The GRA nonsense.

Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill: A consultation

In a statement to the Scottish Parliament in June, the Cabinet Secretary for Social Security and Older People, announced that the Scottish Government would consult on a draft Bill to reform the process by which trans people gain legal recognition of their lived gender through a Gender Recognition Certificate – a right they have had for 15 years. 

To comply with international human rights law, Scotland must have a system for obtaining legal gender recognition.  The current system is viewed by many applicants, or would-be applicants, as demeaning, lengthy, and stressful.

So there we have it; fine intentions. Who can argue against such a thing? It may of course be valid to take a step back and ask why any man or woman would want to say that they are anything other than the sex that they were born into.

What possible reason would a man decide that he 'ought' to be said to be a woman? Mental illness? Certainly, that's one possibility? Some sexist fetish to wear female clothes? Yep, tick box again. Is there any other good reason? I've yet to hear of one.

And then to take a step further and declare that a trans-woman (i.e. a bloke) is a woman, is so nutty that one would wonder if these are indeed the end of days. But not nutty. Actually hideously offensive. Every person on this planet was born to a woman. If a trans-gender activist could look back at their own birth - their mother carrying them for nine months, the labours of birth and then declare that trans-women are women, I do think their mother would drown them on the spot.

Post-election thoughts

They were immediate but of course I never got round to putting them down on paper. I mean, on a blog.

Acres of newsprint has been expended analysing the results - the fall of the 'red wall' and the part played by Corbyn in his own defeat - or was it our unsatisfactory Brexit position, largely the creation of Starmer (and the mass membership, it must be said).

What I was interested in was the split in the Labour vote - we all knew that there was a difficulty in holding a party together (from Hartlepool to Haringey or some such thing) which contained the 'authentic' old working class (residues thereof) with their social conservatism and the metropolitan youngsters with their liberal outlook. These strains currently bedevil all social democratic parties, but not it would seem, the SNP. They march on, as strongly as ever (still with a minority of the vote).

Now clearly they've managed to hold together their own unwieldy coalition of eco-friendly refugee-friendly trans-friendly metropolitans with a horde of outright flag-waving Westminster/Tory/English haters.

If one was to be mischievous and one was intent on causing difficulties, clearly there is a fault line which could just be worked upon.

Just sayin'

The Grievance Factory

One of the more tiresome aspects of the current Scottish political scene is where a daily outrage has to be tossed to the crowds to keep them in a state of revolutionary eagerness to storm the winter palace. 

There was Boris Johnson turning down any request for a second referendum (and especially not granting the powers to Holyrood to hold referenda whenever they want) by referencing the "once in a generation" comment made by Sturgeon and Salmond. It was "we never said once in a generation" (apart from it being in the White Paper). Foam foam foam!!!

Then Lisa Nandy who, prompted to discuss how to combat the SNP in Scotland said that we should look to places like Quebec and Catalonia where nationalism had been defeated by social justice.
Clearly that meant she favoured locking up Catalonians, after giving them a sound beating. Gerry Hassan went as far as calling it, " fundamental nationalism: a call to brutal uncompromising Labour state repression."
Oh, the foaming at the mooth which followed that.

And so it rolls on... the EU flag is being lowered. An outrage. Let's forget that the SNP campaigned against joining in 1975. Keir Starmer said what? Aux armes, citoyens, Formez vos bataillons, Marchons, marchons !

round and round...

The Street

After a break, it's time to have a bit of a download for posterity if nothing else. OK, nothing else. A General Election has been called. Probably the most important for decades. Or probably not. 

And the recent marches by 'All Under One Banner' is probably a good place to start. 

They attract the usual rabble rousers as speakers - Sheridan, Shepherd, Cherry ... but never Ms Sturgeon. 

This new age of direct democracy has a number of parallels to other places where representative democracy never took hold. Most notably, the middle eastern countries where the leader lives or dies by 'the street'. Jostling likely successors, whilst of course being utterly loyal, can play to the street's emotions. 

Sturgeon fired the starting gun for Indyref immediately after the EU referendum and her supporters rushed to mobilise. She of course knew that it just wasn't a runner - the underlying financial state of Scotland (the oil price!) has deteriorated (that Growth Commission seems to have been buried as unwelcome news) and there's no majority for leaving as she knows. But the street doesn't bother about that: #dissolvetheUnion #UDInow they proclaim, as if the world really was as simple as themselves. So she has to keep stringing them along: new speeches will be timetabled to reveal the.. timetable... some time soon.

The Street begins to get restive. The party loyalists appear on platforms denouncing the wicked Tories, the wicked Unionists to rapturous applause. La Sturgeon must sit in palace watching... and waiting... and worrying...

Andrew O'Hagan

Good lord, a real shot in the arm for the Nationalist Project - the esteemed Andrew O'Hagan, novelist, announced at the Edinburgh Book Festival that he's noo all for separation.

But from his speech, how do you square this -

"I have never believed writers should have anything to do with governments, and should never hitch their intellectual freedom to the shifting agendas of political parties, or the careers of those looking for votes.
I believed Alexander Solzenitzyn, many years ago, when he said that governments should be nervous of writers because each writer is a government in himself. The egotism of writers and that of politicians could scarcely be more different. What politicians want is power and what writers want — if they’re any good — is the truth beyond the facts, and to increase our capacity for wonder."

 and this - 

"If Mr Salmond had thought more about the currency question and less about how to unfurl a saltire flag over the Centre Court at Wimbledon, we might be standing now in the independent republic of Scotland"

with what follows in his own speech?
It's a quite remarkable imaginative tract, but that's all it is. Looked at rationally, it's all too easy to condemn it as a mass of woolly thinking, with huge dollops of romanticism. I don't expect O'Hagan to think about the currency question, but if he sets himself up as a seer and a leader we might expect that he at least gives it a bit of thought.
Enough of that, let's have some nuggets!

In my view, in the Internet of Things, Scotland is due to become one of the world’s strongest digital republics, a place whose institutions are daily enhanced and purified not only by the life of the country but by the life of all countries. We could one day be part of a neural network whose strongest boundaries are decency and goodness. The laws of Scotland will one day be both discreet and universal; right for the people of Leith, augmented by brilliance, and right for the people of Calcutta, restored and revised every minute in according to what we know and decide. 

That'll be a hard one to get through the Holyrood sub-committees - decency and goodness! Bless!

Scotland, your Scotland, is in the earliest days of a digital renaissance, when its greatest thinkers — David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson — are redeployed to address the questions of rights and responsibilities in the coming age of artificial intelligence, and where new thinkers, as yet unborn, will address what it means to be a Scottish person with Scottish instincts in a world of code and algorithms and digital money, in an endlessly open society of nations, Scotland teaching the world perhaps how to author a new Gettysburg Address for Peace; showing the globe — with historical examples — how to author a Vindication of the Rights of Robots.

 Look, I'm going to stop there - the above is just lovely but as close to meaningless as it's possible to get. "Scotland" can author a new Gettysburg? If it's possible for a nation to author speeches (I'm not clear about that) then what exactly is stopping us now? You want to bring back a border across an island to errr become endlessly open? As for Scottish people, with Scottish instincts ... so very inclusive, dontcha think?    
 

The missing half million

Well what a turn up for the books - Corbyn storms across the finishing line! Not as winner but that gap fairly came down. As for the hapless May, if she had few allies before, well, she’s got fewer noo.  What a fabulous fuck up. From hubris to humiliation, as the Guardian said.

 Up here of course, the main result was the SNP down from their historic high last time to 37% - and a remarkable upsurge in the Tory vote. I guess that’s a bit different from down south - Sturgeon remarkably continued overplaying her hand pushing another referendum and suffered the backlash. Why that is, when surely her own focus groups told her that it was a vote-loser, is something of a mystery.
Her diehard supporters might have liked her boasting in Leith the day before the election that the SNP was the party of Corbyn, but that really isn’t a message that goes down well in the Mearns, shall we say. And of course, the said same diehards were quick out the traps to lay the blame. After their vote collapsed by nearly half a million votes. Where? Kezia Dugdale of course! She told Labour voters to vote Tory! And so another nationalist narrative is sent off running, garnering momentum. Absolute nonsense, of course.  She'd previously said this -

KEZIA Dugdale wants Tory and LibDem supporters to help Labour oust SNP MPs, but not the other way round.
As she launched the party’s Scottish Manifesto, Ms Dugdale said in seats where Labour is the best placed to defeat the SNP voters should “think before they vote”.
However where where the Tories or LibDems are in a better position than Labour she told her party’s supporters to still vote Labour.

Clear enough?
Later in the campaign, when asked specifically how voters should best vote to defeat the SNP, she answered Sky News - 

“The reality is the vast majority of seats across Scotland, it’s only the Labour party that can beat the SNP. There are a few differences in the Borders and the Highlands where the Tories might be better placed but right across Scotland’s centre belt, where the vast majority of Scotland’s population lives, the only party that can beat the SNP is the Labour party.”

And that becomes Kezia telling Labour voters to vote Tory!

 

Those Local Elections May 2017

I recall them well - not as bad a result as we feared and indeed, clear signs of something more, as I posted on the Herald at the time (I know, I'm a bore) -

To be serious and reflective, don't the results show that NS's strategy of building independence by converting the SNP to a social democratic Party has reached its limit? In other words, she's done a good job at getting labour voters on board, but a sizeable number of labour people will stay with the UK Party for all sorts of reasons.
Meanwhile that strategy has to demonise the right wing faction in Scotland who only have a home in the Tories. How does she propose to win these fiscally and socially conservative elements to independence? She has no strategy for this at all, and her supporters, by vilifying their fellow Scots, are being hugely counterproductive.
She's shown her limitations - brought up in Glasgow, she thinks that all she needs is to garner labour votes. She's gone right up a dead end there.

Of course, I was wrong, she's from Ayrshire.