We have a winner!

WELL, that didn’t take long. Councillor Mark McDonald, deputy leader of the SNP group on Aberdeen City Council, has kindly located this excellent picture of our First Minister endorsing Osama Saeed as the nationalist candidate in Glasgow Central.
Bottle of House of Commons whisky on its way to you, Mark, if you let me have an address. Or I can hand it over to you in person if you want to meet up during the Glasgow East by-election campaign.

(NOTE: Mark McDonald has rightly pointed out to me that an addition I made to this posting after he commented made it look like he was ignoring the additional, political point. That wasn’t the intention, so I’ve amended this post - something I would only rarely do in retrospect.)

Competition time

AN INJUSTICE has been perpetrated. Osama Saeed, SNP parliamentary candidate and supreme leader of the suddenly well-off Scottish Islamic Foundation, is rumoured to have been inexplicably cold-shouldered by his party’s leadership.

Possibly uniquely among SNP candidates, if rumour is to be believed, Osama has yet to have his picture taken with his leader and benefactor, Alex Salmond.

I’m not sure I believe this, however. It’s not as if Osama’s views on the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate or on Sharia law are out of line with SNP policy, surely?

So I’m announcing a nationwide competition: whoever can prove that Osama and Alex have indeed been pictured together in the time-honoured tradition of party leaders and their followers, will receive a fabulous gift from yours truly.

The search begins now. It must be out there somewhere, surely. Surely…?

Blog off

I SEE that someone over at Iain Dale’s Diary has left a comment to the effect that I shouldn’t really have time on my hands to blog, what with being an MP and a minister and everything.

This is becoming an increasingly common criticism. But is it only aimed at politicians? Or does it cover everyone in full time employment? And are those who tell me what I should be doing in my spare time the same people who object if they think that politicians are telling them what to do?

So, for the avoidance of doubt: blogging does not interfere with my job in any way. I don’t interrupt ministerial meetings by saying: “Oh, can we take a break there? I’ve just thought of a great idea for season five of Doctor Who…” And I don’t cancel advice surgeries to review visitors’ comments.

I enjoy blogging in my spare time. If you have a problem with that, no-one’s forcing you to read this. For the rest of you, what did you think about Catherine Tate as Donna Noble…?

In praise of McDonald’s

JUST finished a Big Mac meal (and yes, I did go large). Ronnie and Reggie had their traditional Happy Meals with chicken nuggets and strawberry shakes while Carolyn had some or other vegetarian thing.

Don’t get me wrong - this is not a daily, or even weekly occurrence. Everything in moderation, and all that. But the boys do love their “happy food” as they call it. And so do I.

So why do so many people hate McDonald’s? As far as I can see, they sell extremely tasty food at reasonable prices, they provide an activity and a venue that is decidedly family-friendly. More importantly, they provide employment for many people, particularly the young. And if you can get past the “McJob” snobbery that’s prevalent today, it might be recognised that McDonald’s, in many communities, are an important employer. More to the point, if McDonald’s were not there, those communities would be worse off.

The same is, of course, true for many fast food outlets which provide vital jobs particularly for young people, whether long or short term, and provide a popular service at the same time. The more people who can gain an understanding that “service sector” need not necessarily mean “second best”, the better.

My only complaint is that here in Britain, the definition of “fast”, as in “fast food”, can too often be used with scant regard to the strict dictionary definition. And it can be a tad frustrating when the person serving you responds to your request for anything vegetarian with a look of utter bewilderment.

Children need bad, not bland

When you have to get up early with the kids to let your wife have a long lie of a Sunday morning, there’s a danger in having your brain turned to mush by children’s TV, with its bland combination of politically-correct American cartoons (with implausible English accent dubbing) and cataclysmically dull/irritating “craft” shows. The American ones, like “Clifford, the Big Red Dog” are awful morality tales voiced by women in their mid-to-late thirties trying to sound like 10-year-olds. As for “Big Cook, Little Cook” - where do I start? Setting aside the fact that the cafe where it’s set probably has the worst service in the world (the staff never even ask the customer what they want - they take a whole programme to serve up some awful children’s party food without considering that at this time in the morning, all that’s probably required is a fried egg roll and a cappuccino), the fairy stories the cast read have been neutered beyond recognition. In Little Cook’s version of Little Miss Moffet, for example, the spider doesn’t scare her - they become the best of friends, for crying out loud!

That’s the defining characteristic of children’s TV these days, it seems, or at least, of TV shows aimed at toddlers: any real conflict, any real villain, has been removed or sanitised so that instead of having a good old fairy tale where the hero battles against the odds (and a baddie) to win the day, he instead comes to understand the grievances of his opponent, who then becomes his friend. Bo-ring!

Carolyn disagrees with me on this. Life is difficult enough for children in later life, she says; they don’t need to be challenged or scared by programmes at an early age. Piffle and twaddle, say I. She doesn’t remember “Noggin the Nog” by Oliver Postgate, with its evil baddie, Nogbad the Bad (that’ll come in handy one day when you’re in a pub quiz, mark my words). My earliest, though vague, memory of watching TV was a black and white scene from “Doctor Who”, where a scientist hid behind a console while a monster (later identified as an Ice Warrior) scoured the room looking for him. Did the Ice Warrior intend to befriend the scientist, discuss environmental issues with him? No, it wanted to kill him in an excruciatingly painful way by frying his brain with his Martian weapon. Cool, thought I as I cowered gleefully behind the sofa (and yes, it’s more than a cliché, we actually did that in the ’60s and ’70s).

Kids need to see conflict, and they need to see good overcoming evil. They don’t need to have lessons in morality from badly-animated characters with voices that sound more like their mums than their younger sisters (“That’s why you should always ask how other people are feeling, isn’t it Clifford? … God, I feel like a fag… have we finished recording yet…?”)

Osama Saeed, Alex Salmond and £215,000

Scotland on Sunday have broken what could turn out to be one of the most important Scottish political stories of the year.

UPDATE at 12.25pm: In anticipation of the howls of spontaneous “outrage” that will inevitably emanate from nationalist defenders over this story, let me pose this question: Had Saeed been a Labour candidate and Jack McConnell, when First Minister, had given him £215,000, how would the Nats have reacted?

Media gullibility and Iain Dale’s professionalism

Iain Dale reports today of an attempt by persons unknown to persuade him to write an entirely false posting about the imminent defection of a Labour MP to the SNP. To his credit, Iain checked out the story and, inevitably, it didn’t stand up. Less to his credit, he makes the assumption that this is an attempt by left wing bloggers to smear and discredit right-of-centre bloggers. Unfortunately, this is a theory that has been enthusiastically embraced by those commenting on the post.

But I can shed some light on this, because it is eerily reminiscent of a similar attempt to smear the Labour Party 18 months ago, when Paul Hutcheon, political editor of The Sunday Herald, wrote a front page splash announcing - guess what? - the imminent defection by a Labour MP to the SNP. No evidence was offered by Hutcheon to substantiate the story and he was unable to stand the story up. That didn’t prevent the editor splashing the non-story all over the front page, generating acres of speculation and suspicion (as was presumably the intention), not least in the Scottish blogosphere.

Inevitably, no defection occurred. Equally inevitably, neither Hutcheon nor The Sunday Herald offered any form of correction or apology. And as is the way with Scottish politics, Hutcheon was subsequently honoured as Scottish Political Journalist of the Year.

Someone did try to play you for a fool, Iain. But that “someone” is almost certainly not a Labour supporter; far more likely he is a Scottish nationalist hoping to gain advantage for his party in the Glasgow East by-election. And what does it tell you when a Tory blogger carries out more checks on a story in order to maintain his own credibility than does a full-time journalist for a Scottish Sunday newspaper?

Cameron considers Davis’s future

Thirty-four per cent

Turnout in Haltemprice and Howden was a measly 34 per cent, less than half of what it was at the general election.

No doubt DD’s apologists will claim that this is all the Labour Party’s fault for not standing a candidate (shame on us for not jumping when DD clicks his fingers!). But no amount of spin or argument can disguise the fact that the Haltemprice and Howden by-election has been a colossal waste of time, effort and money.

More importantly, it has had not the slightest impact on public support for (or opposition to) the policy of 42 days detention.

Hope for the bad, but pray for the worst

An excellent meeting yesterday between Scottish MPs and representatives of Scottish Chambers of Commerce. Some genuine concerns expressed by business leaders, but also a realism and determination to succeed. One warned that we’re in danger of talking ourselves into a recession.

Then today, this, by Garland, appears in The Daily Telegraph:

Most economists don’t reckon the current downturn will develop into a recession. But recession is news. Even better: it’s bad news, which, for the likes of the Telegraph means good news (are you still with me?).

The champagne corks would be popping over at Conservative Central Office were recession to arrive, with any sign of growing unemployment and house repossessions seen as “a price worth paying” for an opportunity to issue a few smug news releases.

But recession isn’t around the corner, and the word should never be used as shorthand for any economic downturn. And newspapers - even those slavishly and nauseatingly loyal to the Conservative Party - should exercise a bit more restraint. After all, recessions hit newspaper advertising hard, and we would all hate to see the Telegraph go down the plug, wouldn’t we? I said, WOULDN’T WE?!