Quote of the day...

...comes from, of all people, Scottish Conservative deputy leader Jackson Carlaw, commenting on the fact that three of the four "main" parties in Holyrood are now led by women:

In a back-handed compliment to that huge Hollywood blockbuster Three Men And A Little Lady, this parliament is now fronted by three ladies and a little Willie.

The "little Willie" he mentions is, of course, the Liberal Democrats' non-entity of a leader, Willie Rennie.

(Source: STV News)

Changing of the guard

Yesterday, the first day of the SNP's annual party conference in Perth, saw the reins of party leader formally handed over from Alex Salmond to Nicola Sturgeon, in what was easily the most seamless transition of power I've ever witnessed. I'm certainly struggling to think of any other political leader in recent history elected on 100% of her party's vote... though it certainly helped that no-one was foolhardy enough to stand against her.

Sturgeon and Salmond share similar backgrounds. Born in a council house (in Prestwick rather than Linlothgow), she attended a state school and benefited from a free university education (she studied Law at Glasgow University, while Salmond studied Economics at St. Andrews') and joined the SNP at the age of 16 (she was already a member of the CND). She has always been an incredibly shrewd and capable political operator, and opponents underestimate her at their own peril. For instance, in a now-notorious STV debate, she famously reduced Scottish secretary and supposed "bruiser" Alistair Carmichael (seriously, Google his name and "bruiser" and see how many hits turn up) to a blithering wreck who asked moderator Rona Dougall to intervene on his behalf. (Her weary response -- "Answer the question, Alistair" -- was the icing on the cake.) The unionist parties may like to smugly characterise her election as a "coronation" and point out that she has spent the last seven years being groomed to step into Salmond's shoes, but there's little sense of political nepotism in her appointment -- she really is, by a country mile, the best person for the job.

Sturgeon's ascendancy also leads us to the unprecedented situation of all three major parties being led by women. (I'm including Labour even though, strictly speaking, Westminster MP Anas Sarwar is currently standing in as branch officer following Johann Lamont's applecart-spilling resignation. In any event, Labour's interim Holyrood spokesperson is also a female of the species, Jackie Baillie. And as for the dear old Lib Dems... well, does anyone outside of their own rapidly contracting party even remember who their leader in Scotland is?) I'm not so naive as to suggest that a party being led by a woman is automatically preferable to its being led by a man (just look at Margaret Thatcher, or her spiritual successors, the current leader of the Scottish Tories and the outgoing leader of Scottish Labour), but anything that breaks the political stranglehold of the old boys' club has got to be a step in the right direction. More pertinent, I feel, is that Sturgeon, like Salmond before her, wasn't born into a life of privilege and has got to where she is today through a lot of hard work rather than because she went to the right university and rubbed shoulders with the right people.

Yesterday also saw the party's depute leader elected, with Stewart Hosie coming first with 59% of the vote, from a pool of three candidates. The only Westminster MP to stand for the position, Hosie was my first choice (the election used the single transferrable vote system, allowing you to rank candidates in order of preference), primarily because he's a very smooth, capable operator who comes across extremely well whenever he's interviewed. He strikes me as a hard man to rattle, which is good because he'll no doubt be spending a lot more time in the glare of the media spotlight from now on. There is another advantage, though: it gives the SNP a more prominent profile in Westminster -- something that will no doubt be required if the party is to be successful in its stated goal of winning a majority of Scottish seats in the 2015 election. It also allows Sturgeon the opportunity to choose her own Deputy First Minister for the Holyrood parliament -- effectively two for the price of one.

I'm incredibly sad to see Alex Salmond go, and a part of me still wishes he could have been talked out of falling on his sword. He's been such a staple of Scottish political life for so long that the thought of someone else standing at the dispatch box is genuinely difficult to get my head around. There's also the principle of the matter: Salmond has behaved with integrity throughout his political life, and it seems mighty unfair that someone of his character is stepping down while the assorted pirates and cutthroats of the LibLabCon "Better Together" alliance are (for now, anyway) congratulating themselves and each other on a smear campaign well done and/or being measured for their ermine robes. (Little known fact: he donates a third of his salary to charity every year. The fact that he has never publicised this says a lot about the sort of person he is.) That said, it's becoming increasingly clear that, despite standing down as party leader and First Minister, he has no intention of disappearing into the shadows. And it strikes me that a renegade Salmond, unshackled from the responsibilities of First Minister, could well prove to be far more of a thorn in the side of the British state than he ever was in office.

Ding dong...

I woke up this morning to the news that Johann Lamont, "leader" of "Scottish" Labour, had resigned with immediate effect, giving an exclusive interview in the party's house journal, the Daily Record. In doing so, she has become the fourth SLab leader in a row to be seen off by Alex Salmond since he became First Minister in 2007. This just shy of a month after giving an interview to the same newspaper in which, following mounting speculation that the knives were being sharpened for her, she insisted that she was going nowhere and proclaimed her ambition to be the next First Minister. (OK, stop laughing...)

Artist's impression of Lamont's political fortunes

in the Yes-supporting Sunday Herald last week.

With her excruciating performances on Thursday mornings at First Minister's Questions and a knack for soundbite gaffes that would make George W. Bush blush, Lamont never appeared comfortable in the role of party leader, and has looked like a (political) dead woman walking for at least the last year. She also came across, either as a result of her actual personality or the scripts prepared for her by her spin doctors, as a bitter, spiteful individual -- a perception given credence by the hand grenade she lobbed at the party's Westminster leadership on her way out the door. She claims to be sick of being overruled by London, whom she accuses of running the Scottish division as little more than a regional branch office, and of failing to understand that Scotland's political centre is now Holyrood, not Westminster. (We could have told you that, Johann.)

That's right, the woman who campaigned so strenuously for Scotland to remain governed by Westminster has resigned because she doesn't like being governed by Westminster. I presume she doesn't "do" irony.

In my view, Lamont's departure is both a blessing and a curse to the Yes side. A blessing, because she leaves SLab in such a state of utter turmoil that it's difficult to see how it can recover. There is no heir apparent to her "crown" -- calling the talent on the Labour benches at Holyrood third rate would be overly charitable, and her accusations of London interference means that any "big hitter" parachuted in from the Westminster benches is going to have about as much credibility as... well, Johann Lamont. On the other hand, Lamont's ineptitude has long been viewed as a gift to the SNP. Truly, she was so poor that whoever replaces her can't help but look better by comparison. Then again, much the same was said of her predecessor Iain Gray...

One thing's for sure, I doubt the BBC's James Cook had any idea he was writing the epitaph for Lamont's career when he made this observation to her on a panel show back in August:

What now?

I've deliberately avoided writing about the Scottish independence issue for the last week or so. I spent most of the weekend following the referendum feeling numb, angry and completely hopeless, with the double whammy of losing the vote followed shortly afterwards by Alex Salmond's snap decision not to stand for re-election as leader of the SNP in November leaving me devastated. (And how galling it was to watch the man who'd safeguarded our NHS, delivered free prescriptions, university tuition and care for the elderly announcing his resignation, while war criminals, expenses frauds and proven liars smirked and patted themselves on the back.) I wanted to take some time to let my emotions settle and to mull over the main question that must be on every single pro-independence campaigner's mind -- namely "What now?"

It seems reasonable to suggest that the independence movement will not go quietly into the night. In fact, I've been surprised by just how quickly so many people came to terms with the crushing despair of having lost the referendum and immediately began to regroup, speculating as to what the next step should be for the movement. It will undoubtedly change in terms of its immediate goals and tactics, but the long term aim -- independence for Scotland -- remains firmly on the agenda. It certainly remains my aim, though I'm pragmatic enough to assume that, at present, it's off the menu for at least a few years. The people have spoken, and all that. Many of them may have been cajoled, intimidated and deceived into voting No, but vote No they did, and as democrats we have to accept (I almost typed "respect", but decided against it) the result.

That said, I was intrigued that Nicola Sturgeon, when launching her bid for leadership of the SNP (and there can be little doubt that she'll succeed, given that so far no-one has come forward to challenge her, with every other potential candidate giving her their backing), refused to rule out calling another referendum in the future. It would be absurdly unwise for the SNP to go into the next election with the promise of another referendum in their manifesto -- I expect they would be slaughtered at the ballot box by an electorate that's had its fill of rederenda after two and a half years of argument -- but keeping it on standby as a potential weapon to whip out in the event of a dramatic change of circumstances is a wise move.

What would constitute such a change of circumstances? Well, for one thing, the three Westminster parties reneging on the vows they dreamt up on the back of a fag packet in the final weeks of the campaign. For another, the looming EU in/out referendum the Conservatives are promising in 2017. If a scenario were to emerge whereby England voted by majority to leave the EU and Scotland voted by majority to remain (as the polls tend to suggest), then in my view the Scottish Government would be entirely justified in calling a snap independence referendum on the grounds that the tectonic plates had shifted. And they'd probably win it comfortably.

In the meantime, the SNP's immediate goal appears to be holding Westminster to account over the grandiose promises it made in the run-up to the vote. The words "DevoMax" and "federalism" were trotted out several times -- words with specific meanings, but which both the politicians and the media cynically used to make what they were offering sound more impressive than it actually was. "DevoMax", for the avoidance of any doubt, means maximum devolution, i.e. full control of all matters except defence and foreign affairs. Nothing the three Westminster parties have offered (and all are proposing different packages, with Labour's by far the most feeble) comes even remotely close to fulfilling those criteria, but DevoMax we were promised, so DevoMax we will demand. There can be little doubt that Sturgeon will be all too willing to remind them of the language they used when the negotiations begin.

Apparently, in the most recent issue of the Sun on Sunday, David Cameron stated a desire to give Scotland the power to raise and spend all its own money. I have my doubts that he really means this, as it would mean saying goodbye to all those lovely oil revenues. However, let's take these comments at face value for a moment. Realistically speaking, Cameron has little to lose by offering Scotland as much autonomy as possible. There is, after all, only a single Tory MP north of the border, so in a sense Scotland is already a write-off from the Conservative Party's point of view. Any significant transfer of powers would undoubtedly mean reducing Scotland's presence at a UK parliamentary level to compensate, but something tells me Cameron wouldn't lose much sleep over axing a single MP. On the other hand Labour, with its 40 Scottish MPs (at least until the 2015 general election), has far more to lose, which probably explains why Labour's devolution proposals are so toothless. Indeed, Cameron's "English votes for English laws" drive, announced the morning after the referendum in his victory speech, looks more and more like a cunning trap laid for Ed Miliband and his party.

(Incidentally, I have absolutely no problem with the idea of "English votes for English laws", and indeed I commend the SNP's Westminster MPs for adopting the principled stance of not voting on matters that are devolved to the Scottish parliament. That said, there are certain caveats, the most significant one being that the budget Scotland receives is set by Westminster, and a situation could potentially arise whereby Scottish MPs are unable to vote on motions that impact on the Scottish budget.)

Allow me some pie-in-the-sky thinking for a moment. Imagine a scenario by which the UK moved to a truly federal settlement whereby each of the four nations was completely financially autonomous. If such a situation came to pass, then in many respects the question of independence becomes a moot point. I'm not a hard line Scottish nationalist, and wouldn't have too much of a problem with the idea of a union called the United Kingdom continuing in some form, provided Scotland was allowed to govern its own affairs within that union. The only downside (and it is a major one, I admit) is that it does nothing to extricate us from the UK's disastrous foreign policy or resolve the presence of nuclear warheads just miles from our most populous city. That's why, at the end of the day, while I would take DevoMax or federalism as the next best thing, it's still a lesser alternative to true independence, which I believe must remain the ultimate goal. For the time being, though, I believe the immediate task must be to, as Alex Salmond put it, "hold Westminster's feet to the fire" and ensure that they deliver on their promises.

Crucial to this is going to be getting as many pro-independence MPs sent to Westminster in the 2015 general election as possible. Scotland currently has 59 MPs, of whom a mere six are SNP. The rest consist of 40 Labour, 11 Liberal Democrats, and a solitary Tory in the rather weird Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale constituency. The Lib Dems are, it's safe to assume, pretty much toast, barring in their strongholds in the Highlands and Islands, so the main priority must surely be to unseat as many Labour troughers as possible. That's a hard ask -- many of them have massive majorities, and in many constituencies the SNP came third or fourth in the most recent general election. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see Labour annihilated in Scotland -- words cannot express how much I despise them and the way they cynically wrap themselves in the flag of social justice while doing nothing to alleviate the poverty the blights their strongholds -- but I'm pragmatic enough to accept that this is unlikely. The "ah vote Labour cuz ma da voted Labour" force is still strong.

That said, the ground appears to be shifting. The Labour citadels of Glasgow and North Lanarkshire both voted Yes by majority (in fact, every single constituency in Glasgow recorded an overall Yes vote), so it may be that the idea of the safe Labour seat is coming to an end. YouGov president Peter Kellner published an interesting article the other day speculating as to the likely makeup of the 2015 parliament, going to far as to suggest that the SNP could potentially hold the balance of power in the same way that the Liberal Democrats did in 2010. If that's the case, then the main precondition for any sort of coalition or confidence and supply arrangement must be a guarantee of full DevoMax.

When 2016 and the Scottish elections swing around, the picture is slightly different. The SNP already hold an absolute majority in the Scottish parliament under a system of proportional representation -- an anomaly that was never supposed to happen. It's feasible that they could return to being a minority government, which they previously managed successfully between 2007 and 2011, but I wouldn't like to suggest that a second majority is completely out of the question. It's certainly highly unlikely, barring some sort of scandal that rocks the incumbent government, that Labour will be back in power in 2016, and as for the Tories and Lib Dems -- forget it. The Tories might just cling on, as there's a core bloc that continues to vote for them come hell or high water, but the Lib Dems have already been reduced to a rump of five MSPs, and are for all intents and purposes irrelevant. The Greens currently only have two MSPs, but they stand a strong chance of increasing their presence, and the fact that the vast majority of their new members will be disillusioned Yes voters (membership has trebled since the referendum) means that the party is unlikely to abandon the pro-independence stance that it only reached after considerable internal debate.

So for the time being, the primary goal seems to be to pack both parliaments with as many pro-Yes MPs and MSPs as possible, and to use that position to agitate for a far more impressive package of new powers than what any of the three Westminster parties are currently proposing. I believe we should dismiss any thought of planning to hold another referendum in the immediate future, but to retain it as an option should (a) Westminster renege on its vows and/or (b) we find ourselves being dragged out of the EU against our will. The matter of independence has not, despite the wishes of the No campaign, been settled, and it's entirely possible that we could find ourselves at the ballot box once again within the next decade.

UP NEXT: My thoughts on why the Yes campaign failed.

Fuck.

Right now, I reckon I feel just about as low as it's possible to feel, short of suffering a bereavement. Last night, we had a once in a lifetime chance to make a fresh start, and we threw it away.

Well, 45% of us took that chance. The other 55% decided, for a variety of reasons that are their own, to endorse the status quo. The majority, I'm sure, did so because they genuinely believed it to be the best thing for the country, and I really, REALLY hope they're right. But I can't shake the feeling that in doing so, they implicitly voted for a future that consists of more austerity, food banks, privatisation of the Welfare State, the House of Lords, an undemocratic electoral system, and billions spent on immoral nuclear weapons in the Clyde while one in five children grows up living below the poverty time. The polls suggest that the young and the poor voted Yes, while the rich and the elderly voted No. This was always essentially a class and a generational struggle, and the working class and the young, as is so often the case, got kicked in the teeth last night.

About a year ago, I told myself that in future, if anyone who voted No complained about anything that came our way via the Westminster government, I would quietly remind them that they endorsed it with their vote. I'm not going to do that. It's petty and stupid and helps no-one. People voted No for a variety of reasons, but there's little doubt in my mind that many of the crucial 5% that could have taken us over the finish line did so out of fear. For two and a half years, but especially in the last fortnight, we have been bombarded with a barrage of scare stories dreamed up by the self-titled Project Fear campaign and dutifully reported, without any interrogation, by the supine media. No threat was too great. The elderly were told they would lose their pensions, immigrants were told they would be deported, the terminally ill were told they would be denied life-saving operations... Unable to construct a positive case for the union, they instead settled on bullying the most vulnerable into voting No out of fear.

45% of the electorate won't forget that. In circling the wagons to protect the interests of the establishment, I believe the Labour Party, the BBC and indeed mainstream media as a whole have completely shredded their trust with a significant portion of the population. Many will never vote for them or buy their products again, making this a pyrrhic victory for them. Already, the last minute promises of new powers are unravelling, as backbench Tories declare their intent to vote down any transfer of powers to Holyrood, and already the language has shifted away from "DevoMax" to "extensions of existing powers". Such is life. Tories will be Tories. But I reserve my greatest contempt for the Labour Party, who I suspect will bear the brunt of Yes voters' anger for years to come. The sight of them cheering and dancing with their supposed adversaries the Tories made me sick to my stomach, and I suspect that is an image that will long remain in the minds of their former supporters. The fact that their traditional heartlands -- Glasgow, Dundee, North Lanarkshire, West Dunbartonshire -- voted Yes suggests that they are in for a well-deserved annihilation.

In the end, we fought the good fight, but it wasn't enough. We took on the combined might of the media, the banks, big business, Westminster and a seemingly endless stream of sycophantic "celebrities". We put up a good fight, but we lost. What comes next, I've no idea. I suspect we're going to have a fight on our hands just to get the baubles we were belatedly promised. But I also suspect that, when the dust settles and people realise they've been duped, demand for a second referendum will grow louder and louder. Alex Salmond, who has more magnanimity than I'm capable of possessing at the moment, says that the matter is settled for a generation. With respect, he may find that that is not his decision to make.

As the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. In 1979, we were narrowly cheated out of getting our own parliament. In 1997, we voted for it by an overwhelming majority. History has a habit of repeating itself. 1.6 million people last night voted Yes. That is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a decisive vote of confidence in favour of the Union. And the young, angry and newly enfranchised electorate that voted for independence last night will still be around long after the over-60s who voted for the status quo are no longer with us.

Fault lines

Political musing for the day: I'm intrigued by how readily Labour have inherited the mantle of the "nasty party" from the Tories in Scotland.

I'll explain...

"Right wing" and "left wing" are relative concepts, determined based on where on the left-right spectrum the current political consensus lies. In England, the influence of UKIP (among other factors) has and continues to drag politics ever further to the right, to the extent that we now have a situation where, in many respects, the Conservative Party of the 70s, if it existed today, would be to the left of the current Labour Party. (From a US perspective, where many conservatives hilariously refer to the right-leaning Barack Obama as "socialist", the entire UK political system probably still looks pretty left-wing.)

How the parties have shifted since the 70s (courtesy of Political Compass)

In Scotland, despite all the claims of the Better Together/Project Fear mob to the contrary, the political climate is substantially different, and the Lib/Lab/Con hegemony that defines Westminster politics doesn't exist. The Tories, while not wholly extinct (yet), are now little more than a protest vote north of border, and the two main parties, between whom every election is primarily contested, are not the Tories and Labour but rather Labour and the SNP. The SNP, despite having attracted the nickname "Tartan Tories" in decades gone by, have long since outflanked Labour on the left, campaigning on a platform that is pro-immigration, social justice, Welfare State and unilateral nuclear disarmament. Scottish Labour, whose policies are designed in their entirety by the broader British Labour Party, find themselves in the unenviable position of having to sell policies decided to appease UKIP supporters to an electorate that is largely social democratic in its principles, if not full-on socialist. This, no doubt, is why so much of what comes out of SLab representatives' mouths is so hopelessly muddled and the calamitous Johann Lamont (SLab's "leader" -- though she has no real power) routinely contradicts herself and has to deny ever saying things that are a matter of record. (Her call to end free universal benefits and her "something for nothing country" comment, which she denies ever having made despite it being available on YouTube for all to see, are a case in point.)

The result of this is that Labour is in terminal decline in Scotland. They may not have suffered a Tory-style wipe-out yet, but I'm convinced that they're well on the road to it. The writing was on the wall in the aftermath of the 2011 Holyrood election, where the SNP won an outright majority in an electoral system that was supposed to prevent such an outcome ever happening, taking seats in areas that had been held by Labour (in Westminster and local elections) for nigh on a century. The "I vote Labour 'cos my da voted Labour" contingent is still substantial, but the party's grip on the electorate is weakening, due to a combination of anger at Blair's lies, the Iraq war and widespread corruption in local politics, and the fact that there's little point in voting for a party whose greatest aspiration is to be minutely less brutal than the Tories when there exists a credible centre-left alternative in the form of the SNP (and smaller parties like the Greens and Scottish Socialists, who have a far better chance of being elected in Holyrood which uses the D'Hondt system of proportional representation than in Westminster with its archaic and profoundly anti-democratic First Past the Post).

If the Tories, Lib Dems and Labour represent the right, centre and left of Westminster politics, then I would argue that the right, centre and left of Scottish politics are effectively represented by Labour, the SNP and Scottish Green Party respectively. (Let's ignore for a moment the fact that the Lib Dems and Tories still have more seats at Holyrood than the Greens -- by demonstrating a willingness to work constructively with the government rather than opposing it for opposition's sake, the Greens have managed to make themselves a far more significant force in Scottish politics. The Equal Marriage Bill, for instance, was carried through parliament by the Greens' Patrick Harvie.)

So Labour are on the left of UK politics but on the right of Scottish politics. (I'm not going to get into Wales and Northern Ireland because I don't know enough about their respective political climates to comment on them.) And yet the dismal Ed Miliband continues to campaign under the spurious "One Nation Labour" banner... nicked, incidentally, from former Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. If that slogan is not the perfect illustration that Labour have become the Tories (while the SNP has become Labour, and the Tories have become UKIP, and UKIP have become... well, they've always been a far more dangerous version of the Monster Raving Loony Party, I guess), then I don't know what is.