Fundamental(ist) mistakes from The Steamie

I’ve written before (ok – quite a lot) about the generally poor level of political  commentary in Scottish newspapers. It’s not that I’m obsessed by this, but I really do believe that we could be doing things a lot better.

Working as a lecturer I’ve now started to become interested in the academic aspect of political opinion – particularly the contribution, if any, that newspapers make to the achievement of a deliberative democracy – the kind of engaged, inclusive democracy that the founders of the Scottish Parliament had in mind.

But for that to happen, we need at the very least to have a greater understanding of the political process.

This post in  The Steamie – a decent enough contribution to the political blogosphere in Scotland -  is an example of real misunderstanding masquerading as insight.

Political journalists were interested, reasonably enough,  yesterday in why Nicola Sturgeon, rather than Kenny MacAskill was chosen to front the launch of the SNP’s drive against Scotland’s booze culture.

David Maddox, in The Steamie, suggested that it was in part due to the desire to present Sturgeon, rather than MacAskill as the SNP leader in waiting:

“ Mr MacAskill …… is the most likely figure that any challenge from the so-called fundamentalist wing may gather around, if things were to go pear shaped in the next couple of years. ”  

I want to say this as politely as I can – but that is just daft.  Having worked for John Swinney during his leadership I would not deny that at that time there were painful divisions within the SNP.  But it was far too simplistic to present these divisions as fundamentalist versus gradualist.  It was really the result of the move by the SNP from being a party of protest to becoming a party of government.  There just isn’t a big fundamentalist/gradualist split anymore.

But even if there was,  Kenny MacAskill would probably be the least likely senior figure in the SNP that the fundamentalists would “gather round.”

After the election of 2003, Kenny wrote some interesting articles about the future direction of the SNP. You can get a flavour of this, by reading this piece in The Times, which includes the line:

 ”Shouting “independence” louder is no more likely to increase the vote than would wearing a darker shade of wode.”  Hardly a fundamentalist rallying cry I would have thought.

In truth SNP has developed into a thoughtful movement – is it too much to ask for political hacks to keep pace?

Why Daniel Finkelstein is very good

The best political commentator around is Daniel Finkelstein of The Times.

This high-quality posttoday demonstrates his ability. The reason he’s particularly good is that, unlike most political journalists, he’s  been involved in politics at a high strategic level – ie he’s actually tried to win votes and therefore knows something about it.

When I ran the SNP leader’s private office I was amazed at just how little political correspondents knew about – well, politics.  They were great at running stories about gaffes, humiliations, who was up and down and who said what to who.

But their opinions, freely given, on the business of campaigning for office were usually nonsense.

I remember John McTernan used to write well for Scotland on Sunday, even if I disagreed with almost everything he said,  and I have written occasionally for that paper and some others.  But here in Scotland the press really lacks commentators with the insight gained from running or even being involved in national election campaigns.

That might be one reason why political opinion in our newspapers (with the exception of Ian Bell and one or two others) is so woeful.