‘No one should be subjected to intolerance, prejudice or violence in 21st Century Scotland’. So reads the Scottish Executive website discussing Banning Orders, introduced in 2006, orders that can ban abusive or bigoted fans from attending any football game anywhere in the world for up to ten years. Ironically, as the authoritarian discussion about how to rid Scotland of sectarianism rumbles on it appears that the Scottish Government are illustrating their own far more worrying form of intolerance, prejudice and violence.
Tolerance, it appears, today means not tolerating views that we don’t like. Not too long ago this was called authoritarianism. Now there is talk of making sectarian conduct at football matches a specific criminal offence punishable by five years in jail, with similar powers to target bigotry on the internet. Not too long ago challenging bigotry and sectarianism was seen as a political challenge, today, like many other things, it has become something to be policed out of existence. But then even this is to take the reactionary approach of the SNP and today’s pundits too seriously. Any serious analysis of sectarianism in Scotland would have to conclude that it is largely a fiction. In fact if we take Rangers and Celtic out of the equation - where is this sectarianism? We can no doubt find some stupid kids fighting and call it sectarianism, but previously sectarianism was a powerful force in society, something that meant people would be denied jobs, houses, would never inter-marry, or associate with the ‘other’ side. Today none of this holds true. Celtic and Rangers fans may shout IRA or Fenian this and that, but they then troop off home to their Protestant wife or Catholic mates. Today ‘sectarianism’ is a 90 minute game and the main reason we are aware of it at all is because politicians and pundits are grandstanding, attempting to look tough and purposeful by doing their ‘thing’, which today means being ‘outraged’, standing up for the ‘offended’ and introducing all sorts of draconian law and forms of policing.
Strangely, this whole furore has erupted largely because of a few extreme acts – the sending of a bomb to Neil Lennon (for which there are already laws to send these idiots down), the scuffle between him and Ally McCoist (which actually wasn’t extreme at all but was portrayed as such), and the ridiculous assault (another criminal act) on Lennon at Hearts.
These events have magically been tied into the hundreds of thousands of everyday Old Firm fans who shout and sing at football matches. Here we find the prejudice of the Scottish elite about football fans, with their own comments filled with bile and hatred about this imaginary sectarian force in society, backed up with serious violence in the form of imprisonment for up to 5 years for singing a song that someone somewhere finds offensive.
No one should be subjected to intolerance, prejudice or violence in 21st Century Scotland, except that is for Celtic and Rangers fans. This is the real shame on Scotland.
Thursday 26 May 2011
John Stuart Mill
The below article, 'The great liberal John Stuart Mill could have told the Scottish Government that its approach to drink is wrong headed and highly likely to fail', appeared in The Scotsman on Tuesday 24th May 2011.
Monday 23 May 2011
Sign the petition
The below petition is now online at:
http://www.petitiononline.com/TALS/petition.html
To: Scottish Executive
We the undersigned believe that any action taken by the Scottish government to increase the price of alcohol is illiberal and patronising and should be opposed. Using extreme examples of violence or alcoholism to justify increasing the price of alcohol for everyone is irrational and ends up treating all adults, and especially poorer people whose drinks are generally targeted, as children.
http://www.petitiononline.com/TALS/petition.html
To: Scottish Executive
We the undersigned believe that any action taken by the Scottish government to increase the price of alcohol is illiberal and patronising and should be opposed. Using extreme examples of violence or alcoholism to justify increasing the price of alcohol for everyone is irrational and ends up treating all adults, and especially poorer people whose drinks are generally targeted, as children.
Sunday 15 May 2011
Alcohol Alchemy: Opposing the increased price of booze in Scotland
Take a Liberty ( Scotland ) opposes any increase in the price of alcohol in shops and supermarkets. We believe that any action taken by the government to increase the price of alcohol is illiberal and patronising and should be opposed. Using extreme examples of violence or alcoholism to justify increasing the price of alcohol for everyone is irrational and ends up treating all adults, and especially poorer people whose drinks are generally targeted, as children. Blaming an inanimate object or drug for social problems is infantile and is illustrative less of a political elite with a sense of purpose than one that lacks depth or a serious belief in developing society or the individuals in it. Increasing the price of booze and assuming this will change society is a form of alchemy. Worse than this it degrades the public and undermines further the idea that people must be free to make decisions and take responsibility for themselves.
Snobbery of Prospective Booze Price Rise
This article was written following the last attempt to increase the price of alcohol in supermarkets.
Stuart Waiton
The Scottish media correspondent Iain MacWhirter, discussing the killing of the alcohol bill in the Sunday Herald summed it up well, ‘The smoking ban showed Holyrood at its best, this showed our Parliament at its worse’. For Iain and many like him the more bans and regulations the better – after all – while we can expect ‘responsible’ people like Iain to make correct choices with their lives – for the hoi polloi – well that’s a different story. Poor Iain even shares his pain of having to get his ‘clothes dry-cleaned after going for a pint’ in the bad smoky smelly old days when smelly people used to smell around him. One wonders how Iain coped.
Nicola Sturgeon, according to Iain made one of the best Holyrood speeches for years, and I must agree, if we are basing the speech on illiberal rhetoric it was a belter. The underlying idea used to support the case for pumping the price of cheap booze up is that too many people drink too much and kill themselves, too many people are alcoholics and too many people get drunk and fight and cause mayhem in communities. Or in a nut shell, ‘We can’t trust people. We can’t trust the poor working classes in particular. We need to protect people from other people and from themselves’.
In the past not trusting people to make the right choices and attempting to regulate society so that they could not make those incorrect choice used to be called authoritarianism. Today it is represented as an enlightened form of health and safety awareness raising: A kind of hippy with handcuffs protecting us from ourselves.
That the opposition parties were opportunistic is unquestionable in this whole affair. Labour after all has not a liberal bone in its ‘body’ and is only miffed that it didn’t ban booze first. While the Tories wittering on about how this will undermine Whisky producers suggests they are incapable of seeing an issue of principle and of liberty and freedom even when it is being poured down their throats.
The hypocrisy of Labour is useful to observe because the smoking ban and the various bans of drinking in public that they have overseen are a useful illustration of the trend to ban things today, to make everything about safety. Commentators like MacWhirter and politicians like Sturgeon act as if there is something particular about today that means ‘something must be done’ but it is not the rise of alcohol related problems that is new. What is new is the new depths of political life. As Steven Purdey a Take a Liberty colleague noted, ‘Since when did politics get so low that the government and elected members felt it was there role to debate the merits of buy one get one free policies in Tescos?’.
Farcical though this is, it is part of a trend in politics towards the regulation of people’s behaviour, indeed the ‘politics of behaviour’ has become an accepted new dynamic within government both North and South of the border, increasingly regulating increasing areas of public life. With most new laws developed in this way we are offered extreme examples that are taken as a bench mark for creating new regulations that impact upon everybody. Likewise with the booze ban promoters we get examples of 11 year olds turning up drunk in school, of dying alcoholics and of youth in Drumchapel ‘sucking on big plastic bottles of cheap booze’ and terrorising the community. The solution? Increase the price on cheap booze for everyone and hey presto all these various social problems go away (really?) and we all have to pay more for the alcohol we want to drink.
But even if increasing the price of booze had some impact should it be supported? Surely laws and practices should not be developed based on the lowest common denominator? But even here, let’s face it, the stereotypes being bandied about might not be fictitious but they are clearly one dimensional, simplistic and pretty patronising. As is the very idea that people need to be protected from themselves and from making the wrong choices. Like it or not making the wrong choices is part of being free and as John Stuart Mill argued, the greater good of freedom of choice far out weighs the harm done by people through drink.
Ironically one of the most powerful barriers to drinking excessively is self control, self respect and self discipline – all of which are products of a liberal culture and a culture that celebrates freedom and the ideal of the responsible individual – the very culture and freedom that is being drained from society by the likes of MacWhirter and Sturgeon.
Stuart Waiton
The Scottish media correspondent Iain MacWhirter, discussing the killing of the alcohol bill in the Sunday Herald summed it up well, ‘The smoking ban showed Holyrood at its best, this showed our Parliament at its worse’. For Iain and many like him the more bans and regulations the better – after all – while we can expect ‘responsible’ people like Iain to make correct choices with their lives – for the hoi polloi – well that’s a different story. Poor Iain even shares his pain of having to get his ‘clothes dry-cleaned after going for a pint’ in the bad smoky smelly old days when smelly people used to smell around him. One wonders how Iain coped.
Nicola Sturgeon, according to Iain made one of the best Holyrood speeches for years, and I must agree, if we are basing the speech on illiberal rhetoric it was a belter. The underlying idea used to support the case for pumping the price of cheap booze up is that too many people drink too much and kill themselves, too many people are alcoholics and too many people get drunk and fight and cause mayhem in communities. Or in a nut shell, ‘We can’t trust people. We can’t trust the poor working classes in particular. We need to protect people from other people and from themselves’.
In the past not trusting people to make the right choices and attempting to regulate society so that they could not make those incorrect choice used to be called authoritarianism. Today it is represented as an enlightened form of health and safety awareness raising: A kind of hippy with handcuffs protecting us from ourselves.
That the opposition parties were opportunistic is unquestionable in this whole affair. Labour after all has not a liberal bone in its ‘body’ and is only miffed that it didn’t ban booze first. While the Tories wittering on about how this will undermine Whisky producers suggests they are incapable of seeing an issue of principle and of liberty and freedom even when it is being poured down their throats.
The hypocrisy of Labour is useful to observe because the smoking ban and the various bans of drinking in public that they have overseen are a useful illustration of the trend to ban things today, to make everything about safety. Commentators like MacWhirter and politicians like Sturgeon act as if there is something particular about today that means ‘something must be done’ but it is not the rise of alcohol related problems that is new. What is new is the new depths of political life. As Steven Purdey a Take a Liberty colleague noted, ‘Since when did politics get so low that the government and elected members felt it was there role to debate the merits of buy one get one free policies in Tescos?’.
Farcical though this is, it is part of a trend in politics towards the regulation of people’s behaviour, indeed the ‘politics of behaviour’ has become an accepted new dynamic within government both North and South of the border, increasingly regulating increasing areas of public life. With most new laws developed in this way we are offered extreme examples that are taken as a bench mark for creating new regulations that impact upon everybody. Likewise with the booze ban promoters we get examples of 11 year olds turning up drunk in school, of dying alcoholics and of youth in Drumchapel ‘sucking on big plastic bottles of cheap booze’ and terrorising the community. The solution? Increase the price on cheap booze for everyone and hey presto all these various social problems go away (really?) and we all have to pay more for the alcohol we want to drink.
But even if increasing the price of booze had some impact should it be supported? Surely laws and practices should not be developed based on the lowest common denominator? But even here, let’s face it, the stereotypes being bandied about might not be fictitious but they are clearly one dimensional, simplistic and pretty patronising. As is the very idea that people need to be protected from themselves and from making the wrong choices. Like it or not making the wrong choices is part of being free and as John Stuart Mill argued, the greater good of freedom of choice far out weighs the harm done by people through drink.
Ironically one of the most powerful barriers to drinking excessively is self control, self respect and self discipline – all of which are products of a liberal culture and a culture that celebrates freedom and the ideal of the responsible individual – the very culture and freedom that is being drained from society by the likes of MacWhirter and Sturgeon.
Safety first dogma is poisoning our lives
What’s your image of Glasgow? Having lived there for nearly 20 years I’ve come across a range of images presenting the city as many things. When I first moved to Glasgow it had officially become the City of Culture, but for some it remained the ‘Workers City’, or it was a city that was ‘Smiles Better’. For me, all of these images had something positive about them (even the naff smiley faced one) compared to a more recent advertisement that read Glasgow: Safe City.
Believe it or not, in 2008 Glasgow was ranked the UK’s safest city, no doubt to the great joy of the city’s tourist board, but should we be so jubilant about this ‘result’, should we even be prioritising safety as an objective for councils and government? Or rather, should we not recognise that the myopic preoccupation with safety today undermines our freedom, chips away at liberty within Scotland and infantilises us all?
As we’re in Glasgow, let’s stay there a while and go for a drink. We can take a taxi into town, but perhaps we should ensure it’s a black cab – after all, as a female friend warned me – ‘these minicab drivers may not have been vetted’. If we avoid being abused by the taxi driver we can push past the smokers hunched outside the pub, but only after we’ve been checked out by the array of bouncers who are now on the door of almost every pub in the city centre. Once inside we will hopefully get a glass of whisky, but best drink it quick just in case the licensing board try to make us all sup out of plastics again like they did in 2006. But if they haven’t managed to make us all safe from being glassed, they can at least help us to be aware of the need to ‘Drink Responsibly’, or if we go the casino, to ‘Gamble Responsibly’. (Isn’t that an oxymoron?). Don’t worry about getting a bit drunk and starting some Glasgow football banter, the beer mats will reminding you to give the red card to sectarianism and help you to mind your language. Let’s take a trip to the toilet and be made aware of the latest risky sexually transmitted disease by the poster standing over us at the urinal as we look down at our endangered organ. And finally, after our safe night in town, we can take a taxi home outside Central Station where there is no need to worry about the other people in the queue anymore as we have the friendly taxi queue organisers, with their official luminous yellow waist coats waving us safely on our way to bed. What a night out we had in Glasgow: Safe City.
These examples may appear trivial, but it reflects a trend towards the regulation of everyday life that is spreading across Scotland and the UK, a trend that runs the risk of breeding a generation of young people who hardly know what it means to be a member of the public, indeed who hardly know what it means to be a free, responsibly individual – to be an adult.
Let’s stick with the theme of drink and take a look at the recent debate in the Scottish parliament about increasing the price of booze to get a taste of the illiberal attitudes that exist today.
The underlying idea used to support the case for pumping the price of cheap booze up was that too many people drink too much and kill themselves, too many people are alcoholics and too many people get drunk and fight and cause mayhem in communities. Or in a nut shell, ‘We can’t trust people. We can’t trust the poor working classes in particular. We need to protect you from other people and from yourself’. This used to be called authoritarianism, but today, with almost nobody making the case for individual freedom, it can pass as another enlightened form of health and safety awareness raising.
As with most new laws and regulations, remembering of course that the UK Labour governments introduced a new law for every day they were in office, here the booze barney fed off the most extreme examples to justify new regulations that would effect us all: Eleven year olds turning up drunk in school, dying alcoholics and stories of youth on estates ‘sucking on big plastic bottles of cheap booze’ and terrorising the community. The solution? Increase the price on cheap booze for everyone and hey presto all these various social problems go away (really?) and we all have to pay more for the alcohol we want to drink.
Even if increasing the price of booze had some impact should it be supported? Like it or not making the wrong choices is part of being free and as John Stuart Mill argued, the greater good of freedom of choice far out weighs the harm done by people through drink. For Mill the most important thing was not the choices people made, but the type of people making those choice – free choosing individuals. Ironically one of the most powerful barriers to drinking excessively is self control, self respect and self discipline – all of which are products of a liberal culture and a culture that celebrates freedom and the ideal of the robust, responsible individual – the very culture and freedom that is being drained from society by the safety zealots.
But if society has lost trust in us adults to look after ourselves and deal with one another, this is nothing compared to the Kafkaesque world of child safety. At a recent Scottish Parents Teachers Council, Caroline Stewart, of the Central Registered Body in Scotland, explained to the confused audience all the ins and outs of the new national disclosure system. ‘Do we have to vet Santa at our community event’, one parent asked. I can’t remember the exact reply but it ran something like this, ‘Oh if you know the Santa, on page 87, paragraph 12, clause three, of the guidelines, you’ll find that in this case, Santa does not have to be vetted’. Having listened to an array of questions by parents trying to understand all the technicalities of the new regulations, I had to ask Caroline, ‘Is this not insane?’. Most of the SPTC members laughed and nodded in agreement, but what can they do, ‘the rules is the rules’.
But like many of the safety regulations today, it is often the informal ones, the ones that don’t actually exist in law, the ones that the culture of safety encourage which often impact the most. So after we’ve all recovered from our hangover this Christmas and trip down to our children’s nativity plays, don’t be surprised if the headteacher patronises us all by telling us to put our cameras away – ‘just in case’.
Yes indeed, Glasgow may well be a Safe City, indeed Scotland may be a safe country, but it is a country run by experts and authorities who are dripping with distrust, and dominated by a culture within which adults are treated as vulnerable and incompetent.
But a vibrant nation cannot be built, and dynamic individuals cannot be formed within a climate where we are no longer expected to be able to deal with one another in a pub, or have the capacity to get a taxi home. Nor can a sense of independence or trust be built when we are all treated as potential alcoholic or potential paedophiles. Perhaps most importantly, none of us can become truly adult when we accept all these rules governing our own and everybody else’s lives.
This article appeared in The Scotsman on 7 December 2010
Believe it or not, in 2008 Glasgow was ranked the UK’s safest city, no doubt to the great joy of the city’s tourist board, but should we be so jubilant about this ‘result’, should we even be prioritising safety as an objective for councils and government? Or rather, should we not recognise that the myopic preoccupation with safety today undermines our freedom, chips away at liberty within Scotland and infantilises us all?
As we’re in Glasgow, let’s stay there a while and go for a drink. We can take a taxi into town, but perhaps we should ensure it’s a black cab – after all, as a female friend warned me – ‘these minicab drivers may not have been vetted’. If we avoid being abused by the taxi driver we can push past the smokers hunched outside the pub, but only after we’ve been checked out by the array of bouncers who are now on the door of almost every pub in the city centre. Once inside we will hopefully get a glass of whisky, but best drink it quick just in case the licensing board try to make us all sup out of plastics again like they did in 2006. But if they haven’t managed to make us all safe from being glassed, they can at least help us to be aware of the need to ‘Drink Responsibly’, or if we go the casino, to ‘Gamble Responsibly’. (Isn’t that an oxymoron?). Don’t worry about getting a bit drunk and starting some Glasgow football banter, the beer mats will reminding you to give the red card to sectarianism and help you to mind your language. Let’s take a trip to the toilet and be made aware of the latest risky sexually transmitted disease by the poster standing over us at the urinal as we look down at our endangered organ. And finally, after our safe night in town, we can take a taxi home outside Central Station where there is no need to worry about the other people in the queue anymore as we have the friendly taxi queue organisers, with their official luminous yellow waist coats waving us safely on our way to bed. What a night out we had in Glasgow: Safe City.
These examples may appear trivial, but it reflects a trend towards the regulation of everyday life that is spreading across Scotland and the UK, a trend that runs the risk of breeding a generation of young people who hardly know what it means to be a member of the public, indeed who hardly know what it means to be a free, responsibly individual – to be an adult.
Let’s stick with the theme of drink and take a look at the recent debate in the Scottish parliament about increasing the price of booze to get a taste of the illiberal attitudes that exist today.
The underlying idea used to support the case for pumping the price of cheap booze up was that too many people drink too much and kill themselves, too many people are alcoholics and too many people get drunk and fight and cause mayhem in communities. Or in a nut shell, ‘We can’t trust people. We can’t trust the poor working classes in particular. We need to protect you from other people and from yourself’. This used to be called authoritarianism, but today, with almost nobody making the case for individual freedom, it can pass as another enlightened form of health and safety awareness raising.
As with most new laws and regulations, remembering of course that the UK Labour governments introduced a new law for every day they were in office, here the booze barney fed off the most extreme examples to justify new regulations that would effect us all: Eleven year olds turning up drunk in school, dying alcoholics and stories of youth on estates ‘sucking on big plastic bottles of cheap booze’ and terrorising the community. The solution? Increase the price on cheap booze for everyone and hey presto all these various social problems go away (really?) and we all have to pay more for the alcohol we want to drink.
Even if increasing the price of booze had some impact should it be supported? Like it or not making the wrong choices is part of being free and as John Stuart Mill argued, the greater good of freedom of choice far out weighs the harm done by people through drink. For Mill the most important thing was not the choices people made, but the type of people making those choice – free choosing individuals. Ironically one of the most powerful barriers to drinking excessively is self control, self respect and self discipline – all of which are products of a liberal culture and a culture that celebrates freedom and the ideal of the robust, responsible individual – the very culture and freedom that is being drained from society by the safety zealots.
But if society has lost trust in us adults to look after ourselves and deal with one another, this is nothing compared to the Kafkaesque world of child safety. At a recent Scottish Parents Teachers Council, Caroline Stewart, of the Central Registered Body in Scotland, explained to the confused audience all the ins and outs of the new national disclosure system. ‘Do we have to vet Santa at our community event’, one parent asked. I can’t remember the exact reply but it ran something like this, ‘Oh if you know the Santa, on page 87, paragraph 12, clause three, of the guidelines, you’ll find that in this case, Santa does not have to be vetted’. Having listened to an array of questions by parents trying to understand all the technicalities of the new regulations, I had to ask Caroline, ‘Is this not insane?’. Most of the SPTC members laughed and nodded in agreement, but what can they do, ‘the rules is the rules’.
But like many of the safety regulations today, it is often the informal ones, the ones that don’t actually exist in law, the ones that the culture of safety encourage which often impact the most. So after we’ve all recovered from our hangover this Christmas and trip down to our children’s nativity plays, don’t be surprised if the headteacher patronises us all by telling us to put our cameras away – ‘just in case’.
Yes indeed, Glasgow may well be a Safe City, indeed Scotland may be a safe country, but it is a country run by experts and authorities who are dripping with distrust, and dominated by a culture within which adults are treated as vulnerable and incompetent.
But a vibrant nation cannot be built, and dynamic individuals cannot be formed within a climate where we are no longer expected to be able to deal with one another in a pub, or have the capacity to get a taxi home. Nor can a sense of independence or trust be built when we are all treated as potential alcoholic or potential paedophiles. Perhaps most importantly, none of us can become truly adult when we accept all these rules governing our own and everybody else’s lives.
This article appeared in The Scotsman on 7 December 2010
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