Five things Labour should to do now, and five things it (probably) won’t.

From the Daily Record Sat 14/12/19

The Labour party in England woke up yesterday in the same situation Labour in Scotland found itself in 2015 - shattered, its citadels sacked, the activists bewildered and not knowing how to win back territory taken fore granted for generations.

There are few lessons from Scottish Labour on what to do next, because the party was ahead of Corbyn into the ditch.

If there is a lesson from further afield it is that there no guarantee for social democratic parties in an age of identity politics.

The French Socialist party banked just 6.4 per cent in last year’s elections, in Greece Pasok last polled at just over six per cent. That shows what is on offer for Labour if change does not happen.

Here are five do’s for revival, and five don’t pitfalls.

1) Goodbye Corbyn, but not all of Corbynism

If he hasn’t gone by now more shame on him. The leader, and his legacy of anti-patriotism as much as anti-Semitism, repelled Labour voters. He was a force for failure, not a cause for hope. But the agenda for change, for nationalisation and for renewal, people wanted that. To persuade voters Labour needs leaders who can communicate big ideas, and how they would be paid for, beyond reading out a shopping list.

2) Take your idealogical purity and stuff it where your majority just went

If a party keeps losing, Labour’s lost four in row, it is beyond time waiting for voters to come home. If the Momentum purists and trade union barons put a ring of voting steel around socialist purism and one more push to awaken the working class, then it is time to start thinking about another centrist party. The purge of purism has to be done, and done quickly, or Labour is lost for a decade. 

3) Adopt a friend

If you’re Labour and don’t have any Tory or SNP friends you’re not principled, you’re just a loser.
Listen, don’t preach on politics. Often people will shock you, but unless they cross a racist or bigoted line, try to work out what policy responses can answer their fears.

4) Open up

Mandatory re-selection isn’t popular but open primaries can be. Labour needs top talent, and needs to sound and look like the people it wants to represent. That starts with you, Richard Leonard.

5) Embrace the nation

The UK fashion industry is bigger than the car industry, no one has worked in a deep mine in three decades. New commuter housing developments on the edge of hollowed out former mining towns, in places like Mansfield and Bolsover, do the talking, pay the taxes and voted Tory. Offer aspirational voters the future, not just an echo of the past. So green lives four our kids not just green industrial jobs. 


Five things Labour shouldn’t do (but might):

1) Don’t look back in anger

History is in the rear view mirror, the party could be too. Fine, blame Jeremy or John, kick the dog or the dressing table, anyone but yourself. Your opponents are in front, not behind. Unite quickly to get on with winning.

2) Choose the wrong leader

There is a certain inevitability to the left, which controls the party, trying to prove it was right and the voters were wrong by choosing a bad leader. Don’t choose a leader for you, choose a leader for that SNP/Tory/Lib Dem mate you’re talking to again. You need someone who can win. Otherwise see point 2 above

3) Don’t forget the who won the election

Not Johnson, but the grown-up children of working class voters you lost a connection with. Don’t deny reality, reconnecting on voters’ trust is hard work and takes time.

3) Don’t break up the country

Don’t buy the nationalist narrative of Scotland being ”different” but learn from the SNP that politics is about identity as well as policy. Labour’s identity is common endeavour, that more is achieved by unity. Keep challenging nationalists to come up with a progressive argument for dividing people from each other.

5) Don’t give up

Against failing school and health standards, against austerity, against globalism and climate change, people need a social democratic alternative more than ever.

Tom Watson, the changed man

For the Daily Record 07/11/19

At the Labour conference I took a walk around Brighton with Tom Watson, it was a revelation.

The first person we (almost) bumped into was Jeremy Corbyn. But the weekend after the botched coup against the deputy leader he was in no mood to meet the boss.

We did, however, have several other encounters as we wandered through the Lanes.

“Are you still here?” someone shouted.

“They haven’t got me yet,” said the cheery pro-politician.

“That’s too bad then,” came the reply, but it was in jest. He was genuinely popular.

People flocked to greet him but Watson was most struck by one man whom he had met two years earlier.

“You changed my life,” said the man. “You got me dieting and look, I’ve lost two stone.”

Watson’s own inspiring transformation from “Big Lad” to svelte “Modfather” changed his outlook on life utterly. He looked and talked differently.

There was a sparkle in his eye when he spoke about health, less so when he talked about Labour.

On the way back to the conference he reminded us how he and his father once had their picture taken with Corbyn outside the hall. “Happy days, two years ago,” he joked.

But the laugh was hollow, the rift at the heart of Labour irreparable.  

  

Tom Watson is one of the most tenacious and fearless campaigners of his generation, and his leaving is Labour’s loss.

With his departure a light goes off in the window for those who thought they could return to a moderate Labour party any time soon.

Keith Schellenberg recalled

For the Daily Record 01/11/19 on the death of Keith Schellenberg, former laird of Eigg

At the West Highland Free Press, where I started in journalism in the 1980s, we campaigned for radical land reform.

It was when I stepped ashore on the island of Eigg with photographer Sam Maynard I learned this was easier in theory than in practice.

The islanders, almost all tenants of the landlord Keith Schellenberg, were living in derelict, rented homes. They were working, or not working, depending on the whim of the laird who controlled everything on Eigg apart from the dole and the doctor.

Eigg, we found, was in the feudal death-grip of landlordism.

After years of neglect at the hands of this self-styled “playboy”,the islanders had enough of his cricket matches, vintage Rolls Royces and Toad of Toad hall buffoonery.

Speaking out took some courage, but for those who did it was the first step in finding a voice in their own story.  

In turn charming and menacing, Schellenberg was a savvy legal and media operator, casting himself as a misunderstood philanthropist of which the Hebrides has seen many.


He tried outsmart the islanders by selling on, first to himself, then to a German fire artist.
With legal advice from the late Simon Fraser, the islanders proved smarter. They now own the place - game, set and match.  


I returned to Eigg two years ago for the 20th anniversary celebrations of the buy-out.

The islanders were the same, warm and welcoming, and there were lots more kids running around. The population has increased by 60 per cent, over 100 happy souls live on the inner Hebridean paradise. People were getting on with ordinary, radical lives.

Yesterday, as news of “Schelley’s” death spread, the last of the 3,000 tons of community-owned forestry harvested on the island was being shipped off the modernised pier.

Maybe that, the fact that islanders are cracking on with making Eigg a viable, self-sustaining community, is the best memorial to the Schellenberg era of misrule.

Dear Priti Patel - an open letter

From my Daily Record column

Friday 26th July

Dear Priti Patel,

In fact, Dear Secretary of State for the Home Department. Forgive the informality and my open approach.

We haven't had many journalistic dealings with each other, not since your parliamentary aides stole four bottles of whisky from a Scotland Office reception a few years ago and you had to issue an apology, which you did with great grace and humour.

Your staff were reprimanded, not sent to the gallows (er, ha ha). You changed your mind on capital punishment, I hope I can change your mind on something else.

You inherit a bulging in-tray from Sajid Javid; Brexit, citizenship and immigration will be priorities.

Hopefully you will not have been bequeathed Javid's closed-mind attitude to drugs consumption rooms and the dire health crisis which leaves Scotland facing more than 1000 drugs deaths this year.

Health officials in Glasgow, the Scottish Government, local MPs, and this newspaper are campaigning for consumption rooms where addicts can administer their own drugs in a safe and sterile environment.

This is controversial, I accept, but these facilities have been proven to save lives elsewhere.

The Commons Scottish affairs committee investigation into the issue, which the Home Office boycotted under Javid, should be in your red box soon.

On health grounds, there are few arguments left against these facilities.

As a political issue it is rather more tangled. The SNP insists getting the facilities running should involve devolving part of the Misuse of Drugs Act to Scotland.

Whitehall sees this as conceding more power without purpose.

It need not be so.

As Home Secretary you could change the relevant clauses of the Act by statutory instrument, without a vote in Parliament.

At the stroke of a pen you could approve a UK pilot scheme in Glasgow, save lives in Scotland, confound opponents and show your Government has compassion for some very vulnerable people.

It's a big ask, but it would be a great start for you and is easier than Brexit.

Good luck with that by the way.

Yours, TC.

Beware of making Boris the bogey

From my Daily Record column

DOES political purgatory mean having to live the same lousy life twice over? That's been the experience of observers who are veterans of both the 2014 and 2016 referenda and their aftermath.

Every aspect of nationalism we see writ large across the UK today, we saw in Scotland first.

With Boris Johnson, pictured right - a populist to match Alex Salmond in his pomp - installed as Prime Minister, we are about to see the next phase of British nationalism.

In this stage, patriotism is harnessed to the no-turning-back certainty of a divisive referendum and moulded into an unbeatable political force.

People who took the step and voted Yes in the 2014 independence referendum were easy to gather behind the SNP in a first-past-the-post election the following year, creating a 50 per cent share of the vote for one party and nearly wiping out the opposition in Scotland.

Watch what will unfold. The cabinet Boris Johnson assembled on Wednesday is not one for government, it is for political warfare.

The horseguard of the Leave campaign have been recalled to duty.

Three of the great offices of state, Chancellor, Home Office and Foreign Secretary are filled by the talented children of immigrants, Javid, Patel and Raab.

This cause for liberal celebration also provides cynical cover for a Prime Minister who is about to run a nativist British campaign appealing to white, working-class patriots to get a breakout Brexit over the line.

Johnson, charismatic, funny and optimistic, will have no problem coalescing Leave voters behind this Big Brexit party in an early general election.

He will be the peoples' champion, opponents the unpatriotic roadblock to Brexit.

That is the plan, it's simple, and Scotland, that laboratory of nationalism which populists the world over now study, has shown it works.

One veteran Leave campaigner was quoted earlier this year saying that "if Vote Leave was a party, we'd smash everyone at an election".

In Scotland that's not a political revelation, it's a plain fact.

In the run-up to 2016, the Leave UK campaign studied and learned from the successes and mistakes of the SNP's 2014 venture.

They didn't produce a detailed manifesto. Alex Salmond's White Paper, and when you read it now, it is still stunning to think it was produced by an impartial civil service, became an albatross around his neck.

They didn't propose any detail on the Irish backstop or anything else to tether their fantasy to the ground, which is why so much remainer energy since has been spent on complaining the electorate were sold a pig in poke.

The voters weren't fooled, they didn't vote on detail, they voted on how they felt.

The Leave campaign, like the Yes campaign was an exercise in psychology as much as politics.

The change campaigners reached into the emotional hearts of voters to turn doubts on identity into opportunities.

The very meaning of Britishness, once the BBC is rubbished for "bias", is the NHS, Labour's neverending legacy.

In the Autumn of 2014, the Yes campaign warned there were only days to save the "NHScotland" from a UK Government by suporting independence.

That control of the NHS was already wholly devolved to Scotland didn't stand in the way of the lie.

Similarly, Leave reached into the battlefield between head and heart during Brexit, guaranteeing the NHS would flourish, £350million a week extra, but only outside the EU.

Fortunately or not, the deep anti-politics anger sparked by the 2008 crunch, superheated by the expenses scandal, hardened by the fall in living standards, had not reached boiling point in 2014.

On the morning of June 24, 2016, on what Nigel Farage coined "Independence Day", SNP strategists bitterly realised they had gone too early.

Had they waited, the mood even a few weeks later might have tipped the world their way.

If the SNP are to learn from history they won't repeat Labour's mistake when faced with a populist, right-wing Tory Prime Minister.

Scottish Labour, then the power in the land, demonised Margaret Thatcher to the extent that voicing support for the Conservatives, far let voting for them, was discouraged.

Funnily enough this didn't create Labour converts.

Tartan Tories simply began coalescing around the party most likely to beat Labour, the SNP.

If the SNP offers no better argument for independence than Boris Johnson as a "bogeyman", it could repeat history and reap the same harvest.

New PM could help tackle soaring drugs deaths

From the Daily Record 5th July 2019. A little lengthy but it spells out what  safe drug consumption rooms amount to and how they could be tried in Scotland. 

As the Tory leadership caravan trundles towards Perth tonight, a pack of hounds pursuing the pro-fox baiting Jeremy Hunt, Boris Johnson is nearly home and dry.

By now voting papers are hitting Home Counties door mats and most Conservative members have made up their mind, it has to be Boris for Brexit.

If only the sense of dismay greeting that outcome in Scotland could be matched by Johnson’s own anxiety over his lack of grip on the country of which he has next to no experience.    

There’s precious little understanding of Scotland by the current occupant of Downing Street, let along the next one.

Theresa May gathered Scottish Tory MPs recently, her first group meeting two years after their election. Proceedings started, apparently, with Gavin Barwell, the PM’s chief of staff, telling the room he hadn’t been to Scotland often and outlining what the PM’s speech should say. That heavy rain the other week, it was the weeping frustration of Scottish Tories.

There’s little Boris Johnson can do to change Scotland’s political weather to his advantage.

It’s doubtful his blond appeal can counter the nationalist line that his personality alone is reason enough to stage a second independence vote.

A hard Brexit, Johnson’s epistle to the faithful, his suicide note to the nation, is a clear and present danger to the Union.

On the constitution, and much else, a new PM is going to need every lever at his disposal to wrongfoot Nicola Sturgeon.

One thing Johnson could do is listen to his own libertarian instincts to outpace the SNP in a progressive policy area.

If the Tory leadership contest did us one favour it was to explode the hypocrisy around illegal drugs, taking Michael Gove’s leadership ambitions with it.

The next Prime Minister will almost certainly be a self-confessed drug criminal, possession of a class A drug like cocaine can mean up to seven years in prison, and the prisons are full.

The need for an overhaul of drugs policy across the UK is writ large. In Scotland we are headed for 1100 needless drugs deaths a year.

The rethink on safe consumption facilities that Scottish politicians and this newspaper are campaigning hard for only serves to highlight the drugs crisis across the whole UK.

In England Police chiefs are offering offenders treatment as an alternative to prosecution. 

Unfortunately for the SNP, a demand for anything different is always viewed through the prism of conceding more powers and meets Whitehall resistance.

But this is a UK-wide crisis, the constitution has little to do with it, and, it seems, not much has to change in the law  to allow safe drug consumption rooms that save lives in other countries.

Heroin Assisted Treatment clinics, straight-up medical centres where people are prescribed heroin, rather than methadone, by a doctor for use in the clinic, are on the way. A licence for one to open in Glasgow should be in place for the Autumn.

But supervised drug consumption rooms, where people bring their own street drugs to a safe, sterile space for use under medical supervision, are illegal. 

Health experts avoid calling these places, pardon the media parlance, “shooting galleries” or “injection rooms”. They would look like health centres, and from Portugal to Canada they have proven record in reducing fatalities.

There are just a few legalistic steps to overcome to allow a safer drug consumption facility to operate, because no Health board can put its staff at risk of prosecution for allowing their premises to be used for taking illegal drugs.

There has to be an exemption from specific sections of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, the kind of exemption that allows similar facilities to operate in a range of European countries.

In evidence to the Scottish Affairs committee Professor Alex Stevens, a member Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs, said it would take just a simple statutory instrument to go through the Commons, that is without a vote, to alter the law.

Or, a letter of comfort from the Lord Advocate, Scotland’s chief legal officer, that health staff would not be prosecuted could provide police and medics, and people who use drugs, with the clarity needed. 

The Lord Advocate, James Wolffe, has so far refused to do this pushing the problem back to the Home Office which sticks to the letter of the, highly outdated, 1971 law. 

But in his evidence to Scottish MPs this week, Chief Inspector Jason Kew, of Thames Valley Police, suggested the Lord Advocate could reconsider.

He pointed out that prosecutions can only happen if they first pass the “public interest test”. Given soaring drug deaths would it be in the public interest to prosecute medical staff simply trying to save the lives of vulnerable people?

The roadblock to preventing more deaths is essentially a political one.

The current Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, is irreconcilably against decriminalisation or safe consumption rooms, citing the abhorrence of ordinary people on the streets of Bristol where he grew up to drug trading and its consequences.

Getting drugs and needles off the streets is, of course, one argument for safe consumption rooms.

However, one consequence of a new Prime Minister is a new cabinet, and Javid may be moving on very soon, possibly to become chancellor.

An opportunity arises, for Scotland and for Boris Johnson. 

Another Johnson, Police Scotland’s Steve Johnson, spelled it out in harrowing detail this week. Day on day he is recording deaths through drug abuse of people in their early 20s, people his officers know are in need of a doctor not the dock of a courtroom.  

In one stroke a new Prime Minister could cut through the legalistic buck-passing, and signal that we are ready for a new, grown-up debate on drugs policy.

But scoring a political coup would be incidental and hardly the point. Boris Johnson would be saving lives in Scotland, lots of them.

Tell me, which Prime Minister doesn’t want that headline?

Rogue polls will send indy down the plughole

From my Daily Record column today  12/07/19

Whatever is in the water this summer is fast polluting the independence campaign.

First Angus MacNeil pipes up and says forget a referendum, any election win will do.

Then Kenny MacAskill, whose judgment and political antenna are several stages of evolution ahead, calls for a wildcat, illegal vote.

Add to that Joanna Cherry hijacking plans for citizens’ assemblies as a tool to “create a consensus around Scotland and a bigger majority for Yes” and there’s your democratic credibility swirling down the plughole.

A consultative referendum was a disaster in Catalonia and supporters of citizens’ assemblies are looking at the wrong country.

In Ireland, they were used, successfully, to transition the country on abortion and sexual equality.

These were big cultural and generational changes, massively assisted by the collapse of the Catholic Church and the lived experience of friends and family members talking about previously taboo subjects.

In Scotland, we have been talking about nothing else but constitutional politics for years. Not so much talking as shouting, abusing and singing Kylie Minogue with our hands over our ears if so much as a contradictory tweet comes our way.

Citizens’ assemblies will never be seen in Scotland as anything other than an SNP astroturf campaign, the independence agenda given the synthetic appearance of a grassroots engagement.

Scottish voters have been to the polls eight times in the last 10 years. We were the test tube for the divided, post-crash world that’s seen the rise of nationalism from America to India.

We are the canary in the coal mine of post-truth politics and now we’ve reached the stage where politicians say: “Forget the will of the people, who needs a referendum?” 

To quote the philosopher Justin Timberlake, sometimes the greatest way to say something is to say nothing at all. Not that you’d expect MacNeil to button up.

However, I notice the SNP Government spent £24million on foreign affairs last year, promoting independence abroad. That’s just £1million less than his party has cut from the core budget of MacNeil’s Western Isles council in the last five years.

It shows you what just one year of shutting up about the constitution is worth.

Sùil Eile air Apollo 11

Bho colbh an Daily Record. Mo thaing do Daibhidh Woods agus Mairi K, mar is àbhaist. English translation below.

Nam chuimhne, bha mi cho fad’ air falbh bhon taigh ’s b’urrainn dhomh a bhith aig m’ aois.

Bha mi ann am Bràgar, aig dachaigh m’ uncail, taobh eile an eilein.

Bha telebhisean san t-seòmar-suidhe, ri taobh uinneag ìseal. Bha mise nam shuidhe air an làr.

“That’s one small step for man...”

Bha na h-ìomhaighean dubh is geal, làn sneachda dealain.

Ach bha fios agam, fiù ’s mar phàiste, gun robh sinn ann am fianais seòrsa de mhìorbhail.

Anns na lethcheud bliadhna th’ air a dhol seachad chan eil am faireachadh sin air falbh.

Tha na rinn iad, Niall Armstrong agus Buzz Aldrin, le bhith a’ coiseachd air a’ Ghealaich, fhathast a’ cur iongantas orm.

Bidh mo charaid, a tha na eòlaiche air na speuran, a’ toirt leis ball-coise agus ball teanas a-steach a sgòiltean, ’s iad a’ riochdachadh na Cruinne agus na Gealaich.

Ann am meudachd, tha iad an ìre mhath ceart a-rèir a chèile.

Dè cho fad ’s a dh’fheumas am ball teanas a bhith bhon Chruinne gus sealltainn cho fada ’s a dh’fheumadh na h-astronauts siubhail? Faid do ghàirdein, dà mheatair, còig? 

Bhitheadh an ball teanas 7.5 meatair air falbh, sin 238,900 mìltean.

Bhon a thàinig an sgioba mu dheireadh, Apollo 17, dhachaigh chan eil clann an duine air a bhith cho fad ri mearachd pàiste bho uachdar na talmhainn.

Translation

In my memory, I was as far away from the house as I could be for my age.

I was in Bragar, at my uncle’s home, on the other side of the island.

There was a television in the living room, beside a low window. I was sitting on the floor.

“That’s one small step for man...”

The images were black and white, full of static snow.

But I knew, even as an infant, that we were witness to some kind of miracle.

In the fifty years since that feeling has not gone away.

What they did, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin by walking on the moon, still amazes me.

My friend, who is a space expert, takes a football and a tennis ball into schools, representing the Earth and the Moon. In scale, they are about the right proportion to each other.

How far does the tennis ball need to be from the Earth to show how far the astronauts had to travel?

The length of your arm, two metres, five? The tennis ball has to be 7.5 metres away, that’s 238,900 miles.

Since the last crew, Apollo 17, returned home humanity has not gone the width of an infant’s finger from the surface of the earth. 

Sùil Eile air Peadar Thatchell

Bho colbh an Daily Record - English translation below

Bha Peadar Thatchell air Rèidio Mòr (sin a th’ agamsa air Radio 4) an latha eile, agus ’s e a bha uasalach.

Tha Thatchell air a bheatha a chur seachad a’ srì airson chòraichean na coimhearsnachd geidh agus cearteas.

Thàinig e gu aire an toiseach aig fo-thaghadh Bermondsey anns na h-ochdadan, sabaid cho salach agus a tha eachdraidh air.

Bha na Lib Dems a’ càineadh Thatchell - tagraiche a’ phàrtaidh Labaraich - air sgàth ’s gun robh e geidh. 

Bhuannaich Sìm Hughes, nach robh air aideachadh fhathast gun robh e fhèin geidh. Chan eil fhios an d’fhuair e a-riamh mathanas airson sin. 

Co-dhiù, ’s ann mu chòirichean agus càineadh a bha Thatchell a’ bruidhinn air an rèidio. 

Bha am fear seo air a chur far cùrsa trèanaidh o chionn ’s gun robh e a’ coimhead air dòigh-beatha gheidh mar pheacadh sa Bhìoball.

Cha b’ urrainn dha a dhreuchd mar neach-obrach sòisealta a dhèanamh le beachdan dhen leithid, a rèir an oilthigh.

Dè bh’ aig an Naomh Peadar ri ràdh?

Thug freagairt gheur mun duine: “Tha e cruinn comasach beachdan domhain cràbhach a bhith aig neach gu bheil co-sheòrsachd ceàrr, coltach ri mo mhathair fhìn, ach gun a bhith a’ dèanamh leth-bhreith an aghaidh duine a tha geidh.” 

Sin spiorad mathanais.

translation 

Peter Thatchell was on Big Radio (it’s what I call Radio 4) the other day, and he was graceful.

Thatcell has spent his life fighting for the rights of the gay community and for justice.

He came to attention first at the Bermondsey by-election in the 80s, a fight so dirty that it became history.

The Lib Dems attacked Thatchell, the Labour candidate, because he was gay.

Simon Hughes, who had not yet admitted he was himself gay, won. It’s not clear if he was ever forgiven for that.

Anyway, it was about rights and condemnation that Thatchell was speaking on the radio.

This individual had been booted off a training course because he saw a gay lifestyle as a Biblical sin.

He couldn’t do his job as a social worker with these views, according to the university. 

What did the Saint Peter have to say? 

He gave answer with insight: “It is perfectly possible to hold deep religious beliefs that homosexuality is wrong, like my own mother, but never to discriminate against gay people.”

That is the spirit of forgiveness.

Will Boris do a Darroch on Scottish fishing?

There is a way for Boris Johnson to get a Brexit deal done quickly.  It just requires him to throw Conservative support in Scotland under a bus. From my Daily Record column:

As Donald Trump dog-walked the UK ambassador out the White House door we saw what kind of Prime Minister Boris Johnson will be.

Rather than stand up for the nation’s interests, Johnson promoted his own.

Kim Darroch (surely that’s pronounced “och” not the “ock” of Anglo broadcasters) was toast the moment the future PM refused to back our man in Washington.

Regardless of what his team might brief about a bigger game, a UK-US alliance to challenge the EU unless we get a Brexit free trade deal, what Johnson did was craven, abject, and plain sooking up to the biggest boy in the playground, 

Or was it? Brexiteers propelling Johnson towards the throne think he sent a strong message to the civil service, to Europe, and his party. Namely, there is nothing and no one he will not throw under a bus for his advancement, which hangs on getting a Brexit deal.

The signal will make Europhile civil service mandarins shudder into line and ought to  give fair weather allies of Tory Brexiteers pause for thought.

Scotland’s fishing barons, for example, the Tories’ best new friends, should take a slug of Trawler Rum to steady the nerves. Here’s why.

There is more chance of the lobster escaping the creel than there is of Johnson getting the Brexit deal through the Commons.

He is not mad enough to crash out without a deal (you try crossing fingers while typing that). Even in his mumbling evasiveness it is clear Johnson has to re-negotiate something.

He can’t work up a new deal in three months on time-limiting the Northern Irish backstop and finding these mythical “alternative arrangements” to satisfy the EU and the Tory right.

Fortunately, there is another plan already on the loom that fits the purpose.

According to an authoritative Brexit expert, Mujtaba Rahman, the best option in play is to lengthen the transition period, the time we would still abide by EU regulations without having a say in shaping them, in order to “bury” the backstop. 

It allows Johnson to deliver leave, and parks the border question for later.

This could be relatively easy to negotiate, would deliver the DUP, and get rebel Tory MPs back on board. Halloween party here we come.

There is just one catch. The idea was kicked around Downing Street earlier this year but strongly vetoed by the Scottish Conservatives. 

Any extension of the transition period would mean staying longer in the Common Fisheries Policy without a voice. 

The Scottish Codfathers (five families own 45 per cent of the fishing quota) are already furious at being kept in the hated CFP until December 2020. Under no deal they’d be out and ruling UK territorial waters from day go.

One thing is sure, if they are not out by May 2021, the next Holyrood election, they’ll pull the rug on Ruth Davidson’s Tory revival and possibly pull the curtains on the United Kingdom as a consequence.

Now, it is perfectly possible to argue the SNP alternative for Scottish fishermen is to be permanently in the Common Fisheries Policy, that’s what Remain means. But the narrative of the Tories betraying coastal communities (again) will be hard to counter. 

So, a route to deliver Brexit exists for Johnson on the first day he walks up Downing Street.

He just has to decide if throwing the Scottish fishing industry under the metaphorical bus is a price worth paying. Will he do a Darroch on the fishermen, and possibly the Union too?

Which takes us neatly to what will the Scottish Tories do?

The lobster in the trap right now is David Mundell, the Scottish Secretary. Johnson is said to be keen to keep him in place to provide stability.

Mundell has proved himself nimble enough to jig around SNP opponents. Facing any other Scottish Tory would be like being slapped with a wet fish. But Mundell can’t swallow no deal and the can’t see the Union washed into the North Sea to allow Johnson to deliver on his over-promises.

But Darroch gives us a glimpse of how the scales will be weighed in Downing Street when it comes to hard decisions and self-interest.

Pass the rum, please.

Rockall fishing wars, you ain't seen nothing yet

Given the renewed interest in Irish fishing boats around the Rockall box, I’ve dug out a Daily Record piece I wrote last year, predicting the stramash after being alerted to what was going on. Reprinted below. 

Irish boats have been in and around Rockall for years in waters claimed by the UK. But last season they started, in the words of a Scottish fishing source, “taking the proverbial” in the sure knowledge that no UK Minister wanted to see an Irish skipper in the dock of a Scottish court over a territorial dispute while Brexit negotiations were at a delicate stage.

This year the talking is over, and Scottish Ministers can no longer ignore the complaints of the Scottish fishing fleet or the evidence of the electronic trackers that show exactly where the boats are. They’re warning they will dispatch a fishery cruiser. The Irish government’s apparent bafflement is puzzling, everyone knew what was going on, but during Brexit talks everyone chose to ignore it. 

Daily Record 07/09/18

SCALLOP wars? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Tempting as it is to see the fishing clashes in the English Channel as Brexit without nets, the incident only shows how complicated negotiating a shared resource like fish is.

UK boats have ancient rights to fish the French coast, just as French boats came to UK waters long before a Common Fisheries Policy.

For years, it was generally accepted that small British boats could enter the “closed” French waters for a limited number of “days at sea”.

There was no agreement this year, although that has been sorted now after flares and dangerous clashes at sea.

What tipped the French is that the small boats from Newlyn and the West Country have been joined of late by trawlers from Scotland.

One of the vessels attacked in the Channel was the 95ft Honeybourne III, registered in Peterhead but apparently belonging to a Canadian-owned company. So, nothing as simple as a Scottish boat, and a signal, if one were needed, that our post-Brexit fishing policies should start afresh with an emphasis on boats fishing areas assigned to their home ports.

Expect more of these disputes post-Brexit.

I’m told Irish trawlers are “pulling the proverbial” in the Rockall box conservation area on the edge of Britain’s Atlantic territorial waters.

During delicate Brexit negotiations, which government would risk having an Irish trawler hauled through a British court over fishing infringements? 

When I looked yesterday, the marine traffic map showed the Honeybourne III was still there, off the coast of Le Touquet. The live mapping service said: “Status: engaged in fishing.”

Its business is scallop dredging, scraping the ocean floor for shellfish, which has been described as akin to cutting down orchards to pick apples. But that’s another debate for post-Brexit Britain.

 I NEARLY fell off my scooter when a Mercedes with the numberplate Y19 YES drove past me outside Westminster this week.

Nationalist friends will take it as a sign from on high - well, the DVLA - that next year is the destined one for an independence majority.

Then an SNP MP told me no, it was probably just Alex Salmond on the way to record his Russia Today programme.