Entering the last leg...

Well, we've now been in the US for 4 years, give or take a couple of days. My fellowship has just had its "terminal renewal" (sounds painful) and, in just over 51 weeks, we'll no longer be welcome in the US as J1 academic exchange visitors. So, our US adventure will most likely be coming to an end in the not-too-distant future. It's hard not to be a little pensive at this point.

So, what have we learned? Before we came to the US, to an outsider it looked as though the politics here were absolutely insane. We assumed that spending some time in the US would allow us to see the subtle nuance but it turns out that the political system here is actually as bat-shit crazy at it appears from the outside. The even weirder thing is that most USians would tend to agree with this, but the system doesn't change. Politicians are allowed to lie here, quite brazenly, even during election campaigns (this is illegal back in the UK). The rise of Donald Trump reinforces my impression that the message doesn't matter so much in this country, as long as you shout it very loudly over the top of your opponents. Some people misinterpret the first amendment - freedom of speech means that you can say any bullshit you want, but this doesn't mean that anyone has to listen to it. In the words of Randall Monroe: 

What else? One thing that I've meant to write about but not had time (babies and all) is that, from what I've seen, USians appear to have a much healthier relationship with alcohol than we do back home. I'm not talking about the weird puritan laws that mean I can't buy whisky or beer from the supermarket (this varies by state), but observing people drinking in bars. Closing time in the UK means that, on a Friday or Saturday night, most city centres resemble a war zone as drunken hordes take to the street to do battle either with each other, or with a doner kebab.

But chucking-out time in the US isn't like this at all - USians still get drunk but they act mostly the same as normal, perhaps a bit more loudly. Maybe this is because Brits are generally very repressed and alcohol opens the floodgates of emotion, so it all comes gushing out. Whereas USians seem, on average, less inhibited overall so there's no release of emotion when they're drunk..? Who knows, this is anecdotal. However, I've seen USians try to hook up sober, which has never happened in my life. The UK population would plummet in a couple of generations without alcohol to lubricate those initial social interactions! It seems less socially acceptable to act drunk in the US, and my experience suggests that they don't quite attack alcohol with the same joie de vivre. This has made finding drinking buddies somewhat challenging. One thing that continuously shocks me is watching people get hideously drunk and then drive home from the pub - drink driving is totally unacceptable in the UK but, at least around the DC area, seems to be fairly commonplace. 

Having, at most, 1 year left means that we don't have much time left to see lots of the US. I wanted to take in some of the natural wonders (Yellowstone Park, Grand Canyon, etc) but with the lack of free time and crippling cost of child care, it's unlikely that we'll get much of that done. I think this will be a regret, as we haven't ventured too far from DC. I think, tragically, that the only other cities I've seen have been New York, Chicago and New Orleans. So, I think the (achievable) aims that we have left should be:

• Go out for pancakes for breakfast. I find sweet food in the morning abhorrent, but we should do this once, just for the experience.
• See the deep south / go on a road trip. Kentucky is only 5 or 6 hours drive away, and I think this is entry level "south". Must remember not to be irreverent about religion or patriotism. 
• Go to Texas and eat a steak the size of my head.
• See the world's largest urban bat colony in Austin, Texas. This could be combined with eating a steak.
• Fire an automatic weapon. US relationships with firearms are ridiculous, but when in Rome... firing a machine gun, whilst encouraging this silliness, would also make 8 year old me very happy. But principles (and my wife) may preclude this one from being carried out.
• Get to know US wines better. I meant to do this, but I got too distracted by the delicious South American Malbecs...
• Watch a game of American Football live. I tried baseball, but it was shite. American Football looks like it has potential as it's just rugby league with forward passing. However, I can't encourage the Washington Racist Skins so would need to go further afield to find an NFL game.

There are probably other things that we should add to this list, but I can't think of them right now...

P.S. Sorry for typos, but my laptop battery is about to die so no time for proofreading.

Two mornings after...

Really? Who let this guy out of the box? 

Okay, so we lost the referendum, but not by very much. If 200,000 Scots had voted otherwise, I would be writing a completely different post today. But the reality is that the Yes campaign couldn't overcome the most relentlessly negative political campaign I've ever seen, or the reality of an almost uniformly-hostile media. This isn't the place for a post mortem though, as I'm sure that more astute, political commentator-types will do a far better job elsewhere.

I spent most of yesterday wallowing in the depths of despair. Which is fair enough. A year ago, I had no real expectation of the Yes campaign winning the referendum. But so much energy, hope and enthusiasm grew as the campaign became a grassroots movement in the last several months that I truly believed that Scotland would choose a fresh start, and try to build a better country. Us Scots are not normally known for our sunny optimism, so I truly felt that change was in the air. Now, the mood percolating through my Facebook and Twitter feeds is that of dejection, pessimism and disappointment. Even Facebook's creepy mood-altering algorithm can't bias my newsfeed towards happiness at the moment.

So now what? Do we wait on hastily-made eleventh hour bribes unionist pledges of more Scottish powers coming out way? I wouldn't hold my breath as it seems these are already starting to unravel. I read this post on Bella Caledonia on the train home last night, and it helped to lift my spirits a little. It was written by someone from the Common Weal foundation and, although it seemed a little radical at first, it got me thinking. What exactly was independence for?

As I said before the referendum, my motivation for wanting Scottish independence was to break free from the failed politics of Westminster, neoliberal policies and the xenophobic anti-immigration sentiment that appears to be on the rise in some parts of England. However, whether we like it or not, we're stuck in the Westminster system, so we need to dust ourselves down and keep fighting the good fight. How?

Firstly, we need to make sure that the Labour party are exposed for the right-wing neoliberals that they are. They are NOT the party of the people, and the Labour party in Scotland exists purely to allow Westminster Labour to increase its majority. Look at the second-rate politicians they send to Holyrood, whilst keeping their "big beasts" out of the diddy Scottish parliament. As long as Westminster continues to hoard all of the meaningful power, this is not going to change.

Luckily in Scotland we have other alternatives: while the SNP has an air of market-friendliness about them, their actions (free prescriptions, university education, etc) are least the correct ones if we want to improve social justice, even if their reasons were populist (Labour do the opposite: claim to fight for the people, but deliver neoliberal policies). The Green Party in Scotland have come out of the referendum very well, although their anti-science policies mean that I couldn't support them in their current form. (In their defence, Patrick Harvie replied here and I did meet one of their people in Holyrood a few months later). The SSP, consigned to the fringes after the Sheridan affair (I mean affair is an "fiasco", not "extramarital". Tommy, please don't sue me!), also did well during the referendum.

But just voting for a different political party is not going to deliver any sort of meaningful change. And I don't necessarily think that we have to leave our English neighbours behind either. In Scotland, we're lucky that the proportional representation we have in Holyrood allows minority parties in Scotland (Greens, Tories, etc) to actually have a voice in politics.

However, backing (any existing) political parties won't delivery the change we need. Pity our poor English neighbours, who have no political representation beyond a bland selection of Oxbridge twats, none of whom actually have a clue about how life is for the vast majority of people living in the UK. The current political system biases the system towards producing these Oxbridge PPE elites* and getting rid of them is the first step. But how?

When I was campaigning for the Alternative Vote referendum back in 2011, I was living in Oxford so I was out campaigning with grassroots members from Lib Dem and Labour parties (mostly Liberals, to be fair), who would not exactly have been my natural bedfellows had I still been in Scotland. While the leadership of all three Westminster parties is dominated by said Oxbridge twat clones, after a few drunken pub discussions I was struck by how many at the grassroots in England still genuinely believed that they could use the political system to deliver social justice. These people are still out there, but cognitive dissonance seems to prevent them from realising that their parties do not represent their interests. As an aside, it's worth noting that Oxford (along with Glasgow Kelvin) was one of the 10 electoral regions that came out with a Yes vote for AV.

One thing that the Scottish referendum has taught us, with a turnout in excess of 85%, is that people are willing to engage with the political process if it can arouse passion. There is nothing in the Cameron-Clegg-Miliband trinity that can evoke anything other than contempt and despondency, in me anyway. People across the UK are dissatisfied with the political realities of Westminster - this is the mood that the nasty, xenophobic UKIP has managed to tap into, and they're using that anti-establishment sentiment to further their own isolationist, upleasant British nationalist agenda. Quite how an ex-investment banker like Farage manages to paint himself as anti-establishment is beyond me, but there you go.

The Scottish referendum tapped into a positive case for civic nationalism, but UKIP (and also the more extreme elements of the Tory party) are campaigning on a sense of ethnic nationalism, which is far more negative. However, I refuse to believe that the large numbers of English who voted UKIP in the EU elections are as isolationist as the party they lent support to. But the English have a dilemma - who else can they vote for? To this question, I don't have an answer: the left basically lost the argument in the late 70s and early 80s, which has ushered in 35 years (and counting) of Thatcherism delivered by both Tories and Labour. The Lib Dems briefly tapped into some hope in the 2010 Westminster election, but their utter betrayal of their supporters served only to consolidate the sense of hopelessness when confronted with the Westminster status quo.

Perhaps the Yes movement from the Scottish referendum can serve as an example to our English brothers and sisters: it is possible to reject Westminster without turning your gaze inwards and supporting racist parties like UKIP. There can be a better way, but sitting around on your arse waiting for someone else to deliver change is not going to work.

In Scotland, it's vital that we take the energy from the Yes movement and run with it. We have learned that each individual vote can make a difference: remember, more than 3.6 million Scots came out to vote, and if only need 200,000 had been of a different mindset, we would all still be drunk from Friday's celebrations.

We can't let that movement fizzle out and die after coming so close to having the opportunity of building a better country. But don't leave it to someone else: reach out to the Common Weal. Business for Scotland, Radical Independence Campaign, Women for Independence, or even a join a political party. These groups are the sum of the people and I doubt they will be going anywhere. If you join them, the they are certainly here to stay.

We can't sustain the energy from the referendum campaign, but that isn't necessary. All we have to do is keep the belief that society can be better, fairer, and more just. All we have to do is keep having conversations with people, keep the ideas alive. If you have time, go to a meeting with one of the Yes groups, even if you supported No. Or even just have a conversation on social media.

We have two important milestones on the horizon. The first one is the delivery of more powers to Scotland - the current proposals fall far short of what we need to try and make our country a fairer place. Things like investing in renewable energy, or increasing the number of people in work through universal child care: while profits from the sea bed (via the Crown Estate) and Income Tax and national insurance go to the London Treasury, then Scotland can't invest money here because any return will go to London, thus making it impossible to justify diverting money from our ever-shrinking pot of money away from things like education and health care.

We MUST hold Westminster to account here, as I'd wager that many of the No voters, and at least the 200,000 we needed for a Yes win, believed the Westminster promises of more change within the union. You don't have to be a member of a political party to hold London to account - all you have to do is write a letter! I've found that MPs, MSPs and the others are very good at replying to individual letters. Use a tool like Write to them to quickly and easily send a letter to your political representative and tell them that you expect real change to be delivered, and that you expect them to work constructively with ALL parties. Tell them that if they don't, you will actively campaign against them at the next election. This goes to the SNP as well: more than 1.6 million Scots voted to leave the UK on Thursday, so there is a moral obligation on the SNP to work with Westminster to ensure we get the powers we need to try and build a fairer society. If just 10% of those who voted Yes were to write to their MP and MSP, you can bet your back teeth that 160,000 letters for constituents would make them sit up and take notice. We pay them a lot of money, and we need to remember that THEY work for US (us, the people, not the USofA as Tony Blair believed), and they answer to us first and their political party second.

This also holds true for our English friends: the current system doesn't work and further devolution to Scotland will increase this imbalance. In the past, you've not really been keen on English devolution (although London does rather well out of it) but having 40 Labour MPs force policies on you (tuition fees for example) when they don't answer to you in the ballot box is also unacceptable. English friends, write to your MP and tell them that you expect some level of control over your own affairs. This doesn't have to be in opposition to more Scottish powers - the more decentralised we make central government, the better it will be for all of us.

For the general election next year, Scottish Labour are going to get out of bed with the Tories, have a quick shower and then put on their "party of the people" clothes. They will claim that a Labour vote in Scotland is the only way to secure "meaningful change", "a better society", "keep the Tories out" or whatever empty platitude of the day that Ed Miliband can espouse. Remember what Labour have done in the last two years, and make them pay at the ballot box. Can you honestly see Miliband as PM!? The Tories will almost certainly win the next election and even if they don't, voting Labour in the past has brought us an illegal war in Iraq, tuition fees and Labour even started the ball rolling on NHS privatisation. Labour have promised to maintain Coalition austerity plans - any differences they claim are really window-dressing. "Vote Labour: while we'll still shaft the poor in the same manner as the ConDem party, we'll at least do it with a sympathetic frown". The Labour party are as morally-bankrupt as all of the other parties. Who else to vote for? I'll leave that decision down to you. Remember, no matter how awful the Westminster party is, there are still grassroots members (in England, anyway) out there who believe in the good fight. We just have to reach out to them and help them find a better way.

After further devolution for Scotland (and England!), our second big battle ahead is over the EU referendum that will happen during the next parliament. Given that we're yoked to the Westminster wagon, we have to fight the isolationist, ethnic nationalism being pushed by UKIP and the Tories. In a display of environmentalism that would make the Green Party weep, we could re-use all of the Scottish independence scare-stories used by Better Together during our referendum: access to export markets, EU research funding, although maybe not the Euro. But we're better than that. There is a positive case to be made: the EU is actually pretty amazing, if you ignore the painful and expensive bureaucracy. We can live and work in any of the member states, and receive the same provisions as the locals in terms of health care, university tuition, etc. UKIP and Tories like to talk about all those rules forced on us by the EU (not as many as they claim, but that's an aside). Damn those evil Europeans, forcing us to accept legislation on human rights, the rights of workers, being unable to add nasty chemicals to our food, ensuring peace and stability in Europe after two horrendous wars, etc etc.

Even if Scotland votes unanimously to stay in the EU, we can still be dragged out if 54% of the rest of the UK favours separation. That's the reality of us all being 'better together', so we'll need to find common cause with the progressives in the other UK nations. Who knows? If the Yes movement in Scotland doesn't implode in the next few months, we could even use the EU referendum to inspire our neighbours. That campaign will kick off as soon as the general election is over next spring.

This is turning into one of the longest (and most serious) blog posts that I've written to date, so I'll leave it there. I can't face proof-reading as I need to feed a hungry baby, so apologies in advance for the typos. My final word is this: we fought the good fight and we found our national self-confidence. Losing by such a small margin is no reason to give up now. By all means, get drunk this weekend, wallow in self-pity, do what you have to do. Please DO NOT blame our fellow Scots for the decision they made last week. We're better than that. Instead, let us lead the way in making a better Scotland. Let's do it now, using what powers we have, and help our southern neighbours to see that there is a better way.

* Yes, I appreciate the irony of someone with an Oxford doctorate, currently living in Washington DC, urging people to reject the Oxbridge elites. But I grew up on council estates in the west of Scotland, so I'm probably a bit of an outlier. You lot have to keep this movement alive until me, wifey and my ginger progeny can make it back (this may involve changing current Westminster immigration rules brought in by Theresa May).

Prisoner's dilemma, or is that the pensioner's dilemma?

Another random photo from our trip home last autumn, just because I feel that every blog post should have something visual

Well, things are certainly getting interesting in Scotland now. With around 10 days to go, it seems far more likely than I'd ever dared to hope that Scotland may actually decide to leave the union and rejoin the international community as an independent country. This is despite a relentlessly negative campaign run by the No camp and an almost unanimously hostile media. Yesterday a friend sent me this Bella Caledonia blog post from March, which performs quite a thoughtful post mortem on why the No campaign has failed so abysmally, so I won't dwell on that.  I would like to make the distinction between winning the campaign and winning the referendum, as the Yes campaign has clearly achieved the former even if it may not end up achieving the latter.

A few unionist friends of mine (you know who you are) have been criticising the Yes campaign's sunny optimism about the realities of independence so, instead of having the same argument on Facebook ad nauseum, I'd like to address those criticisms here. The argument goes that the Yes campaign is telling everyone that everything will be perfect on the first day of independence. I don't personally think that's the case. Nicola Sturgeon spent all of last weekend telling people that independence is 'no panacea' ('panacea' being my new English word of the week; 'cauchemar' is my new French word of the week, meaning nightmare, learned from this article in Le Monde). While I personally don't believe that anyone who has thought about the issues for more than a few minutes genuinely believes that independence will be easy and risk-free, I'd like to explicitly explore a few of those risks and then dwell on why the campaign has evolved the way it has.

The main risks that are currently being discussed in the media, often embedded in a one-sided scare story, revolve around economic uncertainty. At least two people sent me today's doom-and-gloom prediction from a Nobel Prize-winning economist saying that a currency union would be a disaster. Compare and contrast this with a different Nobel prize-winning economist who says that a currency union would happen and is probably a good idea. Even Alistair Darling said that a currency union would be desirable back in January 2013, although he seems to have changed his tune since then and maybe he hopes that no-one has noticed.

While it seems clear to me that a currency union almost certainly would happen, one cannot exclude the possibility that a bullish Westminster government (perhaps a coalition of UKIP and the Tories, elected on a mandate to 'stick it to those jocks' in the 2015 general election) could deny Scotland a currency union out of sheer spite. If Westminster went ahead with this act of economic vandalism, then what would be the reality? Scotland would have to either unilaterally use Sterling without a central bank (Sterlingisation) or adopt a new Scottish currency that was either floating or pegged to Sterling.

In these scenarios, there may well be short-term hardships where an independent Scotland had to run a budget surplus to build up the reserve requirement for a central bank, or have a reduced ability for the government to borrow. I'm not convinced that no monetary union is acutally a doomsday scenario, as Panama's government manages to incur debt via both internal and external bonds even though it unilaterally uses the US dollar. Furthermore, a newly independent Scotland in this scenario would also be unencumbered by a share of the epic UK national debt (supporting article from yet another Nobel prize-winning economist - how many of these guys exist?). While some people claim this would be a sovereign debt default, the UK government has already claimed full liability for the national debt and while the Vienna convention on Succession of States would apportion a share of the UK debt to Scotland, the UK never ratified the treaty. Oops. I'm by no means an economist or an international lawyer, and my neuroscience training didn't cover much economic theory, but my understanding is that the currency risks to an independent Scotland are acceptable, given monetary union is the mostly likely outcome.

There are other risks inherent in becoming independent. Almost two years ago, I wrote about Scotland getting a disproportionately large share of UK research funding (before such arguments became fashionable), and I'm not convinced that it would be possible to disentangle Scotland from rUK before the SNP's preferred deadline of May 2016. Even with a currency union, separating a Scottish military from the UK armed forces, working out what to do with research council funding, splitting off a separate Scottish revenue service from HMRC, writing and adopting a written constitution, creating and implementing tax regimes for individuals, corporations, VAT, fuel, bevvy, creating a Scottish intelligence service, diplomatic core, and a million other things, is all going to take a wee while.

However, disentangling all of this will also have implications for rUK (do they just fire 8.3% of the civil service in London and the Treasury!?), so I imagine that there will have to be a prolonged interim period where certain parts of the Scottish government become independent, with lingering transitional periods for things like academic funding. One would hope that both countries would be able to be sensible about this, although if the UK government is run by Boris Johnson with Nigel Farage as deputy PM, who knows what will happen!? Regardless, this will all be incredibly hard work, but I believe it will be well worth the final prize.

Other areas of uncertainty? EU membership. Would Scotland be able remain in the EU via an Article 48 amendment to the Lisbon Treaty, or would they have to go the slow way via Article 49? Can Scotland citizens even be kicked out of the EU without going through Article 50? Common sense says that Scots are unlikely to be cast out into the darkness (East Germany was quickly included via article 48, so can't we just run that process in reverse?) but the answers to this problem are political and not legal. I doubt that Scots would be stripped of the EU citizenship that they already have, but there is no precedent here so anyone who says they know for certain on either side of the referendum debate is talking mince.

Why do they talk mince? Why do both campaigns have to spin in either direction, instead of having a grown-up debate? I have an opinion here (surprise, surprise) but as a primer, I'd refer you again to Bella Caledonia's excellent blog post about the approach taken by the No camp. Done that? Excellent. Let's talk a wee bit about game theory (mathematical game theory, nothing to do with a Playstation or Xbox).

The Prisoner's dilemma is one of the classical game theory problems. It starts off with two prisoners, each of whom has been accused of a crime. The way the game works is that if both prisoners say nothing (the 'cooperate' condition) then they each face a small penalty (a year in prison). If one accuses the other ('defects') while the other stays silent the defector gets off free while the cooperator gets 10 years in prison. If they both defect, they get an intermediate sentence of 5 years. Clearly, the most sensible option is for both prisoners to co-operate, but they each make their choice without knowledge of what the other is doing. This leads to the dilemma of what do you do: co-operate and hope the other does the same, or defect because either you don't trust your opponent or you think they're a mug and you choose to shaft them to 'win'.

We can frame the public aspect of the referendum campaign into the context of the prisoner's dilemma, where cooperating is having a grown-up discussion about the relative merits and risks of independence, and defecting is spinning the facts to claim that your own proposition is completely risk free, while that of your opponent will lead to doom, gloom, death and misery. Starting to look familiar?

Unfortunately for debate in Scotland, Better Together started off with their 'defect' setting turned up to 11, with unrelenting negativity and talk of Ed Miliband erecting check-points along the Scottish border, George Robertson's forces of darkness aligning against Scotland, claims that voting Yes is what ISIS want us to do and all the other scare stories we're all familiar with now as part of project fear. This has two consequences. Firstly, if the Yes campaign were to 'cooperate' and fully lay out both the benefits and risks of independence, then Better Together and their well-trained media machine would pounce on this as 'Even the Nats are uncertain about independence' and there would be no chance of a Yes vote.

The second consequence of Better Together's 'defect' choice is that legitimate concerns about independence get ignored (boy who cried wolf?) and written off as part of project fear. This does a great disservice to the people of Scotland and to public debate in general. The Yes campaign have no option but to also choose 'defect', which involves writing off all of the BT claims as purely scaremongering and, in the mainstream media, having to adopt some negative campaigning by pointing out all of the risks that staying in the union entail. And, irrespective of what Better Together claim, there are risks regardless of what we decide next week.

So, no discussion of the risks of independence is complete without also discussing the risks of staying in the union: there is a very real risk that an increasingly unstable Tory party, driven by its extreme right wing faction and fear of the rabid, xenophobic UKIP, will drag Scotland out of the EU in 2017 against our wishes. And there is also the fear of what happens when the rest of the austerity spending cuts kick in (promised by both Osbourne and the Labour party) and savage the Scottish block grant via Barnett consequentials. What happens when the property bubble finally bursts, or when the unreformed banking sector drags the economy down again? Staying in the UK is far from risk free, but we know what these risks are. We know that the pool of money is shrinking and that the UK has big plans for spending a lot of this on renewing Trident, pointless aircraft carriers and generally trying to pretend that a small island in northern Europe is still a superpower. Independence may well be a leap into the dark, but staying in the union is very much a leap into the known, and that future doesn't look rosy. We can do better than this.

Most of my discussion applies  to the big claims made in the mainstream media by both sides, but I truly believe that the majority of Scots are informed and aware of the realities of debate, and treat press statements with an appropriate amount of salt. The most remarkable thing about this independence referendum is the huge grassroots movement that has sprung up around the Yes campaign. There are public debates happening all around Scotland and, for the first time in my memory, it seems that large swathes of the population are actually engaging with politics. Even from my temporary exile in the US, the buzz and energy coming out of Scotland is very apparent and incredibly exciting. People are finally starting to ask big questions like "what kind of country do I want to live in?" and "is there a better way of doing things?".  Can you imagine a flashmob singing Caledonia in Glasgow!?  Amazing!

While I dearly hope for a Yes vote next week, if this energy and excitement persists beyond the referendum, then this whole exercise has been very worthwhile. I can't wait to bring my tiny little son back to a newly invigorated Scotland (he's ginger, so we can't possibly stay anywhere sunny!) and hopefully helping to build a new country. Scotland has rediscovered her self-confidence and it's remarkable that, for one day next week, the people truly will be sovereign. Let's hope they find the strength and resolve to use that power wisely.

It's not me, it's you...

Hey folks. It's been quite a while since I've posted anything up here because of "interesting times" in real life. I actually wrote a blog post about new perspectives that I have about the US health care system, but we're not quite ready to share that yet. I've been compiling a mental list of other things I'd like to write about, but I'm going to ignore all of those and talk a bit about my home country, Scotland.

Scotland, last autumn. Can't remember which loch this was. Sorry.

As most people are probably aware by now, Scotland is having a referendum on 18th September to decide whether or not we would like to re-join the world as an independent nation after our 307 year hiatus as part of the United Kingdom. I support Scotland becoming independent, and I want to spend a little bit of time explaining why. Scotland has been having this conversation for a couple of years and I think most people have made up their mind, so I'm not writing this with the aim of changing anyone's position on the referendum, but to share my thinking with my numerous English friends, many of whom I love dearly (in a non-weird kind of way).

At first glance, one would think that I've done rather well out of the Union between Scotland and England*: I grew up in fairly rough working class neighbourhoods on the west coast of Scotland, did my undergraduate degree for free (well, it would have been free if I didn't change my mind after 3 years and start again...) at Glasgow University and then did my doctorate at Oxford where I was generously supported by the Wellcome Trust, a UK-based medical research charity, in labs that were funded by the various British research councils. I met my wife in Oxford and even the postdoc I'm doing now was obtained through connections that I gained via UK institutions.

So, why independence? Contrary to the myths that some on the right in England like to peddle, it has nothing to do with Anglophobia. Apart from a brief couple of hours when I first watched Braveheart at the tender age of 14, I've never really hated the English. I think that the warm reception that the English team received at the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow show that anti-English sentiment is limited to a few knuckle-dragging twats and not representative on Scotland as a whole (unless it's on the football pitch or rugby field). Some of my fondest memories involve sitting in a muddy field in Glastonbury, going to small country pubs around Oxfordshire where I spent quite a few formative years, watching Oxford vs Cambridge rugby at Twickenham and getting drunk on the banks of the Thames, all with our amazing English friends. No, the reason that I think it's time for Scotland to go her own way comes down to Britishness, and British values.

Although I was born in 1980, so spent the first 17 years of my life under Thatcherism, I was raised to believe in British values. The NHS meant that everyone, regardless of their means, received free health care, and either incredibly cheap or free vision care (um, is there a better word for this?) and dentistry. British values meant that everyone had the right to a decent home at a decent price, and that access to Higher Education should be based on an ability to learn, not an ability to pay. The Britain I grew up in believed in public ownership of essential utilities and services. These are the British values that I grew up with and, as an unapologetic socialist, I still believe in these values. Many in Scotland do. Unfortunately, it's becoming increasingly clear that England is losing its way and the last 34 years of Westminster governments have done much to dismantle the things that actually made Britain great (we'll ignore all the nasty imperial stuff as Scotland was equally culpable there).

The British values I believe in started to erode long before I was really aware of them: I remember poll tax only through the eyes of a child (but being raised to believe Thatcher was Satan incarnate), and was only vaguely aware that there was something happening involving coal and miners. Little did I know that much of our heavy industry was being dismantled through Thatcher's zeal to break the trade unions, squandering North Sea oil revenues to pay the massive hike in unemployment benefits caused by her war on industry. As a child, I also remember being confused in the 1990s when British Rail stopped existing and wondered why we suddenly had more than one telephone company.

Growing up in working class areas in the west of Scotland, it was assumed that once the 'evil Tories' were deposed and a Labour government elected, things would get better and swing back towards the left. In 1997, we got that Labour government and for the first time in my life, there wasn't a Tory in 10 Downing Street. Did things get better? Nope. Even then, it became clear that the Britain I knew was changing: that year, I decided to leave school a year early in 1997 to avoid paying the tuition fees for university education that were to be introduced the following year. This was the first time that I started to notice that perhaps Labour were not "for the people" and actually seemed not so different from the Conservatives after all. Let's skip through the next 13 years, nodding briefly at increasing university tuition fees, an illegal war in the middle east and the greatest financial meltdown in recent memory.

One of the good things that Labour did was to legislate for a Scottish parliament, which reconvened in 1999. This has allowed Scotland to go in a different direction from England, where university education is free in Scotland (instead of £9000 a year in England) and where the NHS is still in public hands, unlike that in England where the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 is allowing wholesale private provision of health care in England. You can read why this is a bad idea in this article in the Guardian or perhaps in the British Medical Journal, hardly a bastion of left-wing sentiment. This dismantling of the English NHS isn't just a Tory story with Labour laying the foundations for these changes.

As well as opening up the NHS to private provision, the latest iteration of right wing government has also done something that even Thatcher dared not to do: privatised the Royal Mail. This article explains much more eloquently than I can why privatisation is a bad thing but I can't see how selling off public assets to private providers can be seen as more efficient when you have to provide both a service and also profits to shareholders. The East Coast mainline is a telling example: this rail franchise failed horribly when it was in private hands and had to be brought back under state control. The net result? It has made £1bn in profit, going straight back to the taxpayer, since 2009. What did the Tories do? Put it back out to tender to private bidders. Britain has the highest rail prices in Europe and we also have insanely high costs for energy. Just think how much money the UK exchequer would be receiving if it hadn't sold off most of its shares in BP (2013 profit: $23.8bn). It's perhaps telling that many of the companies who own British utilities are actually the state-owned providers from different countries.

The Scottish parliament has helped Scotland avoid some of privatisation forced through from Westminster: we still have control of the NHS and the Scottish Finance Minister has resisted calls to privatise Scottish water. However, the Scottish parliament receives a block grant from Westminster and is responsible for raising very little of the revenue that it spends. This means that any cuts to the Westminster budget are also cut from Scotland's block grant via the Barnett formula. Consequently, in Scotland it's getting increasingly harder to preserve the British values of universal provision and equality that seem to have gone out of fashion in England. The only way forward that I can see is, reluctantly, to leave the United Kingdom.

Perhaps an independent Scotland can uphold these once-shared values and set an example to our neighbours to the south? Maybe we can build a better society, where we don't have to trample the poor to cover the losses of a poorly-regulated banking system. Maybe we can have a country that doesn't transfer public assets to private hands to pay for expensive vanity projects like nuclear weapons. I want a country that doesn't pretend to be a superpower and get dragged into foreign misadventures to please our 'special friend'. Independence is a leap into the unknown. But with much of the coalition cuts still to be applied, the rise of anti-immigration sentiment and UKIP, the coalition flogging off the rest of our silverware, the renewal of Trident and David Cameron's push to rip us out of the EU (our biggest trading partner after the rest of the UK), staying in the union has many knowns. And none of them look attractive to me.

So, to my English friends, sorry. I still love you all, but you keep giving us these terrible governments. You should be rioting in the street over the Health and Social Care Act or the Royal Mail. I think our best shot at a fair society is for Scotland to leave, and I hope you will see that there can be a better way. This doesn't have to be as good as it gets.


* this isn't a slur on Wales or Northern Ireland, but the UK state as we know it was created through the Acts of Union passed in the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707. Wales and Ireland, you guys are awesome too. Especially when you *cough* beat our common enemy lovely neighbours to the south in the Six Nations.

Craig: plague or smeg?

Thee first thing I have to say is that is my first attempt to write a blog post from a mobile phone, so please don't judge me on the above-baseline rate of typos. Petulant and whiney arguments should, however, remain mostly intact.

Anyway, much has been written in the past of the differences between British and American English, but I'd like to talk about it anyway. Let's face it, the USians do some odd (and occasionally horrific) things to the English language. Instead of labouring the differences everyone knows about, I'd rather talk about a couple that confused me when I first arrived.
Although I do still giggle immaturately whenever a USian tells me that they got their pants dirty.

One thing that all North Americans get wrong (yes, I'm making a bold statement and saying "wrong") is that they have some specific linguistic retardation when it comes to pronouncing my surname. They pronounce "Craig" to as "Creg", for some unknown reason. For ages, I thought 'Cregg' was just a typical North American name like 'Brad', 'Randy', 'Jeff', etc. But no. It's a bastardisation of my surname. In the US, this word list flows naturally: Smeg, Leg, Peg, Keg, Dreg, Craig. Weird, eh?

To my North American readers, I shall hereby give you the definitive guide to pronouncing "Craig" properly. Take the word 'train'. Say it out loud. Swap the 'T' for a 'C' to get 'Crain'. Say it out loud again, pronouncing it as you did for 'train'. Got it? Okay, now swap the 'N' for a 'G', and say it out loud again. Was that hard? Try this word-list: train, plain, bain, main, chain, sprain, Craig. There should be a lovely assonance. Thank you.

Since my bus isn't at work yet, I'll talk about the way USians use the phrase 'Excuse me'. In the UK, this phrase is used to interrupt a person to make an enquiry, or to get them to move out of your road. So, if you're asking for the time, "excuse me" means "sorry to bother you old chap, but may I bother you for a brief moment of your time?". But say you're on the London Underground and some numpty of a tourist is standing on wrong side of the escaltor. In this situation, saying "excuse me" translates as "Yo, muthafucka, get your stupid arse out of my way right now before I frown disapproving at you". See? It's a simple context-dependent phrase.

In the US, however, they use "excuse me" where someone back home would say "pardon me" or simply "sorry". Such as trampling a stranger by accident at rush hour. Which seems fine, unless you listen in British English. For the first 6 months we were here, I would often get enraged by someone bumping into me, or blocking the lift (elevator if you're North American  when I'm trying to get off, because they would say "excuse me" and, in UK English, that translates as them having a go at me for
being bumped into or blocking their entrance to the lift. Thankfully, I worked this difference out before saying something like "Naw, YOU excuse ME, pal!" as this may have precipitated a situation...

So, take-home messages? North Americans, hopefully you can say "Craig" now. Even you Canadians do this wrong, which is disappointing. Second lesson? Glasweigan friends, if an American spills your pint in a pub and says "excuse me", they're not actually trying to start a fight.

Microchimerism, or how my genes are spreading even further than I'd anticipated...

As an active biological researcher, I'm often amazed at just how impressive nature is, but we discover cool things all the time so I don't often get that "wow" factor any more. However, I recently learned about a phenomenon that actually completely blew my mind: microchimerism. For reasons that are obvious to most of you by now, I've been taking more of an interest in developmental biology in recent weeks. I work in a developmental neuroscience lab but my focus was widened somewhat from interneurons in the hippocampus to how a little human is actually made. Before I explain microchimerism, we need a quick embryology primer for those few friends I have who didn't do a biology degree...

Most people know the basics: sperm meets egg, buys it a few drinks, they sneak off somewhere quiet, fuse their pronuclei (the half-genome that each of them brings to the party), and create a stem cell. This stem cell is pluripotent, meaning that it can form any type of tissue. The cell begins to divide and multiply and, before you can have a panic attack after peeing on a little stick that changes your life forever (*), you have a little ball of cells that have burrowed their way into mummy's uterus and are marching towards the path of becoming a living creature. As the ball of cells gets bigger, some of the cells start to differentiate to form specific lineages of cells that will become brain cells, immune cells, liver cells, etc. The early stem cells can form any type of tissue but you get more specialised stem cells that can form a subset of tissues and these can persist into adulthood: new brain cells are created from adult stem cells that migrate into your hippocampus where they form dentate granule cells (kind of important for memory and learning), and other adult stem cells in your bone marrow give rise to, um, immune cells and other stuff I know nothing about (hey, I'm a brain guy...).

With me so far? Okay, let's explain what microchimerism is and why it's so mind-bogglingly awesome. Well, it turns out that some of those fetal stem cells will go on a jolly and cross the placenta into the mother's body. This in itself isn't so unexpected - there are lots of diagnostic tests where medically-inclinded folks measure fetal DNA from the mother's blood. But what is insane is that these fetal stem cells not only enter the mother's body but migrate to random tissues where they establish permanent cell lines and integrate into the mother's organs. Crazy, eh? The Wikipedia page on microchimerism has this detailed and highly technical diagram:

So a few fetal cells make it to the mother's body and don't get eliminated by the immune system. So what, eh? They can't do anything useful, can they? Actually, they can. This study carried out in rats found that, when experimenters damaged the heart of the rat mother and subsequently got her pregnant, stem cells from the fetuses entered the mother's heart and actually repaired some of the damage. In their introduction, the authors of this study note that their motivation was the observation that, in humans, male cells had been observed in the hearts of mothers with cardiomyopathy (aka 'a dodgy ticker').

Another study (in mice) found that, using green fluorescent cells, they could detect fetal cells in the brains of the mousey mother. The really cool thing is that they found more fetal cells 4 weeks after birth than they did at the time of delivery, implying that the fetal cells had established permanent populations in the brain.

Fetal-maternal microchimerism has been known to occur in most mammals for quite some time. Is there any evidence for it in humans? Well, this PLoS study from 2012 found evidence of male DNA in multiple brain regions of 63% of female autopsied brains, all of whom had had male offspring. What is really interesting is that those women who suffered from Alzheimer's disease were significantly LESS likely to harbour male DNA. Obviously, this doesn't imply that the fetal cells were neuroprotective, but it does raise interesting questions. As an aside, this phenomenon also occurs with female fetuses, but it's much easier to detect male DNA in a female brain, which is why most studies focus on this. The pretty picture at the start of this post comes from this review article, showing male cells detected in a female liver.

If you're more interested in this (and who wouldn't be!?), it's worth looking at these non-specialist articles in The Scientist or Scientific American to find out more than the brief foray that I've made into the subject here.

Most of you know that my lovely wife Dom is a big fan of cake and sleeping. But since she's been pregnant with the twingers, her sweet tooth has been replaced with a craving for bread, cheese and beef jerky. Instead of sleeping in until 10am, she wakes up at 5, ready to eat all the food in the world. We like to joke that this is due to my genes being expressed in her brain, via our future progeny. If she starts making dirty jokes and chasing deer in our local park, we might start to believe this...

Last word? Microchimerism is pretty bloody amazing. And... look what I did (**):

(*) or at least seeing the stick after someone else pee'd on it...
(**) my wife may have done some of the hard work too...

Paying the bills

Happy New Year. Just a quick blog post today.

Most people by now are aware that Scotland is having a referendum on September 18th 2014 to decide whether or not she wants to leave the United Kingdom and become a separate country. Technically, Scotland wouldn't actually leave the UK because this country was created in 1707 when Scottish and English parliaments both passed Acts of Union dissolving their respective parliaments and forming a Parliament of Great Britian, based in Westminster (I'm trusting Wikipedia on this), so repealing the Act of Union would re-establish both Scotland and England as separate countries. I think. I'm not a lawyer. And I wonder what this would mean for Wales and Northern Ireland - would they become English colonies? I just read that Wales formally entered a Union with England a few hundred years after the English conquest.

Anyway, sorry, I'm havering. Technicalities of what to call the new countries is not what I want to talk about. During the independence debate, the Scottish Government has been declaring that all will be easy and sunny in a new Scotland, whilst the no campaign has been focusing on trying to terrorise the Scottish people into being too scared to quit the union. The last couple of years have been filled with scare stories from the UK government and "independent" think-tanks, detailing how much poorer Scotland would be after independence.

As I'm a scientist and like to play with numbers and spreadsheets (hey, everyone needs a hobby!), I decided to trawl through some of the media statements and reports by people like the UK Treasury, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, etc, and added up all their claims of how much independence will cost Scotland. Caveats time: it's a public holiday and I'm going to make a cake soon for Dom, so I only spent 20 minutes Googling and skimming media reports. Therefore the true total cost of Project Fear could be significantly higher. However, everything here is from an attributable comment made in a mainstream media outlet (BBC, Guardian, Scotsman but not the Daily Mail) or in a published report or policy document. Wanna see my data?

Who	What	When	How much?
Hague & Alexander	Extra EU contributions	18-Jan-14	£3,800,000,000
Danny Alexander	Chilcare costs	17-Dec-13	£1,640,000,000
IFS / Alexander	Aging population and reduced oil revenue	26-Nov-13	£3,000,000,000
IFS	Reducing debt to 40% GDP	18-Nov-13	£6,000,000,000
IFS	Matching UK spending cuts to 2016	29-Oct-13	£2,500,000,000
Alistair Darling	Extra borrowing costs for Scottish Government	27-Nov-13	£9,000,000,000
Philip Hammond	Loss of defence spending to shipbuilding	08-Oct-13	£1,800,000,000
Scottish Global Forum	Running a new military	13-Nov-13	£2,500,000,000
John Swinney	Extra costs of collecting taxes	leaked paper	£312,500,000
Total ANNUAL costs			£30,552,500,000

In graphical form (because everyone loves graphs):

Disclaimer: I would never use such garish colours in a scientific publication, so this is the only chance I get to make hideously-coloured, non-colour-blind-friendly graphs. Don't judge me.

These data do not take into account any start-up costs for establishing new embassies, building a new military, etc. Indeed, Rory Stewart, Tory MP and former Foreign Office diplomat, claimed that setting up secure communications systems for embassies would alone cost "billions'.

Obviously, no-one from the No Campaign has tried to claim that being an independent country would cost Scotland more than £30bn a year extra, especially given that the annual budget for the Scottish Government is £28.6bn. But if you tally up even a small sample of the claims being made by Better Together, then this is the number you get at. While each scare story in the media may sound plausible on its own, adding it all together demonstrates just how ridiculous Project Fear is getting.