New party?

Yesterday, the National Health Action Party launched.

The idea behind the NHA Party is one I support: since the Labour Party is unable and unwilling to properly defend the NHS against the Tory attacks – unable because it is at present a minority party with an unpopular leader, unwilling because properly doing so would involve backtracking and acknowledging that the Labour Party itself went hellishly wrong during the Blair years – there must be political pressure on Labour to force them to act when, as I hope, they win the next election.

Founded by a group of health professionals, our party strongly opposes the Health and Social Care Act. We believe the Act is wrecking the NHS in England by allowing it to be broken up and sold off. We intend to put up around 50 candidates in carefully chosen general election constituencies, and we will urge the Labour party to repeal the Act. We’ll also field candidates in local council elections.

Party co-leader and cancer specialist Dr Clive Peedell said: “For generations we’ve trusted the NHS to be a safety net for everyone in times of need. Putting the values of business and the markets ahead of those of patients and communities will ruin the NHS. This destruction is being fast-tracked by Tory and coalition policies. We hope our new party will halt this process.”

Eleven years after 9/11

Four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gathers his national security team at Camp David for a war council. Wolfowitz argues that now is the perfect time to move against state sponsors of terrorism, including Iraq. But Powell tells the president that an international coalition would only come together for an attack on Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, not an invasion of Iraq.

The war council votes with Powell. Rumsfeld abstains. The president ultimately decides that the war’s first phase will be Afghanistan. The question of Iraq will be reconsidered later. The evolution of the Bush doctrine: chronology

Sorry to see Desmond Tutu in old age repeating silly anti-Blair propaganda. So much for truth and reconciliation. tonyblairoffice.org/news/entry/ton…

— Doug Chaplin (@dougchaplin) September 2, 2012

In March next year, it will be the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by the US, supported by the UK. In the past ten years, over a million people in Iraq have been killed and millions more have become refugees. George W. Bush and Tony Blair are responsible.

Making the LibDem Mistake

20 Scottish Labour, 18 Scottish National Party, 11 Conservative, 6 Scottish Green, and 3 Liberal Democrats. Now before the election all of the parties were talking about the necessity for “interparty cooperation”, but this is… well.

Dan Phillips at BetterNation:

So now comes the hard part. If you follow conventional wisdom, Labour gets to govern and SNP form the opposition, giving the Tories the mathematical possibility of getting in bed with the Reds while the Greens and Lib Dems are left in the cold.

For me that would be a crazy conclusion.

Leith Ward – Results

The candidates on 3rd May were:

• Chas Booth: Scottish Green Party
• Irvine Wallace McMinn: Liberal Party in Scotland
• Adam McVey: Scottish National Party
• Rob Munn: Scottish National Party
• Gordon Munro: Scottish Labour Party
• Nicola Ross: Scottish Conservative and Unionist
• Marjorie Thomas: Scottish Liberal Democrats

The incumbents were Munn (SNP), Munro (Labour), Thomas (LibDem). The turnout last time was 8,391 out of 16,178. The 2012 results are all on Edinburgh Council Elections, Ward 13 – Leith.

So on 3rd May at noon I made seven predictions. How well did I do? Under the cut.

A more equal council for Edinburgh?

Brian Monteith wrote just before five o’clock today:

we may at last be seeing the beginning of a much needed realignment of Scottish politics.

But in one huge respect, Scottish politics is still aligned exactly the way it was before the elections.

From 2008-2012, Edinburgh Council had 15 women councillors out of 58. (Elizabeth Maginnis, elected to Forth Ward for Labour in 2007, died in 2008, and the seat was held for Labour by a man.) From 2012-2017, unless by-elections change this, there will be 15 women out of 58.

Hyperlocal hustings – Southside

I’ve never organised a hustings before. But I may well do so again.

This one was almost impromptu. As I have mentioned, I’m backing Gordon Murdie – and he’s not standing in my ward. So instead of voting for him, I’m managing his blog: Gordon Murdie.

Southside/Newington hadn’t had a hustings at all: Steve Burgess, Gordon MacKenzie, and Cameron Rose, three out of the four incumbents, had been invited to speak at other non-local hustings. (And Rose had also subbed in for the Tory candidate for Leith Walk in the Spurtle hustings.)

This is by no means a formal, full, neutral report – I don’t take shorthand, there were two or three hyperlocal questions where neither question nor answer was fully comprehensible to someone from outside the area, and in all honesty, I took more detailed notes where the candidates’ answers interested me and rested my hand when the speaker wasn’t holding my interest. Politically, tribally, I’m pro-Labour and Scottish Green, anti-Tory, and (at least prior to the UK coalition) was prepared to consider voting LibDem and equally prepared to consider SNP, certainly in a council election. But in general I found at this hustings that my interest was held by the speaker rather than the party.

Place: The proprietor of the Braidburn Inn donated the use of his function suite and a few plates of sandwiches, very welcome since the hustings began at six. (I was last there for a Christmas Day lunch with family in the 1990s, but it’s the local pub/guest house for our chair and for Gordon Murdie. We could probably have fitted five dozen people into the room and it was small enough that microphones were not needed.)

Chair: Owen Dudley Edwards. He is a marvellous speaker and well-experienced in keeping a meeting pleasantly in order and keeping candidates to time. (One member of the audience said to me afterwards “He just radiates calm…”) Though I had to borrow an heirloom wristwatch off Gordon Murdie to let OWD keep time – I use my mobile phone for occasions like this, and Owen Dudley Edwards does not do digital technology.

Who Came And Who Didn’t: The hustings was organised on a week’s notice, on Tuesday 1st May, in order to give as much notice as possible while not using up a candidate’s time on the last night before election day. Proper hustings etiquette would have been to contact all candidates before fixing the date, but sheer pressure of time made that really impossible.

All of the election leaflets available for this ward are listed at Liberal Sellout.

An equal council for Edinburgh

On Thursday 3rd May, Edinburgh goes to the polls to elect a new council for the first time since 2007.

In 2007 we had the guddle of the ballots, and in the five years since the last set of councillors took office, we’ve had an economic crash, LibDems propping up a Tory government, the tenement statutory repairs scam come to light, a serious effort by the Tory, LibDem, and SNP groups on Edinburgh council to privatise our city parks and services (foiled when the SNP group switched sides to vote with Labour and the Greens), and of course… the trams.

Normally you can look at the previous elections and have a fair idea how things are going to go this time. But no one should take the 2007 election results as a guide. All we can be really sure of is that this time as last time, most of the councillors on 4th May will be men.

Defend Marriage

Years ago, I was asked to speak to an English group about the Scottish victory in repealing Section 28. The Labour government in the UK Parliament wanted rid of that monument to Tory homophobia, and they’d been frustrated once already by the House of Lords.

I spoke about the campaign funded by Brian Souter, hosted by the Daily Record, and fuelled by Archbishop Thomas Winning: and how it had been defeated by a simple majority of MSPs and a host of people suddenly turned activist by the billboards Souter paid for all over Scotland, to tell our families and neighbours and co-workers what hateful disgusting people we were. Brian Souter spent a million and he lost.

One of the things I remember from that meeting was a voice at the back from this stoutly-leftwing group of trade unionists and activists, saying angrily that Labour are the enemy. This was 2004, and I was not that keen on Labour myself at the time, but with regard to Section 28, that was foolish talk: we wanted Section 28 repealed in England and Wales, so did Labour, let’s take our allies where we can get them. There are some groups so vile they do not deserve to share a platform with civilised people, but none of the Parliamentary parties of the UK deserve to be categorised in that way.

Lifting the ban on marriage for same-sex couples is one of those obvious next steps on the road to equality.

Why is the Telegraph helping Labour get elected?

Lyall Duff thought he’d made his Facebook profile private. The lesson everyone should take from the Telegraph’s “investigative journalism” – finding a few ranty sweary posts and quoting or partially quoting them – is that Facebook is never reliably private.

The SNP have suspended Lyall Duff, but it is too late to take his name off the ballot for Murdostoun ward in North Lanarkshire: the Telegraph waited to disclose Lyall Duff’s posts until after the deadline precisely so that the SNP’s possibilities for damage limitation would be minimal. This will benefit Scottish Labour; they won a majority on North Lanarkshire council in 2007, and half of the seats in the Murdostoun ward. The Telegraph ran another story this morning with an opening:

Labour questioned why the SNP was prepared to pass new legislation cracking down on sectarianism in football matches but has so far refused to expel Lyall Duff. They accused the First Minister of crying “crocodile tears” over the affair.

Why are the Telegraph runing a press campaign to help Scottish Labour win one more seat in a local authority ward in North Lanarkshire?

Bradford West: Respect

Since May 2010, there have been six by-elections, and every one of them a hold for Labour until last night.

(BBC)

• George Galloway (Respect) 18,341 (55.89%, +52.83%)
• Imran Hussain (Labour) 8,201 (24.99%, -20.36%)
• Jackie Whiteley (Conservative) 2,746 (8.37%, -22.78%)
• Jeanette Sunderland (Liberal Democrat) 1,505 (4.59%, -7.08%)
• Sonja McNally (UKIP) 1,085 (3.31%, +1.31%)
• Dawud Islam (Green) 481 (1.47%, -0.85%)

Eoin Clarke very nicely shows that the biggest slide towards George Galloway was among Tory voters. (Update: And more realistically, Matthew Butcher notes that Galloway’s victory should be a wake-up call to the left – GG campaigned on an anti-austerity platform in a constituency where a Labour council had implemented ConDem cuts.)

But the 2010 election results for Bradford West had Labour winning with a margin over 14 percentage higher than the Tories: 2.9% of formerly-Tory voters were voting Labour: Bradford West was a safe seat, in ordinary UK Parliamentary understanding.