If you haven’t read my previous post explaining what I’m trying to do here, feel free to take a look.

In this post I will set out the thinking behind my views on Scottish independence.

For what it’s worth, I think within a couple of decades the idea of the independent nation state will almost be completely alien. In a lot of ways, it already is. In an increasingly globalised world, countries are increasingly defined not in terms of their own peculiar characteristics but in terms of their relationships with other countries.

For instance, we think of countries as being members of transnational organisations. Countries are usually members of organisations such as the EU, Nato, the UN, the Commonwealth, any number of free trade blocs, special relationships… I could go on.

I have never heard it suggested that the SNP, or supporters of independence as a whole, would wish to do away with Scotland’s membership and / or use of such transnational institutions and agreements (though I’m aware that the SNP is opposed to membership of Nato — just making the point that it’s not the principle of such institutions that the SNP objects to). Nor should they. But unquestionably each of these in some way limits the independence of any country that signs up to it.

So what makes these institutions good (or at least tolerable) while Westminster is so bad? What I struggle to understand about the independence supporter’s position is why there is seemingly no part for Westminster to play in any plans for Scotland’s future.

To bring us back on to common ground, I should point out that my views are almost certainly driven by the same motivations that drive the feelings behind support for independence. Notably this would be the principle of subsidiarity, which means that decisions should be taken at as local a level as feasibly possible. As such, I would support an extension of the Scottish Parliament’s powers in many areas.

But it seems to me unreal to believe that there can be no role for Westminster; that there should be no reserved matters. One thing that is pretty neat about the UK is that most of it is made up of Great Britain, a relatively conveniently-sized island. It is certainly not too big to be adequately governed. It would seem quite silly not to take advantage of this geographical reality.

There are surely areas where the economies of scale trump subsidiarity. Foreign policy and defence might be one area, although I understand that many supporters of independence would find this difficult to swallow after the Iraq War (though a lot of people in the rest of the UK find the Iraq War difficult to swallow as well.)

National disasters could be another area. For instance, the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak which affected both Scotland and England with Cumbria, right on the border, especially hit hard. In such a crisis situation, if the government had to place certain restrictions, or even emergency legislation had to be passed, it would be more efficient (and less costly) for there to be just one government involved rather than have to set up meetings so that you could get multiple governments to agree to a solution.

I’m not saying that it would be impossible for multiple governments to agree. But it would surely be efficient enough to make it worthwhile for there to be a UK-wide system in place. And having two governments involved would only double the chances of there being a cock-up, there is the danger that there will be crossed wires and so forth.

Of course, we are in a bit of a crisis at the moment. Alex Salmond has made much about what an independent Scotland maybe might have possibly been able to achieve. This is mostly fantasy talk though, because we have no way of knowing how an independent Scotland would have coped (meanwhile one of an independent Scotland’s blueprints, Iceland, is facing quite acute difficulty at the moment — sorry for straying off the fluffy consensus-seeking territory there!). I suspect Salmond is only using the crisis to advocate independence, but as leader of the SNP that’s his job.

But there has been plenty of hand-wringing among commentators about how difficult it has been to get world leaders to agree on the best way to tackle this global crisis. What if some kind of major crisis hit the former members of the UK and the leaders got into a stalemate? You can say we have that in this globalised world anyway and there’s nothing we can do about it. But creating even more failure points is hardly a constructive way to approach this.

So that is, in brief, the thinking behind my view on the constitution — how I see powers being distributed between Westminster and Holyrood. I’m delighted to see that Adopted Domain has already written his take on this, and I think our viewpoints are quite similar. A good start!

In the wake of Kezia Dugdale’s retirement from blogging, and having noted the often poisonous atmosphere that pervades some of the darkest corners of the Scottish blogosphere, I think now is a good time for me to come out with an idea that has been floating around in my head for the past few months.

This is an attempt to find the common ground in the constitutional viewpoints of SNP supporters and those of other persuasions. It recently struck me that we all have much more in common than we perhaps imagine.

The eureka moment came after I had a discussion in the pub with a card-carrying SNP member and full-on nationalist. We both sought to gain a good understanding of each other’s views and as the conversation went on we found that we had a lot more in common than we felt at first glance.

I set out my federalist position, using the opportunity to point out that the SNP, too, shares my view that having different powers at different levels of government can be a desirable thing. For instance, it is well-known that the SNP would wish for an independent Scotland to be a member of the European Union.

Furthermore, under current SNP policy, a very important policy instrument would never be controlled by Scotland. The SNP recognises that Scotland is not an optimal currency area, thanks to the large amount of trade Scotland does with the rest of the UK and the rest of the EU. Most likely, an SNP-designed independent Scotland would continue to use sterling in the short-to-medium term while adopting the euro in the longer term future. This means that monetary policy would be set either in London or in Frankfurt, not Edinburgh.

Already we see that the independence issue is not so black-and-white as some of the debates might lead you to believe. The SNP do not support full independence. I am sure that there are some people on the fringes who do, but they are thin on the ground and are certainly not represented in mainstream politics.

That means that there is not actually a great deal that separates the SNP from the ‘unionist’ parties. All of the major parties believe a similar thing. Admittedly they do so to varying degrees. At one end we have the Labour and Conservative position of maybe considering a greater degree of fiscal federalism. At the other, we have the likes of the Greens who want more powers for local government in addition to the Scottish Parliament. And the Lib Dems have long supported federalist solutions.

From my perspective, this is actually pretty damn close to being a consensus in Scottish politics. The introduction of a Scottish Parliament was almost seen as a given in 1997, but even then the Conservatives had a good bash at running a ‘no’ campaign. Were there to be a referendum on having increased fiscal powers for the Scottish Parliament a few years down the line, surely any ‘no’ campaign would be a pathetic laughing stock. Certainly, anyone calling for the abolition of the Scottish Parliament would be totally ignored.

It seems to me that most people now have very similar viewpoints on Scotland’s near-future constitutional direction. The differences are almost a matter of semantics, or at least of niggly details.

That was the conclusion I came to in the pub during this discussion. My nationalist sparring partner, if I understood him correctly, was more or less saying that once Scotland had fiscal powers it was more-or-less independent enough anyway. He was telling me, as a Lib Dem sympathiser, that given this huge amount of common ground the Lib Dems ought to be working with the SNP to try and advance these ideas.

In May 2007 I understood and supported the Lib Dems’ decision not to go into coalition with the SNP. There was a damaging perception that the Lib Dems would just get into bed with anyone so it was a good idea to try and put the lid on that. The flip-side, though, is that the Lib Dems are beginning to like an appendage of the Labour Party — and this isn’t the time to be that.

Worse still, particularly given the large amounts of common ground between the SNP and the Lib Dems on a variety of different issues, the Lib Dems are beginning to look like the sulky party. I am starting to think it would be much more constructive for the Lib Dems to start working with the SNP. Of course, given the relative success of the SNP minority administration so far, it wouldn’t be surprising if the SNP just thumbed their nose at any Lib Dem approach.

All-round, it is beginning to look like a huge missed opportunity. That underlines why I think we need to start focusing on the common ground rather than the minor differences and the petty squabbles.

Scotland sorely needs a proper national conversation right now. Unfortunately, the way things have worked out, we are having two conversations in tandem and the risk is that everyone is just preaching to the converted without actually taking in what ‘the others’ are saying. It’s not very constructive.

I think if everyone ditched the political posturing and the party rhetoric, the politicians and the people would probably find a lot to agree with. Am I right, or do you think I’m being a bit wide-eyed and naive? I want to try and find out.

Here is what I propose. As a starting point, I am going to ask if everyone believes that different powers should be held at different levels. This could be Scotland as part of the EU, Scotland as part of the UK and the EU, or whatever other permutations you care to come up with. I have already noted that I think almost everyone agrees with the principle of this. Am I wrong?

Once we get past the first hurdle, I want to understand why people believe that certain powers should be held by certain institutions. What powers should the Scottish Parliament have? In which areas would it be acceptable for Westminster to retain control? What would be the ideal role of the EU? If you think Westminster should be taken out of the equation completely, what is the reasoning behind that? I don’t necessarily want this to be a game of ‘fantasy constitution’. I’m only interested in realistic ideas.

I’ll post what I think the answers to these questions are within the next day. I hope some other bloggers join in so that we can see where we all agree and get a proper handle on where the disagreements come from.

Last week I was in the pub talking to a friend and we were talking about blogging. This person doesn’t know much about it, but he knows that I’m heavily interested in it. (NB. This person is a Labour Party supporter, which explains a lot.)

He asked me a really strange question. “So, who is it that’s in charge of blogging then?”

“What do you mean, ‘in charge’?”

“Well, there must be someone who’s behind it all.”

“What do you mean? No! It’s something that you do yourself! Anyone can set up a blog.”

I actually had to explain to him that there is no overlord that looks after the blogosphere. There is no official process. You don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to set up a blog.

And that’s the way it should be, right? Blogging — and, indeed, the internet as a whole — is fundamentally a medium of freedom. Blogging is about many of the things we value the most about freedom — of speech, protest, association. And for many oppressed people in this world who would otherwise not be allowed to express themselves, blogging offers the chance to speak out to a wide audience.

The day you have to ask permission to blog is the day you have to ask permission to express an opinion. (Of course, thanks to our friends in the Labour Government, you already do have to ask permission to express your opinion in this country — but that is a whole new blog post.) What amazes me is not just that some people think that’s the way it should be. It that they think it’s the way it already is and are so unconcerned about it.

Still, at least we know it’s not going to happen, right? Right?

Actually, no. Some poisonous person called Marianne Mikko wants to put a stop to all of that “expressing your opinion” nonsense. Marianno Mikko is an Estonian centre-left MEP. It would be someone on the left, wouldn’t it? If anyone asks me why I don’t see myself as being on the left, it is because the left contains people like this.

Here is what she has to say: “the blogosphere has so far been a haven of good intentions and relatively honest dealing. However, with blogs becoming commonplace, less principled people will want to use them”.

Clairwil’s sarcastic response is the only sensible one: “Oh God! I hate ‘less principled’ bloggers!”

And the solution for stopping less principled people from having a blog? Why, red tape of course!

I think the public is still very trusting towards blogs, it is still seen as sincere. And it should remain sincere. For that we need a quality mark, a disclosure of who is really writing and why.

It’s interesting that Ms Mikko thinks that the public trusts blogs, because it doesn’t seem that way to me. Take the aversion that many people have to Wikipedia. “You can’t trust that, you know — anyone can edit it,” they say. That is despite the fact that it contains few more errors than Encyclopædia Britannica does. You hear much the same things about bloggers. They’re not to be trusted. (Of course, the mainstream media is responsible and measured in all of its output!)

That’s just the beginning though. Here is what German ‘Liberal’ Jorgo Chatzimarkakis — a member of Germany’s “Free Democratic Party” — has to say:

bloggers cannot automatically be considered a threat, but imagine pressure groups, professional interests or any other groups using blogs to pass on their message.

Just imagine it! Imagine all those pressure groups. Imagine any other groups! All using tools to communicate with people! Isn’t it just shocking?

Mr Chatzimarkakis continues that blogs “can be seen as a threat”. A threat to what? His job? Then good! Honestly. If this is the sort of thing that comes out of Germany’s “Free Democratic” Party, I dread to think of the illiberal nonsense the other parties come out with.

The thing about it is that you are perfectly welcome to choose which blogs you trust and which you don’t. For me, there are of course some blogs that I trust more than others. I am happy with the decisions I make in this regard. And if it turns out I was wrong about a blog then I just change my mind. Easy.

So what on earth is this ‘quality mark’ nonsense all about? Do these people really think that we are unable to decide for ourselves what we can read on the internet? If these people get their way, soon enough the government will be telling us what to read. If the government tells me to read something though, that is a sure fire sign that I ought to steer clear of it.

Quality mark? Sounds more like skid mark to me.

This might be laughed off by some. But the fact that there are politicians even talking about this is enough to make my blood boil. How can these people have such scant regard for a fundamental right such as freedom of speech?

And, via the comments at The Devil’s Kitchen, it appears as though in Italy they are at an advanced stage of legislation requiring people to register their blogs. Not only that, they would have to pay a tax as well!

The Levi-Prodi law lays out that anyone with a blog or a website has to register it with the ROC, a register of the Communications Authority, produce certificates, pay a tax, even if they provide information without any intention to make money… the Levi-Prodi law obliges anyone who has a website or a blog to get a publishing company and to have a journalist who is on the register of professionals as the responsible director.
99% would close down.

Jesus Shite! Are we really headed down this road?

Ofcom has said that it is thinking about letting television stations broadcast more adverts. Ofcom are considering allowing nine minutes of advertising per hour. Currently an average of seven minutes per hour is allowed, although a maximum of twelve minutes in any one clock hour is permitted.

Longrider is a libertarian but reacts with horror to the news. Meanwhile, Craig is worried about the impact on coverage of Formula 1.

I am no fan of television adverts, but I have to say that I feel sorry for broadcasters in this respect. The comments on the article from Times Online are mostly negative, perhaps encapsulated by this one by Harry Taylor.

Surely not! Is there not too much advertising already, mostly purile, repetitive and often misleading?…

With all its faults give me the BBC.

Of course, if Times Online were to write an article about a proposed increase in the License Fee, everybody would be saying the opposite. But, as they say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Commercial broadcasters are expected to pull excellent programmes out of thin air with the minimum of advertisements. And as we’ve seen this year, another major form of revenue for broadcasters — premium-rate phone-lines — has become a bit of a taboo. People must accept that adverts are a necessary evil — but a balance must be struck.

But for all of their (supposedly) good intentions, a lot of Ofcom’s advertising regulations work against the viewer. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than Formula 1. F1 has the dubious honour of being the only sport event to be broadcast in the UK where adverts are showing during the action. And football fans complain about adverts during half time! Think about how F1 fans must feel!

Once again, it has to be accepted that adverts in F1 are a necessary evil. F1 is almost unique in that a Grand Prix can last anything from 90 minutes to two hours with no break in the action. (The only other sports I can think of that go on for so long with no breaks are long-distance running and cycling, which are usually not shown live by a commercial broadcaster.) Seemingly, this is just too long for ITV to go without showing an advert. This means that they can’t bunch them up at either side of the action as they do with football.

But does it have to be this way? Many F1 fans would be willing to see some form of compromise, but the solutions put forward are currently prohibited by Ofcom (PDF). The main culprit is pesky article 3.1:

Television advertising must be readily recognisable as such and kept quite separate from other parts of the programme service. Breaks containing advertising spots of any kind, including teleshopping spots, must be identified in vision and/or sound, for example station identifications going in and out of breaks.

This means that any way of ITV simultaneously showing both adverts and programming is prohibited. A split-screen solution is often proposed. One part of the screen contains the race action, perhaps as an inset in an advert. But it’s not allowed. Sky Sports News can do it because it is permitted as long as only text is displayed. But even a scrolling text service in this style would not be allowed on ITV, because the rules are stricter for ITV, Channel 4 and Channel Five.

Other reasonable compromises are also prohibited. For instance, ITV would not be allowed to broadcast audio advertisements while race pictures take up the screen. ITV could not even overlay text adverts on top of the race pictures.

All of this is not allowed by Ofcom, probably for noble reasons. But most F1 fans would love to have any one of these solutions over the current situation — where ITV interrupt the race completely and broadcast commercial breaks that last minutes.

Also working against F1 fans is the requirement that ITV must display an ident going in and out of commercial breaks. This prolongs the commerical break for yet more crucial seconds.

Indeed, if you are an F1 fan you might be tempted to suspect that Ofcom’s regulations were specifically designed to get in the way of F1 the most. Because, despite the constant references to how commercials should only appear at “natural breaks” of the programming, one paragraph — which was included specifically with ITV’s F1 coverage in mind — proves that this is all just for show.

In live coverage of long continuous events breaks may be taken at points where the focus of coverage shifts from one point to another of the event for example after a resume of the current placings in a race and before refocusing on a particular section of the race.

So even though there are no “natural breaks” in an F1 race, ITV may show adverts just by giving a run-down of the positions in the race before going to a break, and saying what lap the drivers are on when the adverts are finished.

I also reckon that the rules surrounding the amount and length of commercial breaks also works against F1 viewers. It also works against viewers of football, films, or any other long programme.

Now, my memory of what I am about to say is sketchy. It must have been almost a decade ago and I was still rather young. But I am sure that while I was on holiday in France I watched a commercial break that lasted several minutes. It felt like about fifteen, but it might have been ten minutes. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I would never have seen a commercial break last that long in the UK.

But these breaks were not included willy-nilly in the middle of programmes. The obscenely long commercial break was, in fact, placed out of harm’s way at the end of a football match (or a film, I can’t remember). It was there to make up for the lack of adverts during the programme.* So, while at first a commercial break lasting ten minutes may seem obscenely long, would not most of us prefer this kind of solution? One where the adverts were tucked away where we don’t have to see them?

As such, I would support a liberalisation — or at least a fundamental re-think — of advertising regulations. This is not only for the reasons I have outlined above, but for another reason which is the drive of my liberal view on most things.

Insiders at the regulator are keen to emphasise that they want to avoid coming close to US advert levels, which they believe would be unpalatable to British audiences.

If they were so unpalatable, broadcasters would of course not want to do this for fear of making viewers switch off. No regulations necessary — broadcasters will find the “correct” level of advertising naturally.

I suspect that a few years down the line we won’t have to worry about this at all. Due to the increasing prevalence of PVRs, soon enough we will all be able to record the programmes then fast-forward through the adverts. (I usually already do this when I watch Grands Prix because I am not in a position to watch the races live.)

Advertisers will have to find more and more creative ways to reach viewers. Product placement might be harder to regulate. And soon enough we probably won’t always even realise when we are watching adverts.

* I might actually be completely wrong about this, and the long commercial break may have been caused by some kind of technical mishap or something else. I did not know because I could not speak French, but the scenario I described seems most likely to me.

• Donald Findlay QC has been named as the new Pope
• The Commission for Racial Equality has employed Nick Griffin as its new head
• The BBC has unveiled Harold Shipman as the new presenter of Crimewatch
• Ann Widdecombe will be The Sun’s Page 3 girl tomorrow
• Pete Doherty has landed a new role as Drugs Tsar
• A bear will be asked to shit at the bottom of the ocean
• Tony Blair is now a Middle East peace envoy