I know that all politicos have a major boner for American politics and that this year is just one non-stop wet dream. But do our lot have to make their affection quite so blatant?

As Alex Massie noted a last week, at the Labour Party conference, Gordon Brown was setting himself up as the experienced man who can lead the country through these choppy waters. As he said, “This is no time for a novice. Zing!”

He is betting that, come the election, voters will choose “experience” over “change”. Does that sound familiar?

Today, David Cameron appeared to deliberately counter Gordon Brown’s line. He is “a man with a plan (on a canal in Panama)”. (Sorry to James Graham for stealing his joke.)

He continued by saying, “it’s not experience we need; it’s character and judgement.” He then did his best Bowie impression and used the word ‘change’ 20 times during his speech.

Do these guys really need to copy everything that happens in America? I mean, Gordon Brown’s wife was brought out in front of the Labour Conference as though she is a First Lady. David Cameron spent a minute or two talking about his wife (with a bit of cringe worthy Carry On-lite humour packaged with it), as though I give a monkey’s who his wife is.

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I always had the impression that the job of a First Lady is to provide a kind of ceremonial role, waving at the crowds and the like, because the USA (and France, and wherever) doesn’t have a royal family to do all that sort of stuff. Well the UK does have a royal family to do all that sort of stuff! Besides, Carla Bruni they are not (despite what The Daily Mail tries to tell you.)

Meanwhile, David Cameron was doing that awful thing where he looked as though he was facing the wrong direction. At least this time the people over his shoulder were recognisable faces rather than unknown greasy pole climbers-in-waiting. Unfortunately, George Osborne looked like he was constantly giving David Cameron an evil laser death stare. Watch him in the videos and you’ll see what I mean.

Another amusing aside to the conferences is the BBC’s word clouds. I couldn’t help but notice that Gordon Brown — leader of the Labour Party which distrusts people so much that it wants to issue you with a biometric ID card if you want to so much as scratch your arse — mentioned the word “people” more than any other word.

David Cameron — leader of the Conservative Party that is supposed to hate big government — used the word, er, “government” more than any other word.

Meanwhile, Nick Clegg, leader of the Lib Dems — the party that is said to sit on the fence on every matter — used both words an equally high number of times. At least one of the parties is true to form.

I have written before about how I struggle to understand how people feel ‘pride’ in their country at, say, sporting events. For me, being proud of your country is a bit like being proud of this week’s lottery numbers or something. I just don’t get it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that there has been some time to allow the result of the Glasgow East by-election, I feel like posting some thoughts that are less drunken and kneejerk than my previous post. Originally this was going to be one post, but I ended up blabbing for almost 3,000 words so I have split this into three separate posts which will appear one-by-one over the coming days.

First of all, I’ve spotted a few people south of the border wondering about the impact of the result on the union. For instance, Jennie at The Yorkeshire Gob, Jonathan Calder at Liberal England.

I might be on my own here, but my impression is that people in Scotland simply are not asking that same question. I must say that, as far as I can see it, the Glasgow East by-election result could hardly mean less for the union. Although the SNP are proud — and rightly so — of their victory last week, the reality is that this was much more of a Labour loss than an SNP win. Deep down, I think the SNP know that too.

I read (or heard, I can’t remember) a good analysis of Labour’s current woes. I have completely forgotten where I saw this, but the analysis was this. While the people of England and Wales have fallen out of love with Gordon Brown, the people of Scotland have fallen out of love of the Labour Party.

As regular readers may remember, I have from time to time been quite exasperated at how much people (perhaps particularly people south of the border) are still prepared to give the Labour Party the benefit of the doubt time and time again. I think now I understand why. The Labour Party in Scotland acts differently to the Labour Party in the rest of the UK. It’s certainly perceived differently.

Here in Scotland, voters smell the stench of corruption in the Labour Party. When you bear this in mind, as Holyrood Watcher points out, it’s not so difficult to understand why Labour lost in Glasgow East.

It is not just financial wrongdoings either — it’s a sense that Labour took its core voters for granted. There is a mega mega backlash against Labour in its core constituencies in Scotland.

Take my part of the world, Fife, as an example. Until recently, Fife was completely red apart from in the slightly more rural north-eastern part where Menzies Campbell enjoys a healthy majority.

That changed in 2006 when the Liberal Democrats took the Dunfermline and West Fife seat in a by-election, overturning a significant Labour majority. That was an election that Labour shouldn’t really have lost. But the loss was just blamed on Iraq, or whatever, and people shrugged their shoulders and carried on.

Then last year in the Scottish Parliamentary elections the SNP pulled off a surprise by winning Fife Central. It wasn’t the safest of Labour seats, but it was still a sign that Fife wasn’t quite the Labour heartland it used to be.

That was in the Scottish Parliamentary election. But if I remember correctly, the SNP are fairly confident that they will win the roughly corresponding Westminster constituency of Glenrothes. I have relatives in Glenrothes and apparently there is a lot of support for the SNP there.

Assuming the Lib Dems cling on to their two other seats in Fife, that would leave Labour with just one seat in Fife — Gordon Brown’s in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, where I live. Given the massive unpopularity of Gordon Brown at the moment, any “halo effect” there might have been will probably have vanished, and who is to say that the SNP cannot win here? Come the Westminster election I am planning to vote for the SNP to get rid of Labour.

And here is the thing. The SNP can probably count on much of its support for this reason. It is an anti-Labour thing rather than a pro-SNP thing. That can be seen from the fact that (according to my line of events anyway — your mileage may vary!) the ball was started rolling by the Lib Dems.

For a while I thought that the significant anti-Labour vote would mean that whichever party was in the best position to beat Labour in a particular constituency would grab the votes. Come the Scottish Parliamentary election it didn’t quite work out that way and the only real beneficiaries were the SNP.

I guess in the end the Lib Dems were unable to gain in the same way for a number of reasons. First of all, the media coverage made the election into a Labour vs. SNP battle pretty early on. Also, the Lib Dems did not run a great campaign from what I could see, and I never thought Nicol Stephen was up to much as leader.

Also, the Lib Dems were tainted by association. It was difficult for them to capitalise on the anti-Labour vote when they were having to spend the election campaign defending their record as part of a coalition partnership with Labour. That’s why the SNP capitalised on the Labour backlash and the Lib Dems didn’t.

If you want to experience a proper rollercoaster of emotions, just watch an election in which you despise both of the main parties to hell.

Firstly, I apologise to the voters of Glasgow East for doubting their ability to vote for someone who wasn’t wearing a red rosette.

I was just flabbergasted to come in from a night out to hear them talking on the radio as if Labour had lost. And then came the declaration and it turned out that they had lost. Just unbelievable. If Labour lose a seat like Glasgow East then they really are in serious trouble. There really is no such thing as a safe Labour seat any more. You can forget it.

But will the SNP people stop saying that this was a contest between the Scottish Government and the UK Government. It was not. In Wesminster elections you vote on Westminster issues. People might have thought they were voting for the SNP Government, but only because people from the SNP and other politicos keep on misleading voters about it.

And if any London-types are calling this “Gordon Brown’s backyard” when I wake up in the morning, I am going to kick a brick wall. I know Scotland has plenty of wealthy lairds, but none of them are rich enough for the WHOLE COUNTRY to be their back yard.

I’m just watching the BBC’s coverage and Alex Salmond is actually unbearable. I have been actually shaking with rage (I swear the shaking is not to do with the drink) at the sheer smugness of that man. It amazes me that the SNP only ever do well when he is in charge of that party. What on earth do people see in him? Gordon Brown might be dour, but at least he is not a total arsehole!!

Final thought. I’d like Labour’s woes to continue until the General Election. I’d love for this to happen in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, even if it means the SNP winning. If nothing else, it would enable me to use the heading “They’ll be dancing in the streets of Raith tonight.”

This post began as a response to Jeff in the comments to a post below. But it was getting long and waaay off topic. So I have decided to post it as a separate post.

To save you from trawling all the way through the discussion, we were basically wondering whether the SNP can afford to throw away student votes. I think we agreed that they probably can, because student votes don’t exist to a great extent anyway.

And you raise a good point about the students too. I do wonder how many of them really vote despite their protests and the like. Am I right in thinking that you were even considering not voting? If that’s the case then not much more proof is needed that student participation rates are low.

Jeff is right that I am considering not voting in the next election. It all depends on how annoyed I am at all the parties. Last time round I voted for everyone but Labour (even giving Solidarity my fourth choice!) in the local elections. Possibly in the general election I will throw my weight behind an anti-Gordon Brown tactical voting campaign since I live in his constituency. How funny would it be if he lost his seat? I can’t miss out on that opportunity!

But in general I am pretty disappointed in all of the parties. And given that I have almost zero chance of affecting the outcome anyway, I see little point in casting my vote. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m apathetic about politics, as you are surely aware.

I can’t speak for other students of course, but I think they are much like all young people, and to an extent people in general. Some are really interested in politics and will vote in any election no matter how inconsequential. But many, many others are entirely disenchanted with politics.

There is a stereotype that students are generally heavily interested in politics. Of course there is that element of loud-mouthed self-styled radicals. But they are in a pretty small minority. Most students, I bet, could not give two hoots about party politics. Even some politics students I’ve come across can be surprisingly poorly informed.

This has something to do with blogging as well. It used to perplex me — perhaps it still does — that you do not get more students blogging about politics. After all, students are supposed to be opinionated and earnest. And they often have plenty of spare time to dedicate to this sort of thing. Plus, all of this blogging and new technology — you might expect it to be a young person’s game.

But you don’t get many student political bloggers. From the top of my head, I can count them on one hand. Maybe I can count them on two fingers — including me. I remember once a survey revealed that the average age of readers of political blogs is 40.

Even among my mostly politically aware circle of friends, I probably know almost as many non-voters as voters. I am somewhere in the middle. For the time being I vote, but I don’t blame anyone for not voting.

Funnily enough, despite the general trend that people get more interested in politics (or at least are more likely to vote) as they get older, I have moved in the opposite direction. When I was as young as possibly 12 or 13 I was more earnest and couldn’t see why anyone wouldn’t vote. Now at 22 I am jaded and cynical and am more and more likely to abstain every day.

What does it say about me that I’m jaded and cynical at the age of 22? Imagine what I’ll be like when I’m actually an old codger…

Anyone disagree with me on students and politics? I know a few students (or graduands!) will be reading this, so what do you think?