I set up this Substack in May 2021 to share my columns, essays, op-eds and parliamentary sketches from the Scottish Daily Mail.
From now on, the only way to access them is by downloading the Mail+ Scotland app, which you can do here: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/scottish-daily-mail/id1609084140. You can, of course, still pick up a physical copy of the paper and support your local newsagent!
Anyway, if you do download the Mail+ Scotland app you’ll be able to read my latest column, which is on Nicola Sturgeon, the gender law revolt and what it says about the future of the SNP. I reckon something interesting might be happening inside the First Minister’s party. And to think all this could have been avoided if she had just allowed her MSPs a free vote on the Gender Recognition Reform Bill…
Changes
With this Substack no longer reproducing my Mail columns, I’m going to have to find something else to do with it. My initial thoughts are:
A 97-entry blog ‘In Defence of the Oxford Comma’
A critical re-evaluation of Home and Away as an allegory on late capitalism
A complete history of the Mini Metro
Or, you know, other stuff. I’m open to suggestions.
Just stop Just Stop Oil
The eco-stunt artists of Just Stop Oil have once again brought disruption to the public. This time, they targeted the M25, with sections having to be closed today because of their demonstrations.
The right to protest to make your views known is vital but Just Stop Oil is doing more than making its voice heard, it’s making life much more difficult for members of the public and businesses. Just Stop Oil might think this a reasonable price to pay for saving the planet, but I’m not convinced that’s what they’re doing anymore.
Their hijinks have lost them sympathy with a lot of the British public, including those who might otherwise endorse their aims. Allowing continual disruptions is a political choice by a government that lacks the will and determination to put a stop to these antics. Too many in Whitehall think Just Stop Oil has a point. Either that, or they fear the optics of being seen to take the side of climate change over those protesting against it.
Yet this is more than just an inconvenience. It is economically damaging in a country that desperately needs to generate more growth, quickly. Standing up to eco-zealots is imperative but it won’t happen until ministers discover a collective backbone.
Now more than ever
Today marks 50 years since Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in the 1972 US presidential election. In all, Nixon won 520 of the 538 electoral college votes and 49 out of 50 states. His opponent, progressive Democrat George McGovern, managed to take only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. McGovern lost his home state of South Dakota by a nine-point margin.
Nixon is generally remembered as a villain for Watergate, the break-in and unlawful wiretapping of the Democrat National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington DC. What did for Nixon was not so much the off-the-books espionage but his efforts to cover up his involvement in and knowledge of the affair. He resigned in 1974 to avoid impeachment, the only occupant of the Oval Office ever to relinquish the post voluntarily.
Watergate was a low point in modern American history. Nixon also made disparaging remarks about black people and Jews. His visit to China and embrace of the totalitarian regime in Beijing put in train half a century of bipartisan delusion in Washington about China’s aims and the ability of the US to encourage political liberalisation through trade.
However, Nixon’s legacy is more complicated than that. As Hugh Davis Graham observes in ‘Civil Rights During The Nixon Administration, 1969-1974’, Nixon’s contributions to the US civil rights movement have largely been forgotten. Yet it was Nixon who, despite earlier campaign rhetoric, advanced desegregation of Southern public schools; Nixon who pushed through the Philadelphia Plan, making it easier for black men to get hired on construction sites; Nixon who set up the Office of Minority Business Enterprise; Nixon who quadrupled the budgets of agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Health’s Office of Civil Rights, and the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
In his day, he was a cultural icon of the right, and especially the ‘silent majority’ of Americans dismayed by campus radicalism, urban crime and social breakdown, the anti-war movement, abrupt shifts in public morality and growing militancy on the left. In Congress, he was a staunch anticommunist who mostly managed to avoid the demagoguery of Joe McCarthy.
But he also created the Environmental Protection Agency, supported the Equal Rights Amendment, airlifted arms to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, backed the Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, and pushed for expansion of healthcare coverage for poorer people. This right-wing spectre who haunted the imaginations of the New Left imposed federal price controls and put Harry Blackmun on the Supreme Court, where he would later author the decision in Roe v Wade that created a constitutional right to abortion.
Half a century on, it may still be too much to ask but Nixon deserves reassessment beyond just academic historians. He was a deeply flawed and unpleasant man, a rogue who raised dishonesty to an art form. He was, however, a statesman and a conservative who understood that conservatism was about conserving — using the government to do good rather than declaiming government itself as the problem. He grappled with questions the Republican Party still struggles with today and came to conclusions about the role of the state and the virtue of social cohesion that, 50 years later, Republicans may finally be coming round to.
They say it’s your birthday
Happy birthday to Joni Mitchell, who is 79 today. Singer, songwriter, countercultural icon, Mitchell made a surprise return to live performing this summer. May she tour for many years more.
Oh dear, not another app... And what about your "sketches" on FM question time?
I actually prefer your "single-topic" posts, rather than the ones collecting random thoughts.
I know I don't have a say on the matter, but... another app???
Talking about JSO, I was in the car listening to the news on radio 4 earlier on. First there was a bit on cop27 and an intervention by NS (why???). Then they played the audio from some clip shot by some 24 year old lunatic who burst out sobbing while on a bridge over the M25. Really... why??? Was what she was doing really newsworthy? No idea why she was sobbing as I turned the radio off immediately.
Anyway... another app????
Apple store only?