On Quick Updates in April

[danieldwilliam]

Time for a bit of a catch up.

1) Rugby - rugby is going well.

We were at a festival in Stirling at the weekend. Stirling County RFC are one of the other Super Six clubs in Scotland, so they have a pretty large and well organised set up. Nice festival. 8 teams in our age group. Played 7 games of 9 minutes long (quite short). Definately a festival spirit, the referees weren't keeping score.

I thought we played lots of good rugby, lots of good support running, lots of good passing out or, or before, contact. Defence was a bit patchy, particularly towards the end. However, it's not something we can't fix. We're struggling to deal with the spearhead approach. Often other teams will pick a good runner, ususally someone who is quite fast, has decent evasion skills and is crucially pretty big, they get this kid to stand 5 yards back from the scrum-half at a restart. They run up, on to the ball, and through the defence. It's effective but it's not pretty to watch, it won't work next year when the tackling and the defensive structures are better and I'm not sure it's helping the kids learn to play rugby. For the record, I largely don't care about winning P4 rugby games. I may care when the kids are Under-16's or Under-18's. So long as they aren't getting whalloped I'd rather they learned the instincts of quick passing, good running, playing together, being a team, how to read and manage a game rather than knowing that if Kid-X starts with the ball they will probably score a try.

Good refereeing by the SCRFC folks. Biggar RFC P4's stand out for their organisation in defence and their sportsmanship. They are both nice club. Stirling's ground is very picturesque, being by the Forth River, between the castle and the Wallace Monument.

Briefly met my old school friend who now lives in Ayr. She was up with her son who plays in P6.

The Captain had a good festival, lots of tries, lots of good running, lots of tackling. He's great to watch. Particularly when he plays with the rest of his team.

2) Work. Work is busy. Interesting, but busy. I'm deeply invovled in two quite large projects on top of my usual work and some succession planning stuff too. It's busy. Good, but busy.

3) Family -

BB is planning her post-graduation life in  Bristol. She submitted her dissertation. Now only 3 exams and a powerpoint presentation stand between her and graduation. 

My brother is finalising his separation from his wife. That is sad but necessary.

My parents are okay, although dad seems care worn by, well I guess by the care he's giving his friends.

MLW is working incredibly hard, even by her own standards.

We have booked a summer holiday in Northumberland. Mostly so we can go to BB's graduation in July. I'm not entirely convinced that the holiday venue is great. It seems like a sort of cut-price CentreParcs. We'll see. Mostly I am looking forward to having a little clear down time.

4) UD -we've just agreed a budget with some exciting expansion plans. I hope the extra resource allows us to break through in to a period where we're doing more campaigning, gaining more members, increasing our funding, and being more effective and that doing more of all of that means we can do more of all that in some sort of virtuous circle.

5) Brexit - I have joined, but am not actually active in, the Edinburgh pro-EU campaign group. I am releasing my food stockpile to general stores and will re-stock if the political situation becomes fraught. For the first time I think Brexit is now probably not going to  happen.

6) Entertainments,  I am reading some books about Greek myths by Stephen Fry. They are jolly good. I may even go to see him in the Festival. I have a new real time grand strategy game on the PS4. This is taking up quite a lot of time and I need to do less of it so that I'm not too tired. Currently watching the Umbrella Academy, Sabrina and Only Connect and about to start on American Gods, Ozarks, Good Place and Star Trek Disco

7) Cottage is in good shape and now has a new heating control system user interface which should make it both better and cheaper. Currently thinking about new boilers for the central heating system. I'd like to replace the standard sized boiler and tank with a very small (10cm by 10cm by 100 cm ) flow boiler and reclaim the corner of the kitchen. Summer is well booked, no big repairs are currently pending.

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

Broadly, I think my country would be better run if it were independent. It's not driven by any strong sense of Our People, Ourselves Alone.

There is an ideological element to it as well.

More particularly

Span of Control and Scalar Chain

Large countries are exponentially harder to run than small countries. Partly this is because smaller countries find it easier to have internal alignment and solidarity. Partly this is just down to considerations of span of control and scalar chain.

For example, an independent Scotland would have 7 or 8 management layers between a bobbie and the First Minister. The US has two layers of government plus all the management layers between the President and a beat cop.

An independent Scotland ought to be able to get closer to its own problems and get closer to its own solutions and create broad and deep and sustained agreement and action on those problems. Being a few percent better at running a counrty compounds nicely over a lifetime.

Constitutional maturity

Scotland is a much more constituationally mature state than England and England's failure to grasp both what constitutional maturity looks like and why it is needed is really getting in the way of Scotland doing what it needs to do. It is obvious (or ought to be) that if you are going to have a semi-quasi-federal structure in the UK with England, NI, Wales, and Scotland (& London) having degrees of autonomy then you need to be having a conversation about a) a separate legislature for England, b) the problems of running a federal system when 1 of the 4 elements is 80% of the Federation.

Largely if you try to prompt that conversation in England you get back a response which is, a more or less sophisticated version of "Eng-Ger-Land! "Eng-Ger-Land! "Eng-Ger-Land! " or a Rudyard Kipling reference. England just don't seem to have processed that devolution and the semi-quasi-federal structure in the UK means that anything about the governanance of England needs to be examined. It's frankly wearing having to keep on having those conversations. The time wasted could be better spent actually sorting stuff out.

Post-imperialism

Britain has a post-imperial problem. We used to be the most powerful country in the world. We then used to be the former most powerful country in the world. We're now a rich, but second or third teir country. We're only going to fall down the rankings as time goes on. (I'm not sure we've spotted this because of Mercator projections and racism - Nigeria will have a population twice the size of ours and half as rich by the 2030.) Britain hasn't quite got its head around that. England struggles to realise that it is even a question. One of their favourite football chants is still "Two World Wars and One World Cup." Again, that mental blocker is just getting in the way of the UK sorting itself out. Which means that Scotland isn't being sorted out for the 21st century.

England, I think, has another 20 years before it realises it has a problem in terms of the constitutional set up and its post-imperial role. That's two decades where nothing much happens in Scotland.

There is an opportunity for an indepedent Scotland to become a country that thinks creatively about the 21st and 22nd centuries, as we will actually experience them.

The Tory Party

Well, the Tory Party. It is a mistake to think that just because the Tory Party doesn't poll well in Scotland that there aren't Tories here, or that we won't have a centre-right party with influence post-independence but there is something so inimicial about the Tory Party and their believe that the interests of the Tory Party are the interests of England and that England is the same as the UK. Particularly when combined with their chimerical approach to their ideology and ethos. Are they Burkean conservatives, radical neo-liberals, small state libertarians, reactionary representatives of Capital or just the political wing of the Anglican Church?

Ideologically

Scotland is somewhat to the left of the UK.

The settled political consensus of Scotland appears to be that we wish to be a liberal social democracy, probably along a Scandinavian model. I'm not saying everyone agrees that this the way forward but I think 20 years after indepedence everyone would agree that that was the model Scotland had picked.

Issues like human rights appear to be contentious in England, and therefore in the UK. Socialised health care appears to be something that England wants to debate. Sure there are social democrats and democratic socialists in England but they are on the defensive. Sure there are neo-liberals in Scotland, as well as fascists and Christian Conservatives.

So, to sum up. I think Scotland will be better run as a small country. There are governance and psychological issues in the UK that act as a blocker on Scotland's aspirations. Those aspirations appear to be different from those of England. I am tired of waiting for England to sort itself out so that we can go forward together.

[notasupervillain]

That makes a lot of sense, and it gives it a quite different valence than the Canadian/Quebec issue. You really are talking about constitutional questions and management issues in Scotland, and I'm talking about identity issues in Quebec.

I've felt for a while that England has a dysfunctional attitude towards the rest of the Kingdom. I mean, I live in Newcastle and I feel that London has a dysfunctional attitude towards the North! I know that to some extent that's true in any country. Canada has issues about Western alienation, where Alberta in particular feels like Ottawa isn't working for them. But it sees especially bad in England. Maybe the legacy of the monarchy, where it wasn't wrong to say that the country should be run for the benefit of a few people who lived in London?

[danieldwilliam]

There are for sure some identity issues in the Scottish independence question.

The SNP have been very explicitely about civic nationalism - that this is a question about like-minded people of whatever heritage coming together to build a decent place to live to a shared vision - rather than a Scottish i identy that is distinct and special and separate from the question of management. But there is some blood and soil nationalism going about too. And there is a risk that our attempts at civic nationalism are looking at England and going "Not that" and not fully developing the model we positively want.

And this is why the use of the word "separatist" irks many supporters of Scottish indepedence, because it implies a desire for identy nationalism, for the Scots to be a separate people, rather than for Scotland to be a separate part administrative unit within the EU.

I think for a long time England never had to consider the differences between England and the UK and England and Wales and England and Scotland because, being a super-power you can buy your way out of that sort of problem and who doesn't want to be on the winning side. It's become harder now that people in Scotland and Wales are questioning what winning looks like. The fact that London is a mega-city and not in the middle of the UK makes that even harder to manage. (The Irish Question is a bit different and was managed by expelling an ungrateful Ireland once its usefulness had passed.)

I don't think it's a legacy of the monarchy per se and Britain is not historically the worst country in Europe for having a closed, powerful elite clustered around the monarch. Perhaps the opposite. The UK has been a constitutional monarchy since before it was the UK. For about six months in the 1640's we had a government in England that was so radically socialist that neither radicalism or socialism had been invented yet. In Scotland we had a radical democratic theocracy. Then we both had Oliver Cromwell. Since the 1640's the powers of the monarch, both personally and embodied in the notion of the Crown have been more regulated than in e.g. France or Russia or the Italian duchies.

The richest person in Britain (perhaps the world,) during the Industrial Revolution was the Marquis of Bute, a Scot who lived in Wales.

In some regards the North South divide is quite recent. Or at least it was different in the past. In the industrial revolution when the North and Scotland and Wales had all the coal, iron, ports, and industry the South was poor, rural, backwards and suffering from neglect. Or you might argue that the divide goes back to the Reformation, the Rising of the Northern Earls and the Elizabethan Reprisals. Or perhaps further back to the Harrowing of the North by William the Conqueror.

Or perhaps its just what happens in a long, thin island country.

But, the British aristocracy (plutocracy?) have been very good at maintaining both actual power and the idea that they ought to be in power.