It’s another aspect of American politics that I find to be a turn-off. That’s probably partly to do with my dislike of patriotism. But even the idea that some policies are inherently American and others are “un-American” is strange. And the idea that you would judge a policy on its American-ness is even weirder.

I mean, do these guys sit around the place reading policy proposals thinking things like, “Pah, that sounds like something a Canadian would support.” Or, “Only cheese-eating surrender monkeys believe that sort of thing!” I suspect that they actually do. What is wrong with, “Blimey, that doesn’t sound like a very good idea and it goes against my principles”?

This isn’t a one-off and you do hear from time to time people dismissing something-or-other for being un-American. I know the USA is a very patriotic country, and whether that is a good thing or not is a separate argument. But I doubt this kind of thing would wash in many other countries. Can you imagine some shadow cabinet spokesperson bemoaning a government’s policy for not being British enough?

The thing is that it just seems like such an arrogant thing to say. The only decent solutions come from America and no-one else in the world has a valid input to make? And they don’t understand it when some people have an iffy attitude towards the USA?

I don’t mean this as a dig towards the USA as a whole. I think it’s a wonderful country with some great people. I just find it amusing that being “un-American” is such a heinous crime according to some.

I am no fan of telephones at the best of times. In fact, I come close to detesting the things. Mike Smith had a brilliant rant about it a few months back that pretty much sums up my feelings.

As if it’s not bad enough that someone expects you to drop everything, some people have the audacity to do this with the aim of extracting pounds from your wallet. I will never forget the time I answered the phone only to be greeted with this almighty rude salutation, delivered in a gruff, hectoring manner: “This is just a survey, I am not trying to sell you anything. How many windows do you need double-glazed: two, three, four or the whole house?” I just love the fact that zero and even one were not options.

Others try getting you to spend half an hour answering tedious market research questions. Some despicable people even try to get you to vote for them!

I am quite disappointed in the Lib Dems. It has become a bit of a theme of this blog that I am disappointed in all of the parties and am considering not voting. As things stand, the Lib Dems are the only party that I would even consider voting. But their odd decision to interrupt people’s lives with a robotic version of Nick Clegg just makes me wonder what is going on with them.

What makes it all the worse is that you normally expect the Lib Dems to be dead against this sort of thing. They have pretty sound views on privacy and have campaigned in the past against cold callers. I think a lot of people who are members of the Lib Dems normally take a dim view of this sort of thing. It’s good to see that, for instance, Stephen Glenn has criticised the tactic and the people at Lib Dem Voice seem fairly unhappy about it as well.

These calls do invade your privacy, they are intrusive and annoying. Nowadays I do not answer the phone if the number is withheld unless I am expecting a phone call. If I have been at the receiving end of this phone call by a recorded Nick Clegg, I would probably decide not to vote for him.

Advertisement: Advertise on this blog

It will be an informal barcamp / unconference-style event. It’s being organised by Alex Stobart who works at the Scottish Government. Dave Briggs is also helping out and the event will be backed by BT.

I’ve mostly been trying to drum up interest among bloggers because it could also be a good opportunity for some bloggers to meet up and talk shop a bit. But it will be about much more than that. It will be about the application of web 2.0 technologies in general, in government, in the private sector and in the ‘third sector’.

Among the speakers will be Simon Dickson of Puffbox; Ross Ferguson of Dog Digital; Iain Henderson from MyDex; Stewart Kirkpatrick, former editor of Scotsman.com, now at w00tonomy; James Munro of Patient Opinion; and someone from BT to talk about Tradespace.

The best news is that attendance is open to anyone who is interested and it is free. All you have to do is sign up through Eventbrite and print out the ticket.

If you’re interested, keep an eye on the ScotWeb2 website. It’s not quite finished yet but it will be fleshed out soon enough.

More information from the Eventbrite page:

Web 2 seminar hosted by Edinburgh University, supported by BT and for all those interested in learning about Web 2 from practitioners, government and business users.

An informal, bar camp style event allowing participants to listen, network and share experiences with those who have designed and are managing Web 2 services.

Speakers and workshop leaders from Health, Business, Web design, Colleges and Universities, Social Enterprises, Social Media, Journalism, Government and Civic Society…

Other from Web 2 companies, Web 2 social enterprises, Web 2 designers ( public and private sector ), Not for Profit organisations, Academia, Business and the public sector will be there to run work-shops and explain their experience of Web 2…

There will be talks, opportunities to break out into discussions and to mix with those speakers who have used and built web 2 applications, and who are wishing to see change in the way users interact with their service providers and elecetd representatives.

There is an e-mail list here

If you are interested in web 2 as a subject covering communications, marketing, consultation, participation, engagement or service provision then this event will be of interest.

A lot of people get themselves really jazzed with American politics. I mean, I get it — the President of the USA is an important person, so it’s good to keep up with events. But some people actually seem to enjoy it. Are they sadists?

For the past two weeks my favourite radio programme Up All Night has been hijacked by these American politicos talking enormous amounts of horsey-poo. Dr Karl’s excellent science podcast was this week unbearably difficult to listen to because presenter Rhod Sharp was sitting there in Denver surrounded by lots of people cheering. (To add insult to injury, the podcast was less than half the length it normally is.)

The thing about these party conventions in America is that they always seem so detached from reality. I know this is not an original comparison, but it really is like pantomime. A politician can say the most banal, boring thing with a clumsy delivery, but the crowd will still cheer and applaud like crazy. Bring up the enemy and they boo and hiss. And at the end of the day you will still be no clearer about what anyone will actually do if they are elected.

And speaking of the applause, and the cheering and the whooping. What is with it? I wandered into a room that had the Democratic Convention on the television last week. All that was happening was some kind of upbeat music was playing, and the people were cheering and whooping and dancing. I must have been in the room for three or four minutes. I left before anyone actually uttered a single word. I mean, what is this? The world’s biggest laughter therapy class?

When I see stuff like that, it just makes me think everyone that is sitting in that room is delusional. John McCain is never just John McCain. He is always, always, “The Next President Of The United States Of America, John McCain”. What makes them so sure? That is just cocky. I would kind of get it if it was obvious he was going to win, but even then it is like tempting fate. When Neil Kinnock tried it here in 1992 he got hammered. So why does this stuff sit well in the USA? Perhaps it is one of those things where they think, “If I say it often enough it will become true.”

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I think politics should be about the issues. At least in Britain the parties pretend to talk about policies during their conferences. In America, party conventions just put too much emphasis on the razzmatazz. It’s all about the glitz and the glamour. Then there is the emotive nature of it all. Most of it seems to be about tugging on the heart-strings, and they’re not very subtle about it. It’s just too saccharine for me.

I am certainly glad I don’t live in America so that I have to actually face to prospect of having to pay attention to all of this nonsense. If you ask me, it is no surprise that turnout in the USA is so low. I would hardly be overjoyed by the prospect of choosing between the White Elephants Party and the Ridiculous Asses Party.

It is true that politicians can be quite off-putting here in Britain as well. But at least they put me off because of what they say. American politicians put me off because of what they do and how they present themselves.

What gets me is the fact that they think I would be impressed with any of the sort of silly things they do at conventions. It’s like when they get a group of people to stand behind the speaker. I think it’s meant to look like he’s so popular that he’s always got scores of people standing around him. In actual fact it looks like the speaker is facing the wrong way without realising it.

When Michelle Obama started speaking at the Democratic Convention, all of these placards suddenly appeared from within the audience. It looked like there were hundreds of them. “MICHELLE”, they said. Why was that? Were they worried she was going to forget her name? Why don’t they make her check the inside of her underpants like the rest of us have to?

I only include the video to prove the point about the placards. Don’t watch the whole video — it only encourages them. Incidentally, the first word is not even uttered until 1:19.

As far as I can make out, the list contains two blogs based on Scottish politics run by mainstream media organisations. One is the rather good Blether with Brian from the BBC’s Brian Taylor. The other is The Herald’s politics blog (though going by Iain Dale’s list it is only Douglas Fraser’s entries that meet with approval). I have to say that while I was very aware of Brian Taylor’s blog, I was only vaguely aware that The Herald had a political blog.

You might think that two entries in the top 30 of Iain Dale’s poll is not too bad. But when you look more closely at some of the other entries, things don’t look so good for the Scottish media. Wales has no fewer than four blogs in the list: David Cornock, Betsan Powys, Vaughan Roderick and 07:25 to Paddington.

Three of those come from the BBC Wales politics department. In Scotland, Brian Taylor is the only BBC political journalist that I know of that has a blog. Even then, I suspect that Brian Taylor was asked by BBC News Online to start his blog. Blogs by the political editors of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all started within a very short period of time of each other, as I recall.

What interests me more though is the poor showing of commercial media outlets. Wales is represented by a blog from WalesOnline. Also on Iain Dale’s list is a local blog run by David Ottewell of the Manchester Evening News.

So where are the Scottish media blogs? I don’t think I would be alone in saying that I think The Herald’s blogs are rather limp and half-hearted. Of late, Douglas Fraser has only updated once every fortnight or so (although, yes, I know it’s the summer — but there have been a lot of Scottish political stories too). Robbie Dinwoodie is much the same.

Scotsman.com is even worse. It has no proper blogs. It does, from time to time, call articles blogs, but they have no permalinks and no comments — just a normal page with some date headings. Worse still, many opinion pieces are behind a paywall, which means that bloggers — even if they can be bothered to fork out to read it in the first place — will seldom link to them and engage in the debate.

I doubt things will improve in this area. Ever since Johnston Press took it over, they have seemed determined to treat Scotsman.com like it is the website for a tiny local newspaper. The perfectly good website was replaced with Johnston Press’s own template which is used for all of their local papers, just with content from The Scotsman shoehorned in. This kind of approach to the web, which will be an increasingly important part of The Scotsman’s business in the future, does not bode well.

I am sure the Sunday Herald used to have a separate site for blogging and comments. I don’t think I imagined it, but I can’t find any sign of it now. Mind you, I’m not surprised — it wasn’t very good.

It needn’t be like this. Despite claims from some that bloggers and the MSM are competing, this is simply not true. Blogs and the MSM are complementing. There are plenty of excellent, high-profile blogs run by media outlets based in London. The Spectator’s Coffee House, The Times’s Comment Central, The Telegraph’s suite of politics blogs, The Guardian’s politics blog and Comment is free, Nick Robinson and many other blogs from the BBC.

And Iain Dale’s list shows that they don’t have to be based in London, with respected blogs coming from other parts of the country. Why is there not more coming from Scotland?

It has to be said that the honourable exception is Brian Taylor. He seems to enjoy blogging and it is certainly a great place to catch up with recent political shenanigans. But what about everyone else?

If this happened on the train I would probably be complaining quite vociferously. As it is, I lie between the Brian Taylor and Calum Cashley in Iain Dale’s top 40 Scottish political blogs, as voted for by readers.

More to the point, this list is definitive proof that this blog is the second best non-aligned non-MSM Scottish political blog (behind Ideas of Civilisation). I always knew it. (Any way to make the result sound more impressive, huh?)

Overall this blog is 16th, which is a dramatic fall of fourteen places from my previous position in this list. Still, I got off lightly. The person who was number 1 in that previous poll is nowhere to be seen in the top 40 now. Just goes to show what a fickle world this popularity malarkey can be.

I’m actually quite pleased for this blog to be up there still in 16th place given the increasingly sporadic nature of my blogging. I certainly can’t complain about the blogs above mine in the list, nor a few below mine. So thanks if you voted!

Another point to note is that Scottish Roundup is number 31 (in the week that it celebrates its 100th roundup too). Not bad for a blog that has next to no original content. Scottish Roundup is run by me, but it is a thoroughly collaborative effort with many people chipping in. So if you have contributed to Scottish Roundup before, give yourself a pat on the back.

Advertisement: Advertise on this blog

For a number of years in the past the SNP has used the slogan “Scotland’s Party”. You often hear them distinguish themselves from other parties by highlighting the fact that the other parties are “run from London” and so on and so forth. It is inherent in the nationalist ideology that there is a distinctively “Scottish” point of view. As the main nationalist party in Scotland, the SNP has to make sure it always represents this “Scottish” point of view.

Of course, it’s not unusual for a political party to claim to represent an entire group of people. For instance, the Labour Party would claim to represent working class people (or, in today’s language, “Hard Working British Families”). But it’s one thing to try to represent a particular sub-set of the population. It is quite another to try and represent an entire nation.

Of course, there is no “Scottish” point of view. However, the SNP often do a fairly good job of convincing people that there is. They will often tell you they are the only party standing up for Scotland’s interests, and I often think that some people south of the border really do believe that what the SNP says is an accurate reflection of Scottish opinion.

The danger for the SNP, though, is that they always have to make sure that they actually do provide an accurate reflection of Scottish opinion. This will often means that the SNP ends up doing what is popular rather than what is right (this probably explains why many of the SNP’s policies are so populist). A lot of the time, what is popular and what is right will be aligned. But what if they are not?

The thing about Alex Salmond’s interview was not that he said “I didn’t mind Thatcher’s policies so much.” The problem was that he said “Scotland didn’t mind Thatcher’s economic politics so much.”

The interview with Iain Dale in Total Politics sees Mr Salmond being his usual presumptuous self. He sees himself as speaking for Scotland. In fact, he is only qualified to speak for himself or, at the very most, for the SNP.

I suspect that if Alex Salmond simply said, “I didn’t mind Thatcher’s economic policies”, you wouldn’t have seen a fraction of the outrage. There might have been a few “Tartan Tory” jibes, but that would have been about it.

It was the fact that he was attempting to speak for Scotland — and he got it wrong. If you are going to be arrogant enough to speak for the whole country, you need to make sure your finger is right on the pulse. Make one little slip-up and you end up offending most of the country.

For whatever reason though, patriotism undoubtedly exists and it can be a major vote winner. Politicians know this and they take every opportunity to associate themselves with some kind of patriotic cause.

The Olympics is one of the worst instances of politicians engaging in this kind of blatant demagoguery. For instance, Kelly Holmes was given a gong a few years ago because it was felt that her achievements in Athens in 2004 should be “recognised”. Much the same sort of thing will happen this year — it has already been confirmed by Chief Nationalist Demagogue, Gordon Brown.

Mike Power put it best on Twitter: “Surely the achievments of the British Olympic medallists have already been ‘recognised’ ? They got f**cking medals! Jeez.”

A couple of weeks back Mike Smithson wrote about how dangerous it is for politicians to claim credit for the achievements of athletes:

But it’s dangerous stuff trying to claim credit in this way. Firstly it appears to detract from the performances of the athletes in Beijing themselves and secondly it raises the question - where did the money come from that has made this happen?

Obviously the SNP haven’t read this otherwise they wouldn’t have come out with this sort of claptrap. It is just a week or so ago that Alex Salmond was acting as though Chris Hoy was the only person ever to win a gold medal.

Chris Hoy’s dad was pretty quick off the mark, pointing out that a Scottish Olympics team would die on its arse because Scotland doesn’t have the same world-class facilities and funding that Team GB has. Want to decrease the amount of medals Scots get at the Olympics? Simple: rip them out of the GB squad.

Before any nats start jumping up and down and start accusing me of belittling Scotland or somesuch nonsense, let me just close that argument down straight away. What we are talking about here is a simple concept: economies of scale.

First of all Scotland would have to build three velodromes at £50m a time to match UK facilities. Then there’s world-class performance funding (£4m a year). And it takes eight years to get a medal. Multiply that across all sports, and Scotland would be facing a huge sports bill.

You had to have a heart of stone not to let out an almighty guffaw when Chris Hoy himself yesterday stated that a separate Scottish Olympics team would be disastrous (as noticed by Bill Cameron:

We don’t have an international facility for cycling and we don’t have the coaching structures in place. In fact, we don’t have anything in place, so the whole idea is ridiculous. I’ve not lived in Scotland for nine years because there is nowhere for me to train. I’m a Scottish athlete but I’m proud to perform in a British team.

That was added to by one of Scotland’s other most successful Olympic athletes, the canoeist David Florence:

It’s a non-starter and he should consult athletes first before he comments. Scotland would have to build a new slalom course first and they would have to build a velodrome.

I am very proud to be Scottish, to have been born in Aberdeen and have Edinburgh as my home town. But I am also very proud to represent Great Britain and everything that stands for, which is not just Scotland.

I’m as proud to wear the union jack as I am the saltire. I don’t have a problem separating my pride in being a Scot from being British at the same time.

This gets to the heart of one of the things that most irritates me about the SNP. While I am not a nationalist of any kind, it strikes me that one of Scotland’s special strengths is its ability to have a distinct identity of its own, and indeed a sense of national pride, without having to completely dissociate itself from a larger political entity, the United Kingdom.

One can say he feels equally Scottish and British without any sense of contradiction. Indeed, whenever the ‘Moreno question‘ is asked, the results show that the vast majority of Scots can feel at once part Scottish and part British. Now this approach is something that I can feel proud of. It is one that Scotland’s Olympic athletes exhibit, and it is very admirable. Unfortunately the SNP cannot be so admirable because it would undermine their very raison d’être.

Mr Eugenides has got it spot on. Using Chris Hoy for their own petty political ends was always going to be a risky game for the SNP to play. They tried to capitalise on his gold medal haul by saying that Chris Hoy’s success shows why Scotland should have its own Olympic team. Then Hoy himself bit them on the bum by pointing out that “I wouldn’t have three gold medals hanging round my neck if I wasn’t part of the British team.”

There is another aspect of the SNP’s argument that appears to be fundamentally flawed. Like I’ve said, I don’t think people should feel proud for other people’s achievements. But conceding that some people do, are people more likely to be proud of the team representing them winning 19 gold medals or 3 gold medals (all won by the same person)?

I don’t even have to be a big fan of the idea of nationalities measuring their penis sizes through the medium of sport to find it hilarious that Great Britain finished ahead of Australia in the medals table. Scotland couldn’t have achieved that. Splitting Scotland’s medals apart, they would be ranked 20th-or-so. That is admirable enough. But as Chris Hoy and David Florence pointed out, Scottish athletes relied on UK-sized facilities to get their medals.

Like Mike Smithson said, it’s dangerous for politicians to attach themselves to athletic achievements. The irony is that neither Labour nor the SNP could ever take credit for a sporting success. If anyone can take credit for Great Britain’s performance in Beijing this year, it appears to be John Major for setting up the National Lottery. The results have come through at just the right time. The first injection of lottery money will have come just at the time when most of the current batch of athletes were beginning to mature in their sporting development.

Whether you think that is a good thing that so much public money is ploughed into sport is another matter. Alex Massie says yes, Fraser Nelson says no.

I definitely lean closer to Fraser Nelson’s point of view. I don’t think public money should be spent on the arts or sport full stop. Of course you would expect schools to provide PE lessons, though having said that if one thing put me off becoming an athlete it was PE lessons. Beyond that, the athletes should be by themselves as far as I am concerned.

I just don’t see what advantage it is for a country to have lots of sporting success. If it’s a “feel good” thing, lottery and government cash would be better spent on cute bunny rabbits to be sent to every household.

I have to say where I was when each of these events happened.

Princess Diana’s death - 31 August 1997

I was in bed. I first heard about it when my brother came into my room wanting to play the PlayStation but ended up watching the television a bit instead. At first I thought it must have been the Queen Mother who had died, and when I found out it was only Princess Diana I struggled to see what the fuss was about. Never liked her.

Margaret Thatcher’s resignation - 22 November 1990

No recollection whatsoever. I did know of a time when Thatcher was Prime Minister, and I of course remember John Major being in charge. But I remember nothing of the transition.

Attack on the twin towers - 11 September 2001

I remember this very clearly. I was at school in my German Writing class. The first time I realised something was up was when the lesson hadn’t started after we had been sitting there for ten or fifteen minutes. Our teacher was constantly moving between the classroom and the staff room. I didn’t mind because German Writing was my least favourite subject at that time.

Eventually our teacher wheeled the television through and said, “I’m going to show you this because it’s very important and there will be a lot of consequences” (or words to that effect). I was a bit peeved that he chose ITN over the BBC, but never mind. One of my strongest memories is the fact that one certain person in our class particularly struggled to grasp what was happening. In retrospect, I suppose he was right to be so sceptical of the idea that people would be mad enough to delibrately crash planes into buildings.

Of course, we did not get any learning done in that class. Of course, not everyone’s teachers wheeled the television through like ours did. I suppose most teachers will have been completely oblivious. It was the major talking point among my classmates after school, but people from other classes thought we were tacking the mickey.

It was also strange going home, and I got the feeling that I could kind of tell who knew what was happening and who didn’t. I remember seeing a few people driving cars who obviously looked like they were listening to what was happening on the radio. When I got home my parents were both in the living room watching the television (my dad had the day off for some reason that I can’t remember). I carried on watching it for around two hours.

England’s World Cup Semi Final v Germany in - 4 July 1990

I have no recollection of this match in particular, but I was aware of Italia 90. I liked the mascot, ‘Ciao’! I also took in the design of the graphics used during the matches — an early example of my interest in television presentation.

President Kennedy’s Assassination - 22 November 1963

I was 23 years away from being born.

I now I need to decide who to tag:

• Onebrow
• Jack Deighton
• MatGB
• Colin Campbell
• Mr Eugenides

Better than being number 1 in Scottish Unionist’s list, though, was the testimonial he gave this blog:

Non-partisan analysis from a thought-provoking contrarian. Fantastic.

Reading that particularly pleased me because it confirmed that I am achieving pretty much everything I have come to wish to achieve by blogging. Over the years I’ve been blogging (since 2002, would you believe), I have spent some time thinking about what I want to achieve as a blogger, what makes bloggers good and what sets them apart from the mainstream media.

One of my conclusions has been that there is no point in being predictable if you are a blogger. There is no point in setting up a little platform to express yourself only to be boring when you climb onto it.

One of the biggest crimes any writer can commit is to give you what you expect. When I started to go off newspapers, it was because the op-ed pages are always full of clichés, sloppy partisanship and ideological tub-thumping. More often than not, you can read the heading, see who wrote it, then practically write the column yourself.

Simply, what is the point in reading what Polly Toynbee has to say about rich people? Because you certainly won’t learn anything. I can only think that the only people who read Polly Toynbee are those who take delight in fisking her on one side, and those who are seeking to have their own prejudices confirmed on the other.

As a blogger — i.e. someone who says to people, “look at me and listen to what I have to say” — I owe it to my readers to be interesting. There would be no point in me writing something bland and predictable — and that is one of the reasons why my posting can become quite sporadic at times. Better to say nothing at all than to say something boring, I think. If it ever got to the stage where I stopped offering anything different, I would find myself with no readers left.

That perhaps means that I am tempted to exaggerate my views and emphasise the areas where I am out of phase with the general public. Indeed I do sometimes use “artistic license”. Often I will put forward what may be seen as an unusual view, though I do so more to ask the question and raise the point rather than because I actually agree with it. However I certainly don’t lie or put my name to something that I don’t believe in.

This is an extension of my “real life” self. I often find myself, almost unwittingly, arguing against my own beliefs in the instance where I agree with the person I’m having a conversation with. There is little that worries me more than agreement. Disagreements are what makes the world go round, and it can all get a bit too cosy if I find myself agreeing too often.

This isn’t because I am a combative person, because I am not. But I am genuinely scared of groupthink. If we all agree about things and fail to challenge received wisdom, we will soon find ourselves being the victim of the scenario we failed to foresee. Either that or we will find ourselves stunted by complacency. Debating issues keeps the mind sharp, focusses attention on why we believe something and reminds us why we reject the alternative. In short, disagreement is a good thing and should be encouraged in my view!

There is also the prospect that people are jumping on the bandwagon and are agreeing for the sake of agreement. You might say that I disagree for the sake of disagreement, but I think that my approach is the safer option. Almost inevitably, the truth lies somewhere between two extremes and I think it is wise to experiment with the balance to see where it lies.

So I was delighted to be described as a non-partisan, thought-provoking contrarian. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I think, though, that most of us bloggers know all this. The blogosphere is a wonderful place to have a discussion. Our world is a normally respectful one where alternative ideas are discussed with seriousness. It can be a great platform for people who have ideas that are not well represented in the mainstream media.

That is one of the reasons for the existence of that gulf between Joe Blogs and Joe Public. We know there is no point in just regurgitating the views we see in the mainstream media. Our role is to question the mainstream media and consider the alternatives.

The blogosphere is no place for boilerplate clichés and ideological tubthumping. Boring, predictable writers are ignored in this great forum of interesting debate. So let’s see some more contrariness!