Hold the Lions

NZ's Halt All Racist Tours’ 1981 poster

Guest columnist Ray Bell reflects on the political importance of sporting propaganda and asks: “What one thing does hold the Lions together?  A vague Victorian sense of Britishness. And if that’s too subtle for you – why do they play nearly all their games are against former colonies?”

With the current furore over the creation of Team GB – the British Olympic football team – it is about time that a similar institution underwent the same kind of scrutiny. I’m talking of course, of rugby’s British and Irish Lions.

Some might argue I’m picking a soft target here, but I’d argue otherwise. The British Lions rarely get the attention they deserve, and there is an irritating notion that all Scottish rugby fans are somehow silent supporters of the concept.  Not so. While many of Scottish rugby’s great and good, the likes of Gavin Hastings and Ian McGeechan, may have got onboard, we still can’t get away from the fact that the Lions are essentially political. Metapolitical perhaps.  Maybe it’s the assumption we’re all good Brits together. Maybe it’s the assumption that apartheid was never to be discussed. Maybe it’s the fact that the very first Lions tour to South Africa was underwritten by the white supremacist governor Cecil Rhodes, and it’s been mostly downhill from there…

Golden Oldie

A classic cut from the vintage vault here from dear old BBC in 1975. From the anthropological approach to the faux-editorial balance its a classic of its era. Includes a look at George Reids take on the world in 1975. You have to wait to the very end for the pay-off classic line but worth a look. A Dimbleby at  supremely patronising best…

Terra Madre

The Terra Madre (Mother Earth) is a network of food communities, each committed to producing quality food in a  sustainable way. Terra Madre also refers to a major bi-annual conference held in Torino, Italy intended to foster discussion and introduce innovative concepts in the field of food, gastronomy, globalization, economics. Terra Madre is coordinated by the Slow Food organization. Iain McKinnon from the crofting township of Camuscross , Sleat, Skye travelled to Torino and gives us a crofters take on the Slow Food Movement…

Last year I was part of a delegation of eight people from the crofting counties who travelled to Turin in northern Italy to attend ‘Terra Madre’ an international gathering of food producers, local communities, cooks, academics and young people.

The crofting system of land tenure was set up at the end of the 19th century after a long period of civil unrest in the Highlands and Islands because agricultural communities were being cleared from the land to make way for large sheep farms.

Calman

The Calman Report was either the biggest thing to happen to Scotland in thirty years or a complete non-event, depending on who you read and what you want to put across. Certainly the streets were hardly awash with ‘Calman Fever’. I wasn’t stopped once on the street by people screaming “My god have you read the Calman Report!”

There’s good reason for this. This is political rights sprinkled on a democracy like sweeties. No one elected Sir Kenneth Calman. He is a be-knighted steward of the British Establishment and his remit is clear from the Unionist parties: come up with something to stop the trajectory towards independence. Anything will do. Handgun control is anything.

That his remit should ‘consider all the options ‘ accept the one the view that is represented by the currently democratically elected Scottish Govt, who polled upwards of 40% at the latest election in some constituencies, is just bizarre, even by the terms of British historical chicanery.

It leads to the most honest analysis of the Calman Report being a commentator on the Scotman website who wrote: “With Calman you can ban handguns. With independence we could ban Trident.” This is the reality of the poxy paternalistic counter-intuitive nonsense dolled out by Calman to prop up the failed British State.

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

England will run out at Hampden Park representing ‘Britain’ in 2012. What a depressing end to Gordon Browns dreadful attempt to stoke up Britpop-New Labour and the Imperial End Game at the fag-end of Blighty. Thatcher, Blair and now Brown are the haggard smokers outside the pub still heaving away at the last fag of British identity. This is the last shameful wheezzie gasp, achievable only by the self-colonisation and collusion of the Scottish Football Association.

In a hilarious expose of English media ignorance the Guardian in this report has this team running out at Wembley, not Hampden. If that was true it would almost be forgiveable. As it is, it’s a hilarious metaphor for  a failed construct: we pay for another nation to ‘represent’ us in our own city at our own cost in a hapless effort to fix the un-fixable conundrum that is contemporary British identity. It’s a genuiney shameful phenomenon for which the SFA should be disbanded immediately.

Unions without the Union

The British labour movement has traditionally been hostile to independence movements within these isles which are seen as a threat to the unity of the British working class. In this extract from Breaking up Britain, published as part of our series to mark the book’s release, Gregor Gall argues this concern is misplaced and speculates on what a post-Union labour politics might look like.

Left politics has traditionally been founded on internationalism, taking inspiration from the historic appeal to workers of the world, regardless of country, to unite together in common purpose. Herein lies the source of the accusation wielded by some on the left against others on the left that giving any support to any independence movements on mainland Britain will lead to a fundamental, irrevocable and unwelcome fracture to the working class. The fear is that the unity of the working class movement in Britain will be broken, leading to retreat and defeat as well as the end of the socialist project.

Those on the left who support the right of the peoples of Scotland and Wales to national self-determination are castigated as nationalists while those arguing against these nations’ self-determination are held by the other side of the left to be unionists. Such a division reflects of an age old schism amongst the left between the polarities of what pass for understandings of nationalism and internationalism.

WMD, Jobs & the Union

Last weeks announcement by the MoD that Scotland would now be the location for the entire nuclear submarine fleet couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Scottish people don’t want it, the military doesn’t want it, even the Tories don’t want it! So why as they face meltdown in the polls are Labour providing jobs in the mass murder business?

As one general announced:  ‘Ministry of Defence documents suggest that the seven Trafalgar class submarines currently based in Devon will be relocated to Faslane on the Gare Loch near Glasgow by 2015′ earlier in the same week  another general, Sir Hugh Beach, the former deputy commander-in-chief of UK land forces, summed up the UK’s Trident missile system: “It’s no bloody use. Let’s not waste money on it.”

Re Joyce

If your dog dies you can stuff it and keep it in the hall, but it’s no longer your dog. Labour supporters who believe in ‘Labour values’ know in themselves they are the stuffed-dog-brigade when they still remain part of the nightmare that is Brown-Blair Labour.

You know that Labours unionist wheeze is unravelling not when The Daily Torygraph has a good go at ritualistic Labour-bashing, but when Scotsman journos leave the script and start writing about the reality around us.

Systems Failure

Why have the poor to take on the failure of capitalism? What’s going on? Is the system collapsing or morphing into something worse?

Over stateside Counterpunch writer Saul Landau asks ‘We Bail Out the Banks, Why Shouldn’t We Own Them?’  while Martin Jaques is in sombre mood: the business and political elite are flying blind. This is the mother of all economic crises. It has barely started and remains completely out of control…

So good so far, next, here, Govan’s finest bard, Bob from City Strolls writes: “We do not live in a bubble that is aloof from the misery of others, no matter what rhetoric we hide behind, whatever possessions we covet to dull the noise of our conscience. Our struggle for peace is continuous as is the tyranny of those who seek to destroy it. But we need to believe it can happen, things can change. We will not find what we are looking for in the pages or the networks of the propaganda systems created to dull our senses – fill us with fear and imply – it is useless to try something else.”

Read the full article here.

Con Census

Do you live in Edinburgh or Lewis and remember the horrors of Abu Ghraib? According to Indymedia Scotland the UK subsidiary of a company that provided interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq will be running the next Scottish census.  In a new twist to the idea of ‘bringing the war back home’ Richard at Indymedia writes: “The company – CACI – will be involved in an official census rehearsal being  held at the end of March in the west of Edinburgh and in Lewis and Harris.  CACI International is a US-based defence contractor. From August 2003 until the early autumn of 2005 it was contracted to provide “interrogation services” for the US Army at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. While CACI staff were employed as interrogators at Abu Ghraib, prisoners were humiliated and tortured there by US military police. CACI denies any responsibility for the abuse that was photographed and denies some other allegations of abuse. But it is trying to block lawsuits brought against it by former Abu Ghraib prisoners by claiming “official immunity.”

We agree that “It isn’t too late for the Scottish Government to cancel the contract. It must do so immediately.” More here.