St Andrews Day 2010

Saturday saw people travelling from Dumfries, Fife, the Borders, Glasgow and across central Scotland to be part of the Building a Movement for Yes event. There’ll be a full report to follow, but first a round up of some of the news and views this St Andrews Day.

By Mike Small. This is the key bit here:  ‘10.21 A referendum is essential because the Scottish Government believes that this debate cannot be restricted to the Scottish Parliament. The National Conversation has allowed the people to articulate their views, and it is now time for them to be invited to express those views in a formal way.’ Read the whole thing here.

Four possible scenarios for Scotland’s future are contained in the white paper:

1) no change in the present set-up

2) more powers, as recommended by the Calman Commission review of devolution

3) a major transfer of responsibilities from Westminster to Holyrood, such as full financial autonomy

4) independence

Speaking at its launch in Edinburgh, Salmond said: “It’s time for the people to have their say on Scotland’s future. The debate in Scottish politics is no longer between change or no change – it’s about the kind of change we seek and the right of the people to choose their future in a free and fair referendum.”

Perhaps assuming that all political parties are ready to jettison their core beliefs at a moments notice, Iain Gray predictably urged the SNP to drop the referendum and instead called on the Scottish Govt to drop it and focus on more immediate concerns, such as the recession.

As you’d expect the media is uniformly hostile, sometimes viciously so to the referendum idea, or perhaps just to democracy in general.

Despite universal gloom and doom amongst the commentariat its a pretty clear referendum choice. Despite the repeated accusation of SNP intransigence and dogma, it’s pretty conciliatory, some would say too much so.

Whilst trying to set as bleak a picture as she can muster Jackie Ashley at the Guardian concludes:

“The deals to be done are fascinating. To get a referendum through the Scottish parliament, the SNP needs Labour or Tory votes. Labour wouldn’t want the devo-max option on the ballot, though the SNP (and perhaps the Tories) would. But as the tectonic plates of Scottish politics shift, these are details that can be dealt with. The result? A referendum on Scotland’s place in the UK is now seriously on the cards, at some stage after next spring’s general election. What Salmond is announcing in Edinburgh is not a fantasy agenda. And it could have a direct relevance for every citizen, every taxpayer and every political party in the rest of the United Kingdom. Whether St Andrew’s Day 2009 feels like a moment to celebrate depends on your taste in politics. I, for one, feel a little queasy.”

Kevin McKenna (‘I Trust the People to Save the Union’) writes a spirited diatribe ending atleast fairly: “A referendum on returning us to an independent state, though, will be the election of our lives. A democratically elected nationalist government has a right to present it and we have the right to take part in it.” He does however talk quite a lot of drivel in between a strong opening and a fair ending, including the remarkably stupid comment that:

“There are few, if any, separatists who can demonstrate how everyday life in Scotland will improve after independence in any specific area.”

Closer to home Iain Macwhirter is dabbling in semantics asking: ‘The real question is does independence matter?”. Well the answers to Iain and Kevins questions return home in body bags from Afghanistan and until recently from Iraq on a all too regular basis. And the common riposte in today’s papers has been about the cost of the referendum, yet no one is blinking an eye at the arrival of the hideous Astute (sic) submarine on the clyde or the insanity of the Trident nuclear programe (estimated cost £125 billion) which Iain’s own newspaper revealed only a day ago that – as Cilla used to say ‘Surprise Surprise’ – our deterrent isnt very independent after all.

Iain writes: “The Calman report, for all its faults, is a tribute to the success of the SNP in office. All the unionist parties now support giving Holyrood greater tax powers, something that would have been inconceivable only three years ago. Whoever wins the next UK election, something like ­Calman is going to be introduced and this will require the active…”

This just isnt true. Almost as soon as the Calman Commission reported the three parties unity  impoded. The Liberal Democrats have been gleefuly indolent, the Tories are in total disarray (see Sunday Herald again) while Labour are offering the prospect of control over handguns in six years time.

You ask does independence matter? Yes it does, and most people know it. Scotland’s independence would represent a huge  geopolitic event, hence Jim Sillars recent articulation that the reason the Union is being fought so strongly is that the nuclear weapons on our soil represent the Anglo-British States membership to a permanent position at the UN Security Council. It’s only our own brow-beaten self depreciation that tells us we are not of any importance. The media are complicit in this, evoking what C.J. Watson once described as ‘the sense of weariness, of the absence of hope, and lacerating self-contempt which is a marked component in the psyche of colonised people’ (Literature of the North, 1983). We are self-colonised, but the description might seem familiar.

That sense of being insignificant and lacking in direction, more than anything would change with self-determination and shift the sort of hopeless politics represented by Scotland having no representation in Copenhagen despite showing genuine global leadership in climate change legislation.

The reality is that no-one elected Calman and the opponents of independence need to be specific about what they are putting on the table, hence, I believe options two and three.

I don’t believe the media any more. I don’t believe in the banking system, I don’t believe in eternal growth, I don’t believe the British State protects us. I don’t believe in weapons of mass destruction in my country, I don’t believe our troops should have been in Iraq, nor should they be in Afghanistan. We can only change these things by creating a new democracy that’s fit to the challenge of the post-crash reality, away from the corruption of Westminster and the suffocating institutional consensus of Union, free market and elite rule. These politicians and these instutions are irredeemably lost and the sooner we realise this the better.

See interview with the First Minister and Nick Robinson here. See also Gerry Hassan on constitution and inequality here.

Non-Identity?

This extract from The English Postman, by Tom Nairn on the past and emergent future identity of the Anglo-British identity published inthe latest issue of  Scottish Left Review:

…Identity is of course a collective metaphor; but metaphors are malleable, and re-usable (part of their point) and in this case they have awarded a strangely rural dimension to the past of the first industrial nation-state — as Greenfeld says, the principal parent of urban capitalism and commerce.

Building a Movement for Yes!

BUILDING A MOVEMENT FOR YES!
Saturday 28 November 2009
10.30 – 6.00 @ Out of the Blue

As the plans for a referendum on Scottish independence are announced a gathering looking at why we need a Yes vote and what are the positive visions for an independent Scotland?

Media, Communication and the Union
11.00 – 12.30

Pat Kane on The Democratic Interact: the challenges of social media to Scottish Self -Determination. Pat is a musician, blogger, author, columnist and has been involved in the politics of independence from Scotland United days. More at The Play Ethic.

Glasgow NE – Political Failure

That Labour can hold a seat in a by-election brought about by the exposure of massive corruption and incompetence, in a constituency that has been ’served’ by Labour for 74 years and by a Labour Govt for a decade, yet still faces some of the worst poverty, poor housing and deprivation in Western Europe is astonishing. That the SNP have failed to capture a seat in these circumstances is equally so.

The SNP put up a Shallow Hal candidate, a right-wing Opus Dei-ite who failed to deliver a vision or a policy platform and suffered as a result. David Kerr’s campaign crumbled under the negative attacks from Labour and the Unionist press, who’s best smear of the week seemed to be that Alex Salmond had taken someone for a pizza.

The SNP need desperately to create a vision beyond ‘independence’ that rises to the new challenge of the financial and environmental crises we face and presents a clear deliverable left-green alternative to Labour.

Turnout was down from 45% at the 2005 General Election to 33%, what we are seeing is the effective collapse of  belief in the political system after the Westminster expenses fiasco and Labour resorting to attack-dog politics and churning out their core vote, a  rump of less than 15% of the electorate in the constituency. Labour has become a regional party, stuck fast in the west coast where reality seems to have been suspended as party-loyalty has become a sort of secular religion.

SNP activists put a brave face on it saying: “There was one factor clearly similar to Glenrothes and that was the huge number of Labour activists imported from all over the UK. In fact, looking at the sea of red rosettes at the count ,the SNP may well have been outgunned on the ground. Labour at Glenrothes and at Glasgow North East was not going to take anything for  granted, as they did at Glasgow East. Labour have had to fight furiously  for their own very safe seat and this itself  is a sea change in Scottish politics. It remains to be seen just for how long they can do this.”

Many commentators have mentioned the multiple deprivation in the area, but, as Alf Young mentioned on Newsnicht, many families have generations of benefit dependency and have such low and lowered expectations that is an ingrained part of the cultural landscape. This is the legacy of the Union and of Labour-Tory misrule. Today Labour and the Unionist parties can cling on to the warming truth that many people are feeling vulnerable in the face of recession and financial shocks, too frightened to take th e bold step of independence. They will have to ask themselves if this is a credible way to secure the Union, or if it will be enough to prevent the paternalist hand of David Camerons Etonian cabal seizing Downing Street?

As public realm politics collapses apart from the digerati, the commentariat, and the media classes the ground is open to professional political classes to ‘get out their vote’ as the majority lies disaffected disillusioned and disenfranchised. If the SNP can’t articulate a vision to defeat this rabble then the wider independence movement will have to emerge more clearly and show some leadership.

Two final thoughts. The BNP again failed. They have never saved their deposit at an election in Scotland and they never will, despite the mainstream medias obsessive promotion of them. Finally, where was Iain Gray? Jim Murphy seems to have completed replaced him.

We await the post-mortem into the role of the Unite union acting as political dogsbody for the Labour Party and the police investigation into electoral fraud and ‘personation’ at Alexandra Parade and Dennistoun polling stations.

Simon Mann

This entry below is from Craig Murray (who is back blogging after a healthy pause) on the recently release of  Simon  Mann.

The only addition we can make to this is the fervent hope that Mark Thatcher gets jail.

Murray is also good on Rory Stewart the Tory who has been the recent subject of an embarrasingly gushing artcile by Deborah Orr. He may be a bit of posh-totty for Guardian hacks but, as Murray puts it plainly:

‘Let me be plain. Rory Stewart was an officer for Torturers’R'Us (formerly trading as MI6).’

“I am not rejoicing at the return of Old Etonian Simon Mann from jail in Equatorial Guinea. His failed coup attempt was just one of a series of ventures in which a group of upper class public school English former officers worked with former apartheid era forces to try to seize control of mineral resources across Africa.

You can find the story of my own involvement with them, the full background and the untold evidence of Blairite complicity in my book The Catholic Orangemen of Togo.

Long term readers of this blog will know that Mann’s erstwhile mercenary partner, Lt Col Tim Spicer, frightened my publisher out of the book by commissioning Schillings to send threatening letters under the UK’s notorious libel laws. But the book is entirely true, eyewitness stuff, as witnessed by the fact that, since self-publication, over a thousand copies have been sold while tens of thousands have read it free online – but there has been no sign of the threatened libel action from Spicer.

New Labour, of course, went on to consummate their relationship with Spicer by making him a multi multi millionaire providing mercenaries to their invasion of Iraq.

Had Mann’s coup succeeded in gaining the oilfields of Equatorial Guinea, it would almost certainly have resulted in the deaths of large numbers of Africans, just as Mann and Spicer organised in their in Executive Outcomes days. That is why I think he should still be in jail.”

More here.

Multitude

Democracy at a global scale is becoming for the first time, a real possibility that we call the multitude’s project. Multitude’s project is not only expressing the desire of a world of equality and liberty, it does not only claim for a global democratic society open and inclusive: it actually demonstrate the means of releasing this desire.

from Multitude. This, if anything represents the ethos and aims of Bella Caledonia. Tom Nairn reviews  Multidude by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri:

The cover of Multitude invites bookshop browsers not just to read it, but to ‘Join the many. Join the Empowered.’ The missionary tone is underlined by Naomi Klein’s blurb – ‘inspiring’ – and a frisson added by the book’s appearance: a brown paper wrapping like those used to discourage porn thieves and customs inspectors. Trembling fingers that go further are reminded that this book succeeds Empire (2000), by the same authors, which provided a picture of the global imperium supposed to have followed the Cold War – not the American Empire, but a wider settlement of which US supremacy was just one part. This imperium has generated global resistance, which all purchasers are now invited to approve, in the name of democracy.

Hardt and Negri’s multitude should not be confused with the working class, or any ethnic and national group. It seems to mean humanity in general – ‘The multitude is many-coloured, like Joseph’s magical coat,’ but the coat hides an increasingly common will, summed up by the authors as ‘democracy’. Readers are warned that the book’s argument may not be ‘immediately clear’ and are exhorted to be patient, for Multitude is ‘a mosaic from which the general design gradually emerges’. Before turning to that design, it’s important to stress how welcome this expansiveness is. In a venture like this, social anthropology and philosophy are as important as economics or conventional international relations. As Gopal Balakrishnan wrote in his review of Empire in New Left Review, it seems apposite to cite Virgil: ‘The final age that the oracle foretold has arrived; the great order of the centuries is born again.’

And yet, as in the previous book, this oracular tone is puzzling. If the outlook for global democratisation were as good as these prophets maintain, then surely a more empirical, matter-of-fact tone would suffice? Instead, an exalted and visionary tone prevails, right up to the high note of rapture on which they end: ‘Today time is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living . . . In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future. This will be the real political act of love.’ Hardt and Negri’s project is constantly undermined by an inebriate tendency towards the absolute. It is as if the authors find themselves transported by a philosophical elixir of oneness which, though invariably justified as ‘radicalism’, may in fact carry the reader towards an odd style of religiosity. Nor is this just a side effect: it is this that we are really being invited to ‘join’ – empowerment through faith, via spiritual transport.

You’ll have to tell them frankly you can’t explain
Why Nineveh is still standing though you hope to learn
At the feet of a prophet who for all you know
May be turning his donkey toward Nineveh even now.

Carl Dennis, ‘Prophet’

While Empire made some readers think of Virgil and Rome, in Multitude the defining shift is more restricted: the postmodern has become the premodern. The philosophy of Spinoza has replaced both Marxism and capitalist neo-liberalism. While affected timelessness is inherent in the Hardt-Negri rhetoric – hence their over-easy references to antiquity or the Middle Ages – the centre of gravity in this book is firmly in the later 17th century. Once regarded as an important precursor of the Enlightenment and of Marxist materialism, the thought of Spinoza (1632-77) is redeemed in these pages, as a wisdom awaiting its vindication in a globalised epoch yet to come. In vital ways, Spinoza told the whole story: his apparently abstract pantheistic philosophy explained history itself, future as well as past, and the globalisation process simply favours a return to such understanding, after the mounting sorrows and delusions of modernity.”

Read the full article here.

Not So Special Delivery

The same political forces that ask us to believe in the Union are the ones that are shredding Britain of the only civic institutions that would make that concept viable, public realm bodies such as the National Health Service, the Royal Mail and the education bodies are being broken down and sold off. As Eddie Barnes pointed out here there is a growing disparity to this approach North and South of the Border.

John Pilger in his latest piece for the New Statesman offers an acute observation on the wider context of the postal strike:

“The postal workers struggle is as vital for democracy as any national event in recent years. The campaign against them is part of a historic shift from the last vestiges of political democracy in Britain to a corporate world of insecurity and war. If the privateers running the Post Office are allowed to win, the regression that now touches all lives bar the wealthy will quicken its pace. A third of British children now live in low-income or impoverished families. One in five young people is denied hope of a decent job or education.

And now the Brown government is to mount a fire sale of public assets and services worth £16bn. Unmatched since Margaret That­cher’s transfer of public wealth to a new gross elite, the sale, or theft, will include the Channel Tunnel rail link, bridges, the student loan bank, school playing fields, libraries and public housing estates. The plunder of the National Health Service and public education is already under way.

The common thread is adherence to the demands of an opulent, sub-criminal minority exposed by the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and of the City of London, now rescued with hundreds of billions in public money and still unregulated with a single stringent condition imposed by the government. Goldman Sachs, which enjoys a personal connection with the Prime Minister, is to give employees record average individual pay and bonus packages of £500,000. The Financial Times now offers a service called How to Spend It.” Read the full piece here.

Guest writer Ray Bell writing for Bella here offers a personal account of dealings with the private service alternatives:

Another day, another strike. But there is one that particularly strikes a chord with me. Not because I wish to be some trendy lefty jumping on yet another bandwagon, but because in the case of the postal strike, there are some pretty serious issues at stake. Thing is, whatever our misgivings about the Royal Mail – the “Royal” part being one of them perhaps – the alternatives are far far worse. The postal service is already heavily mutilated by cuts from successive Tory and Labour administrations, and by EU “competition” laws. The Post Office has been asset stripped to disastrous effect, and we can’t blame the posties for fearing the same will happen to the Royal Mail.

British State – Police State

The British State has evolved into a surveillance society and a police state with the combination of digital technology, database culture and the use of  ‘the war on terror’ as a smokescreen for a full-on assault on civil liberties. From Tomlinson to Jean Charles de Menezes to the full extent of this co-ordinated national police force it adds up to a police state off the leash, unaccountable and dangerously out of control.

There is confirmation of years of political experience today as the Guardian announce:

“Police are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.

The hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor “domestic extremists”, the Guardian can reveal in the first of a three-day series into the policing of protests. Detailed information about the political activities of campaigners is being stored on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime.

Senior officers say domestic extremism, a term coined by police that has no legal basis, can include activists suspected of minor public order offences such as peaceful direct action and civil disobedience.”

More here. Read Adam Price on surveillance satire here.

Where are the slayers of big government when you need them?

The New 40% Rule

They’re just making it up now…Gerry Hassan in today’s Scotsman outlines the recent attempts to re-awaken an old debate that somehow we would need TWO referendums to gain independence. The first, you see, to sort of see if we wanted it, and the second, to, you know, er, just check we knew what we were talking about.

In the last few days, Jo Eric Murkens, a former researcher at the Constitution Unit has revisited the argument of their book, ‘Scottish Independence’ of a few years ago which made the case that Scotland needed to have not just one, but two votes on independence.

As  Gerry points out: “…there is no precedent anywhere in the world for two votes. Instead, it would be seen as another ‘40% rule’ – a constitutional barrier and the equivalent of gerrymandering to influence the ultimate result. “

But, I hear you say, I thought they didn’t want us to have one referendum now they want us to have two? Though Hassan recalls the 1979 attempts to derail the devolution vote – just think we could have avoided Thatcherism in Scotland if they hadnt done that! – he’s forgotten more recent history – whereby the devolution vote had added the Tartan Tax clause in an attempt to muddy the waters in 1997.

Gerry concludes:

“There are no comparative cases of two votes. Twenty four new nation states have been born since the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Not one of them had two votes. Indeed not one new state anywhere has had two votes. Why should Scotland be the first and only one?”

Read the full article here.

Britain & Freedom

Our friend Tom Griffin argues that Anthony Barnett’s piece on the BNP and the BBC is the best he’s seen so far, and certainly Barnett is clear where some have been ambiguous:

“It is necessary and important to stress that Griffin is an English Fascist.”

He continues: “This means he wears a cloak of reasonableness wrapped around his prejudice. Choice phrases give the game away. Yesterday Griffin was interviewed by Martha Kearney on the BBC’s World at One.

In the course of his answers he referred to prisoners in British jails as “vermin”. She seemed to think this acceptable and let it pass. Of course, there are some very evil men behind bars in the UK. There are also over 4,000 women (in 2006, the last date given on the Prison Service website) and many sad, dyslexic short-term prisoners. To describe any of them as “vermin” is to fundamentally dehumanise some of our own citizens and part of the human race. Rats and cockroaches are vermin. You trap, kill poison… or gas them. The word was no slip, it occurs in official BNP communications. It gives permission to dream of extreme violence. It signals the real Fascism behind the New Fascism.

In these circumstances as the moral failure of the political class brings forth demons, the BNP has to be confronted. Stuart Hall got it right: they need to be engaged with by the media when they are part of a news story, but they should not be on Question Time giving us their views about everything as if they are an acceptable part of fireside conversation.”

Barnett’s point is not original (I knew the BNP were fascists!). The important point he makes is about the complicity and uselessness of the BBC. He makes two points:

“The reality is that it is part of the larger political class now seeking to perpetuate itself in the face of public discontent” and perhaps less obviously that:  “The BBC…is itself an extension of the surveillance society and the database state (for our own good of course).” Read the full article here.

Also good is Ian Bell in that dying organ, the Herald: “Tens of thousands of the men who fought in the Second World War were under no illusions. They disputed fascism with their lives and voted Churchill – whose image Griffin will not relinquish – out of office. A handful of them had bled with the International Brigades long before anti-fascism was “premature”, and found themselves treated to the state’s suspicion when they enlisted. No matter.

They did not go to death just to allow us the luxury of sophistry. The BNP is old evil newly painted. It finds democracy charming, and stupid. It loves our “debates”. So here’s a fact: no free society can allow liberty to those who loathe liberty.”

See Wikileaks here.