Scottish politics... it makes Zimbabwe look truly sensible
IF being a political anorak is a crime then the inside of a cell in Barlinnie will be my resting place. My earliest political memory is the 1970 election when as a three-yearold in the arms of my mother – who as a council house Protestant voted Tory – she tried to get me to accept a sticker from a Tory canvasser.
As my father – normally a Labour supporter – was voting SNP in that election, I truculently threw it onto the pavement. No Spangles for me that day, I can tell you.
Every general election night since then I have regarded as a weird kind of Christmas Day that only comes every four or five years. A former boss I tried to shepherd around a Labour Party conference once said to me, perplexed: ‘You enjoy this like sports writers revel in world cups.’
Sad, perhaps, but true. Studying for what were then called O Grades, my modern studies teacher told me that for 10 per cent of my marks I could do a paper on a ‘local issue’.
For me it was the Hillhead byelection of 1981. The newly formed SDP was trying to win a Tory seat – a Tory seat – in Glasgow.
I watched Edward Heath deliver an inspiring speech in front of 900 people. A few nights later Roy Jenkins was even better in front of 1,500. I met Malcolm Rifkind – a thrilling speaker with no notes – and even Sir Geoffrey Howe was a lively sheep.
The SNP candidate was a surly man called George Leslie but he was kind to me. The Labour Party wouldn’t entertain me – even though I was a party member at the time – because I went to a private school. Plus ca change.
BUT politics has always gripped me. The battle of ideas. The noble cause of trying to improve peoples’ lives. Denis Healey was my political Kenny Dalglish or Jim Baxter. I hid Das Kapital under my bed while other boys of my age secreted more photographic material under theirs.
I don’t believe in political sectarianism and never have. Margaret Thatcher did wrong with her disregard for the communities she tried to ‘modernise’ – but she also did a lot of necessary good no one is suggesting should be reversed.
I would love to have got the chance to speak to her, or her guru Keith Joseph or Milton Friedman, never expecting to agree with them but just to get a better understanding of their thinking.
I worked for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who I believe delivered the most radical Labour government since Clement Attlee. I wish I had got a chance to speak to John Smith or Michael Foot, too. But sometimes you look at your habits and wonder if it is time you ditched them – even if you have followed them all your life.
I watch First Minister’s Questions every Thursday. As a man who has believed in devolution since I was in the Boys’ Brigade you would expect nothing less.
But this week I wondered. I have known Nicola Sturgeon since student days. I don’t agree with her politics or how she conducts them but have genuine admiration for the journey she has gone on and I have an understanding of the sacrifices she has made.
Yet in a world where we are told that something as fundamental as gender can be ‘non-binary’, our politics is completely binary.
At FMQs she told me not how an extra £2 billion for Scotland would be spent after the UK budget, but how it was really a cut. Through accounting rules she argued it was the wrong sort of money.
WHEN Ruth Davidson said that the First Minister looked like someone had ‘stolen her scone’, she managed to turn it into a question of food banks. The question should be that if the First Minister is so offended by food banks, why has she done nothing to abolish them?
I am aware that some think swimming through fish guts is the way to engage people in the world of ideas, or that embellishing your bank account with roubles is a noble cause. That is not the game – the politics – I fell in love with.
When I worked on the Better Together campaign, one of the best aspects was working with Tories, Lib Dems and people of no party who just believed in something.
I have dear friends I have grown up with who are now senior in the SNP who – however much I disagree with them on the constitution – I know are good people who just want to make the world better.
Yet I don’t see politicians with what Denis Healey called a ‘hinterland’. If I don’t like my current circumstances, Miss Sturgeon tells me it is all my fault for voting No and there is nothing she can do, or is willing to do, until I recant.
The good folk of Scottish Labour offer the remedies of the 1970s which failed then. Ruth Davidson I admire but I can’t get away from the idea that voting for her is to vote for Boris Johnson. Willie Rennie? Bless.
This week the bloodless coup in Zimbabwe was concluded. Former henchman of Robert Mugabe, Emmerson Mnangagwa, whose hands are as steeped in blood as his predecessor, took office.
Yet, however insincere his words may turn out to be, there is one thing he said I cannot imagine being said in Scottish politics – ‘Let bygones be bygones.’
I would like our politicians to persuade me. To offer fresh arguments and not try to anticipate and then play to my prejudices.
Holyrood was supposed to be a crucible of distinctly Scottish ideas. Instead it seems like a place where people who get paid more than they would be anywhere else play to the obvious divisions in our country.
But if they argued passionately for values they believed in, even if I disagreed with them, it might bring back my boyish enthusiasm.
YOU can expect the future of Hampden Park to become a political football over the coming months. The SFA is threatening not to renew the lease, which would lead to its closure. People suspect that closing our national stadium would enable the SFA to buy off critics at both Celtic and Rangers by paying them to house internationals and national cup ties instead. But after the success of the Commonwealth Games it would also mean that Glasgow could never host a major athletics event again. There will be civil war over Scotland’s national stadium – named after the English patriot from the English civil war, John Hampden.