View from Stirling

Robbing the rich but not necessarily giving to the poor

07/11/2011 20:32:00

By serendipity we came across two interesting articles on charity and charities this weekend.

The first comes from Brendan O’Neill of Spiked, a summary of his lecture to the Liberty League last month attacking the concept of ‘the poor’ and the moralising of those who purport to help them and the perceived ‘underclass’.

“We should be super-sceptical whenever we hear the phrase ‘the underclass’… because I can guarantee you that every time you hear those phrases, you will discover far more about the person doing the talking than you will about the people being talked about”

O’Neill’s argument is that there is no hard academic research-based evidence for an underclass – merely anectodal - “…what we have today is a situation where all sorts of activists and thinkers basically go fishing for anecdotes in ‘underclass’ communities and then use those anecdotes to justify their own Victorian-style campaigns of pity or condemnation”.

‘The poor’, he says, are the fodder the political and chattering classes use to promote their pet campaigns; they see in the downtrodden an excuse to intervene in people’s lives – “…more parenting classes, more relationship education, more psychological analysis, more food advice, more dog-training expertise… all of this and more is now offered to ‘the poor’, as every area of their lives becomes fair game for the meddling of experts and emissaries from the welfare state”.

Now of course this does not mean that there no poor people. There are. But all the intervention – and it comes from all sides of the political spectrum these days – does is to increase reliance on the welfare state. O’Neill maintains the constant deluge telling people how to live their lives saps the individual will, takes away any spirit of community and reinforces the message that the state can do it better. Worth a read.

The second , more practical thought on charities comes from Sam Bowman writing for the other libertarian think tank, the Adam Smith Institute. No-one these days holds any brief for bankers except their wives and families, but the ASI is against the Tobin – or as it prefers, the Robin Hood – Tax on financial transactions, because it will hit pensions and savers every bit as much, if not harder, than the bankers, and could destroy London as the financial capital of Europe.

Yet leading charities support it. Bowman says those who give to charity expect their money to go where it is most needed, not towards funding a political campaign. His list is quite long and features the Salvation Army and Save the Children.

Christmas is coming.

You might wish to reflect before putting your money in the tin.

Wanted. A suit of armour...

30/10/2011 18:43:00

Has Dr Eilidh Whiteford now taken her grievance a step too far? In today’s Scotland on Sunday, she likens the alleged bully-boy tactics of Labour MP and chairman of the Scottish Affairs Committee Ian Davidson to women who are subjected to domestic abuse and are said to be’ asking for it’. Methinks the lady doth protest a tad too much. As does the paper’s editorial.

Now we hold no brief for Mr Davidson, who we suspect is a product of that old West of Scotland school where men are men and women belong in the scullery. It is intolerable to threaten anyone, male or female, with a ‘doing’. If he has gone further, and changed the record of what he actually said to Ms Whiteford, as she now alleges, so that it reads as less of a threat, more a gentle admonishment, that is also intolerable. (Incidentally, was no-one taking notes at this meeting? Is there no accurate record that can be made public?).

However, Ms Whiteford put herself up for election to the business of politics, and she surely was not under any illusion that Parliament was full of knights in shining armour. If so, then she was due for the rude awakening she seems to have had. We appreciate the difficulty of finding the mot juste at precisely the moment one needs it, but one cannot imagine, for instance, the doughty Christine Grahame or Margo Macdonald allowing Mr Davidson to get away with it. A well-crafted on-the-spot put down sometimes works wonders.

Politics is a tough world and most of those who enter it do so already having acquired the hide of a rhinoceros. There are other battles the SNP needs to have with Mr Davidson and his committee’s ‘separation’ review.

Dr Whiteford needs to don her own armour and return to the fray…

What's stopping Huhne?

21/10/2011 11:08:00

Folowing our comments on Tuesday about the potential of shale gas outlined by Professor Dieter Helm, the Adam Smith Institute has published an even better case for exploiting the apparently limitless supply of the stuff lying off the coast of north-west England.

ASI says Europe is going hell for leather for very expensive green renewables with coal backup while China and America are seeing the light on shale.

Russia, it says, is worried about the future of its natural gas when demand is reduced;that pipeline coming across Europe wouldn't be able to hold us to ransom.

And, most interestingly, Beijing solved its smog problem (remember the last Olympics?) by runing its buses on extracted shale gas.

Once again there are vested interests at work here and Energy Secretary Chris Huhne appears to be digging his heels in. What sort of agenda it it that chooses to force up energy bills, pushing people into fual poverty and making choices between heating and eating, when we could all benefit from being warm though the winter?

Modern Scotland's 'archaic relationships'...

19/10/2011 10:37:00

Yesterday the Sovereign Fund came into being. Part of George Osborne’s Spending Review last autumn, it changes the way we pay for the monarchy, with the Civil List being exchanged for a 15% share of the revenue of the Crown Estate.

We have watched with interest the attempts by the First Minister to ensure that the increasing revenues accruing to the Crown Estate from offshore wind development around the Scottish coast and in Scotland’s coastal waters come to Scotland rather than straight into the Treasury coffers without passing Go. It has been another round of ammunition in the FM’s on-going skirmishes with Westminster. Most political commentators take Salmond’s side on this one, although the Commissioners and the Treasury appear to be paying scant heed.

For background to this, we commend For Argyll’s masterly October 2010 article on the Crown Estate’s position in Scotland, and their comments here following the Spending Review.

This is prompted Ian Bell’s excellent article in today’s Herald highlighting the dilemma the Sovereign Fund now poses for the First Minister, who wants the money, but has all along said that an independent Scotland would still wish the Queen and her successors to remain as head of state. Yet he has within his party many who are staunch republicans...

“There are two connected issues. One is a matter of broad principle: why should the monarchy be granted privileged access to the profits from British national assets? Another issue involves a Scottish question. Having identified the Crown Estate as an institution falling within the logic of devolution, how many Scottish assets will the First Minister cough up just to keep the Queen happy?
In June, Mr Salmond attacked those unaccountable commissioners. He questioned their right to control Scotland’s energy future for 12 miles in all directions. The First Minister said: “The time is right for the archaic legislation governing the Crown Estate to be brought into line with the realities of devolution in a modern Scotland, accountable to the Scottish Parliament and its people and delivering direct benefits to our communities”.

Bell thinks that logically the time is maybe also right for a ‘reconsideration of other archaic relationships’. But the majority of the Scottish public, as Salmond knows, would not wish that ‘archaic relationship’ to end.

There are potentially £millions at stake here.

Watch this space.

The lights may stay on a little longer...

18/10/2011 16:17:00

So, are we convinced by the Prime Minister and Chris Huhne’s little chat with the energy companies? Did we see the big six retreating cowed, licking their wounds and promising we’d all be warm this winter. Porcine squadrons more like. Instead, we’re to be sent little leaflets urging us to switch to another company charging almost exactly the same, and those of us who have the temerity to cling to quarterly bills to go for that direct debit. Go on, you know you want to…

Interesting article from energy expert and Oxford professor Deiter Helm in today’s Guardian. Professor Helm says that Cameron, and Huhne in particular, are basing their approach on the assumption that energy prices will continue to rise. Not so, he says, there’s plenty of fossil fuel left, never mind renewables, but we have been made lazy by an unending supply of relatively cheap oil from the Middle East. Now we need to invest in extracting more efficiently. Shale gas is transforming energy policy in the US, and could do so here, says the Professor. It is not without its problems, but a constant supply of energy without volatile prices might be worth sacrificing a little of the green moral high ground.

On the subject of volatility and peaking production, those who say an independent Scotland’s economic dependency on oil revenues would never work for those two reasons were dealt a bit of a blow from last week’s news from BP. Not only is North Sea production not peaking, but their new drilling on the Clair Ridge is likely to see us through to 2050. For Scotland it means jobs – and presumably the resurrection of the old battle cry at the coming SNP conference. The political implications for the referendum - outlined by Eddie Barnes in this week’s Scotland on Sunday - are enormous.

And we still have the turbines. When they’re switched on and turning. Work began this week on the upgrade for more efficient transmission with the dismantling of the existing pylons running through the Cairngorms National Park. In some places they will be replaced by lines between wooden poles, and in other places the lines will disappear underground. SSE says removal of just the first pylon in the Boat of Garten region has “a huge impact on this stunning landscape”.

A pity then that there will be an equally huge impact on another stunning landscape further down the Beauly-Denny line when it emerges from the National Park and marches across the Ochils and down into Stirling. No undergrounding and wooden poles here; instead the height and size of the pylons increases as Scottish Power ruled out burying the line on the grounds of cost.

The UK Department of Energy (a rare bouquet for Mr Huhne here) and the National Grid have recognised that energy has to be moved from A to B, and in order to appease local communities already up in arms about windfarms, the means of doing so could at least look good. A competition to design a more aesthetic pylon has produced some interesting concepts, any one of which looks more acceptable that the monsters coming Stirling’s way.

So why can’t we wait and have these? Not in the consultation process, says Scottish Power, so can’t be done. Why can you never find a Scottish Environment Secretary when you need one?

A must- read from the Guardian

14/10/2011 09:35:00

All this week the Guardian has been running a series of articles and readers’ comments under the banner of Disunited Kingdom that looks at the process of devolution in all three administrations.

What makes it interesting, apart from excellent (if predictable) contributions from Professor John Curtice, AL Kennedy and Simon Jenkins amongst others, is that this is almost the first time that a UK-wide newspaper has treated the subject of devolution and independence with anything approaching seriousness.

A short sojourn in the deep south-west of England recently revealed to us that most people we spoke to still have not risen far above woad, Mel Gibson and the border passport control approach still prevalent in much of the English editions of the Daily Mail and Telegraph.

And indeed, how can we expect them to become engaged if all they hear is how much they fork out to subsidise the celtic fringe?

Which makes the Guardian’s attempt to elucidate and involve southern readers in this running debate all the more laudable.

Three things more interesting than the Tory leadership election...

06/10/2011 22:04:00

We can't help feeling we should be exercised over the Scottish Tory election, but frankly, the party seems so hell bent on destroying itself one way or another that it’s impossible for even political nerds like us to maintain much enthusiasm for the details.

The most interesting press contribution we’ve seen so far came from Kenny Farquharson in last week’s Scotland on Sunday; if Murdo Fraser wins, he thinks, and presumably, all goes according to plan, the formation of a new centre right party believing in devo-max will galvanise those of all parties who support this putative second option on the referendum ballot.

This will deflect support away from a straight ‘Yes’ to independence. If Davidson /Carlaw/ Mitchell prevail, and persist with the hard unionist line, Farquharson reckoned the chances that Scotland will be independent by 2016 increase enormously. It’s probably more complex, but as an argument, it’s a good place to start.

More interestingly, three other issues caught our attention in recent days. The first comes from the left-leaning New Statesman on coalition plans to abandon the traditional registration of voters by household and replace it with registration by individuals.

This, says author Mehdi Hasan will result in thousands of voters being dis-enfranchised and we will become a ‘sick democracy’ with fewer voters and lower turnouts.

And these disenfranchised voters are, according to Hasan, the young, the poor and ethnic minorities – all potentially Labour supporters. Labour is thus accusing the coalition of gerrymandering (as over constituency boundary changes that seek to equalise numbers).

Coalition ministers say we don’t - and won’t - force people to vote, so why should they be forced to register? Academics and Ed Miliband say voting is not a ‘lifestyle choice’ but a ‘civic duty’. Quite.

It may be that having to make an effort to register accords the vote more significance; in time Labour fears may be confounded and the turnout actually rise.

The second article that caught our eye came from the Guardian’s Public Leaders’ Network (yes, we really will have to get out more), lamenting the wasted opportunities for the civil service to learn from the variations in approach thrown up by the devolved administrations.

None of the promised monitoring seems to have taken place – Audit Scotland and the Crerar report have been largely ignored south of the Border, yet, says the article’s author David Walker, there is much good work that could be adopted there – yet “for Whitehall and Westminster, their insularity seems if anything to be growing – in inverse relation to the theory and practice of public services in what always was and now more than ever is another country – Scotland”.

No wonder Holyrood and Westminster seem so much at odds over implementing Calman if there is no meeting of minds among those charged with seeing it through.

And lastly, a tale courtesy of the Adam Smith Institute blog demonstrating that red tape is alive and well. For sheer hair-tearing stupidity we have seen little to beat it. It involves the Zoo Licensing Act 1981, a local authority and 480 tortoises.

Read and despair…

We must go further...

15/08/2011 22:27:00

Carole Vordeman’s report on the teaching of maths (see Doing our sums properly, below) has elicited this response posted it on the ConservativeHome website today from John Bald, an independent education consultant.We urge anyone remotely interested in education to read it.

Mr Bald thinks Ms Vorderman’s report does not go far enough. We should not only ignore leftist educationalists, we must go back to basics, and should apply her idea of separating everyday maths from ‘abstract’ maths to the teaching of English too.

Link this to Harriet Sargeant’s article over the weekend in both the Spectator (also below) and the Sunday Times. Last week’s riots may at last have brought into sharper focus the failings of the way we have taught basic skills to children for the past forty years and the pressing need to change course.

At the root of it all...

14/08/2011 07:35:00

Rainforests have been sacrificed this week in an attempt to analyse the riots in English cities. One of the best efforts appears in the current edition of The Spectator - from Harriet Sargeant, who points the finger squarely at education – or lack of it – that has made a swathe of young men and women unemployable.

Quoting figures on literacy released in the week before the riots Sargeant maintains that “… Sixty-three percent of white working class boys and just over half of black Caribbean boys at the age of 14 have a reading age of seven or below... teaching a child to read or write is not difficult or expensive … much poorer countries manage to do it”. Indeed. By the age of 14, she goes on, these boys have been humiliated in class and have either dropped out or been excluded. They then spend their life on the streets.

“Other people go from school to university”, says one, “We go from school to prison”.

And it gets worse. She accuses the educational establishment of putting their ‘cherished beliefs’ first and the child a poor second. Faced with a child who cannot learn, teachers will, Sargeant says, blame the child or his background, but not their teaching. Yet of 450,000 teachers [in England], only 12 have been suspended for incompetence over the past nine years.

While in years gone by they could have obtained employment in a factory with few or no qualifications, the jobs now on offer in service industries require skills they do not have. And so, of the 1.8 million rise in employment while Labour were in power, 99% went to immigrants, who are educated and do have the skills we need. Benefits that pay more than jobs keep the young men in their dependency and young women becoming single mothers

Sargeant’s first analysis of the problem - Wasted : the betrayal of white working class and black Caribbean boys was published two years ago in 2009 by the Centre for Policy Studies. Sadly, as with other similar studies and reports, little seems to have been acted on.

Time to move on from being caught like rabbits in the headlight and take notice of those like Sargeant and Frank Field who have for years been warning about a need for early intervention, greater parenting skills and reform of welfare. Perhaps this week will concentrate all our minds wonderfully.

The rise of the feral rat

10/08/2011 15:47:00

We in Scotland have been a tad reticent this week in intruding on the private grief that has overtaken London and other major cities in England. Professor Tom Devine says we are a more conservative (with a small c) society, not given to civil unrest. How can he be so sure? The best way to alleviate poverty has long been to heave a brick through a designer shop window, and if poverty is the cause of the rioting, then we have communities every bit as materially poor as Tottenham.

Ken Roy in Scottish Review warns against complacency. The same inequality he sees in London Society – ‘rich Tory boys’ versus the ‘rule of the mob’, may well still surface here “… we should be frank with ourselves: the most disaffected of the marginalised in London and other English cities are young black men, of whom there are few north of the border. We specialise instead in marginalised young white men, from whom we may be hearing at some stage, perhaps as the Commonwealth Games – our own bread and circus – draws nearer. What we are seeing is not so much a breakdown of law and order – that is merely the visible symptom – as a breakdown of trust in those set in power over us. It's as true here as it is on Clapham Common.”

Meanwhile we cast around for explanations and someone to blame so that we can tidy it all up and go back to dealing with the collapse of western economies.

John McTernan in the Scotsman blames Boris Johnson for his slow reaction to the police shooting of Mark Duggan. Johnson was on holiday in America and should, says McTernan, have realised the importance and taken the first plane home. Ken Livingstone, his Labour rival for the post of Mayor of one of the major world cities would not have made the same mistake. “It may seem unfair to blame the mayor of London for the conduct of police officers on the streets of London, but he started it. Boris was proud to take personal control of policing when he became mayor. The political control of policing is controversial, but it is mainstream Tory policy. But with actions come responsibilities. Once you take over, you own the lot: good or bad.” McTernan may have a point. Most commentary is agreed that Johnson is now, in the current vernacular, toast.

In yesterday’s Telegraph, David Green [from think tank Civitas] blamed a culture that has increasingly emasculated police forces. Successive investigations into police conduct, he says, from Brixton through MacPherson to kettling have left the Met in particular wary of contact for fear of being called racist, mindful of taking any initiative without orders, frightened of repercussions.

We should welcome the fact that the ethos adopted by our police is to use only the force necessary, but, says Green, when force is needed, it must be used… “The present generation of police leaders gained promotion by mastering the art of talking about “issues around” racism or bearing down on hate crime “going forward”. Learning the management buzz words of the last few years has not produced leaders able to command men in a riot. The injuries sustained by officers show that we have plenty of men and women prepared to be brave when needed, but they are lions led by donkeys who listened a bit too intently to the sociology lectures about “hate crime” at Bramshill police college”.

You think this is an occasion when our hapless and apparently helpless political leaders might rise above tribalism? Prepare to be unsurprised. . Last night Newsnight [32minutes in] put Michael Gove on the same platform as Harriet Harman. According to Harman, those who looted Currys and burnt down a five-generation family carpet business were merely reacting to the government’s policy on tuition fees.

If you have tears to shed…