Scottish Salmond

“The sun has no significance,
The eclipse full of meaning.”
From The Boogoo Diaries
of Bachchoo
One sometimes gets the feeling that Britain is an overdeveloped democracy. The representatives of the people are kept on a tight leash and sometimes, in a libertarian fantasy, a mood induced by introspection or other substances, I feel it may be a bit too tight.

Take the case of Alex Salmond, the secessionist boss of the Scottish National Party. He was crowned the first minister of the devolved Scottish Parliament at Holyrood in Edinburgh on May 18. This Parliament and its powers were established by the Labour Party when they were the government. They must have calculated at the time that this would satisfy the feeling in Scotland that it was being treated as a colony by Britain and that having more say in its own matters through direct representation would cool the ardour of the Scots separatists. It was a vain hope and a bad strategy.
Mr Salmond’s party, which had demanded such a Parliament and declared that its avowed intention was total independence for Scotland and a break with the United Kingdom, gained the most seats in this, their second, election.
Mr Salmond is consequently riding high, making demands on Westminster and clearly signalling that a few years into this auxiliary Parliament he will hold a referendum in which the Scots will say Yea or Nay to total independence.
This reportage is not prompted by any political foreboding. I have as yet no view on whether an independent Scotland would be a good or a bad thing for the Scots, the English, the European Union, the world, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Lashkar-e-Toyota or for me. I admit I would find it very slightly burdensome to carry a passport every time I visited Glasgow and would deem it extremely disadvantageous if my stage plays were banned from the Edinburgh festival on the grounds that I wasn’t McDhondy.
No! The point is that Mr Salmond is now King and crowing, consequent upon the will of electoral democracy, but there is no prospect that he will celebrate the event by spending a million pounds or so of tax-payers’ money on a cake for his birthday. Neither can he erect statues to himself in the parks and at the junctions of thoroughfares in Aberdeen. No doubt some Scottish arts minister will order more statues of Robert the Bruce or Robert Burns and they will stand proudly at road junctions to the delight of tourists and pigeons, but Mr Salmond, alas, will have to await the opening of a branch of Madame Tussauds in Edinburgh to be so honoured. If he did order a million pound birthday cake or build statues of his party’s symbol in Scotland, as some chief ministers in a distant country feel it their prerogative to do, he would today find himself enjoying Her Majesty’s hospitality, breaking rocks in some high-security English prison.
Then there’s the case of poor Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat minister in the present UK coalition government. Mr Huhne is in trouble as the newspapers allege that he was speeding in his car and, because he faced a driving ban if he was found guilty of this driving offence, asked his wife (from whom he has since separated) to take the rap. How is that possible? The speeding offence was recorded on cameras trained on the roads to register the speed and number-plate of the offending car. The speed cameras don’t photograph the driver.
If a driver gets a certain number of convictions for violations of traffic laws, s/he is automatically banned from driving. The offences are recorded as “points” on your licence and when you reach 12 you are banned. Mr Huhne, it is alleged, was close to 12 and asked his wife to say she was driving and take the negative points awarded for the offence. All this was supposedly eight years ago!
Dishonestly transferring blame for driving offences so as to avoid a ban is a procedure known to most people in Britain. I am not saying very many people use it, but it’s known to be a possibility. If this was Mumbai and one was stopped by a constable for speeding, violating a red light or using a mobile phone while driving, it is customary to slip the diligent officer a crisp piece of valuable paper, accept his salaams and move on. Not so in Britain. The camera hounds you, the phone evidence confounds you.
Mr Huhne is damned by the allegations. He has allegedly attempted to dodge the consequences of a traffic offence and defraud the law. There are now calls on him to resign as a minister. Even if he is guilty, should he resign? Does the responsibility that democratic election put upon you enjoin you to not attempt to beat traffic regulations and penalties? There are other countries in which ministers get away with fraud, with storing crores and crores-of-crores of their ill-gotten, dollar-converted currency in international banks — the proceeds of graft and licence-selling.
Democratic vigilance?
The last case of this over-enthusiastic democratic vigilance concerns the words used this week by the justice secretary of this government, Ken Clarke. Mr Clarke is a veteran Tory minister and he was being questioned on a radio programme about his attitude to sentencing in rape cases. He has expressed his view that sentences of defendants who plead guilty for any offence should be reduced by a judge for sparing public resources — the time and cost of a useless trial. Mr Clarke talked around the issue and seemed to be of the opinion that some cases of rape, those with extreme violence, for instance, were more serious than, say, the withdrawal of consent by a rape victim at the last minute in a “date-rape” case.
The interview and this contention caused a political tsunami. Labour leaders demanded that Mr Clarke be sacked because he had committed the crime of saying some rapes were more serious than others. The shock and horror at his statement seemed to me to be somewhat feigned. Democracy, though, includes women’s votes and the opposition clearly thinks, whatever their view on sentencing suspects who plead guilty, that Mr Clarke has walked into a linguistic elephant trap and that there will be popular support for him going down.