Save Diageo Jobs in Scotland

Here is a short video with some of the Diageo workers from Port Dundas and Kilmarnock who lobbied the Scottish Parliament today to get behind the campaign to save their jobs. They were supported by MSPs of all parties:

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It's a form of socialism without the politics

Liverpool's Bill Shankly once said he was the best manager in the game because he was never devious or cheated anyone. To me, he summed up what made football beautiful:

"Train the right way. Help each other. It's a form of socialism without the politics."

Shankly knew what he was talking about. He came from the Ayshire mining village of Glenbuck and started his working life emptying coal trucks. 

The local team, the famous Glenbuck Cherrypickers, produced some 50 players who made it as professionals before they folded in 1931, following the closure of the colliery. Not bad for a wee village whose population was never more than twelve hundred.

They included Bill's older brother, Bob Shankly, who won the League as manager of Dundee and took them to the semi-final of the European Cup in 1962-63. They defeated AC Milan 1-0 at Dens Park before losing 5-2 on aggregate after a heavy defeat in Italy.

Shankly believed that footballers should help their team mates in the same way that miners looked out for each other in the pit. I wonder what he would have thought of Eduardo? 

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Willie Bain - The Local Voice for Local People

Labour's candidate in Glasgow North East explains why he is standing to be the MP for his local area.

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Due process

Earlier this week Kenny MacAskill defended his decision to release Abdelbaset Ali Al-Megrahi to fellow members of the Scottish Parliament. His primary defence was one of ‘due process’.

However, as the evidence unfolds it is becoming increasingly clear that the decision to release Mr Al-Megrahi has all the hallmarks of an irrational and ‘Wednesbury’ unreasonable decision for want of due process.

If there had been time, I believe both the decision to release, and the decision to allow Mr Al-Megrahi to return to Libya, could have been challenged on a petition for judicial review. Consider some of the facts we now know.

The decision to release Mr Al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds was made upon medical evidence that he had less than three months to live. This week it became apparent that four prostate cancer specialists refused to say that Mr Al-Megrahi had less than three months to live.

It is understood that the Justice Minister disregarded four expert opinions in preference to the judgment of a prison GP with little experience of prostate cancer. If that is correct, that in itself would have given grounds for challenge.

The decision authorising Mr Al-Megrahi’s return to Libya was made because remaining in Scotland was ruled out as ‘Clear advice from senior police officers [was] the security implications of such a move would be severe’. That advice became opaque this week as Strathclyde Police disclosed they had not been asked whether they could manage the security implications of trasferring Mr Al-Megrahi to a secure residence in Scotland. If they had been asked they could have done so.

I have already flagged up other major contradictions in Kenny MacAskill’s judgment in my The Firm blog earlier this week. The ‘due process’ defence - now threadbare – is looking ridiculous.

For example, Mr MacAskill’s visit to Greenock prison continues to be hailed as necessary under ‘due process’ of consideration of the prisoner transfer application. Yet that application should have been automatically rejected as premature under ‘due process’.

At the end of the day all that remains is a legally flawed decision made on the grounds of political expediency.

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Fraser Nelson to edit the Spectator

Fraser Nelson is to become the new editor of the Spectator. The former Political Editor of The Scotsman is living proof that the devil has all the best tunes. 

A convinced Conservative with a public school accent, he is quite possibly the best political journalist of his generation. This correspondent first met him when he was learning his trade as a student hack at the Glasgow University Guardian. 

Channel 4 News reporter James Blake was part of the same generation of Glasgow students who now work in London.  

It is disappointing that, after ten years of devolution, our best talent still goes south and we have no equivalent of the Spectator, the New Statesman, or even a Radical Scotland. 

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A Valley in Spain called Jarama

STV's documentary on the Spanish Civil War has been a real treat with some wonderful archive interviews with Scots volunteers. The bravery and idealism shown by these old men who left their homes and families to fight Franco was inspiring.

Alan Clements, a history graduate who STV poached from the independent sector to become their Director of Content, was the programme's Executive Producer. He told The Times he wants the station to be "the broadcaster of choice for the people of Scotland". If this is how he intends to succeed then good luck to him.

Yousuf has a good posting on his blog so I won't go on about it at length. Instead, here is Pete Seeger's version of Jarama Valley. The song was written by Alex McDade, a soldier with the British Battalion who came from Possil in Glasgow.

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What the Tories really think of the NHS

This video shows Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan running down the NHS on American television.

The cruel logic of America's private health care system is that if you can't afford to pay then you will be treated as a charity case and not as an equal. 

I wonder how many other senior Conservatives share Daniel Hannan's extremist views about the NHS and want to undermine what Labour created in 1948? 

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Building for the Future

Cathy Jamieson makes the case for a step-change in Government policy to build more affordable homes for rent, on a visit to open a new development in Maidens, South Ayrshire.

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The Kerrs

From time to time I intend to use this blog to publish articles, or extracts of Tom Johnston's journalism.

Perhaps his most famous work is Our Scots Noble Families, which was first published in 1909. 

This classic text on land ownership in Scotland was so controversial that the newsagents John Menzies refused to sell it. 100 years later it has sold over 120,000 copies and is still in print.

The political climate of the day put the great aristocratic land owning families centre-stage. Johnston's polemic aimed to show that the aristocracy had only gained their wealth and power by exploitation and robbery on a grand scale. 

I thought I would begin with a topical name, so here is what he had to say about the Kerrs:

"It appears that not only the wicked but their descendants are allowed to flourish like the green bay tree. Here, in the Kers, we have the descendants of savage pirates, men who literally washed their hands in blood, men who stole without ceasing, and murdered without compunction, rewarded generation after generation with an annual payment of £145,554! 

"The founder of the Ker estates seems to have been a huntsman or forest-rover, who was taken under the patronage of the Douglases, and was, for some reason or other, given a charter of the lands of Altonburn and Nisbet. In 1451, James II gave the Kers the lands of Auldroxburgh "for payment of one silver penny at Whitsunday if demanded" and in 1488 James IV handed over "Roxburgh with its patronage of Maisondeau" for payment of "a red rose at the feet of St John the Baptist." It is well to have these accounts exact: they may be useful when the State demands restitution and the Duke makes an outcry for "compensation". The two supporters on the Roxburgh crest are "savages, each holding a beacon", and I can imagine nothing more appropriate, for with the Scotts and other robber clans, they were eternally at feud, and they carried their moonlighting and murdering right up to the streets of Edinburgh."

"At the Reformation of Church plunder period, the Kers absorbed the whole of the great property of Kelso Abbey, miles and miles of rich lands, baronies, lordships, mills, patronages, everything they could lay their hands upon, and the sole excuse given for this shameless rapacity is that "Sir Robert Kerr of Cessford was a great favourite at Court." These estates are today enjoyed by Sir Robert Kerr's descendant, although we are told in Crawford's "Peerage", that the Kerrs were forced to hand back about 20 churches and their tithes to the Crown. The first Earl was Privy Seal to Charles I, was notorious for his cruelty, and was long remembered for his discgraceful betrayal of Montrose. They specialised in open rapine, these Kers."       

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Religious intolerance has no place in politics

There are whispers that the writ will be moved for the Glasgow North East by-election tomorrow, meaning that the contest would take place in August. 

I don't know if this is right, but from a Labour perspective a summer election is attractive because the SNP's struggle to select a candidate has given them a shambolic start.

The Nationalists finally rested on David Kerr, but he is already on the back foot over snobbish comments to students that Glasgow Caledonian University is so bad it "doesn't have a reputation to tarnish". 

I reckon there is so much in his politics to disagree with that it is unnecessary to turn the clock back fifty years and focus on his religious beliefs, as some journalists have done.

Nobody has made the case against religious prejudice better than John F. Kennedy, who in 1960 became the first Catholic President of the United States.

In one of his most famous speeches during the campaign he said, "I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President, who happens to be a Catholic."

His point was that this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed. In other years it had been - and could be again - a Jew or a Quaker or a Baptist. 

It saddens me that such questions still seem relevant in Scotland today. Religious intolerance has no place in politics and should be kept out of the by-election campaign.

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Kerr to pull out as SNP by-election candidate?

It looks like the SNP might be about to lose another by-election candidate in Glasgow North East. 

David Kerr is the hot favourite to become the party's candidate following James Dornan's decision to step down at the weekend, after newspaper allegations about his financial affairs. 

However, today's Scotsman reports that Kerr, "is having second thoughts because of the bad publicity surrounding the selection and the embarrassment of losing the first time round."

We should find out by the end of the week if a serious arm twisting has encouraged him to stay in the race. But this is turning into a real fiasco for the SNP.

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