I have a horrible feeling inside me that Labour will win the coming general election. The fear has lingered in the back of my head for a while now. Even when Labour were at their lowest, perhaps 18 months ago or thereabouts, the Conservatives’ poll lead was not a great deal to write home about.

Right now the polls say that the Conservatives are roughly eight points ahead of Labour. It’s not all that tight, but you would expect the Conservatives to be doing better given everything that has gone wrong under Labour’s watch.

It’s been clear for a while that voters dislike Labour, but they can’t bring themselves to be convinced by the Conservatives. As a result, the Conservatives are really just a small disaster away from being just a handful of points ahead. And thanks to the corrupt voting system in operation, even if the Conservatives lead by a handful of points, Labour will still win the election.

It’s a prospect that frightens me, because just imagine what Labour would imagine they could get away with if they could still be in government this summer. But I think it is an increasingly real prospect. 2010 is the new 1992.

This is because somehow, despite being one of the most hated people in the country, Gordon Brown always manages to end up on the good side in any story.

I can probably count the number of people that I know like Gordon Brown on the fingers of… one finger. You would think that if you had to conjure up a nothing story that painted a person of your choice in a bad light, the person you would choose is Gordon Brown. Yet, anyone who tries to do it just messes it up.

This bullying story reminds me very strongly of the story a few months back about a “disrespectful” letter that Gordon Brown sent to Jacqui Janes, the mother of a soldier who died while serving in Afghanistan.

The expectation was that everyone would be outraged by Gordon Brown’s callous disregard for British soldiers’ lives. I am sure Mrs Janes envisaged herself being the hero that bashed the final nail into Labour’s coffin, while The Sun was rubbing its hands with glee at the prospect of “wot wonning it” for the Tories again.

In the event, Mrs Janes and The Sun massively overplayed their hand. Instead of being outraged, peopled ended up just feeling sorry for a man who was trying his best, but was hindered by his notoriously poor handwriting and the decreasing quality of his eyesight.

Now, a genuine story about abuse in the workplace has ended up being all about the way a charity is run. Surely Labour cannot believe their luck in this respect. Christine Pratt, co-founder of the National Bullying Helpline, probably dreamt that she was being some kind of modern-day Nelson Mandela when she publicised information about users of the service that was supposedly confidential. Instead, she has faced criticism for this inability to engage brain before sticking the boot in.

You can only imagine that a child-like head rush goes through people who get an opportunity to criticise Gordon Brown like this. It is a shimmering open goal — a massive bullseye target on the world’s biggest bahookie. It is understandable why someone might get a bit too excited at this prospect.

It is a bit like a child riding a roundabout. The kid thinks it would be really great to ride the roundabout as fast as humanly possible. Not only will it be immense fun, but everyone will think you are a hero for managing to go so fast on the roundabout. Instead, what happens is that you end up being sick on yourself, and looking a bit stupid.

There is still a story about Gordon Brown, but only a little bit. The fact is, the revelations about the Prime Minister’s behaviour are not exactly surprising. Mr Brown’s strange behaviour, temper tantrums, and penchant for being violent towards inanimate objects, have been a fairly open secret for a while now.

The macho, bullying culture has been just about the only consistent thread that has run through New Labour since its inception (that is, after all, why Malcolm Tucker has been such a successful character). If these “revelations” about bullying were truly damaging information, the damage would have been done already.

And in fairness, if you were asked to guess which person in the country gets the most angry in his job, you would probably say the Prime Minister, wouldn’t you? It would be a shock if the manager of your local Tesco bawled at his employees on a regular basis. But you’d think anyone working for the political leader of the country would sign up in the full expectation that tensions might be heightened from time to time.

The key reason why this is playing into Gordon Brown’s hands? It is not despite the fact that he’s hated so much. It’s because he’s hated so much. It’s just not cool to kick a man when he’s down. It is, after all, a bit like bullying.

I would like to wish everyone who still reads this a very merry Christmas.

As time has gone on, my updates have become increasingly sporadic. I am surprised and touched that people keep coming back to read and comment on what I have written. Looking back, I have actually written almost a hundred articles for this website in the past year (I am surprised it is that many). But at times it has been at the rate of just a few a month.

My year in brief

It has been quite a strange year. It started with me losing my part-time job at Woolworths. The closure of the store was itself quite an odd experience.

But losing that job didn’t hit me so hard. My long term future was never going to be with Woolworths. I graduated in summer 2008 and was hoping to find a job that could have reflected this. But it wasn’t happening.

I spent several months visiting the Jobcentre while experimenting with being self employed. While the bits and bobs of freelance work I was doing was good in the sense that I made an amount of money that was greater than zero, it didn’t provide anything like the security I needed in order to make plans for the long term.

Over the summer things slowed down quite alarmingly. I took a break after I was amazingly invited to a tour around the Williams F1 factory and museum.

It was the first time I had gone on anything resembling a holiday for a long while. I hung around in Oxford for a day or so then on the way back went via London to briefly visit friends. But because of the last-minute nature of the trip it was very hectic and felt rushed. It is the only time I have ever felt what I would call being intensely tired.

I arrived back to bad news on the work front. After another month or so of inactivity, it had felt like things had hit rock bottom.

Luckily, it was rock bottom. Since then, the news has all been good. Having decided that doing anything was better than rotting at home, I applied for an internship in the office of an MP. Unlike the freelance work, I did not earn more than zero by doing this. However, I can safely say that nothing has been more valuable to me in terms of gaining confidence in my abilities, which had been totally shot.

I only had to spend a couple of months there before — finally — finding a good job. My first month working at the University of St Andrews has been great. The only problem is the journey from Kirkcaldy, which is a bit on the long side. But apart from that, things are going well. In complete contrast to earlier on this year, I now feel lucky in so many ways.

The future of my online activities

Now that I am settling down to some kind of routine, I am hoping to be able to update this website more regularly. Certainly, once I move closer to St Andrews I will hopefully have more spare time in the evenings.

But now that I am in full time employment, I don’t have the time or energy to continue running three separate blogs, as I have been doing for the past couple of years. At the start of 2007, I decided to stop writing about motorsport here and set up a separate blog, vee8, to act as an outlet for my thoughts on Formula 1.

That worked really well at first. But over the past year or so, as I have had less and less time on my hands, it has meant that both doctorvee and vee8 have been neglected too much. It is so easy to concentrate on one blog and forget about the other. I feel that now both websites are suffering.

So I have taken the decision to close down vee8, and bring my writing on motorsport back onto this website. I know this won’t be popular with everyone, but it no longer makes sense to have these two separate websites when I no longer even have the time to properly maintain one. The change will happen some time in the new year.

In preparation for the change, I will remind those readers who are not in the least bit interested in F1 that the F1-free RSS feed still works. So if you want to subscribe to this website without being bombarded with opinion on motorsport, subscribe to the F1-free RSS feed.

Merry Christmas!

Until that happens, I hope you all have a relaxing Christmas period. I could certainly do with a wee break to recover from the hectic nature of the tail end of this year, and the extra time will come in handy for working on the changes I am making to this website.

For the past couple of weeks, many big-wigs are meeting in Copenhagen for a chit-chat about climate change. This happens against the backdrop of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit email hacking. This is said by some to offer evidence that climate scientists have manipulated data in order to boost the case that climate change is man-made.

The emphasis on whether or not climate change is man-made confuses me. For instance, the Met Office’s response to the hacking seeks to underline the fact that climate change is man-made: “The bottom line is that temperatures continue to rise and humans are responsible for it.”

Why is there so much concern over whether or not changes in temperature, and the knock-on effects that result, are man-made? Would climate change really be any less of a problem if it were caused by, say, volcanoes, sunspots, or other natural phenomena? The flood would come anyway.

Surely the correct question is not whether climate change is man-made. The correct questions are:

• Is climate change happening?
• What effects will it have?
• What will be the net cost of these effects?
• What actions can be taken to guard against these effects?
• What will be the cost of taking these actions?
• Is the cost of taking these actions greater than the net cost of the effects of climate change? (i.e. can the resources be better spent elsewhere, for instance on alleviating poverty, etc.)

If I see that it is raining, I don’t just stand there for ages pondering over whether or not the rain is man-made. I just put up an umbrella.

• Is it raining? Yes.
• What effects will it have? It will make me wet.
• What will be the net cost of these effects? I will feel uncomfortable and may become ill.
• What actions can be taken to guard against these effects? I can put up an umbrella.
• What will be the cost of taking this action? I will have to carry my umbrella around with me.
• Is the cost of taking this action greater than the net cost of the effect of rain? No.

Voila — I have successfully guarded myself against the effects of rain in the most efficient manner, without worrying about what caused the rain. So why worry about what causes climate change? As far as I am concerned, if the flood is coming, the flood is coming and that is the only information I need to know.

Granted, the causes of climate change are a pretty important thing to know. If you know the cause, you know what you can do to help prevent it.

But the debate over whether or not climate change is man-made implies that, even if climate change is happening, it doesn’t matter if it’s not man-made. But that is surely not true. The effects will be just as devastating whether it turns out climate change is caused by man-made or natural causes.

It just seems to me that the focus on whether or not climate change is man-made suits both sides of the debate rather too much. Climate change sceptics will apparently view any evidence that climate change is not man-made as a signal that climate change is nothing to worry about (which is surely not true).

Meanwhile, left-wing environmentalists love the focus on the man-made aspect because it gives them an excuse to lecture people on their behaviour. This can be seen in the ever-growing list of human behaviours that are said to cause climate change — everything from taking the car to eating meat and even — can you imagine? — having children.

I would like to hear a bit more emphasis on the effects of climate change in the event that it is not man-made. Otherwise, the anti-environmentalists seem like all they care about is their cheap flights and fast cars. And the moralising environmentalists come across as wanting to take us all on one big guilt trip for having the temerity to exist.

It has been an unusual few weeks in the Scottish political blogosphere. Already, a number of bloggers had apparently lost motivation and were openly wondering if they should continue. Since then, a number of blogs have closed down, apparently due to external pressures.

Firstly, Wardog was closed down after journalists from a number of major newspapers sought to write stories about it. The angle was that the blog was pretty close to the bone and potentially offensive. Was it acceptable behaviour for an employee of a university?

Then, the author of the Universality of Cheese was “outed” as Michael Russell’s office manager. Mark MacLachlan had to close down his blog and quit his job. The added twist to the story was that Michael Russell, an SNP Government minister, has been a major advocate of new media such as blogging within the Scottish Government. It remains to be seen if this scandal has an adverse impact on the admirable aim of using new web technologies in government.

At the weekend, Subrosa opted to close her blog, apparently out of fear that she was going to be “outed” as well. As the weekend passed and the Sunday newspapers were published without event, the blog has since re-opened.

[Update: Please see Subrosa's comment below for a clarification on the information in the above paragraph.]

The author of Advanced Media Watch appears to have decided to keep his blog closed. Meanwhile, even Scotland’s top SNP blogger, Jeff Breslin of SNP Tactical Voting, was also involved in a minor stooshie.

I have seen it written by more than one person that it feels as though the Scottish blogosphere is “under attack”. Maybe under attack is putting it too strongly, but certainly some big giants are peering into this particular goldfish bowl just now.

There have been some interesting articles about the blogosphere by journalists lately. Iain Macwhirter has waded in once again, with a rather sensible analysis. Joan McAlpine also penned this interesting take on Scottish political blogging.

But as far as the scandal goes, it appears as though not all blogs are affected. It is a sub-set of blogs. The common thread is easy to spot. All of the bloggers involved are SNP supporters.

There are two possible theories as to why. One explanation — the one favoured by nationalists — that the “Labour establishment” in the Scottish media has stitched them up.

More likely is the idea that this is an effect of the “cybernat” phenomenon. Some of the bloggers who have been put under the microscope over the past few weeks could not be compared with the cybernats. But some were worse than others, and certainly one or two of them sailed too close to the wind.

Those who sailed the closest had to shut their blogs down. I felt that some of these blogs, in their better moments, were lacking in rigour. In their worst moments… well, the news reports have let you know about that. I should point out that this description by no means applies to all of the blogs that have been caught up in the recent fracas.

There may be a temptation among some to put this down to the fact that bloggers can be anonymous. That was certainly the conclusion of Iain Macwhirter. However, the cybernat phenomenon does not have much to do with anonymity (although that is an aspect of it, and apparently sock puppet accounts are rife).

But the fact is that the person who ran Wardog, the first blog to take a hit, was not anonymous. His name was displayed on his blog, in addition to his occupation and the fact that he was a lecturer! Clearly he was not ashamed of the way he presented his opinions, even if he had to relent when challenged about it. Nor is Jeff at SNP Tactical Voting anonymous (although it is totally unfair to compare his rather minor incident with the closures of the other blogs).

There is no doubt that the ability to be anonymous on the internet is abused by many, including a high proportion of cybernats. But there can be sound reasons for wanting to be anonymous. There may be those whose blogs are innocuous, but who prefer to remain anonymous in case it upsets their employer or someone close to them.

Others may blog anonymously as whistle-blowers of a sort. Think of PC David Copperfield or Civil Serf. A different set may like to blog for entertainment, but prefer to keep their privacy, like Abby Lee / Zoe Margolis or Belle de Jour.

The problem that has hit the Scottish blogosphere in the shape of cybernats is not as a result of anonymity. The problem is the fact that some SNP activists just get too excited for their own good. SNP activists in general are known for being particularly boisterous, excitable and even aggressive. On the internet, some become absolutely feral.

As I have said before, I have absolutely no doubt that the cybernats are a very small minority of SNP activists. It is a tiny proportion who get a bit too excited and don’t properly think through the consequences of their actions. It goes without saying that some of Scotland’s best and most clear-thinking bloggers are SNP supporters.

But the cybernat issue has bubbled under for too long. For a couple of years the phenomenon has been doing the SNP a great deal of damage in terms of its image. Perhaps it was easily dismissed as the hidden nocturnal ramblings of a small few in the comments section of a dying newspaper’s website. Maybe blogging was not mainstream enough for it to concern them.

It’s different when Sunday newspapers start to take notice and write articles about it though. And not just a one-off — a sustained burst targeting multiple blogs.

Now it is said that Alex Salmond has asked SNP activists to shape up and play nicely online. You just wonder why he hasn’t done it before now, when it was too late.

While some seem to believe that the Scottish political blogosphere is “under attack”, and that this can only be a bad thing, the truth is more nuanced than that. This is an overdue weeding-out of the dreg-ends of the gutter of the blogosphere.

Bloggers should take this not as a threat. It is a warning, but also an opportunity. As Will Patterson says:

…we can raise our game, answer the charges with the positive, celebrate the good things we get up to and in so doing, make the critics look like muppets, simply by proving them wrong.

Or, as someone else put it to me, the blogosphere will be “leaner, cleaner and keener” from now on. It is all about bloggers engaging their brains a bit more and becoming a more savvy about what they say and do. Overall, the blogosphere will be stronger in the end.

Other interesting takes

As you expect with a story about blogging, bloggers have been all over it. Here are some of my favourites:

• Bloggers’ dilemma – Go Lassie Go
• Night of the hard drives – SNP Tactical Voting
• Blogging: ex mea sententia – Ideas of Civilisation
• Ghosts of blogs past – J. Arthur MacNumpty

I don’t often write about myself here these days. Despite the fact that I went to all the effort to set up a personal website, I do think it is a tad self-indulgent to bang on about myself. However, some readers may be interested in recent developments in my life.

Regular readers will know that I haven’t had the best year when it comes to work. After graduating from university last year, I struggled to find employment. Then I lost my part-time job when Woolworths closed down. I had done bits and pieces of freelance work, but not much else.

A few months ago I decided to bite the bullet and look for unpaid work. I saw an internship at the office of Willie Rennie MP advertised, and went for it. It made sense in a lot of ways. The Liberal Democrats have long been the party I sympathise with the most.

Plus, Willie Rennie’s constituency of Dunfermline and West Fife is just next door to mine, so there is the local connection too. I liked the fact that he beat Labour in an area that is so left wing that it was once represented by a Communist MP — a great achievement.

I spent a few months helping out there doing a variety of tasks, and I enjoyed it so much that I will still help out from time to time. It is worth pointing out, in the interests of transparency and what-not, that I have joined the Liberal Democrats.

But I no longer catch the bus to Dunfermline to work there. That is because I have finally found a proper job — one that involves being paid and everything.

I am now working as the Web Editor at the University of St Andrews. When you read this, I will have started my second week there. As you may imagine, I’m really pleased to have got the job.

Despite the recent navel-gazing about the value and future of blogging, which I wasn’t very positive about, getting this job is a vindication of the time and energy I have spent running websites.

All the knowledge that enabled me to get the job was gathered as a result of my hobby running websites. I have no other background or qualifications in editing content for the web. Mind you, I gather that this is no barrier.

There is another way in which this blog helped me get the job. I was originally alerted to the position by a reader of this blog. Then, despite expressing my initial reluctance, she encouraged me to apply. That person has proved difficult to get in contact with since. But if you happen to still be reading, you know who you are — thanks so much!

I am not yet sure what this means for the future of this blog. While I have been busier over the past few months, my already-infrequent updates have become even less frequent. I will spend the winter months experimenting to see what works.

Hopefully I will be able to continue updating, but maybe with a different different focus. Less about sin taxes, and more about syntax? Less about dealing with the DSS, and more about dealing with CSS?

Whatever, stay tuned. I’ll be back with more posts soon.

Something I have noticed about the Glasgow North East by-election is amount of innovative online coverage there has been from the media. All Media Scotland has reported on interesting methods of covering the election which have been adopted by three Scottish newspapers.

The Scotsman has invited the candidates from five of the main parties to contribute to its politics blog The Steamie in the run-up to the election. Full credit to The Scotsman for coming up with the idea. They are clearly trying something interesting with The Steamie, having recently invited some of Scotland’s top bloggers to regularly contribute to it.

It is interesting to see how the various candidates are using this platform. Will Patterson is analysing the candidates’ blog posts to see what message they are trying to get across.

I am infact surprised that the candidates feel that regularly contributing lengthy posts to a blog is a useful way to spend the final week of the campaign. Are there that many votes to be won among the readers of The Steamie?

The Daily Record has held its own type of digital hustings in the shape of a podcast. The Record’s political editor, Magnus Gardham, sat five of the candidates round a table to answer questions sent in by the newspaper’s readers.

Interestingly, the Daily Record chose Tommy Sheridan as its fifth candidate, while The Scotsman chose the Greens’ David Doherty. Perhaps the choice reflects the demographics of the newspapers’ readerships, with the Record thinking that its readers will be more interested in what Tommy Sheridan has to say.

Who is right about who the most credible fifth candidate is? It is not easy to tell, particularly when some believe that the BNP may even come third.

Not to be outdone, The Herald has done its own podcast for the by-election, chaired by its political editor Brian Currie. They have opted to feature just the candidates of the four main parties.

Clearly, the candidates feel that engaging with the electorate online in this way is worthwhile. It’s interesting that the media outlets are so interested in pursuing relatively innovative ways to cover the by-election. There seems to be a lot of experimentation among Scottish media outlets as they work out how to survive the current choppy waters. The increasingly common use of blogging and podcasting by Scottish newspapers is certainly to be welcomed.

But it’s interesting that all of this innovative digital activity should surround a by-election taking place in east Glasgow. In a way, you could hardly pick a worse city in which to pursue this sort of strategy. Glasgow is firmly on the wrong side of the digital divide. A study by Ofcom conducted last year found that only 32% of homes in Glasgow had broadband, and that Glaswegians are significantly less likely to own a PC than the average Brit.

No doubt someone is paying attention to these virtual hustings. But it is more likely to be middle-class political geeks than the actual voters of north-east Glasgow.

I was sorry to read that Scottish Unionist has decided to stop updating his blog.

I know from email correspondence that he has, from time to time, thought about the future of his blog. Now he appears to have decided to call it a day for good.

What a great shame that is. Scottish Unionist did a fine job of exposing the rotten nature of nationalism. His eviscerations of the borderline illiterate Cybernats who pollute the Scottish blogosphere were excellent.

This may have led to the blog been a bit one-note and too negative. Plus, the knuckle-dragging nature of Cybernats is somewhat self-evident. But the case cannot be made too often.

The personal experience that Scottish Unionist has gone through while facing up to the aggressive nationalists has been truly shocking in some cases. It spoke volumes of Scottish Unionist as a person that he always conducted his debates with dignity, treating his opponents with respect — much more than a Cybernat could ever achieve.

I echo the sentiments of Jeff. I doubt that the Cybernats really need to be tackled — they discredit their ideology enough with their own words.

But Scottish Unionist was more or less the only person who frequently visited the constitutional issue, at a time when we could be facing a fundamental referendum in the next couple of years. Perhaps the rest of us should step up to the plate.

I was delighted when Scottish Unionist asked if I would write a guest piece for his blog earlier this year. You can still read my piece about a vision of a federalism in the UK.

This is the accompanying article / transcript to my contribution to this week’s edition of The Pod Delusion, a humorous lefty / skeptical podcast. You can listen to the full podcast below.

This year’s party conference season has now finished, and attention turns to the General Election that will held some time between now and June. What that really means is that everyone’s thoughts are turning towards the prospect of the Conservatives being in power.

Many people now seem to be treating a Conservative election win as more-or-less a foregone conclusion. This is despite the fact that they still have slightly underwhelming opinion poll ratings. The Conservatives are not exactly getting an enthusiastic reception. It’s just that the other parties are disliked even more.

Something that the Tories have going for them at the moment is the announcement a couple of weeks ago that The Sun will be endorsing them at the next General Election. Truth be told, I was surprised on the one hand that they hadn’t already announced it. On the other hand, I was surprised at how early they had announced it. After all, it gives them plenty of time to change their minds between now and the election.

The Sun tends to back a winner, even though it is probably more of a case of being a weather vane rather than any sinister string-pulling from Rupert Murdoch. A few people I have spoken to think that it’s out of order for The Sun to be advising its readers how to vote. Maybe so, but the freedom of the press is vital to our democracy and they should be allowed to put it in their paper if they wish.

Some people note that people who buy The Sun are probably not buying it for sober and authoritative political analysis. That is true. But I actually think the Conservatives are a perfect match for The Sun. David Cameron and George Osborne would look great on Page 3. They are, after all, a massive pair of tits.

Putting aside whether a tabloid endorsement is something for an aspiring government to be proud about, what should we make of a potential Conservative government? Some on the left contend that no matter how bad Labour are, the Conservatives will always be worse. I do not quite agree with that.

If you ask me, the one thing scarier than a potential Conservative victory is a potential Labour victory. After all, given the turmoil of the past few years, just imagine what Labour would think if they could get away with it all. They would probably literally think that they could get away with actual murder. The thing is that they probably would get away with a lot — more than the Conservatives would anyway.

It has become common for people to say that Labour and the Conservatives have become similar to each other as far as policy goes. I don’t really agree with that. They are quite similar, but with Labour you get bonus ID cards and biometric anal probes. All-in-all, I doubt that a Conservative government would automatically be worse than another Labour one.

The most disconcerting thing about the Tories is not that they seem particularly nasty, but that they seem pretty vacuous at the moment. It may be a cliché to say that most people don’t know what David Cameron stands for. But you do get the sense that their manifesto will resemble some backs of envelopes and cigarette packets stuck together with Sellotape.

During all the talk recently about televised leaders’ debates, David Cameron seems to be the more eager between him and Gordon Brown to appear. But you wonder quite what he will find to say. With the lack of policies, I can half imagine him responding every time he is asked a question by saying, “that’s what she said!” It will probably make about as much sense.

For a lot of people, the Tories are the enemy because they are posh. Cameron and Osborne are the notable posh figures in Westminster, though Boris Johnson also comes in for a fair bit of stick on this front.

Some Conservative politicians are indeed quite ludicrously posh. For some people, this prevents them from representing the voters of Britain adequately because they lack empathy with the man on the street. But for me, a politician’s background is irrelevant. What matters is their capability for the job.

I have to confess to having a bit of a soft spot for Boris Johnson. I need to watch what I say here. I have been told off before for having an opinion on Boris Johnson because I am not a Londoner, so in fairness it is none of my damn business.

But I did once have the opportunity to vote for Boris Johnson. That was when he attempted to become Rector of Edinburgh University when I was a student a few years ago. He was the early favourite, but an intensely negative campaign from the student politics establishment played heavily on his posh image. This ensured that Boris Johnson not only failed to win the election, but he actually came third out of four candidates.

I should point out that Boris was not my first choice in the election. My preferred option was the former Scotsman editor Magnus Linklater, who finished second.

So who did we get as Rector instead? A man called Mark Ballard. I know what you’re probably thinking: who on earth is Mark Ballard? At the time, he was a Green Member of the Scottish Parliament. However, the general population was not quite so enamoured of him as the student population was and he has since lost his seat in the Scottish Parliament.

I have actually met Mr Ballard a couple of times and I can certainly say that he is a very pleasant chap. But ultimately he is a bit of a nobody, certainly in comparison to somebody like Boris Johnson. I mean, at Edinburgh University we could have had London’s Mayor as our university’s figurehead. As it was, we got someone who was rather worthy, but rather anonymous and a bit dull.

I don’t suppose there is necessarily anything wrong with that. But the mantra of “anyone but the Tories” surely isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

There has been a fair bit of chat in recent weeks about the prospect of a televised leaders’ debate in the run-up to the next general election. This sort of chat always comes up in the run-up to any election, but there appears to be an extra momentum this time round.

It seems as though the promise by Sky News to televise a debate come what may — even if the debate was between tubs of lard — has forced everyone’s hand, broadcasters and political parties alike. It seems as though now it is going to happen, with the involvement of all the major broadcasters. It also appears as though the three main party leaders are on board (albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm).

The end of the issue? Of course not. This is just the beginning of the matter. More details will need to be fleshed out. What format should such a debate take? Will there be a number of separate debates? And what about the role of smaller parties?

I am normally fairly ambivalent about calls for televised political debates. Those politicians who call for such a debate usually do so because they perceive that it would advantage them.

Someone like David Cameron will go for it because he is a confident performer, the momentum is behind him and the media appears to have declared him the winner already. Someone like Gordon Brown will reject it because he does not come across so well on television. This time he has been forced into it, partly because of Sky News’ promise to “empty chair” him if he didn’t, but also because refusing to appear would further the idea that Brown is a coward with poor leadership qualities.

The prospect of a televised political debate fills me with dread rather than excitement. I doubt it does much for democratic accountability. Part of me suspects that vain politicians just crave appearances on the television.

No doubt we will be served up a rather unedifying spectacle, like PMQs on steroids. I predict Punch and Judy politics a-plenty. Most likely, as with Question Time, it will be a platform for the most appalling demagoguery, complete with an audience that will clap like seals at any old nonsense.

Most of all, I think the idea of a leaders’ debate just misses the point. While it is useful to know what the major party leaders think, focusing on leaders too much is damaging to the health of our parliamentary democracy. Once again, there is a clamour to bring to Britain a feature of US politics which is a square peg in a round hole.

Televised debates are highly popular in the USA. But that is because the format is practically ready-made for the US political system. For one, the US system is a Presidential system, meaning that voters actually do elect the country’s leader. The US system is also a truly two-party system, with two Leviathans totally overshadowing any minority candidates. This makes it easy to adopt a one-on-one, head-to-head debating format.

Even though the televised debate is more-or-less a perfect fit for a US Presidential election, the format’s success is a matter for debate. In years gone by it may have provided some election-defining moments. But as I recall, the debates involving Barack Obama and John McCain, and Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, hardly set the world alight.

So what on earth makes anyone think that this gimmick will suit British politics? It seems like just another outcome of politicos’ obsession with America. It seems like the idea of someone who has mistaken his DVD box set of The West Wing for real pornography.

Our Parliamentary system doesn’t — or at least shouldn’t — place so much focus on party leaders. Very few voters will actually have any sort of say on who the Prime Minister is. I will have the option to vote for or against Gordon Brown, but only because I happen to live in his constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. I will have no say whatsoever on David Cameron or Nick Clegg.

And what of the smaller parties? In the UK, broadcasters are required to be impartial in the run-up to an election, meaning that legally broadcasters will find it difficult to lock out the small parties. Even if these other parties have little or no chance of forming the government. Even if most viewers will not be as interested in hearing from these parties.

The most noise is being made by the SNP. They are threatening legal action if an SNP representative is unable to play a part in a televised leaders’ debate.

The SNP may have a point. Even though they have only a handful of MPs, and are only contesting seats in a portion of the UK, they have a lot of support in that portion. They are not a loony fringe party. They are in fact in government in the UK. Viewers north of the border will certainly be interested to hear what the SNP have to say in the run-up to the election.

At the same time, their presence may be a distraction from the real purpose of the debate, which is basically to watch the potential future Prime Ministers partake in a spot of verbal mud-wrestling. It is, after all, a “leaders’ debate”. Despite all his ambition, Alex Salmond is highly unlikely to be the next Prime Minister, as is Angus Robertson.

Yet, what if there is the prospect of a hung Parliament? The collapse in Labour support has not been met with a real surge in support for the Conservatives. With so many parties having moderate levels of support, it is conceivable that a party like the SNP could play a king-maker role.

There is no easy answer. This is the core problem with the idea of a televised debate. It might be good for a simple, true two party system such as the USA’s. But for the UK’s more subtle and diverse politics, it won’t fit quite so well.

What a stooshie there is over the Scottish budget and John Swinney’s plan to scrap the Glasgow Airport Rail Link. I have found the reaction from Labour very interesting. Their strategy appears to be to attempt to paint it as an anti-Glasgow policy from an Edinburgh-centric party.

Jeff thought that Steven Purcell may have jumped the gun by describing the SNP’s budget proposals as “anti-Glasgow”. But if he did, Labour certainly weren’t embarrassed about it, and enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon. Already during the budget debate Margaret Curran had asked a pointed question about just what was in the budget for Glasgow.

Separate parts of Labour soon latched on to the idea. For instance, Tom Harris was very quick to tweet the following: “Gutted by the SNP’s decision to axe the Glasgow Airport rail link. Serves us right for not being Edinburgh, I suppose.” I also noticed an update from the official Scottish Labour Twitter account which said, “Glasgow is being ripped off by the SNP in Edinburgh.”

Will “the SNP in Edinburgh” became a nice little catchphrase, just as “London Labour” effortlessly rolls off the tongue of any nationalist? I predict that it won’t. “The SNP in Edinburgh” is slightly clunky-sounding, while “London Labour” has an alliterative, almost symmetrical quality.

Trying to associate the SNP with Edinburgh is also a bit strange given that the SNP occupy just one of Edinburgh’s five seats while Labour MSPs currently sit in two of them. At least in this respect it makes about as much sense as “London Labour”, which was always quite a curious turn of phrase given that Labour have their greatest concentration of support in Scotland, not London.

You can say one thing — Labour’s move into the realm of regional politics is an interesting strategy. But as far as I can see, most people seem to just be rolling their eyes at the anti-Glasgow claim. The relative merits of Garl aside for the moment (and I think it is a mistake to scrap it), there surely can’t be many cities that have had more public money poured into them in recent decades than Glasgow.

Do Labour risk painting themselves into a Glasgow-shaped corner? Is there any real point in Labour playing this card? If there is one place in Scotland where their vote is safe, it is Glasgow. I fear that by focussing so strongly on Glasgow, they could easily make themselves less electable in the rest of Scotland.

I mean, in what way is wailing for yet more pork in Glasgow supposed to appeal to the rest of Scotland? Most people were quite heartily sick of the Glasgow-centric nature of the Labour party, as Lallands Peat Worrier explains quite well. And the Glasbolisation of the Scottish media is as tiresome as any London bias.

But it will be interesting to see how the SNP cope with the anti-Glasgow accusation. They cannot really afford to give up on Glasgow. Nor can they reject Labour’s line of reasoning, because this sort of territorial whining is their bread and butter.

That is one of the things that puts me off the SNP so much. They try to exaggerate the cultural and political differences between Scotland and the rest of the UK, while playing down any differences within Scotland. Take, for instance, top SNP blogger Jeff, who on Friday scoffed not once but twice:

…as if there is any significant difference between Glasgwegians and Edinburgers.

Let’s all settle down shall we, factionalism is what tore Scotland apart in the early 1700s. Let’s not go back to those days.

It’s kind of funny to hear the SNP pleading against tearing a country apart. After all, it is normally de rigueur for the SNP to constantly make out that there is a significant difference when in reality there is just a bit of normal human diversity — just as long as the dividing line is the Scottish / English border.

The constant SNP refrain that a democratically elected Conservative government should not have the right to govern over Scotland because they have slightly less support north of the border is one of my biggest bugbears. As I have pointed out before, there will be regional differences within any democracy, no matter how you draw the borders.

So in Scotland you have Labour’s famous dominance of the West of Scotland. Meanwhile, the further north you go, the more likely you are, generally, to be in an SNP seat. There are no SNP constituency MSPs south of Kilmarnock and Loudoun, with the vast majority coming from north of the central belt. The other parties have their geographical cleavages of support too.

But for the SNP, the only important regional divide is the one that divides Scotland from the rest of the UK. They would have you believe that other regional differences don’t exist, or at least that they are not nearly as important.

This is one of the reasons why I reject nationalism. It is fundamentally disingenuous. At least Labour’s tactic has this going for it: it could show up the major contradiction of the SNP’s world view.

I’ve been thinking about getting involved in podcasting for a while now. So when I saw a favourite blogger of mine asking for contributors to a new podcast he was setting up, I thought it was the ideal opportunity to dip my toe in the water.

The podcast is the idea of James O’Malley, a fine chap with a jolly good blog. His thinking is to have a number of contributors chipping in to a weekly podcast which will be around 15–20 minutes long. The podcast will be along the lefty / liberal / atheist / skeptical / rationalist lines. Read James O’Malley’s explanation for more.

What was missing was a name for the podcast. A bit difficult to come up with a name for something that only exists in your brain. But with the vague template in mind, I set to work, along with the other contributors, to think of a suitable name.

Suddenly, it came to me. After I had been lying in bed literally unable to sleep for hours, it suddenly came to me: The Pod Delusion. Yes, I know. I’m a genius. Not quite a living legend like James O’Malley though. Nonetheless, the fact that I came up with the excellent name means that The Pod Delusion is definitely my podcast. The fact that I put no effort whatsoever into creating it, producing it or commissioning pieces for it is frankly neither here nor there.

Anyway, I am quite excited about The Pod Delusion. With the stellar line-up of contributors, it seems like it’s going to be ace. If everything goes to plan and this week’s pilot goes down well, you can expect a new episode every Friday. My plan is to publish all transcripts of my contributions, or an accompanying article, on this website as and when each podcast is published.

Here is the first episode of The Pod Delusion. I have just listened to it myself. Since it’s the first ever attempt, it is a tad ramshackular, but that will get better over time. All-in-all, I think it’s a fine listen.

Hopefully sometime soon it will be available over iTunes too. You can follow @poddelusion on Twitter.

My first little piece for The Pod Delusion is about product placement. When I first set about doing it, my intention was to try and make it serious. I had actually been planning to write here about the product placement hoo-ha, but then decided I could kill two birds with one stone by making it my Pod Delusion contribution too.

Unfortunately, I got a little bit carried away with the fact that I was working in an exciting new audio medium. I inserted a few audio jokes which won’t work in writing. From then on, the whole thing became just a collection of bad jokes about product placement, strung together by the flimsiest of wafer-thin serious points.

So, bearing that in mind, here is my contribution to this week’s Pod Delusion.

It was announced last week by Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw that product placement will soon be allowed on commercial channels. I suppose there was an inevitability in this. After all, commercial broadcasters finding it harder to sustain themselves through traditional advertising in a multichannel world. Plus, we are living in an era where so many people use PVRs to fast-forward through the adverts anyway.

There has to be some way to fund commercial television. After all, what would we do without ITV? Okay, that’s a bad example. But what would we do without Channel Five? Well okay, but you get my point.

Many worry about the effects that product placement will have on the viewing experience. With product placement, there will be a question mark over the purity of the programmes we watch. Will our programmes be peppered with subliminal advertising that attempt to brainwash us into changing the brand of soap powder that we use?

I’m not so sure that will be such an issue. After all, we are well used to product placements in major films. Television programmes from other countries are filled with product placements already. I am sure that most people are savvy enough to tell what’s going on.

For instance, it can be disconcerting to watch an episode on Neighbours when one of the characters decides to open the fridge. Inexplicably, the fridge is filled from wall to wall with nothing but cans of Sprite! That is obviously a nonsensical scenario. It would have been far more realistic if the fridge was filled from wall to wall with cans of tasty Dr Pepper — “what’s the worst that can happen?”

The odd thing about imported programmes is that due to the stricter laws in the UK, our broadcasters have to blur such product placements out. But this only brings attention to the fact that there is an alien blob floating around on the screen.

Focusing on the blobs on American Idol, for instance, you can clearly see that the judges have large cups on their desk. These cups are predominantly red but with a distinctive white swirl that can only be associated with Coke. Mmm… fresh, ice cold Coke.

The new product placement rules do not affect the BBC. But it would be interesting to consider what it might be like if one day the rules were relaxed for the BBC too. After all, is there anything more ridiculous than the slightly awkward attempts to avoid using brand names during makes on Blue Peter? Referring to “sticky back plastic” may be quaint and traditional, but it is also distracting and sets off a klaxon in your brain that sounds something like: “SELLOTAPE! SELLOTAPE!”

I once saw a Blue Peter make where you had to use a “crisp tube”. What on earth is a crisp tube? Crisps come in packets don’t they? What they were talking about was a pack of Pringles. Given that Pringles are the only make of crisps to be sold in that style of tub, you can more or less guarantee that sales of Pringles went through the roof anyway — all because of the BBC’s massive abuse of power.

Well I think I have said all there is to say about product placement. I think what I will do now is take off my Specsavers glasses and shut down my Asus Eee PC. Then I think I will listen to my Apple iPod, while eating a fresh sandwich from Subway.

Or perhaps I will just go for a piss in my Armitage Shanks toilet.

I see that The Scotsman has again been trying to wring another story out of a politician’s use of Twitter. This time it is Jo Swinson exposing her ignorance about football.

As she was overwhelmed by members of the Tartan Army at a railway station, Ms Swinson got out her BlackBerry, logged on to her Twitter site and wrote: “Have I missed something? What’s the football festivity? Can’t move at Queen Street station for folk in Scotland tops.”

Seven minutes later, Graham Barrie posted: “The Tartan Army v the Dutch Army tonight at Hampden Jo. You really need to get out more ”

Jeff and Mr Eugenides both have good takes on this. I have to agree with them. For some, football is a matter of life and death. The Scotsman’s David Maddox calls the match “do-or-die”. But in truth, it isn’t much more than a slightly tedious playground game.

The Scotland–Netherlands tie wasn’t exactly in my diary, though it is true that I was quite aware of it thanks to my football-loving friends. My own take on the match, as published on Twitter, would probably have got me into more trouble. I wasn’t merely ignorant; I was aware, but sarcastic and dismissive:

Advice to football fans: Scotland won’t win the World Cup, so I wouldn’t concern yourself with it.

I find it difficult to get excited about football at the best of times. My enthusiasm for Scotland internationals is marginally above zilch. In my defence, I was rather put off by the fact that last month I was taken by a friend to the pub to watch what I was told would be a football match but turned out to be a disaster film. Strange.

Really, you could argue that the people who don’t think about football are making the right decision. All that worrying over whether Scotland gets knocked out in this round or that does seem to be a waste of energy. And I can well imagine Jo Swinson has plenty of other things to occupy her time with.

This comes just a few months after Patrick Harvie was at the centre of another Twitter row manufactured by David Maddox. His crime was to discreetly tweet at the dinner table, something which I think many people do.

I don’t get this obsession with politicians having to be identikit robots who all have to be up-to-date on the price of milk, whatever music is in the charts and some tedious sporting exploit. I have written about this phenomenon before, and my views haven’t changed.

The fact is that there are 646 MPs and 129 MSPs. If you took 775 random people, you can be guaranteed to find people who couldn’t give two hoots about football and couldn’t tell you how much a loaf of bread costs. You would certainly find plenty of people who didn’t feel the need to contrive odd opinions about the Arctic Monkeys. Yet we expect all this from our politicians. Why?

On the one hand people criticise politicians for being almost like robots if they are perceived to toe the party line, talk in soundbites or reel off reams of irrelevant statistics. But then if they reveal a bit of their personality by representing part of the variety of society by not fitting a media-constructed template of what a “normal person” is expected to be, they are blasted for being “out of touch”.

I can more easily admire Jo Swinson for her personal choice not to worry about football than any politician who feels the need to pretend they are interested when they are so clearly not. Indeed, Jeff’s comparison with Gordon Brown’s uneasy comments about Paul Gascoigne’s goal against Scotland in Euro 96 reveals that this is one of those issues where you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.

While you would expect parliamentarians to have a knowledge of certain things in order to do their job, there’s nothing wrong with them being human when it comes to their personal interests. In cases like this, it is those in the media who seem more out of touch.

There was an interesting blog post over at the Telegraph by Geoffrey Lean over the weekend. He asked if GDP is “past its sell by date”, noting that “the EU is due to publish a paper which will conclude that GDP is too limited a measurement.”

I agree with the view that GDP doesn’t tell you the whole picture. I have written before about the obsession that the media and others have with what this or that will “cost the economy”. These stories normally come along with some kind of figure of the effect some trend or other will have on GDP.

GDP is quite a useful measurement in a lot of ways. As a barometer of how things are ticking along, it isn’t bad. When GDP rises steadily things are ticking along quite nicely. When it decreases people generally feel it. In truth, no-one needed to wait for the GDP figures to come round to work out that things were bad. But GDP does give us a vaguely useful way to quantify how things are going.

However, it omits a lot of useful information that might help us to measure our quality of life. Perhaps most strikingly of all, it takes very little account of leisure — surely the best part of life.

You can be fairly certain that the economy is producing more between 8am and 8pm than it is between 8pm and 8am. The economy goes into recession every night! But in which part of the day is your quality of life higher? The part where you’re slaving away in a stuffy office, or the part where you’re relaxing with a cold beer?

Enjoying yourself and relaxing, whether it’s having your nightly kip or spending an afternoon in the park, often means removing yourself from economic activity. This in turn leads to a reduction in GDP. That is “the cost to the economy”. This is despite the fact that sleeping and having a stroll in the park are both very valuable activities.

I am currently reading The Armchair Economist by Steven E. Landsburg (I’m only 15 years late to the party). This book points out that GDP is also unable to account for the value of housework. If you pay someone to do your dishes, the value is counted in GDP figures. If you do them yourself, GDP is unaffected. But in both cases you have a rack of clean dishes of equal value.

Geoffrey Lean also points out that GDP fails to take the environment into consideration. An economist would say you need to internalise the externalities. But the question is how? (Pigovian taxes are a nice idea.) Some extreme environmentalists go further and advocate zero growth, an idea rightly lambasted by Adopted Domain.

I guess it all depends on what you want an indicator to tell you. GDP has become the one everyone talks about as a proxy for our standard of living, but clearly has deficiencies in that it leaves out important elements that contribute to our standard of living.

Unemployment figures are a possible alternative. On one level, it can be said that unemployment is the main thing that worries people. Despite the often-made point that unemployment is a lagging indicator, for many it is the bottom line.

But this has many of the same problems as using GDP. We look forward to our weekends, our holidays, and ultimately our retirement. Not working is actually a good thing. Few people want to work. They only want the money they earn from working. That brings us right back to GDP.

In recent years there has been a bit of hype about happiness economics (which I have previously written about). This field likes to measure Gross National Happiness. But this too is fraught with difficulties, not least the fact that it relies on shaky survey data based on people’s varying interpretations of what “happiness” is.

Perhaps you could stop paying attention to aggregate statistics in general. On one level, what really concerns me is my own personal well-being. How much I earn, how much disposable income I have, whether I have a job and how happy I am all concern me greatly. I am less concerned about other people’s well-being.

But that’s not quite right either. Even though I, like most people, am primarily worried about myself, I do care about the general well-being of other people.

It looks like we have to make do with GDP as the main measure to be concerned with. However, it does seem that it is creaking a bit with old age. No doubt there will be plenty of criticisms of GDP to come in the future, particularly from environmentalists.

Beware of the alternatives people advocate though. They will probably all be biased one way or another. Any proposed new measurements will probably be put forward by some interest group trying to manipulate the terms of the debate in its favour. Were that scenario to arise, I would rate myself 3 out of 10 happy.

Last week the SNP set out its legislative plan. The headline grabber was the long-promised independence referendum bill. Today I saw Caron’s post asking, “why bother with a referendum?” She has a good point. It is widely recognised that the result of any referendum would almost certainly reject the SNP’s favoured proposals.

“Ah, but!”, say proponents of a referendum. Opinion polls consistently suggest that around three quarters of people would like there to be a referendum on independence. This is supposedly a good enough reason to actually hold a referendum.

It strikes me as a bit daft though. Imagine the scene. You’re sitting on a park bench eating your lunch. A chap with a clipboard approaches you. He’s from a polling organisation. “The Monster Raving Loony Party,” he begins, “plans on giving everyone a slap on the face.” Your eyebrows raise. The prospect of the Monster Raving Loony Party being in a position to give everyone a slap in the face feels a bit distant. But the pollster continues: “Would you like a referendum on face-slapping to be held before this policy is pursued?” Yes, of course, you reply.

Of course people say they’d like there to be a referendum. If you asked people if they wanted a referendum on legislation about chewing gum wrappers, they would most likely say yes. In fact, I wonder what is going through the minds of the quarter of people who say they would not like a referendum. They probably can’t be bothered with the campaigning. Perhaps they dread the prospect of politicians hogging the box, or maybe they think their vote isn’t worth anything.

Nevertheless, in general, ask people if they would like a right, they will take it with both hands. The right to vote on Scotland’s constitutional future is appealing. But it is just one appealing thing out of an infinite number of appealing things that may be offered by a government. We have unlimited wants, but the government has limited means.

That is the essence of the argument put forward by those who would rather there wasn’t a referendum on independence. Opponents such as Alistair Darling say there are more important issues facing the voters, not least the economy. It would be wise to tackle them first before concerning ourselves with “distractions” like the independence debate.

I don’t quite agree with that perspective either. It is perfectly valid (though, in my view, incorrect) to say that economic and other woes may be fixed by Scotland becoming independent. In fact, I think it is quite dangerous to dismiss any analysis of the constitutional position as a “distraction”.

I am in favour of constitutional reform. I do not agree with the sort of extreme reforms that the SNP would like to make. But certainly I would favour some degree of fiscal autonomy. I would like the UK to adopt a federal structure. And I think there is a pressing need for reform of the voting system.

I do not support such reforms because I think it would be a bit of distracting fun. There is nothing particularly satisfying to me about the calculations the single transferable vote system would entail (though it might be another matter for some political geeks). No, the real reason I favour constitutional reform is because I believe it will fundamentally improve the governance of the country. To dismiss constitutional debates as “distracting” is a bit of an insult. The constitutional structure is fundamental.

The reason to oppose a referendum on independence is not because people don’t want a referendum. And it is certainly not because it is a distraction. The reason is simply that there is no appetite for independence.

Some people have a peculiar obsession with referenda. But it’s worth remembering that they are actually quite a recent addition to British democracy, and have only been used a handful of times. The UK’s first referendum was held in 1973. Since then, a further eight have been held. Only one of them was held across the UK. Only another two have been Scotland-wide.

The idea behind holding a referendum is to make bloody well sure that the major constitutional change which is proposed is actually favoured by the people of the country. So rather than having a mere parliamentary majority, you make sure there is a majority favour among the people too. If you like, a referendum seeks a second mandate to go ahead with the change.

You see where I’m going with this? There hasn’t even been a first mandate yet. Although the SNP forms the Scottish Government, it is a minority administration. A majority of MSPs oppose independence.

You cannot even convincingly argue that the 2007 election result demonstrated momentum towards MSPs that favour independence. Although the SNP made large gains, this was mostly at the expense of other parties that favour independence. The Greens had their representation cut by two thirds. The SSP were totally wiped off the map. These two parties saw their share of the vote cut more than any other parties. Meanwhile, the three main opposition parties saw stagnant levels of support — they dropped, but not by that much.

That is why I oppose the idea of holding a referendum on independence. There simply isn’t anything going for it. There is no groundswell of support for independence among the voters. And there certainly isn’t enough appetite for it within the Scottish Parliament.

Those in favour of a referendum cling on to the fact that most people would like there to be a referendum. But that in itself is pretty meaningless because, as I have said, people will always prefer to have a referendum on anything, even if it’s on getting a slap on the face.

I see there has been a frisson of activity over the suggestion that some councils are looking to hold their counts on a Friday rather than the traditional Thursday night / Friday morning when the General Election comes round. The Sunday Times has reported that the BBC believes that up to a quarter of councils are considering making the switch to sociable hours.

The fear is that such a move would ruin general election night, the greatest political television show going. There have been plenty of passionate defences of the show, and the “Save Election Night” campaign has true cross-party support: see Jonathan Isaby of Conservative Home, Labour MP Tom Harris, SNP activist Will Patterson and Liberal Democrat Voice’s Mark Pack.

Without a doubt, it is fun to stay up all night watching power switch hands from one MP to another, and gradually from one government to another. And there is no denying that the television show has brought us some of the most memorable political moments of recent times. Everyone knows what you mean if you mention “the Portillo moment”.

But is it important? Is it even right? The political class treats a general election like a big sporting event. It is our Superbowl, and David Dimbleby is our John Madden. Coverage of politics is heaving with horse racing and other sporting metaphors. Correct me if I’m wrong, but an election is supposed to be about the serious business of government, not an entertaining night in front of the box.

Adam Smith famously wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” I do think the cross-party support for election night coverage may be to the detriment to what is good for the public.

It is interesting that three of the biggest stories of the past week or so have been about the entertainment side of politics. There is a big debate just now about whether there should be a presidential-style leaders’ debate in the run-up to the election — Sky News is promising to plonk three chairs on a stage and give anyone who doesn’t turn up the “tub of lard” treament. (Of course, all the smaller parties cry, “Why can’t I be on a fourth chair?”) I’m not sure that anyone genuinely thinks such a debate would be a valuable addition to our political discourse, but it will be entertaining so that’s all right then, huh?

Then there is the controversy over the BBC’s decision to invite Nick Griffin onto an edition of Question Time. Chris Dillow summarises Paul Sagar’s point that Question Time is “not a platform for debate but merely a zoo in which soundbites are vomited into an audience who clap like hyperactive seals.”

Now there is this controversy; this fear about the future of election night coverage. Don’t get me wrong. I like a bit of political rough and tumble as much as the next person. And I agree that the votes for a general election should be counted as quickly as possible. There are very valid arguments against moving counts to Fridays, as you will see in the articles I have linked to above.

But the focus on the entertainment value of staying up all night is something that I find a tad distasteful. I am particularly surprised to see this point of view being advocated so strongly by any Liberal Democrats.

That party is quite rightly in favour of reforming the voting system. Most electoral reformers agree that single transferable vote (not to be confused with STV) would be the best (or least-worst) system to adopt. That move would almost certainly put the kibosh on any notion that we will find out the result before breakfast time, but it would still be right.

What is important is that we have a result that is fully reflective of the wishes of the people. In comparison to getting the right result, the speed of finding it out or the entertainment of the televisual spectacle pales into insignificance.

I would rather see a complete end to those sporting analogies I referred to earlier — “first past the post” and “two horse race” being among the most important ones to consign to history. I would happily see the television show “general election night” consigned to history too if need be.

So sacrifice your psephological salivating. Yes, election night can be fun and entertaining. But it would be better for democracy if our democratic institutions operated for the good of the voters, not for the good of politico television viewers.

Last night I was a bit bored so I indulged in a spot of channel surfing to see if there was anything decent on. There usually isn’t. But even with my lowered expectations, my jaw literally dropped when I saw what STV were broadcasting — STV Roulette.

Yes, if you thought dodgy gambling programmes were the preserve of the arse end of the Sky channel list, think again. It is right here on Scotland’s Channel 3 franchise, a public service broadcaster no less. You will be delighted to know that STV plan on broadcasting this tat three days a week, for three hours a day.

Presumably this is part of of STV’s much-hyped strategy of promoting “home produced content”. However, STV Roulette and the STV Casino website are produced by NetPlay TV, whose studios are in London.

In recent times, STV has increasingly pursued a strategy of turning down the opportunity to broadcast some of ITV’s best programmes in favour of showing dodgy local clip shows, American imports and… oh, “home produced content”. But the identity of this “home produced content” remains a mystery to viewers. That is probably because it simply doesn’t exist.

I suppose Fitz — a cheap American import — is supposed to count. Apparently it has some kind of vague connection to Cracker. So the trailer tells us anyway. In fact, “Fitz” turned out to be a description of what STV viewers go through every time they realise that their favourite programme has been ditched in favour of some kind of low budget michty-me, jings, crivens and help ma boab bunch of SHITE.

Oh, and apparenty South Park counts as “home produced content” because, in the words of STV’s Managing Director of Broadcast Services, Bobby Hain, it is “mischievous and cheeky”, just like Scottish people! Huh?!

This new found love for “local” programming really is rich coming from STV too. This is a station that, just a few years ago, would do anything to avoid showing locally produced programmes. It blatantly reached its quota of regional programmes with cynical late-night repeats of Weir’s Way and extra editions of Scotland Today Interpreted For The Deaf. As if the ploy wasn’t blatant enough, these showings were ramped up a bit towards the end of the year as well, presumably because the quota needed filling.

I think a lot of people assumed that STV had already been taken over by ITV plc, which sadly is not the case. Any bosses who think people tune in to watch STV are living in cloud cuckoo land. They press button 3 to watch ITV, and expect to watch ITV programmes. That is because regional television is an anachronism that viewers do not care about. This is why STV’s odd strategy has proved so controversial.

STV’s plan wouldn’t be so laughable if it wasn’t based on the totally bogus premise that anyone actually likes regional variations. As I have written before, regional variations are always rubbish, as this excellent clip from The Armando Iannucci Shows ably explains:

I know plenty of people who have mentioned in passing how upset they are that STV refuse to broadcast their favourite programmes. Among the programmes missed by Scottish viewers are showings of the FA Cup, The Bill, Midsomer Murders, Kingdom… I could go on.

New episodes of Lewis are not broadcast, but repeats are fine. New episodes of Poirot are bumped in favour of repeats of Poirot. If those have run out they will show a series of South Park. Other gaps can be filled with cheaply-sourced American imports, Irish (!) imports or films.

That shows up the policy for what it is. This stunt is nothing to do with locally produced programming. This is no favour to the Scottish viewers. It’s all about money. Or so you would think. Quite how STV intends to increase advertising revenues by showing a load of cheap C-grade crap in place of what the viewers are actually expecting is a mystery to all.

STV Roulette is a prime example of STV’s clueless desperation to make money. It is not as if ITV plc has a better record in this department. A couple of years ago it fell in love with the then-fashionable “quiz television” fad, where late-night viewers would be goaded into phoning a premium rate number to answer a question with no proper answer. ITV even set up an entire channel, ITV Play, dedicated to the genre. That was until the public realised they were being hoodwinked, bad publicity ensued and the whole quiz television industry backfired on itself.

At least ITV have got over the fad however. STV seems not to have noticed that it’s bad form to put on this sort of programming. It apparently has no qualms about dedicating 9 hours per week of its channel towards encouraging late-night (i.e. drunk) viewers to gamble.

Sometimes I wonder if STV’s real strategy is to deliberately drive itself into the ground. That way it wouldn’t have to bother with all of that pesky “catering to the viewers” or “making money” business like other commercial channels. Instead it could rely on subsidies for its eternal existence. Genius.

It is already going cap in hand asking for a £5 million subsidy in return for carrying out one of its obligations as a public service broadcaster. Apparently five mil a “reasonable sum”. I am not sure how many people would agree with that, though I reckon a lot of people would be more receptive to the request if they actually showed any sign of wishing to serve their viewers rather than going on some odd crusade of apparent self-destruction.

Watch STV? I’ll opt out, thanks.

It was revealed yesterday that Gordon Brown will spend part of his summer doing voluntary work in Kirkcaldy, the town where he grew up which forms the major part of his constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. It is also my home town.

Some uncharitable people have suggested that his job may involve digging holes, something he has done quite enough of as Prime Minister. More cutting might be the observation that voluntary work is the only sort of work you’ll be able to find in Kirkcaldy.

A couple of weeks ago, The Times ran a piece about the economic woes which have hit Kirkcaldy which was a talking point among some of my friends. Aside from apparently inventing the demonym “Kirkcaldians” (I personally prefer “Langtonian”, named after the town’s old nickname, the Lang Toun), I think the article is largely a fair and accurate reflection of the town.

I have written before about the sorry state of the Mercat, the town’s main shopping centre which used to house my former workplace, Woolworths. Over the difficult Christmas period the Mercat went from bad to worse. But it gets just a passing mention in the Times piece, with its mere eight or more empty units.

Apparently there are thirty empty units in the High Street. There is a particularly dire section in the middle of the pedestrianised zone, where three shops in a row — which used to be the Link, Adams and Icon Clothing — now lie empty. What remains has been criticised for exhibiting the characteristics of a clone town (PDF link). Beyond that, particularly in the west end, what isn’t a chain store is most likely a pawn shop or a charity shop.

Perhaps this is not particularly unusual. The death of the High Street has been widely advertised, so this is not a problem unique to Kirkcaldy. The Times article briefly touches on the retail park. It sits on the north-western edge of the town, well away from the centre. But it is currently being expanded, a development which feels like a desperately-needed shot in the arm for Kirkcaldy.

The problem is that it just is not enough. Indeed, the clamour over the few new jobs that are available serve to bring into focus just how dire the situation is. I have lost count of the number of people that I know of applying for the same few jobs.

A new B&Q has opened, although the old one closed. A number of my former colleagues at Woolworths have ended up working there. PC World is another new store at the retail park. But so many people I know applied for jobs there. A friend who got an interview there was told that they had been bombarded with over 700 applications.

If you got rejected by PC World, you could always try applying for a job at the new Toys R Us. The only problem is that they apparently had 3,000 applications. Only a lucky 350 got an interview, with just 40 places going.

An Argos Extra has also opened up. They held an assessment day at the Jobcentre a couple of months ago. I saw it with my own eyes as I walked past it. There were two queues coming out of the Jobcentre, one in each direction. I have been told that the larger of the two queues stretched all the way to the police station, which sits at the opposite end of a street which is the best part of 200 yards long.

The store has been open for just over a week now. The good news on that front is that my friend, who transferred to work there from the existing High Street store, reports that sales have been very encouraging. Whether that is simply down to the excitement of something new opening in Kirkcaldy remains to be seen.

As for the Jobcentre itself, that continues to hire new people, including one of my friends. What they’ll do with the new staff when demand for the Jobecentre’s services is not so strong is unclear. But at the moment that feels like a distant possibility anyway. Whenever I went there I was often told they were short staffed.

In the Times article, there is a quote about the Jobcentre by a man called Tam Collins: “they expect you to stack shelves at Asda.” I got exactly that when I visited the Jobcentre. Going there is a fruitless task which I have now given up.

The Asda is a new store which has opened up in neighbouring Glenrothes. It is probably the most exciting thing in terms of employment to happen in Glenrothes for years. That is another place where a few of my former Woolworths colleagues have ended up. In a way they were lucky — Asda received over 7,000 applications for that one store.

Meanwhile, the town’s largest employer, a call centre called MGt, has recently shed 65 jobs as a result of the closure of Setanta. 65 looks like a small number compared to the amount that are already looking for work. But MGt has provided a lifeline to Kirkcaldy in terms of employment since it set up around a decade ago. Today it has around 1,000 people on its books. I dread to think what Kirkcaldy would be like if it wasn’t for MGt. That even MGt is downsizing is ominous.

But that sums up Kirkcaldy. It lost its way after the industrial decline of the previous fifty years. Now if you want a job in Kirkcaldy you need to either work in a call centre or in the precarious retail sector. And even then, good luck to you. After my previous experience of working in retail, I am avoiding it if at all possible.

Seven months since losing my job at Woolworths, and over a year since I graduated, I still haven’t found a full time job (although I’m lucky to have found bits and pieces of freelance work). I have well and truly hit the buffers, and I am now starting with a blank sheet of paper to decide on my next move.

One of my biggest mistakes was to focus my search too narrowly on a small geographical area. I certainly didn’t bet on finding a job in Kirkcaldy — it was bad enough before and clearly getting worse. But I planned on finding something in the eastern part of the central belt — somewhere within an area encompassing Fife, Dundee, Perth, Stirling or of course Edinburgh. No luck yet. I will have to broaden my search further and hope that something comes up, or hope that I will be able to rely on freelance work in the long term. I wouldn’t like to bet on relying on getting a job at a call centre in Kirkcaldy.

It is sad that Kirkcaldy is like this. This is the town of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics who looked out onto the bustling Firth of Forth, full of trade ships, and was thereby inspired to investigate sources of wealth. Today he would only be inspired to investigate the weed growth in the derelict former workplaces.

Sadder is the role of Gordon Brown. Surely, some people say, if there was one man who could save Kirkcaldy, it would be the Prime Minister and former Chancellor, who grew up here and depends on the residents’ votes. Some are truly furious about it.

Others, as the Times article notes, inexplicably give him and the government the benefit of the doubt. Talking to people, it is genuinely true that there are people in Kirkcaldy who believe that Gordon Brown is a competent leader who has somehow been stitched up. Even for failed leaders, the halo effect is still in evidence.

That is the irony. The people of Kirkcaldy are probably the one set of voters in the country that Gordon Brown can afford to take for granted. Could it be that having the local man as Prime Minister has exacerbated Kirkcaldy’s problems?

It would indeed be harsh to lay the blame wholly at Gordon Brown’s door. Kirkcaldy had problems before, and most of what has happened in the past year can be put down to the global recession.

But the Labour Party is supposed to look after the interests of people who live and work in towns just like Kirkcaldy — a former industrial town that slips ever-further into the mire, with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. On the evidence I see with my own eyes, the Labour Party have failed us.

Have you noticed that there is a lot of introspection about devolution just now? I suppose it underlines the fact that devolution is a process rather than a settlement that everyone is still looking at how to tweak it. Maybe it is just the newness of it. The Scottish Parliament is very young as these things go, just ten years old. As such, there is inevitably a sense that we haven’t quite got it right yet.

Mind you, you can never get it “right”, in the sense that everyone will be happy. Westminster is as well-established as they come, and yet people are constantly suggesting reforms from every angle imaginable. That has, of course, gained even more momentum in the past year or so, particularly with expenses scandals and the like.

So it is only natural that people should be wagging their jaws about devolution all the time. But the chat has seemed particularly intense of late. The SNP are having a National Conversation, while the other major parties have thrown their lot in with the recently published Calman report.

I guess you can put a lot of this down to the fact that the SNP are in government. That was an epoch; completely new territory that demanded introspection. What are the reasons for the SNP being in power? Unless it is an anti-Labour vote (which, to be fair, is highly likely), it may be because people are unhappy with the constitutional situation as it stands. An SNP government is perceived to be a major step towards independence, even if a number of major hurdles remain.

The tenth anniversary of the Scottish Parliament is also a good excuse to look back on how devolution has panned out so far and to work out how to refine the system for the future. All of this has been a useful hook on which to hang Patrick Hannan’s latest book, A Useful Fiction, of which I recently received a copy to review.

But that is largely a marketing device. The tenth anniversary of devolution is barely, if at all, mentioned. Meanwhile, thoughts on the Calman Commission feel as though they have been slightly shoehorned in, rushing to mention it lest the book feel out of date by the time people get round to reading it.

But the book could not have been written six months ago. Indeed, the sheer amount of important events that actually happened in the past year or so (chief among them the credit crunch and the collapse of RBS and HBOS) become quite clear as you read the book. For that reason, it probably will feel out of date by the time many people get round to reading it. But that is the peril of writing a book about current events, especially a process as unpredictable as devolution.

Mind you, not all of the book is about current political events. That is simultaneously the book’s main strength and its main weakness. On the one hand, it ensures that the book isn’t completely preoccupied with political points that are very salient in 2009 but will be fish wrapper come 2010. On the other hand, any politics geeks who read the blurb and expect to be able to immerse themselves in interesting constitutional arguments will be disappointed.

While the second half of the book focuses very much on the politics of devolution, it takes a while for the book to reach that point. Much of the front end of the book is preoccupied with more general points about national identity. I spent a lot of my time thinking, “well there’s plenty about cricket, rugby, the meaning of flags and other cultural issues; but not much of the politics I was looking for”.

That is not to say the early part of the book is useless; far from it. These reflections on Britishness and the nature of national identity are fundamental to the subject, not to say interesting to read about. But I did feel as though the book was taking its time to deal with the questions I was seeking answers for.

But when the book does move on to ask these questions, answers are few and far between. In his review of the book, Will Patterson said that A Useful Fiction is a book for moderates, which is a good way of putting it.

It is not exactly to say that Patrick Hannan constantly flits cowardly around the middle ground. I did raise my eyebrows from time to time in the course of reading this book. But after making an interesting suggestion, he often fails to commit it. The reader feels almost like the victim of a practical joker who looks like he is passing you something only to snatch it away as you reach out for it.

This left me finishing the book feeling as though I had read an interesting book, but one that lacked any central themes or arguments. It makes me wonder what Patrick Hannan sat down to write the book for, other than to set out an interesting collection of thoughts on Britain’s constitutional situation.

Nonetheless, I would say it is well worth reading A Useful Fiction because it is an interesting collection of thoughts. It certainly provided me with some fresh perspectives and Mr Hannan is an engaging enough writer.

But if you think you’ll want to read it, I would hurry up before it gets overtaken by events.

Apologies for the lack of updates here. I have been particularly busy of late, and as some of you may know I have spent the past few days on a gallivant that came together at the last minute. I will probably write about it later. But as a result of the trip, I have fallen even further behind on updating this website.

However, on my train trip I finally got round to writing an article that I have been meaning to do for ages now. Scottish Unionist kindly invited me to write a guest post on his blog on my views on the union. In case you haven’t seen it already, you can read it here.

Thankfully, it seems as though the article has had a fairly positive response and has stimulated an interesting discussion, although I haven’t had the chance to read the comments properly yet. I will get round to them and respond when I get the chance.

In the meantime though, I have a to-do list twice as long as my arm. I have a couple of things up my sleeve for this website, so please keep an eye on here if you can, even if I’m not able to update it as much as I’d like to!

Here is the full text of an article written by Grant Thoms for his Tartan Hero blog on 24 November 2007:

Wendy’s in a ’spin’ again

It should have been third time lucky for Wendy Alexander and a head of communications for the Labour Group. First, Brian Lironi left within days of Wendy’s coronation. Then Babyface Marr spectacularly resigned last week after a bout of political Tourette’s Syndrome. Now, the third man, Gavin Yates is in a spin after his blog postings were reported by the Sunday Post and Sunday Herald.

In his blog (which has since been closed down, a fine example of bolting the stable door), he praised Alex Salmond as ‘a politician at the top of his game’ and lauded the SNP Government’s achievements in it’s first 100 days. Now we shall see if this ‘journalist’ will change his tune now Labour is paying for his pipes.

Today, the Tartan Hero stable finds its door bolted firmly shut. A message simply reads: “the blog at tartanhero.blogspot.com has been removed.” His blog posts are now being reported in The Herald.

It seems as though “Tartan Hero” has become the Tartan Feartie, scared of his own views. For the man the SNP were pinning their hopes on for the Glasgow North East by-election has now withdrawn from the contest, apparently afraid that his blog “would return to haunt him”.

We have seen this sort of thing before of course. As Tartan Hero’s post says, one of Wendy Alexander’s spin doctors, Gavin Yates, closed down his blog and deleted it. As I pointed out at the time, if you want to hide your blog then deleting it is pretty futile. You leave traces of yourself all over the place, and deleting your blog only brings attention to the fact that you might have something to hide.

In the case of Gavin Yates, I was still able to access all of his archives which were sitting in my Google Reader account. Anyone can access old RSS feeds in Google Reader as long as they were subscribed to the website while it was still being published.

This week The Herald says that “traces” of the Tartan Hero blog have been retrieved by Mr Thoms’s political opponents. In my Google Reader account I have found a bit more than “traces”. I have access to the full content of 684 of his articles. I think this is a very substantial proportion of his archives.

In the words of Lallands Peat Worrier, he has been “Indygalled“! We can add his name to the list which includes Gavin Yates (whom, ironically, he gloated about), “Indygal” Anne McLaughlin and Kezia Dugdale.

Anne McLaughlin’s blog made the news when she became an MSP. Journalists trawled her archives looking for anything vaguely juicy, and they found a few interesting comments about (and a few photographs of) other politicians, but not much more. After some of the offending content was deleted, and a brief hiatus, she continued blogging and the whole thing blew over.

Kezia Dugdale also took some time off her blog after deciding it was “far too risky a past-time”. I think she got in hot water a couple of times about some of the things she published. Now with a promise that she will “be a bit smarter” with her blogging activities, it remains one of the very best Scottish Labour blogs going.

Tartan Hero was not among my personal favourites (although I guess I should be grateful to him for once rather inexplicably deciding that this was the second best Scottish political blog!). But it was clearly a very popular blog and appeared to attract quite a wide audience. His opinions didn’t do him any harm then.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think there is anything in Tartan Hero’s archives which is worth getting too excited about, which makes the deletion all the more strange in my view. The Herald hints at worries about this views on gay rights and Catholic schools. Jeff (apparently with the scoop!) also pinpointed Catholic schools as a potential issue.

The thing is, Tartan Hero was always had quite a provocative style. The views were not particularly extreme, but they were forthright and strongly expressed.

It seems strange to me that a politician would get cold feet over political views they so vehemently expressed just a year or two ago. It can’t be a surprise that his writing would find itself in the spotlight. Indeed, that was surely the intention.

It is true that in the rough-and-tumble world of party politics, one’s character and history faces a different type of scrutiny, and the game is not often played very fairly. But Grant Thoms is surely an intelligent person who has presumably had his sights set on becoming a Parliamentarian for a while now. None of this can be a surprise to him and he will surely have seen it coming.

So the deletion of his blog does make me scratch my head a bit. Moreover, it looks particularly silly given what he wrote when Gavin Yates deleted his blog.

As I said the last time I tackled this issue, no doubt if someone tried hard enough they’d find plenty of material on my blog to use against me. After all, as a mere 22 23-year-old scamp who has been blogging since 2002, I have left a fairly thorough record of my opinions going back to the age of 16.

It’s not that my opinions as a 16-year-old were particularly invalid or wrong, but a lot of them will have changed. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that I have written something in the past that could be taken out of context and used against me.

I’d like to trust people to be responsible about it, but I wonder if it’s possible. Certainly, it is a sad reflection of the state of politics that astute bloggers feel the need to cover up their writing for fear of it being used against them and thwarting their political careers.

At least Anne McLaughlin and Kezia Dugdale have not been put off for good and have been able to continue blogging in the long run. I wonder if one day soon a modified version of Tartan Hero will return to the blogosphere.

I was interested in this recent article about SNP MSP Kenny Gibson’s comments about Reporting Scotland (via cobaltmale). For him, BBC Scotland’s flagship news programme is too parochial. Apparently the way to fix this would be the creation of a Scottish Six.

It would mean you would have less of the Mrs-McGlumpha’s-cat-caught-up-a-tree-type stories that you sometimes get on Reporting Scotland.

There would be things presented from an international perspective rather than at present, which is still on occasion mind-numbingly parochial in my view – that would be a better way forward.

Before proceeding, I should point out that I am in favour of the Scottish Six. But I do have one problem with the idea.

I don’t follow Kenny Gibson’s logic that by increasing the length of Reporting Scotland, you will have fewer cat-up-a-tree stories. Sure, a Scottish Six would cover all of the important international news and UK-wide news that is salient to Scottish viewers. But then what?

I would guess that on most days, that would fill 40 minutes tops. Don’t forget that a Scottish Six would remove any “Englandandwales”-only stories, which could easily trim five or ten minutes off the Six on many days.

Given that the current Six O’Clock News-and-Reporting Scotland slot is almost an hour long, it seems to me that there would be a lot of time to fill. When you consider that it is followed by the dire One Show, filled with its own type of cat-up-a-tree stories, the problem is accentuated. It’s bad enough having half an hour of dross on prime time BBC One. We don’t want even more.

Maybe it is a prestige thing though. A confidence thing. Part of the nationalist argument is that Scotland has latent abilities that are locked up as a result of its participation in the union. Maybe they also think that a Reporting Scotland with an upgraded “Scottish Six” status will result in the producers and journalists coming up with a better product. Who’s to say that’s not possible?

Perhaps the most lamentable thing about Reporting Scotland is not so much the quality of the programme, which I think is not too bad. The main problem is the fact that I couldn’t honestly tell you that today’s Reporting Scotland was all that different to the programme that existed before devolution. It is still presented as a local news programme; a disposable appendix of the Six.

This adds to the perception that the Scottish media has, counter-intuitively, withered in the devolution era. Faced with more news to report in the form of a devolved Parliament, Scotland’s media has in fact failed to step up to the plate and is by most accounts weaker than it has ever been.

Unlike the newspapers, Reporting Scotland is funded by the license fee. So it doesn’t feel the pinch in quite the same way as commercial outlets. Maybe there is an opportunity for BBC Scotland to fill the gap that is being left by Scotland’s media by going ahead and launching the Scottish Six.

There is still something inside me that doubts that the Scottish Six could successfully fill an hour-long slot. When you watch Reporting Scotland, most days they are already talking about sport (almost always football, and usually just Rangers or Celtic) just ten or fifteen minutes after the programme has started. With more time to fill, we might have to get used to the real cat-up-a-tree stories.

I saw this story on Scotsman.com today about the Scottish Parliament’s Public Petitions Committee attempting to reach out by using social media. Of course, I am all for the correct use of social media as a sensible and low-cost way for any organisation to communicate with the public and to allow people to get in contact. But there was something about this story that just seemed odd.

HOLYROOD chiefs are to use blogs, Wikipedia and YouTube to make Parliament more accessible to the public, they said today.

People petitioning Parliament will be able to provide videos and photographs.

And Holyrood’s Public Petitions Committee is to have its own blog and Wikipedia page.

It’s the mention of Wikipedia — twice — that tweaked my antenna. How exactly does Parliament intend to “use Wikipedia” to become more accessible to the public? Perhaps they meant using wikis, and got that confused with Wikipedia.

I decided to delve a bit further in case The Scotsman got the wrong end of the stick (which, let us face it, is fairly likely). But the Scottish Parliament’s press release seemed even odder.

As from today blogging, Wikipedia and YouTube will be some of the new social media tools introduced by the Public Petitions Committee as part of its report publication. The report is the result of a year-long inquiry into improving awareness and participation in the public petitions process.

Petitioners will be able to provide videos and photos about their petitions as part of the committee’s new blog page. A podcast, Wikipedia page and dvd about the Parliament’s public petitions system all signal the committee’s commitment in encouraging access to and awareness of the petitions process. The committee also supports the creation of local petitioning systems with local authorities.

I was still confused, so I took a look at the Public Petitions Committee’s report to see what the plans actually were. You can read the details of its plans to use social media under the heading “E-Based” (paragraph 84 onwards).

In paragraph 119 the Public Petitions Committee says: “We are launching, alongside this report, a dedicated Public Petitions Committee Wiki page.” The footnote takes you to this Wikipedia article. This is an article which was already deleted when I checked it early this afternoon, and remains deleted as I write this article.

The Public Petitions Committee’s attempt to use Wikipedia like this completely misunderstands what Wikipedia is for. A page such as the one the Public Petitions Committee tried to create is completely against Wikipedia guidelines. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not some kind of worthy version of Craigslist. They could try reading about What Wikipedia is not, notably that Wikipedia is not a soapbox:

Wikipedia is not a soapbox, a battleground, or a vehicle for propaganda and advertising… Therefore, content hosted in Wikipedia is not… [p]ropaganda, advocacy, or recruitment of any kind, commercial, political, religious, or otherwise…

[Content hosted in Wikipedia is not] Self-promotion. It can be tempting to write about yourself or projects in which you have a strong personal involvement. However, do remember that the standards for encyclopedic articles apply to such pages just like any other, including the requirement to maintain a neutral point of view, which is difficult when writing about yourself or about projects close to you.

An subject is considered worthy of an article on Wikipedia by the bottom-up processes upon which Wikipedia is based. It is not for the Public Petitions Committee to swan in and create a page for itself. Nor can it be the final arbiter on what that article contains. The report somewhat states in somewhat Orwellian fashion:

We are of course mindful of the ability to amend text given the ‘ongoing principle’ under which Wiki pages are created. Our clerks will monitor the page carefully to ensure it remains a factual and authoritative source of information about our public petitions process.

Moreover, Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook or scientific journal:

Wikipedia is an encyclopedic reference, not an instruction manual, guidebook, or textbook. Wikipedia articles should not read like… Internet guides. Wikipedia articles should not exist only to describe the nature, appearance or services a website offers, but should describe the site in an encyclopedic manner, offering detail on a website’s achievements, impact or historical significance…

In paragraph 109, the Public Petitions Committee itself says of its attempts to use social media that it is “not seen as ticking a box which says ‘look, we are doing this because everyone else is!’”. But this Wikipedia stunt has box-ticking written all over it. It has Dad-dancing written all over it.

I’m sure using Wikipedia to publicise the Scottish Parliament’s petitions process seemed like a good suggestion in a meeting room somewhere. But they could have done with having a bit more of an understanding of what Wikipedia actually is before actually proceeding with the idea.

Luckily, the Public Petitions Committee didn’t put all of its eggs in one basket. There will also be a “pod cast”, which currently seems to be a solitary MP3, tucked away at the bottom of the press release. Other than that, there is a promise to link to the Scottish Parliament’s own podcasts. There is no RSS feed and no option to subscribe.

Let’s look it up on the Public Petitions Committee’s new best friend Wikipedia. The article for Podcast is currently illustrated with a massive RSS icon. It says:

A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually either digital audio or video, that is made available for download via web syndication. The syndication aspect of the delivery is what differentiates podcasts from other ways of accessing files, such as simple download or streaming: it means that special client software applications known as podcatchers (such as Apple Inc.’s iTunes or Nullsoft’s Winamp) can automatically identify and retrieve new files in a series when they are made available, by accessing a centrally-maintained web feed that lists all files currently associated with that particular podcast. The files thus automatically downloaded are then stored locally on the user’s computer or other device, for offline use.

I therefore await the launch of some actual podcasts, not just MP3s branded as “pod casts”.

The Public Petitions Committee will also have a “blog page”. That can be found here and, in fairness, it doesn’t look all that bad. It looks like a good way to highlight the work of the Public Petitions Committee.

I think organisations like the Scottish Parliament should be using social media and web technologies more. So the Public Petitions Committee’s steps in this direction are welcome. The blog looks particularly promising.

But engaging with the public is about so much more than tossing around buzzwords like ‘Wikipedia’, ‘YouTube’ and ‘podcasts’. A proper understanding of social media would provide a better service to the public and waste fewer resources.

One thing that really stuck me about the leaflets from Ukip and the BNP for the recent European Parliamentary election was the fact that they were stuffed full of cheesy patriotic symbols — Union Flags, Spitfires, Winston Churchills and so on. Any electorate in the world will have a certain contingent who are enticed by nationalistic rhetoric at the expense of good policies.

In England, Ukip and the BNP have cornered this market pretty well, with the English Democrats also doing a good job of it. One thing that these three parties have in common — aside from their narrow nationalism — is the fact that they are all pretty vile.

Here in Scotland the nationalist vote is completely mopped up by the SNP. We all know that the SNP uses national symbols which appeal to base instincts which may entice certain types of voters. This gets up some people’s noses, including mine.

But the SNP have done a grand job by keeping a lid on the nastier side of nationalism. For this we can be thankful. All though there is, without a doubt, a nastier side to some of their supporters — as we have seen with the Cybernats — you won’t find these types of views coming from the mainstream of the party.

Indeed, the party is at pains to promote a progressive type of nationalism. They embrace civic nationalism. They reject ideas of Scottishness defined in terms of ethnicity. They avoid anti-English approaches. And we can be especially thankful that violent methods do not form part of the nationalist agenda in Scotland.

This is combined with progressive policies, including an enlightened approach to immigration and a positive agenda towards Europe. While in many other parts of the world nationalism may be equated with right-wing or fascist concepts, the SNP combine a nationalist ideology with a broadly centrist agenda.

Whatever the motives of the voters, the SNP’s form of nationalism is a great deal more tolerant — and tolerable — than the forms of nationalism we see from the likes of Ukip, the BNP, the French National Front, the Movement for a Better Hungary, or any number of extreme parties across the world.

Richard Thomson recently described the SNP as being part of “unquestionably the best behaved nationalist movement in the world”. Looking at the European election results and seeing where nationalist votes seem to go, it’s easy to agree with him.

A bit like the UK-wide result, but even more so, the result in Scotland was very static. In fact, in many ways, the outcome was totally predictable, and no seats changed hands.

But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any stories though. Indeed, it was historic because it is the first time the SNP have got the most votes in Scotland in a UK-wide election. And unlike the 2007 Scottish Parliamentary election, it wasn’t a narrow result either.

Indeed, the fact that Labour got the most votes in only three council areas underlines just how much Scotland has fallen out of love with Labour, something that seemed an impossibility just a few years ago. That bodes very well for the SNP in terms of future FPTP elections, which have always acted to keep SNP representation artificially low.

A couple of weeks ago I teased Jeff about recent opinion polls. In the rest of the UK — in a three-party system — Labour was well and truly in the doldrums, fighting for third in the high teens in opinion polls. But in Scotland’s four-party system, Labour were still a comfortable 2nd in the mid-20s.

In the end though, the SNP delivered a comprehensive drubbing to Labour in the European elections. The gap between the SNP and Labour is now over twice as large as the gap between Labour and the Conservatives. And that’s not as a result of how well the Conservatives are doing — their share of the vote went down.

While the UK-wide picture was largely about Labour losing votes and not much else, Scotland’s results were only partly about the Labour collapse. The SNP gained a lot more than Labour lost, so that can be seen as a sign that the Scottish voters are quite happy with the mid-term Scottish Government.

I’m tempted to suggest that the Lib Dems’ drop in support is partly due to the electorate’s perception of their performance in the Scottish Parliament. That would be me projecting my views on the entire electorate. I had gone off the Lib Dems a bit because of their poor performance in the Scottish Parliament, and it was only after investigating each of the parties that I realised they are probably the only party I could bring myself to vote for. If I hadn’t done that, I probably wouldn’t have voted.

The Greens didn’t come close to getting a Scottish seat, which must be massively disappointing for them. A near miss might have been tolerable, but according to the d’Hondt calculator I used, Scotland would have needed nine seats if the Greens were to take one.

Ukip suffered a noticeable dip in an already low level of support. Mind you, last time they were snapping at the Greens’ heels. This year they were far behind. They remain sixth, but are increasingly irrelevant in Scotland.

Meanwhile the BNP gained, but to a quite distant 7th. The BNP had just 2.5% of the vote, compared to a 6.2% share UK-wide. They were 9th in Scotland in 2004, so they have made a bit of a stride in Scotland. But they only gained around 8,000 extra votes. Much of the BNP’s advance can be attributed to the collapse of the SSP and the disappearance of Operation Christian Vote (which entered as part of the Christian People’s Alliance — a move that didn’t do them much good).

Scotland’s socialist titans continue their journey to obscurity. The SSP scraped together just 10,000 votes — six times fewer than the number of votes they got in 2004. Even the Socialist Labour Party, Arthur Scargill’s vanity project, got over twice as many votes as the SSP. The Socialist Labour Party didn’t even bother to enter the last European election. By beating the SSP so comfortably, they have certainly shown just how irrelevant the SSP have become. Those heady days when the SSP had six MSPs feels like so long ago now.

Tommy Sheridan threw his lot in with No2EU, which got even fewer votes. In fact, No2EU got even fewer votes than mystery man Duncan Robertson. That is no mean feat considering I had a struggle finding out anything about Mr Robertson at all prior to the election.

Right at the bottom of the heap was Jury Team, a candidate with which I sympathised a bit. Perhaps it goes to show that, despite the current crisis of confidence in mainstream politics, people still like the principle of party politics rather than taking a risk on an independent candidate.

The Europe-wide picture

The consensus seems to be that, Europe-wide, it was a good election for the centre-right. It certainly seems as though the governing centre-left parties have taken a bit of a battering, while voters seem content with centre-right governments.

Those of a socialist persuasion may well feel disgruntled. In the midst of an economic crisis which they say was caused by the excesses of capitalism, voters seem to have lost faith in socialist parties’ ability to deal with it. The far left also took a knock. On the other hand, the Green grouping is the one grouping (aside from non-aligned) to have increased its representation in the European Parliament.

Interestingly, despite the fact that apathy was the clear winner of the election across the EU, the main Eurosceptic grouping was almost totally wiped off the map, with the exception of Ukip. Perhaps domestic issues are the cause of this. But if 2004 was the breakthrough year for Eurosceptic parties (which led to the formation of the Independence / Democracy group), 2009 was the bump back to earth. As thing stand (and no doubt they will try to woo more MEPs on board), Ukip alone now account for almost two thirds of the grouping.

The main UK parties

The UK-only picture was rosier for Ukip, but only slightly. This year will be remembered for the fact that they finished 2nd ahead of Labour. But they would be deluding themselves if they believed this was because of a rise in support. Their increase in the share of the vote was a pretty titchy 0.3 percentage points. Indeed, they gained fewer votes than in 2004, and got just one extra MEP despite the huge collapse in trust of the major Westminster parties.

In a lot of ways, the UK picture as a whole is surprisingly static. Yes, there was a massive drop in support for Labour. But none of the major parties were in a position to capitalise, so everyone apart from Labour just shuffled up a bit. In the circumstances, the Conservatives ought to be pretty miffed that they lost votes and increased their vote share by just 1 percentage point. It doesn’t exactly look like a party with the momentum to take a Westminster landslide.

The Lib Dems, who arguably weren’t hurt nearly as much as Labour and the Tories by the expenses scandal, managed to reduce their share of the vote, which almost no other party did. Of course Labour’s share decreased. Plaid Cymru’s UK-wide share decreased, but their Wales-only share went up. The only other party to reduce its share of the vote was the Scottish Socialist Party, which has cemented its place in history by being consigned to it.

The BNP

The BNP made a different kind of history by winning two seats, which became the story of the election. It was probably inevitable that people would “blame” proportional representation for this. But the simple fact is that PR doesn’t vote fascists in — fascist voters do.

6.8% is not an inconsiderable share. Almost a million voters decided to put their cross next to the BNP on the ballot paper, and they didn’t do so by accident. Gerrymandering them out of existence will only exacerbate the problem.

That’s not to say that the closed party list system used for European Elections isn’t flawed, because it is — deeply so. But the corrupt First Past the Post system would only further increase the anger that people feel at being disenfranchised by the political system.

In a lot of ways, the BNP’s “success” is pretty unremarkable. In 2004 they were the sixth most successful party. This year, they were still the sixth most successful party. In the region where Nick Griffin won his seat, the North West, the BNP actually got fewer votes than in 2004.

The BNP only got seats because Labour’s collapse was so dramatic, and those former Labour votes went to a large variety of smaller parties. 11.3% of votes went to parties that weren’t among the top eight, compared to 8.3% that went to other parties in 2004 (and that was in the days of a relatively strong Respect party).

The BNP didn’t gain seats because they caught up with those in front. They gained seats because others joined the queue behind them. Despite still having five people in front of them, the BNP effectively moved closer to the front in relation to the entire queue — just because more people joined behind them.

Nonetheless, any attempts to ignore or belittle the BNP’s success, or to gerrymander it away, should be condemned. It is important to understand why people would come to vote for a fascist party, because that is the best way of defeating the ideology.

Luckily, YouGov have done a good job at finding out (more detail here). And — surprise surprise — it seems that BNP voters are mostly racist. That rather undermines the idea that people voted for the BNP just as a protest vote. With so many potential protest parties, why choose BNP? I guess they were at the top of many ballot papers, but that oughtn’t gain them so many votes. No, people vote for the BNP mostly because they are racists.

In difficult economic circumstances, people often turn to fascism. It is totally misguided to do so though. One potential plus side of the BNP gaining a couple of MEPs is the fact that the spotlight will now be shone on them, and people will see just how rotten their ideology is.

I will look at the Scottish results in a separate article