While President Joe Biden was in Glasgow for COP 26, his Vice President, Kamala Harris was preparing to join Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm at a hangar at John F. Kennedy International Airport to announce $127 million in new federal funding for medium and heavy-duty trucks that produce zero carbon dioxide emissions. They also announced a new partnership the Energy Department will forge with HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Cleaning) makers to try to speed up development of electric heat pumps that can operate in colder climates - both key steps to meeting long-term U.S. climate goals. When the US media speculate on a rift between the President and his Vice President they offer as evidence how seldom they appear together in public these days after being inseparable in the early months of the Presidency. Could that just be a natural development of their roles. Yes they were over 3000 miles apart as COP 26 was underway, but they were hand in hand ‘across the pond’ in taking forward the USA’s climate goals.
0 Comments
Some years ago I wrote a piece about my childhood called ‘An Unsure Start’. This one begins sixty years later. What makes retirement tolerable is it comes with lots of discounts. I first realised this when I went to get my haircut and the sign showed a pound off for over sixties. The conversation turned to what I was doing for the rest of the day. I told the barber I was going back to work and with that any chance of a discount vanished. My bus pass also posed a bit of a moral dilemma. I was still working and earning and surely it was designed for people on restricted means. However, the more I thought about it the more I concluded that it was a right of passage into your sixties with little to do with income. I had always used public transport to go to work and once I had decided that it was OK to accept concessionary travel I began to save a fortune and this would continue for the next five years. I began to think nothing of it till the time I was due to go to Aberdeen to help in a by election. To my surprise I found that I could use my bus pass on the new Gold City Link Express from Glasgow. It got to Aberdeen in no time at all with only one stop I think. Not only was it free to use but it had leather seats and you were served tea, coffee, sandwiches and ice cream throughout the journey. That just seemed wrong. The targeted versus universal benefit debate raised its head again when I started receiving the Winter Fuel Payment from that nice Gordon Brown.
I had tried to retire when I was fifty nine but my boss wouldn’t let me and you have to wait till sixty to retire with or without permission. By then the opportunity I had in mind had gone and I accepted that I would just have to soldier on. Local Government is always changing but it had started to change at a greater pace and not for the better. The socio economic ethos which had been handed down from the days of the old Regional Councils was fast being replaced with a model based more on private enterprise. When my job title changed from a ‘Policy Officer’ to a ‘Policy and Performance Officer’, I knew that I was now in the employ of an organisation that didn’t really need me any more. Oscar Wilde wrote that ‘the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’. I wasn’t keen for too much of that cynicism to rub off on me. And so I was delighted to find that I could qualify for something called ‘flexible retirement’. It was a new right for all public sector employees and all councils were required to agree a policy on it - but it was left up to each council to decide what their policy would be. North Ayrshire Council decided it would apply to anyone who had reached their sixty third birthday and they would be allowed to take their pension and be reemployed with hours reduced by up to one day a week. This meant I was able to spend the final two years of my time with the Council working four days a week with my pension making up the drop in salary. On top of this, there was a crisis of office accommodation and so I was offered the option of home working if I gave up my room. I had embarked on my very own road to freedom Work life balance is usually taken to mean ensuring you leave plenty time for family and friends, hobbies and relaxation. For me it meant making sure I did a good job at work as well as all my political campaigning. Flexible retirement allowed me to save up my days off and spend far more time with my wife Sandra at Westminster supporting her in her work as an MP (always unpaid, before you ask). When it was time to stop work altogether, I left as quietly as I could get away with. I had a nice send off with work colleagues at a farewell do in the Harbour Arts Centre. I was sixty five. I had read all the ‘Preparing for Retirement’ literature and even signed up for ‘Ayrshire Opportunities in Retirement’. It didn’t turn out quite how I expected. The first year I worked full time on the Referendum campaign. Received wisdom has it that the Better Together Campaign killed off the Scottish Labour Party, forever tainted by cooperation with the Tories. My logical mind doesn’t wholly accept that theory. Referenda confront people with a binary choice and throw up two official campaigns, one on each side of the argument. It is inevitable that you find yourself on the same side as those with very different views from your own. It is true that very early on Sandra and I realised how important it would be to support a separate Scottish Labour campaign and threw ourselves totally into United with Labour. We took to the streets every week and also organised a series of public meetings. Sandra invited some of her colleagues with particular areas of expertise to be the speakers at these. Packed meetings listened to Ian Murray on the Economy; Greg McClymont on Pensions and Anne Begg on Social Security. Having won that campaign, I was immediately caught up in the next - the General Election. It became obvious that we were about to be hit by an SNP tsunami that would sweep everything before it, but I still had to give the fight everything I could. That too became a full time job, organising Sandra’s last campaign. It turned out to be one we could all be proud of in spite of there being no chance of winning. We had a brilliant town centre location for our shop and rooms; we took to the high streets every weekend and knocked doors and telephone canvassed daily. We tried bus advertising for the first time since 1992 and hired space on the video screen in Ayr’s busy Whitletts Road. It was strangely satisfying to know we had done everything we could have even though the tide was firmly against us. Any idea that I could now sit back and enjoy my retirement was dispelled when Sandra was diagnosed with cancer at the end of 2015. 2016 was given over to supporting her through radical surgery, chemotherapy and a slow recuperation. So it wasn’t really until 2017 that I could say my retirement was properly underway - ten years after I had first applied for it. 2017 was the year of two major events - our younger daughter Karen got married to Mark at the beautiful setting of Dumfries House in Cumnock, and we got a dog. The wedding gave us all a focus and provided a joyous family celebration that we will never forget. Rosie, our cavapoo, became the centre of our attention bringing nothing but happiness into our lives. My health had taken a downturn and I had to make a number of hospital visits before things settled down and became more stable. There was however one constant that became a major part of my life after retirement, - creative writing. I have always written. In the early years when I was a minister it was weekly sermons, then when I worked in local government, committee reports and policy papers and all the while, leaflets, press releases and political research for the Labour Party. Now I had retired I could start writing for fun. I began a blog called ‘What’s Left’ which has now run to over seventy posts (including this). I began writing for other journals including regular articles for the wonderful Scottish Review, an online weekly, started by the greatly missed Kenneth Roy. Lots of people suddenly find time for the novel they knew they had always wanted to write. I started messing about with a few of my short stories and finally managed a novella of around 14,000 words called ‘Denunciation’. Then there was COVID and the lockdown. From the vantage point of retirement I have to say that it meant being denied the opportunity to do lots of things we had no intention of doing anyway. It was horrible to have little or no contact with our family and I never want to do a video quiz ever again but with fixed incomes it had no financial impact whatsoever. With two jags behind me, what does the future hold at 73. I’m not quite ready to embrace Dylan Thomas’s injunction - “Do not go gentle into that good night”. I always preferred Roger McGough’s plea: “Let me die a young man's death not a clean and inbetween the sheets holy water death not a famous-last-words peaceful out of breath death” At very least, I think it would be nice for once to be able to do anything I want or just nothing at all. Last week the House of Commons held a moving debate to mark 5 years since the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox. Jo was elected to represent the parliamentary constituency of Batley and Spen at the 2015 General Election, having spent several years working for the international humanitarian charity Oxfam. She was married with two young children. On 16 June 2016 she was on her way to meet constituents at a routine surgery when racist Thomas Mair shot her twice in the head and once in the chest with a modified .22 hunting rifle then stabbed her fifteen times outside a local library. Her killer, who is now serving a life sentence without limit, was born in Kilmarnock but had spent most of his life in England. The toxic anti immigration rhetoric of the Brexit campaign then in full flight, helped fuel Mair’s hatred of the liberally minded left. He saw them as the main enemies of white people. For him, Jo was a ‘collaborator’, a traitor to his race and a legitimate target. Thankfully the debate did not focus on Thomas Mair at all, but only on the fantastic legacy of Jo Cox. Many of her friends struggled with the emotion of the occasion as they remembered their former colleague. Her friend of over 20 years, Stephen Kinnock, broke down as he told of their time sharing an office, the privilege of getting to know her beautiful children when she brought them in with her. He said, ‘Jo was an internationalist to her fingertips, believing that we can do more good by working together with our friends and neighbours than we could ever do on our own. She wanted Britain to continue to be an open, tolerant and generous country—a country that engages with the world with its head held high, instead of turning its back on it.’ Can you imagine what she would have had to say about the shameful abandonment of the Afghan people. The debate provided a fitting occasion for Jo’s sister, the brave Kim Leadbeater, to make her own maiden speech as the newly elected MP for Batley and Spen. Time and time again MPs talked of Jo’s hope, energy, enthusiasm and optimism and how all of these qualities have continued to deliver benefits long after her death. Over 20 million have participated now in the ‘Great Get Together’ events as well as the ‘More in Common’ Volunteer Groups and the Jo Cox foundation. ‘More in Common’ refers to the famous line in her Maiden Speech in 2015, ‘We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.’ In June 2016 a number of artists got together to record a Friends of Jo Cox tribute - the Rolling Stones song ‘You can’t always get what you want’. ‘You can't always get what you want But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find You get what you need’ Also in June of that year, Oxfam announced it would release ‘Stand as One - Live at Glastonbury’, an album of live performances from the 2016 festival in her memory. Proceeds from the album went towards helping the charity's work with refugees. George Burns is credited with the famous quip, ‘Sincerity - if you can fake that, you've got it made.’ Jo reminded us that politicians at their best don’t have to fake it.I have never talked or written about this before but it’s time to ‘come out’ and reveal that I am one of a persecuted, discriminated against minority. Up till now I have just got on with life. I didn’t feel the need to talk about it, but neither was it a secret or something to be ashamed of. Prejudice
isn’t pleasant. Nobody relishes being discriminated against just because they belong to a particular group of people. Nor should anyone be stereotyped because of a particular experience someone has had with one individual of that persuasion. The truth is I am and always have been ‘corrie-fisted’. For the non Scots speaker (who is in the majority) that means left handed. It comes from the Gaelic word for ‘left’ or ‘wrong handed’. There we go again with negative connotations. It’s time to take ownership of the word and shout it out loud - “Corrie-fisted and proud!” It’s hard to separate fact from fiction when you research left handedness. Right handed people dominate the world. Around 10% of people in the west are left handed. It is thought to be in our DNA and that we can tell how we are going to turn out by which thumb we suck in the womb. The good news for left handers is that for them the parts of the brain responsible for language skills work better, hence the beautiful flowing prose of this piece of writing. We are also thought to be more creative and have the edge in boxing (south paw). The latter may because we have to learn to cope with orthodox boxers in training whereas they are taken by surprise when faced with a ‘south paw’ in the ring. Such prestigious names as Leonardo da Vinci, H G Wells, Annie Lennox, Kirsty Wark, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are on the long list of famous left handers. On the other hand, so are Jack the Ripper, Osama Bin Laden, Prince Charles and Bart Simpson. Society has long tended to associate the left side of something with the bad. We say someone has ‘two left feet’ but that someone else is ‘my right-hand man’. The word ‘sinister’ derives from the Latin for left and brings with it a sense of darkness, evil and threat. Whereas ‘dexter’ or ‘right’ gives us the word ‘dexterous’, or from the French, ‘adroit’ both with the positive meaning of ‘skilful’. Like many things in life, the choice (if it is a choice at all) is not binary. We should recognise that many people are ambidextrous while others are mixed handed. I have always used my left hand to write but played sports and played the guitar right handed. Today we face the challenges of new technology. I am writing this on my iPad holding it firmly in my left hand and typing out the words with my right. But hold on a moment. Now I am typing with my left and holding it with my right and there’s not a lot of difference. Perhaps how we identify matters less these days. With the left wing candidate, Pedro Castillo, poised to win the presidential election in Peru, I found myself arguing over the significance of this with a young left wing Labour Party Organiser and academic. He had enthusiastically welcomed the victory, while I expressed some fears that Peru might be let down. It left me feeling very uneasy. Had I gone soft on my socialism over the years or were sections of the left here just too romantically uncritical of left wing leaders in South America? I first came across Liberation Theology as a student studying Divinity at Edinburgh University in the late 1960s. Liberation theology caught my imagination with its message that the church should derive its legitimacy and theology from the perspective of the poor and should be a movement for those who are denied their rights as human beings. My mentor in this was Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez and Brazilian Leonardi Boff. Later, when I was doing a diploma in community development in the 1980s, I embraced the ‘problem posing’ community development strategy of Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire set out in his ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’.
I had my chance to put Freire into action when I was the Community Minister in Lochside in Ayr. Part of the church building was turned into a community centre offering the more traditional ‘community education’ style blend of classes, sports and activities. The rest of the building was for me to develop a range of community development initiatives - a rights advice service; small social enterprise initiatives and tenants groups. With the zeal of Freireian praxis we changed the world from the bottom up - or at least we helped the tenants campaign for and get long overdue central heating and window replacement. We must have been doing something right because local Tory MP, George Younger, got our Urban Aid funding withdrawn for undertaking ‘political activity’. It was reinstated after a visit from the then Moderator of the General Assembly, an unassuming elderly cleric who turned out to be a bit of an old fashioned socialist. He lobbied successfully on our behalf. In those days, Labour was at its most radical when looking outwards at the international situation. The election of the communist, Salvador Allende, in Chile was iconic. His assassination followed by the Pinochet dictatorship left us with a burning anger that persists to this day. Optimism was sky high when Robert Mugabe was elected as the first leader of an independent Zimbabwe. We celebrated the triumph of an articulate intelligent African freedom fighter comprehensively defeating Britain’s favoured puppet candidate, Bishop Abel Muzorewa. Mugabe let us all down badly, turning against his erstwhile comrades, crushing dissidents, massacring opposition supporters and taking his country to the very edge of bankruptcy while he obsessed over internal politics and his succession plans. My heart was pounding as I stood on Glasgow Green at the May Day Rally in 1989. The motorcade drew up and out strode Daniel Ortega, darling of the left and President of Nicaragua. We were ecstatic that he had seen off the threat to his country from the US and the US backed Contras. Good times surely lay ahead for Nicaraguans. He has stayed in power off and on ever since, turning from tackling poverty and promoting economic development to crushing opposition, championing the socially conservative agenda of the Catholic Church including a total ban on abortion and persecuting gay people. Looking back I feel a bit like the Communist Party comrades who gradually had to come to terms with the truth about the atrocities and failures of the old Soviet Union. So many of my political icons proved to have feet of clay. An exception to this was Nelson Mandela. In 1993 our family was part of 10,000 people who gathered in George Square to welcome him to Glasgow twelve years after he had been given the Freedom of the City. He used the opportunity to thank Glaswegians for the stand they had taken against apartheid over many years. Mandela never let us down and remains a beacon of hope for radical change. All this is to say I don’t criticise the left in South America lightly. For much of its history Latin America has excluded the left from its elections, first through limited suffrage and later through military intervention and repression during the second half of the 20th century. The collapse of the Soviet Union changed the geopolitical environment as many revolutionary movements folded and the left embraced the mixed economy. As a result, the United States softened it’s view of leftist governments as a threat to security, creating a political opening for the left. The pink tide, as it became known, was led by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in 1998. According to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a pink tide president of Argentina herself, Chávez of Venezuela, Lula da Silva of Brazil and Evo Morales of Bolivia formed "the three musketeers" of the left in South America. Tides are caused by the rise and fall of sea levels influenced by a number of forces. The political fortune of the left in Latin America has ebbed and flowed like the tide. Left wing governments succeeded in reducing poverty and inequality and boosting literacy levels and skills. Progress is always followed by a backlash but we also have to recognise the left’s own failings in government. Too often those elected on the pink tide have played fast and loose with the constitution and the democratic checks and balances of the state. Presidents of both the left and right have been equally keen to change the electoral rules so that they can go on and on. The left has been too quick to curb press freedom, silence opposition and clamp down on civil unrest and protest. It has also failed to challenge the socially conservative legacy of the Catholic establishment. When sections of the left here in the UK welcome the election of Castillo in Peru they seem prepared to gloss over his opposition to all abortion, LGBT+ rights, equal marriage and gender equality. Can you really call someone a ‘socialist’ with views like that? There is a path for the left to follow in South America but it has to be a socialism of a different sort. It has to be a socialism built from the bottom up, fashioned by the social movements of the day, by feminism, by indigenous activism, by postcolonial thought. It should be secular, socially liberal, open to sexual difference, women's rights, different ideas of governance, different perceptions of social property and the market, focused on a just transition to a green economy. It must be a truly democratic socialism. This was to be the election when things got tactical. George Galloway urged us to vote for the best placed constituency candidate to beat the SNP and then for his party on the List. Alex Salmond called for an SNP vote in the constituency and a vote for Alba and a ‘super majority’ on the List. In the event, voters chose to ignore them both. Only the Greens managed to ‘game the system’ and secure additional independence supporting MSPs by persuading sufficient SNP voters that they would be a more effective use of their List vote.
On the unionist side of the argument, a huge effort went into persuading voters to vote tactically for the candidates best placed to stop the SNP. This wasn’t just George Galloway’s All for Unity but right across social media. Again, this had minimal impact on the outcome. Where tactical voting did work was in a small handful of key marginal seats. In the SNP’s top target, Labour-held Dumbarton, a swing from the Conservatives translated into a big majority for Labour’s Jackie Baillie. In Eastwood, a three-way marginal between the two anti independence parties and the SNP turned into a relatively comfortable win for former Scottish Conservative leader Jackson Carlaw. The Labour vote there dropped by around 4,000. In two Edinburgh seats, Labour and Liberal Democrat incumbents saw huge rises in their vote at the expense of the other unionist parties, helping them hold off the SNP in contests the nationalists had high hopes of winning. In Galloway and West Dumfries, the Conservatives easily saw off the SNP challenge thanks to Labour’s share of the vote dropping by half. However, the limited success of tactical voting could be seen in Edinburgh Central and in Ayr where the SNP took both seats from the Tories and in East Lothian where they won from Labour. Whatever the tactics might have been in a handful of seats, all three main parties stuck doggedly to a call for voters to give them both votes. The Tories stressed particularly the importance of using the List vote for them. This wasn’t so much a call for tactical voting as a pitch to secure the prize as the main defender of the Union. There were six marginal seats where the Tories had real hopes of defeating the SNP if Labour supporters had been willing to lend them their votes. They won none of them. And in a number of seats where Labour came second in 2016, and might have had a chance of success with some tactical voting, the Tory vote actually increased. So, in the final analysis, this wasn’t to be the election where tactical voting became decisive. I must be honest and say, hand on heart, there are no circumstances in which I can ever see myself abandoning Labour just to keep another party out, and most Labour voters would echo that. In spite of all the anecdotal evidence of Tories being prepared to back Labour to defeat the SNP, when it came to the bit, they remained just as loyal to their party. But then is it really such a bad thing to see it as more important to stand up for something we believe in than just oppose something we don’t. Loads of people have used social media to post their verdicts on the two televised Leaders’ Debates. Some may have actually watched them. The Daily Record online poll called both for Sarwar while the Herald put Sturgeon ahead (no surprises there). The Scottish Conservatives’ twitter account called the BBC debate “Ross 1 Sturgeon 0”. That piece of Newspeak would have made George Orwell smile. He called it the ‘the language of propaganda’. The general consensus from all sides was that Anas Sarwar performed strongly and Nicola Sturgeon solidly, albeit from the stance of a defending incumbent. No one thought Douglas Ross cut it in either.
I don’t like Leaders’ Debates. They make me nervous and change very little. When I was a student in the sixties, my politics class had to study the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon TV Debate. It is still talked about as the turning point in the campaign. Nixon was the favourite until he went before the glare of the cameras in an ill fitting suit that merged into the studio background and with what looked like a five o’clock shadow caused by his refusal to allow studio make up. No one now remembers that the pundits called the second and third debates for Nixon and the fourth a draw. Far fewer people tuned in for the other debates. Mark Twain defined a classic as ‘something that everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read’. Leaders’ Debates are a bit like that. There is a huge fuss if a leader refuses to take part, as did Theresa May. They are analysed to the n’th degree, but does anyone decide who to vote for as a result? How many people watch from start to finish and how many just watch the start then turn over and read about it later online or in the newspapers? Two political commentators provided us with some interesting and useful insights into the making of these debates. Former Scottish Labour Leader, Kezia Dugdale, posted a series of tweets describing her role in helping Ed Miliband prepare to take on David Cameron, and Better Together Co-ordinator, Blair McDougall, described his contribution to the Indy Ref TV Debates. Kezia wrote about the work that goes into preparation and how she had to role play Nicola Sturgeon. She also admitted that as a participant you have no idea how it has gone - it is a complete blur afterwards. Blair revealed some of the strategy employed. We were told the value of a ‘moment of conflict’ or a memorable sound bite. Both are invaluable as the media will be looking for a single strong story from the debate, not a blow by blow account. Sarwar scored well on both these counts in the BBC debate. First he challenged the First Minister on the delay in treating the cancer patient he had met, and then, later, he told Tory Leader, Douglas Ross, to ‘grow up’. This was when Ross foolishly attacked Sarwar in answer to a question on racism and prejudice that had the making of uniting the candidates till he piped up. This, by the way, was an example of how not to follow the strategy handbook - the bit where it says ‘avoid the clanger’. Douglas Ross misread the situation badly. He is not the first. When Gerald Ford was debating Jimmy Carter in 1976 he famously gaffed that ‘there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under my administration’. In 1992, George H W Bush was caught on camera looking at his watch when a woman was asking him a heartfelt searching question. The STV debate had a very different format from the BBC one especially giving over so much time to candidate cross examination. It was also much more wide ranging in topics covered but how much of that will be remembered. I’m sure Sturgeon’s opponents will want to remind voters she admitted “we took our eye off the ball on drug deaths”. But will anyone recall it was in answer to a question from Douglas Ross? Makes you wonder what was holding her gaze at the time. Patrick Harvie asked Douglas Ross one of the best questions of the night: “Is it your whole party that is prejudiced against gypsy travellers – or just you?” This provided Anas Sarwar with the ammunition for a good one liner later to Ross : “I’m not sure talking about hate crime is your strongest suit.” Nicola Sturgeon came under heavy fire on her government’s record over the last 14 years. As in the first debate, Anas Sarwar focused on an individual, the death of 10 year old Millie Main, to drive home his question on why she allowed the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Glasgow to open given the problems it had. Years later and a public enquiry to get at the truth didn’t seem a very satisfying outcome. The great myth surrounding everything to do with TV Leaders’ Debates is that they have any significant influence on the outcome of the election. When George H W Bush was glancing at his watch back in 1992, I was taking part in a far more humble event. Radio Scotland was broadcasting a live hustings of the candidates standing in Ayr Constituency. I tried to remember all the preparation and media training I had been given. I got my ‘moment of conflict’ in early when one of my supporters was picked to ask the first question. It was about the consultation that had just closed on giving the new Ayr Hospital trust status. I was ‘‘shocked’’ to learn that the SNP candidate hadn’t bothered to make a submission. Then a question on the poll tax gave me an open goal against the Tory candidate. Kezia was absolutely right to point out that you have no idea how you have done in a debate. When it was over it was all just a blur, but everyone told me how well it had gone. Two weeks later I got beat. Arm in Arm is a campaign led by the academics behind the Oxford Vaccine and supported by the University of East Anglia and the University of Essex. It invites us to celebrate our own vaccination by donating to the World Health Organisation's COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. As a guide, the cost of the Pfizer vaccine that most people here have had so far is about £15 a jag. You can find out all you need to know about the campaign at arminarm.net.
Our education system in Scotland was regarded as the jewel in the crown and held up as one of the best in the world. Although that reputation has taken a battering under the stewardship of the current SNP Government, we still feel that it should occupy that position. State education matters to us.
When some people in our party question Anas Sarwar’s suitability to lead Scottish Labour because he chose to send his children to an independent school, they are raising a legitimate issue. We could never have considered sending our children to a private school whatever the circumstances but parents have to do what they think best. However, I have no doubt that much of this ‘faux rage’ we have seen is a proxy for opposing the return of Scottish Labour to the mainstream and the defeat of the hard left. You never hear them berating Diane Abbot for doing the same thing or Richard Leonard for attending independent Pocklington. Tony Blair is looked down on for going to Fettes but Tony Benn is forgiven for going to Westminster. It’s all too easy to dismiss politicians who went to ‘public’ or independent schools as stuck up toffs - many are, but others grew up to embrace radical and progressive causes. Just look at Tam Dalyell for example. I did a bit of delving into the educational background of the current Scottish Parliament. I found that MSPs are now five times more likely than the average Scot to have been privately educated. Twenty per cent of politicians elected to Holyrood in 2016 went to independent schools. This is up from the previous Parliament due to the resurgence of the Scottish Tories who are always more likely to have had private education. Thirteen of the 31 Conservative MSPs are independently educated but only 5 Labour and 6 SNP. As you would expect, the Labour Party is solidly rooted in the state education system. Every UK Labour Leader from Harold Wilson to Keir Starmer, with the exception of Michael Foot and Tony Blair, went to a state school. Scottish Labour greats like John Smith, George Robertson, Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Helen Liddell and John Reid all went to state schools. When you look at Scottish Labour Party leaders the same pattern is to be found. Donald Dewar went to Glasgow Academy but every leader after him until Richard Leonard went to a state school. The other seven - Henry McLeish, Jack McConnell, Wendy Alexander, Iain Gray, Johann Lamont, Jim Murphy and Kezia Dugdale all went to state schools. Scottish Education is still hugely important in Scottish Politics but not merely in terms of what school you went to. Nicola Sturgeon described improving education in Scotland as the ‘defining mission’ of her government and said that she should be judged on her record on education. The place of state education remains secure - it’s the state of education that we should be worrying about. After 13 years of the SNP running Scotland: • Spending per pupil has fallen. • Teacher numbers are still below 2007 levels. • Class size targets have been missed. • Scotland is sliding down the international rankings. • Pupils were unfairly treated in the SQA results scandal. • The attainment gap has persisted. We need to restore funding for our schools and increase teacher numbers to at least pre-SNP levels; reduce class sizes and ensure all pupils get the time they need with their teachers. If Scottish Labour is to find a way back in Scotland it has to offer the electorate some big ideas and initiatives for a Covid recovery - not just on education, but also on health, taxation, jobs, tackling poverty, promoting equality, the environment, local government. The electorate deserve parties and leaders with real policy choices to offer, but politicians can’t be expected to focus on that if their energy is constantly expended on dealing with internal squabbling and back stabbing. If you were at a Burns Supper this year it was almost certainly online. I first came across Robert Burns at primary school when I was awarded the Burns Federation Certificate for Excellence in Recitation. I had to recite that dreadful piece of bloodthirsty doggerel, ‘Scots Wha Hae’.
By secondary school I was reading the English poets from John Donne to TS Elliot but then I developed an obsession for the fashionable renaissance of Scots - Sydney Goodsir Smith, Alexander Scott, Norman MacCaig, Robert Garioch, and my favourite, Hugh MacDiarmid. I had a Poetry Poster of his ‘Bonnie Broukit Bairn’ on my bedroom wall. “Mars is braw in crammasy, Venus in a green silk goun, The auld mune shak’s her gowden feathers, Their starry talk’s a wheen o’ blethers, Nane for thee a thochtie sparin’ Earth, thou bonnie broukit bairn! – But greet, an’ in your tears ye’ll drown The haill clanjamfrie!” I remember reciting a huge chunk of his epic ‘A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle’ at a school Burns Supper in the presence of the man himself. I was too immature back then to fully understand how objectionable many of his views were. I eventually learned that just because you are a great poet doesn’t mean you are a good person. As a student I moved on and embraced ‘The Liverpool Scene’ with Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, based on the beat poetry of the fifties. Ten years after reciting Burns at Primary, performance poetry was back in fashion. I have spent my life trying to avoid Burns Suppers but living in Ayrshire for the last forty years hasn’t made that easy. I may have tried to avoid Burns Suppers but I grew to love Ayr’s annual ‘Burns an a’ that’ arts festival. I remember Patti Smith belting out ‘Ye Jacobites by name’ to a backdrop of a floodlit Culzean Castle. The person standing next to me introduced herself as Beryl Bainbridge from Liverpool. I’m ashamed to say I had never heard of her at that time. If you were to ask me my favourite Burns song today I would say ‘Green Grow the Rashes’ sung by the late Michael Marra. This January however, it wasn’t Robert Burns who turned thoughts to poetry but rather Joe Biden. The 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln was a great lover of Burns and had already booked his passage to Britain to visit Ayrshire and pay homage to his favourite poet when his life was cut short on that fateful night at the theatre. The 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, has declared himself a lover of the Irish poets. His favourite quotation from the work of Seamus Heaney couldn’t be more apt. “History says, don’t hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme.” His inaugural address came peppered with some powerful poetic language of his own. He lamented the “lies told for power and for profit,” and said, “Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire.” The most memorable line was a simple one, that “we must end this uncivil war that pits Americans against one another.” But the poet of the month by far was not Burns or Heaney but the wise young black woman, Amanda Gorman, who followed in the footsteps of Robert Frost and Maya Angelou when she performed at the Inauguration. Her poem, ‘The Hill We Climb’, was just what America needed to hear. “For there is always light/ if only we’re brave enough to see it/ if only we’re brave enough to be it”. Perhaps, just perhaps, this marks the start of something. Could President Biden be the one to turn the old political adage on its head, and go on to govern in poetry after campaigning in prose. |
CategoriesAuthorAlastair Osborne is always left, sometimes witty and totally Labour
Archives
February 2024
|