As promised, let's talk about the so-called progressive alliance, that Labour, the LibDems, Greens, SNP, and Plaid should come to a non-aggression arrangement to maximise the anti-Conservative vote in upcoming by-elections and the next general election (now most unlikely to be next year). This means unpicking 'tribalism'.
Let's start off with a question. Though it has happened at local level on a number of occasions, most Labour people from all wings of the party would react with horror about cutting a deal with the Tories. Why? It isn't a matter of them being "not us". Politics is not a game of football where someone is wedded to one side and affects hatred for designated rivals. On the whole, the reaction against the Tories is because of what they do. We see their policies hammer our people and protect the privileged, and more often than not regardless of the damage they wreak on the fabric of social life. We know they represent a set of interests that ultimately aren't the same, and indeed are opposed to the interests of the people our party represents.
Let's bear that in mind when we come to the Liberal Democrats. Tony Blair liked to flatter them by pretending their party lies within the radical tradition, but that is to evacuate any sense of meaning from the term. The LibDems, historically, represented the less backward elements of the same class the Tories do. When they collapsed and were supplanted by Labour in the 1920s, they faded away into electoral obscurity. Yet, philosophically and in terms of its core constituency, they were not qualitatively different from the Tories. The Liberals as were had sharp policy differences with the Conservatives from time to time, but these were of degree and not of kind. And we don't need to play thought experiments or dredge up records in local government. They might have prevented some utterly mad Tory policies while in coalition, but their time with ministerial portfolios saw through cuts to social security, the doubling down of market mechanisms in the public sector (especially in the NHS), and a complete abandonment of their Keynes-lite strategy for getting the British economy moving again. They are hostile to trade unions acting politically and, lest we forget, that nice "lefty" Tim Farron is open to the idea of going in with the Tories again. Lovely.
The SNP and Plaid Cymru, on paper, should be better candidates for a progressive alliance. Leanne Wood is a nice centre left-type with a Trot pedigree to her name. Nicola Sturgeon's closet has no Fourth Internationalist skeletons, alas, but apart from independence you could make a case for the Scottish government being more consistently social democratic than the Labour administrations preceding it. What's more, the SNP had its own Corbyn-style surge long before Corbs lent his name to politics-defining membership surges. In one sense, the SNP is entirely different to what it was before the Scottish referendum. Most of the left are there. Most of the progressive vote are there. And yet, two stubborn political realities remain. Despite approaching the same number of members as the Tories, it has made little difference to the SNP politically. It remains pretty much the same outfit with the same people in charge. Scottish radicalism hasn't remade the party in the same way Corbynism has upended everything in Labour. That, ultimately, has something to do with the character of the SNP as a bourgeois nationalist party. The basic political subject it's trying to organise is the nation, and in capitalist societies the interests of the nation are defined in impeccably bourgeois terms: growing GDP, low inflation rates, balance of payments, the successful competition over markets and so on. True, the SNP offer 'nice' civic, left-tinged nationalism and not the ugly rubbish long associated with Britishness and Englishness in particular, yet it too cannot resist defining itself against the backward, Tory-voting xenophobes south of the border. Nor seeking to exacerbate divisions in Labour, its long time rival and potential future nemesis. Perhaps I'm old fashioned for sticking to the view that nationalism is the passage to division and the domination of politics by unscrupulous scoundrels. What an idle whimsy, eh? The same applies to Plaid as well. While seeking more autonomy for Wales in a federal-style arrangement, which seem entirely sensible to me, for PC it's a step toward independence and ultimately they organise on that basis, albeit much less successfully than their friends in the north. For us, interests and solidarity exits across borders. For the SNP and Plaid, that fundamentally threatens their project.
And the Greens. Of the four parties they are perhaps the best candidates for an alliance with Labour. Our party arose to prosecute the claims and interests of working people in capitalism, and green parties respond to the environmental despoliation that same system has accumulated in slag heaps, rubbish tips, and long-term changes to the climate. Both are potentially and imminently radical because of the adversarial position they have vis conventional economics. Where Labour and the Greens differ is at the level of constituency. Labour is powered by working people generally - historically most of the "traditional" working class and the middle class in the professions and public sector, and now increasingly by the networked worker. The Greens by small business and also sections of the middle class. Unlike the other parties, there is a tension between these constituencies but no fundamental opposition. An alliance that wouldn't lead to political catastrophe a la Italy's Democratic Party is possible here. Thing is, it's completely pointless. The Greens didn't cost Labour the general election. A deal would benefit the Greens - Caroline Lucas would remain unmolested in Brighton - but where's the quid pro quo for the much larger would-be partner?
There's nothing wrong with members from different parties working together where interests are episodically aligned, but a tie up is fraught with serious difficulties. There are significant sections in each, particularly Labour and the SNP who wouldn't countenance such a thing. Sinking differences into an amorphous nice-politics-for-nice-anti-Tory-people formation is a recipe for splits. The second problem is, well, the national card. The Tories proved adept at playing it in 2015 and, unfortunately, it did frighten the horses in too many marginals. A full blown alliance unhappily risks stirring the rank politics of English nationalism and anti-elite populism. Remember, the consequences of its recent outing hasn't been positive. And lastly, an alliance between irreconcilable parties won't fly because of the interests underpinning them. So-called tribalism recognises this truism of politics. No matter how crude its expression, such dumb materialism is more advanced than "enlightened" views stubbornly refusing to understand politics beyond free floating ideas.
New academic year, a new season with the Sociology Research Seminar Series at the University of Derby. Opening for the semester was Baris Cayli, Research Fellow in Criminology with his paper, ‘Zones of Fragility: Outlaws and the Forms of Violence in the Ottoman Empire’. This was one of a series of interlocking projects spun off from Baris’s work in the old Ottoman archives scattered about its former territory. These range from the Grand Vizier’s office and Imperial decrees on foreign affairs hosted in Istanbul, to smaller collections of correspondence and edicts from governors and local officials. The basic question guiding the paper was how the structure of the empire was shaped by violence, or rather how the sporadic violence undertaken by bandits, outlaws, and rebels – regardless of subjective intentions – contributed to this shaping of the empire.
Received histories of the Ottoman Empire, particularly from the 19th century on to its eventual collapse after the First World War was one of decline and gradual dismemberment by the European Great Powers and newly independent Balkan states. Pressed by imperialism and colonialism from without, the Ottomans faced instability thanks to the spread of national consciousness among subject peoples, and perpetual cycles of tension and revolt around land ownership and tax, the latter varying enormously across the empire’s territory. This was symptomatic of a weak central state and high levels of autonomy for governors. Effectively, they comprised petty states within a state and was seldom in touch with the imperial centre. This itself was a consequence of poor and/or non-existent infrastructure. In TE Lawrence’s First World War memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he notes it was quicker and easier to move reinforcements from London to the Palestine front than it was for the Ottomans to transfer forces from Constantinople to the same.
A consequence of this ramshackle state structure was its lack of immediate presence. There was no social fabric as such to support Ottoman rule, little or no identification with the centre. Issues of hegemony and consent, traditionally bound up with socialist strategy in the advanced countries were absent because the structures underpinning them were absent. This meant in towns and villages throughout the empire, there was no rule of law. Instead there was sporadic and unrestrained violence on the part of bandits. The archives talk about Bosnian outlaws sometimes, but not always, influenced by nationalist ideas who would sack towns and villages. It follows that if a state cannot acquit itself of the very basic function of protecting life and property of subject populations, then its potency, power, and legitimacy becomes much diminished.
This is where Baris introduced his notion of zones of political fragility. These are simply spaces where political violence occurs. Likewise, zones of social fragility are locales in which non-political violence are regular occurrences. Where they proliferate, antipathy towards central authority grows. And the second consequence is that terrorised subject populations may surrender to outlaw groups, form alliances with others, and/or take on a nationalist coloration. In short, fragile zones act as centrifugal pressures that prise away national minorities and territories. This dynamic seems to have been at work especially in the Balkan provinces previously under Ottoman control. However, while political and non-political violence contributes to this fragility, and therefore should be viewed holistically in its consequences for state authority, Baris was clear that this is only a provisional concept and requires refinement through the examination of comparative cases.
In the subsequent questions, Baris was asked about how does one differentiate from political and non-political violence? Especially as criminal enterprise can be carried out for political reasons, as well as sustain political violence (an example that immediately jumped to mind was of a youthful Stalin and his bank-robbing scrapes in the Caucasus that helped fund the Bolsheviks). For Baris, the definition just concerns goals, though in practice they may entail similar consequences. With Stalin, for example, the criminality of his enterprise was wedded to political objectives. For most bank robbers, that obviously isn't the case, but a multiplication of this violence for whatever subjective reason results in the fragility zone problem.
While far from a modern state on the 19th century/early 20th century West European model, I asked if hegemony was entirely absent from the Ottoman Empire and if the central apparatus and the constellation of forces bound up with the empire at least promulgate an official ideology and inculcated discourses of consent? Baris replied that its internal looseness (provincial governors often paid none of their tax take to the central treasury) meant such a project had only a limited scope. Plus for consent to be obtained, it needs to acquit the basic function of providing security - a point long noted by Max Weber and the state as the repository of the monopoly of legitimate force. However, as the empire was officially Islamic, while there were degrees of religious freedom for subject populations Muslims were officially privileged. However, late in the day it did try and introduce citizenship laws that guaranteed all subjects certain rights and obligations. The problem here is that in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith empire in which there was already a legally privileged population, stripping those advantages away stirred up resentment among what would be its social bedrock. It was also difficult to enforce. Given the autonomy of the periphery, different areas were ruled alternately by imperial law, Sharia law, Christian covenants, and other local political and religious permutations of both. Not only were these sources of existing tension, a hegemony-building edict from the outside would do exactly the opposite. The state, rather than placing itself as an arbiter of tension becomes its origin, therefore contributing to the dynamics rending the empire.
Overall, an interesting start to the 2016-17 round of Sociology seminars.
One man is responsible for today's fiasco, and that is the Prime Minister. Or, thankfully, the soon-to-be-ex-Prime Minister. Dave joins Neville Chamberlain and Anthony Eden - coincidentally Tories too - in the hall of notorious failures. For his political vanity, for narrow party advantage over a hard right insurgency that began petering out before he conceded them the EU referendum, Dave has inflicted incalculable damage on the British economy, on the politics of this country, and goes into retirement trailing a bitter legacy of division and hopelessness. Well done that man. Well fucking done.
There's a lot to be written about the referendum - the character of the people voting leave, what it means for mainstream politics, whether UKIP will do a SNP, and the looming no confidence vote in Jeremy Corbyn. But here, while he's still relevant, I want to concentrate on Dave's miserable figure and the trajectory of his career. And there are a couple of things that stand out. As I've argued before, actually Dave is a proven weak leader but his sole discernible talent is to look the part. Hence when politics is aestheticised and image is everything, that is able to cover for his legion of faults. This brings us to his big problem. Dave, you see, is an addict. A gambling addict, and this frame can be usefully employed to think about his career.
Dave's brinkmanship started small. Upon his election in 2005, he put the party in the bath to hose down the muck of ages and the nasty, bigoted toxins the Tories had accumulated. A lot of members didn't like it, and off they went. At the end of it we had a shiny new entity. "Vote blue go green" was the slogan as our youthful PM-to-be preached compassionate conservatism and made out with huskies in the Arctic. It wasn't long before Dave faced his true test. Going up against a wounded and flailing Gordon Brown, he took a chance breaking with the Tory commitment to matching Labour spending and used the window opened by the financial crisis to oppose the measures necessary to save Britain's banking system. Economically, it was as bankrupt as Lehman's, but politically Dave skillfully - with some help from his media friends - turned a crisis of capitalism into a crisis of public spending. Matters were helped by Brown and Darling deciding that the route back to normality meant passing through a period of austerity. Dave gambled by staking out new political ground, and won by setting the terms of the debate.
The next big gamble came shortly after. His "big, open and comprehensive offer" to the Liberal Democrats to join him in a coalition government was a novelty, and commentators - including not a few Labour MPs - were bowled over by this new "cooperative" approach to politics. In practice, there was little qualitatively different between it and any other Conservative government. But Dave reasoned rightly that the LibDems were hungry for ministerial office, and would cling on for as long as they could knowing another chance may never come their way. A recipe for chaos it was not.
Dave's next big stake was the war of equal marriage. Trying to give the Tories a progressive gloss after implementing their first round of cuts, Dave more or less purged the party of its remaining bigots and homophobes. Tory associations folded and UKIP, then presenting itself as a libertarian party, promptly junked these principles and cleaved to the old school to hoover them up as recruits. A risky gamble because a declining Tory party could ill-afford to dispense with activists, and it gave UKIP the shot in the arm it needed.
His gambling appetite was now whetted. While it had simmered away for a while, Scottish independence wasn't a decisive issue then in Scotland. But with the SNP in power, he thought to lance the boil and go down in history as the British PM to see off Scottish nationalism. I don't believe he was far-sighted or Machiavellian enough to believe the referendum would destroy Scottish Labour, but this was the happy consequence as, somehow, the project fear approach of Better Together won the referendum at the price of immeasurably strengthening the SNP and Scottish nationalism in general. It doesn't matter, as what happened in Scotland allowed him to play the English identity card and scaremonger enough voters in swing seats to grant him a slim majority.
The problem with problem gamblers is, unfortunately, they don't know when to stop. Fresh out of the Scottish referendum, Dave sought to neutralise the UKIP vote in the marginals by offering the in/out EU referendum. Fully expecting it to be negotiated away in subsequent coalition talks that didn't happen, the majority landed him with a promise he'd be hard pressed to wriggle out of. What raised the stakes even higher is Dave went away to Europe with the promise to renegotiate the UK's relationship, and came back with thin gruel. He gambled this would be enough, along with a project fear-style 'it's the economy, stupid' campaign to win again and secure his place in the pantheon of all-time greats. His gamble failed. For the sake of a small number of votes from a minor party in decline, he was happy to risk everything. With the risks so high for a stake so small, why didn't someone make an intervention earlier? It's too late. He lost, and - ironically - it will disproportionately be those who voted against him who will pay the cost of exiting.
Dave's career is one gamble after another, gradually growing in risk and increasingly marked by personal vanity. I always knew Dave would get found out one day, and when that happened he'd be finished. He has, and a dislocated and dysfunctional country is what it took.
Dave and co were hoping a spot of economic determinism would see them through the EU referendum. Unfortunately for them, and all our people who stand to lose should Britain exit, this is proving not to be the case. Drawing deep from a poisoned well sunk by tabloid after politician after demagogue, Leave have doused the referendum campaign in xenophobic and anti-immigration toxicants. As my comrade Lawrence Shaw puts it:
EU referendum debate round-up of the last six months in case you missed it:
Immigration. Immigration. Immigration. Foreigners. Muslims. Immigration. Taking all "our" jobs. Immigration. Immigration. Two whole aisles of Polish food in Tesco's. Immigration. Country is too small. Immigration. Immigration. Foreigners. Immigration. Changing our culture. Immigration. Immigration. Immigrants. Asylum Seekers. They can do anything they want. Immigration. Immigration. Terrorists. Immigration.
And don't forget political correctness. I mean you're not even allowed to talk about immigration these days.
How has this come to pass? Unfortunately, it goes back to this blog's old warhorse: labour movement weakness. The reason why blue-on-blue dominates the airwaves and are hegemonic in their respective camps isn't because Jeremy Corbyn is rubbish at media, it's because - pound for pound - the social forces underpinning big business and finance are so much stronger, cohesive, and assertive. It's a political situation arrived at after the breaking of the labour movement in the 1980s, the promotion of economic and domestic policy designed to continually disperse the sorts of solidarities that underpin socialist politics, and the letting loose of free market fundamentalism across ever greater areas of social life have eroded relationships and replaced them with impersonal transactions. The election of Jeremy to the Labour leadership has shifted the terms of debate, arguably contributing to the government's litany of U-turns and defeats, but underneath the question remains whether a counter-movement to the further weakening of our constituency is occurring. Doubling the size of the party and getting another trade union aboard is but a baby step in the direction socialist politics must travel.
Because our movement is marginal, there was no chance of leading Remain or Leave on our terms. You just have to look at the grotesqueries of your John Manns and Kate Hoeys peddling unvarnished Farageisms, and the idiocy of Alistair Darling lining up with Osborne - again - promising to kneecap pensions and public services. Our people, at least nominally, doing the do on their terms. The question flowing from this is what would be best for our people and the rebuilding of our movement. Or, using the logic of lesser-evilism, what would be least worst.
Here, I think so-called "Lexit" comrades have been cavalier with the dangers pregnant in the situation. Okay, assuming Remain wins, little would change domestically. The Tory Party would carry on, albeit damaged and its government crippled for the foreseeable, and stagger along its path of collapsing membership. UKIP too, also on a downward spiral, would also carry on, albeit under reduced circumstances. The stock market and the pound rallies, and it's back to politics as normal in all its mendacity and beggar-thy-neighbouring. What an inspiring vision to rally around! Though it is worth noting one thing. A Remain vote in the minds of millions, whether they're for or against, is a climax of a culture war. The EU is not an internationalist utopia or anything approaching the sort, but nevertheless and no matter how mistaken they are it is perceived as a repository of hope, a modernity beyond Europe's tragic history of belligerent states, and is a symbol of cooperation across nationalities. It is also these same reasons that motivates opposition to the EU among kippers and the Tory hard right. To this technocratic futurity we find opposed Germanophobia, empire nostalgia, libertarian fantasy, insularity and, of course, the fear of Johnny Foreigner. We've recently peered down one wormhole, so lets go through another: Leave are pushing Britain toward a mini-America with gun controls.
Just think about it for a moment. If Leave wins, who wins? The most backward forces in British society do. The Europhobic Tory right, UKIP, and every two-bit racist outfit. The most socially useless, noncompetitive, and regressive elements of British capital. A strengthening of nationalism - and I'm not talking the fluffy civic kind pushed by the SNP - is likely. Increased hostility to migrant workers. More scapegoating. More blaming the EU for our failings because they presume to "punish" the UK for leaving. These are the self-same forces who cry foul about Osborne's kneecapping budget today, but will be the ones implementing it with relish tomorrow as they squeeze the cost of exiting out of the remaining social wage.
Some comrades of a more economistic bent think exit would destroy the Tories once and for all. We watched Amber Rudd smacking down Boris Johnson. We've seen Michael Gove rubbish his chancellor's claims about the economic dangers. The campaign has played out as an internal party feud with intervals staffed by the other mainstream parties. Yes, an exit would mean no more Dave and the thwarting of Osborne's ambitions, but would that necessarily mean the end of the Tories? Just because the Conservatives are the stupid party doesn't mean they're stupid. Remain Tory MPs are as likely to leave their party as Progress-types are Labour for as long as First-Past-the-Post rules the day. Yes, they might be pains in the arse for an incoming government headed by Johnson, Gove, IDS, and Farage, but the party is likely to limp on in much the same manner as it would after a Remain victory.
Oh, did I just mention Nigel Farage in the same breath? Yep. Because one lesser-spotted dynamic in play is what happens to UKIP in an exit scenario. With a Tory Party dominated by Leave and, in all likelihood, led by Johnson after a perfunctory leadership contest, there is a good proportion of UKIP members for whom the purple party is no longer required. How many would come back and how many voters would follow ex-Tories returning to the fold? I don't know, but far from weakening the Tories they could re-emerge from the chaos of the referendum campaign as a populist, self-consciously patriotic party. Stranger things have happened, and this is more likely than a Tory split fantasy.
And then there is a further, darker scenario. Everyone who pays attention to politics and the European Union know that whatever deal post-exit Britain is able to get, access to the single market will be contingent on accepting the free movement of labour. There is not one single member state that would countenance Britain having the rights of access without the responsibilities attending it. The promises Johnson et al make about immigration now are not worth the air drawn to utter them. Mass migration will continue, and then what? With the promises abandoned and politics seemingly unable to do anything about it, there opens a space for the kinds of forces who are presently marginal but have mass followings on the Continent. Leave the EU to become more like the EU?
The old politics are dying. The constituencies of the previous order are dissolving, but the same ugly politics are as pernicious as ever. Ultimately, this referendum is a choice between what we have now with its problems and opportunities, or a "crisis" trending toward the further empowerment of the hard right, of xenophobia, of nationalism and hate politics. There is no "left exit", only a step into the abyss.
It caters for all tastes. The smells appeal to some and turn others off. It can and is served up overcooked and underdone. What's baking in the oven? Ideology. In a Britain-shaped tin.
For the first time last night, the residents of Chateau BC turned the dial to BBC One for the grand final of The Great British Bake Off, a phenomenon that's less a popular TV programme and more a cult for the 13.4m people who watched it. Having studiously avoided it, as a (former) non-watcher GBBO is impossible to escape. The show plays a fantastic Twitter game, the press are obsessed, and the News at Ten and Newsnight both featured the victorious Nadiya Hussain on their roster of the day's newsworthy, um, news.
Once we had it on, I couldn't help but be drawn in. Like the Sidebar of Shame, but without the foul aftertaste, watching the contestants hurrying hither, scurrying thither as they produced the most sumptuous food porn imaginable was compulsive. You couldn't taste the layered pastries or the cornucopia of cake, but it was almost as good. The camera work was every bit as explicit as the infamous M&S adverts of old. This was filth for foodies. But like all good game shows, for that is what GBBO is; tension and drama is the hook. The fun is rooting for your favourite and investing their travails with your hopes (and everyone was backing Nadiya, right?). So before we take the cake knife to the show, the first rule to peeling back the sugary layers of ideology is to note that above all GBBO works because it's entertaining.
Of course, entertaining itself is a loaded term. What we consider entertainment is fully loaded with cultural codes of acceptability/unacceptability and, of course, has a history. The experience of being entertained is underpinned by what the PoMos used to call intertextuality. To get a text, in this case a beloved TV programme, it demands the reader/viewer has a familiarity with genre, the cultural codes the show draws on, and something of the wider zeitgeist - fashionable structures of feeling and popular cultural practices currently enjoying wide affirmation and participation.
Let's lose the cultural studies babble. There are two important matters GBBO addresses. One almost banal and done-to-death, and the other less so. For right wingers, Bake Off was a manifestation of the dreaded PC culture. Even Ian the LibDem was treated like a human being, for crying out loud. This is socialist propaganda through the medium of chocolatey noms, a meringue-tipped missile threatening the last bigoted redoubts with tolerance and respect. How awful. And what really riles the right is the show's appropriation of the quintessentially English garden fete. The marquee is redolent of tombola, brick-a-brak sales, Hoopla with the vicar, and definitely no non-white people. Of course, Bake Off isn't cooking up full communism or anything of the sort. It articulates the contemporary sense of Britishness, a multinational identity that tries to include everyone who identifies as British, regardless of their background. It's pointless to speculate whether the inclusivity of GBBO is intentional. The point is that it reflects the experiences of increasing numbers of people. Hence why the unreconstructed xenophobic right hate it. It's less a statement of intent than a representation of what really is. Seeing a Muslim woman win by out-Englishing "proper" English people over 10 weeks rubs them up the wrong way. It reminds them that they've already lost.
The second key GBBO prop is that structure of feeling that, want for a better phrase, you might call 'cupcake conformity'. Back when I was a horny handed son of toil doing working in a factory, we had a peculiar tradition of birthday boys/girls bringing in cakes on their special day (shatloads of doughnuts when it was my turn, if you must know). It was a nice gesture of sharing that helped bring the twilight shift a ripple of harmony inbetween the effing and blinding, the bitching, and fallings outs. Fast forward, the provision of cake - usually of the cuppy kind - at managerial meetings/large gatherings is so ubiquitous that HR manuals surely must contain chapters on confectionery provision. It knocks the sharp corners off bad news. Discussing the possibility of redundancies and/or increased workloads seem less worse if the meeting papers are accompanied by a plate of fairy cakes. Food, of course, is often an accomplice of sociability. By giving cake, we can pretend the power structures that rule our lives at work are as fluffy as the delicious sponge. The employer/employee relation, an inequitable and exploitative fact of life for all capitalist societies, tastes much sweeter wrapped in a paper case. The better the cake, the duller the pain.
With its ubiquity in the workplace, it's little wonder we're living in the age of the March of the Cake. Going through a break up? Have some cake. Bricking it before the interview? Have some cake. Depressed? Have some cake. It's not just that human beings are sugar-loving beasties (which we generally are). The cake has moved from just being a treat to a therapeutic treatment. Huxley's Brave New World had soma, we've got chocolate gateaux. And because cake's ubiquitous, it would be shocking had GBBO never taken off.
GBBO works because it marries genuinely entertaining drama and suspense to a sense of inclusiveness, of reflecting and promoting British unity around a cake tray of goodies.
We now know what happened, but why did it happen? How was it that an election campaign characterised by two different approaches, one upbeat, one defeated-looking; one that had momentum and enthusiasm and the other little more than desperate personal attacks, climaxed as it did? The result, which was unexpectedly very bad for Labour, is going to be scrutinised and analysed for years to come. But over the coming months dominant narratives about what happened will emerge in labour movement circles, and the story we tell about the shock catastrophe of 2015 will heavily condition the stories the leadership contenders in waiting tell and the subsequent trajectory of the party. A lot turns on getting this right - not merely the outcome of the next election, which will be difficult after the coming boundary review anyway, but also the viability of the party itself. Here are some thoughts that are not exhaustive by any means. If I don't mention some issues, that doesn't necessarily mean they're being ruled out.
First things first, we have to look to ourselves why things went wrong: the political technologies of modern campaigning, and the huge strategic blunders. There's no use blaming the Greens or the SNP - that way lies the road to avoid asking tough questions. Neither will blaming the media do, though of course there is a huge democratic and accountability deficit when so much is concentrated in the hands of wealthy right wing tax dodgers. Nor do I think changing the programme Labour stood on, whether to the left or to the right, would have got different result. There is something about our tactics and our strategy that was off.
The size and efficiency of Labour's ground game was impressive, even to the extent of contacting more voters in Scotland than the mammoth-sized SNP. 200,000 members, five million contacts, a campaign that, if you were close up, fizzed with energy. And there is the problem. I think Labour had a very good campaign. More or less everyone who actively participated probably feels the same. From the outside though, not so much. Turnout was at 66.1%, a measly one per cent greater than last time. If it wasn't for the "special circumstances" in Scotland it might have proven less than 2010. Yet again, a third of eligible adults completely tuned out from what mainstream politics had to say. The messaging, more of which shortly, didn't cut through. The greater range of more viable electoral choices failed to engage. Even hitting areas notorious for low turnouts produced little in the way of joy. Yet none of this registered in the campaign at the time. On the day, my impression of the campaign in Stafford (where I'd mostly been volunteering this year) was excellent. Turnout in Labour areas looked good. Speaking to comrades elsewhere gave me a sense that the same was true everywhere else. Social media provided similar anecdotes. And yet, we were wrong. As insiders speaking to other insiders, listening to other insiders, and following Twitter feeds plastered with encouraging words from, yes, more insiders, we got caught up in a campaign bubble of our own.
This leads to the second technical problem. The best antidote to self-referentialism is to talking to people outside that little enclosed world. And activists did that in their tens of thousands. So never mind the polls failing to pick up the Tory/UKIP swing, why is it that the largest sustained canvassing operation for many years didn't catch the vibes that must have existed out there. It it simply shy Tory syndrome? I'm not buying it. Sure, some people might say Labour to just get rid of an annoying doorstepper, but in such numbers? There has to be something about the questions we ask when activists go and bother voters. Our database, Contact Creator, records information (with regional variation) about voting intention, previous votes, and - sometimes - whether the punter prefers a Labour or Tory government. Experienced activists are able to to glean this information using whatever talking and listening strategies they think appropriate at the time, but others - including some who should know better - jump in with both feet. "Hello there madam, it's general election time, are you going to vote Labour?" The party used to record the strength of the pledge which, for reasons unknown, was done away with. Maybe the powers that be believed this was too subjective and so dispensed with it whereas it seemed like a potentially useful tool for identifying soft supporters and the level of hostility - time for a comeback? Nevertheless, we need to look at the quality of our "conversations" and work out why accurate information was not getting relayed, and why it didn't pick up a turn away from Labour.
Also, we must be weary of fetishising activism. Turning out thousands of members and supporters every weekend is important and necessary, but it is not sufficient. No amount of door knocking is going to turn Bill Cash's Stone constituency red. Political strategy is key, and this is where we made a catastrophic mistake.
Going all utilitarian and starting from the premise of the greatest good for the greatest number, one strong argument against Scottish independence was 'what about England?' The fear - and I certainly feared it - was that a yes vote in Scotland would have galvanised a poisonous English reaction that could have blighted politics in the rest-of-UK for years to come. What were the needs of five million vis a vis a population 11 times larger? Independence didn't happen, but the SNP took off for reasons. The Tories, eager to seize anything to shift polling in their favour, started hammering the spectre of Scottish nationalism for all it was worth. "The gravest constitutional crisis since the abdication!" wailed Theresa May. The SNP are going to rinse the English taxpayer. They threaten our security and promise full communism. You've seen and heard the nonsense pouring from Tory mouthpieces. They would stop it. The Tories would save the union from the bag-piping Bolsheviks and tartan Trots, and keep Britain. As one woman put it to me on the campaign trail, "I think Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon are dangerous people ... he has some really silly idea on getting rid of our nuclear subs in Scotland." This woman was a low paid residential carer for disabled children. She didn't follow politics, but it was a message that cut through, a message that played up the fears one falls pray to when living a precarious existence fraught with insecurities.
Here was the problem. The SNP not only stole Labour's social democratic wardrobe, they added to it swish items like hope. They allowed its supporters leeway to project their own desires onto their canvass. Labour's response in Scotland was basically "don't let the Tories in". The Conservatives whipped up English nationalism, suggesting the SNP were purveyors of existential terror. If you wanted to save the union and get a fair deal for England, vote Tory. Labour? "Save the NHS!" We had nothing to say, nothing to counter it. And the evidence? Look at those UKIP vote shares. Long held to hurt the Tories more than us, in seats Labour should have easily picked up Tory majorities increased, and this was because blue leaning voters supporting UKIP returned home in number while red-tinged kippers stayed put. To use the old vernacular, Labour lapsed into economism. The Tories took hold of the question of how we're ruled while Labour neglected it completely. And we need to. It's not as if Labour has nothing to say on this topic. Not only was the party responsible for a more inclusive 'official' Britishness during its time in government, it saved the union. Ed Miliband (remember him?) once made a great deal of fuss about One Nationism. He did it in a wonkish way, but at least it indicated an understanding of the emotive power national identity has. Yet, where was this? Where were we as champions of the union, as the people responsible for securing a popular mandate for a voluntary union between Scotland and the rest of the UK? Nowhere. Labour, the party that saved the UK, was easily painted by the Tories as the party that wanted to destroy it. And the fear mongering worked.
We need to start thinking seriously about England and Englishness. It is seen as something backward, thoroughly imperial, small-minded, a little bit racist by the left. I know, I'm of this view myself. However, Englishness doesn't have to be like this. It needs to change and we have to be the people who shape it for the better, because if we don't the Tories and UKIP will continue monopolising it. In British politics, where Scotland goes England tends to follow. The struggle against the poll tax and the breaking of the political mold into multi-party politics. In both, the latter followed the former. My worst nightmare is this. We elect a new leader and carry on carrying on framing policies, whatever they may be, as technocratic. If values come into it, fairness is about as far as it goes. England and Englishness gets ignored because, after all, it's the economy, stupid. And come 2020 Labour gets steamrollered because, again, the Tories and UKIP exploit the fear and insecurity of the many by appealing to English nationalism.
Our biggest misstep since the Scottish referendum was this. Let's not do it again.
There's not much left the Tories can do to turn the polls in their favour. Attacking Ed Miliband personally hasn't worked, and the more it's done the more credible he appears. Neither has spraying around the cash in what, at best, can only be described as a series of fiscally incontinent pledges. With the momentum appearing to cohere around Labour, and the party in front on the key indicators health, immigration, education, and social security, you can see the desperation emanating from Dave and co's TV appearances. Patriotism, as Samuel Johnson exclaimed, is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Lo and behold, it's that our Tory friends now turn to in lieu of anything else.
The thing is, their attack lines of the last few days, the 'coalition of chaos' nonsense, of a lefty party being propped up by an even leftier party isn't even new. Back in early March, which seems like a foreign country already, Dave was mouthing off about a Labour/SNP deal. "You could end up with an alliance between the people who want to bankrupt Britain and the people who want to break up Britain", says the man waving £25bn worth of unfunded promises. However, the Tories think they're on to a winner this time. After spending time with focus groups (which is a problematic method for finding out what "real people" think), they've come to the conclusion that sufficient numbers of voters would be concerned if the SNP were to use their leverage to fleece the English taxpayer. If you put it to your focus groups in those terms, it's hardly shock, horror.
There is something to this though. Nationalism by its very nature is divisive. Our friend Nicola Sturgeon, for example, might hold to a nice civic nationalism in which anyone identifying as a Scot is welcome (in itself, not different from the contemporary recasting of British nationalism) but it still creates an in group and out group that pays no respect to the class underpinnings of social democratic/labourist politics, which the SNP have adopted with no small success. As the Scottish independence party, its 'other' is the multinational state that lays claim to majority of these isles. That implicitly means the majority shareholder of that construct: England. It's a politics whose vision of the good society is contingent on separating from us down in the warmer climes. Unsurprisingly, it feeds the deeply anxious beast that is English nationalism. The very idea of the SNP extracting special favours for Scottish budgets at the English taxpayers' expense is something the Tories are banking on. They talk up the SNP to stoke a resentful Englishness - never minding that they're imperilling the very union they profess to love. The main question, however, is will it get traction?
Undoubtedly it will get some sort of an echo. Those tending toward UKIP might be tempted. Voters who were in the habit of giving electoral time to the BNP by way of a protest too. Also layers of people who don't pay close attention to politics, but occasionally pick up a bit of messaging. Among those who have been softened up by years of propaganda against benefits cheats and immigrants, it addresses the interplay between hard-done-to taxpayer and workers-as-martyrs. It will niggle and nag at people, snap at their thoughts, and make them think twice about voting Labour or supporting UKIP. Is that really the case though? So far, painting Ed Miliband as the dolewaller's champion hasn't worked, nor have the dire warnings of economic catastrophe. Also, if you want to get into the scaremongering business, Labour has a much bigger weapon in the Tory record on the NHS than the blues have with constitutional jiggery pokery.
Nevertheless, to their credit the SNP and Labour both moved to quash this attack before Dave reheated it this week. In the leaders' debates Nicola Sturgeon has somewhat successfully detoxified English expectations of what the SNP are about. And for his part, Ed Miliband continues to rule out a coalition - it looks like his favoured approach, assuming Labour forms a minority administration, will be to forge his own policy agenda and dare the other parties to vote it down. There's no way, for example, the SNP would not support those recognisably social democratic aspects of Labour's programme, nor would the Tories say no to Trident replacement. Also, if the Tories want to play the narrow nationalist card they could lose as much as they gain. Their esteemed lordships Norman Tebbit and Micheal Forsyth are of this opinion, and it cedes crucial 'one nation' ground to Ed Miliband too - a point not lost on the Labour leader. And if they really want to throw in the nationalist card, UKIP can beat them at that game every time.
In all, there are not many more places the Tories can go. As Labour runs with the NHS this week and living standards the next, as their village idiot is embroiled in another scandal, time is running out for the Tories. And if they lose, their appalling campaign merely prefaces the death agonies to come.
Are they? Nicky Tyrone seems to think so. Well, to be absolutely accurate he's talking about the left wing media here. Continuing our exacting theme, while his piece asks about "the left media's worship of the SNP", he qualifies this by noting "the slightly pro-SNP slant of the left of centre media". Idolatry vs a qualified welcome. Hmmm. Furthermore, the bloody, quivering slab of evidence backing up his position is ... a single article by Zoe Williams. Double hmmm.
I'm not about to offer a content analysis of our centre left press friends at The Graun, Indy, or Mirror. Let's take the Labour-supporting tabloid. Here are a couple of pieces faithfully reproducing the Labour narrative about SNP votes and Tory backdoors. Meanwhile The Graun flags up Nicola Sturgeon's anti-austerity credentials and publishes her offer to Ed Miliband to keep the Tories from darkening Number 10's door ever again. The Indy offers matter of fact reporting on all these. So, in the grand scheme of things, centre left coverage is somewhat balanced - though in the real world far more pairs of eyes get to read what The Mirror says than The Graun.
Not that I'm going to apologise for the SNP. Like Nicky I am as opposed to the project of a separate Scotland as much as a resurgent British, or English nationalism. It is the most pernicious kind of us vs themism, a set of fictions disseminated consciously and unconsciously by the ideas factories of states, institutions, media, parties and movements, and good old commonsense. It's a politics seeking salvation by separating one set of people out from another. In its rightist forms, best exemplified by UKIP, it's blaming problems on the presence of Johnny Foreigner. In the SNP's case, at least in its current social democratic incarnation, the neoliberal power centres in London and the English voters who return governments craven before those interests are stopping Scotland from building a fairer society. As someone who holds a candle for labour movements and the pursuit of common interests cutting across nationalities, left-tinged nationalism is problematic.
Being opposed does not, however, preclude understanding why it's spring time for Scottish nationalism. As this piece for the BBC makes clear, many people are attracted to the SNP because it chimes with their priorities. In short, as Scottish Labour retreated from pretty basic Labourist politics so the support has followed the policies. It wasn't long ago that a former Scottish leader was defining aspiration for Labour as "second home ownership, two cars in the driveway, a nice garden, two foreign holidays a year, and leisure systems in the home such as sound, cinema, and gym equipment." Good grief. This is a crisis of Labour's making, albeit not on the grounds of its own choosing.
If there are elements of the centre left media establishment down here receptive to the SNP's anti-austerity message, that comes as no surprise after having market fundamentalism stuffed down everyone's throats for the last 30 years. However, while the SNP's nationalism puts their social democracy into question, so their social democracy raises a question mark of their nationalism too. This isn't the same as Zoe's argument, but perversely the strength of the SNP rests on appropriating a politics based on solidarity, not division. Nicola Sturgeon's inbox proves it. Here's the bind the SNP find themselves in. Successfully pursuing social democratic politics in a whole UK framework ultimately saps the basis of the SNP's success. But doing anything else risks opening up the SNP's fault lines that, at present, barely register as hairline cracks.
Labour however can turn the situation around and put the SNP and Scottish nationalism back in its box. But not before the election, and not before next year's Holyrood elections either. We're going to have to play the long, long game of not just competing with the SNP on policy and looking for opportunities to outflank them, but use our offices in government and local authorities to consistently work against the myriad insecurities that living in a capitalist society visits on us. If that means structural change, then it means structural change. Far better our party reconfigures British capital than have it, as it has been doing, configuring us.
At the risk of summoning the spirit of Max Weber, what left intellectuals, opinion formers, anyone with an audience ought to be doing is using their voices to press this process on. The SNP is an opportunity and a warning. Huge numbers of people are receptive to a different kind of politics, and if we don't do it someone else will and our party, or worse, our movement could be left in the dust. Both one-sided critiques like Nicky's or one-sided celebrations like Zoe's fall somewhat short.
I'm not an avid follower of Paul Kingsnorth's work, but I do remember his One No, Many Yeses. This was a contribution - some may say cash-in - to the burgeoning library on the internationalist, anti-capitalist, and fashionably networky movement of sundry NGOs, anarchists and occasional Trots of the early part of the last decade. As something of a radical travelogue, our Paul flitted from country to country giving us the low down on the Zapatistas (of course), the G8 summit in Genoa, hung out with gold miners in New Guinea, and all other kinds of things. It was an uncritical celebration of this most rooted of rootless movements, an advert for the New Way of Doing Things. The book stuck in my mind because it helped fill an adventure of my own - a bus trip from Stoke to Telford.
Since then I've heard tell of brother Kingsnorth as something of an authority on Englishness. His Real England, a book I haven't read and therefore cannot comment on, was generally well received by polite left society. What caught my eye about latest piece for The Graun was the epithet our chums over at Bella Caledonia granted it: "a deeply sad Green Powellism ... full of resentment, nostalgia, and paranoia." Could this really be the same Paul Kingsnorth, previously cheerleader for the transnational global resistance?
One and the same, unfortunately. It's a piece we've heard before (and readers will have seen previously here, here, and here. Of course, the idea that England has become a scary place for some is not new. That insecurity is stalking the land and causing some to lash out at immigrants, fearful that newcomers are out-competing the "natives" for jobs, for housing, for school places, for slots on the dentist's waiting list. This is all very fine. One can write about it sensitively and with understanding and still maintain that essential analytical and political distance from it. After all, when all is said and done most left writers on nationalism, and English nationalism particularly, identify its roots in order to understand it and ultimately, undermine it. Hence why, for instance, I sound like a one-trick pony banging on about self-security.
That sceptical attitude is missing from Paul's account. It starts off okay, but then the telling asides start creeping in. We are baldly informed, for instance, that in "four English cities, including the capital, English people have become an ethnic minority." At the risk of sounding like an elite metropolitan from the, um, Potteries, I didn't know 'the English' were a discrete ethnicity. A nationality, certainly. Does Paul really want to get on the slippery slope of regarding second and third generation Afro-Caribbeans, Africans, Asians, and East-Asians as 'not-English'? Of course, I know what he really means, he's talking about white people, but stated in this way it's only a nudge from "ethnically English" to authentically English. Kerfuffles of this type could so easily have been avoided had he merely talked about white English people.
I'd like to put it down to a slip of the pen, but then we have this nonsense about nationality being an innate need. As he puts it,
A nation is a story that a people chooses to tell about itself, and at its heart is a stumbling but deep-felt need for those people to be connected to the place where they live and to each other. Humans in all times and places have needed ancestors, history, a place to be and a sense of who they are as a collective, and modernity and rationalism have not abolished these needs
For someone who's written a book on national identity, this betrays a shocking ignorance of the mountains of scholarship on the topic. With nuances and some dispute over timing, the consensus is national identity and the nationalism appropriate to it is a thoroughly modern phenomenon, linked with patterns of state formation from the 16th century onwards. The sense of belonging Paul romantically writes of were unknown to the English peasant, the Frankish warrior, the Roman house slave. Affective ties were the property of the immediate household, family group, and comrades-in-arms. in all cases a "belonging" different in kind to nationality.
Therefore it is a nonsense, even if only as a rhetorical device, to suggest - as Paul does - that the English were the first victims of the British Empire. The invasion of what would become England in 1066 by the Normans was not the occupation of one nation by the armed forces of another. It was the dispossession of one feudal elite by another. The Domesday Book was a census not for the management of a society, but an audit of the booty William the Bastard reigned over.
What is also lacking is a sense of national self-awareness, which is surprising in a scholar of nationality. Paul berates the Left in England for not wrapping itself in the flag, unlike our French, Greek, and Spanish counterparts. This, supposedly, is a sign of our metroleftyism. Or, perhaps, it has something to do with history. Paul writes about England/Britain's three century rampage across the globe. He doesn't mention the revolutionary republican (and universalist) roots of French nationalism, despite the crimes of French imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Nor the leading role the left had in representing a rising nation against fascist dictatorships in Spain and Greece. Whatever problems these nationalisms have, insurrection and insurgency are part of their national narratives. No such content is present in English nationalism, so small wonder the left aren't keen to embrace it.
Yet this is what we need to do, says Paul. What is needed is a radical parochialism to resist the predations of global capitalism, and Englishness is a ready made for the task. The problem is this. Such a project is hugely out of step with the trajectories of modern Western societies. Wherever global capitalism has put a plus, Paul paints in a big fat minus. There is a globalism of above, and a globalisation from below - a point understood by the movements Paul used to write about but one he has since forgotten. The multiple networks ever-growing numbers of people plug into voluntarily are knitting together millions of people with weak affective ties far more closely than the nationalism of old ever did. Sometimes, though one shouldn't overstate it, they collapse the communicative and social distances across borders. But within England, millions are arguing, sharing ideas and memes, liking this 'n' that, trolling, plugging selfies (some even promote blog posts - absurd!) and this is transforming what it means to be English. Why do you think the younger a cohort is, the fear of immigrants, the antipathy to the EU, the attachment to the parochialism Paul endorses gets progressively less? Because it, the media landscape, and day-to-day life are great social mixers. To their credit, the main political parties - and I exclude the smaller-than-the-Greens UKIP from this - have a concept of national identity, albeit a British one, that is officially inclusive. Instead of looking to the past, a new, open sense of Englishness is starting to emerge.
A great sifting of the national identity is taking place. The left don't have to stand in vanguard fashion and articulate a correct Englishness that can be taken up - folk are doing it for themselves. Some might want to fly their England flags, those who are anxious can grumble away, feel resentful, and vote accordingly come election time, but theirs are a large, diminishing slice of England. Address their concerns, yes. Trying to tackle the insecurity driving their angst, absolutely. But to flatter and pander to it as if the fetishising of Morris dancing, hot dog vans, and real ale pubs is some radical alternative? No, no, no, no, no.
Former Prime Minister John Major certainly thinks so. I believe the answer is more nuanced than that. Speaking on Andrew Marr this morning, the grey man of politics said UKIP were un-British because they are "anti-everything", particularly "anti-foreigner" and "anti-immigrant". He added that this is "the negativity of the four-ale bar. That’s not the way to get into Parliament, it’s not the way to run a country." Finally, Major mused that as the economy gets better, you can expect UKIP support to die back. Possibly, John, put only if people's sense of self-security gets better.
On the general charge of being "un-British", what does that actually mean? Can on be un-Danish, un-French, un-Polish? It seems like a silly attack to make. Or, to be more accurate, it would have been nonsensical to level such a charge say 20 years ago. Since then nationality in Britain, and particularly Britishness has undergone a profound change. In a process of rewriting from above and below, what it means to be British is to be tolerant, inclusive, respectful, and polite. It's an identity predicated around sets of "British values", such as liberty, freedom of speech, conscience and religion, of sticking up for the underdog, playing fair, and securing by common endeavour a health service free at the point of need.
How does UKIP measure up to these facets of contemporary Britishness? Not very well. It peddles lies and bigotry about immigrants, blames the least powerful for problems generated at the top, feels profoundly threatened by "alien" cultures and would like to see some visible expression of faiths, such as the hijab, banned outright. It also thinks gay people should not be allowed to marry, denying them a liberty afforded heterosexual couples; and Farage himself have been caught on tape favouring an American-style system of privatised health cover. Slam dunk to John Major then.
This Britishness, however, is very recent. In many ways it has come to resemble the character of Americanness. From the outset, the US and its nationalism were predicated around sets of values and promises. These are set down in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. American national identity is explicitly an ideological - in the wide sense - project. If you come to America, accept the values on which it is founded, and spend the rest of your life as a US passport holder, you are as American as anyone born there. And, potentially, anyone can become American. Multiculturalism from below and inclusively-minded initiatives from official society have adapted Britishness along the same lines. Originally an elite project to cohere the ruling classes of the multinational United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, it had a certain inclusiveness already built in, albeit one directed outwards to Johnny Foreigner and colonial land grabs. The retreat from Empire, starting with Irish independence down to decolonisation saw that construct colonised by imperial nostalgia. It was clung to more tightly as the original wellspring ran to a trickle and dried up. After being mobilised by Thatcher in support of the Falklands adventure, and the occasional bit of official flag waving for national occasions, the association of Britishness with narrowness and unreconstructed nationalism proceeded until the 1990s, where the perfect storm of footballing success, a self-consciously British musical movement, New Labour, the popular rejection of racism, and the growing integration and social mobility of minority ethnicities begat its reinvention. It follows that being British is no longer predicated being born on this island.
All that was horrible, stupid and bigoted about "old" Britishness has not gone away, but has found a home in UKIP. And it too has changed. UKIP is less a British and more an English nationalist party. Britishness has been ceded to the metropolitans, the lefties, and "the ethnics" while it seeks to cohere a base around a very white notion of traditionalism, nationalism, and a paternal relationship with the Commonwealth. It responds to the uncertainty of a new Britain in the age of globalisation by counterposing a narrow Englishness, that nevertheless remains thoroughly British - even if its legitimacy is not what it used to be. As such UKIP are an embarrassment, a throwback, an atavistic reminder - especially to the centre right - of the awful, toxic politics that are very, very British too. That is part of UKIP's appeal. And is one of the reasons why more thoughtful Tories with the longer term view, like Major, are very keen to put clear water between his party and theirs.
Yuck, globalisation. A notion so commonplace, so banal that to write it these days is like murmuring a vulgarity. It's a truism universally acknowledged that the circuits of capital, the organisation of production, its division of labour, and worldwide commodity chains tend to treat borders as irrelevances. Cheap air travel and affordable internet access has shrunk the planet and thrust economies and cultures closer together. Societies and their fates are interpenetrated, and the possibility of describing human civilisation as a single, integrated entity is here. Wonderful, isn't it? The soft underbelly to globalised economies and cultures is the opposite movement in politics. If there was a mechanical correspondence between production and politics, supranational entities like the European Union and UN would enjoy increasing legitimacy. The project of pooling sovereignty would correspond to the needs of the system and be accepted as necessary. Yet they're not. Nationalism in Scotland and England are on the rise. Nationalist movements in Basque, Catalonia, Belgium, Corsica show no sign of disappearing.
How come economic and social integration is heading one way and politics the other? Why is closer global integration breeding separation? I want to concentrate on Britain and Scottish and English nationalism - nationalist revanchism in the former USSR and its clients have specificities bound up with bureaucratic repression and the brute scrubbing of national minorities.
Potted history lesson. Capitalism and the formation of nation states were coincident, intertwined processes in the West. Both were the contingent outcomes of the class struggles of decaying feudalism, and they recast more or less static societies into dynamic entities. Capitalism, emerging in the countryside, established wage labour as an exploitative, surplus-yielding social relation awarded land owners greater shares of the surplus than the old arrangement of lord/serf bonded labour. Simultaneously the apparatus around the monarchy was centralising and waged more or less perpetual wars against their neighbours. Military competition demanded funds, provided by taxes which were levied primarily on the monarch's landed cronies. They in turn had a clear imperative to squeeze as much surplus to make good the taxes, giving them a material interest to dissolve bonded labour and liquidate serfs' right to the land. More free wage labourers were the result, and on and on the process went.
Prior to the emergence of industrial capitalism in the mid-18th century, it was more or less a nonsense to speak of nationality as we understand it today. But the wars from that period on, particularly those between the two most advanced states - Britain and France - suggested a sense of one national community facing off against another. Likewise industry drew masses of people into huge workplaces. Languages and traditions were shared and new ones born over the spinning jenny, the steam pump, the finery forge. Differences too were exploited mercilessly by employers. Cheap Irish labour undercut the wages of English, Scottish and Welsh workers - ostensible communities of solidarity turned against an outside nationality in defence of immediate class interests. All the while, the emergent national identity from below was in-step with a national project from above. The state, as an instrument for networks of competing elites and fractions of capital assumed a managerial problematic. It assumed the responsibility for governing and regulating the unruly, growing masses. Having established a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence in a territory (in the 19th century, this was the entirety of the British Isles), the growth of state bureaucracy, the press, the education system, the military, these institutions secreted a (contrived) commonweal of myth, history, dress, and character. And this was the natural order of things: the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of national struggles. Such were the roots of the pan-Europe phenomenon of young men by their millions cheerfully marching off to slaughter one another a century ago.
Today, states are acting in much the same way. They continue to manage populations. They are nominally subject to those populations too while remaining, in the last instance, capital's guarantors. But the conscious efforts of governments to create a globally integrated social system has not engendered a bottom-up internationalism to go along with it. Even bourgeois internationalism from above is hardly championed in elite circles, except by the odd fringe group. Instead, borderless integration is calling forth a recrudescence of nationalism along a number of axes:
1. In pushing the integration of global capital, governments are undermining the basis of their own states. By now we're familiar with the terror our political masters have of currency markets and bond traders, that they are powerless in the face of the world they have and continue to create. If states cannot shelter their citizens from the ceaseless maelstrom lashing the country, what is the point? Despite this, politicians' unalloyed enthusiasm for more, more, more globalisation reinforces their position as remote, out of touch, and fundamentally against the interests of the populace. The Us vs themism of left and right populism mobilises national identity as a reference point - hence how the neoliberal unanimity of Westminster cut against Scottish social democratic values; how the PC-loving pro-EU consensus of the establishment crowd out Englishness on the behest of a Stalinoid super state. When legitimation fails, movements from below will grab the nearest, most convenient tropes to hand. Invariably, that tends to be nationality.
2. Progress on capital's terms is not a linear path to a better, braver world. It proceeds violently, by a process of creative destruction. The world is made and remade in its image, according to the whims of the invisible hand, and the orgy of surplus extraction that the metaphor artfully conceals. The flux and flows of capital generate new jobs, make others obsolete, throws up gleaming palaces overnight and leaves them ruins just as quickly. In capital's global race, there are winners and there are losers. The winners, in Britain, has been finance. The circuits of capital have made London the hub of its empire. Untold billions pour in and out everyday, blessing - or blighting - the city with the most amazing wealth. The streets aren't paved with gold, but its skies are awash with digital ones and zeroes denoting untold riches. As the new Rome, or Babylon, London is increasingly the world centre for culture and the arts too. Celebrities and celebutants flock to the big smoke along with millions of others making it the most mongrelised, international city on Earth.
Every winner needs a loser. As global capital fires its hub, so the rest of Britain is drained. The financial prosperity of London rests on the broken skulls and broken communities dotted over this island's industrial heartlands. Thatcher's assault on the miners and the labour movement in the 1980s made possible the dispossession of public wealth. The grease for deregulating the city were the profits and expectations of (guaranteed) profits to be creamed off the privatised utilities. To get to this point industries were torn down and ways of life were destroyed. And with it went a central plank of Britishness. Industries up and down the land were not only integrated into a vast manufacturing division of labour, trade unionism and, to a lesser extent, the Labour Party united workplaces in a shared sense of solidarity. When all this was dynamited, Britishness stumbled. The comeback of Scottish and English nationalism is the product of slippage, it is driven by loss. It is kickback against seemingly impersonal forces which were anything but unintended. Scottish nationalism oppose broken solidarities with the hope independence might offer something better. English nationalism thinks withdrawing from the world is an escape back to bucolic times. The content is different but the underlying drivers are the same.
3. None of this makes sense without acknowledging anxiety and precarity. With countries torn up by economics, politics content to cheer it on, and a pace of social change that is as bewildering as it is maddening, nationalism is more than a convenient ideological resource to mobilise people. It's an anchor, a rock. As the globalised winds blow in from the coast, national identity stands steadfast. It can be packaged up and sold, but it remains the property of the people. In a world where values are upended and identity is promoted explicitly as a project of self-actualisation, nationalism is a port in a storm. It offers the familiar and the unquestioned. It's a shortcut to belonging and solidarity. In a world where that is barely valorised, a communal readymade is seductive. No wonder that, perversely, uncertainty breeds familiarity.
It's been a huge week, a profound week for British politics. What does it all mean for the parties and movements jostling for position in the referendum's aftermath?
As far as Westminster is concerned, a bullet has been dodged. There is a cloying desire for a return to business as usual, and just as many determined to carry on as if it has. Not least among them is our old pal Dan Hodges. With the referendum done he's turned in one of the worst, most complacent articles I've seen. On the basis of Dave hitting the TV cameras yesterday morning to announce he's tying further Scottish powers up with English votes on English laws, the election next year is all wrapped up. Slam dunk. Unfortunately for Dan, good speeches don't win elections. As confident as Dave appeared let's not pretend his position is anything but precarious. His panicky sojourns to Scotland exposed him - again - as weak. This is the Prime Minister reduced to saying "please, please, please, please, please vote no"; who referred to his own party as the 'effing Tories'. Is this behaviour of a man secure in both party and parliament? Is a leader bounced by backbench revolts into promising a two-speed Westminster someone in control? Dave and Crosby think hitching English votes to Scottish powers is a trap waiting for Labour, forcing them to renege on promises made, but most people will see it for what it is: a cynical wheeze to buy off restive MPs. Unlucky for him, the path to the new Scotland Act is not entirely in Dave's hands. The renegacy is all Dave's should he try and delay it.
The only good thing Dave did in this campaign was to concede the referendum in the first place. In true Tory fashion, the No campaign was outsourced to an alternative provider: the Labour Party. It was they who held the line in Scotland, provided the energy and activism, knocked on the doors and got out the vote. Dave absented himself from the field while Alistair Darling and a resurgent Gordon Brown made the case. Not only was Labour effectively alone on Scotland's streets defending the union, they were seen to be the only party batting for it too. That most stubborn of breeds, the Scottish Tory, saw their party vanish. Don't be surprised if a few of them punt on Labour next time. Similarly in England, centrist pro-union voters will have noted the same thing. And don't expect Ed Miliband to be too quiet about it. His One Nation scrapped with 'two-nationism' and the 'one state solution' emerged the winner. He'd be crackers not to try and capitalise on it over the coming months. Not all is rosy though. Many comrades who headed north were shocked by the decrepit state of Scottish Labour. Hardly surprising when you think positioning yourself to the right of the SNP's soft social democracy is the best thing a centre left party can do. Yet while the organisation isn't in the rudest of health, one shouldn't automatically suppose big Yes votes in Labour areas means its support has collapsed. According to Lord Ashcroft, 40% of Labour and LibDem voters supported Yes. Similarly, 14% of SNP voters said no. Are they going to suddenly switch? When it comes to May next year, I suspect too much is being read into Labour's "collapse".
I think everyone can agree how blissful it has been to have had a politics mostly free of Nigel Farage and his squalid little band. But now the referendum is done, they're determined to make the most of the constitutional opening. Yesterday he was out posting letters to Scottish MPs to ask them not to vote on "England-only" issues. Yet, for once, the media aren't entirely biting. Crosby and Dave we'll cheery toasting a few into thinking they've headed UKIP off at the pass - on this issue at least it's the Tory leadership who'll be doing the running. However, their clever clever silver lining comes with a big dark cloud. English votes for English laws is all about embedding Tory party influence in England. It has hijacked "fairness" to ensure its legacy in England cannot be repealed should they retain a majority here. Dave wants to log jam future governments in the belief Tories will benefit electorally from inevitable crises. What this silly man doesn't realise is it could end up helping his UKIP nemesis. In next year's tight election, the message is a clear "vote UKIP, get Labour". But the fixation on England betrays his thinking that this is safe Tory territory. The more Dave intimates that the Tories will get in in England, the more he undermines his line of attack against UKIP and the less likely Tory/UKIP switchers sympathetic to that message will break his way. It also emboldens those Tory MPs excited by the fantasy of a Tory-UKIP pact, if they think such a lash up would thwart Labour in perpetuity.
Last night's ugly scenes in George Square were depressing as they were predictable. Had Yes won out I have no doubt this repulsive mix of loyalists, assorted fascists and EDL/SDL/Britain First scum would have done the same to "remind" Scotland that they're staying put. But in terms of more significant political shifts in the bowels of Scottish society, it's what's going to happen to the Yes movement that could have greater repercussions. Much has been made of its class character, but noted here earlier in the week, the movement was under the SNP's thumb and as such would probably demobilise, leaving our movement, the workers' movement, no stronger. On cue Nicola Sturgeon has reported that the SNP recruited 4,000 people in 36 hours. A soft left nationalist movement led by a bourgeois nationalist party ends up strengthening that bourgeois nationalist party - didn't see that coming. Still, we can take comfort that Socialist Party Scotland signed someone up too. Okay, I am being a bit naughty. The strong relationships and weak ties forged between different camps will, I hope, feed into more left and socialist activism over the longer term. But it hasn't got off to the most encouraging of starts.
Twitter regulars will have seen thousands of Yes'ers rebadge themselves as 'the 45'. So named after the 45% who gave independence the thumbs up, you can understand the desire to hang onto the camaraderie forged in the heat of political struggle. Yet all this is achieving is identifying themselves with a large "enlightened" minority against the forelock-tugging drudges who filed into the polling booths to vote no. It's an internalisation of division, the logical culmination of a nationalist project. While some, a small minority it has to be said, are trying to move the emerging sentiment toward an internationalist perspective, they are outnumbered by those for whom the 55% were scabs and traitors. So much for Yes's sublimated class politics. Bugger the 99%.
After the referendum, what now? For Scotland, it's to make sure the promises made last week are delivered as per the promised timetable. For the rest of the UK, and England particularly, it's to ensure a new UK-wide constitutional settlement fires the imagination and engages masses of people. Yes to a democratic convention, no to the narrow nobbling of parliament.
