Gray wins Labour leadership

We shouldn’t have been too surprised but Labour has yet again shot itself in the foot by choosing the useless and uncharismatic Brownite clone Iain Gray as its Scottish leader. Cathy Jamieson came second while the most obnoxious candidate of all Andy Kerr was relegated to third place. In the deputy leadership campaign Labour members rejected the socialist Bill Butler in favour of Glasgow MSP Johann Lamont.

In my view Labour’s only hope was to choose Jamieson and Butler. While Cathy Jamieson’s hardly a radical socialist she does speak more for the left and has closer links to the unions than either Gray or Kerr. I also thought a victory for her might have been good from a gender perspective as she appears to have a record of speaking out on some feminist issues (such as her strong condemnation several months ago of the proposed opening of Hooters ‘restaurants’ in Scotland).

Cathy Jamieson was the one person who could have made the SNP seem bad from a left perspective and re-energised Labour’s core supporters. Whether or not she was actually committed to doing anything once in a position of power I think a shift to the left in tone from the Labour leader would have helped move Scottish politics in a leftward direction and forced the SNP to take more notice of ordinary people’s concerns.

At the same time that Labour have been imploding the Liberal Democrats have been moving rapidly to the right with its UK leader Nick Clegg attacking ‘social-democracy’ as somehow being no longer relevant and demanding a new wave of tax cuts, a call echoed by their Scottish leader Tavish Scott who has proposed an immediate 2p tax cut for everyone - this would apparently give the average Scot another £300 in their pocket each year (and of course mean the government has £300 less to spend for each person on education and healthcare).

The next general election at Westminster is almost certain to yield a huge majority for the Conservatives and unlike last time (ie. the 1980s) not one of the main UK parties is going to have any sort of alternative to offer whatsoever. Here in Scotland the SNP will keep on portraying themselves as the radical alternative which people want while in reality hardly ever doing anything differently.

Large sections of the electorate can be deceived for a few years, perhaps a decade, but not forever. When they realise the real agenda of those in power there is always an opportunity for new social and political movements to emerge. But the more likely outcome is yet more political disillusionment and a growing sense of hopelessness among those who are left behind, those who mainstream politicians ignore and wish would simply go away.

Back to uni + some good news for once

After 4 months of doing very little I was fairly happy to go back to Glasgow Uni today for the start of my second year where I'll be studying level 2 Politics and Central and East European Studies and level 1 Sociology. A lot of work (which is not so good) but hopefully there'll be some interesting stuff as well. But there's one slight problem - I've got lectures at 9am 3 days a week (last year there was nothing before 1 in the afternoon). So today I was up at 7:30 after 2 and a half hours sleep - not getting back home again till 15 hours and 2 socialist meetings later. I don't know why I'm still awake but I do know that I feel crap and am probably more than doubling the risk of death from all sorts of hideous diseases (at least that's if the study on sleep I recently read about is correct).

On the subject of busy students, something I read today in the Guardian is that the English work much less than those in other countries (studying for just 26 hours a week compared to 41 for the Portuguese, 35 for the French and 34 for the Germans). These 26 hours are said to include 14 hours tuition and at least 12 hours private study. In my three courses the maximum time spent a week in lectures and tutorials (provided I went to them all) adds up to just 12 hours so maybe the Scots are even lazier. As for private study I didn't do nearly as much as 12 hours a week last year but then it was only my first year and I'm probably quite lazy. But I think the fact studying hours are generally much lower in the UK must have something to do with the way in which many students here have to devote so much of their time working in crappy jobs to cover their costs - something made far worse by the abolition of grants and the introduction of tuition fees (in England and Wales at least).

Not all news is bad news so here's some positive stories I've seen over the last week or so:

* After a recent reshuffle Norway's cabinet has, for the first time, more female than male ministers – by 10 to 9. Added to the fact that 4 out of 7 of the country's parliamentary parties have female leaders this is certainly a positive sign for gender equality in the country, at least at a political level. Another good thing about Norway is that it was the first country to introduce compulsory gender quotas within company management positions and soon no less than 40% of such posts can be occupied by women. Patriarchy of course goes a lot deeper than simply creating a lack of female politicians and business leaders but at least the Norwegians are doing more than most. And I'm very happy that they're likely to follow Sweden's example by criminalising the purchase of sex later on this year, a move which will hopefully have a significant effect on public attitudes to the sex industry in general.

* Scottish Labour's new leader Wendy Alexander appoints 7 women and 3 men to her party's 10 most important posts with hardly a mention and significantly less criticism than you might expect from our sexist media (although if I remember correctly the Daily Record had a big full page story titled “JOBS FOR THE GIRLS”).

* Italy considers fining men who pay for sex as well as serving legal papers in their own homes to shame them. Any action against these evil bastards is more than welcome but should surely also include keeping them behind bars for a good few months.

* The emergence of a new mass struggle against the brutal military dictatorship in Burma which has, for 45 years, been torturing and enslaving its own people and starving them of the nation's resources. Western countries might now be expressing their support for the protesters but let's not forget that they've done nothing up to now and have always been perfectly happy to let their corporations profit from the misery of the Burmese population.