Rolled-up Trousers

Fancy some lunch?

That Glasgow Central is within reach of the SNP at this General Election has been devastatingly demonstrated this week.

The party is throwing itself behind this campaign and the public are responding. As has been widely reported, there was a fundraiser for the Glasgow Central campaign held this week which was packed out and raised much needed funds given we're up against multi-millionaire opponents.

The event sent shockwaves through the Labour ranks. The natural order of things was troubled. It is Labour who are meant to organise big dinners with the Asian community. There was a layer of people there hungry for change and willing to put the time and money into making it happen. They weren't the usual "community leaders" and chuntering classes.

The news coverage came from Labour's feeling of "How dare the SNP come onto our patch and raise sums of money too"! They even demanded to know whether diners knew they were donating to the SNP. Our donors have been phoned by the Sarwar family with demands to know why they are supporting us. Politics is rarely simple in the Asian community, typified by how the owners of the restaurant where the dinner was held, the Kabana, made a video of the event which is the one that was leaked to the media.

In the ensuing press coverage it has been hard to assess what the issue is. In the small print, issue has been made about food being consumed at the Scottish Parliament. Clarification has been sought from the authorities, and it has been made clear that the lunches can move elsewhere. Donors were not hung up on the Scottish Parliament aspect of it, and in fact were possibly even going to be put out having to go to Edinburgh.

We've then got the 'cash for access' aspect which apart from on the headlines, only a few have tentatively put forward because of the absurdity and hypocrisy of it. The donors/auction winners didn't need to win the auction to make whatever points they may or may not have. They were sitting a few yards away from Alex Salmond all evening. We're also talking about the most accessible First Minister we've had. I know all sorts of people, often of no real substance, who have successfully held meetings with him and Nicola Sturgeon just because they requested it. Some have tried to deride the comparison the SNP have made with charity auctions, but the principle is the same if you see it as 'cash for access'.

This takes us back to two points here - the first is that the opposition don't like the SNP raising money. And those donating to the campaign were an indication of the desire for change in Glasgow Central, and no amount of shenanigans of the type we've seen over the last few days from Labour is going to change that - in fact it's likely to harden it.

Labour's commitment to GARL

Labour in the Scottish Parliament have been complaining for months about the Glasgow Airport Rail Link not going ahead.

The uncomfortable fact for them though is that their manifesto back in 2003 promised us a Glasgow Airport Rail Link and they didn't produce it in the next four years. After the election, "delivering" the rail link was also in their coalition agreement with the Liberal Democrats.

It followed the previous parliamentary session where Iain Gray, then transport minister, announced in the Scottish Parliament on 9 October 2002 that it was one of the then Scottish Executive's "top priorities" (col 14500), and the plan was for work to begin in 2005. They didn't end up presenting a bill before Parliament till 2006.

Labour were in power till 2007. If GARL was such a top priority for them, why hasn't it been completed already? They like to harp on about manifesto commitments. Fact is that they didn't get round to GARL during the times of plenty.

This post was updated on 8 February 2010

Can war criminals be arrested in Scotland?

While the London government makes preparations to curtail the ability of courts to pursue war criminals, there has been no discussion of what this means to the Scottish legal system.

On first glance it may appear relatively simple. It is the UK government which has signed up to the relevant international treaties, so theoretically they run the show. They are not likely to be advocating withdrawing from international treaties though.

What the proposal from London is expected to be is that magistrates can no longer issue arrest warrants, and instead the Attorney General has veto, so that he can take into account political interests. Her equivalent in Scotland is the Lord Advocate who could take a different view on these matters.

Arrest warrants till now have been issued under the Criminal Justice Act 1988. This only though applies in England and Wales. What may be relevant in this regard instead in Scotland is Schedule 5 of the Scotland Act:

"observing and implementing international obligations, obligations under the Human Rights Convention, and obligations under community law."

If this is not considered encompassing though, the Scottish Parliament could theoretically legislate for it as criminal justice is a devolved matter. There then is the question of whether Scottish courts could bear the universal jursidiction of a war crimes trial. My understanding is that the position on this is unclear.

I'm not a lawyer, and my aim here is to kickstart a debate and get people thinking. If my analysis is correct, the Scottish position could do with tightening up on war crimes and it would be good to see that happen.

UPDATE: Craig Murray calls for the Lord Advocate to publish her opinion on the legality of the Iraq war, while Bill Wilson and a group of SNP MSPs begin action to have Tony Blair prosecuted in Scotland.

It was never about WMD

Anyone expecting a Frost-Nixon moment when Tony Blair appeared in front of the Iraq Inquiry was sorely disappointed, and an unfeasible optimist. It's not just because the inquiry's panel have all the forensic questioning ability of Frost in his latter days at the BBC.

It seems Nixon had a heart that at least eventually confessed, in a way that Blair's is entirely black.

If Iraq was about WMD, there is precedent for this kind of action. During Blair's own reign, he was involved in a previous bombing of Iraq, Operation Desert Fox, which was ostensibly about weakening Saddam's WMD capability. Bill Clinton when attacking Sudan also that year said he was targeting weapons, though that turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory.

So what this establishes is that WMD were a concern previously and action was taken on it. What changed after 2000 was the neoconservative ideology of occupation.The problem of course is that there were no WMD. If the evidence was actually "extensive, detailed and authoritative" those sites could easily have been hit directly.

I don't think despite Blair and Campbell's strenuous protestations that anyone seriously thinks this was the reason for war anyway. Blair's chief of staff Jonathan Powell told the Iraq Inquiry that more time for weapons inspectors wouldn't have made any difference as there were no WMD. What makes Blair's situation even more egregious, is not just the way Iraq has appeared like a classic war of exploitation for big business, but that Blair himself has become so personally enriched on the back of it.

His bank directorships and six-figure lecture deals in America are payback for his shoulder-to-shoulder wars with the draft dodger Bush. He'd not be raking in anywhere near the sums over there had it not been for the spotlight he generated for himself over there through Iraq. So no, he's not going to be sorry.

Ending the Scotland Office

The First Minister recently refreshed calls for the Scotland Office to be abolished.

Certainly it is struggling to explain its relevance. As the FM said:

"I think that it is better if departmental contact that the Scottish Government and its officials contact directly the relevant department. I don't think that an intermediary is particularly helpful on many occasions, and I think that would be more effective."

The Scotland Office's budget is said to be £7m. It increases bureaucracy. Labour might want Jim Murphy to continue using it as a platform to get on the media and attack the SNP, but that's not his job. 

The Scottish Secretary's position is akin to being the UK's ambassador in Scotland, but without the independence bit. Given Mr Murphy may well lose his seat at the election this year, perhaps he would be a candidate for such a role post-independence. Would just need to sharpen his diplomatic skills a bit.

The banks say they are "too big to fail." So let's make them smaller.

Jim Wallis:

When I recently told a few friends that my wife, Joy, and I had decided to close our little account at Bank of America and move our money to a local bank that has behaved more responsibly, I was amazed at the response. Religious leaders and pastors from around the country called to say that they, too, were ready to take their money out of the big banks that have shown such shameful morality and instead invest according to their values, by putting money into more local and community-based institutions.

So we've decided not just to remove our own money, but to invite other Christians, Jews and Muslims to do the same. Already we are hearing reports of whole congregations, groups of churches and faith-based organizations, from California to New York City, deciding to transfer their funds to local banks and credit unions.

The banks say they are "too big to fail." So let's make them smaller.

Using Miliband to sell Labour to Muslims

Mohammad Sarwar’s Muslim Friends of Labour initiative seemed to have slipped off the radar for a while.

There have been no reported donations for a few years now, but they are still attracting top level cabinet ministers to their events, with David Miliband the star attraction last week in Kensington.

It is an odd choice of person to try and sell Labour to a Muslim audience, much less elicit money from them. Mr Miliband is at the moment trying to find a way to stop Israelis being tried for war crimes in the UK, was supportive of the Gaza bombings himself, and typically dismissive of the Goldstone report. He dismissed the latter as “flawed”, albeit this is coming from the government that thinks Chilcot is a robust inquiry.

A couple of years ago, Miliband was forced to deny reports that he had visited relatives of his who were Israelis that lived in an illegal West Bank settlement, one of the biggest obstacles to peace. That report in the Jewish Chronicle has mysteriously vanished. The question of who these relatives are has never been answered.

Maybe they live in East Jerusalem. Miliband appears to be the architect of the UK Government’s current position where it is advocating a “shared Jerusalem”. With weasel words though, he told the MFL audience he backed a Palestinian state on 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital. He didn’t have the heart to tell them that he actually wants to change internationally accepted borders.

Obama's drones kill 700 Pakistanis

On the anniversary of Barack Obama's inauguration, I thought I'd post up the fact that US drone attacks killed 700 Pakistani civilians during 2009.

Of the 44 attacks, only 5 hit their intended targets.

The total already surpasses George W Bush's kill count in Pakistan.

Hat tip Pulse Media. Good read on drone attacks here.

Thieves in the night

This week my house was broken into. We were woken when they were at our front door at 5am. After hearing us get up they scarpered, but not before driving off with our car which they'd managed to get the keys for from the house.

Over the last few days I've been astonished at the number of people I know whose homes have been broken into at some stage or another. The numbers are inevitably going to be going up too with rising unemployment.

As people who have been through this know, it's a time of vulnerability. Your home isn't quite the same afterward. Possessions come and go, but the main thing is the family are fine and no one was hurt.

When I'm being philosophical about it, I did manage to get a look at the two boys who did it. And I do mean boys. They were very professional in how they drove off with the car, but they barely looked old enough to drive. What kind of circumstances must they have been brought up in, and live in currently, to be patrolling the streets when people are sleeping to do this kind of thing?

As my son asked innocently afterwards "Won't their mums ask where they got that car from?". If only life were that simple.

I'd like to thank family and friends who have been absolutely awesome in helping out these last few days.

Ferrets in a sack

The Labour Party tried yet again to hand Gordon Brown the sack last week, only to find themselves too busy fighting in the said receptacle to do anything with it.

It is the third time they have made a timid attempt to remove Mr Brown, only to find themselves paying unwitting homage to their leader in aping his decade of marches half way to the top of the hill against Tony Blair.

The obvious point is that the Labour Party, including the cabinet, have no confidence in the prime minister. It's just they don't have anything better. David Miliband didn't have the bottle when the need came to push and shove. However, the astonishing thing for me about last week was not just the so-lukewarm-it-was-actually-as-cold-as-the-weather endorsements of Gordon Brown by the obvious people, loyalists like Jim Murphy and proteges like Douglas Alexander were at it too.

Voters cannot then by into this Gordon Brown vs David Cameron dichotomy that Labour try to create, and not just because there is no difference between Labour and Tories apart from presentation.

In Glasgow Central, the electorate has a choice between a Labour MP and an SNP MP. If the former is elected, and Labour win power for five more years, he is going to spend his time on benches fighting amongst colleagues on how and when Gordon Brown is to be replaced. If Labour are in opposition, he is going to be spending his time in recriminations, finger pointing and yes, fighting with colleagues.

Only a solid block of SNP MPs, including one from Glasgow Central, will offer the coherence and cohesion that is needed during these times of national and international crisis to stand up for Glasgow and Scotland.