Blogs are back in town! I only managed a couple of short pieces during the General Election campaign, Here I am writing my first proper blog post for six months. Blair McDougall’s ‘Notes on Nationalism’ is back too but with the announcement that it is to have a new editor following Blair’s election as an MP. 

I didn’t want to write directly about the campaign that has just taken up so much of my life so I have turned my thoughts to the French election. President Emmanuel Macron posed the question to the French people, ‘Qui sommes nous?’ (Who are we?). He had called a snap election in the wake of the far right making huge gains in the European elections and gambled on the good sense of voters to reject electing them to take over the national government. His gamble seems to have paid off for the moment, with the Left Alliance (the New Popular Front) winning most seats ahead of Macron’s centrists and the far right National Rally third. This was achieved by the left and Macron agreeing to run single candidates against National Rally in the run off voting to maximise the chance of defeating them - a tactic called ‘Le barrage’ or ‘the Dam’. As I write it is still not clear what will happen in terms of a government being formed as there is no consensus on working together in coalition, only on how to defeat National Rally in that second round of voting. Far right political parties had made gains in the European elections – but did not do quite as well as some anticipated. While Italy, France and Germany saw the far right advance, the picture across the rest of the EU was more nuanced. Far right parties only came first in five countries, and second or third in another five, predominantly at the expense of liberal and green parties. 

Here in the UK we took our eye off what was happening in France as we were caught up in our own general election. We too were faced with the question ‘Who are we?’. We answered ‘We are not Conservative’. After 14 years of austerity, chaos, scandal and mismanagement, we said it was time for ‘Change’. ‘Change’ was also the choice of voters in Scotland, finally rejecting the SNP and 17 years of failure and broken promises.  While the far right ‘surge’ largely failed to materialize in the UK, thanks to our First Past the Post voting system, the substantial vote for Reform UK demonstrates increasing support for anti-establishment, populist and anti immigration policies. 

The US Presidential election in Nov will not allow for tactical voting or the equivalent of the French ‘Le barrage’. There it will be a fight to the death between the populist far right policies of Trump and liberal Biden (or whoever becomes the Democratic choice).

The irony is, just at the moment we in the UK answered the question ‘qui sommes nous?’ by choosing to reject the right wing policies of the Tories and, in Scotland, the populist UK sceptic views of the SNP - just when we chose solid, stable, calm good governance over chaotic panic, the rest of the world seems to be locked in a battle to stem the rise of the far right.

That brings me to the age old question of voting systems.  For the French National Assembly, all candidates winning more than 12.5% of the votes of registered voters, or the top two candidates if two candidates didn’t make it, go through to a second round. Then parties can agree to withdraw in favour of another candidate as a tactic to defeat a third. This is what happened in France resulting in the defeat of the National Rally. In the UK under our FPTP we have just had our first election ever where four parties got over 10% of the vote share. It is clear that the British public is prepared to weigh up whether to vote with heart or head.

If the election had been under the same system as used for the Scottish Parliament, Labour’s  representation would have been almost halved but we would still have been the largest party. SNP would have got double the number of seats, still well down on last time, but the biggest change would have been Reform UK. They would have got nearer a hundred seats rather than the 5 they did. While PR may be fairer in determining the number of seats gained it can be very undemocratic in political outcomes,  giving disproportionate power to minorities. Remember the role of the Greens in the Sturgeon government. Here in the UK. whether we know it or not, we have just answered the Macron question with an emphatic ‘We are not for PR!’. That is in effect what we have said by giving Labour a majority of 172 over all other parties. There is just no possibility of another referendum on PR,  just as there is no possibility of another on Scottish independence. ‘Nous sommes la majorité’ - ‘Vive la majorité’.

We have just finished a short break in Porto. It is worth writing about because holidays abroad have become more of a challenge for my wife and me as we get older and have less mobility than we once had. We were able to have a great time in no small part because of the fantastic hospitality, friendliness and help afforded to us by everyone we came into contact with. The Hotel couldn’t have been more welcoming. Nothing was too much bother. The same was true in restaurants and bars. Passers by were always willing to help with directions or assist us navigate the metro and bus system. In one short week we managed a ‘Tuk Tuk’ tour of the city; a sail down the Douro; a food and drink tour with a really nice bunch of people who we would never have met otherwise, then out of Porto to the seaside and a canal boat sail in Aveiro, Portugal’s Venice.

Imagine my surprise then when I found some people (just a few) had taken the time and trouble to post negative reviews about the hotel and the city. Why do they do that? Even if I was disappointed by something, I can’t imagine me writing a bad review. I would just put it down to me being unlucky. Do these people never stop and think of the impact their unfounded remarks will have on those targeted? I suppose I should be used to this considering the vile abuse and vitriol internet trolls post every day, turning anything positive into something really nasty.

My holiday reading in Porto was Bob Cryer’s tribute to the life of his father, the late Barry Cryer, one of my favourite comedians. And that was where I found it - Barry’s perfect repost to those nay sayers who post unwarranted negative reviews. “I am carefully noting all your comments so I can report them to the next meeting of my local ‘Get a Life Club.”

“Stop Press: East Fife 3 Airdrie 2”. Only Baby Boomers like me would even know what ‘stop press’ means. The print media has long been abandoned by the Zoomers and probably the Millennials before them. It will be news to them that papers used to have a column, usually on front or back pages, left blank for the addition of late breaking news added after the presses had started running. When I was young, I would wait outside the newsagent every Saturday night for the arrival of the sports editions of Edinburgh’s Evening News and Dispatch (the Pink and the Green). There you could read reports of the game you had attended that afternoon. And in the Stop Press column, the full time scores appeared in smudged typeface. In 1947, on his way to the Commons to make his Budget statement, Hugh Dalton, Labour's Chancellor in the first Attlee government, told the lobby correspondent of the London evening paper, The Star, what was in his red Budget case. Dalton had no idea how fast an evening paper could work even in pre-digital days. Within an hour, The Star was on sale with the revelation in its 'stop press' column that Dalton - who had yet to reach this point in his speech - was to slap a penny on a pint of beer and a tax on dog racing. The following day he was forced to resign. The Saturday sports papers were killed off eventually by teletext, the arrival of Sunday papers on the streets late Saturday night and, of course, the internet. Rolling online news made ‘stop press’ columns redundant.

We ‘baby boomers’ had soaked up our news from print. I think we kept our local newsagent in business with a weekly order of two dailies, three Sunday papers and several locals. That slowly changed. The Herald started to be delivered later so that often I had already left for work. By the time I got home I had usually seen it somewhere else. Gradually the emphasis shifted online and then to digital editions. Now thanks to my library’s subscription, I can read nearly every newspaper and magazine there is for free using the Press Reader app. My local Ayrshire Post used to run to well over 100 pages and cost about 30p. This week’s edition has 48 pages and costs £2.50. No wonder I choose to read it online. Access to Press Reader has also opened my eyes to another development. Nearly every newspaper carries the same stories, often syndicated so they are the same word for word.

I have been the local Labour press officer for election campaigns since the 1980’s. In that time the printed media has changed out of all recognition. It used to be essential to get to know the local journalists who covered political stories and also the photographers who worked for each local paper. A well written press release was almost guaranteed to be printed unaltered as it saved the journalist the hassle of rewriting someone’s clunky effort. Submitting your own photograph was frowned upon by all of us on the left as close to blacklegging. Nowadays, ownership of locals is in the hands of only one or two publishers, journalists are shared across several titles, it’s standard practice to send your own pictures and online versions are seen by a far greater readership than printed versions, as circulation numbers plummet. We have also seen the arrival of ‘local democracy reporters’. These are a trade off funded by the BBC in return for being allowed to expand its local news coverage. They work for local papers placing stories about local authorities and public service organisations. But nowadays, even a well written interesting press release often never makes it into print.

During previous elections, political parties started moving away from wooing political journalists to  signing up celebrities to send supportive tweets and attempting to win over YouTubers with millions of followers. This election has seen the focus shifting further towards winning over more “authentic” influencers with smaller but loyal followings. The parties are intent on targeting the ‘micro-influencers’ on Tik Tok and Instagram. The intention is to cut through to niche audiences who spend their time scrolling through videos on their phones. Political parties have begun to produce influencer-style content themselves, circumventing a dying local news industry. I’m not sure I even understand what I have just written but I do know it’s happening. - “Stop Press: Zoomers 6 Baby Boomers 0”.

It is exactly ten years since I first wrote a piece under the title ‘Quisling’. It was at the height of the bitter campaign fought over the Scottish Independence referendum of 2014. Who would have thought that it would merit an updating and rewrite ten years on.

There are many words with a high level of usage but a low level of understanding. Quisling is a good example of this. The term quisling was coined by the the Times in an editorial in April 1940, entitled "Quislings everywhere" after the Norwegian Vidkun Quisling, who assisted Nazi Germany as it conquered his own country so that he could rule the collaborationist Norwegian government himself. The term soon came into common use internationally. With the passing of time it had fallen into disuse again until more recently. Quisling, as synonymous with ‘traitor’, is one of the favourite terms of abuse used by cybernats to describe those who stand up for Scotland to remain part of the UK. It became their insult of choice during the independence referendum campaign back in 2014. They plumbed the very depths of abuse by using this and other hateful words to smear the character of young Mum of the Year, Clare Lally, who provides 24 hour a day care for her disabled daughter, for daring to speak out at the Better Together 100 Days Rally. They still pepper their vile posts with the term ‘quisling’ to this day although often now they resort to plain ‘traitor’ instead. Traitors and Faithful are the two categories of contestants in the popular TV game show ‘The Traitors’. The Cybernats have no doubts what side they are on.

There is of course an irony in any nationalist using that term to describe someone who disagrees with them. It has been well documented in the print media and on the internet that the SNP has a hidden past which fits more accurately with the description ‘quisling’ than any views expressed by a modern day supporter of the UK. MI5 documents were released recording the wartime conversations of leading Nationalist, Arthur Donaldson, who became SNP leader in the 1960s. Apparently he had been talking about setting himself up as some kind of Scottish "Quisling", in the event of a Nazi invasion of the UK. At its conference in 1939, SNP leader Andrew Dewar Gibb told party members that “imperial England” had no right “to criticise the actions of any other country [i.e. Germany]”. Hugh MacDiarmid, still hallowed as Scotland’s foremost nationalist poet and honoured by the wearing of white roses by SNP MPs at the State Opening of Parliament, argued in the 1930s that Nazism should be a model for Scottish socialist nationalists. In 1940 he wrote a poem admitting that if London should be destroyed by bombs, “I hardly care”. Professor Douglas Young was Chair of the SNP in 1940 when he was imprisoned for leading a group of Nationalists who refused conscription in an ‘English war’. If he had said he was a pacifist that would have been a principled position but his opposition had to be because it was an ‘English war’. I doubt if either Arthur Donaldson or Douglas Young had genuine Nazi sympathies but they couldn’t see past the nationalist’s paranoia and therefore saw their enemy’s enemy as their ‘friend’. 

The 1930s is a period ‘whaur extremes meet’ as McDiarmid himself wrote. Ideologies of left and right sometimes became indistinguishable. The Labour Party had its Oswald Mosley, who with others then went off to form the fascist New Party and the blackshirts. The Tories had their appeasers of Germany along with sections of the establishment. Sir Thomas Moore, MP for Ayr for almost 40 years right up to 1964, spent the 1930s writing in support of Hitler and Nazi Germany. The Daily Mail carried the front page story ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ by Lord Rothemere. We shouldn’t judge today’s political parties by their blackest moments in history. We shouldn’t judge the SNP by the shameful words of their early leaders. In the famous words that begin the Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’ But George Bernard Shaw reminded us that ‘we learn from history that we learn nothing from history.’ 

It is legitimate to hold parties accountable for what their supporters do and say today. It was unacceptable for Dianne Abbott to write that ‘the prejudice experienced by Jewish people was similar to, but not the same as, racism’. The Conservatives should have returned all donations from donor Frank Hester after he said looking at Dianne Abbott made him ‘ hate all black women’. The SNP need to take ownership of the vile abuse dished out online by their cybernat trolls. It is frightening to think that not only do they spend their time posting crude, witless insults – they actually think that way. Someone recently described an internet troll’s mind as ‘a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness’. The real danger is when we choose to blot out the past from memory, to unlearn its lessons and begin to make apologies for those who do the same things all over again.

I am not at the Scottish Conference. My weekend has instead been taken up with a visit to Tesco, a bit of leafleting and, OK, I admit it, following the conference on social media. It feels a bit strange to someone who was an Annual Conference junkie from 1983 on. I sometimes missed the Scottish one but never the ‘Labour Party Conference’.
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Ask our two daughters and they will tell you tales of long journeys to Brighton and Blackpool and hours of conference crèche play. Sometimes we took Sandra’s mum to baby sit. Brighton and Blackpool in turn was suddenly interrupted with a year at Bournemouth. Ryanair did a direct flight from Prestwick then and I remember Bournemouth being very hilly. It just didn’t feel the same when the Conference started moving to other cities like Manchester or Liverpool. 

It wasn’t just the location that changed - the conference itself changed. My early memories are of long compositing meetings and motions carried by the Union block votes. The joke used to be that when someone asked who would like tea or coffee the answer was 4 million for tea and 2 million for coffee. We were in the tea room at the Bournemouth Conference in 1985 when Eric Heffer marched past us having stormed off the platform and out of the hall after Neil Kinnock took on Militant. He won acclaim for his speech accusing Militant run Liverpool of causing a grotesque scene, "hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers."

High-spots for us in those days were contributions from Arthur Scargill in support of the Miners’ Strike, bravura performances from Trade Union leaders like Jack Jones and emotional pleas for nuclear disarmament by Philip Noel Baker and Monsignor Bruce Kent. Then there were the wall to wall fringe meetings. How often was it possible to hear Tony Benn speak in one night? It wasn’t all politics. I remember some amazing social nights. An Irish Night compèred by the irascible Dominic Behan sticks in my slightly befuddled memory. Another night Sandra and I went to a meeting which we thought was on some interesting international topic only to find we had gone into the wrong room and were now the only lay people in a room of staff from the reinforced steel industry. There was no escape from this riveting experience. What made it worse was we could hear applause and laughter through the wall from the meeting we had meant to go to.

These were the years of great conference punch ups. When New Labour took over everything changed. Conference became totally stage managed, window dressing around the Leader’s speech. Even so it was good to be alive then when we were winning and making such a difference to people’s lives. There were still memorable moments. Brighton 2000 saw Nelson Mandela address conference.  In Blackpool 2002 it was the turn of Bill Clinton to give a masterclass in how to deliver a conference speech beginning with the words ‘Conference, Bill Clinton, Arkansas South CLP’. Gordon Brown delivered some fantastic speeches too.

As the years passed we started picking and choosing the sessions we would go to  and even missing out Conference some years altogether. It’s really good to see that conferences have come alive again with a new generation feeling the excitement and adrenaline we experienced all those years ago. The conference still ends with the singing of the Red Flag -  it’s just that next year it’s  rumoured the singing will be led by Taylor Swift.

A member of my family lost a very good friend this month. It reminded me of losing my oldest friend four years ago, but he had had a long life, this was a relatively young man. How do you console someone at a time like this. Someone mentioned to me recently they were surprised how many young people posting on social media about friends who have died, talk about them ‘looking down on us’. We explored for a few minutes what they meant by that. No doubt some people do have a simple literal faith in an afterlife and can accept a place called heaven from which those who have passed on can look down and observe. Others will use the imagery of ‘looking down’ as a metaphor for something else. They may have a strong sense of the person who has died still having some kind of presence - some kind or ongoing link to our lives. They may simply find it too difficult to let go of the person they have known or loved. I don’t imagine they even feel the need to think it through as logically as that. I’m cursed with a logical mind. It has taken me a long time to realise that logic isn’t all it’s made out to be. Sometimes you are better letting imagination and imagery run loose and live even for a few moments in that world. There’s a lot to be said for the philosophy of John Lennon, “Whatever gets you through the night, it’s alright, it’s alright”

That doesn’t mean inhabiting the world of the crank with lights going on and off, radios changing stations, items inexplicably falling off shelves signaling that your departed loved one is nearby and trying to get your attention. If you want to make your head hurt Google afterlife and read a selection of serious studies on the subject. What they all have in common is a belief that there is an afterlife however hard it is for our human understanding to grasp or interpret. What the philosophers, mystics and theologians also have in common is a rejection of the idea that when you die that is an end to it. For them there has to be more - they just can’t agree exactly what that is.

I have never taken a literal view of an afterlife. I used to understand the concept of heaven metaphorically. To be more accurate, I saw religious language as allegorical. An allegory can be more complex than a metaphor. It allows you to interpret a hidden meaning behind detailed religious narrative about God, spirituality and afterlife. Interpretation is not just a modern phenomenon to make sense of what the ancients accepted as literally true. The oldest scriptures contain lots of imagery too. The book of Revelation paints a picture of the New Jerusalem (heaven on earth). “It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. And the gates are never shut” 

My own journey took me from using religious language which I understood metaphorically, to just not using language at all that I had to explain I didn’t take literally. It may sound harsh and depressing to dismiss the possibility of afterlife but it’s far from that. Poetry teaches that memory, friendship, inspiration, empathy, and most of all, love are powerfully real and enduring emotions. We don’t just forget about people when they die - just as we don’t forget about people when we are separated by distance. It is true that it becomes harder to keep enduring memories alive with the passing of time, but that’s not the same as forgetting about someone. It’s just our way of coping and moving on with life. Christina Rossetti captures that in her poem Remember - ‘Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad.’  
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Maya Angelou reflecting on the death of poet James Baldwin wrote.
‘And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.’

Today my Constituency Labour Party selected former diplomat and local Irvine boy, Alan Gemmell to be the Labour candidate for Central Ayrshire. Back in August 1972, Alice Cooper was in the recording studio shouting, “I’m your top prime cut of meat, I’m your choice, I wanna be elected”. Watergate was just around the corner. The process by which would be MPs put their names forward, seek members’ support and go through a selection process has always fascinated me. As a political nerd l can’t get enough of Michael Crick’s ‘Tomorrow’s MPs’. He describes it as ‘lifting the secrecy on how parties select candidates’ and it is followed on ‘X’  by almost 40,000 people. It’s where you find all the names, the gossip, the conspiracies, the long listing, the short listing and eventually the winners. There’s even a bit of comment now and again. 

Michael Crick has  claimed that the Conservative Party’s headquarters are attempting to “stitch up” safe seats in favour of so-called “blue prince” candidates aligned with Rishi Sunak. Crick believes, while Labour has focused more on making sure candidates have local links, the Tories have preferred to build up a “gang of people who've had high powered jobs, in government or as special advisers and so on, a lot of ex-MPs”, who apply for multiple seats, often against each other, until they find somewhere that wants to select them.

When it comes to Labour selections, Crick has raised concerns that the leadership has had its hands all over them. Depending how you see it, either it has been blocking those it doesn’t like or simply ensuring a high quality of candidate. He has highlighted several big names on local councils failing to make shortlists. The tight controlling of candidate lists by the central party has raised some concerns over  due diligence not being “equally applied”. The conspiracy theorist would claim that you might get a heads up to remove something less than ideal or be told something mildly contentious in your past will be overlooked. But If you’re not the favoured candidate then any scrap of controversy can be used to block you from even making it onto the shortlist. I’m not really into conspiracy theories and although I have no doubt the leadership has probably gone far too far in poking its nose into some selections, it’s probably been done with the best of intentions. We've very clearly turned the page on the Corbyn years, and no one who took part in wrecking the party between 2015 and 2019 is getting anywhere near a parliamentary seat. A Labour Government is going to have a really tough job whatever the majority and we are going to need a united, disciplined PLP. 

Another barbed comment coming from Michael Crick relates to the outcome of the twinned selections in Scotland where two constituencies selected their candidates jointly, everyone voting for a man and a woman. The candidate coming top in each category was selected for a seat and the one with the most votes got to choose which. He points out that this has nearly always been the man, even suggesting male candidates were encouraging members not use their second vote for a woman to make sure they came out on top. Again there may be some truth in this,  but these constituencies are all within Labour’s grasp now. Whatever its weaknesses, twinning had ensured more women candidates and the winning man hasn’t always picked the ‘best’ seat. Former Better Together supremo, Blair McDougall, came top but opted for East Renfrewshire where he has stood before, rather than the better option on paper of Paisley and Renfrewshire South.

Of course, leadership interference in selections is nothing new. Claims of centrally organised “stitch-ups” when Jeremy Corbyn was Leader dominated selection battles leading up to 2017 and 2019.

Before the voter volatility of recent years,  getting your name on the ballot paper in the first place, as opposed to what happened on polling day, was arguably the most important step in the process to become an MP. These were the days of safe seats for life.

Some went beyond obsessing about selection stitch-ups to looking at ways to increase participation, seeing the two things as linked. Can anyone remember when arguments about the merits of holding ‘primaries’ were all the rage. As politicians looked across the pond, they were seduced by the American tradition of open and closed primaries - open where anyone could turn up and influence the selection and closed where there was a register of party sympathisers or supporters. A move to primaries was championed by David Miliband on Labour’s side and by David Cameron on the Tory’s. It was all a bit naive really. Open primaries allowed opponents and enemies to gate crash the selections and shape the outcomes. While closed primaries signed up a rag tag of hostile people on the fringes and factions beyond to scew the results in favour of people who would never have got the support of long standing members. Ed Miliband brought in registered members and supporters to widen the franchise for Leadership elections and we ended up with Jeremy Corbyn.
Scottish Labour has its own story to tell about candidate selection. After the 2015 rout of Labour by the SNP we went through a period when selections weren’t so much a battlefield as a desert, with us searching for anyone willing to stand. That is over. We are back in contention with hard fought selection contests.

My memories of selections go way back to the 70s 80s and 90s -  fiercely contested and often factional battles. I remember my own selection for Ayr in 1990. Branch and Union support was seen as crucial and the candidates went to umpteen meetings seeking endorsements. At the final selection meeting, we were ushered in, one by one, to the crowded Labour Rooms to make our pitch and answer questions. One of my fellow contenders came back saying it had gone OK except for a question from the CLP chair. ‘What was his question?’ I asked. ‘Well it was hard to understand unless you were fluent in Serbo-Croat’. A local councillor rose to ask his question-  ‘Do we need to sit through everyone? We all know who we are voting for.’

By 1997 we had all women shortlists. Some men protested that this would stop members picking the best candidate (‘man’ in other words) for the job. As if the ‘best candidate’ had always emerged from smoked filled union rooms and branch cliques in the past.  What actually happened was some very capable women were able to come forward and be taken seriously. In Ayr we volunteered for an AW shortlist and ended up with five to pick from. The ‘best candidate’ won (I’m biased - it was my wife) but among the others, we had two women who went on to be MSPs and government ministers, a BAME Regional Councillor and an excellent local trade unionist. The idea that all women shortlists would deny members choice was blown out the water.

Back to the present. As I said at the start of this article, my own constituency party selected its Labour candidate this week. There was no gathering in damp Labour Party rooms; no one standing at the back heckling; no dodgy PA system; no slips of voting papers getting folded and put into the baskets as they came round. It was all done on line by Zoom with an e-vote at the end. It just wasn’t the same somehow. It was hard to feel you were at the centre of the cut and thrust of electoral politics when you were sitting in front of an iPad in your living room with your carpet slippers on.
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By elections
“The turn outs were terrible. Our voters stayed at home. They’ll be back” Wrong! They have all been really significant in the scale of the swing. The turn outs have been in line with by election turn outs historically. And no - your voters (SNP or Tories) didn’t stay at home, all voters stay at home in a by election and yet Labour won well.

The Wisdom of the Crowd
Someone in Canada did a Masters Degree in Political Betting called ‘the Wisdom of the Crowd’. It examined why people collectively reach a decision or change their mind about something with no obvious single reason for doing so. What have the Tories and and SNP done to be found out at last and for the voters to turn against them. Nothing new really. The Tories have never learned from 1997 and have continued to cut taxes for the rich and slash public services. All their Chancellors have kept pictures of Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson on their desks. They never moved on - just got lucky electorally. As for the SNP, it’s not a question of why have the electorate turned on them but why has it taken so long?

Expressing a view on Gaza
It’s totally exhausting expressing a considered view on Gaza - making it clear your abhorrence of the terrorist atrocities of Hamas and of all antisemitism while doing justice to your unqualified support for the Palestinian people, your condemnation of the Israeli government’s collective punishment of innocent civilians and the need for a two state political solution however far off that might be. It’s exhausting unless you just want to take sides and scream abuse at each other. When it comes to a ceasefire the word ‘immediate’ has come to have a high level of usage but a low level of meaning. I think it was Biden who compared Gaza to Northern Ireland - not a helpful comparison except in one respect. The breakthrough there came when the terrorist gunmen and the political intransigents of both sides finally recognised the need to put violence aside and embrace compromise and cooperation.

I’m a celebrity get me out of here.
I’ve watched and enjoyed most of the series up till now. That’s been against my better judgment. I don’t really like the nasty trials but have found the social interaction fascinating. Some of the celebrities I thought I wouldn’t like have turned out to be interesting and attractive people. But even I have my limits - watching this one is a step too Farage. I was wondering if the makers of the show could use the advances in AI to spice things up and bring in a few celebrities from the past like Stanley Matthews, Agatha Christie, Marilyn Monroe or Oscar Wilde. Wilde could have had Nigel Farage’s jungle stay in mind when he wrote ‘some cause happiness wherever they go - others whenever they go.’

My wife and I were in Edinburgh last week to see comedian Matt Forde’s Fringe show, ‘Inside No 10’. Matt, a former Labour Party Advisor, is now a political satirist and impressionist. He has a very popular podcast called ‘The Political Party’.  I would give his fringe performance five stars but as the show’s run has come to an end it doesn’t really matter. A key part of his routine these days is to tap into the rich seam of comedy provided by the shenanigans of the SNP. It seems this usually results in a few disgruntled Nats walking out - but not the night we were there. It used to be disgruntled Corbyn supporters who left his show early but now he has moved on and has the SNP firmly in his sights. It makes a pleasant change from recent years when Labour seemed to be the butt of all political jokes. That had got so bad I just couldn’t bear to put myself through it anymore. You’ve got to allow comedians to give you a hard time without storming out, so, if you feel they are going too far or misrepresenting your position, better just to stay away. 

I grew up in an Edinburgh where locals tried their best to ignore the Festival and Fringe. Even so, I did go to the occasional folk concert and play back in the 1970s. It was only much later and living in the West of Scotland that we started to visit Edinburgh on a regular basis each summer and take in a few shows.

I will never forget the year we managed to cram 8 performances into a 3 day stay. That was before hotel prices during the festival went through the roof. There was an excellent stage version of ‘Twelve Angry Men’ with a star studded cast including Bill Bailey and Russell Hunter (his last performance). Then there was a rather dark play about euthanasia, ‘No more shall we part’, starring Bill Paterson and Dearbhla Molloy. To lighten the atmosphere we thought we would end our trip with the stage version of the TV sit com ‘Allo Allo’, set in René Artois’ small café in Nazi occupied France. To say it didn’t quite work is the understatement of all time. We were squeezed in at the end of a row of about thirty seats. There was no centre aisle. By the time Officer Crabtree said his first ‘Good moaning’ we were ready to say ‘au revoir’ but there was no escape until the interval. An hour or so later it became clear that there wasn’t going to be an interval. Like the painting of ‘the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies’ hidden in the cafe’s cellar, we stayed in the dark right through to the end.

Fast forward to last week and the seating at the Pleasance made it equally difficult for an early getaway. Thankfully that wasn’t needed as everyone sat tight, laughing right through till the hour was up. We would have stayed for another hour if we could have.