A tale of two elections

"My God, what have we just done?"

I'll be upfront about it: that was my immediate, instinctive reaction when the exit poll was published at 10 PM on Thursday night. At that point, I wasn't looking at the Tories and Labour's share of seats. They barely even registered on my radar, so convinced was I by the media narrative that there would only be a handful of seats between them either way. All that mattered to me at that point was to see how well the SNP were set to do, and when I saw that number -- a projected 58 out of 59 seats -- a shiver went up my spine as it hit me how seismic this event was. To put it bluntly, the swing was so extreme that it scarcely seemed possible and the challenge to the accepted orthodoxy so brazen that I half-expected divine retribution (or whatever the atheistic equivalent is) to be imminent.

I'll turn to the not so little issue of the UK-wide results and their implications later. For the time being, to hammer home just how truly remarkable the death of Scottish Labour and rise of the SNP is, take a look at this graph showing the share of Scottish seats in every general election since 1955:

In the space of a single night, Scotland has done to Labour what it took 40 years to do to the Tories. We've routed the bastards almost completely, reducing each of the three main unionist parties to a single MP each (meaning that the exit poll WAS slightly out, if only by two seats). We now inhabit a reality in which the heartland of Labour in Scotland is Morningside. BLOODY MORNINGSIDE.

This election was always going to be fought in the shadow of the 2014 independence referendum, hence why, in a previous post, I emphasised how disastrous Labour's decision to campaign alongside the Tories was. Not everyone who voted for the SNP on Thursday was an independence supporter, and vice versa, but the referendum has essentially hardened political thought in Scotland along pro- and anti-independence lines. Between 30 and 40% of Labour's voters voted Yes last year, and from where I was standing, it almost seemed as if Labour actively went out of its way to insult, belittle and alienate these people. (It's telling, I think, that the bulk of Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy's "high command" is made up of former Better Together staffers, among them odious unreconstructed Blairites like Blair McDougall and John McTernan.) As the results came in thick and fast, with seat after seat falling to the SNP on swings of up to 40%, my jaw was on the floor. In many ways, it felt like long-overdue payback for the night of 18th September 2014, and like many of my fellow Yes voters, I adopted an attitude of "enjoy the schadenfreude tonight, worry about the bigger picture in the morning." MP after MP fell by the wayside in both the Labour and Liberal Democrat camps: chinless wonder Danny Alexander, Labour's sanctimonious campaign director Douglas Alexander (toppled by the brilliant 20-year-old Mhairi Black), thug in a suit Ian "bayonet the wounded" Davidson... and perhaps the sweetest and most unexpected victory of all: the decapitation of the snake himself, Jim Murphy.

And of course, south of the border there was the unexpected spectacle of Ed Balls -- the man who stood shoulder to shoulder with George Osborne and Danny Alexander this time last year to tell the Scots they weren't entitled to use their own currency -- losing his seat to his Tory challenger. This is a crucial point. It wasn't just that the anti-independence parties were saying "Here are the bad things that will happen to you if you vote Yes." They were saying "Here are the bad things WE WILL DO TO YOU if you vote Yes," and then months later expecting those they threatened, bullied, lied to and cajoled to neatly fall back into line and vote them into power again. By mid-morning, when the results for the Balls constituency were declared, the overall picture was looking so bad that I was desperately hoping for as many English Labour MPs as possible, but I was prepared to make an exception for the odious Mr. Balls.

"The Scottish lion has roared," declared Alex Salmond after winning the Gordon seat, and though he's often given to grandiose, poetic turns of phrase, in this particular case it doesn't seem like too much of an exaggeration. The nation perhaps didn't "speak with one voice" (just under half the electorate voted for a unionist party of one hue or another), but those looking for a better, fairer future did succeed in (mostly) uniting behind one banner and kicking the liggers, troughers and assorted criminals of the political class so hard in the ghoulies that they'll be singing falsetto for years, if not decades, to come. I used to think the SNP's victory in the 2011 Holyrood elections, where they achieved a majority in a parliament built on proportional representation, would be the high point of the party's electoral fortunes. On Thursday night they smashed that record. The joke used to be that Scotland has more pandas than Tory MPs. Already I've seen memes on Twitter and Facebook presenting a new variant on the joke in which Edinburgh Zoo's two pandas are "Scotland's second largest political party."

The political landscape has been transformed utterly. Deadwood politicians who for years and decades coasted on the belief that they had a job for life are out on their ear, and Scotland now has 56 MPs who will speak up for it, who won't simply sit on their hands as a hostile government enacts destructive policies designed to punish the most vulnerable in society...

Which brings us to the thorny issue of England, and why I titled this post "A tale of two elections." For as elating as the results in Scotland were, the results in England were truly catastrophic. While in Scotland a progressive, centre-left party standing on an anti-austerity, anti-Trident, anti-House of Lords ticket was sweeping the board, south of the border the Tories romped home in such increased numbers that they confounded (almost) all expectations and secured a majority, albeit a very narrow one. I think the dichotomy is brutally but perfectly encapsulated in John Harris's comments in his video for the Guardian, reporting from Glasgow: "I've got to go back to England now, and we haven't got any source of hope there."

Make no mistake, what happened on Thursday night can't be blamed on Scotland for voting SNP, despite the predictable shrieking of those in the Labour ranks. (And the Lib Dems too -- unless I'm completely misunderstanding what he said, Vince Cable appeared to even blame the SNP for the loss of his Twickenham seat.) Even if the whole of Scotland had voted Labour, the party would still have ended up woefully behind the Tories (once again reinforcing the old complaint that Scotland is powerless to determine the outcome of UK general elections). Indeed, had Labour done better in England, a clean sweep of SNP MPs in Scotland would actually have been more useful to them than a simple re-run of 2010's results, since the SNP not only decapitated Labour but also the Tory-friendly Lib Dems. No, the only people to blame for the Tories' success are the people who voted for them.

And why did they vote for them? I think it's important that we try to understand this. It's too simplistic to simply say that these people are cruel, heartless sociopaths (though many undoubtedly are). There's a good piece at Bella Caledonia by Dougald Hine (which, incidentally, is well worth being read by progressives in England, since it offers some useful suggestions for the way forward) which I suspect hits the nail on the head:

We need to understand the amount of fear in the equation. Miliband used to talk about the “squeezed middle”, but it turns out the Tories can still count on the worried middle. As I’ve said before, there aren’t enough people doing well in Britain to deliver a Tory majority, but there are enough people who are worried, who hope the brittle prosperity of the housing bubble will sustain their way of living a little longer, who hope that what happened to the poor, the young and the disabled over the last five years won’t happen to them. The puzzlement I see in the despairing posts of friends on Facebook over the past twelve hours comes, I think, from the difficulty we have in understanding this. Somehow, we need a space for conversations where people can speak honestly about their fears, their disillusionment, their lack of belief in the possibility of change for the better – without trying too hard, too quickly to convince them they are wrong. Presenting big ideas or retail policies is no substitute for this.

(Emphasis in original article.)

Why were the electoral fortunes of these two countries so diametrically opposed? In part, because there simply isn't a party of the left in England with sufficient power to challenge the might of the Tory machine and its ability to set the agenda. The Labour Party is without direction, purpose or principle, and I fear that the left won't be able to make any real headway until it stops attempting to use that party as a vehicle for progressive change. The Greens are there, along with initiatives like the National Left Action Party and Left Unity, but I fear it'll take years, decades or more for them to build up the sort of power base required to achieve meaningful results, particularly when faced with an awful, archaic voting system designed to squeeze out smaller parties. Remember that it took a century for the SNP to reach their current dizzying heights. They spent most of that century as a tiny fringe party dismissed by their opponents as single issue crackpots. Now they run the country's devolved parliament, have achieved a near wipe-out in a general election, and are led by a woman described by the Daily Mail as "the most dangerous woman in Britain" (a badge I imagine she wears with considerable pride).

The point I'm trying to make is that change is possible, but it takes time, and combating voter apathy and despair are going to be the biggest hurdles. The good news is that we have weapons at our disposal that the SNP didn't have when they were still languishing on the margins of Scottish politics, the most powerful of which is undoubtedly the internet. It's given ordinary people a voice and allows them to organise, strategise and share information in a way that was unthinkable even a decade ago. So to the English, Welsh and Northern Irish left I would say: do not despair. Tighten your belts, get organised and get ready to continue the fight, and those of us north of the border who want the same things as you -- equality, justice, peace, prosperity -- will do everything we can to help. For now, you can start with something as simple as signing some of the petitions highlighted by Mark, my friend from St. Helens.

Apologies if the above comes across as muddled, pretentious or overly grandiose, but I wanted to set down my thoughts on the highs and lows of the last few days while they were still reasonably fresh in my mind. I'll leave you with a look at the new political map of the UK:

A united kingdom? Less so now than ever, in my opinion.

The sound of the beat(en)

Tomorrow, the UK goes to the polls, and the union has arguably never been more divided. In the last five years, the poor have got poorer, the rich have got richer, the press have gleefully turned the "deserving" against the "undeserving", all three major Westminster parties (in hoc to the UKIP-set agenda) have stoked the flames of xenophobia with their anti-immigration rhetoric, and a little matter known as the 2014 Scottish independence referendum has dragged into the spotlight many of the long-festering tensions that exist both within and between the union's various constituent nations. The old adage goes that how Scotland votes has no impact on the outcome of UK-wide elections. Well, this time round, a perfect storm of factors have come together to make this one the exception to the rule. And surprise surprise, the establishment doesn't like the thought of the tail wagging the dog.

When the main unionist parties -- the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems -- united under a single banner to deny Scotland its independence -- a small number of commentators made the prescient observation that Labour had put itself in a lose-lose situation. By aligning itself with the Tories, it left much of its core vote appalled and disgusted, and found itself having to effectively defend Tory policy, selling the current settlement -- with its NHS privatisation, food banks, nuclear weapons, illegal wars and austerity -- as preferable to going it alone. After being widely photographed dancing and cheering with the Tories as they celebrated their pyrrhic victory, Labour was thrust straight into a general election campaign in which it found itself having to do battle with the very party with whom it had happily stood shoulder to shoulder just weeks earlier. The incompatibility of these positions was laid bare for all to see. During the referendum campaign, for instance, Labour poo-pooed the idea that privatisation of the English NHS could have any impact on Scotland's health service and claimed that the NHS was "safe with a no vote". Mere weeks later, they were singing an entirely different tune as they desperately tried to convince Scottish voters to back them once again:

Before:

 After:

For years, Scottish voters accepted as gospel the mantra of "vote SNP, get Tories". Throughout the campaign, Labour has stuck doggedly to the line that only they can prevent another Tory government, conveniently ignoring the fact that, in every general election since 1955, Scotland DID vote Labour and ended up with the Tories anyway a full 7 out of 14 times (including 2010, when Labour's vote share in Scotland actually went UP even as it plummeted elsewhere). This time round, all the polls point to the electorate having stopped listening. The unionist parties believed that defeat in the independence referendum would hobble the SNP irrevocably, and yet the exact opposite seems to have happened. To put the SNP surge into perspective, in 2010 they won 6 seats to Labour's 41. In 2015, the question is not whether the SNP will increase their share of the vote but whether they will wipe Labour out completely or merely cut their share of seats to single figures.

The wildest estimates suggest the SNP taking the whole lot, i.e. 59 out of 59 seats. Personally I don't think that's likely, and bitter experience has taught me not to set myself up for disappointment by having unrealistic expectations, but I do think 50+ is within the realms of possibility (and would be the highest share of the vote ever achieved by any party in Scotland). Of course, anything over 11 is record-beating, anything over 12 is the SNP doubling their current number, and anything over 30 is an absolute majority.

I'm in the strange situation of utterly despairing at the state of the union and its politics and yet looking forward to tomorrow night with a sense of unbridled glee. That the SNP could perform a clean sweep on between 45% and 55% of the vote shows how utterly broken, inadequate and undemocratic the awful First Past the Post system is, but that's the system Miliband, Brown, Cameron et al pleaded with us not to reject last September, and if it was good enough for them when things were going their way, then it should be good enough for them now. (The irony, of course, is that many of the voices who will be shrieking the loudest about the iniquity of it all should the SNP wipe the board will be the same ones who so vociferously defended it in 2011 during the AV referendum.)

I really don't care whether Labour or the Tories win the most seats across the UK, for the simple reason that it doesn't really matter all that much. That's not because I think the two parties are almost completely interchangeable (though that much is certainly true) but rather because, unless every single pollster is wildly out, the arithmetic is such that no party will be left with a majority, and regardless of all the demented "the largest party gets to form the government" posturing from Labour, the Tories and their media chums, the reality is that being able to win a vote of confidence in the Commons is what matters. The simple fact is that, with the SNP -- this year's kingmakers -- refusing the support the Tories under any circumstances, the only person who can prevent Labour forming the next government is Ed Miliband himself, and something tells me that, regardless of his current posturing, there is no way he's going to risk the ire that would come his way should he hand the keys to David Cameron for another five years rather than work with the centre-left, socially progressive SNP. I expect the horse-trading over the next couple of weeks to be brutal and messy, but it's ultimately what matters, rather than whether the Tories end up with fractionally more seats than Labour, or vice versa.

I'm going to stay up until I can't keep my eyes open any longer, keeping track of the results as they come in, probably listening to NewsShaft's coverage rather than going with the BBC, ITV or any of the other usual suspects. There are many "big hitters" whose defeats I will relish immensely should they come to pass: Anas Sarwar, Margaret Curran, Ian Davidson, Douglas Alexander, and my own crook of a Lib Dem MP, Jo "photo op" Swinson. I have the following queued up, ready to be played loud out often throughout the night:

Terrible, terrible damage

As the 2015 general election approaches, we've been getting voting intention polls on an almost daily basis. All seem to agree that the two "main" UK parties, Labour and the Tories, are hovering somewhere around the dismally low 30% mark. In Scotland, as I've blogged about previously, the picture is quite different, with the SNP, perceived as the "losers" following the defeat of the independence referendum, steamrollering ahead into first place. Virtually every single poll released has placed them ahead of Labour in terms of Westminster voting intentions -- a shocking turnaround, given that Scottish voters, however they might vote at Holyrood and local elections, tend to coalesce around Labour when it comes to Westminster elections. Still, there's now so much polling evidence that it seems impossible to avoid the fact that a shift has occurred in Scottish politics and that voters are now looking more and more to the SNP to stand up for their interests in London.

Today's poll, commissioned by STV and carried out by Ipsos Mori, puts the SNP on 52% of the vote -- i.e. more than that of every other party combined. For a party that polled just 19.9% of the vote in the 2010 election (albeit with a very different picture in the Holyrood election the following year), such a result would be nothing short of remarkable, and it must be stressed that this poll is at the extreme end when it comes to favouring support for the party. Indeed, I'm slightly suspicious of this succession of stories all predicting a near wipeout for Slab. I can't help but thinking that they're preparing the ground for being able to spin anything less than total annihilation as a victory for Labour's northern branch office.

Nonetheless, if these numbers were to prove accurate on polling day, this is what the Scottish electoral map would look like:

Source: STV News

As someone who desperately wants to see Labour and the Lib Dems punished for the myriad of offences they have committed in recent years -- not least (in Labour's case) the unlawful invasion of Iraq and the heinous actions both parties and the Tories committed during the independence referendum in order to secure a No vote that was, in my opinion, unfairly won -- such a prospect fills me with absolute glee. Quite apart from the schadenfreude angle, however, a large contingent of SNP MPs in Westminster would be good not just for Scotland but for the whole of the UK. They are by far the most progressive and left-wing of the large parties (the Greens are further to the left, but, much as I admire their ideals, the level of support they currently command just isn't going to translate into more than a seat or two UK-wide, more's the pity), and today the party's leader, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, signalled that they were prepared to abandon their long-held convention of not voting on matters devolved to the Scottish parliament. This, she said, means that if a bill was put to the house that would restore the English NHS to public hands, then the SNP would vote for it.

It's a curious state of affairs that the party whose raison d'etre has, since its inception, been to dissolve the Union could end up coming to the aid of the rest of the UK. Because let's be honest, they'll do more good than a similar number of Labour troughers ever will. So take heart, progressives in England, Wales and Northern Ireland: help could be on the way. As I've said before, we live in interesting times.

On nations and national identity

National identity is a concept that I find genuinely fascinating, not least because it's something I profess to not really understanding. I'm from Scotland, but I can't say I've ever really felt a profound sense of Scottishness, and even less so a sense of Britishness. If someone were to ask me my nationality, I'd probably hedge my bets and say something non-committal like "I'm from Scotland" as opposed to "I'm Scottish". I'm not sure why -- I feel neither a sense of shame nor one of pride at the thought of being considered Scottish. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that any nationality invariably comes with a whole lot of assumptions and prejudices associated with it. Idealistic though it may be, I'd rather people simply saw me as a person rather than a member of a particular identity defined purely by virtue of where I happened to be born.

I've never, and suspect I WOULD never, describe myself as British, though I should note that in that respect I'm far from unusual -- in the 2011 census, 62% of Scotland's population described their national identity as "Scottish only", compared to a mere 8% who chose "British only". (18% described themselves as both Scottish and British.) 8% is a remarkably low number by any stretch of the imagination, but doubly so when you consider that their passports tell a radically different story! (And gives rise to the conundrum of the Scotsman abroad: "Yeah, I know it says 'British' but actually...") Again, I'm not sure why. But I think a lot of that has to do with the feeling that, despite continually being told that we're part of a bigger whole, voices in UK politics and in the UK media always construct me, as a resident of Scotland, as some sort of "other".

These feelings were recently crystallised for me when watching the BBC's coverage of the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Although their coverage is ostensibly aimed at an audience across the whole of the UK, I was immediately struck by the fact that the predominantly English presenters (bussed up to cover the Games at the expense of local talent) continually used pronouns like "they" and "them" when describing Scottish athletes and indeed the Scots in general, versus "us" and "we" when describing the successes of athletes competing for Team England. The Games as a whole have been quite revealing in terms of shining a light on the weird cognitive dissonance required in order to view yourself as both Scottish (or Welsh, or English, or Northern Irish) and British at the same time.

The bulk of this confusion, I've no doubt, stems from the fact that the UK, as a "country of countries" (or a "family of nations", as we often hear Better Together representatives describing it), is something of a basket case in the world. This gives rise to all sorts of confusion internationally, with many people assuming that "England", "Britain" and "UK" are interchangeable. Then again, it's not just people from far-flung corners of the globe who can be forgiven for not knowing any better: plenty of people who are actually from the UK are under the misconception that Britain and the UK are the same thing. They're not. (For the record, Great Britain is a chunk of land and is a geographical rather than a political entity. The UK is that chunk of land plus Northern Ireland and various smaller islands, including Anglesey, Arran, Scilly, Orkney, Shetland and a great many others.)

It's often said that people in the UK are comfortable with the notion of having multiple identities. You can be Glaswegian, Scottish and British all at once, and if you happen to have come from another country (or have parents or grandparents who came from another country), even better: it's just another layer added to the rich tapestry that makes up your identity. (I know one person, originally from down south, who describes herself as an English Scot, and in fact English Scots for Yes is a growing force within the broader Scottish independence movement.) But I suspect that, with regard to the Scottish/British debate, that's misrepresenting the situation somewhat. In Scotland, as noted above,only a quarter of the population consider themselves British at all, which strikes me as a fairly clear rejection of that particular part of our identity. (Even if it's quantifiably untrue -- we live on the island of Great Britain and are therefore British whether we like it or not, just as Nigel Farage and his cronies are Europeans whether THEY like it or not.)

In England, this is less true. Speaking as an outside observer, I get the sense that, for a great many English people, "English" and "British" are in fact almost interchangeable. You hear and see it all the time, from reports on the 6 o'clock news about "the NHS" and "the education secretary" when in fact what they really mean are "the NHS in England" and "the English education secretary", to members of the English swimming team at the Commonwealth Games competing with Union Jacks on their swimming caps rather than the St. George's Cross. I don't believe any of these are examples of people trying to make overt political statements or trying to assert some sort of cultural superiority: it's simply a natural by-product of being the biggest constituent nation with the loudest voice. As the country with the largest population and land mass in the UK, not to mention the main seat of power in the form of the London Parliament and the originator of most of the media we consume, England is the dominant culture of the UK. Turn on the TV and radio and what you'll hear more often than not are English voices telling English stories representing English values. I'm not suggesting that these voices are in any way illegitimate, or that they should be stricken from the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish airwaves, but it does lead to a strange feeling that you are a foreigner in your native country when you constantly hear the place where you live spoken about as if it is some strange, faraway land.

The Commonwealth Games' opening ceremony was very much Scotland as seen through the eyes of an outsider: Nessie, Irn Bru, people prancing around in kilts, dancing Tunnock's tea cakes, and the "plastic Jock" himself, John Barrowman, putting on his best "Scaddish" accent in his role as master of ceremonies. For an outsider with a passing fondness for Scottish culture, it probably seemed mildly quaint. Speaking as someone who actually lives here, it was cringe-inducing: a budget Brigadoon version of a country that has at no point in its history been more alive with nuanced political debate and aspirations to forge a new society. It felt very much like "Back inside your box, Jock," and it comes as no surprise that much of the Twittersphere, particularly on the pro-independence side, erupted in righteous indignation at what was perceived as the denigration of an entire country, reducing it to a series of tired stereotypes and clichés. All that was missing were the "See You Jimmy" hats and an appearance from Rod Stewart. Oh, wait.

But at the same time, the independence debate has awakened a very pronounced desire to keep hold of Scotland in many of the same people who view it as a faraway land where people talk funny and dance strange jigs. I remember shortly after the SNP won their landslide victory in 2011 and it became clear that a referendum on independence would be held, David Mitchell (he of Mitchell and Webb fame) wrote an incredibly shrill piece in the Guardian decrying the very idea of it. Scotland should stay part of the UK, it seemed, purely because he liked the idea of having it there, and because his sense of "Britishness" would somehow be diminished if a part of it was no longer under the thumb of a government it never voted for. I've always found that mindset to be completely incomprehensible (and it certainly diminished Mitchell considerably in my eyes -- that and various sneering comments he has since made about Scottish independence on the likes of 10 O'CLOCK LIVE). We hear the same refrain often from the unionists: voting Yes would be bad because our friends and relatives south of the border (and in Wales and Northern Ireland, but no-one ever seems to mention them) would become... FOREIGN. Dun dun dun!!! (To which the inevitable response, though rarely articulated, must surely be "What have you got against foreigners?")

The bizarre sense of ownership and entitlement that many of these pro-union pundits exhibit has more than a vague whiff of the imperialistic about it and suggests a deep-rooted sense of insecurity about oneself. As James Kelly put it in his excellent blog, Scot Goes Pop:

I must say that in my view, a national identity that is so fragile that it depends on 'keeping hold' of others is a frighteningly immature identity, and one that for the sake of its own adherents needs to evolve as a matter of some urgency. Look at it this way - in the unlikely event that the ultimate 'unionist' fantasy ever came true and Shetland decided to become independent, how many of us would feel that our Scottish identity had been diminished as a result? Very few, I would guess, because Scottish identity is not rooted in the possessive mindset of imperialism. And how many of us would feel that Shetland was even one iota more 'foreign' when we visited? Almost none.

Many independence supporters have remarked that speakers for the No campaign often preface their comments by stressing their Scottishness and sense of national pride, to the extent that "proud Scot" has become a sarcastic nickname that is attached to anyone on the unionist side who talks the country down (e.g. Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown or any of the array of media pundits who are wheeled out with their doom and gloom projections on a daily basis). I don't think I've ever heard a Yes campaigner describe themselves as a proud Scot. You could argue that that's because many would assume that, in campaigning for Scottish independence, one's national pride is self-evident. I disagree. I'm campaigning for a Yes vote and am not, nor have I ever been, a "proud Scot". I think that national pride is a fundamentally nonsensical sentiment, and one for which I have little time. I'm not proud to be Scottish; I just happen to have been born in Scotland, live in Scotland and ultimately want the best for Scotland, as indeed I want the best for England, for France, for Mozambique, for Gaza, for the world. I want to end this rather rambling and incoherent post on a quote from a recent article posted on Wee Ginger Dug which I found very powerful, and tallies with my own feelings on the matter:

I'm not proud to be Scottish any more than I am proud to be left handed, or proud to be gay, or proud to be Glaswegian. I just am all those things and I act accordingly. The Proud Scots TM of the No campaign miss the identity point. When you are secure and confident in your identity your identity does not define you - you define your identity. And you define it by your deeds and your choices and how you live your life. Scottishness is what we make it, not what we are told it has to be. Identity is a living thing, not a faded photo of an ancestor in tartan. So let's live Scottishness, not commemorate or celebrate it in a stone age grave.

Amen to that. Let's leave the dancing Tunnock's tea cakes to the "proud Scots" while the rest of us work towards building a better society.