Early last month with ISIS/ISIL/IS running amok in northern Iraq and leaving a trail of bodies in its wake, I argued there was a temporary coincidence of interest between the US/UK, the decaying apparatus of sectarian Iraqi state, the Kurds and the opportunities for labour movement and socialist politics in the region. Since then air strikes have happened, special forces are in action, the collapse of Iraq has been stymied by a new power sharing deal, and weapons and training have flowed to the Kurdish peshmerga. It's also worth noting that Kurdish forces are secular and, by any definition, leftist.
This brings me to tomorrow's vote in Parliament. According to Dave, the Iraqi government have asked for our help to rain bombs down on Islamic State strongpoints - hence why tomorrow's vote in Parliament is looking to rubber stamp combat operations likely to take place over the weekend.
Contrary to Stop the War and other comrades opposed to the action and the worthy arguments they have marshalled against, I believe the aforementioned coincidence of interests still pertains. Remember, Britain owes the Kurds a profound historical debt too. But critically supporting military action against IS means just that, being critical. And there is one awkward question hanging over UK participation in a weekend of attacks.
While Dave has slowly and carefully built the case for war, there is one question he cannot answer. The Americans have undertook air strikes in Syria and Iraq. Other Arab states, some of whom were happy to throw money at the jihadis until very recently, have also taken part in bombing. Why then is the very modest effort from the UK needed? To let the Americans concentrate on targets in Syria? To be honourable? For domestic political boosterism?
As we know, one burgeoning income stream for the psychotic would-be caliphate is ransom payments. Despite a covenant between Western states to not pay out for the safe return of citizens kidnapped by terror groups of whatever persuasion, Islamic State has a tendency to release Danes, French and Germans who've fallen into their clutches. A rare moment of pity? An attempt to divide the coalition arrayed against it? Or is mercy redeemed through bundles of cash made payable by a labyrinth of back channels? I know what I believe.
This is scant compensation for British and American hostages currently held by IS. Unlike other governments whose commitment to not paying ransoms might be less than absolute, this is one foreign policy both states have stuck to. Is know this, so what does it gain from kidnapping journalists and aid workers, and then bragging about their brutal murders?
Writing of the September 11th attacks, the late Jean Baudrillard argued they were acts of semiotic terrorism. The World Trade Centre, The Pentagon, The White House were targeted not so much for the maximisation of casualties but their symbolism as universally-regarded signifiers of American power. These kinds of operations seem beyond the capacity of IS to pull off, even if it is reasonable to assume some of its ex-fighters have made their way home from Syria and Iraq. But as medieval thugs with a situationist sense of the spectacle, they have to rely on smaller scale but no less shocking ways to outrage and disgust. As Stalin reputedly noted, the death of one man is a tragedy yet the death of a thousand is a statistic. This is the insight that informs the IS manual on semiotic terror. The parading of the victim, the boilerplate denunciation of the West and its works by Jihadi John, and the fade out before the hostage is murdered - leaving the viewer to play the terrible act through their mind - and then showing the body is carefully calibrated and contrived to disturb, upset and anger. Sophisticated, and all the more chilling for it.
Unlike the Nazis who, despite the scale of their crimes, attempted to conceal them; IS positively revels in its brutality. The murder meted out to British and American hostages is on a continuum of terror and murder. Apostates and infidels, anyone not conforming to their twisted notions of religious purity are right to be fearful should IS gobble up their town or village. This, of course, is not accidental. Projecting violent imagery is psychological warfare designed to create panic among civilians behind enemy front lines. As well as dealing with logistics, Iraqi army and Peshmerga have their resupply schedules affected by refugees fleeing their homes. But it also has the opposite effect. IS brutality has galvanised the Kurdish response and, suddenly, the West have forgotten the PKK are on its terror list and are showering it and Iraqi Kurds with all manner of weaponry. But to return to the main point, IS criminality projects an image of radical seriousness. To alienated young Western Muslims undergoing bedroom radicalisation, IS are the real deal. Unlike fusty mosque goers preaching understanding and tolerance, these brothers and sisters are wading through blood to build a caliphate. The image of the boiler suited hostage isn't just about outrage. It's a recruitment pitch.
Lastly, for the IS fighters themselves - especially those from the West - murdering hostages is a form of substitutionism. It works on two levels. In revolutionary socialist groups, the activist from a non-working class background often has to deal with issues of "authenticity", even if its a prolier-than-thou superego that's piling on the guilt. Something similar happens with Western jihadis. They may have suffered racism, Islamophobia, prejudice and discrimination of some sort, but compared to IS fighters drawn from Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan they might feel "less real". Hence they will tend to overcompensate by volunteering for dangerous missions, suicide bombings, or the business of torture and execution. British jihadis, for example, are reputed to be among the most fanatical, murderous and pitiless fighting under the IS banner. The second level is payback. Try as they might, IS will not goad Western troops into a ground war with them. Drones, special forces, and air power is elusive and next to impossible for them to counter. American and British hostages, unfortunately, are the only means they have at "striking back". They are stand-ins for targets they cannot reach.
Not one but *two* five-year plans? Ambitious targets? An 80 minute monologue with anecdotes about meeting ordinary people? Forget Red Ed. Today we saw the debut of Kim Jong-Mil. Yeah, yeah, lame. But Ed Miliband's speech was interesting, and not because for what went unsaid. The mild social democracy was there - the 25p/hour minimum wage uprating until 2020; jobless, housing, first time buyer, apprenticeship targets, votes for 16 and 17 year olds and the property speculation mansion tax to raise £1.2bn for thousands more GPs, nurses and careworkers. And, by the standards of British politics, a radical plan to completely decarbonise the economy by 2030. Good stuff. After the austere miserablism of yesterday's Ed Balls speech, it fell to the leader to set out the nicer things. As it should be.
Labour should go much further and offer more. Even within the limits the leadership have set themselves, there is considerable scope for delivering a stronger programme of social democracy and remaining fiscally neutral. Still, as it stands the policy agenda we've got is much better than the electoral anaemia served up by the 2010 manifesto. It's a definite improvement on the social neoliberalism of the Blair/Brown years. That doesn't mean some progressive policies aren't half-arsed. There are a clutch of proposals directly against the interests of our class and movement too. According to Westminster received wisdom, the bitter mix of the okay and the awful is the cocktail swing voters in marginal constituencies enjoy sipping, apparently. Still, on the two crucial measures - the greatest gain for the greatest number; whether more opportunities for further socialist advance will be opened up - on both counts Labour policies have a clear edge over the Tories' demented little Englandism.
To use the abysmal term Ed's speech was no "game-changer". Life under Labour will be less worse. It's an improvement but, good grief, we can aspire to be better than this.
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.
Anna Chen is a London-born writer, poet, broadcaster and Orwell Prize shortlisted blogger. She was the co-ordinating press officer for the Socialist Alliance (2000-1) and the Stop the War Coalition (2001-3). Her documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and 4, pioneering explorations of race and class, include the groundbreaking 10-part series, Chinese in Britain (2007). She writes and presents an arts series, Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge, for Resonance FM. You can follow Anna on Twitter here.
- Why did you start blogging?
I started blogging as Madam Miaow in 2007 to stop me chucking heavy objects through the television screen. I needed not only to vent, but to order my thoughts when faced with the all-pervading mess out there. I'm sure there are many of us who have been kept sane by having the option to communicate our views to an audience, even a small one. It's a healthy way to make sense of an increasingly chaotic world.
- What's been your best blogging experience?
Being shortlisted and longlisted for the Orwell Prize and then being invited to hold a poetry workshop for them for schoolchildren in Wigan.
- Have you any blogging advice for new starters?
Be aware that blogging has peaked. Every journo now has a blog so the brilliant democratising platform that was blogging has already been skewed in favour of the establishment. It's significant that the Orwell Prize dropped their blogging prize last year.
Having said that, it's very useful as a personal journal and a great way to place your world-view on the record. Don't write humungous long screeds unless you will otherwise burst. Try to keep it to 400-800 words per post, and be entertaining and witty as well as wise and wonderful. Everybody's pushed for time nowadays — make it worth their while spending a little of it on you.
- Do you think blogging's changed much since you started?
There are a lot more of us and a plethora of platforms. It's a boon for general literacy — I've seen various writers grow and improve their craft over the years.
- Do you find social media useful for activist-y-type things?
Anything that helps communication and gets different perpectives out there challenging the status quo must be a good thing. Useful for shining a cleansing light in all those nooks and crannies. Let a hundred flowers bloom.
- Who are your biggest intellectual influences?
George Orwell for giving us the language tools to nail what the Stalinists were doing; Patrick Heron on art (especially on what the CIA did with modern art when imperialist hegemony was played out on canvas); Robert McKee on cinematic story structure; Joss Whedon on televisual story structure; Greg Benton and Jonathan Spence on Chinese history; Maya Angelou; bell hooks; Rosa Luxemburg; the NME writers of my childhood who were like big brothers and sisters navigating me around the culture ... I'm quite eclectic and a working-class autodidact, having left school as 16, so it's difficult to pinpoint.
- What are you reading at the moment?
The Origins of the Boxer Uprising by Joseph W Esherick. Ricky Rouse Has A Gun, a graphic novel by Jorg Tittel and John Aggs.
- What was the last film you saw?
Southland Tales. My first was Disney's The Sleeping Beauty and George Pal's The Time Machine. Now THAT was a really powerful influence — who are the Eloi and who are the Morlocks? And who is the Traveller?
- Do you have a favourite novel?
I had a Chuck Pahlaniuk craze for a while (Fight Club and assorted novels and short stories). Animal Farm and 1984 have been faves, as was The Magus when I was a teen. I loved Evelyn Waugh's savage humour when I was a kid.
- Can you name an idea or an issue on which you've changed your mind?
I was sympathetic to the Yes-vote in the Scotland independence referendum until I was won over to the argument that this was actually about class solidarity over nationalism. Emotionally, I'm with them and share their disgust over Westminster's austerity policies — and I remember how they got the Poll Tax before anyone else. However, some Scots nationalists seemed to be saying screw you to the English working class. Instead of uniting to get rid of the unelected Tories and their LibDem shills, it was "devil take the hindmost".
It looked more like a battle between contending ruling-classes than liberation for the Scottish people, which is how it was being sold by SNP "Tartan Tories" tacking left for the vote. Would it really have been an improvement being ruled by Brian Souter, Ann Gloag, Rupert Murdoch and Angela Merkel?
- How many political organisations have you been a member of?
The SWP and their reboot of the Socialist Alliance (SA), and I also established and ran the press for their offshoots, the SA, Globalise Resistance and the Stop the War Coalition. See this.
- What set of ideas do you think it most important to disseminate?
A rising tide floats all boats. Rosa Luxemburg's warning that the choice would be between socialism or barbarism grows truer by the minute. Socialism is supposed to about an egalitarian, freeing society; from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, not a wholesale troughing down by power-hungry opportunists.
- What set of ideas do you think it most important to combat?
Nationalism, anti-immigration, racism, sexim. I would include reformism if only there was a socialist alternative.
- Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major influence on how you think about the world?
R D Laing's Knots when I was 16. The George Orwell canon.
- Who are your political heroes?
Rosa Parks and her compadres who were defying America's racist laws. The Wobblies who recruited American Chinese farmworkers into the labour movement when scumbags such as Denis Kearney and his Workingmens Party of California were stoking up lynchings. My father who came to Britain in 1927/8 as a seaman, helped establish the Chinese Seaman's Union and campaigned against the Japanese occupation of Manchuria (1931) and invasion of China (1937) — it got heavy!
- How about political villains?
Anyone who rises through the left only to take an axe to the movement as soon as they see an opportunity to climb the greasy pole — they have done so much damage to the movement and proper socialism which should represent liberation for the majority. The SWP analysis in the late 1990s predicted that Blair would be right-wing and betray the working class who would move rightwards so it was vital that we build an alternative to Labour. They were correct in that instance yet here we are over a decade later with the left worse than ever following pointless sectarian punch-ups mostly initiated by the SWP when a strong principled left has never been more desperately needed.
The uber villains are the vulture capitalists (as exposed by investigative reporter Greg Palast in his book Vultures' Picnic) who want it all but, in a grisly way, they are the logical conclusion of capitalism in old age. And, of course, Tony Blair and all the Labourites who allowed this monster to take the helm. I mean, trousering £2-3 million a year from J P Morgan, the bank that just happened with be awarded the lucrative co-ordinating role of extracting money from Iraq after Bush and Blair's war? WTF?!! Talk about the banality of evil.
- What do you think is the most pressing political task of the day?
Demonstrating that proper socialism can actually function for the majority, not an easy task when you see the destructiveness of so-called socialists: from the guys who rose through the ranks to rule the Stans, to our own homegrown efforts in the UK. The creation of so many billionnaires in China just makes me weep. So often it is merely a conduit to power for sociopaths. May we be honest and look at why socialism is such a dirty word for so many who would actually benefit from it?
- If you could affect a major policy change, what would it be?
Taxing the rich is a perrenial favourite. Lobbying for an international tax system that challenges evasion and havens (hello Britain!). TTIP is an evil the world can do without.
- What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world?
The constant upward suck of wealth with our resources accreting in the hands of a tiny global elite. This can't carry on without major crises and a battle to redistribute fairly. Trouble is, they now have the technology to hang on to their ill-gotten gains and leave us behind. Recent "revolutions" have not been inspiring, they've simply meant a change of personnel at the top as die alte scheisse takes over.
- What would be your most important piece of advice about life?
Beware inadequates — they loathe you. Learn to tell the difference between lip-service and action. If love isn't part of your politics, then you have no business telling others what to do and how to run the world. Far from being romantic nonsense as so many cynics would have it, love is the highest plane on which human beings as social animals interact. We need to develop 360 degree abilities and wider bandwidth.
- What is your favourite song?
It changes but at the moment it is the Dusty Springfield version of Windmills of Your Mind, turning trite hippy lyrics as sung by Noel Harrison into something genuinely profound. Also, Why'd Ya Do It?, lyrics by Heathcote Williams and sung by Marianne Faithful.
- Do you have a favourite video game?
I got all the way to the end of Doom. Does chess software count?
- What do you consider the most important personal quality?
Capacity for love — not the romantic kind, the other bigger one that encompasses generosity, solidarity and comradeship. Intelligence versus cleverness.
- What personal fault do you most dislike?
My own? Naivety. Over-eating. Being useless at maths.
In others, cowardice. Not physical cowardice, but personal, ethical, intellectual and moral.
- What, if anything, do you worry about?
The lack of any social force in the world that can challenge the feral ruling class and its mechanisms for extracting money, labour and soul. And a dehumanising callousness at every level, in every sphere, spreading like ebola and threatening to be the death of us all.
- And any pet peeves?
Mockney accents on posh leftists who tell working-class people how to be working-class. Purported progressives and anti-racists I've never met projecting their yellow peril fears onto me. Leftists who fall over themselves to appropriate your labour and the comrades who turn a blind eye. The snowy blinding WHITENESS of the left groups and the obvious lack of diversity, often manifesting as outright hostility towards Other. Organisations that bolt themselves to the front of other people's struggle and then claim leadership rights. None of this helps us advance our political cause.
- What piece of advice would you give to your much younger self?
Use softening rose water instead of tonics that strip your skin and dry it up. Don't smoke or stay in the sun too long.
Don't go anywhere near the British far left. Too many charlatans, careerists and snake-oil salesmen and women with ambitions who are happy to plant their boot in your face if it means personal advancement as soon as something's up for grabs. Suddenly, gay rights are no longer a "shibboleth", that rape never happened and "what's yours is mine". Wise up to the fact that, just because someone says the right thing, it doesn't mean they live it. No-one on the left has your back if you are already a marginalised minority because so many of them are insecure, chasing status, career, youth and power, and they harbour a deep contempt for those who they see as occupying at the bottom of society, whatever lip-service they pay otherwise — it's their own self-loathing projected out. Just because you are comradely, principled and non-sectarian, it doesn't mean everyone else is, too, simply because they've read the right books. Watch out for the middle-class ones who sneer at ethics and morality as "bourgeois", forgetting that Trotsky wrote a book called Their Morals and Ours, not Their Morals and We Ain't Got None.
- What do you like doing in your spare time?
Reading, gardening, cooking, writing poetry and fiction. I enjoy performing poetry. I have a collection out, Reaching for my Gnu, which has a political dimension, both explicit and implicit. I used to draw a lot — that's something I'd like to take up again. And playing chess.
- What is your most treasured possession?
A lock of hair from my late boyfriend of 23 years ago.
- Do you have any guilty pleasures?
Oh yes! Watching Big Brother and I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.
- What talent would you most like to have?
I'd like my old eiditic (photographic) memory back. I used to have one until I had some sort of aneurism when I was 19 and then spent ten years relearning how to string a sentence together.
- If you could have one realistic(ish) wish come true - apart from getting loads of money - what would you wish for?
To live a happy, productive life surrounded by loved ones in a peaceful world.
- Speaking of cash, how, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money?
My NICS and income were disrupted when I worked for the left for no pay on top of the ten years I was ill, so some sort of a pension would be nice. It would mean no more fear of dying in poverty.
- If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be?
Edward Asner, Mary Shelley, Hong Xiuquan (the leader of the Taiping rebellion). I met Ed and found he was my ideal father figure. I developed a little crushette on him.
- As a non-Labour labour movement person, do you think Labour will win next year?
Not if they carry on the way they are, trying to out-right the right — we have one of those already, thankyou. The Tories and their Lib Dem human shields are so loathed that they should be a shoo-in but I wouldn't put it past them to nause it up.
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.
I take no pleasure in seeing an enthusiastic mass movement thwarted when it came down to it, but there is a consolation for disappointed Yes people as they woke up this morning. The Scottish referendum has changed politics forever. In order to save the union, they almost had to kill it. The new constitutional settlement for Scotland has to be followed by more powers for Wales, Northern Ireland and, yes, England too. It goes without saying that local government should get more clout and that the centralised farce of the jerry-rigged UK be replaced by a federal state befitting a family of nations.
For years the 55/45 outcome of the Scottish referendum will be debated. Was the early triumphalism of Yes Salmond's "Sheffield moment"? Did the Project Fear of no have the desired effect? And can Gordon Brown add 'saving Better Together's bacon' to his CV? I want to get away from the proximate causes of the result and take a step back. I want to point fingers. As far as I'm concerned there are three political villains of the piece mainly responsible for almost breaking this island in two. These are more responsible than anyone else for fuelling independence.
Our first villain is Margaret Thatcher. Heralded as one of Britain's greatest peace time prime ministers by Westminster pygmydom, perception of her legacy depends very much on whether you won or lost during the 1980s. Our class didn't win. We might have emerged from the decade with the right to buy our council housing and enjoy cheap consumer durables, but the price paid was the smashing of our communities, the evisceration of our industries, and the brutal beating of our movement. The Scottish working class experienced this along with dozens of English and Welsh cities and towns. But to rub it in, Thatcher experimented with the Poll Tax in Scotland a full year before its introduction in the rest of Britain. If that wasn't bad enough, tax receipts from Scottish oil wealth went down south to subsidise the obscenely rich. Well done that woman for giving Scottish nationalism legs. Well done for thinking that it would have no consequences.
Our second villain is Tony Blair. This isn't because his government delivered the Scottish parliament as part of a package of measures aiming to modernise the British state which, in typical Labour fashion, didn't go far enough. His neoliberalism with a smiley face didn't repair the damage done to Scotland, but even that by itself was less significant than the third facet of his premiership: Iraq. Let me clarify. Scotland was no more opposed to invading Iraq as anywhere else. On the day a couple of million people marched in London, 100,000 or so took to the streets of Edinburgh. Yet this huge movement wasn't enough to derail the war locomotive. Blair blithely ignored public opinion and went ahead. The result wasn't popular revolt, but a collapse into despondency. If masses of people can be safely ignored, then what's the point in conventional politics? What Blair did was do the spadework for cynicism, powerlessness, and anti-politics. His premiership more than any other cut Westminster adrift and set it against the electorate, it's them vs us. This is fecund soil for populism, which Scottish nationalism has since proven adept tapping into.
The final wrong 'un is David Cameron - who else? Asked why he wanted to be Prime Minister, he reportedly replied "I thought I'd be rather good at it". What pish. Dave will go down in political history as the worst leader ever to grace Number 10, and this time his incompetence almost split this island in two. To keep devo max off the paper in defiance of SNP wishes and then, in blind panic, conceding no effectively means devo max beggars belief. Yet Dave's villainy lies not in his incompetence but his complacency. As soon as the Tories and their LibDem bag carriers got their feet under the table the same old Thatcherite crap returned. Unlike Thatcher, Dave has made no bones about his government being the most sectional, most backward administration to have blighted these lands in modern times. As he has shovelled gold into the maws of his base, he has pinched pennies from the poorest and most vulnerable. Every time an opportunity has come to shore up the narrow interests of his class, he's used it. If an occasion has passed to kick working class people, he has done it. Small wonder a million and a half Scots jumped at the chance of kicking against this nonsense. And the price almost exacted for the obscene transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich was the country his party professes to love. If he had any decency, rather than oversee his 'English votes for English laws' wheeze, he should resign.
Dear Comrade,
There are many things on which we can agree about the referendum campaign. The mobilisation of masses of people in Scotland is a good thing. Whichever way the vote goes I hope the energy and positivity mobilised by Yes can feed into progressive politics and positive social change. It's also kicked the complacency of establishment politics into touch in the rest of Britain. Seeing the powers that be panic as a huge movement blew up before them is something not seen too often. I hope the people of England and Wales are taking notice and the union, with or without Scotland, is radically recast. To be sure, after tomorrow we on the left have a hard job ensuring that not only is a new constitutional settlement for the rest of Britain argued for, but that it reflects the interests and aspirations of our class. These moments seldom come and to cede it to the wonks, the constitutional specialists, and the little England isolationists would be a terrible squandering of an opportunity.
For all that, I remain extremely wary of a Yes vote in Scotland winning. In spite of the engagement, the grassroots organisation, the outbreaks of political optimism, I think socialists and leftists are making a big mistake agitating for independence. This isn't because the soft social democracy assiduously cultivated by the SNP fails a revolutionary purity test, or for whatever scaremongering reasons financial institutions can cook up. For me and other no'ers on the left, our scepticism and concerns are founded on answers to two basic questions.
1. Does Scottish independence strengthen or weaken the labour movement?
2. Does Scottish independence strengthen or weaken British capital?
Taking the questions in turn, it's no use pretending the labour movement isn't weak. I'm sure you would agree that the key political struggle facing the left - regardless of individual politics, party affiliations, and position on independence - is rebuilding it. This means reconstructing workplace organisation and doing ceaseless battle against the dog-eat-dog common sense of the age. It's not a linear process by any means, nor does it unfold according to some schematic timetable. Prosecuting our interests, our class interests, means identifying opportunities that come to hand and scrambling to seize them. One such opportunity is the general election next year where there is a real possibility of returning a Labour government. Now, its policy agenda hardly heralds a coming red dawn. Yet it combines immediate relief for some of our most poorest and vulnerable people with the scrapping of the bedroom tax. It will curtail and partially reverse NHS marketisation. Labour is going to undo the iniquitous cash-for-tribunals system and significantly devolve power to local authorities. These and other measures create a more favourable structure of opportunities for the left. There is a world of difference between this policy agenda and a mad Tory one that so dysfunctional that it's injurious of their class. Would a newly independent but necessarily inward-looking Scotland afford the same political opportunities, especially when the price paid is a greater chance of Tory rule over the remaining 58m people of the UK?
Surely this view has been rendered null and void by the intrusion of many millions into the Scottish debates? Unfortunately, for all the networked organisations, the radical independence outfits, and non-affiliated people this is a movement under the undisputed leadership of the SNP. Its reach is powered by a soft left-populist rejection of Westminster and, despite the hopes I have for it, is likely to simply demobilise in the event of a Yes victory. I say this not because it's convenient, but by looking at the mobilisation of similar movements elsewhere. Remember the mass movement against Le Pen in 2002? Where did it go? What happened to the defeated movement for Quebec independence? Or what about the mobilisation of the grassroots for Obama's 2008 presidential campaign? Even huge working class mobilisations under ultra-correct revolutionary leaderships can quickly fade, such as the 'victorious' anti-Poll Tax movement. With radical groups present but by no means hegemonic, I can see Yes heading the same way. I understand you may feel different, but enthusiasm in the absence of a unifying organisation can dim very quickly. Once the job is done, if the job gets done, what next? How can the momentum be maintained at the moment its SNP lynchpin works to shut it down?
Then there is capital. Putting aside blood-curdling business screams, there are two matters that need addressing here. While the SNP are by no means guaranteed to be the government of an independent Scotland post-2016 (a Gordon Brown-led Labour government is not beyond the realm of possibility!), their stated desire to undercut corporation tax in the rump UK by three pence is illustrative of a wider problem: the new border encourages a race to the bottom. Who can offer the most "attractive" environments for international capital? Edinburgh? London? Whoever wins, it's not working people. Similarly an independent capitalist Scotland is weaker vs North Sea oil interests, the bond markets, finance capital, and large concerns like StageCoach and News International. It was only last October that Ineos threatened to scrap Scotland's oil refining capacity. The same will be the case for the rump UK too. Smaller states are easier to bully, especially when the elites who run them - as in Scotland and rUK - are utterly beholden to neoliberal common sense.
The British state is hardly a repository of socialism. Time and again it's been used as a battering ram for bourgeois interests at home and abroad. And yet, like all liberal democratic states it is vulnerable to pressure from below. That is the case right now. The 307 year old union is done come what may. But there is an opportunity to make it anew, to re-establish Britain as a multinational, federal state that has come together on the basis of a voluntary union of peoples. If you, your comrades, the radical organisations and the Scottish labour movement stay with us, that might be the prize. No guarantees of course, beyond more organising and struggle. But what a win it would be.
Unfortunately, this in mind I cannot see how independence would strengthen our class across Britain, weaken capital, and give the Tories anything other than a satisfying slap across the face. As your comrades we want and need you in the battles to come. To steal something from Ken MacLeod:
(I'll explain this better
in the cold light of day,
but I'm voting No,
And here's what I say)
Let's team up together,
Keep the Tories out,
We all have English friends,
Give them a shout.
We have a common enemy,
English ain't all Eton Boys,
Let's get them out together,
And make some noise.
Westminster don't represent
The Ferry or Newcastle,
So let's get together,
And show them some hassle.
The Tories hurt us all
Let's show them how it's done
Let's team up together
We'll fight them as one.
(by a 'Young Lady Comrade')
Please stay with us comrade. Your class here in England and Wales needs you.
Comradely,
Phil
Better Together has been short on emotion, and all of a sudden there's shouting and bawling all over the place. Almost. The Prime Minister has ventured north from Westminster twice to make heartfelt pleas to Scottish voters. And Gordon Brown (Gordon Brown!) has been stomping around making the passionate case for the union. Too little too late when compared with the apparent enthusiasm of the Yes campaign? We'll only know for sure come Thursday.
But I want to be indulgent for a moment. I want to pause, and reflect. Way, way back in October 2008, as ears were ringing to the cacophony of crashing stock markets and all those ten-a-penny Trotskyist forecasts of economic crisis came to fruition, I took a brief break from thinking and blogging about those events to talk about how I felt. After all, the received political and economic wisdom was vaporising faster than sub prime mortgage trades. Having one's coordinates suddenly shift was disconcerting and exhilarating, and while you could see the attacks to be unleashed on working people to pay for this crisis coming a mile off, for a brief moment it felt there was everything to play for.
The Scottish independence referendum is very similar. Everything we know about British politics is upended. Whatever happens, the union cannot be the same again (and the left should champion its remaking, especially in England). The cosy Westminster consensus has not so much been shaken but rudely shoved into a blender. And how wonderful it is not to have politics blighted by UKIP and the festering lump of decomposing Toryism. Questions of social justice are front and centre, not immigration or benefit bashing.
What about feeling? It's all a bit unreal. It's frustrating for one. I'm stuck here hurling my opinions at the thousand or so regular drop-ins when I want to be out with other WestMids comrades who've made the trip to Scotland and making the left case for no. Penning long screeds and snarking on Twitter are poor substitutes for getting face to face and patiently explaining your point of view.
There's anxiety too. If Scotland opts for independence, yes, official politics is struck a blow. But when the dust has settled I believe capital will be strengthened, and labour weakened. A lot is it stake and the wrong decision will very likely be a severe setback for socialist politics across Britain. Because it's so close, all socialists and labour movement people should feel a little angsty.
Yet there's a weird sort of excitement too. Part of me wants it to be over, but to be on the cusp of change ... well, whatever I'm experiencing must be a pale reflection of the intensity of being directly involved. The thrill of the new, for good or for ill, is very much in the mix.
Thankfully, there is one emotion missing. The tendrils of despondency have kept at bay. If the worst comes to the worst, the fluxes and shifts of politics will still afford new opportunities for the left and the labour movement, even if they're somewhat truncated. The tough job of work is to get the labour movement to seize those moments - and likely that means a return to frustration! It's a good job I'm predisposed toward optimism.
Less than 48 hours before the polls open, how do you feel?
