Cute Cat Friday 2014-09-12: Belle

Did someone order a cat?

Scotland's Vote 19: My family and the forces of evil

The polls are close, and we are eight days away from the vote. Inevitably, the campaign is becoming more heated.

A major theme of the Yes campaign is that the UK cannot be reformed. As an audience member asked in the second debate, "Why aren't we already better together?"

The argument is that the British state is controlled by the forces of evil, and they are just too strong to be worth fighting directly. Power is held by corporations, including the media and above all the banks of the City of London, seeking to maximize profits at the expense of ordinary citizens. UK politicians in all parties are smooth, bland products of public schools and Oxbridge, and they want to perpetuate the system, not fundamentally change it. The archaic structure of Parliament makes it too difficult to reform. Scotland has a one-time opportunity to use an escape hatch, and try to build something better.

I have a lot of sympathy with this point of view. The British state has failed its citizens in all sorts of ways. Change has proved difficult, and the Labour government of 1997-2010 was disappointing at best. If Tony Blair and Gordon Brown represent the absolute limits of improvement within the UK, why not declare independence? (I will have much more to say about this in future posts.)

A second theme is that No voters are stupid. Or perhaps they are evil, or treasonous. According to Alex Salmond, the referendum is not a disagreement between Scots, but a struggle between "Team Scotland" and "Team Westminster". Clearly he does not think No voters are on Team Scotland.

In a way, this follows logically from the first part. Surely someone must be foolish, wicked, or both to support the continuation of a state which is so obviously beyond redemption.

A little bit of my family history is relevant here.

Scotland's Vote 18: Thorough Reality Analysis (Or Not)

Here is a much-needed distraction from the serious arguments about Scottish independence.

An opinion column in the New York Times had the following comment, from somebody called Chuck Brandt in Berlin:

I don't have any particular axe to grind in this contest, so I am merely passing along a bit of information that I came across at an after party. 

It seems that this particular date of the Scottish referendum, September 18, 2014, falls in an especially inauspicious period astrologically, that could terminally impair the vitality of the new independent Scottish nation likely to be conceived out of its aftermath. 

True, the actual process of independence would take place only circa 2016, but this 09/18/2014 is the critical relevant factor in the equation. Of course, you are free to go where your passions take you, but it would be far better if you sat down and did a thorough reality analysis. 

One more thing: if at all a new independent Scotland comes into being, and then when it goes to seed, a lot of us would've developed a healthy respect for the skills of that Berlin astrologer.

[Emphasis mine, grammar and American date format in original]

If Scotland votes Yes, it is alleged the positions of gigantic nuclear reactions billions of miles away give us a dire warning. Scotland will be befallen by some terrible doom: Unspecified in nature but possibly involving the Loch Ness Monster.

A man in the pub told me the SNP have denounced this claim. A druid has performed a reality analysis upon the entrails of a sheep (before making them into haggis) and pronounced the 18th of September to be an auspicious date for Scotland.

It would be altogether more interesting if Mr Brandt's friend had predicted the referendum result itself. I can't imagine why an astrologer would be reluctant to make testable predictions.

---

The column is by the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, and explains why it would be dangerous for an independent Scotland to continue using the UK pound sterling -- in an agreed currency union or otherwise. Krugman is horrified at the SNP's glib assurances that continued use of sterling would be good for Scotland. It's worth a read, although unlike the comment it is not funny at all.

Update 2014-09-09: Krugman has clarified the argument from his column in a short blog post.

Scotland's Vote 17: Poll Position

Today, for the first time, a mainstream poll has put Yes in the lead. The Sunday Times reports Yes 51%, No 49%, excluding undecided voters.

Here are my immediate reactions, in no particular order.

Congratulations are in order for the Yes campaign. Until a few weeks ago, No had a stubborn lead of between 10 and 20 points in the polls. It would have been very easy for Yes supporters to despair. Instead, they fought on with enthusiasm. It's impossible to know precisely what brought about this change in the polls, but some of the credit must lie with committed and energetic Yes campaigners.

The usual margin of error in polls is 3%. We will probably see some statistically illiterate commentary which claims any lead of less than 3% is meaningless, and the race is too close to call. In fact that margin for error is a 95% confidence interval, so with a 2% lead and 3% margin for error, there is a 95% chance that Yes is somewhere between 54% and 48%. Very roughly, there is less than one chance in three that No is still in the lead. These are not odds you would bet the farm on, but the chances are high that Yes is narrowly ahead.

No matter who wins the referendum, I hope the result is clear and decisive. A 51-49 split in either direction would be all right; but if this is settled by 100 votes, then almost certainly there would be legal challenges which dragged on for months. It would leave the eventual winner with a shaky and uncertain mandate to govern Scotland.

Back in July, I observed that about one-third of Scottish voters had expressed a positive opinion of the SNP government in Holyrood, but intended to vote No. I surmised they were willing to give the Yes side a fair hearing, but had not been convinced of the merits of independence. It seems the Yes campaign has convinced some of them. Not all but any means, but enough to make this into a contest; the SNP has had approval ratings of up to +23, while the current Yes lead is +2. By the same token, many potential supporters remain, so the Yes campaign could widen its lead.

If the No campaign wins, I believe a close win would be more beneficial than a narrow one. The former might just motivate the UK government into enacting serious reforms. These reforms could grant more autonomy to Scotland, and also protect its powers from being altered at the whim of the ruling party in Westminster.

The so-called devo max option entails greatly increased powers for the Scottish Parliament. If it had been on the ballot paper, it would have been extremely popular. If there is a very narrow majority for No, it might shock Westminster into implementing something like devo-max anyway.

I think the narrowing lead is a good thing. I don't want No to win by default. I don't necessarily want No to win at all, I am not committed to one side or the other. Let the winner be a group who had to fight for it. Let them try their hardest and deploy their very best and most persuasive arguments.  Let each voter make a positive choice, knowing that the result could plausibly go either way. Scotland deserves nothing less.

Cute Cat Friday 2014-08-05: Dexter

Next Monday the 8th of September, it will be exactly three years since we adopted Dexter. The Blue Cross animal shelter had found him wandering the streets of Cambridge, where he'd had a very hard time. Thankfully he is now happy and healthy in his life with us.

We'd never had a cat before, and I'm glad we were able to adopt Dexter. He is greatly loved and has brought us more happiness than I could have ever imagined. Here's to many more years with our furry little friend, who is pictured taking a cat nap in the garden.

Scotland's Vote 16: Scotland is not a colony

One argument for Scottish independence was expressed on Tuesday by George Monbiot in the Guardian:

Imagine the question posed the other way round. An independent nation is asked to decide whether to surrender its sovereignty to a larger union. It would be allowed a measure of autonomy, but key aspects of its governance would be handed to another nation. It would be used as a military base by the dominant power and yoked to an economy over which it had no control. It would have to be bloody desperate.

This ignores all the practical costs of creating an independent state; but let's leave that aside and move on to the point of principle. In a nutshell, Monbiot seems to be arguing Independence Is Always Good, so it should be taken whenever it is offered.

On the surface it looks plausible, because recent history has seen decolonisation on a vast scale. The empires of Britain, France, and other colonial powers were broken up, and later the USSR and Yugoslavia collapsed. The number of independent countries grew from 51 in 1945 to 159 in 1990 and 193 today.

These former empires were created and held together by military force. The colonies on the periphery were not given a vote in the central government. When the overlords in London, Paris or Moscow were unable or unwilling to apply enough violence to keep the empire together, it broke apart. Of course none of the new states created by this process want to go back to being subjugated.

In the heyday of the British Empire, how many seats did Australia have in the Parliament at Westminster? How many Indians or Nigerians served in the British Cabinet? None, and none.

When Britannia ruled the waves, Scotland was
imposing colonial rule, not receiving it.
Image source: Wikipedia

Scotland's situation is very different. It has 8.3% of the UK population, and 9.1% of the seats in the House of Commons. Scots have the same legal and political rights as any other citizens of the UK. They regularly rise to the highest offices of government; less than five years ago, the UK had a Scottish Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Scotland is not ruled by England; they are both components of a larger state, the United Kingdom.

Scotland's campaign for independence has been peaceful. The SNP won a free and democratic election. It wanted a referendum on independence, and that referendum is about to take place with the full cooperation of the UK government. Not a single shot has been fired. This is not the behaviour of an imperial power trying to impose its will.

Monbiot uses the language of colonialism to describe Scotland; but Scotland is not a colony. Pretending otherwise is inaccurate, and frankly insulting to genuine movements for liberation.

Conversely, there are many examples of smaller polities choosing to unite into a larger nation. Often the components have huge disparities of size; in the USA, California has 65 times the population of Wyoming. These unions include some of the richest and longest-lived democracies in the world: Switzerland, the USA, Canada, and the Netherlands to name a few.

The British state undoubtedly has serious flaws. In many ways it is undemocratic, and serves the interests of corporations and the rich rather than ordinary people; but these issues are not specific to Scotland. It would be grotesque to argue that a wealthy resident of Edinburgh's New Town is the victim of colonial oppression, while a single parent on benefits in the East End of London is not.

Is it better for Scotland to stay put and help to reform the UK, or seize the chance to leave? That is a much more interesting question which deserves its own blog post. But it is foolish and historically illiterate to say the UK should not continue to exist, simply because it is a union between nations.

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For: Review

I enjoyed the first Sin City film very much. It took every film noir and gangster cliche imaginable, and gleefully turned them up to eleven. Nine years later, the sequel Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is intermittently entertaining, but fails to deliver the swaggering good fun of its predecessor.