For a list of the current Friends of the Scottish Review, click here
Catherine Czerkawska and others
Ian Hamilton QC
Despite some of his politics, I always have had time for my fellow advocate, Ian Hamilton QC. Bar the national question, his trenchant analysis of many of the key issues often chimes with such progressive consensus as exists in Scotland. Yet he and Alex Wood (15 November), commenting on the forthcoming battle for Britain, test the fragility of that consensus.
Ian is correct – while defeat in the 2014 referendum (if he is right, the opening salvo in ‘neverendum’ referenda) should at least see off the question for the remotely foreseeable future, it does not end it. We live in a parliamentary democracy. Moreover, in Scotland we have now added to that already cobbled together constitutional landscape our infrequent recourse to the plebiscite. I trust we surely will see off secession but if, at some future date, 22nd or 23rd-century Scots voters (or others in these small islands) wish to revisit such 19th-century issues, who dares to stop them? That’s not ‘hokum’ – it is democracy.
But Ian and Mr Wood might do their opponents, not least their centre-left and Scottish opponents, the courtesy of acknowledging that we too want good things for our country and we too look for real change. I read Mr Wood’s musings while listening to radio reports on progress on tackling child poverty in the years since 1998. Admittedly, not enough done and not done fast enough, but 1.1 million children lifted out of poverty. That’s 1.1 million more than Ian, Mr Wood, still less Mr Salmond ever managed. Good people, like Alistair Darling and even more so Gordon Brown, secured that progressive advance.
For progressive folk, Brown’s political legacy in the UK must be judged by his role in winning the opening rounds in the currently stalled war on poverty and, not least, in creating the political climate where even the likes of Iain Duncan Smith have to assert that they will find better routes towards ending child poverty.
When Gordon Brown first started campaigning against child poverty, the likes of IDS and the Blessed Margaret were merrily increasing not just the numbers but the misery of such children. A refusal to acknowledge that advance, not least as an instance of sustained and determined political action grounded in ‘moral purpose’ (pace Wood) sounds more like spite than mere passing ignorance.
There surely should be scope in Scotland to recognise a common enemy and shared progressive goals? Yet the narrowing opportunity for such space to open up in the political landscape, at a time when Scotland faces existential challenges of the order of those in the 1980s, is seen in the antipathy of both correspondents for Labour. Small, if any, acknowledgement from either man that Scottish Labour’s worst political performance not only matches the SNP’s best but is, of course, a necessary component of their electoral strategy. While proclaiming centre-left values, both stand ready to see centrists (if one is minded to be generous in political classification) like Souter, Farmer, Mather, Stevenson and, of course, His Eckness to the fore.
Ian again is right that we finally saw off the Conservatives in Scotland (though for ‘we’ – read Labour voters) but does he seriously suggest, standing the evidence of their inaction over two administrations, that any of that last litany had even a passing interest in social justice when weighty matters as to the correct hue of the Saltire, lowering corporation tax, how many embassies we’ll be needing and elbowing our way into an unwelcoming EU and Nato needed their attention?
Ian might rest assured that those of us on the centre-left advocating that we are ‘Better Together’ are ‘all there’ and we will be there and waiting for him, Mr Wood et al to send them hamewards so that, at least for the foreseeable future, Scottish politics might properly focus on what really matters.
Brian Fitzpatrick is an advocate and former Labour MSP
