Scottish elections 2016: party manifestos

As next Thursday's Holyrood election approaches, I thought it might be helpful to gather links to the various manifestos into one place. (I appreciate there are other smaller parties running. Please feel free to add links to their manifestos in the comment box.)

RISE here

Scottish Labour here.

Scottish Conservatives (goes to PDF download) here.

Scottish Greens here

Scottish Liberal Democrats here

Scottish National Party here

UKIP here

Women's Equality Party here


Any (polite!) analysis also welcome in the comment box. From a quick google, I've located the following online commentary which might be helpful. (Again, anything else that might be useful, please add in the comment box.)

BBC website (contains 30 second summaries by leaders and links to party by party analysis) here

Holyrood Magazine (fairly general) here

Universities Scotland (on education policy): here


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George Mackay Brown (1921-1996)

George Mackay Brown died twenty years ago today.

Although this blog focuses mainly on Catholic social teaching, it's worth considering precisely how the arts -and in this case poetry- contribute to our life as social beings. At the funeral Mass, Archbishop Conti said the following:

I remember George describing the earth under the farmer's plough as being scourged -or was it the back of Christ he say being ploughed?...If my memory falters, it is because of George's characteristic interchanging of images, which revealed not only the twin sources of his deepest inspiration, namely his native Orkney and his adopted Catholicism, but also his easy integration of what for so many remain separate orders of life and faith. This is why his death at this season seems so right, for this is the season when the life of faith and the life of nature so marvellously correspond; when he who was hung up on the bare wood, and moistened it with his blood, made it to flower as the instrument of salvation; when He who ws buried in the dark earth, and shared it with its apparent sleep, burst forth from it revealing the new life of grace.

[From: Ron Ferguson's, George Mackay Brown: the Wound and the Gift, p.365]

Brown's work and Archbishop Conti's assessment of it above suggest two immediate thoughts for me. First, there is the link with Roger Scruton's use of the concept of the 'Lebenswelt' (roughly, the environment for human beings, constructed by our imaginative engagement with the world) and the need to repair and enrich it, in part through the use of literature and art. (For an article on this by Scruton, see here. For previous discussions of Scruton on this blog, see here.)

Secondly, and continuing with this first thought, Catholicism in Scotland can often be seen to be 'foreign' or 'other'. (The nineteenth century Protestant jibe of 'the Italian mission to the Irish' is relevant here as are more recent secularist attacks on the acceptability of Catholic understandings within a modern Scotland.) Brown reimagined Orkney as a Catholic landscape. He also reimagined Catholic Orkney as a central landscape rather than one marginal to Scottish and wider human concerns. Despite all the differences between them, Brown's enterprise here strikes me as at least analogous to Tolkien's construction of a 'legendarium'. Bradley Birzer's book, J R R Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth deals with this aspect in considerable detail:

[Birzer] also explores the social and political views that motivated the Oxford don, ultimately situating Tolkien within the Christian humanist tradition represented by Thomas More and T. S. Eliot, Dante and C. S. Lewis. Birzer argues that through the genre of myth Tolkien created a world that is essentially truer than the one we think we see around us every day, a world that transcends the colorless disenchantment of our postmodern age.

[From review here.]

A small selection of Brown's poems, read by him, can be found here.

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Amoris Laetitia

 The full text of Pope Francis' Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia ('The joy of love') can be found here.

The best advice is that of the Holy Father himself: 'The greatest benefit… will come if each part is read patiently and carefully, or if attention is paid to the parts dealing with [your] specific needs’ (section 7).

The following may initially be helpful:

Analysis by the theologian Dr Stephen Bullivant in the Catholic Herald: here.
A selection of five key passages in the Exhortation: here.
A personal reaction from the historian Professor John Charmley: here.

More in due course, no doubt...

Theos Think Tank: Is the 'common good' a meaningful political objective?

Interesting paper by Chris Bickley from Theos Think Tank:

In summary, common good language crops up not infrequently in political discourse. I have said that it should not be pressed too hard for philosophical coherence, nor is it easy to detect a philosophical genealogy. However, I do not say that it is empty rhetoric – rather, it is used to critique politics as missing a vital common dimension, though the blame is laid in different places. Finally, I have argued that the language is nonetheless useful in helping us think constructively and practically about political challenges and goods – it is not justice alone, but it can’t be less than that. It requires substantially addressing how ordinary people can achieve a greater degree of agency in different forms of public life – not less, but certainly more, than politics as we have come to know it. It is surely no accident that some of those who have most convincingly advocated ‘common good’ politics have emerged not from the sphere of political theory, nor in fact from party politics, but from the practices of community organising. The common good is not something to be endlessly theorised, it has to be done.

Full article here.

'The common good' is (as Bickley points out) a phrase that is often bandied around primarily for rhetorical purposes, not only in the political circles he refers to but also in more narrowly Catholic circles. An aspect he underplays is that the common good arises from the existence of various societies (and not just the state) in which individuals participate: a family has a common good apart from the goods of the individuals; a club or other association of civil society has a common good apart from its individual members.

“Common good” is very often a safer translation of bonum commune than “the common good”. For there is the common good of a team, but equally the common good of a university class, of a university, of a family, of a neighborhood, of a city, of a state, of a church and of human kind throughout the world. The difference in each case between the group's common good and an aggregate of the wellbeing of each of its members can be understood by considering how, in a real friendship, A wills B's wellbeing for B's sake, while B wills A's wellbeing for A's sake, and each therefore has reason to will his or her own wellbeing for the other's sake, with the result that neither envisages his or her own wellbeing as the source (the object) of the friendship's value, and each has in view a truly common good, not reducible to the good of either taken separately or merely summed. Inasmuch as there is possible and appropriate a kind of friendship between the members of each of the kinds of group listed (non-exhaustively) above, each such group has its own common good.

(From the article, 'Aquinas' moral, political and legal philosophy' in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here. My emphasis.]

A necessary condition of the existence of common goods is that the existence of these 'little platoons' is acknowledged and supported by the state. Perhaps most importantly, the functions of these smaller societies should not be undermined by the state (or indeed by other entities such as business). There are undoubtedly benign meanings that could be attached to Bickley's following claim:

It is surely no accident that some of those who have most convincingly advocated ‘common good’ politics have emerged not from the sphere of political theory, nor in fact from party politics, but from the practices of community organising. The common good is not something to be endlessly theorised, it has to be done.

But a worry would be that the practice of 'community organising' which might be appropriate for some communities would not be appropriate for others. (An interesting thought experiment here would be to imagine the practice of 'community organising' as realised within a family or a playgroup.) A danger here is that the specific nature of some of the communities human beings need to flourish and of the practices needed to sustain those communities are being forced into a model of community activism. While Bickley notes the dangers of a (party) political model of the common good, he does not attend to the dangers of  a model of community activism that might equally distort their character. The state is not civil society and civil society is not the family. The various associations of civil society are not interchangeable. And none of these communities are the Church.

No expression of social life — from the family to intermediate social groups, associations, enterprises of an economic nature, cities, regions, States, up to the community of peoples and nations — can escape the issue of its own common good, in that this is a constitutive element of its significance and the authentic reason for its very existence.

[Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, section 165 here]

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