It is possible both to argue that minimum pricing for alcohol is entirely right but that it is just only if we see it as part of a proper social contract. If the governing classes keep imposing policies on the poor but never for the poor, what we get is ‘minimum society’.
The power motive in the local government carve-up seems to be misunderstood, but the outcome is still a dangerous game for a LabourParty which has been revelling in the SNP’s own dangerous games.
Read More »It may be power not politics, but it’s still a dangerous game
An electoral system that ‘gives’ you councillors you don’t really want via a barely-proportional system no-one understands, and one that seems to favour candidates who come first alphabetically and can easily result in councillors with little link to you or your concerns cannot be a good system. The Single Transferrable Vote should be replaced, and with haste.
Read More »STV stinks (the electoral system, not the TV station)
The ‘political class’ has got to give up on its lazy recourse of blaming ‘apathy’ for low turnout. People turn out when they think they can make a difference. In most communities they know they can’t. So blame the system, not the people.
Nouns without verbs, verbs without nouns and adjectives where there don’t belong. These local election leafless are quite pretty, but they sure as hell don’t help you to vote…
Read More »Pretty – but pretty useless. Review of local election leaflets.
The idea that collusion with News International was entirely acceptable right up until the Milly Dowler phone hacking scandal is perhaps the weakest piece of self-justification in recent political memory
Read More »The ‘Wilson Defence’ of collusion with Murdoch shames him
Politics – an society – has got into an awful habit of ranking people according to their functional usefulness. And unfortunately young people aren’t all that functional useful, so we tend to see then in terms of problem. This can’t be how we relate to our own citizens.
Read More »It’s not young people that are the problem, its us
The First Minister thinks he has a responsibility to corporate profit that extends beyond his responsibility to the Scottish people? If we don’t remove this infection of money from Scottish politics we will have no democracy left.
We’re all nationalists now – such seems the evidence of a new poll on national identity. It seems that ‘Britain’ as an identity is in rapid decline in comparison to Englishness, Welshness and Scottishness. So what could Britain mean if it survives?
It is time the Scottish public sector considered a much more robust and comprehensive challenge to the PFI landscape, putting real effort into finding legal ways to rip up unjustified contracts. Claiming we can’t do anything about it is not a good enough response.
Read More »PFI – are we really powerless in the face of this scandal?