Apologies for keeping the nation holding its collective breath in anticipation of the Planet Politics internment, but a double whammy of lack of motivation and increasingly unwieldy final post are to blame.
But the latter reason perhaps helps rationalise splitting the blog's epilogue in two, and this first instalment provides a decidedly personal account of political frustration and alienation.
It all really started twenty years ago when I moved to Dundee from London, having spent more than three years in the smoke as an aspiring young professional.
My career plan started to go off the rails soon thereafter, unfortunately, and after stuttering for a couple of years it finally hit the buffers. Politically I was still a Labour party supporter though (having flirted with the hard left during a more youthful and radical period, galvanised - as many others were - by the Miners' strike of the early 1980s), and also something of a so-called '90-minute', saltire-waving Scottish patriot, although when push came to shove the class struggle came before allegiance to country. On the other hand, I bore no ill will at all towards the SNP, and even flirted with the notion of supporting Scottish independence, and indeed at another time also considered that the Lib Dems could be 'my' party. Anyone, in short, but the dreaded Tories! (If born thirty years later, and hence currently in my late teens, then a scenario of the Greens perhaps followed by the SNP in a subsequent slightly less idealistic phase is an entirely plausible 'what if' hypotheses!)
However, I was never a Labour party member, nor politically active in any way beyond a greater-than-average interest in politics and current affairs. And at that point government wasn't really something I had much in the way of interaction with, what with trying to forge a career and the fact that I wasn't really the complaining type anyway.
However, in the mid-1990s I started a postgraduate IT course at Abertay University in the hope that this would help kickstart my (accountancy) career, and got a job as a part-time taxi driver to pay the bills. But my financial situation became increasingly precarious, and I dropped out of the course and worked as a full-time taxi driver in Dundee for a couple of years.
It was at that point that the rot started to set in, and instead of viewing the political process as a partisan struggle of good over evil I increasingly viewed the whole thing as morally bankrupt, and in essence it's been downhill ever since.
In particular, it immediately became apparent to me that the arena of taxi regulation played host to several glaring injustices the like of which I would previously have viewed as fertile ground for the political struggle, but instead were effectively ignored by mainstream politics.
Likewise, working as a nightshift taxi driver provided a completely different perspective as regards matters like liquor licensing, and law and order generally, and since the modest flat I had previously bought in Dundee became increasingly blighted by the same issues then this further contributed to my personal political conversion from left-leaning optimist and idealist to right-leaning sceptic and realist.
While the minutiae of that (slow moving) Damascence conversion has been touched on in numerous previous blogposts, as regards the process of government the taxi factor was more of a sudden epiphany. In particular, I've never really trusted local government since then, neither as regards Dundee nor more generally in relation to what I've learned from local authorities elsewhere. This distrust later spread to central government and the whole edifice of public sector bureaucracy as well.
However, having successfully studied various academic and more vocational subjects at degree and professional level - primarily law and accountancy, but also IT, economics, history and criminology - in taxi regulation I'd eventually came across something I thought I could contribute something really original to, not to mention hopefully helping to right several examples of manifest unfairness! And to a lesser extent this also applied to the law and order debate as well.
Of course, that wasn't to be, and perhaps this can be articulated in terms of what Professor Walter Humes calls 'narrative privilege', in essence meaning that political and bureaucratic elites use numerous means - whether fair or foul - to freeze out inconvenient counter-narratives, for example by employing sham processes of supposedly democratic consultation. Or, in less, er, elitist political language, those considered 'off-message' are effectively ignored.
Thus distrustful of party politics I submitted several hundred pages to several official consultations on taxi licensing matters. However, in essence I got the distinct impression that I shouldn't have bothered, and certainly won't be bothering again.
Trying a slightly different tack, in the subsequent ten years or so I wrote several hundred letters to the press on various politically-related subjects, and insofar as most were published then that should be considered a personal success.
But that's as far as it goes, because in the final analysis a letter published in a newspaper normally amounts to little more than tomorrow's mealy puddin' supper wrapper.
For example, relatively few of my letters ever generated a substantive response, which I generally viewed as symptomatic of having won the point being made. But perhaps the real point here is that the politicians, powers that be and movers and shakers consider that the best strategy is to ignore such correspondence - they may have lost that miniature battle, but it won't change the course of the war, and it's a mere gadfly as regards the dominant narrative privilege.
For example, a year ago a letter of mine published in the press made the point that legislative provisions allowing licensing authorities to limit the number of liquor outlets was pointless because this wouldn't reduce consumption, but instead would allow existing licensees to profiteer. However, a subsequent comment piece in the press praised the measure, ignoring the point about consumption being unaffected.
No great surprise in that, obviously, but my letter was published in the Herald, and the opinion piece was one of the newspaper's leader columns on the same pages a few days later.
Thus if a newspaper isn't even moved one iota by a letter published on its own comment pages a few days earlier, then what price the wider debate?
And it's perhaps also instructive that while some regulars in the correspondence columns of the press occasionally claim that they get a fair few letters sent to their home address - containing everything from praise to threats of violence - yours truly can only recall one such missive. This was (as I recall it) from the European Movement in response to a letter critical of the EU and one of its more prominent Scottish members. And it was an invitation to join the organisation, thus I assumed it had either been sent in error or was simply taking the pish!
Then there was my blogging period, lasting three years and around 700 or so posts. Naturally, while this might not quite change the world, it would certainly change my status in Scottish political discourse.
Nae chance! Of course, there have been numerous less successful blogs than this one, but outwith the confines of the MacBlogosphere its influence has been effectively nil. Again it's perhaps instructive, for example, that while some bloggers claim to receive numerous emails from others lavishly praising them and suggesting posts and suchlike, I can only really recall receiving one such latter missive. And an enquiry from one local journalist, but this was in relation to a blogging matter rather than anything more substantive.
Also, despite numerous Dundee-related posts I can't really recall any real interest from anyone in the city either, except one hostile comment that seemed to misconstrue what I'd said. Moreover, the small number of friends and relatives that I've shown the blog to - in essence those who I thought might be remotely interested - have never mentioned it again. Nuff said!
And while I'm not really one for the hard sell, my small number of attempts to court the press have been similarly unsuccessful. Most obviously, not long before my blogging period I stood as an independent candidate in the last round of Dundee City Council elections. Given the difficulty for independents in view of resource limitations and lack of publicity, I wrote several essays on pertinent subjects, posted them on a website and sent summaries to the local press in the form of press releases. Perhaps these were not hugely intellectual and insightful in terms of content, but certainly a bit different from the usual platitudes and banalities of the genre. Alas, this strategy was also, er, limited in terms of success, thus the 'Stuart Winton 4 councillor' campaign was effectively still born. (No, I didn't really use that annoyingly textish '4' abbreviation - perhaps that's where things went wrong!)
Of course, anyone(?) reading this might well consider the foregoing the worst kind of self-pity, self-importance and self-interest. After all, there are five million people in Scotland, so it's a bit arrogant and pompous to assume that one particular individual's views are of any greater merit than any others.
A fair point indeed. But while on the one hand I don't claim to have produced anything particularly original or insightful as regards mainstream politics, on the other hand I do feel more confident with regard to my own more specialist hobby horses. And indeed the blog and my other activities were intended more to provide a platform for those pet projects rather than the more mainstream comment, which is clearly a highly competitive and crowded field anyway.
But one such example relates to liquor licensing, an example of which was mentioned earlier. Another relates to the last official consultation I responded to, namely that concerning the Scottish Executive's proposal to licence taxi and private hire vehicle booking offices, which was eventually implemented by the SNP Government during its first term.
And indeed I did receive an acknowledgment for my submission - both by email and snail mail - which in itself was something of an achievement! On the other hand, my name was not included on the 'List of consultee respondents' in the 'Summary of responses to consultation paper'. Ah, but I wasn't actually a consultee as regards the original, um, consultation. But some of the listed 'respondees' weren't 'consultees' either, and in any case the exercise presumably wasn't confined to some sort of inner circle, or at least officialdom would try to avoid such a perception?
Anyway, the specific point I made concerned the road safety implications of allowing taxi firms to take calls from customers in the vehicle via a mobile phone and, more particularly, to then also control other vehicles via two-way radios. Thus as well as taking calls from customers while driving, the driver also despatches other vehicles to pick up the customers as well as having to consider other information from the controlled vehicles such as their position in relation to customers waiting to be collected, not to mention assisting drivers who may be unfamiliar with the geography or other matters. These tasks would of course normally be undertaken by a controller sitting at a desk beside a telephone and radio equipment.
However, the Scottish Executive/Government or whoever seemed unconcerned that a driver could be performing this task while at the wheel and while driving passengers around themselves. The matter was not mentioned in the 'Summary of responses to consultation paper', nor in the subsequent 'Equalities Impact Assessment' or 'Regulatory impact assessment', blah, blah. Or at least I don't think so, because by that time I'd lost interest.
Of course, again it's perhaps a question of balancing the views of a jumped-up member of the public with the, ahem, experts, but surely there's a self-evident road safety issue here - the Highway Code advises that "Using hands-free [mobile phone] equipment is also likely to distract your attention from the road", never mind doing that and directing several other taxis by radio at the same time while carrying fare-paying passengers!
And indeed I believe the London private hire legislation precludes drivers from taking calls from customers in the vehicle, and also that some provincial local authorities in England and Wales have implemented such a prohibition in their local rules. But perhaps the point here is that in the former case the relevant framework legislation was enacted during the mobile telephony age, whereas the latter was not.
Thus the provincial legislation in England and Wales can perhaps be excused for not addressing the issue of modern communications equipment in its provisions, but Scotland can hardly be excused in this regard. So what is the excuse? Does anyone really care? And if the politicians and bureaucrats don't care then these matters are certainly below the media radar screen as well, or at least insofar as the new legislation related to issues other than the alleged infiltration of hire car booking offices by organised crime.
Indeed, a more recent example of 'narrative privilege' in this field relates to the rather messy taxi and private hire legislation pertaining to England and Wales, much of which dates from the days of horse-drawn Hackney Carriages in the mid-1800s, and which attempted to address contemporary matters such as the health and environmental hazards created by uncontrolled accumulations of horseshit in public places. (The reason for mentioning this mild expletive being of course that it's entirely appropriate in the context of this blog's stance on politics!)
Anyway, earlier this year the Law Commission doon there agreed to review the legislation with a view to addressing the "sheer bulk, complexity and inconsistency of the regulatory systems" (despite the fact that an Office of Fair Trading report nearly a decade previously had conveniently managed to ignore many of these issues in a report running to several hundred pages, despite many of the relevant matters being brought to its attention by yours truly and no doubt many others. Thus an object lesson in officialdom appearing to say a great deal without actually saying very much at all, or even exemplars of political expediency and our good old friend the narrative privilege).
But to that end and as a preliminary the Department for Transport recently assembled a meeting of the great and the good, er I mean 'stakeholders', in the taxi and private hire sector to discuss some of the issues. And in this context 'stakeholders' seems to mean just about everyone except those actually driving the vehicles.
But one particular cracker from that meeting came from a 'stakeholder' who remarked that because there were more taxi driver licenses in issue than vehicle licences then this "indicated strongly that many drivers had acquired driver licences in more than one area". Which is sheer and utter, ahem, horseshit, because multi-driver vehicles are commonplace in the trade, which anyone with even the remotest of connections with it should know.
But presumably this stakeholder's status as a former local authority licensing official, his current status as a self-appointed 'licensing consultant' and that he has instigated something by the name of the Private Hire Reform Campaign means he's regarded as some kind of expert. And this is despite the fact that his point outlined above is about as penetrating as someone saying that because a city's population exceeds the number of residential properties then this would indicate that some people had some kind of dual identity. Thus while narrative privilege is one thing, completely divorced from the reality of the situation is quite another!
But if that's to be the level of the input to the Law Commission's review then it hardly bodes well for the final result, but then again perhaps it will turn out like the Scottish Executive's consultation on the same subject almost a decade ago, which was kicked into the long grass where it has since presumably become totally obscured by the weeds of bureaucracy and politically expediency, particularly since the Scottish Parliament has been so busy over its lifetime addressing such matters as, er, not very much.
Oh aye, I got so engrossed there that I'd forgotten about the immediate task in hand, which was to close down this blog.
So cheerio then!
Until the final post, that is. And no jokes about watching paint dry and kettles boil, please!
Two bald me fighting over a comb
4 hours ago
