The white heather club with decollete

Scotland on Sunday is obsessed by Jackie:

Why do we cringe when Stewart Maxwell, the Scottish National Party's culture spokesman, demands, as he did the other day, that BBC Scotland's Hogmanay Live show is broadcast to the rest of the world as proof of its status as a "huge cultural asset"?
Why, indeed, are we remembering Jackie Bird's gaping dress and Aly Bain's lemon smile and the year the storms threatened to blow Edinburgh Castle clean off the rock and, before that, all the horrific heedrum-hodrum Hogmanay heucheramas "starring" Andy Stewart and Sydney Devine and Calum Kennedy serenading the sheep and, look out, it's the bloody Alexander Brothers, both of them?
Why? Because we're Scottish, of course.

I don't remember any gaping dress. And at the risk of dwelling upon unnecessary physicalities, is there anything there which might cause gaping?

I remember Ms Bird trying to sing a song, which was embarrassing for all concerned.

Weekend poem No 16

Metaphysics this week.

The grave's a fine and private place
But none I think do there embrace

Great poem - not sure about the sentiment.

To his Coy Mistress
by Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Oh dear...

As everyone else has decided to burden you with his or her predictions for 2007, I thought I might add my tuppenceworth. I have limited my prognostications to Scottish politics.

1. The outcome of the parliamentary elections in May will be as follows (current numbers of seats in brackets):

Labour 46 (50)
SNP 34 (26, including Presiding Officer)
LibDem 21 (17)
Greens 12 (7)
Conservatives 11 (17)
SSP/Solidarity 1 (6)
Others 4 (6)

2. As leader of the largest party, McConnell opens negotiations with the LibDems with a view to forming a coalition administration. After three weeks of prolonged bargaining, interspersed with internal party consultations, the proposed deal founders on the LibDem refusal to accept nuclear power stations or weapons and on Labour's refusal to accept a local income tax. The Daily Record reports that Stephen has been in constant secret contact with Salmond during the negotiations.

3. Salmond now opens negotiations with the LibDems and the Greens. These are successfully concluded three weeks later, when Salmond agrees to postpone any referendum on independence until 2010; he justifies this concession on the basis that his pre-election pledge of an immediate referendum would only have applied if the SNP had secured the largest number of seats. The centrepiece of the new coalition is a proposal for a local income tax. Parliament assembles to vote on the arrangements, but to no-one's surprise the new coalition fails to secure a majority when four SNP MSPs from the party's fundamentalist wing abstain and three LibDems vote against (allegedly because of having been leant on by Ming Campbell who has been horrified by this dalliance with the nationalists, which is not going to do any good for his Westminster prospects).

4. As it is now July, the Parliament goes into recess for two months. (Nothing is allowed to disrupt the MSPs' family friendly holidays.) The Executive is in effect being run by civil servants on a care and maintenance basis. Westminster, Whitehall and England look on, appalled. When it is revealed that the McConnells' summer holidays were spent at Lulu's villa in Torremolinos (The Daily Record went bananas), the Labour Party (encouraged, it is believed, by Prime Minister Brown) organises a leadership contest which, after a special party conference in September, is won by Iain Gray MSP (who has taken over John Home Robertson's seat). McConnell accepts defeat gracefully but regrets that he will no longer be the best small First Minister in the world.

5. In October, Gray succeeds in convincing the Tories, most of the LibDems and the Greens not to oppose a minority Labour administration which will treat each policy issue on its merits and it is duly approved by the Parliament. The legislative programme is anodyne in the extreme. Salmond resigns his Holyrood seat and his leadership of the SNP to return to Westminster. The Scottish political scene returns to its usual torpor. But nobody expects the Gray administration to survive for long. But attention has turned to the forthcoming UK election expected in spring 2008...

Joined up government

Extract from the First Minister's New Year message:

"There are still important changes we need to see through. We will improve the nutritional standards of the food in our schools."

Slightly unfortunate that on the previous day the First Minister's expert group came up with this (from the BBC):

Fish and chips, more salt, and some crisp products could be permitted on the school menu, under proposals put before the Scottish Parliament.
An expert group, set up by the Scottish Executive, said there should be a "more pragmatic" approach to nutrition to entice pupils back to school meals.

Homage to Catalonia

Matthew Parris of The Times is a writer that I greatly admire, but today he has decided to dip his toe into Scottish politics. He prescribes a new attitude (to describe it as a policy would be stretching matters) for the Tories towards... well, you tell me:

But rather than bewail its aggression or pick at its obvious inconsistencies, we Conservatives should consider the possibility that separatist politics in Scotland appeals to something real and deep in the electorate: a need that cannot be answered by scorn, or wished away.
If we sense this, we must ask ourselves a second question: can Conservatives, consistently with our own principles, try to answer this need in a way that reconciles it with our own hopes for Britain? I think the answer to both questions is “yes”. A Conservative vision of the Union could be of a deep and permanent alliance of equal nations within a common economy, each with the dignity of self-government, each raising taxes for what they did alone, and sharing taxes for what they did together. The disparities in population between England and Scotland will be fatal to this structure only if we want them to be. Other federations and unions take such problems in their stride.
Disparities in wealth will only prove a stumbling block it we want the Scots to stumble; there is otherwise no reason why the richer parts of the Union should not voluntarily help the poorer parts, as they always have, as makes sense in any common market.

Well OK, Mr P, but don't just blather on; tell us what you want the Tories to do precisely. Ms Goldie and her chums have accepted the fact of devolution; even Mr Cameron (after some initial swithering about the West Lothian Question) seems to have set his face against the more radical forms of English nationalism. Mr P, you now appear to be advocating fiscal autonomy, supplemented by English subsidies to maintain the financial status quo in terms of relative shares. Is this the case? Have you thought it through? After all, if the transfers of resources from the UK Exchequer are to continue, then what is the point?

And what is this talk of doing things together? Are you really suggesting that the Scottish Executive/Parliament (representing one of the 'equal nations') should have a role in determining a joint foreign or defence policy? And how would that work when a Scottish government wanted to scrap nuclear weapons?

Perhaps the lesson from Catalonia is that centre right parties in a devolutionary context are doomed to a minimalist existence? In which case, it really doesn't matter what either Mr Cameron or Ms Goldie does. But it does not really help when London/Catalonian journalists pontificate vaguely.

And she said it with a straight face...

Integrity and probity are not words that immediately spring to mind when thinking about the present government. But The Guardian reports:

Hazel Blears, the Labour party chairwoman, appealed to the media to stop prying. "I'm not privy to his private arrangements for his holiday. We are talking about big issues around pensions, energy, NHS, education - and yet right across the media it's tittle-tattle about where he's gone for his holidays," she told BBC Radio 4.
"All members of the government are always conscious of the need to have integrity, public probity: all those issues are important. For people to be crawling over the details of the prime minister's Christmas and New Year break, I just think is entirely wrong. You've had the reassurance from Downing Street that he is meeting the cost of his holiday, as he has done for previous holidays."

[my highlighting]

Given the events of the past year associated with Blair, Prescott, Jowell and so on, I can only admire the lady's chutzpah.

In praise of ... the BBC

for contracting to re-play Bob Dylan's themed radio shows. You can still hear them here.

How often can you cry 'Wolf'

Well, nothing happened. And I suppose that we should just be jolly grateful. Here was what The Guardian reported on 11 December:

An attempted terrorist attack in Britain in the run-up to Christmas is "highly likely", the home secretary, John Reid, warned yesterday.
"The threat in this country is very high indeed. It is at the second highest level and people now know that publicly, because we publish it on the web. And that means that it is highly likely that there'll be a terrorist attempt," Mr Reid told GMTV's Sunday programme.
"We know that the number of conspiracies of a major type are in the tens - 30 or round about that," he said, although he did not give the details of any plots.

And we'll all believe him the next time he issues such dire warnings?

The spongers

Could he not, just once, pay for his holidays? The BBC reports:

A British Airways plane carrying 343 passengers and crew including Tony Blair and his family has overrun the main runway at Miami Airport.
No-one on board the Boeing 747-400 plane was injured after the incident...
Evan Benn, a reporter for the Miami Herald newspaper, told BBC News Mr Blair was holidaying in Florida.
"The prime minister and his family are staying with Robin Gibb, the former Bee Gees star, who has a $10m [£5.1m] house here in Miami Beach," he said.
Downing Street confirmed Mr Blair was on his winter holidays but said it never comments on specific arrangements.

That's an interestingly novel part of our constitution. We are no longer allowed to know when or where the Prime Minister goes on holiday.

Burning up the planet

It's been no great secret over the past year or two, but The Independent has finally caught up with this:

A top adviser to Tony Blair on sustainable development and the environment has been accused of undermining government policy on curbing aviation pollution after it was revealed that he makes a 500-mile round trip by jet from Birmingham to Edinburgh each week.
Richard Wakeford, a senior civil servant in charge of the Scottish Executive's environment department, commutes to work in Edinburgh every week from his home in Gloucestershire producing an estimated 90kg of carbon dioxide.
Over the four years of his contract, Mr Wakeford is likely to travel as many as 94,000 air miles getting to work, accounting for approximately 17 tons of carbon dioxide. The figures do not include his weekly 100-mile round trip to Birmingham airport from his home outside Cheltenham, or the 20-mile round trip between Edinburgh airport and the headquarters of the Scottish Executive.
He refused to move to Scotland when he became department head nearly two years ago for "family reasons".
Mr Wakeford was chief executive of the Countryside Agency and a member of the Sustainable Development Commission which advised the Prime Minister on action to reduce CO2 emissions, including calling for more radical measures to curb airport development.

One wonders why he was thought appropriate for the job in the first place. And never mind the tons (or tonnes) of carbon. How does Mr Wakeford manage to fulfil his duties on a three and a half day week? He is seldom in the office before Monday afternoon and rarely on a Friday.

Wishful thinking?

I suppose that stranger things have happened, but I just can't see the Tories participating in a coalition with the SNP and the Greens. Nevertheless, this guy in The Herald does:

Far better, then, that Goldie should bite the bullet and join a rainbow coalition with the Nats and Greens. This would provide the Scottish Tories with a meaningful role. Not only would they be in power, but they would be the guardians of the Union, threatening to bring down the coalition if any attempt were made at wrecking Scotland's traditional partnership within the UK. Of course, the Tories would have to agree to the referendum on independence, but they would do so on the condition that they would use their ministerial positions and influence to campaign for a No vote. Also, they would insist such a referendum could only be con-sultative. There could never be a Referendum Bill, as constitutional affairs are reserved. Indeed, even the funding of a consultative referendum could be challenged in the courts.

Guardians of the union by agreeing to a (challengeable, consultative) referendum? It doesn't seem plausible. And what about other Tory policies? Pro-nuclear, more prisons, more PFI? Not really appealing to the SNP or the Greens, are they?

Never mind, I am sure that we will read much dafter notions before May.

Brucie

Your Christmas treat.

Move along now

No need for you to read this. It's for my records (and vanity).

Update: And again, for similar reasons.

Weekend poem No 15

A poem, a brief one, by Wendy Cope.

Christmas

At Christmas little children sing and merry bells jingle,
The cold winter air makes our hands and face tingle
And happy families go to church and cheerily they mingle
And the whole business is unbearably dreadful if you're single.

The Beatles

This takes me back a good few years.

You know what you can do with your goose fat...

The newspapers are full of advice about Christmas cooking. Janice Turner in The Times puts the boot into the ever so slightly portly Nigella:

How are you cooking your turkey on Monday? Surely you won’t simply shove it in the oven with a knob of butter? Has Nigella taught you nothing?
This week the nation goggled and gagged while the domestic goddess shoved a large bird in a bucket of salty water then added star anise, berries, maple syrup, parsley, an orange . . .
This is no longer cooking: it is shtick, Nigella as a parody of herself, fleshy and lubricious, tempting us into 3,000-calorie repasts, because they haven’t hurt her, saying hang the washing up (and sod the planet) with her chuckaway roasting tins.
My esteemed colleague Robert Crampton once wrote that the world can be divided into Cavaliers and Roundheads. And Nigella is the chef of the Cavaliers — louche, lazy and approximate. I’m missing the culinary Oliver Cromwell, the exacting mistress of the kitchen: this Christmas I’m going back to Delia.

Me, I'm going to my sister's. And when it comes to cooking, she is at least the equal to either Nigella (silly name!) or Delia.

The planet strikes back!

The Guardian pushes the joke a little too far, of course. If the passengers shivering in the tents at Heathrow could get their hands on the writer, he might be smiling on the other side of his face:

Freezing fog: what's not to like? I like to think I'm a caring kind of guy, even where arrogant sociopaths who pollute the skies are concerned, but - respect to all you air passengers huddled in your blankets out there - don't you think this might be the planet trying to tell you something?
And if, like me, you're lucky enough to be snug as a bug in a well-insulated home, doesn't this have to be one of the best environmental stories of the year? Don't you love Nature herself finally taking over, to ground the planes that helped make this the hottest year in history, forcing everyone on to trains and coaches instead? Sorry, but ever since this fog thing started, I haven't been able to wipe the smile off my face.

But one cannot deny a certain schadenfreude in those of us who are not expecting to grace the European ski slopes over the festive season. And our (slightly) guilty pleasure would have been enhanced by the fact that Heathrow (that modern temple to greenhouse gases) seems to have borne the brunt of the disruption, were it not for the fact that it had knock-on effects everywhere else.

London - a faraway place of which we know little

Why am I not surprised that Malcolm Chisholm's resignation does not merit even a mention in any of The Guardian, The Independent, The Times or The Telegraph?

Reference Guide

For surfers everywhere. The Guardian has updated its guide to the 100 most useful websites here.

The slough of despond

It is almost impossible to keep track of the mendacity of this government. Here are but a few examples:

From Martin Bell in Cif (here):

The Prime Minister said "There isn't a change of policy. Don't be under any doubt at all. British troops will remain until the job is done." This was simply untrue. Plans are being made to withdraw from the three main bases in Basra and from the logistics base at Shaibah, parts of which are already being dismantled.
Three of the battlegroups leaving in the spring will not be replaced. The remainder will be concentrated round Basra Air Station and will be drawn down as quickly as possible. By early summer, under almost any conceivable circumstances, the British will have handed over such control as they have to the Iraqis. Then it will be time to declare victory - or at least avoid defeat - and leave the field. The conditions for "success" are being redefined, and will certainly be much less than we went to war for.

From Jackie Ashley, also in Cif (here):

Using increasingly apocalyptic language, Blair talks of a "monumental struggle going on worldwide between those who believe in democracy and modernisation and the forces of reaction and extremism". For Mr Tony, speaking in Dubai yesterday, it is simply a matter of us and them: "Us is all those who believe in tolerance, respect for others and liberty. We must mobilise our alliance of moderation in this region and outside it to defeat the extremists."
How conveniently clear. How black and white. What an easy contrast. Yet this is the same Mr Tony who only a month ago was urging a dialogue with Syria and Iran upon an unwilling George Bush. This is the same Mr Tony who earlier this week insisted that solving the Israel-Palestine issue was the only way to defeat extremism.

From Mr Eugenides, in a splendid diatribe (here):

We are enraged because there’s not a soul, even in the Labour Party, who wouldn’t admit, privately, that John Prescott is sitting twiddling his thumbs – or diddling his typist – at taxpayers’ expense; and there’s not an employer in the land, private or public, who would react to allegations of misuse of government funds and property – and serial sexual harassment – by taking the papers out of his intray but leaving him with his salary, pension, perks, and office intact. And yet, such is the contempt with which we are treated, that this is exactly what has happened. Such is the volume and frequency of these stories now, such is the weight of evidence of the corruption and sleaze that has taken root, that we are reduced to shaking our heads mournfully, or snorting in derision, depending on our point of view and blood pressure on the day.

And finally from Adam Boulton of SkyNews (here) in a story that would be funny if it were not so dispiriting:

It was reported this morning that Mustaf Jamma, a key suspect in the killing of PC Sharon Beshenivsky, may have fled the country (using another passport) whilst wearing an Islamic veil. The suggestion was that checks on departure were not as stringent as one would hope.
So my first phone call was to West Yorkshire Police (PC Beshenivsky's constabulary). They refused to speculate on how Jamma may have left the country... on the record at least. The newspapers this morning cited "police sources".
Next, the Home Office; immigration controls come within John Reid's remit:
"Nothing to do with us", they said. "Embarkation controls haven't been in place since the late nineties. This is an airport security issue. Speak to BAA" [the company which controls Britain's airports].
...So next I make contact with a very harassed-sounding press officer at the BAA. He isn't very happy with the Home Office - to put it mildly:
"This isn't anything to do with us. It is the responsibility of airlines to check the identity of passengers travelling on their aircraft. This happens at two separate stages: at check-in and at the departure gate".
Back in the warm, it seems the Home Office have revised their position:
"It's a myth that there are no embarkation controls. Checks are carried out on an intelligence-led basis. In November alone there were 745 immigration offenders detected leaving Heathrow."