Cross-party social

This is a reminder that the cross-party social night is this Friday at 8pm, meeting in the Middle Bar in Teviot. So all politicos at Edinburgh University - Nationalist, Labour, Tory, Liberal, Green, Socialist can get together for a blether and a chance to meet each other as fellow students and humans, and not (always) as implacable foes.

Public lecture by Alasdair Allan

This post is just a wee reminder that the public lecture by Dr. Alasdair Allan MSP will be tomorrow (Thursday) in Appleton Tower, Lecture Theatre 2, 7pm.

Dr. Allan is the Minister for Learning and Skills with responsibility for the Scots and Gaelic languages, and will be speaking on the subject of "Language and Politics in Scotland".

The event is free to attend.

Calling all new Freshers!

Hello and welcome to whichever one of Edinburgh's universities you are studying at! The next few years will be some of the best of your life, and if you want to make them even better, then drop in and have a chat with Edinburgh Universities Scottish Nationalist Association! We campaign for the restoration of Scottish Independence on and off campus, and put on plenty of social events to relax at with a drink to take your mind off all the hard work you'll surely be doing over the next 4 years. We meet weekly in the middle bar at Teviot (Edinburgh University's student union, in Bristo Square) on Tuesdays at 7pm, so pop along if you want to chat! We've already been to Napier University's society fair and got a great response, and held a pub quiz at the Pleasance where teams walked away with great prizes including whisky, buckfast and irn bru! If you want to find out more contact us via email at eusna@hotmail.co.uk, visit our facebook page at or come along to one of our meetings every tuesday in teviot at 7pm. University is a great time to meet new people and try new things, so if you're interested in our ideas, want to get involved in student politics, or just want to find a few people to have a drink with every tuesday night, come and get involved, or contact us to find out more! You won't regret it!

A Sense of Balance?

A Sense of Balance?

There's been a fair lot of comment in the last few days following the announcement by Tory leadership hopeful Murdo Fraser that he'll disband the Scots Tories and form a new centre-right party should he win the contest to replace Annabel Goldie. A lot of this comment has taken the form of backslapping among the Scottish left, congratulating ourselves on how our nation has sent them hamewards tae think again, how genetically social-democratic we are, and the odd word about Thatcher.

All of which has a certain measure of truth, but I'd be the first to chastise any Nationalist (or any other non-Tory Scot) for complacency. 1997 saw the Tories wiped out in Wales just as in Scotland, now they have 8 Welsh MPs. They had 9 AMs in 1999, now they have 14. Revival can happen, jst as can decline. That's not to say that the Tories are on the cusp if a comeback in Scotland (indeed, all the indications are the other way), but the Tories are people who know a thing or two about power, and we should never let our guard down.

That said, a Tory comeback at the moment does not seem to be on the cards, something which seems to dismay even those Scots who'd rather gouge their eyes out with a rusty spoon than vote Tory. These are folk who are convinced that we need a Tory presence in Scottish politics to provide balance from otherwise lefty tendencies.

I beg to differ.

Seeing healthy numbers of blue, red, green and yellow dots on charts of the parliament's seat distribution may appeal aesthetically, but think about what a Tory presence in our public discourse really means before you lend a sympathetic nod to the idea of “balance”.

The Tories, to be blunt, have been on the wrong side of almost every major debate most people can remember. Privatising industry. Gay rights. Devolution. Iraq. Hunting. Minimum pricing. The Tesco Tax. Land Reform. The Poll Tax. Proportional Representation. The great council house sell-off.

And look what they're getting up to in England – tuition fees through the roof, privatising swathes of the NHS, cutting public services to the bone.

If this is balance, then frankly, it's a balance we don't need. The longer we allow the voice of privilege to shriek in our halls of power, the longer we hold back our nation from true progress.


There's another angle to these calls for “balance” as well. John McTernan, writing over at LabourHame (http://www.labourhame.com/archives/1843), argues that we need more Tories to balance our body politic. Now, far be it from me to suspect that Tony Blair's former advisor, and the man who wrote in the Scotsman during this year's Scottish election that Labour were doing badly because they weren't negative enough, might have some broadly rightist sympathies. I'm sure such could not possibly be the case. No, he argues that Scottish politics needs the Tories so that the workload of attacking the SNP can be shared more equally and realistically among all the opposition parties. One commentator on the article goes further, saying:

“A reformed conservative Party could become a potential coalition partner for Labour, and why not? We have to bury our political differences (which have become smaller and smaller since the nineties) and present a united front to stand up for our Union. Never before in the history of British politics has an alliance been so vital.”

Is this what the Labour party has come to? The Union is now more important than the founding principles of Labour. The issue to be addressed is not the disgraceful fact that there is so little difference between Labour and the Constervatives (openly acknowledged). I could hardly believe what I was reading – the prospect of a Tory free, independent Scotland is something that sends the shivers down this Labourites spine! Living in Britain, shared alternately between the Tories and the rightward-drifting Labour is the best we hope for, so all hands on deck! What we have here is clearly no more about balance, but about desperate alliances to halt the prospect of Scotland going it alone.

This will not do. Whether Scotland does become independent or not in the next few years, the fact is that we are plainly developing a very separate political culture from that subsisting south of the border. As Murdo Fraser has noticed, that culture has little place for the voice of privatisation, cuts and privilege. Whether that voice continues to be represented by the Tory party as currently constituted, or in some other form, Scotland must continue to resist it. We must continue to bring our nation along the path of equality, of land reform, of renewable energy, of autonomy.

Will Murdo Fraser deliver that under any party banner? Awa an gie's peace.

The Deadliest River on Earth

You might not be immediately aware of it, but a force far deadlier than the alligators or piranhas in the Nile or Amazon stalks the still grey waters of the Clyde. The United Kingdom’s nuclear ‘deterrent’, Trident, is based at Faslane, just 25 miles from our largest city, Glasgow. Four submarines glide silently in and out of the Gare Loch, barely hinting at the awesome power within them. That’s 200 nuclear warheads, a stones throw away from over 1 million people. Now the Scottish people have repeatedly shown their opposition to these weapons being in Scottish waters, but UK governments of all parties have repeatedly point-blank refused to withdraw them.

Nuclear weapons are the most destructive objects ever devised by mankind. In their only wartime use so far, two of them killed over two hundred thousand people in Japan, most of them innocent civilians. They make no distinction between enemy soldier and innocent child. They lay waste to cities and leave whole areas drowned in radiation for years. And with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, they will not realistically be used in the foreseeable future.
The United Kingdom first obtained nuclear weapons in the early 50’s, when the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin said ‘we’ve got to have one and it’s got to have a bloody Union Jack on top of it’. Not a great deal has changed in 60 years. The government of the United Kingdom will never give up its nuclear weapons as long as they guarantee it a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Weapons with the capacity to kill millions are an extravagantly expensive vanity project so United Kingdom Prime Ministers can strut on the world stage as if the Empire never went away. Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money spent in service of a dead ideal and to massage the egos of those who still see Britain as a Great Power and not the rich, historical but not very powerful country that it really is and indeed should be.

Estimates vary, but Wikipedia tells me that Trident cost £12.9 billion pounds in 1996 and £280 million per year to run. That is a staggering amount of our money for an immoral weapons system that is nearing obsoleteness in the post-ideological world where threats are just as, if not more likely to come from non-state actors such as Al-Qaeda than an opposing country like the Soviet Union. It boils down to about one billion of that is Scotland’s share based on population. Think about that. What could we do if we had an extra billion to play with, and twenty million pounds extra per year? We could buy more state of the art equipment for our hospitals and schools. We could upgrade our roads and infrastructure. We could invest even more in green energy to provide the successor to the nuclear age, or afford to give tax breaks to enterprising companies and businessmen in that sector.

That’s why we need independence. To break away from the world stage posturing of the United Kingdom and concentrate not on weapons to kill millions but the problems that blight the lives of our people. A country that can afford to spend billions on nuclear weapons and millions on the monarchy but claims it can’t afford to pay for free university tuition in England or free personal care for the elderly as we have here in Scotland is not one that I want to be a part of.

Waking up to reality in the new Scotland

Well, it's finally happened. The people of Scotland are going to have the question of whether or not to become an independent state put to them in a democratic referendum. A lot of nationalists may be forgiven for thinking that this was it, we've won. After all, for the past few years we've been so fixated on simply getting the referendum, that it was easy to forget that we still have to win the thing!

Well, if nothing else, the results of the Scottish elections definitively put an end to any quibbling or petty arguments about the people of Scotland's choosing of their constitutional future. The starkness and definitive nature of the result can be seen in the raw parliamentary arithmetic, the electoral map, and on Youtube, in the shocked faces of candidates, both SNP and otherwise, as their results came in. All uncertainty has been removed, on both sides of the argument. Unionists have had to face up to the fact that, like it or not, there will be a referendum in which the people will exercise their democratic right to choose. To their credit, most of the intelligent ones among them (they do exist) have done so with good grace, and recognise their need to build a positive case for the Union if it is to be preserved. No doubt these same intelligent Unionists are thoroughly dismayed by the recent rumours that Lord Reid will be the man to lead their campaign.....

However, the immediacy and tangibility of the referendum we have long campaigned for also provides some challenges for we nationalists. Politically, nationalism and a desire for independence is what defines us, and it is the only thing that fully unites the SNP. We are a broad church, and whisper it, but without independence many of us would be very at home with Labour, the Lib Dems or the Tories. And yet, in recent years, we have not been doing much talking about independence. This is entirely understandable. The SNP is a nationalist party, but it rightly is also a realist and gradualist party. It has spent the last four years governing competently, addressing the major domestic policy issues and not wasting its time trying to persuade the Unionist majority in the parliament to take their heads out of the sand long enough to hold a referendum.

However this is no longer the case. The election result has put independence right into the spotlight, and has had many of us re-examining our reasons for wanting independence, of which there are as many as there are nationalists. Sometimes, hanging around only with nationalists means we can forget why we want independence, as we all take turns to agree with each other in conversation. Now, with independence cropping up in conversations with other friends, who may not necessarily immediately agree with us, we must get used to hearing our ideas challenged.

So, why do you want independence?

EUSNA on the campaign trail

With the Holyrood elections just around the corner, members of EUSNA have been getting involved in the campaign to re-elect the SNP. Over the last four years, the SNP has delivered for Scotland, and come May the people will have a straight choice between the SNP, fighting on a strong record of government and Labour, who over the last four years have offered nothing but negativity and knee-jerk reactionary responses to every initiative.



Members of EUSNA have been out leafleting for Marco Biagi, the SNP's candidate for Edinburgh Central. (visit the Facebook page for Marco's campaign here: http://www.facebook.com/Marco.Biagi.SNPforEdinburghCentral )

We will be getting ever more involved as the election draws nearer. Leafleting, hustings, debates... if you want to get involved, email us as: eusna@hotmail.co.uk



EUSNA members with Jim Eadie, the SNP's candidate for Edinburgh Southern (visit his campaign page here: http://www.edinburghsouthernsnp.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3&Itemid=5 )

Report from the debate...

A week or so back there was a debate at the University of Edinburgh about how best to respond to the cuts and fees currently dominating education debates. Our newest member, George Lerner, spoke on behalf of EUSNA. He reports...


A panel ended last Thursday to discuss the cuts, our SNP representative, just one of eight, concluded that the general mood was to chastise the major political parties, rile the fifty-person audience with unnerving commendation of bankers, and be subjected to the fawning ferocity of utopic talk that read very little into the problems and solutions faced by Scotland.

It began with an introduction; the beginning of a welcome political dialogue that was not reciprocated with reason granted by the expansive girth of the panel’s Scottish political connections. It included a Conservative, a Labour member, a Lib-Dem, and a Socialist in addition to an Anarchist, a Green, and a Feminist.

While each speaker was asked a question and each one granted the ability to give what was supposed to be a prompt reply, the overall topic of the debate was not Scotland. Indeed, a bystander could have been taken back; temporarily confused that he or she was seated near Westminster, discussing its problems, then really a mere three miles away from Scottish parliament and hundred times at that from London. Despite questions from our own Ben MacPherson and Euan Campbell, a scrappy performance was brought to bear coalescing under an umbrella of either the meanderingly redundant, involving stating with a remedial ‘if bankers do that, we’d be happy to have them leave,’ and party-toeing nihilism to include, ‘well Labour’s policy in Scotland doesn’t exist, so I guess I’ll just make it up as I go along.’ One must question whether bashing bankers, and it came up quite often, does any good. While I agreed that bankers and the banking sector needs to come under major restrictions, one should have mentioned that the banks which were bailed out or nationalized were all South of the Border. Most of the speakers believed that the protesters were doing the right thing. While I agreed that civil disobedience is necessary, nothing has ever accomplished by protesting your way out of it.

It should be noted, though, that the Feminist speaker, who did not have had applause in mind, should nonetheless be congratulated for not conforming to expectation, and discussing the problems directly. She said, ‘women could be most affected by the cuts since they are disproportionately represented in the humanities which are being cut 40 to 60 percent, than the marketable (science and business) degree.’

My thoughts from beginning to end were that the debate ignited few sparks. There were some passionate, albeit, pointed remarks from myself, George Lerner, but overall the mood was acquisitive and not dynamic. Intellectual debate was scorned and riding the bandwagon seemed like a much more enviable opportunity than seeing if Scotland’s perfunctory union with England could get any better. Indeed, not one member of the panel included a singular word in just one their remarks beginning or ending with: ‘Scotland.’ Instead, while the moderator tried their best to keep the panel, and the audience, at ease, the questions and answers were petty, trivial, vague and generalized.

To give one example of what I tried to do when the topic was close to tackling the deficit and cuts, it asked: are there alternatives to the cuts? To which my reply was: why not make it more efficient and save money that way? Surely, cutting out some English bureaucracy in the form of Trident, education, and other public services would go a long way to lessening the stranglehold of £170.8 billion? A budget deficient, which should have been pointed out, is greater than at any time in Scottish and English history except for the wartime needs of just two periods: the 1910s and 1940s. However, while
trying to conjure some reasoned arguments which could step the problems; I myself sometimes showed a lack of concision than the others had.

Speaking for the SNP is possibly one of the most difficult but rewarding opportunities that I could have enjoyed. And, while I should deal with the rancor of the audience and speakers more pristinely, I will make sure that the problems discussed in Scotland should have something to do with Scotland. That’s why I came onto the panel, and I think the audience, through grit and groaning understood my message to them at the end. It’s a much better solution for the SNP to be fighting battles against the banal interlocutors from other parties by explaining to them that if they live in Scotland they should help fight and put the priorities of the people living around the University of Edinburgh first before those of Westminster. That, without touching the education budget, the SNP is going to free up SNP £100m in local NHS spending, what would the other parties do? More cuts, ignore existing solutions for the deficit, and ignore Scotland.

- George Lerner

Iain Gray's at it again...

A while ago, I blogged on here about the economic dangers of letting Iain Gray’s fiscal illiteracy loose on Scotland’s economy. That a man who doesn’t know how Norway structures its $510,000,000,000 oil fund thinks he is qualified to say Scotland shouldn’t do the same is odd. That a man who hasn’t a clue about how the financial sector is structured should seek to be first minister of a country which has a large financial sector is worrying. But, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Gray himself opened a speech at the Fabian society some years back by admitting he knew nothing about the economy (http://joanmcalpine.typepad.com/joan_mcalpine/2010/12/oh-dear-kevin-the-teenager-has-got-over-excited-again-iain-gray-according-to-an-interview-in-scotland-on-sundaythinks-he.html). Perhaps he’ll take a crash course should his cohorts emerge victorious in May.
But while overseeing economic development is an important part of the job of First Minister, there are other things for the top man (or woman) in Scotland to see to. One if these is diplomacy. Iain Gray has demonstrated as poor a grasp of diplomacy as he has of economics during his lamentable tenure as Labour’s leader in the Scottish Parliament. He has drawn criticism from Ireland and Norway for misrepresenting them in his attacks on the SNP. Gray can now add Montenegro to his list – perhaps he’s trying to complete a set. Prior to Holyrood’s Christmas break, Gray attacked Alex Salmond for holding up Montenegro as an example of how independence could be achieved. When Salmond noted how the nation of Montenegro went from a plebiscite to UN membership in forty days, Gray lowped to his feet and immediately started mouthing off about ethnic cleansing (which didn’t happen in Montenegro) and two World Wars also being involved… the wars of course, had nothing to do with Montenegro’s independence and I seem to recall hearing that most of the rest of the world suffered then as well, but no matter. Just Gray getting his facts wrong again, nothing to see here, folks.

But, of course, it does matter. It matters to the people of Montenegro when they see their history being misrepresented in public by someone who ought to know matter, and it matters to the people of Scotland that their relations with other nations are not soured by such ill thought out rhetoric. Mark McLachlan at the Universality of Cheese reproduces an email from a Montenegrin friend about how this matters to them, (http://the-universality-of-cheese.blogspot.com/2011/01/nezavisna-crna-gora-nezavisna-scotland.html). The Montenegrin ambassador in London has written to Gray, Ed Milliband and several Scottish newspapers, but of course the arrogant Labour leadership have not bothered to issue an apology.
From the Scotsman:
In it [the letter], the Montenegro Charge D'Affairs, Marijana Zivkovic, writes: "I cannot help but feel deep regret about the way you chose to depict it (Montenegro] in your public statement." The sharply-worded letter to Gray has been copied to Labour leader Ed Miliband. Last night, the SNP said that Gray should withdraw his comments immediately.

Montenegro achieved independence in 2006 after a referendum and is an official candidate for membership of the European Union. In the letter to Gray, Zivkovic says: "Your statement that Montenegro was involved in 'ethnic cleansing' including your references to 'a war crimes tribunal and a UN peacekeeping mission' is simply incorrect.'

She adds: "It was the only former Yugoslav republic where neither war nor devastation took place in the last decade of the 20th century."

Is this really the kind of representation for our country that we want at international level? Gray and Labour are an embarrassment to Scotland, and we cannot let them get their grubby, blundering hands on power to embarrass us even more.