An appeal for reason and compassion in the gay marriage debate

With the publication at the beginning of this month of the Scottish Government's consultation, a starting gun of sorts was fired in a national debate about same sex marriage. I say "of sorts" because in reality folk have been campaigning on both sides of this issue for a long time. But we now have a rough timetable: the consultation period will end on 9 December, meaning we're likely to see committee evidence sessions in 2012, and completion of whatever legislation is decided upon by 2013. Naturally this has galvanised people into action.

The Daily Record chose to announce news of the government's plans in a half column story on page 17 of the next day's paper. When you consider the months of hysterical front pages with which they greeted the announcement of Section 28 repeal in 1999, it's clear they have come a long way. Most other newspapers gave the news similarly unsensational coverage.

In some ways this is unsurprising. We have seen a major shift in public opinion on gay rights, and specifically on gay marriage, in the last decade. The most recent results from the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey show that 61% of Scots agree that same sex couples should be allowed to marry. Newspapers are following their readerships.

There remains a solid bloc of opposition to gay marriage, and it is naturally finding ways to get its message across. Of course we should have no objection to this. All honest opinions should be heard, and it is only by engaging in debate that we will all be able to hone our own views.

But dishonesty, deliberate misrepresentation, distortion and vilification are things we should all object to, whichever side of the argument we are on. Because we know from the traumatic experience of the Section 28 battle how harmful they can be. 12 years ago the lies and hounding of the Keep the Clause campaign did serious harm to LGBT people across Scotland, as I wrote about earlier this year. Much of that harm was the result of the currency of pernicious lies about gay people, their relationships and their lives which was used to try to persuade MSPs to oppose a small step towards fair and equitable treatment.

There is a grave danger that that same currency of lies and hurt will resurface in the coming debate, and could have the same hugely damaging effect on vulnerable Scots.

Already Philip Tartaglia, the Catholic Bishop of Paisley, has claimed that the government has no right to define marriage - a simple falsehood, as evidenced by the many times governments have redefined marriage in the past.

Worse, Cardinal Keith O'Brien has claimed that gay relationship are "harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of those involved". This is an old lie sometimes justified by fake pseudo-scientific papers produced by the US religious right. He went on to claim that gay marriage is only supported by "a small minority of activists". In truth, not only do the majority of Scots support equal marriage, the majority of Catholics do too.

And this week we have seen the intervention of Brian Souter, the fundamentalist Christian who funded that homophobic campaign to the tune of £1m 12 years ago, echoing some of these same lines.

I think there is a real and grave danger that this debate will descend into the sort of hate speech and misinformation campaign that Keep the Clause embodied. I think that right now, as we see the first warning signs, we need to try, together, to stop it happening again.

I therefore call on all sides in the gay marriage debate in to agree to a set of basic decency principles, to try to ensure that statements which misrepresent, vilify or do harm to others are not the currency of our discourse, to thereby prevent a repetition of the harmful, painful promulgation of anti-gay sentiment we saw in the Section 28 debate, and to permit reasoned, fair debate on a polarising subject.

I hereby declare:

1. I will not lie or make false generalisations about the lives or behaviour of any group in our society.
2. I will not knowingly lie about, distort or misrepresent any material fact.
3. If something I believe to be fact is shown to be unreliable, I will immediately stop saying it, publicly retract previous statements, and make every effort to stop others repeating it too.
4. I will recognise the right of our democratically elected government to enact legislation according to our constitutional law.
   

I call upon church leaders, politicians of all parties, media organisations, campaign groups and all other participants in the coming debate to make the same declaration. Please let us discuss this issue without condemnation or vilification, but with respect, with honesty, and with compassion.

Thank you.

Put a cork in it, West Lothian

This is not Susan Boyle

This article was originally published on Amansaman.

This week an old, thorny question was in the news again. Harriett Baldwin, a Tory MP for nowhere near West Lothian, brought forward a private member’s bill in the House of Commons to try to settle the issue of MPs from non-English constituencies voting on English-only matters.

Private members bills are an important part of Westminster democracy. They allow any backbench MP to propose legislation to a largely empty parliament chamber, hold an entirely meaningless vote among a handful of MPs, and then barter with the government to try to get a small sliver of their argument into law.

Calling things obscure names because of events many years ago is also a strong Westminster tradition, which explains why the issue of MPs voting outside their geographic competence is known as the “West Lothian Question”.

In 1977, when “home rule” for Scotland seemed just around the corner, the then MP for West Lothian, Tam Dalyell, was a vocal opponent of devolution. He pointed out that if Scotland had a parliament which was in charge of things like health and education, and English MPs therefore had no say in those areas in Scotland, then the fact that Scottish MPs would continue to have a say in those areas in England was a bit tricksy.

People nodded sagely, some muttering under their breath about the state of his hair, and agreed that at some point, something would have to be done. Enoch Powell, the fun-loving member for South Down, christened this the “West Lothian Question”, possibly because he couldn’t spell Dalyell’s name, and the moniker stuck. Happily for Tam, the mooted home rule never materialised, the Tories took over, and his question was shelved until 1997, when Labour got back into power and immediately embarked on devolution.

Remarkably, Tam Dalyell was still an MP, though by this point after boundary changes, for Linlithgow. (Disappointingly the question was never re-christened as the Linlithgow Question.) Once again the point was made about this clear problem, once again people nodded sagely, but in those heady early days of the Blair years all problems seemed minor, the sun glinted off Tony’s teeth, and it was decided to deal with it in due course, at some point, but really not worry about it too much.

Okay, perhaps a more honest version of the story would be that, with a large number of Scottish MPs being Labour, and the Blair government pushing through difficult reforms to English public services, having Scots voting on English-only matters was really quite handy for ensuring bills got passed, actually.

Fast forward to today, and with a Conservative-led government now pushing through their own disastrous challenging legislation, the existence of a phalanx of Scottish MPs, all but one of whom isn’t a Tory, brings the question to life properly. Tam himself is, sadly, no longer an MP so is unable to take part in the parliamentary discussions. But despite the government’s polite dismissal of Mrs Baldwin’s bill, it seems something may actually be about to be done.

A commission – of experts, no less – has just been set up to look into the issue. They will no doubt report on the usual glacial parliamentary timelines, but it is possible that before the end of this parliament, restrictions will be placed on non-English MPs to stop them voting on English-only laws.

But as Pete Wishart, the SNP MP, said in Friday’s debate, there is an elegant solution to this problem. It isn’t, as he suggested, Scottish independence, because that would leave people in Wales and Northern Ireland still voting on England’s business. No, it is even more obvious than that. It’s devolution for England to match the devolution in every other UK nation.

A federal United Kingdom. It’s the perfect answer. It has just one tiny flaw: the English don’t want an English parliament. They’re happy with the one they’ve got because they’ve never really noticed that it is anything more than an English parliament.

So, we shall see. Constitutional change of one sort or another is definitely coming. Scotland may vote for independence before Westminster hears back from the experts. English-only bills might end up getting special treatment in the Commons. Or the English people might rise up and demand their own, slightly different, parliament for some of the things that trouble them. But the main thing is, West Lothian will have its question answered. And I managed to get through this entire article without mentioning Susan Boyle. Ach, dammit.

Sectarianism: message received?

This article was originally published on Amansaman.

Sectarianism has rarely been out of the news since a spate of high-profile threats at the start of the year spurred the Scottish Government into action. A “summit” (as in “we have to do summit aboot this”) was held in the run up to the Scottish election, and football clubs, police and politicians promised action. When, after the election, Celtic manager Neil Lennon was assaulted on live television, the rhetoric hardened and the newly anointed SNP majority government pledged new laws to solve the problem.

Fast forward a few months and, while the passage of new legislation has been slowed to allow for proper consultation, the Lennon case has been prosecuted, and this week the jury reached a verdict, sensationally acquitting John Wilson of the assault charge, convicting him instead of a breach of the peace. But more interestingly as far as I’m concerned, the jury chose to remove the statutory aggravation of “motivated by religious prejudice” from the charge, meaning that Wilson was not convicted of a hate crime.

Under Scots law, any charge can have an aggravation attached to it by the Procurator Fiscal to identify additional factors in a crime, but different approaches in different areas mean that they are used haphazardly. Statutory aggravations are a relatively new concept designed to standardise aggravations to identify hate crimes. The first was introduced in 1998, covering racially motivated crimes; in 2003 a statutory aggravation for religiously motivated crimes was brought in; and last year more, covering homophobic and transphobic crimes, were created.

The logic is pretty reasonable. If hate crimes are accurately identified and similarly prosecuted across the country, then sentences can be consistent and the authorities can gather statistics which help formulate policy to combat these type of offences.

So far so good. Juries are being asked to assess the motivations of actions, like those of John Wilson, to decide how harsh his sentence should be. They have to be sure beyond a reasonable doubt of those motivations. So it is right that, when they cannot establish that certainty, such aggravations are dropped from the conviction. Nonetheless, statutory aggravations give a solid and useful method for identifying and monitoring hate crime across Scotland.

So if we have an effective way of prosecuting hate crimes (even if not all prosecutions are effective, as the Lennon case shows) then why is the Scottish Parliament in the throes of constructing more law to tackle sectarianism?

The answer, unfortunately, is that it is trying to “send a message”. A dodgy form of politics and a dodgy form of law, because it is essentially a sleight of hand. “Send a message” politics tries to change behaviour by giving it a special status in criminal law, when in fact the behaviour is already against the law. It tries to set up a hierarchy of badness, making a particular crime worse than another simply because it is part of a social phenomenon which is of concern.

We saw an analogy in the aftermath of the recent London riots, when magistrates were instructed to hand down jail sentences for all offences committed during the unrest. So the smashing of a shop window which might have attracted a fine were it done the day before, attracted six months in prison because it was done as part of that dangerous few nights. By all rational assessment this is ludicrous, and it’s highly likely that a series of expensive appeals will overturn the worst excesses.

The danger with current proposals for anti-sectarian law is that they may do the same. It is one thing to use statutory aggravations to track and monitor hate crimes; it is quite another to enshrine in law that committing a crime on the day of a football match is worse than committing the same crime the day before. A famous political fallacy is in danger of being brought to bear again: “Something must be done; this is something; therefore it must be done.”

Sectarianism is a scourge in parts of Scotland, but so are racism, homophobia and Islamophobia. And if we’re honest, they all have the same root, and it’s nothing to do with religion, race or sexuality. Some people are violent and pig-ignorant. We’ve developed ways of dealing with such people over the centuries, none of which are perfect, but they are the best we have. We ought to think carefully before we send any more messages using the law. They might just get lost in translation.

Celebrity politics

This article was originally published on Amansaman.

It’s on Five, the word “celebrity” has been redefined so that it now includes anyone who’s been on a reality TV show, and the fee clearly means more to most inmates than the exposure – but Celebrity Big Brother is back, and we’re just going to have to accept it.


And following in the footsteps of everyone’s favourite demagogue George Galloway and the people’s day-glo champion Tommy Sheridan, this year sees another politico entering the house in the hope, one can only assume, of emerging with an enhanced reputation and offers of safe seats strewn at her feet. Sally Bercow is a Labour activist and a high profile Twitterer (@SallyBercow), but the reason she is famous is that she’s the wife of the former Tory MP, now Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow.

Now I like Sally. She’s smart, she’s witty and she will one day make a very good MP. She tries not to play on her husband’s position, though without it she would have a far lower profile, and she gives as good as she gets from the (many) folk who attack her for being who she is. But I wonder whether she’s made the right decision here.

One thing in her favour, which marks her out from Galloway and Sheridan, is that she is doing the celebrity bit first, and will then do the politician bit second. This is plausible. Celebs can turn political successfully. Ronald Reagan is a high-profile example – a former film actor turned advertising spokesmodel who was recruited by the Republicans as a saleable character and went on to become the wildly successful frontman for a set of free market ideologues. In the UK we have the likes of Seb Coe and Glenda Jackson, who forged serious, if not stellar political careers.

But the fundamental issue, for me , is that politics and celebrity aren’t just different, they’re effectively opposed to each other. The more elections become about name recognition, the less democratic and representative our politicians become. And the more politicians feel they need to expose their personal lives, the less likely it is we will end up with the sort of serious, diligent people in parliaments and councils that we need. Politics is, ultimately, about representation and leadership. Elections should be the selection of candidates we think can best represent and lead. The closer they come to being a personality contest, the less chance we have of decent government.

One of the saddest moments in the run up to the 2010 general election was seeing Gordon Brown appearing on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories. Not because he gave an emotional and upsetting account of his and Sarah’s loss of their child – affecting though that was – but because he had been put there in the first place. His PR people clearly thought that his personal life needed airing with the public to make him less aloof, more “celebrity” and thereby more electable. I think it was a dreadful mistake, and a horrible thing to do to a decent man. Gordon got where he was via politics, not celebrity, because he is clever and politically astute, not because he looks good on TV. I wish he’d told them where to stick the Morgan interview. He’d still have lost the election, but he’d have kept his dignity.

I wish Sally Bercow the best for her stint in the Big Brother house. I hope for her sake it’s a short one. I hope she can then go back to being a decent, principled politician electable for what she thinks and says rather than what she does on the telly.

Marriage is so gay

These puppets have no opinion on gay marriage

This article was originally published on Amansaman.

The release of the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey is an annual opportunity to be depressed at the number of morons who call Scotland home. The most recent results show that more people now dislike gypsies, foreigners and transgender people compared to the previous year. Oddly, self-loathing doesn’t appear to be measured, though I suspect it’s on the rise too.

One piece of good news for people who believe in not being a moron is that support for gay marriage has shot up. 61% of Scots now think marriage should be open to all, and only 19% were dead set against the idea of two people who love each other being able to legally call themselves husbands or wives. And with both the government and opposition parties making positive noises, it does seem that marriage equality for same sex couples might be delivered by the current Scottish Parliament.

We can expect the coming debate to be characterised by the following sentiments. On the one hand:

• Marriage is a religious construct, and it’s not for the state to tell religious people what they should believe. That should be left to mistranslations of ancient texts and the people we pay to indoctrinate our children about them.
• Marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman, and changing that definition will rend the very fabric of society, destroy the concept of family and turn the country into a morally relativistic wasteland.
• Gay people already have civil partnerships, so they don’t need marriage, the greedy buggers.

On the other hand:

• Marriage is a construct defined and regulated by the state, and the fact that religious groups have their own, separate interpretation of it shouldn’t impact on the state’s ability to redefine it whenever appropriate.
• The definition of marriage has been changing constantly for centuries, in terms of recognising the rights of those of different races to marry, changing the age at which marriage is permissible, and most recently changing marriage from a contractual ownership of a woman by a man to the more equal contract it is today.
• Civil partnership marks out same sex relationships as less significant than mixed-sex ones.

Detailed and honest assessments will be made of all of these claims and a fair and equitable settlement reached with an emphasis on our shared goal of social justice.

Ha.

Wouldn’t it be nice if that was how politics worked? Evidence-based decision-making, open and honest discussion, consensual conclusions? How lovely. No, in reality the items above will be largely invisible under an avalanche of slander, sensationalism and fear. Politicians will be terrified of invisible constituencies and their next election result. Pressure groups will promote myths about gay “lifestyles” and religion will be pilloried as a force for evil. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria, as Dr Venkman might say.

We’ve already seen the opening shots of this. A couple of MSPs have stuck their heads over the parapet to prop up and then shoot down some straw men about forcing churches to marry gay people. The heat generated in the responses has been greater than the light. Polarised ranks are already forming, positions being entrenched, demagoguery being polished. It’s pretty depressing to be honest. And we know it can be incredibly damaging, because we remember the Section 28 debate and the Keep The Clause campaign. Thank goodness Brian Souter, the man behind that hate, no longer has any sway in the politics of this country. (What’s that? He’s a major party funder and has just been nominated for a knighthood by the Scottish Government? How extraordinary.)

Here’s hoping we can rise above it this time. Here’s hoping no-one tries to buy off democracy with a chequebook this time. Here’s hoping religious disagreements can be dealt with without fear and anger this time. Because really, this is about love. And with all the shit going on around us – riots, economic meltdown, the Fringe – we need a bit of love.

Too many bananas will kill you

This article was originally published on Amansaman.

There’s a very good reason for government health warnings and TV campaigns: some people are too stupid to understand, and then act on, facts. But there’s another slightly more subtle reason, and it’s the same reason why packets of peanuts say “contains nuts” on the back. It’s an arse-covering exercise. If they’ve assumed you’re an idiot and told you about everything that might be dangerous, you can’t sue them or blame them on those rare occasions when something goes wrong.

Most of us will have grown up with one particular health warning very prominent in our lives: Drugs are bad. M’kay? And most of us will have eventually understood that that’s not true. Some drugs are lovely. Some drugs are really, really excellent. And we’ll have called out the hypocrisy and taken another step toward becoming the cynical, worldly wise souls that we are today.

Of course we know that drugs can do harm. Amy Winehouse is not the first, nor will she be the last person to destroy her or himself by taking too much, too fast. And for every Amy there are a thousand anonymous deaths that are no more than statistics to us. So we do need to understand and act on the facts around drugs.

There are a lot of ways to objectively assess the harm done by different drugs. A recent study in the Lancet classified drugs on the basis of what they do to the person taking them, plus their effect on others around that person. No prizes for guessing that heroin and crack were judged pretty bloody dangerous, while cannabis and ecstasy were comparatively much less harmful. Maybe some slight surprise to find that the ever-popular and legal drug alcohol was judged the number one most harmful, being both incredibly toxic and incredibly socially damaging. I’m sure we’ll come back to minimum pricing for alcohol in a future column, so let’s just leave that there just now.

But a measure which I’ve always thought just as critical as the harm done is whether it is physically possible to get enough of the stuff inside you to kill you. Because I think that tells you a lot about the danger you are putting yourself in when you indulge.

For example, if it takes you four pints to get drunk, then it’s estimated that it would take between five and ten times that amount of alcohol – 20 to 40 pints, or the equivalent in shorts – to kill you. The factor for heroin and crack is even lower. But the factor for cannabis is around 10,000. 10,000 times what it takes to get you stoned before it kills you. And there’s no way around that – you’re going to be asleep before you reach 3, no question.

So you can kill yourself very effectively with heroin, crack and other nasties. And you can kill yourself, given a swift enough swallowing before you pass out from the effects, with alcohol too. But you simply can’t kill yourself smoking or eating cannabis.*

And so, as you might expect, we come to the issue of bananas.

Bananas are a delicious source of vitamins, minerals and tasty goodness. But one of those minerals is potassium and an overdose of potassium can be fatal. For people with certain medical conditions, the risk is increased, but it is thought that for an average person a mere 250 bananas consumed in one sitting could kill you. This makes bananas several orders of magnitude more dangerous on the scale of getting-enough-in-to-kill-you than cannabis.

And yet bananas are sold freely across this great land. Even to children. They are even sold in our schools! And how long will it be before some resourceful mite stashes away a fatal stock and binges one day during playtime? It’s a sweet, convenient, pocket-sized tragedy waiting to happen.

Despite there being no reported deaths from banana overdose in humans, the fact remains that the banana is a couple of orders of magnitude more lethal than cannabis, a controlled substance the mere possession of which is a criminal offence.

I’m not going to end this with a rallying cry to decriminalise drugs like cannabis and ecstasy, removing a huge cost from the justice system, cutting the profits of criminals and opening up a potential new source of revenue for the Treasury. You’ll have your own views on that, and I respect them (as long as they are the same as mine).

No, my point here is this. Until we do have sensible, rational, fact-based drugs laws, I want a label on every banana in this country. I want a skull and crossbones and big scary lettering. And I want you to only be allowed to buy them from the special banana counter in the supermarket, next to the lottery machine and the PayPoint outlet.

Then we’ll be safe from the banana menace. Only then.


Find out more about drugs from Crew 2000 http://www.crew2000.org.uk/

The Lancet study mentioned in the article is at http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2810%2961462-6/abstract

* Unless you are a child below the age of three, in which case, frankly, you shouldn’t be reading this. And get that out of your mouth, whatever it is, you don’t know where it’s been.

Blindcraft: A victim of budgets, not cutbacks

It is to Edinburgh's shame that the doors of the Blindcraft factory in Craigmillar closed last week for the last time. A social enterprise founded in 1793 - yes, 218 years ago - which has provided disabled people in the capital with not just a living but an opportunity to be valued and productive, closed down in the name of "cutbacks".

But the great irony of this despicable decision is that closing Blindcraft, and making all those workers redundant, will cost the taxpayer more, not less, than keeping it open.

What this really is is a cynical manipulation of budgets by the SNP/Lib Dem council, the same misrepresentation that the SNP Scottish government does on a bigger scale on a regular basis.

Make no mistake, closing Blindcraft will save the council budget a substantial sum, which the SNP/Lib Dem council can now choose to spend on flags or propaganda. But the overall cost to the taxpayer will rise as a substantial majority of its 53 remaining employees are left without employment or prospects and are forced to rely entirely on state benefits.

The economic cost of the closure to the UK benefits budget is likely to be approximately twice the amount of the savings made by the council. But the benefits budget comes from central government funds, so neither the council nor the Scottish government care about it. It's still taxpayers' money, but it's someone else's responsibility.

Of course the real tragedy of the closure is the effect on the lives of the employees. For these folk, Blindcraft has been a unique opportunity to build a career in an environment which does not discriminate on the grounds of disability.

Blindcraft was the very definition of a successful social enterprise - both an economic and a social good. But because the SNP/Lib Dem council had the opportunity to offload the cost to someone else's budget, no matter the overall economic impact and no matter the opportunities destroyed in the process, it is now gone.

Edinburgh people shouldn't forget this in next year's council elections. But voters in the City Centre by-election in two weeks (18th August) have the opportunity to break this coalition now, and potentially give a new council the chance to right this wrong. Vote Karen Doran on 18th August to turf the SNP/Lib Dem rulers out of the City Chambers.