.

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Lying Track

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

Ian Murray, Scotland’s sole Labour MP, lied to the people of Scotland today.

This morning, 14th September 2015, he was interviewed on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland primarily on the extent of his agreement with his party’s political realignment in the wake of their most recent leadership changeover.

In one segment he makes the statement that the Scottish Government appeared to favour awarding the Scotrail contract to the Dutch Government owned Abelio rather than renationalising Scotland’s railways.

The relevant comment beings at 5.50.

He appears to forget that under the Railways Act 1993 enacted by the Tories and never repealed under Labour, the Scottish Government is currently barred from either renationalising the railways or forming a company in which they own a controlling stake to bid for contracts and tenders.

Indeed, under this bill any government on the planet could potentially own and operate our railways except our own.

I’m sure that rather than this being a lie, personal or political, today’s comment was merely a slip of the mind and that Mr Murray will be submitting a bill to repeal this clause in the near future.

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Unweaving Tangled Skeins

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments
The Old Clock Square in Hom, Syria. Left - Before the war. Right - The ruins of the war.

The Old Clock Square in Homs, Syria. Left – Before the war. Right – The ruins of the war.

 It seems certain now that within the next few days or weeks the House of Commons will, for the second time in as many years, be asked to vote to go to war in Syria. I have no doubt that the picture painted will be one of us plucky Brits bravely defending ourselves against an utterly inhuman, utterly irredeemable, utterly evil and, most importantly, completely monolithic force and that after a short, sharp military action peace will be restored and reign supreme. The difference between this time and last is that last time the evil monolith was the Assad Regime. This time, it’s ISIS.

 We always seem to be sold war on such simple terms. Often, we seem to buy it because of them. But the world out there beyond the red-top tabloids is rarely so black-and-white. The conflict in Syria is less so than most.

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How To Start a Currency From (Almost) Scratch

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 10 Comments

An RBS £1 Note – Scottish Parliament Commemorative Issue

It’s fairly widely acknowledged that one of the weaker aspects of the 2014 Scottish Independence debate was that surrounding currency. I still hold to my long-standing view that all options open to us were and are equally viable. All come with unique benefits, all carry characteristic risks. All that was required was the will to manage those risks. Scottish Independence should never have even been about the question “Which currency should we use?”. I believe that instead, the real question was “Should we, in Scotland, have the right to ask that question?”

Recently though, the catastrophic circumstances facing Greece have focused minds back to this first question and many are now convinced that before we go into another debate on independence we must be able to answer the questions we failed to answer last year. So let us take a scenario where Scotland is faced with setting up its own currency. Just what would that involve?

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Greening Your Vote

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 3 Comments

Note: This article assumes that readers are fully familiar with the AMS voting system used in Scotland. If you are not or would like a refresher please read this article first:- How Scotland Votes: A Guide to the Scottish Elections

Greening Your Vote in the Scottish Elections

SGPlogoI’ve mentioned in a previous post that we in the Greens general regard the First Past the Post voting system as an unfair and unrepresentative system. It punishes all of those parties which poll less than about 35% of the electorate with fewer seats than they deserve whilst rewarding those parties which can achieve just slightly more than that with almost all of the power. For a smaller party like the Greens this means that looking for seats within the constituency vote is a particularly difficult enterprise and, in all likelyhood, would result in a waste of resources more effectively spent elsewhere.

For this reason it is very likely that you, as a voter, will not see a Green candidate on your constituency ballot paper next year (although exceptions like party co-convenor Patrick Harvie’s campaign in Kelvin will be one to seriously watch).

The great advantage within Scottish politics, however, lies in the Regional ballot. I’ve detailed in my How Scotland Votes article how this ballot is used to ensure proportionality within the parliament as a whole but this article intends to deal with another of its great strengths. The regional ballot allows voters who may describe themselves as “traditional” voters of one party to compliment or nuance their voting intentions by voting for another party as well.

I will here argue that in the Holyrood elections next year there is great scope for many voters to consider seeing a regional vote for the Greens not as a “splitting” of their vote but as a strengthening of it. Even when your “traditional” Constituency affiliation has been with the Labour party or the Liberal Democrats or with the SNP there is much that you may also find appealing within Green politics and much which may lead to you to giving us your Regional vote.

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We Need To Talk About: The Green Investment Bank

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

gib-logo-green-background

Another day. Another broken promise from Westminster. I had been expecting news like this since the referendum last September but I’ve been frankly shocked by the rate at which they’ve been coming and where the hammer-blows have been falling.

Today it was announced that the Government will sell off the Green Investment Bank. The bank, capitalised with some £3 billion of taxpayers money, was set up in 2012 with the mandate for providing investment and incentive for renewable schemes across the UK. Its headquarters were located in Edinburgh in a bid, as it was reported at the time, to attempt to head off the push for Scottish Independence. Indeed, even just the week before the referendum dire warnings were uttered about the potential of Scotland “losing” the bank if we voted Yes (The news that the bank hadn’t actually been investing more than a token amount within Scotland in its first year or so was, of course, conveniently placed to the side).

Instead, now that we’ve “safely” voted No, the bank is to have up to 70% of its shares sold off to private interests for somewhere around £1.4 billion, under half of its initial capitalisation, at a time when it has just announced that it has become profitable.

Of course it’s not all just about the outright betrayal of Scottish voters. In this move, as well as last week’s scrapping of onshore wind incentives, David Cameron and his new Tory majority government are flexing their ideological muscles. Gone utterly is their “Greenest Government Ever“. To quote Scottish Greens co-convener Patrick Harvie on the topic today:

“The sell-off of the Green Investment Bank proves that David Cameron’s comment about wanting to ‘cut the green crap’ has now become a full-blown mantra for a right-wing Government determined to wreck our renewable energy opportunities. The bank was a half-hearted effort by the Tory-Libdem Coalition, with limited powers and funding. Rather than taking another backward step we need governments to go further and faster on developing new energy sources and cleaner industries as the need to leave fossil fuels in the ground becomes ever more urgent.”

Added to this is the call from Green Party of England and Wales MP Caroline Lucas:

“The Government’s rash and irresponsible plan to sell off a large chunk of the Green Investment Bank calls into question their commitment to investing in a low carbon economy.

“At precisely the time when we should be leading the world in the fight against climate change our Government appears to be in retreat. The Government should keep at least a majority stake in the Green Investment Bank to ensure investor confidence is upheld and the commitment to low-carbon lending remains.”

This is just another string of sell-offs by the Government of profitable parts of public service at a substantial loss to the taxpayer (joining such company as the East Coast Mail Line, The Channel Tunnel, The Royal Mail and many of the banks bailed out in 2008). It is purely an ideological move by the Tories to get the Government out of the business of owning any kind of body capable of serving the public.

I have to wonder what they think the endgame is. Just what do they want Tory Britain to look like?

And is there a place in it for us on the ground?

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How Scotland Votes: A Guide to the Scottish Elections

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 20 Comments

A Guide to the Holyrood Election System

The Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament Building. Source: Wikipedia

The Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament Building. Source: Wikipedia

I know that it feels like we’ve just finished a rush of politics and campaigning and that the next step will be a while away but believe me, a year is not a long time and the 2016 Scottish Parliament General Election will be upon us before we know it. The various parties and actors are already starting to formulate their plans and draw their lines and the speculation over what could result from the vote and how those results could be achieved are being debated over the various Internet and social media channels.

In much of this speculation and amongst my conversations with some of my peers I’ve realised that more than 15 years after the first Scottish elections there remains much to be said about our level of knowledge about how our votes are cast and how the seats are calculated. Here, therefore, is a guide to how it all works.

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A Lesson From History

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

Scotland has become a strange country where videos from Government feeds regularly trend around social media, has it not? Gloriously so, I think.

Two such videos are, as of writing, doing the rounds.

One being Brendan O’Hara, the new SNP MP for Argyle and Bute, and his maiden speech in the House of Commons.

 

I’m not going to take anything away from this speech. It is a wonderful one. My concern lies instead with the other video going around. Namely, the reply from the Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg.

 

This reply is being held up as some kind of paradigm shift within the House of Commons’ attitude towards Scotland and the SNP. I, however, was reminded of a passage from Aneurin “Nye” Bevan’s memoirs, “In Place of Fear” published in 1952 (page 7-8 of the First Edition).
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Four Conservative Policies Which Attack Your Human Rights

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

Somehow, it doesn't seem so bad when a comicbook supervillain says it.

In my previous post, I outlined the Conservative plan to strip you of your Human Rights and replace the ECHR (Full text of the Convention here: http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf) with a British Bill of Rights. I maintained then that I didn’t believe that the Tories actually want to remove, in general, any of the rights within the bill but do want to give themselves the power to remove your rights selectively whenever it chooses to.

We will still have to wait to see what any proposed British Bill of Rights actually contains to see if this prediction bears fruit but while reading up on this it has become quite clear to me that several imposed or proposed policies skirt a very fine line with regard to the articles within the ECHR. I’d hazard a guess that if any of your Human Rights are to be removed then the following would be the ones to watch.

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We Need To Talk About: Human Rights

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

BrotherCammy
“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.” – David Cameron, 13th May 2015

Well, that didn’t take long, did it? No sooner than a few days after the news that we’re to endure another Tory majority government (albeit one with a majority only barely greater than Major’s 1992 fragile win) and we see what’s in store for us. Almost first on the agenda, an aggressive move against our civil liberties and a move to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights.

To understand the significance of this we need to look at the history of the convention and why it came about.

Like much of the early history of the European Union and other such institutions, the ECHR was birthed from the recoil from the horrors of the Second World War and was drafted by the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in 1949. It sought to match the then newly drafted Universal Declaration of Human Rights and was part of the wider strategy by the Allied nations to ensure that no government or country could attack its own or any other populace with the severe violations committed during the war. Over 100 parliamentarians from twelve countries, including the leading role played by the UK, drafted the 59 Articles of the Convention.

Some of these articles are so self evident; such as the right to marry and raise a family, protections against torture, the right to life and freedom from slavery, that it may be a wonder to some that they have only been put into such a convention within living memory. And yet, Cameron would sweep them away. What could possibly scare him so?

Certainly Article 7’s clause against retroactivity may yet cause him problems due to the debacle in 2013 when Iain Duncan Smith’s Workfare program was deemed unlawful until the government decided by fiat that it was and always had been. (See: http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/dwp-retrospective-law-fascist-workfare.html)

Even Article 16, which prohibits EU nations from considering other EU citizens as “foreigners” has serious implications for his attempts to restrict welfare, the right to work and the right to free movement within the European Union.

But from what’s been said just this week, it seems that what Cameron is most interested in is avoiding a repeat of the 2009 instance of the near-breach of Article 15 on derogations from the Convention in extremis. In that case (A v United Kingdom: http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/sites/eng/pages/search.aspx?i=002-1647) it was found that while the UK was right to apply to partially suspend the convention in the wake of the Sept 11th attacks the measures it actually took (extending detention without trial and control orders to British citizens as well as foreign terrorists) were disproportionate.

I rather suspect that Cameron’s attempts to replace the ECHR is less about removing the rights entirely but about allowing the government the “flexibility” to bend the rules whenever someone becomes an inconvenient embarrassment much like the case of Abu Hamza al-Masri who spent ten years successfully arguing that it would be illegal to extradite him to a torture using country to face prison conditions which would be considered degrading under British law and where he could possibly face the death penalty (i.e. The United States of America). Now, al-Masri was not a pleasant person and when he finally was deported he was duly tried, found guilty and incarcerated for his crimes but to scrap the entire basis for our human rights just to speed up the getting rid of such inconveniences is simply beyond the pale. It opens us all up to the time when we, too, become an inconvenience. As Cameron has stated, it is no longer a matter of whether we break the law or not.

Our Human Rights are just that. They are Rights. They are not suggestions to be ignored by the government at will. They must be protected and we must oppose the government’s inhumane attempt at authoritarian control.

It has long been the last defence of the proponents of the police state that those who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear.

It is time for those people to step up now. Read that quote in the opening again. That defence has been shattered by the Prime Minister’s words today. What is your response now?

Further Reading

The Full Text of the ECHR: http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/en/Treaties/Html/005.htm

The Scottish Government’s adoption of the ECHR: http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Justice/law/human-rights/Europeanconvention

More on the ECHR and Scots Law: http://www.scottishhumanrights.com/careaboutrights/howaremyhumanrightsprotectedinlaw

The implications for Scotland if ECHR is abolished: http://www.scottishhumanrights.com/careaboutrights/howaremyhumanrightsprotectedinlaw

14 Myths about ECHR spread by the press: http://rightsinfo.org/infographics/the-14-worst-human-rights-myths/

How abolishing ECHR could lead to indyref2: https://commonspace.scot/articles/1322/michelle-donnelly-why-abolishing-the-human-rights-act-won-t-make-britain-any-more-sovereign-and-could-be-the-road-to-indyref2

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