Tuesday 23 December 2014

A response to Sandy Wilkie in the National

Sandy Wilkie sent a letter to the National yesterday in which he purported to be taking an ecumenical tone, talking about #OneScotland.  In the same letter however Wilkie lets the mask slip;

"Perhaps [the First Minister] has enough on her plate trying to assimilate the 45ers whose strong views were unleashed by her predecessor; unleashed without any thought as to the genie being let out of that particular bottle?"

Who are these dread democrats?  Hatred and fear of popular politics is most notably associated with the right, and indeed is the foundational conerstone of conservative politics.  If Wilkie is the "left leaning idealist who believes in a federal UK solution" he confesses himself to be one would think this cohort of Scots who want democracy instead of remote Whitehall rule are not very far from Wilkie's position?  If not, why not?  The repeated wild animal metaphors the young Labour activist uses rather give the game away. 

I am not remotely an idealist, but as an internationalist and a socialist, I could only vote YES, campaign for YES, and repudiate the reactionary British state - one of the most venal and imperialistic polities ever created.  My response to the referendum result was to stick an A2 YES poster in the window, because of what this rebellion represents - a left wing rejection of imperialism, chauvinism, backwardness and Tory reaction.  The formal technical arrangements by which Scots get to opt out of the far right consensus that characterises the three Tory parties at Westminster is far less consequential to me than simply that we do, and at the very earliest opportunity, taking control of our natural resources to establish some form of social democratic commonwealth.

Nevertheless the federalist who wants to 'leash' fellow Scottish democrats goes on to qualify his support for "federalism" but invoking the Smith Commission and the need he sees not to suggest it does not go far enough.  This is a body designed to deliver a rehashed Calman Commission, and a settlement so far from Home Rule (defined as the same as Dominion Status within the British Empire) and federalism as to be palpably ridiculous.  This prompts questions about how deep his ostensible federalism runs, because the Smith Commission is a mandate for continued unitary British state and the absolute sovereignty of Whitehall in fiscal and social security affairs, which brings us to his next point. He claims we need to be "taking active responsibility for making things better," yet he refuses to trouble himself with taking responsibility for the contradictions of his position.

For many of us the democracy rebellion - for that's what it remains - is not an academic exercise, as it appears it is for our "federalist" who somehow mananged to reconcile his beliefs with working a 22 hour shift for the campaign against democracy on polling day.  In communities blighted by Whitehall rule this rebellion *remains* a zero sum game.  In August of this year my residents association held an emergency local meeting in response to the escalating humanitarian crisis in our community.  Large numbers of us aren't eating.  The local foodbank was set up following poverty stricken residents needing to steal food from the big Tesco to survive.  At the time of the August meeting we had data to show that during May 623 people around our estate had to rely on food parcels to eat.  Over 60% of our community went on to vote YES.  One month after the right's pyhrric victory in October 623 had become over 1000 relying on food parcels to eat.  This horror continues to escalate.  When will Wilkie, the man who hails from the party which caused this crisis, take some responsibility?

Perhaps because our "federalist" qualifies his left wing credentials by saying he's an "idealist" we maybe need to inject some empiricism.  The British state is starving poor Scots because of conditionality in the benefits system, introduced by James Purnell in 2009 under the last UK Labour government, who was advised by one Blair McDougall at the time.  The system of sanctions and work capability assessments introduced by McDougall and Purnell were found by the SCVO to be not just the primary cause of food poverty but (together with Westminster's labour market regulation: another thing we don't get to 'take responsibility for') the almost exclusive cause of it.  Currently DWP targets state that 5% of all welfare recipients must be sanctioned every two weeks, regardless of circumstance, so the 'conditionality' merely matches the target, as was always intended.  This conditionality (the sanctions regime) is *designed* to starve people in communities like mine, with the only conceiveable aim being to 'discipline' the labour market.  This labour market discipline (and the low wage economy it precipitates) is why there is cross party consensus among the Tory parties of power at Westminster, because this is the point of ideological unity.  This is what the NO campaign was about enforcing in Scotland, so our 'left-leaning federalist' would absolutely *have* to be an idealist to fail to interface with this.  Let me spell it out to Wilkie because he seems too interested in his own idealism to understand the reason we remain in rebellion: the British state is currently starving 2% of Scots as an act of *cross party consensus,* which will be exacerbated by whoever wins the next UK election; there is only one way in which this will not be the case.

That is if the Red Tories - let's call the centre right opposition what they objectively are - are condemned to electoral irrelevance in Scotland and Scots can force the Red Tory Chancellor in waiting to cancel his planned £86billion of cuts, circumscribe the vile right wing extremist Rachel Reeves, and thereby restore food to the table of the 2% of Scots Wilkie has worked 22 hour shifts to immiserate.  NO activists like Wilkie continue to refuse to take responsibility for the misery their selfish right wing actions have caused.  We can all accept when folk mea culpa and admit they got it wrong, and that they now wish to join the fight for democracy.  However the idea that right wing activists should get to lecture us about solidarity and communitarian ethics when their arguments consist of astroturfing, victim blaiming, characterising those whom they claim to share so much with rhetorically as wild animals, British nationalist Schmalz and disingenuous confessions of left wing faith is a vile travesty.  Objectively these British nationalist activists stand for remote far right rule that is causing an escalating humanitarian crisis.  This is a zero sum game Mr Wilkie, and if you want to have any credibibility at all with democrats and not just with privately educated Red Tory councillors it's about time you took some some responsibility and joined us in the fight to end Labour's policy of promoting and escalating starvation in working class communities.

Monday 15 December 2014

Why a vote for Labour in Scotland is a vote for a colonial relationship and reaction

1. Scotland is a colony.  The Anglo-Scottish Union is a colonial relationship.

2. The Labour Party is the strongest source of fealty to the Union in Scotland.

3. The Labour Party in Scotland is the leading force for reaction. 



1.)



This is how wikipedia defines a colony.  Get sniffy about the source if you like, but its definition seems pretty accurate.
"In politics and history, a colony is a territory under the immediate political control of a state, distinct from the home territory of the sovereign.[...]Unlike a puppet state or satellite state, a colony has no independent international representation, and its top-level administration is under direct control of the metropolitan state."
Miriam Webster has: "an area that is controlled by or belongs to a country and is usually far away from it."

The reason for maintaining a colony is pretty simple: resource extraction, and to project military force.  It is easier to deploy troops in a territory that is under your jurisdiction than it is to attempt landings or invasions in places which are not.

For the first half of the Union, the '45 clampdown excepted, Scotland was in a state of "semi-independence."  It was not a colony, but the result of a ruling class compact where Scotland was officially annexed on terms.  It was to borrow a fairly exact metaphor a satrapy.

"the Achaemenian Empire[...] established 20 satrapies with their annual tribute. As the head of the administration of his province, the satrap collected taxes and was the supreme judicial authority; he was responsible for internal security and raised and maintained an army. [...] the satraps often enjoyed virtual independence."

A Satrap holds court in S. Afghanistan.  Satrapies enjoyed semi-independence, within an empire.
This semi-independence was characterised by local control and exercise of power.  The institutions involved were the Kirk, and the justiciary (which was in the pocket of the landowning classes and, aware of their own illegitimacy and their fragile position of dual power, was by turns cautious and liberal and reactionary and revanchist).  The Kirk controlled health, education (parish and higher education), welfare, civil law, fines and levies, and even had control over migration.  Labour market regulation, law making, taxation and civil defence were in the hands of the lairds.  Westminster controlled wars and foreign colonies, and so long as the Jocks didn't cause too many problems, who were they to trouble themselves with the administration of Scotland.  Besides which colonies were providing much of the resource extraction.

This period of satrapy status ended when the British state grew in Scotland.  After this point Scotland became more or less a colony in the traditional sense, and ceased to be a satrapy.  It first became a nascent satrapy again in 2007.

The Disruption Assembly of 1843: one of the key moments when Scottish dual power which emerged in 1560 died.
The mechanism for the British state's growth and Scotland's long interregnum was the smashing of the Kirk, and the establishment of ministerial control over Scotland from London.  In 1846 the British state started to build free schools, in competition with parish schools, before long it would annexe the welfare system and health and social care; the landed classes had already undermined the Kirk's migration controls, and were busily undermining Kirk sessions wherever they could.  The context for these moves was the British state's attacks on the power of the Kirk, in which the landowning classes of Scotland had acted with British government support to insist and rule in favour of land owning patronage in the Kirk, in appointing ministers, in opposition to a parish membership ballot.  Before this attack on the Kirk the civil adminstration of much of Scotland by the Kirk meant it had been handled in a different way and according to different priorities.  The Kirk could be a very ideologically intolerant place, but its radical democracy would make Switzerland look centralised.  This attack, faced down by the General Assembly, but later enforced by the Court of Session led to a massive split in the Kirk, known as the Disruption of 1843.  This blew a hole in the dual power of the people against our rulers, and they seized their moment to 'go British' by having a London minister put directly in charge of running the various public services they colluded in having the British state annexe from Scotland.  By 1885, following decades of Scottish elite agitation, there was a secretary of state in charge of running all of the things from an office in London.


This is also about where the former civil servant John Jappy's evidence acts to corroborate the central assumption that Scotland was a satrapy, which became a colony under Scottish ruling class expediancy and British centralising pressure:- 

[That this process should be completed towards the end of the 19th century, during the New Imperialism when Britain was getting a bit skint and plumping for more finance capital is of course entirely coincidental.]





Since then the position has merely been maintained.  Wherever you take the point in Scotland's history from then on wages are low, profit is extracted from Scotland, and is not reinvested back.  An ossified landed class and an absentee bourgeoisie exerts disproportionate influence over much of the countryside, leading to massive deliberate underdevelopment.  The parties of power at Westminster stand for enforcing a policy uniformity across the United Kingdom which does not correspend with action which would challenge these net capital outflows, fiscal transfers, lower wages or iniquitous distribution of land, patronage and power.  Meantime the military industrial complex of the UK treats Scotland as a dumping ground for nuclear waste, unexploded ordinance, industrial waste and its unpopular nuclear arsenal.  This happens while civil servants in London draw up the plans for UK energy infrastructure which leads to the underdevelopment of our great renewable energy potential.  not content with treating Scotland as a cowp the MoD over-extends its veto powers in the planning system with the same effect on the renewables industry, because the UK refuses to buy a modern radar system, and mere economic necessity is a negative externality.  All of this is in frustration of and for the satrapy government which seeks to end the historical underdevelopment which has characterised long stretches of time in Scotland's interregnum. 

Under Labour Scotland returned billions in unspent Scottish Government finance to the UK Treasury (which we already subsidise to the tune of £1.5billion+ annually).  In 2006 they began a concerted effort to privatise all the public services in Scotland.  Their tenure was associated with the demolition of 1 in 40 homes in the country, all of them publicly owned.  Scotland did not support this kind of government, driven by the City of London and Gordon Brown from London.  Power only exists if it is used and Scotland's emergent break from colonial status to accession as a satrapy begain in 2007 and is an unfinished process.

This potential change in status comes out of the simple fact that this is literally the first time in 150 odd years that Scotland has had a government which intends to do things differently from the right wing / British norm in Scotland.  However normal the SNP's aspirations may be in European terms, that fact alone in Scotland make them revolutionary, because success on their own terms would necessitate ending Scotland's colonial relationship, and exposing the nature of Scotland's ongoing tribute payment relationship with Whitehall.

2.)

The principle agent which can bind Scotland to the Union is Labour.  While Scotland sends its 4% of lawmakers to Westminster under a Labour badge, it votes for the UK Labour Party's policy in Britain, with all the implications for not challenging Scotland's colonial relationship within the Union.

Since the defeat of the working class movement which began in 1979 this has meant enforcing neo-liberalism alongside colonialism's asset transfers.  However the leftwing policies of Labour administrations which predate this arguably relied more on such asset transfers because they faced capital flight and were therefore more reliant on natural resources.  In both incarnations in Scotland - an agent of Thatcherism today, and an agent of command and control Labourism in the fading past - Labour has acted to secure the ongoing asset transfer from Scotland to the Whitehall regime.  Indeed Willie Ross' failed "Socialist Plan for Scotland" was essentially logically predicated within Cabinet on addressing the lower wages, higher unemployment and poorer levels of investment and retention of profits.  And *it failed* when Britain needed the cash for being a big boy instead.

A Labour vote from Scotland is basically a vote for this colonial relationship, particularly when we consider the prize.  And here I completely agree with the Tory Unionist enemy.

The Telegraph's Iain Martin echoes my view. 

" Be in no doubt: if Labour is banished from Scotland, the Union will be done for [... The SNP] hope to hold the balance of power in the event of another hung parliament. That way, they might demand yet more powers for the Scottish Parliament or perhaps even another referendum on ending the Union."

Alex Massie, not normally given to fantastic rhetoric, even believes we have lived thru such a crucible moment that it compares to the Easter Rising in terms of Scottish consciousness.

"Pound for pound – or, rather, per capita – the SNP is now the largest political party in Britain. Indeed, it’s the only one that can plausibly claim to be a mass organisation. That’s quite something.The kind of thing that makes one wonder if – just perhaps – next year’s election in Scotland could produce results of the kind seen in Ireland in 1918. John Redmond’s Home Rule bill was passed in 1914 but its implementation delayed by the First World War. Then there was the small matter of Easter 1916 and, most importantly, the British authorities’ cack-handed response to Pearse’s provocation. It all helped to ruin the Irish Parliamentary Party. They lost 61 seats in 1918 as Sinn Fein won a landslide victory in southern Ireland, gaining 67 seats and winning almost 47 percent of the vote."

If the Labour Party were smashed at Westminster, particularly where this led to a confidence and supply agreement with a minority Labour Government, the political Union would effectively be over, and Scotland would gain full satrapy status by default.  The machinery of the Labour Party in Scotland would be crushed, and the idea that people needed to vote Labour to keep the Tories out would also lie dead.  Paul Sinclair is on record as saying he agrees with this analysis, asking why would people feel the need to vote Labour, if they got a better Labour government by not doing so.  If they got a Tory government, it could only be because England rejected Labour, as the SNP have made clear their intentions never to vote for a Tory Government, in which case all the fairies and unicorns "solidarity" talk during the referendum from the NO campaign would be very very exposed indeed, as would the democratic deficit.  So long as Scotland voted SNP in sufficient numbers this contradiction would be fully and completely exposed and the pressure brought to bear on this reactionary compact of a state.

The eventual outcome of such a shift away from the Labour myth of the post-war welfare state is that Scots see Westminster not as a place which determines their Government, but as a place where they send delegates to fight for Scotland, against Whitehall.  Such a nonsense can only last so long, as the essential colonial relationship would be laid bare for everyone to see.

Given that what British policies mean in Scotland, this is indeed a glittering prize.  It is the result of British policies that in the month of October in Maryhill over 1000 people relied on food parcels to eat. A month previously Maryhill had voted YES by the same size of majority as the landslide among Labour Party members that has swept Jim Murphy into power.  It is the result of British polices that demand is being sucked out of the economy to pay for bloodletting, and economic mismanagement sees vital industries placed on pause amidst a youth unemployment crisis.  Starvation, job losses, economic failure and blight caused by a lack of power to change the welfare system, improve employability and borrow to invest.  None of this is rocket science, but none of it is going to change as long as Scotland is shackled into a relationship where the number of food bank users has equalled the number of SNP members at 2% of the population, the Scottish Government is throwing money hand over fist at alleviating suffering caused deliberately by a distant far right government, while having its budget cut by that same government 7% a year, with no ability to borrow money, all while Scotland subsidises the UK exchequer by an average of £1.5billion+ a year.

3.)

Analysis of Labour's remaining core vote (roughly 50% of its 2010 vote), shows it to be the most suspicious of politicians, the most cynical of elected authority, and together with cynics and fans of Westminster there is a strong majority against the Scottish Parliament gaining political prominence.  A majority of Labour's remaining supporters ticked "neither of them" when asked if they trust Westminster or Holyrood most, and 24% wanted most power invested in Westminster.  Like the number of YES voters in Maryhill this amounts to the same mandate Labour Party members just gave Murphy - only a small minority of Labour's remaining support base wants a stronger Scottish Parliament.  The comparable cohort for the 2010 Labour vote who wanted a stronger Westminster was just 15%, and unlike their remaining support base a majority wanted most power at Holyrood.  Their support is increasingly concentrated among reactionary and erratic political cynics.

This is to say nothing of the actions of those who still command this dwindling and increasingly erratic reactionary support.  Jim Murphy as we know won a landslide victory for reaction among the Labour *membership* vote.  Labour has in the region of 7000 members, up from their pre-referendum total, after they recruited 1000 new members based on one of the most reactionary campaigns in recent Scottish history.  These people want to be led by a bullying, hectoring, creepy right wing lunatic because they see him as the man to crush Scotland's democratic aspirations and put its left wing hopes to bed.  A workers party that's lost its way?  Or a party of colonial reaction and empire fealty?

"Graeme Morrice, Labour MP for Livingston, was
guest speaker at the Bathgate Boyne Celebrations
of East of Scotland Orangemen." Reads the Orange
Lodge campaign website British Together. He went
on to pen an article for "Orange Torch" magazine.
There has been some recent online speculation that Scottish Labour's endorsement of such a right wing creep would "push the SNP to the right"; this is a misreading of history.  The current SNP strategy of being a competent centre left government is the continuation of the party's strategy that it first adopted in the fallout from 1979, where then as now the working class had voted YES but the reactionary upper middle class had voted NO to prevent a change in political weather which might affect their London career ladders and perceived vestiges of patronage.

The idea that Labour is going to push the SNP to the right is a nonsense.  Since 2007, when Labour lost the election after its failed bid to privatise all of Scotland's services, it began a campaign of centre right attacks on the SNP and carping.  From a law and order campaign of moral panic, to Johann Lamont's Cuts Commission, thru to Jim Murphy's wonderful ideas about the need for more pensions firms involved in the financing of public services, the Labour Party has been a force on the right day in and day out.  Now that the combined Unionist candidate now rules expect him to pursue the same strategy as Michael Forsyth did, as #creepyjim tries to prove Scotland is indeed a centre right country.  And the SNP don't.  Like they haven't.  Ever.  At any point in government since 2007.  Or since, as a bunch of left wingers, they came up with their current grand strategy in the 70s and 80s.

Apart from anything else, attack where your enemy is not.  The cold war for Scotland we are living thru is not analogous to the Republicrats versus the Democans where each looks for space in the centre.  That just isn't a fit for what is going on.  The SNP's opposition to austerity for example was not drawn up under similar circumstances to Labour's plan to ban migrants from claiming benefits.  The latter is cynical policy stolen from a poll.  The former is the channelling of political conviction from social democratic instinct, thru a council of economic advisors including some of the world's most celebrated anti-austerity economists, until it becomes a serious and empirically backed policy.

There will be no shift to the right with Labour.  Calling for a vote for Labour is calling for the satrapy to be put back in the box marked colony.

Thursday 30 October 2014

Is it not time for a full frontal attack at the centre?

The battle is now for the very soul of the country.  It isn't for a loud voice in the margins.  

"the question that the socialist left in Scotland must seek to answer if we are to defend what’s left of our social security system, and present an overall challenge to neoliberalism. This answer is not, it is our contention, with the SNP[...] In a possible future Scotland, Labour and the SNP join in a permanent battle of the civic nationalisms; one British, one Scottish. In this permanent fore-grounding of national antagonisms more vital issues of social justice can be lost[...] This is especially possible should the next leader of Labour in Scotland attack the SNP from the right, in which case the SNP, especially if it believes the left flank is secure, will draw to the centre."

This view strikes me as remarkably similar to John McTernan's reading of politics in Scotland, even tho he's coming from the exact opposite goals.

"The SNP are busy constructing a myth that Scotland is a wildly Left-wing, working-class country. It is not. As the referendum result showed, it is a solidly middle-class, and – dare one say it – moderate Unionist country. “No thanks”, the final slogan of the No campaign, captured that perfectly[...]That was the key to the victories in Scotland of Tony Blair, Donald Dewar and Jack McConnell. And that is precisely where there is vacant ground in Scottish politics – space for a moderate, modern party representing the mainstream middle, that doesn’t blame “London” for all its problems. When your opponent makes a mistake, as the SNP has done, don’t ape it. Exploit it."

I think Shafi is wrong here because I think he fails to appreciate 1) what the SNP represent, 2) what the Labour Party now is, and 3) what Scotland is.

1) The SNP have always proposed a 'Scotland for the smaa fowk.'  This can be dismissed as populism masking nationalism, but this seems like putting theory in place of lived reality.  Yes there have been historical shitty compromises, and yes there have been stupid leaders and political illiteracies.  There is however no getting away from why people join the SNP.  One person in thirty three people in Motherwell is not in the SNP because they are sentimental souls.  It also neglects a generation of history.

Scottish Labour have been attacking the SNP from the right, first in government, and then in opposition for two decades now. In that time the SNP has moved further left.  It has become a mass party of the working class.  This was the vision of the 79 group, more or less. As if to underline that point the current deputy leadership contest has become a debate about the responsibility of the party to the (largely) Jacobin mass movement it has invoked and fostered.

2) On the question of Labour, and organic crises, it ceased to be a Workers Party (in the technical sense of that phrase) at the point when Progress seized the leadership, a generation ago. In form under Blair it was more really a traditional fascist, conservative or Stalinist state style capture of the unions for the ruling elite. At this point it became a party of the Establishment in control *over* the organised working class. The furore over the recent Falkirk selection battle demonstrated conclusively that over two decades on not only was this *still* the case.  That furore happened because Unite had a failed challenge in asserting agency in the relationship, something which remains anathema to the party's rulers.  Because of this 'outrage' Miliband determined it required a change in rules over party funding. The Labour Party remains a Tory Party under Miliband, representing the section of the Establishment which aims to control the unions as the basis of its political power.

This is a direction of travel Blair and Brown were explicit in pursuing.  This ruling class perspective, this course can be summed up in their phrase "the natural party of government" - ie the government that rules forever and ever. The terms of referenence for the policy debate among its rulers, outside of the wee Stalinist-Unionist rump in Scotland, is that of traditional Tory liberalism and Progress' dangerous neo-conservatism.  It is the latter grouping which could be set to trash the last defiant Scottish Stalinist rump, and, in doing so, wipe out the Labour Party in Scotland.


To imagine that Scotland's leading Tory party will force the SNP to the right seems like a misreading of the situation.  That idea that Labour continuing to be Tories, as they obliviate themselves, will force a party that is now a mass movement into a right wing box seems like narrative over logistics.  The SNP is comprised of working class socialists and social democrats.  It's led by a lefty lawyer and machine politician.  We're not going to see some massive rightward shift, because neither the leadership nor the engaged membership are in politics just for the sake of exercising power.  Labour itself counts for much of its vote on centre left low information voter pensioners, but there are diminishing returns in reliance on that demographic. They have long been the tactical Unionist vote, and perhaps the SNP stands to lose some of the centre here if there is a reaction against the explicitly revolutionary component of the mass movement.  This is possible, but that's a circle it has been able to square in the past while leading one of Europe's most centre left administrations.  And frankly Tories know exactly what the SNP is, which is why they have been nervously and perfervidly shuffling and jeering and voting against it since 2007, so appealing for their votes was never going to work.  Labour - the party which stands for government for its own sake - may have to appeal for those votes however.

Is it not time to capture the centre for the smaa fowk and finish the job instead of trying to build a small group of Cassandras?

3) The reason there isn't a need for a Jacobin movement in most countries but there is in Scotland is obvious.  Solutions which elide these relations omit the central question of working class political power in Scotland, which is the Union or democracy.  Now that The British Road To Socialism is as long dead as Clause 4 and the old CPGB and the working class is represented in government by a well turned oot bunch of Jacobins is it not time to just sweep the bastards out?

One third of our land is ruled over by a tax exempt hereditary elite, kept as a desert producing no food, nor profit, nor widespread human use values, locking the remaining poor of our 'interior' into a life of insecurity and poverty, and presenting a barrier to development. We are the only Western country to take a broadly stable government arrangement of roughly one third of our populace and reduce that to a wasteland populated by retirees, with the vestigial working class.  This vestigial working class - still frequently Gaelic speaking by the way - remains in hoc to the gentry and the  new bourgeois rulers who've bought up the massive estates to live out the big house fantasy. 

We are a state of people who control absolutely the very flow of our water, but who do not control whether we let the poor starve.  We pay for this privilege of inertia in the form of tribute and that our finances be doublechecked in England's parliament (where we maintain, under sufferance and sectional alignment a token minority of legislators).  This arrangement is immensely popular with our shrinking violet upper middle classes, who are as privately educated as their Southern peers.  They benefit from obscurity and the crystallisation of class relations we often term 'The Unionist Establishment' or 'Committee Scotland.'

That Ross and others were able to funnel a space for the Labour Establishment into this otherwise private school Edinburgh Tory elite that made its compacts with Henry Dundas 200 odd years ago does not obscure the general principle that Committee Scotland is rarely met but often encountered.

Talking in terms of 'populism' with reference to the SNP is missing the real empirical basis upon which the Pairty o the Smaa Fowk rests, and the necessity of the revolution it represents.  Scotland is a backward country in dire need of land redistribution, changes to property ownership and taxation, democracy and real local government, openness and transparency, a fairer social wage, full employment, Keynesian investment and a political reckoning, all of which the SNP, the mass party of the working class, stands for.

Monday 7 July 2014

Some indyref debate facts about the YES side

CONTEXT/logistics

YES HQ has no organisers; this is by far the most serious strategic error of the YES campaign.  Since the start of the campaign it has had no organisers.  It has been the ever present absent of the campaign.  YES staffers have responded to queries about the lack of a steer from the centre by saying it is not their job to provide a steer from the centre; this is spad talk for "I don't know what the Hell I'm talking about" - any serious social movement REQUIRES organisers, and providing a steer from the centre was YES HQ's ONLY JOB beyond data entry and the messaging they've largely failed to get anywhere with due the Unionist media hegemony.  They have been explicit about this abrogation of duty to organise the movement.  Whatever the cause of this or the rationale it has certain implications.

There are many hundreds of thousands of commited YES voters who remain inactive, when a bit of "pushing" would activate them.  The actual YES movement could easily by twice the size it is now, with organisers, and a year of work.

Much of the actual existing movement is a bit inert; this is why we can dominate facebook and twitter and yet fail to canvass Scotland a bagillion times over.

There are something like 200,000 YES activists, or more - if that number is wrong it's because it's too conservative. (By activists I mean people who are doing something for a YES vote; in my immediate area there are dozens of YES activists; if I were to split my burgh of Glasgow up into branches of YES activists I could form a dozen very solid branches within the mile and half or so radius that covers).  I can go anywhere in the country and I will find a YES activist.  My entire immediate family is a YES activist.  Most of my friends tell similar stories.  My immediate family and theirs are usually politically inert.  I constantly meet people who have never given a shit about politics in their lives, and now they are card carrying YES activists telling their neighbours the good news.

Let me repeat I believe that 4% of Scotland is a YES activist.  The movement remains chronically disorganised, due to poor leadership decisions taken by the political adepts who understand elite politics, PR, data, and winning elections, but not running mass movements like trade unions or huge community coalitions.  Otherwise we would by now have completely overwhelmed the Establishment enemy.  Five really good trade union or community organisers would have done it

Just to underline the point the last count released on signatures for the YES declaration put the number at 789,191 at the start of June.

More than 1 YES activist in 10 has joined the SNP.

--

'DEFEAT'

If the movement is defeated with a narrow NO victory in September, then it will suffer a terrible harrowing.  We can expect that at least 75% of it will drift away should it be defeated, and we have not "innoculated" or hardened the troops in some way.

So if nothing else happens there will be a movement of 50,000 people, half of whom will be in the SNP.

IF we 'lose' the referendum because of fear and elite media hegemony we will have a national liberation movement of 1% of Scotland.  Organised, this is a movement that could inflict greater damage on the Establishment enemy and the Unionist Government than this disorganised 4% of Scotland has.  But organising is the key.

[A word to the sniffy political adepts.  Excoriating people for spontaneously supporting protests and not canvassing is not the same as organising; it's actually disorganising, as it's Holy Willie stuff that encourages passivity.  Organising leadership is leading by obeying, leading out, encouraging, coaxing, and social pressurising.  It isn't being more morally upstanding and shouting that everyone else should be.]

--

VICTORY

To the victor the spoils.  200,000 people are now an establishment frame, now fighting a challenger frame which was once the corrupt Unionist elite.  The SNP will hold directional influence, but they can't count on hegemony should they try and hold the movement back.

The trouble with popular politics for elites and political parties is that you can't put the genie back in the bottle.  Some of us don't want the genie back in the bottle: we want our three wishes.

--

For the record here are mines:-

End the colonial ruling class: utterly smash them - no mercy;

The Keynesian social democratic state that reindustrialises at pace;

Economic, political, cultural, ecological renewal.  An end to Welsh knots, Super Ponticums, Anglocentricism, and fawning elite defeatism; no more 32 'local' councils, and above all real politik in the actual national interest.  If we can "afford a God-damn supercarrier" then, why not a colossal fleet of diesel hunter killer subs and the world's largest drone strike fleet, and a quid pro quo with Germany to regain complete control of our fisheries - our reindustrialisation requires a very real military counter-threat to the Russian navy, and we need to save our environment from Spanish trawler Keynesianism;

The left cynics will note that only in Scotland does a form of Northern European bourgeois normalism constitute a revolutionary manifesto, but that is reality.

Tuesday 1 July 2014

The media Brit pack

During yesterday's twitter rammy - where YES insiders, and piqued journos sounded off against the YES movement for its coorse protesting - I took David Leask to task.  He's normally 'not the worst of them.'  That I can say that is testament to the problem.

Leask's reply is a valuable stopping off point.  He is right that I criticise an entire trade, because quite frankly that is what is going on.  The entire profession of journalism in Scotland is either overtly NO friendly, or an active part of the NO campaign.  Outside of online media, and the Sunday Herald this is exactly what is going on.

I don't know about YES HQ's media as I don't see their press releases; I suspect that maybe they are not as strong as they should be, and this is part of why they fail to get decent coverage, but I don't know that and the same certainly cannot be said for the SNP.  They produce quite brilliant press releases, day in and day out - few are ever reported.  On twitter you can often observe Unionist journos sneering about them, in a "Well we're certainly not going to report that, lol!" way. Meanwhile if Gordon Brown has a brainfart it's front page news and something for the TV studios to mull over.  The NO receptiveness of 'an entire trade' is pretty palpable at this stage and we can tell how it warps discourse in the conversations we have with people canvassing.

I've canvassed well over 4000 people since the start of this campaign.  It is very common to find people fixating on Alex Salmond in a way that is manufactured from NO messaging, believing that we won't have a currency if we vote YES which is the result of NO messaging, or that the country will be bankrupt - something which has been shown to be untrue but which is an intended goal of NO messaging.  It is much less typical to find people familiar with YES arguments.  I frequently meet people whom benefit sanctions are starving who think we're 'stronger together' and are totally unaware that the Scottish Government has pledged to end benefit sanctions.  One ten minute conversation is enough to convince almost anyone in this position to vote YES, because as soon as they hear YES arguments that relate to their lives they become YESes.  They aren't hearing or reading those arguments in the media.  The single strongest driver of whether someone is informed about the referendum is whether they use the internet to get their news.  What a damning indictment upon "an entire trade."

Part of the reason the media focusses on total shite, trivia the NO campaign wants it to focuss on, or manufactured stories (like the Rowling 'abuse'), is that the relationships between journalism, media editors, committee Scotland and the NO campaign hold the whip hand for 'the trade.'  When Lesley Riddoch asserted that nobody would be hauled over the coals for advocating a NO vote among the establishment, and we'd all shake hands and spit and gie, I found that kind of couthy warmth hard to take.  Joco it ain't, but then these people are starving my neighbours, and I'd sooner see them at the Hague than shake their hands.  Since the Labour party introduced benefit sanctions in 2009 there has been a massive explosion in hunger.  This doesn't affect the revolving doors of professional politics and the media world, and in that bubble ongoing relationships must survive momentary tensions.

As Alistair Davidson recently put it, "Professional politics are a neat affair, not always polite, but high-pressure, based on personal relationships and unwritten rules. Professional politics in Scotland is conditioned by private schools and University debating societies. It is conducted in committee rooms and over working lunches more often than in public meetings or democratic bodies[...] Perhaps the politicians, spin doctors and journalists think the referendum should be as staid and lifeless as our election campaigns have become. Perhaps they worry what will be said about them at gatherings of their social equals, or fear burning bridges that they will need intact after the vote."

This week in my scheme, the residents association has decided to hold a public meeting on how attacks on our welfare system are starving over 600 neighbours a month, and what the independence referendum means in that context.  My son attends a local playgroup.  Mothers attend who have no money at all, because of benefit sanctions.  There are regular reports of elderly people and mothers shoplifting at the local Tesco because they have no money for food.  Occassionally some truth seeps in.

Julie Webster of the Maryhill Food Bank, quoted in the Evening Times, 28 June 14:
On the whole however the independence debate conducted in the press and broadcast media seems to represent a parallel universe.  Instead of talking about the £6billion of cuts we are living through, the £4billion on the horizon, the 50,000 job losses we have experienced, and the 100,000 on the horizon it consists of posh politicians talking endless shite about whatever the NO campaign have press released that day, for them to talk endless shite about.  That's how you can get vacuous debates on STV about whether or not we are all bravehearts now (at what point does the hand wringing of elite Scotland actually become satire?).  It's why Ed Miliband can come to Scotland and spout some incredible pish for the millionth time about border posts without it receiving a big fat yawn or being publicly savaged (even tho anyone who knows *anything at all* about the EU knows that this is false, and *anyone* who has heard of the Common Travel Agreement will know that this is false - journalists are educated people; they know both of these things, but they choose to omit them).  It's why the press will dutifully report the Labour line that if we vote YES there will be 1million immigrants by 20umpty and we won't afford the state pension (journalists understand the statistics too, and they know that what is being discussed is an additional 1800 migrants per annum; they just don't have the professionalism or the human decency to report that context).

"[A]n entire trade" has decided for reasons of careerism, and elite editorial class bias to back the Union, despite the fact that the parties of Union all want 22,000 children to continue to starve, because none of them want to end benefit sanctions.  But that's not hurting posh journalists is it?

The first duty of any Government is to ensure that the people eat.  This is why Holyrood has demanded control of welfare.  Frankly if "an entire trade" had any sympathy with the ordinary people of Scotland instead of doing human interest pieces on Jim Murphy, or reporting on political has beens like Gordon Brown haiverin their latest irrelevant green ink plans for potemkin village constitutions that trade would be out there asking the people protesting at the BBC why they were there.  It would be focussing on precisely what is causing this massive rupture with the institutions of Establishment Scotland.  They would be at the local foodbank telling the people of Scotland that this was going on, interviewing affected people, and they would be asking the revolving door of rich politicians in their studios and offices just precisely what they were going to do about 260 weans starving this month around the Wyndford in Maryhill.  They are not doing that tho, are they?

What are they doing?  Clearly they are speaking for somebody.  They are echoing the fears and smears of the rich, the entitled, the landed, and the conservative fearful who to a Unionist inhabit communities with full employment, living wages, job and income security, and widespread capital and access to capital.  Why is multi-millionaire Labour donor and Better Together activist JK Rowling's risible perspective worth several days of febrile hand wringing, but Julie from the Maryhill foodbank's perspective is not leading the agenda of Scotland2014 or on the front page of the Record?  We all know why.

So here are some facts, for the journalists who think they represent Scotland accurately back to us.

2000 people in Glasgow a month are handed benefit sanctions.
One in three households in Glasgow are workless.
4.2% of Dundonians are starving.
The mode average wage in Scotland is £14,000.
3 out of 5 Scots earn less than £25,000.
2,000 freeze to death a year.
Despite the Scottish Parliament providing the funds to offset it, many landlords are still chasing poor Scots for the bedroom tax.
72,000 Scots are starving.
22,000 Scots bairns are starving.

What is on the front page of the papers today? (Or any day in the past three years).

Friday 23 May 2014

UKIP surge confuses Scottish orientalists - what it means for YES?



I wrote this thing about the rise of UKIP a couple of weeks ago, sent it to a friend for editing and to ensure my language was exact and I couldn't be pinned on some stupidity, and attacked as a closet racist by student lefties keen to play the most progressive person in the room game.  In the end I didn't publish it for fear of that dynamic.  There's a lesson in that.  It would seem pathetic not to publish it today however...

I read a thing by Iain MacWhirter today, but we often come from quite different placesIn the middle of a very decent article about how more or less the entire Scottish intelligentsia is voting Yes (he's right about that), there was a weird wee clanger: he claims that nobody in Scotland is interested in immigration.  For me this showed the kind of people MacWhirter has been hanging around with.  In Scottish working class communities I have canvassed most people are worried about immigration – it is a hegemonic concernKnocking doors, immigration is the most likely reason you will be given when someone takes issue with the Yes campaign, and it is also a reason some people give for wanting independence.

The UKIP surge in England is also about immigration – they use 'anti-EU' as code for opposing immigrants. Most people on the left avoid anti-EU politics for just this reason, and the likes of No2EU go out of their way to make it clear they oppose Eurocrats, not European immigrants. But this misses the point – UKIP voters aren't worried about Jose Barroso, and in some senses they're not really worried about immigration itself.  Anti-immigration politics are actually code for yet another phenomenon.

It has been shown consistently that UKIP's voters are further to the left on most issues than supporters of the big three parties.  They are more likely to favour nationalisation and protectionist measures.  The Labour left in particular (bear in mind, in England there is such a thing) cannot fathom what is going on, and considers UKIP a sub-Tory phenomenon. That is of course true of their origins and true of many of their activists, but is now most definitely not true of their voting base. So why are they such extreme racists?  The clue is in that last fact: their supporters HATE Westminster, HATE politics, and see it as delivering poverty and social decline.  They FAVOUR greater social protection and national state ownership.  They want controls on things that free market policies have seen the state cede control of - things like price controls, rent caps and so on.  I know only too well that UKIP's economic politics are ultra-right, so don't get stuck here; I'm most definitely not claiming that the politics of UKIP are genuinely grassroots.  But if by now the penny hasn't dropped on UKIP's support base consider this.


In normal times, the Governor of the Bank of England fixes the rate of unemployment, and the rate of wage increases.  He (it's always a 'he') does this by a number of mechanisms, but interest rate targeting is a key one.  Mark Carney is explicit about doing this if you are prepared to read beyond the illiterate froth of the non-financial papers.  Sado-monetarism is nothing new, but at the moment the Governor is prepared to tolerate a rate of unemployment of 7%.  The ruling class call this group of people knowingly consigned to the scrap head, the "Equilibrium Unemployment,” the rate of unemployment at which wages don't increase. Incidentally, their theories here are remarkably similar to what Marxists term the "Surplus Army of Labour."

What does this fixed rate of human misery mean, though?

​​
Well, 7% is not the rate of adults without a job.  It is the rate of adults considered to be active right now *in* the labour market, without a job.  All those people who are sick, or full time carers or in receipt of disability benefits, or in full time education and so on: they are not in that 7%.  We've got in the region of 9 million people chasing less than 500,000 jobs, most of which are created in London and SE England.  That breaks down as just under 6.5 million 'underemployed' (people in crap part time jobs, or zero hours arrangements and so on) and around 2.5 million unemployed people chasing those 450,000 or so jobs inside the M25 orbital. That's why 1 in 3 households in Glasgow with a person of working age resident are classed as workless.  Glasgow is not unique.  There are many places in this "United” Kingdom which are black holes of permanent mass unemployment.  Great swathes of despair pock mark these islands.

So New Labour...  well actually, they made this problem worse.  A lot worse.  The last Labour government allowed 6.5 million immigrants into the UK: a little over a 10% increase in the population.  Some returned to their country of origin when the shit hit the fan on the grand New Labour financial deregulation experiment, but many did not, hence the year on year growing population - the birth rate among UK born "white (some British nationality)" is less than 2 per couple.  During the boom there were antagonisms over schools in England, over housing policy and so on.  But it was actually refugees not Polish barristas and Latvian builders that caused most of the community 'beefs.' Those sentiments were most closely associated with the neighbours of these refugees and emerged out of the perceived injustice of differences in financing for social housing and refugee accommodation.  Since the crash, that's changed.  Now people are really having a pop at the skilled immigrant workers, even though they are paying British taxes and paying for British social welfare.

Why?

For a start, because social welfare is being ripped up.  In fact the entire social contract is being revoked wholesale.  Nary a day goes by when there isn't some sort of new attack on the concept of access to justice, access to education, access to healthcare, access to advancement, or access to the means of life itself.  Imagine you're a full time mature student at a university in England. Or unemployed, with kids in college. Or pursuing a claim for wrongful dismissal.

Imagine it?  Place yourself in your one bedroom flat in the East Midlands.  You're fucked.  Go home.  Do not pass go.  Do not collect £72 a week.  These things can no longer be done.  None of them, really, without incredible hardship.  We are already *in* a crazed and inhuman market society thanks to New Labour, finished by the Tories.  Only the Scottish Parliament is mitigating any of this insanity, and that is only lag, waiting for the whip hand of Westminster cuts to the Scottish budget to force the issue.  Only a YES will get us out of this spiralling Hell.  But most people do not, deep down, really believe that this is happening.  Social democracy and the welfare state are so hegemonic that people believe they still exist despite the evidence of their destruction.  They have to EXPERIENCE the death of these things to feel the difference.  Politics can be like muscle memory in that sense.

Those of us familiar with scheme politics for instance, know all too well the battle cry of the frustrated social democrat: "Pull thae hooses doon mate.  We want back and front doors." The reality that there will be no back and front door nirvana is invisible. The common assumption that the social contract is forever and indivisible is probably the biggest barrier to organising for change. 
The popularity of UKIP's anti-immigration politics, while appalling, is not driven by an upsurge in racist hatred.  There is not some mad ethnocentrict campaign of race hate aimed at 'the Polak, the Bulgar, the Magyar and the Slav' going on in the UK, despite the best efforts of men in bomber jackets with a clever social media strategy.  But from the middle class discourse you get on immigration in the liberal media and in the YES campaign you would think that there is some escalating racial hatred going on, only held in check by occasional wafts of privileged liberal smugness.

The Labour elite supposes, in complete blindness to their decades long campaign of establishment racism, (whisper 'Islamic fundamentalism' again Tony?) that the shared demographic bias between Yes and UKIP – both find their greatest support in the working class – means that the Yes movement is a sort-of Scottish UKIP.  It's not just them though: the Tory “Vote No Borders” astroturfing campaign assumed “unpolished voters” (their word) will be motivated to swing behind the UK if presented with Orangeish reaction and sneering at “politics.”  Both views are a trap.  But so is the smug.

Those concerned about immigration in Scotland will not vote UKIP.  Angry Unionists pushed to the right by the referendum campaign will vote UKIP, because that's the British thing to do.  That's it for UKIP in Scotland.  Largely anti-immigration working class voters will continue to back the pro-immigration SNP and pro-immigration Yes prospectus.  National political culture plays a role, but here's something for the middle class comfortable multiculturalists to chew on: anti-immigration sentiment is typically associated with people who have left wing views on social policy.  I'll say that again.  Anti-immigration sentiment is typically associated with people who have left wing views on social policy.

So enough preamble, what's the bloody point?

FULL EMPLOYMENT.
FULL EMPLOYMENT.
FULL EMPLOYMENT.

When someone starts a rant at a door to you with "I'm not a racist but..."  And then doesn't say anything explicitly racist, but rather goes on about how everyone they know is unemployed, fucked and struggling, and they feel desperately insecure and frightened about the future, maybe it's worth pushing them deeper on the question.  Yes some people may just dislike anyone from East of the Rhine or some other mad bollocks, but most of those people are voting No.  There are always mad wee reactionaries with their own special green ink plans and answers for everything and I reckon there are just as many of them in leafy shires and gilded bungalows.

But when it's the main issue on the doorstep, and coming up again and again and again and again and again among people who are really very favourable to independence, and really very favourable to a thing they term "socialism," there is something else going on.  If a community is hit with 50% unemployment (many Glasgow communities match this sort of profile), concern about labour market competition is bound to be hegemonic.  This is especially true when even those at death's door are being hounded by ATOS out of their death beds to die on a zero hours contract.

In England anti-EU is code for anti-immigration, which is code for closed borders and full employment.  This is why Labour cannot win the next election in England.  They do not support a "referendum", which means they do not support a slow down in immigration, which means in the eyes of the voter they do not support jobs for working class people.  In Scotland the situation is more complicated, but there is the same overwhelming desire in working class communities for full employment.  It is so utterly hegemonic as a concern that the first person to promise and deliver on it will win it all.  Nevermind the EU, nevermind immigration.  These things are ABOUT something else.

Eating at hip new restaurants and being able to buy every food on God's earth might be very jolly for the middle classes who are 'pro-immigration.'  But these same people live in a Scotland of largely all white Scottish commuter belt suburbs and towns which enjoy full employment and family wages.  There is a profound disconnect in this country between the haves and the have nots.  The baby boomers that bought their council houses and spawned bungalows and 2.4 cars Scotland do not face the same pressures that many working class communities do.  This is why reindustrialisation is so important.  A finance-based economy can never ever hope to deliver full employment.

We need to stop treating anti-immigration sentiment as being caused by individual racism, and the moral failings of the poor.  It just comes across as patronising smugness. At root, it is a bunch of all "white Scottish" middle class orientalists hectoring working class people who actually already live in multicultural communities, as opposed to just going out to fruity restaurants.  There is not some mad Enoch Powellist revival going on in England, and we are not immune to the same collectivist protectionist impulses enervating the UKIP rise in England, because the exact same pressures are placing intolerable strain on working class families, many of whom are struggling to eat.  So let's get real, and let's start demanding full employment through reindustrialisation.

Wednesday 14 May 2014

Unpicking Labour's living wage claims

The thing is the Scottish Government haven't blocked the living wage. 

This was explained on yesterday's newsnight

Public sector workers already get the living wage. The Scottish Government brought in a bill some time ago guaranteeing this.  Labour did not do this while in office.  They could easily have done so.

The Government has sent a memorandum to private sector employers saying they want the living wage to be paid.  It's more than a little implicit that they will have a prejudice in procurement for companies that pay it.  They have stated they want to write it into procurement law as well but they consider it legally dodgy to do so because of EU competition law.  EU law definitely allows the Government to ensure that one project or another must be living wage, but the Government sought legal advice from the EU commission on the matter and they have received a letter back from an EU Commissioner stating that the Government cannot make living wage mandatory in procurement. 

Labour wanted the Government to put it into law anyway risking a legal challenge within the EU. The Scottish Government has been arguing for this to be clarified and changed at a European level to allow them to make it mandatory. 

There isn't really a huge gulf between Labour and the SNP on this issue it seems. Labour's contention is that Boris Johnson has made living wage mandatory in London. 

The British Government however has publicly warned him this risks an EU legal challenge, and the Scottish Government believes it is in breach of EU law, based on their own legal advice and the direction from the EU Commissioner. 


Maybe Labour are calling this right and nobody will drag Scotland through the EU courts; I can see an argument for this, but this is not a disagreement of principles, just one of tactics.  However Labour have condemned the Scottish Government for doing exactly what they are currently calling for.  They have attacked the Scottish Government for minimum alcohol pricing legislation precisely because it has been challenged by EU competition legislation.  Or as Jackie Bailie put it"Perhaps if the SNP spent more time on the substance than the spin they might come up with policy that was actually competent - not half-baked policies that are wide open to legal challenge."

Maybe the Government doesn't want to pick anymore EU battles? I don't know, but there is nothing to stop the Government demanding living wage in the private sector for any particular projects if it so chooses. Campaigners for the living wage across the board in government procurement have something to focus on there that is much more productive than vindictive Labour nat bashing and empty posturing when there is little of substance here actually being argued over.

From SNP Euro Elections Manifesto
Last month the First Minister was in Brussels arguing for a change to EU law to ensure that the living wage could not be challenged in Europe were the Government to write it into procurement legislation.  He noted that this kind of contribution to the EU is one that an independent Scotland could make that could improve the lot for millions of workers across the EU.  In fact the SNP place it as the second priority for the Scottish national interest in their EU manifesto. 

In light of this there is something very petty about the rhetoric games the Labour Party and its press allies are playing with regards to the living wage.  They could just as easily be working with or to pressure the Scottish Government to deliver living wage jobs in actual government contracts with private providers.  That would have a real impact.  But then that might damage the ability of Labour Councils which routinely use cheap private sector providers, often with links to Labour figures, for construction and service delivery.


Monday 24 March 2014

2 types of YES; 3 types of NO

Some thoughts on types of YESes and types of NOs.

The YESes:-

Nationalists: people who believe in the rights of nations, believe Scotland is one (lots of varieties of perspectives on how and why), and believe in national self-determination for places which are nations and that.

Nationalists often talk about civic nationalism, meaning no ethnic essentialist basis to this perspective.  There are variations on the theme.  Ultras believe in independence as the main thing, be all and end all - starting point of politics; some of the Nationalists would argue if a NO vote was a better deal that was Scotland's self-interest and we should vote NO.  But it depends.  The point is people who are of this sort are all voting YES, because a NO vote is not in the Scottish national interest, and that's about 25% or so of Scotland (although typically not a ruling class perspective, and more common in poorer Scotland - for a variety of historical reasons that are not worth going into a length here; as one nationalist put it in Scots: "Scotland for the minkers!").  Because Scotland does not have state power there are few if any ruling class voices for the Scottish national interest.  Those that exist tend in the main to be exporting industrialists whose interests are at variance with London's spivland (£65billion of UK tax receipts come from the City of London: it is practically impossible for a Westminster Government to democratically win a mandate for a war economy which would allow for a restructuring of British capital which would be in those exporting and manufacturing industrialists interests).

The left: from middle of the road Herald reading social democrats to hard left Trotskyists, people who aren't social conservatives and are left of centre are increasingly voting YES because it's clear that the UK cannot provide a better social deal, or even stand still with some national consensus armistice line in the battle between classes.  For many Scots the Britain they believed in started in 1945, and begun to be dismantled following the pauchlin of the 79 referendum and the defeat of the unions.  Osborne is simply finishing the job, as would Balls (who pledges to stick to Osborne's plans).

Unionist attempts to create a left NO position appear to only have any resonance with the mere 5000 people who make up the ailing Scottish Labour Party.  Even the likes of Ian Davidson, the 'Chair Tube' of social media opprobrium for his Westminster crusade against independence admit that the referendum is happening because the last Labour government was a crap red Tory government and that the right wing crapness is an unbroken pattern since 1979.  They don't even believe their ain haivers on the left NO standpoint Lamont is pretending they have adopted.


The NOs.

Identity: "A'm British."  Flags, nations, borders, glory, empire, the protestant ascendancy.  Take your pick.  100 varieties of flag worship as the paramount perspective under a Butchers apron.  This perspective of fealty is similar to the phenomenon of working class Republicans in the USA, or UKIP voters in England.  It's not necessarily implicit that said persons are right of centre, but reason is not the cause of affiliation here.  The census showed quite spectacularly how irrelevant this viewpoint is.  In no part of Scotland does it clock in at more than 15% of the locals.

Big Britainism: the kind of view that identity, where you come from, is important, tells you something about yourself, but while Scotland is a nice place to live, with a colourful history, Britain is best.  Again this is a fringe view, but from the various appeals from the right wing of the commentariat for the NO campaign to talk about Britain more we can fairly assume that it's a popular view in Morningside.  It's certainly been speculated as a reason for some of the upper middle class' attachment to the Union (of job prospects, cheap Edinburgh to London flights, and interesting career ladders).  But that's your NO voting Scottish and British right there.  Your "I'm a proud Scot," sort of sophist.

Cannae-dae-its: the 90 minute nationalist is why Scottish civic nationalism is hegemonic in Scotland, but support for a YES is not.  So many people you canvass will tell you how poor Scotland is (Scotland which has 60% of Europe's oil and gas, a potential of 200 gigawatts of renewables generation, an agrisurplus of between 1/5 and 1/4 per annum despite turning over 1/3 of the country into desert, a Scotland that has the world's 3rd largest fishery and comparable coastline to world powers like China).  Cannae-dae-its see the ocean of poverty around them, and if they work they fear tax rises, and if they don't they fear middle class reaction against their perceived subsidies ending the high life of the JSA gravy train.  Language is a factor. As is mass unemployment in Glasgow and West Central Scotland.  Inferiorisation sets in with the bairn's first contact with the state, and continues for many as a lifelong passion (I have been told by a Labour activist and bedroom tax victim that the very tedious bairn's reading group book written in Scots, "Jordan's New Jaiket" is a bid to warp the minds of the young and make nationalists of them with the use of subversive "slang" - that dastardly Salmond and his banal reversal of the policy of actively crushing Scotland's native languages!).  Britain's hectoring hegemony is Unionist gloom and Westminster threats 24/7 on every channel and in every publication in Scotland.  But this is the chunk that could win a NO vote.  The actual Britishers in Scotland number less than 30% even in assimilado Embra.  The cannae-dae-its are usually want-tae-dae-its but hinna-been-convinced-we-cans.

Labour's tax chimera: totemic pish and scunner-extremism

The Labour Party and the 50p tax chimera.

Redistribution means squeeze the rich until the pips squeak right?  So per se bringing back the 50p tax rate (which affects those earning over £150,000: less than a fraction of 1% of Scotland's workforce) to spend on bringing the poor up seems like a left wing policy, eh no?  Only when the Labour Party shouts it from the rooftops, it isnae.
Johann Lamont, showing off her stage props after having a pop
at FM Salmond and his wife's lack of bairns: the loving mother.

Labour mean to bring back Brown's hated 10p tax.  Ed Balls has said he will.  In order to not show up the Lamont fudge at the weekend Labour had to hastily rework Devo-Nano to allow a future Scottish Government to bring in the tax rate (which because Labour is devolving 15p of income tax would actually *RAID* the Scottish budget to plug the 5p gap) affecting the lowest earners.  That's just under about 1/3 of Scots to be badly affected (the mode average wage is 14k; many many more earn much less).  So easily up to a poorest third or so, in Scotland's low wage, "retail regeneration" central belt 'economy.'  If someone can tell me the projected tax take from that measure I'd be much obliged, but it's likely to be a lot lot more clawed from the meagre earnings of the very poor than the £10million won back from the rich.

The Tories abolished Brown's 10p tax, and brought the threshold for paying tax to 10 grand, after the liberals lobbied for it.  Labour want to bring the 10p rate back; it remains to be seen just what the threshold will be.  Miliband has only haivered equivocally about it.  Under Brown people were liable for a 10% rate of income tax on earnings after a stupidly low income (just over £5000).  If you earned as little as £8000 a year you would be liable to pay tax on much of that.  Imagine what that means.  Being poor is really really expensive.  By contrast George Osborne's move to lift a whole section of the very poor out of tax altogether (admittedly a liberal policy, but the Tories aren't bidding to be the 'party of the workers' without at least a figleaf) paints him in crimson red against a hammer and siccle background in comparison to Balls' vicious plans (which Devo-Nano was hastily rewritten to accomodate).

If somebody can point out how Labour's 10p tax plans are part of some bold left wingness I'd very much like to hear about it.  What I see is a totemic policy (the 50p rate) which will affect next to naffall people, generate just £10million in Scotland, as a figleaf for the policy of bringing in the 10p tax which will plunge hundreds of thousands of working poor Scots, ironically made richer under a Tory Chancellor (some former Labour Government, eh?), into deeper poverty out of some 'national unity' BritNat 'One Nationism' where all must make sacrifices (but especially those least able).

As for the super rich - the Tony Blairs and Gordon Browns of this world and their mates in the City of London: people earning megabucks - they can choose whether to pay tax or not.  We're forever told Gordon Brown gives all his tidy earnings to charity.  Indeed he does: his own.  This exempts him from tax, but as Tory blogger Guido Fox uncovered, Brown's 'expenses' for running his office and jetting about the world lecturing and hectoring, are of the order of £10,000 a day.  How it works for the super-rich is like this: corporation Brown or corporation Blair takes a fee as a contractor.  The company or charitable trust or shell company is paid for their 'services', then the money passes thru various opaque charities or shell companies in dribs and drabs, sometimes in kind, or in capital, and said millionaire gets an expense account from one of their many firms, indemnified from tax by their army of accountants and PR men, with almost no limit on how much they can spend without paying a single penny to HMRC.  This is entirely legal in the UK at the moment.  For instance in one year Tony Blair plc (or whatever egotistical name he calls it) earned £7million, and paid £0 and 0p to HMRC.  A working mum in Shettleston, Craigmillar or the Hilltoun cannot afford an army of accountants to turn her into a corporation, so the pittance she earns will be liable to be taxed but that's OK because the super rich (who only ever pay tax on their earnings for PR purposes anyway) are now going to be hit with a 50p tax rate which most will never pay, because they don't have to.

This isn't redistribution.  It's a dastardly scheme to present scunner-extremism of a right wing variety, which even George Osborne disdains, as progressive.  Yet again the Labour party wants to make the pips squeak, in housing schemes and pokey tenement flats across Scotland.