November 5, 2015

Let's look at just a few of those issues.

Milford Haven (what you refer to as Haverfordwest) has deepwater berthing, but is rather remote (good for isolation, but with poor road links), with extensive existing oil and gas installations and difficult topography (a problem also faced at Coulport, where the warheads have to be transported up and down a precipitously steep winding road to the explosives handling jetty, but where availability of 3,000 acres of what was once open moorland allowed the demarcation of a large buffer zone around the red area); accommodation for personnel would also be a significant problem; direct sea access would be to the south of the Irish Sea rather than to the Western Approaches, which is a strategic consideration; the MoD vetoed the idea of stationing Polaris there in the 1960s for "safety reasons" due to the newly built oil refinery; since then another refinery has been added and it's become home to two liquefied natural gas facilities and will soon host a new power station; the LNG facilities supply 30% of the UK's gas.

Barrow-in-Furness has a superficial appeal, but problems of tidality in the Walney Channel make its existing operations, which only require occasional access and egress, difficult (subs are very restricted in when they can gain access to and leave the existing facilities and have to make a break for it when the going's good, currently around once a month) and there's a shortage of land for expansion, especially to allow the safety clearance distances needed for any successor to Coulport; it's a long way to water deep enough for as sub to safely submerge, let alone reach operational sea areas.

Devonport has extensive dry dock and other facilities and with substantial investment would probably be able to duplicate what Faslane has to offer if the MoD were willing to write off the extensive recent investment as Faslane, but duplicating Coulport would pose major problems due to the proximity to a major population centre and again the issue of an adequate safety zone; again, it's a long way from the Atlantic patrolling areas, often through quite crowded sea lanes.

Any nuclear sub facility also needs the co-existence of Z-berths, and relocation of the fleet would need to expand that provision outside Scotland, where there are numerous deepwater lochs and other "suitable" locations; Z-berths are supposedly primarily to allow recreation and re-supplying of nuclear-powered subs, but subs have been known to use them in emergencies and when sufficient accommodation is unavailable at Faslane.

Contrary to your assertion, attack submarines don't just escort the boomers, they have other roles - some deploy Tomahawk cruise missiles, as used in attacks on Libya and elsewhere, and current doctrine sees them focusing more on integrated fleet defence operations and sonar surveillance. There would be strategic arguments for not putting all the UK's eggs in one basket by co-locating them along with the Trident successor.

The minesweepers (MCM Squadron) are widely deployed in the Gulf or wherever their services are required; their primary role is not, as you claim, to protect the "security of the bombers" - they could be stationed anywhere, but they have comparatively empty sea lanes up here in which to conduct their exercises (which they also often do outside my house!).

I don't underestimate the petulance a UK government might display by taking all its toys away if denied a base for the Trident successor, but finding a new home for that alone would be far from simple and would take a hell of a long time to get through design and planning, environmental impact assessment hearings etc., then the subsequent building, as the above explains, let alone relocating the facilities for the other submarines, the minesweeper squadron etc. etc., which could be dispersed, but have been concentrated where they are for a reason.

Faslane also regularly hosts ships and occasionally submarines from NATO and other forces, especially during annual exercises which focus on activities in the Atlantic. Its strategic location and necessity (whether one approves of it or not) would not change in that respect.

I doubt anyone would shed too many tears if we lost the Royal Marines. They're accommodated within the base, have access to NAAFI and other facilities that mean they don't support the local economy much anyway, and we generally only notice them when one of them runs amuck in a local bar and maims a resident or two or three.

Numerous voices among the armed forces have deplored the concentration on the "cuckoo in the nest" that is Trident, which has sucked up resources to the extent that we barely have a functioning surface fleet able to provide lower-level strategic responses (remember the scramble during the Falklands War?), and the debacles over the aircraft carriers and maritime surveillance capabilites have been widely reported. Staff recruitment and retention have also become serious problems. It's proving very hard to find people willing to serve on Trident, and what were once the elite among the submarine staff now see new raw recruits stationed on the subs, some of whom aren't psychologically suited to that role.

Like-for-like re-employment for those directly employed would be nigh impossible, but many within the navy retrain or develop their existing skills in civvy street or invest their payoffs in setting up new businesses unrelated to their MoD work on retirement anyway - I know some people locally who've done that.

As for the directly employed civilian workforce - the government's own figures put the numbers at 500-600 - given the employment issues we all face, the base unions risk taxing people's patience if they act as if they're entitled to incredibly expensive jobs for life (and longer!) when very few others have that luxury. We all have to adapt, and we've all contributed to keeping these folks employed over the years when many of us have been struggling along with little state support or concern when our circumstances change and we have to adapt. As a long-time local pointed out to me, when you sign up with the forces or military civil service, you'd be daft or very shortsighted not to realize that the future of your job hinges on purely political decisions. The unions have also been incredibly unresponsive over the years to any initiatives to explore alternative employment (I was involved with the Alternative Employment Study Group back in the 1980s, when we looked at all these issues)- it's been far easier to dig their heels in and try to hang on to the status quo, which has largely been a slow, losing battle anyway as contractorization has taken hold and conditions have deteriorated under cost-cutting. Being contractors, a fair proportion of the base workers don't have local roots, so the impact of any direct job losses would be spread around the country.

Nobody doubts that there would be an impact on indirect employment in the locality, but the most catastrophic predictions exaggerate its scale and assume that nothing would replace the current work on offer. Bear in mind the Faslane base has its own supply lines and extensive facilities on-site that restrict the amount of money pumped into the local economy.

There are also opportunity costs due to the location of the bases - the west of Scotland largely missed out on being able to service the oil industry because the navy didn't want the Clyde cluttered up with extra installations and traffic. On a more minor level, the area around Faslane and Coulport was excluded from the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park when it was set up - some tourists might get a kick from seeing subs and other military hardware and miles of razorwire and weldmesh and watchtowers and armed guards and nuclear warhead convoys etc., but most of those I've spoken to have been disturbed.

Have to stop there because I need to get back to work!

November 3, 2015

There is no "plan to seperate Scottish Labour from UK Labour".

I give you all credit for making an honest effort to understand some of the dynamics at play in Scottish politics nowadays.

But such a separation as you mention can't be achieved as the structure of the party stands, and there's no evidence at all of any serious ambition by Shadow First Minister Kezia Dugdale or her shadow cabinet to do so, nor does Jeremy Corbyn show any sign of envisaging or sanctioning this - he's very much a unionist where Scotland's concerned, in contrast to his stance on Irish issues.

The tail of Scottish Labour will always be wagged by the dog of the UK Labour Party. Any politician who tries to tell you different is plain lying. All you're seeing right now is public scrutiny of tensions and conflicts that have been part of what Labour is for a long, long time, probably since its inception, just more glaringly obvious nowadays. It's always been a broad church. That's been a strength and a fatal weakness at different times.

Just look at the rapid pushback from Shadow Defence Secretary Maria Eagle on the Trident successor if you want proof of what I'm saying: https://www.politicshome.com/foreign-and-defence/articles/story/maria-eagle-slaps-down-scottish-labour-trident

Even the Scottish Labour vote by around 70 per cent to 30 against the Trident replacement at the weekend was presaged the previous day by a vote that included the stipulation that "renewing Trident would support the steel industry". That's just opportunist politicking, and meaningless in real terms.

Today the Scottish Parliament voted 96-17 to oppose the successor to Trident. These MSPs voted in support of the successor:

Just one Labour MSP supported it publicly - Jackie Baillie, whose constituency includes the Faslane and Coulport bases (and where I happen to live), and who will make up any ridiculous porkies she feels she needs to about the number of jobs at stake (official figures released under FOI legislation put it at 500-600 direct jobs, Baillie's burbled on the record about anything between 9,000 jobs and 13,000 and counting, and never clarifies where she gets these figures or what they're actually measuring - Faslane services a whole lot more than Trident) in order to try to hang on to her seat at Holyrood, as that's the only argument she has - "Morality aside", she declared at a Hiroshima Day commemoration I attended one year, "it creates jobs." Oh, how we laughed.

Baillie's in the Scottish shadow cabinet. Even her party leader, Dugdale, a declared multilateralist, voted against the Trident replacement today. Scotland's lone MP, Ian Murray, although to the right of the party on a number of issues, is also solid on this, and there's been discussion of how his place in the UK shadow cabinet can stand if he were to defy the whip at Westminster on a Trident successor vote (the expectation is that he would tactically abstain).

The only way such a separation as you mentioned could be achieved is to abandon the formal and financial links between the UK Party and its Scottish subsidiary and set up a whole new party in Scotland, with lip service to fraternal co-operation on common priorities, as exists between other parties. Otherwise it's always going to result in the sort of ugly fudge we're seeing now on key issues, which actually just makes Labour look as chaotic and divided as it really is, and isn't going to win any votes of confidence from people who support one or the other view among the electorate either in Scotland or the rest of the UK.

As for Corbyn himself, I know the guy of old. He spoke eloquently at a fringe meeting at a Manchester CND Conference I attended back in the 1980s on the issue of nuclear disarmament, and I give him credit for consistency over the years. I know where he stands, and I also know he's never been a weathervane on this, always a signpost.

I can't say the same about the Scottish Labour Party (despite today's vote), nor the UK one.

I used to be a Labour activist, CLP delegate, the lot. I lived through the transition to Kinnock, whose scorched-earth disdainful policy towards those of us who campaigned on the ground (on the basis that we had nowhere else to go and weren't needed any more as there were other ways to reach the electorate) was completed by Blair, and whose legacy is at the root of the Labour Party's current unappealing schizophrenia on so many issues.

Once you abandon principles on such key issues as nuclear weaponry for electoral gain (bear in mind this whole issue is more pressing for people in Scotland as we actually host the missiles and submarines - they sail past my front window!), you open the door to a situation where what's next? Clause 4. Public ownership. You don't seek to persuade others to accept your currently unpopular moral stands, you make yourself a slave to focus groups, and the fickle and often distracted and contradictory mishmash of opinions that a random bunch of people will come out with when fed leading questions by a pollster with receptive ear.

Scottish Labour needs to forget trying to vie with the SNP for votes all the time and look for some bloody principles and stick to them consistently for a considerable period, and stop doing what US Republican campaign strategists are so fond of by focusing only on winning each day's news cycle (people may be distracted by everyday concerns at times, but they're generally not stupid, and they can grow to deeply resent those who make it blatantly obvious that they assume they are for political gain). Then it may regain some ground in Scotland.

Unfortunately for Scottish Labour, I don't think this is possible under the current - and only recently elected - Scottish leadership. And I see nobody in the wings who could do better for them.

Basically, if it's ever to hold power in the UK again, Labour needs to focus on the rest of the UK beyond Scotland. It can't be all things to all people. It should stop trying to be. There are votes out there to be had among people who have been so disillusioned that they've disenfranchised themselves. Chasing Tory voters or Lib Dem voters or UKIP voters is a fool's errand. They'll maybe become Labour voters if they can figure out what the hell the party stands for, and feel like they can trust that this isn't going to change tomorrow or next week or when the next media onslaught or opinion poll shifts the goalposts.

October 28, 2015

PMQs verdict: Corbyn just hammered Cameron

"I'm fed up with the Punch and Judy politics of Westminster, the name calling, backbiting, point scoring, finger pointing."

So said David Cameron when he won the Tory leadership back in 2005.

It didn't take long for him to surrender that ambitious hostage to fortune - partly because of the adversarial structure of the House of Commons, and partly because of his own temperament, which is naturally closer to Flashman than Gandhi.

Among his many weaknesses is his patrician temper, as has been widely catalogued by the press from both left and right, and over the years has caused concern among his own advisers.

And so we come to today's Prime Minister's Questions, on the strength of which Politics.co.uk's Ian Dunt has awarded Jeremy Corbyn the ears and tail for sheer doggedness:

It's worth looking out for these habitual tactics of Cameron's in future.

As Dunt observes, this sort of spectacle - and the awarding of "wins", reducing our ambitions for party politics to a mere tribal spectator sport in an archaic and very expensive setting - may not shift polls or win elections or change the destructive trajectory of a hubristic government and the kneejerk reactions of the evasive PR man in charge, but if a Punch and Judy show's all that's on offer, we may as well all join in on the "That's the way to do it!"

ETA: Video of the exchange here: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/28/jeremy-corbyn-six-tax-credit-questions-david-cameron-straight-bat

October 28, 2015

Britain is heading for another 2008 crash: here’s why

Whole article (which I've had to edit heavily to comply with fair usage here) with graphs: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/28/2008-crash-government-economic-growth-budgetary-surplus

October 27, 2015

David Cameron to curb powers of House of Lords after tax credits defeat

So much humbug it's hard to know where to start. This government has developed the habit of trying to curtail and sidestep proper consideration in the Commons of its proposed changes by trying to enact through statutory instruments rather than full bills. Changes to the tax credits regime were not part of the Conservative manifesto at the last election, and here's Cameron on the BBC's Question Time in April 2015, when he was chasing suckers' votes:


Six months is a long time in politics, obviously. As it is, last night's votes have accepted the principle of the cuts, the focus is now on the detail of the timescale and arrangements for enacting them.

I've never been much of a fan of the tax credits regime. It sidestepped issues of low wages and has ended up with all of us subsidizing companies (including ones that studiously avoid paying their fair share of taxes in the UK) that don't pay their workers decent wages. But to cut that support away without proper consideration of the consequences and sane plans to phase the changes in so that people who need help aren't driven into dire straits is appalling.

The debate about extending the "convention" that the Lords don't oppose government finance bills to statutory instruments should be an interesting one. I hope the Opposition isn't going to cut Cameron too much slack in an effort to look "reasonable". He deserves to have his promise from April rammed in his face at every turn.

October 18, 2015

UN investigators begin taking evidence in UK on ‘rights violations’

The article also reports that "the UK appeared to have become the first country to face a high-level inquiry by the UN’s committee on the rights of persons with disabilities (CRPD)"

UK FIRST!

October 9, 2015

Frankie Boyle’s conference roundup: Labour’s haunted tennis ball and the Slytherin chancellor

Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle sketches the party conferences so far. Nobody is spared.

The rest here: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/08/frankie-boyles-conference-roundup-haunted-tennis-ball-slytherin-chancellor-politics?CMP=share_btn_tw

May 10, 2015

"Scottish Labour: Inside the campaign from hell"

A (Scottish) Sunday Herald article looks at some of the dysfunction within Scottish Labour's campaign (Reddit link as the Herald article's paywalled - they also didn't deliver to my local shop today, drat). I'm sure there's a lot more to come out, but much of the focus is inevitably on Jim Murphy:

I expect Murphy to be gone within the week. He's mainly hanging on now in the hope of negotiating a secure regional list slot in the 2016 Holyrood elections (oh Christ, another election ...).

April 14, 2015

The fight for the "real left" with Scottish Labour is something Labour has long abandoned.

Labour lost me before Blair took office (I was a CLP member), and confirmed me in my decision through its embrace of Thatcherism, its turnabout on nuclear weapons, its conduct over Iraq, and its abandonment of a commitment to social values I hold dear, among a number of other things.

The SNP moved leftward under Salmond over the years (he held the leadership twice), and Sturgeon's politics are to the left of his. She's been in leadership now approaching just 200 days. She has a wider and more enthusiastic following in Scotland than Salmond ever did (his appeal among women in the electorate was never that strong), though he's rightly regarded as a political phenomenon of his generation. The transition in power between the two couldn't have been smoother, or in retrospect, better timed.

Old loyalties die hard, and few harder than the old tribal loyalty to the Labour Party in its Scottish heartlands. But since the referendum last year, many Labour members and voters have deserted the party, not just for the SNP, but primarily so. They just took longer to jump ship than I did. Labour's membership in Scotland is now reputedly in the low thousands (I say reputedly because they refuse to make the number public), while the SNP's has swollen to 105,000 and counting. The effects of that influx have yet to be fully felt, but it's likely to see a cementing of the leftward trend. It may also see healthy intra-party conflict, and it'll be a test of the SNP leadership how well it harnesses that energy.

I've no idea what you mean by "identity politics." The whole thrust of the SNP's modern incarnation is civic nationalism, not ethnic nationalism. If you're settled in Scotland, you're as much a part of the polity as anyone else, no matter your background.

Labour took its voters for granted. For too many years, especially after the advent of New Labour, issues that Scottish constituency parties wanted prioritized in the party platform had to be sidelined because "the South East of England won't wear it." It's gotten worse as Labour's tacked right with the Tories to appease UKIP on certain issues such as immigration, and it's hard to see how they can cede any more ground on "austerity" and privatization. I'd obviously prefer to see Labour in power than the Tories, but it's not a particularly stark choice nowadays, despite Miliband being, on paper at least, more leftish than recent Labour leaders.

Scotland provided Labour with a reliable supply of lobby fodder for the best part of a century, and often got little to show for it in return. The setting up of the Scottish Assembly was intended to bring about the demise of the SNP, and its PR voting system was structured specifically to prevent one party (particularly the SNP) gaining an outright majority. This was confounded when the SNP did just that in the last Holyrood elections.

The old joke about a dog with a Labour rosette being able to win a seat in many constituencies wasn't too far from the truth when I was active in the party. This has come to bite them in the ass.

In the 2010 general election, the SNP suffered from being squeezed by a massive tactical vote by people desperate to stop the Tories taking power (I tactically voted Lib Dem for my sins, as the second-placed candidate in our constituency was a Tory - never with an inkling that would fuel an alliance with the Conservatives, of course). For too long, Labour barely had to work for votes in its heartlands, and now, with the massive swing to the SNP in the polls, it doesn't have reliable data from the previous campaign to base its canvassing on, and has so few activists left that in places it's reduced to shipping them up from England to chap on doors.

And now today we see Jim Murphy, the (Henry Jackson Society member, Blairite) leader of the Scottish Labour Party, having spent the months since his election as the "safe" right-wing candidate for that post declaring how independent Scottish Labour was from Labour in the rest of the UK, and just the other day in a leaders' debate boldly declaring that there would be no funding cuts in Scotland if Labour took power, being publicly contradicted and humiliated by Labour's Chuka Umunna in an interview with Andrew Neil, pointing out that Murphy can promise whatever he wants, but he won't be drawing up any Labour goverment's budget.

It's taken me a long time. I've voted SNP in the past - over the years since I abandoned Labour, I've voted Green, SNP, Scottish Socialist Party, and Lib Dem in various elections (one of the benefits of our Holyrood electoral system is you get two bites of the cherry - a direct candidate vote and a regional list vote, so you can mix and match depending on the appeal of an individual candidate and what representation you'd like to see in the Scottish Parliament). But this election, we've a very good SNP candidate in my constituency whom I'll have no qualms in voting for.

How it all pans out if a sizable bloc of SNP MPs hits Westminster, I've no idea. None of the other parties in contention have left me any alternative (the Greens have a way to go in our area before they're contenders, but I hope they'll do as well as can be expected under first past the post).

I've said it before, but I think it's almost impossible to gauge what's been going on politically in Scotland recently without living here. The media's portrayal is so warped that it's unbelievable (at least a few of the Guardian's columnists have recently stopped being so damn stupid about events up here, but their editorial line still stinks), and in Scotland that largely translates to being Labour mouthpieces.

In the referendum, no broadcast media and only one newspaper, The Sunday Herald, supported the Yes campaign (we've since had a new independence-supporting newspaper, The National, emerge, which has a way to go, but is a healthy antidote to the tired older media). Those allegiances have been transferred to the current election, the split being focused on Labour/SNP, with some of the right-leaning papers offering lukewarm support for the Tories up here, but generally being skewed that way in their coverage anyhow.

It's remarkable that such a political transformation has taken place with so little backing, or even honest reporting in a lot of cases, from the MSM.

March 4, 2015

Actor Michael Sheen gives powerful speech in defense of NHS and against austerity

Speaking at a "People's March for the NHS" rally in Tredegar, South Wales on St. David's Day, he invokes the memory and passion of Nye Bevan:

Full transcript here: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/mar/02/full-text-of-michael-sheens-speech

Fuller video of speech here (won't embed): http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/mar/02/michael-sheen-defends-nhs-against-bland-politicians?CMP=share_btn_tw