Why YES lost: a reply to Gerry Hassan's claims in the Daily Record

Gerry Hassan writes:-

• A second Scots indyref is likely but not inevitable. It will only happen when it is winnable, Yes is in a significant lead, and importantly, detailed work has been done to improve and make more credible than last time the indy offer. My Sunday column.(Gerry Hassan on a second independence referendum - 'A new vote on an independent Scotland must be economically honest - not based on fantasy oil prices writes GERRY HASSAN.')

  
  
• Nick Durie This is dishonest, and echoes the Unionist crowing with hindsight. The SNP's projected oil revenues relied on a price that was midway between the OBR projection and the Department for Energy and Climate Change projection. The Daily Record might lap up such Unionist sophistry but the facts say something different.

  
  
• Gerry Hassan Good to know you are thinking Nick; 'Unionist crowing' to point out as someone who voted Yes the limits of SNP indy offer and the complete lack of any post-indyref reappraisal. Yes lost and deserved to lose: welcome to reality.
  
  
  
• Nick Durie You didn't address my point.
  
• Nick Durie You claim that oil projections were a fantasy. Why were they less than those issued by the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change?
  
  
• Nick Durie The fact of the matter is that oil price projections were based on market trends and market fundamentals, and they did not anticipate that Saudi Arabia would flood the energy market to destabilise Russia and collapse US fracking. This was not something the British Government anticipated either, and claiming some kind of post facto foreknowledge while adopting an "It was rubbish" Unionist frame is not the same thing as providing a credible critque. Neither a Scottish currency, nor attempted accession to the Euro is without problems; furthermore neither of those two options does anything to reassure those worried that their savings and investments, denominated in Sterling, would be secure. That was afterall the whole point of the "You're not getting the Pound" frame - to terrorise that cohort that held savings and investments denominated in Sterling. Simply saying 'we won't have Sterling anymore' does not resolve or de-weaponise that attack line; it actually makes it stronger. People were not worried about the future of Sterling in Scotland because of some haivers about central banks. They were worried about their savings and investments.
• Gerry Hassan Everything about the economics of the indyref offer was a fantasy: oil price, economic projections, currency, Treasury/Bank of England straightjacket. And all only made sense in light of SNP leadership thinking they would lose and instead engage in a vote maximalisation strategy. Then late on they convinced themselves they could win.
  
• Nick Durie This is a media bubble argument which owes more to the self-congratulatory discourse of the Unionist commentariat than it does to any extant evidence. The currency strategy was determined by a council of economists, not politicians. The SNP chose simply to follow it; whether their political calculus determined it was good to follow it or not, that strategy was, as you know, written by some very globally notable economists. The oil price was essentially a UK government and Scottish government consensus. The shared central bank is a threat, a gun to the head of Whitehall, and a determination to give the spivs a golden bridge, rather than collapse the London banking centre by immediately denominating Scottish energy in another currency. To claim otherwise to any of that is to fail to engage with the evidence.
  
• Nick Durie "Yes lost and deserved to lose: welcome to reality."
  
  This assumes that the YES offer was why YES lost. I don't think that's particularly materialist. In many ways YES did deserve to lose, but I would argue it lost because the formal YES and SNP campaign concentrated on public relations and fought a very good election campaign, but the depth of citizen engagement with the issue left that approach looking top down and shallow. Citizens were interrogating the question with a zealous seriousness that is not analogous to an electoral cycle contest. The wider mass movement of the YES campaign came to understand that, and had to make up for the shortcomings of the offical and largely corporate style campaign. Consider how much more seriously the Wee Blue Book took the reader than the official YES literature, Your Future, which notionally filled the same role. The latter was put together by a PR company. The former was written in a referenced academic style where the reader could go and check the footnotes. Yet YES HQ reacted to these on the ground efforts with umbrage, and often deliberately sabotaged the logistics of the on the gound campaign, purely to maintain the PR voice of the campaign 
  
  [In one notorious particular instance of this YES' point man for 'organising' of the YES movement, Ross Greer, got into a fight of his choosing with a local YES campaign group because they were distributing leaflets advertising Scotland's most popular, and pro-independence, political news website Wings Over Scotland; YES HQ continued to oppose the distribution of the Wee Blue Book, also produced by Wings Over Scotland, despite activists finding both that this was the single most effective written introduction to the arguments for independence, and the widespread desire of local YES groups to get more serious and comprehensive literature to the switherin voters because of the feedback they had been getting from these voters.  It appeared that YES HQ ignored that feedback, because little was done to distribute non-PR based publications in this kind of format. 
  
  The pointless, and often apparently petulent, self-sabotaging of the actual YES movement by Ross Greer and others at YES HQ caused serious rifts within the campaign and damaged the credibility of the campaign centre among those it sought, wholly inexpertly, to direct.  We now know from Greer that this petulence from the centre went further, and that, without any accountability, disciplinary procedure or published code of conduct, Ross Greer and Jonathan Mackie operated personal blacklists of campaigners they personally didn't like; we will perhaps never know the extent of this practice, but it typifies the strained relationship between the failing campaign centre and the more successful huge movement that had built up often in despite of it.]. 
  
  To some extent the upbeat smugness of the PR campaign did however act as a late stage force multiplier on the late stage undecideds, but by this point the official campaign had already burnt many bridges with its actual on the ground logistics. It was the absence of these logistics that prevented YES from mobilising its own base, and saw many YES activists late on in the campaign do largely frivolous things. The infrastructure of the official campaign prattled on and castigated those people, but they were not plugged in to their official campaign precisely because it had been so incompetent at building and directing a peoples movement*, and had therefore totally lost the respect and capacity to mobilise its own potential logistics, nor did it have the vision to do so. This was why YES lost by 180,000 votes. It had little or nothing to do with the actual offer.
  
  *[At no point did the YES HQ employ or seek the advice of professional trade union or community organisers with experience of building mass movements; there were a number of such people involved in the grassroots of the YES campaign, many of them with decades of experience in trade union organising drives, or community coalition building.  Their skills were never called upon or utilised in any kind of systematic way.  For those who have seen the effects of a trade union or community organising drive with a staff led organising component, this seems a serious ommission, and perhaps explains why following campaign "launch" events drawing in hundreds of potential leaders. in major towns and cities, often nothing happened as a followup to engage with this base for 12 months or more.  The entire approach to the logistics of engagement played a less important role for Greer and others notionally tasked with organising the logistics, than the question of brand maintenance and PR, which in the end proved less significant to the result than the number of one to one conversations the actual movement was having, independent of any direction or cajoling from the YES centre, with undecided voters.]

Scottish Greens: From 'monetary' haivers to 'too wee, too poor, too stupid'

Green noteable Ross Greer responding to serious questions raised after Caroline Lucas MP voted
against Home Rule after "doing best to reflect views of colleagues in @scotgp @patrickharvie"

Today was the day that the Scottish Green Party policing of opposing Home Rule, and all that this fiscal conservatism implies in terms of enforcing austerity, came to the proper attention of the democracy movement.  This follows a vote earlier in the week in the House of Commons where Green MP Caroline Lucas voted with the Tories to defeat an SNP motion calling for the phased introduction of full taxation powers, which would have given Scotland Home Rule.

Months previously Scottish Green Party Convenor Patrick Harvie MSP had maundered in the National and for Commonspace on why the Greens (probably) opposed "Full Fiscal Autonomy."  However the use of the jargon and his non-committal 'this needs more work' style of delivery meant most activists and democracy supporters eyes glazed over before they could come to understand the implications of this apparently technical statement.

The Greens initial supposed point was that devolving control over taxation to Holyrood would leave us hostage to whatever the Bank of England decided to do about our currency and interest rates.  They made some rather curious points about an inability to borrow which need teasing out because they are utter haivers.

Giving Scotland full control over taxation would not, in and of itself, allow Scotland to borrow money.  The UK government issues debt by selling government bonds it creates which are called "gilts" (the UK has a funny special word for government bonds, which are basically government IOUs - which can themselves be bought and sold, or speculated on - because the UK is a fousty old empire and likes to have stupid words of its own for something every country does; they are no different from any other government bonds).  There are no proposals on the table or recently defeated proposals off the table to be able to allow Scotland to issue these "gilts" in its own name.

That *doesn't quite* mean Scotland can't borrow money tho.  The new Forth Brig has been financed by money from the "Scottish Futures Trust" (SFT), which is basically a series of loan deals between the Scottish government and individual private sector lenders, on negotiated terms.  These aren't government bonds tho, because they are specific to the projects, or bound by individual contractual arrangements, whereas bonds are a much more universal and therefore more 'liquid' asset.  The Scottish Government has been trying to create its own system of regular debt financing and bring these debts into a more regularised system of debt and interest along the lines of bonds markets.  That's what the whole SFT thing is about, and why it's not just a series of private finance deals.  But here is the rub, unless there is enough debt issued on behalf of the government, it is not possible for the government to treat this as a sustainable market for government finance in the way that UK gilts, or the more pedestrian (and less up itself) named US Treasury bonds are.  There needs to be enough IOUs floating around for international investors to care about or trade in them, and for a standardised rate of interest to emerge on what would then be effectively real Scottish Government bonds to emerge.  I.e. we do not need to access Westminster's gilt markets to issue government bonds on behalf of the Holyrood government, and do real government borrowing; it is simply a question of scale.  Roughly around £10billion needs to be issued in debts before there would be a secure market for Scottish government borrowing.  It wouldn't necessarily have the same rate of interest as UK government borrowing, but it would have *a* regular rate of interest, and it would allow us to *END AUSTERITY.*

The problem at the moment is that the Scottish Government's budget sits at about £30billion.  There is no collateral for the Scottish Government to issue that amount of debt.  However under Home Rule this position is reversed.  If we are able to access the money raised in Scotland, and spend it in Scotland (or on the 'shared services'/tribute payments towards our glorious Union), we would be able to establish a secure Scottish bonds market, and therefore be able to *completely end austerity*, within the Union.  The Scottish Green perspective that this is risky within a currency union and so forth omits that at the present moment our economy and society *is being destroyed* by Westminster's austerity programme.  The Greens position then starts to seem like an awfully theoretical splitting of hairs when action is needed now.  In effect voting against Home Rule amounts to voting for continuing austerity.  How is this preferable?  Any risk incurred through having a shared currency with Westminster is also a risk for the Whitehall state, and that also has the benefit of encouraging the British state to start to see Scotland as better off independent anyway.  This twiddling of thumbs while the children of benefit claimants starve was enough to send a snell scunner through the movement by itself, however in defending their dippit policy the Greens's leadership have been rather more revealing about their attitudes towards Scotland than perhaps they at first realise.

Cos obviously if we controlled our own taxes, and had the ability to
borrow they'd have to call in the IMF, right?  Is Patrick Harvie's
twitter account now being run by Peter Jones from the Scotsman?

When Greens like Ross Greer start to talk about *PHASED* tax devolution to Holyrood (which has all these advantages I've spelt out) as 'enforcing austerity' they start to sound very much like Labour, and one careerist Greer becomes another careerist Dugdale merging into a monotone cacophony of self-doubting cringing verbiage, straining to douse any last hope beneath a blah blah of identikit 'realism.' 

And yet the Greens are asking for SNP members to lend them their second vote in the forthcoming Holyrood elections on a constitutional change ticket?  Perhaps 'too wee, too poor, too stupid' is not quite the amazing chat up line it's cracked up to be?  Can someone tell the leader.  Under pressure to defend his party's vacuous policy of enforcing Tory spending at Holyrood to avoid 'risk,' Patrick Harvie let the mask slip. 

There is no doubt the many thousands of new members who joined the Greens in the aftermath of the referendum did so because the Greens were in favour of independence and autonomy for Scotland.  Perhaps it is time they started to rein in a leadership that seems on the face of it to have been exposed as preferring Unionist managerialism to real autonomy and broken down into a paroxysm of cringing at Scotland's economy.  The issues at stake - the lives of our poorest citizens - are too important to allow the Greens' feart managerialist leadership to allow our movement to fracture into self-defeating Scotch cringe and Unionism Lite posturing.  It is time they were called out for opposing democracy and autonomy by their own members.  Holyrood needs Home Rule, and we need to end austerity.  Trying to separate these immediate demands from the democracy struggle can only weaken our movement.

I have become the "unacceptable face" of Scottish nationalism

I have just had the bizarre and unexpected experience of becoming the unacceptable face of "Scottish nationalism."

If you have united Ross Greer and Stuart Campbell in condemnation of you it is worth taking a step back.

I am a little confused that journos from the mighty Daily Record consider my words so noteworthy they are worthy of retweeting, but for the record what I wrote was the following. (see right)

I am sorry if my intemperate tone has caused offence to the wrong parties.  Genuinely.  I am.  My intent was to communicate the following points.

1. The journalist Aidan Kerr was once considered a local stalwart of the forces of progressive social change, and democracy for Scotland.  He was elected leader of a student nationalist association.

2. As as insider Kerr developed a "map" - a picture of the social relationships, and the stories, anecdotes and power relationships between individuals within the democracy movement.

3. Kerr abandonned his apparently heartfelt beliefs when he became a professional journalist, and began writing scurrilous articles in support of the British establishment, for money.

4. This insider information, coupled with his willingness to surrender his principles for money has made Kerr dangerous.  The ultimate validation of this is the extent to which the Depute Editor for the Record is working his socks off to hype Kerr's output on social media.  People in the democracy movement should beware of such individuals, as they maintain links and sources of information, but they have no principles and are ultimately interested in money first and foremost.

This was the extent of my point.  Had I expressed it less trenchantly, or in the post modern 'ironic' way, I doubt very much the noble Aidan Kerr would be soliciting the views of the Green candidate for East Dunbartonshire.

Let me explain why I reacted so hostilely to Kerr's latest (now frontpage) attempts to troll for the Daily Record.

1. During the course of canvassing I have met a great many people who - as a result of the system of benefit sanctions Kerr, now a Unionist, upholds - could not feed their children.  In one discussion in Possil I met a woman with three kids who had not eaten in days, who was intent on voting NO, because in her eyes Scotland was worth nothing.  She voted YES, after I had spoken to her.  Her understanding of which parliament controlled which powers and who was enacting which policy was poor.  She had been reading the Unionist red top newspapers that Kerr now plies his trade for.  The same Unionism had handed down to her a benefit sanction of three months with no money, the cause of which she still did not know or understand.  Kerr has joined in this system of misinformation, exclusively for the money, against his previous principles.  Meantime in the month of August 2014 my residents association held a crisis meeting because over 600 people in my local area had relied on food parcels between April and May.  By October that number was up to 1000.  My community voted YES overwhelmingly, but people like Kerr changed their allegiance when the money flowed the right way.

I know how I feel about this.  It makes me intemperate and angry.  I refuse to apologise about being angry about such naked injustice, or towards those who can react dispassionately towards such evil and vindictive things, or ignore the causes of them, when Scotland's second largest red top flashes pound notes.

2. People like Kerr have deep roots, which they will use as contacts.  Kerr has his defenders in the movement, who will defend him every bit as vociferously as David Clegg.  Clegg now considers Kerr's attack pieces frontpage news.  Clegg's paper is one of the primary institutions upholding food poverty, reaction, and two faced concern for poverty.  Lots of pathos, with an exhortation to vote for monetarism.  Call me an extremist every bit as much as you like, but I personally consider that seedy in the extreme.

3. Which is worse - being an intemporate mouth on social media with an audience of a few hundred fellow travellers, or writing a scurrilous piece of divisive and disingenuous claptrap which enters the households of 300,000 Scots and tells them to know their place?

4. Ross Greer and Stuart Campbell united on the same side - can't be doing half bad, eh. ;p

So mea culpa, and I'm sorry for using the wrong tone, and being very shouty.  I am human and stupid.  But that doesn't mean we should be taken for fools.

The Serpent's Egg and the Brown Plague

“No one understands better than the people of this land how a severely depressed economy, combined with a ritual national humiliation and unending hopelessness, can hatch the serpent’s egg within its society. When I return home tonight, I will find a country where the third-largest party is not a neo-nazi party, but a nazi party.” -- Yanis Varoufakis

All Scottish Europeans need to understand that we live within a wider context than purely our relations within England's empire.

Europe is now on the brink.  This is an epochal time.  States and empires may fall or change hands, and coups and revolutions have already taken places as a result of the ongoing economic crisis, and the misery our corrupt liberal rulers have inflicted with austerity.

Greece' third largest political party, the Nazi "Golden Dawn".

Detailing the insignia of new government militas in the Ukraine,
who deliberately evoke the iconography of Ukrainian Nazis during
World War 2. The US installed Ukrainian coup regime is a mixture
of Nazis and billionaire gangsters and their henchmen. It is currently
carpet bombing and shelling housing schemes, and running paramilitary
death squads in the East of the state for the crime of opposing the coup,
and favouring democratic elections to decide the country's future.

 "You cannot promote nazism in one country and suppose that it will stay within that country’s borders. The wave of Nazism spreads to all, overstepping boundaries. That’s the reason they called Nazism “The Brown Plague.” Nazism must be stopped at the distant approaches, lest it arrive in your house. [...] Should anyone suppose that one can simply ignore Ukrainian fascism, and pay no attention to it, he is utterly in error. The nature of Nazism is such that it takes being ignored as encouragement, even as an acknowledgement of its strength. Nazism is never local; it can only root, and grow. Therefore the only way with Nazism is an active bitter struggle against it." - Open letter to Angela Merkel from veterans of Stalingrad.
 
In England, and Wales, there is a return to 'David Stirling style' end of empire chauvinist nostalgia mixed with a bit of Enoch Powell style imperial racism, in the service of some forces in the City of London.

In Scotland the spectre of Metternich, while currently a distant discordant and unpopular voice, is gathering pace, with certain Unionists rallying against "appeasement."  Currently precocious, a rout of the Scottish Government would provide the conditions necessary for just such an approach.  Putting democracy back in its box in Scotland (when Unionists discuss 'winning the peace,' that is of course what they mean) would require a crackdown and a linked demoralisation of the democracy movement.  There are those who consider this political possibility feverish hyperbole, citing the UK as a liberal democracy where freedom of thought, speech and action are cherished norms.  They would do well to observe the practices of the UK when it faces existential threat, and have a cursory swatch of the past 50 years of history in these islands.  The UK is perfectly capable of running death squads, interning dissidents, or executing those it considers a threat to security.  What has been done before, in our lifetimes, in the hinterland of the state we live in, can be done again.

It's always helpful in assessing political "possibles" to find out if there are any advocates of a particular approach.  It turns out ending "appeasement" for the Jocks is actually quite popular with the grassroots of Unionism and the right of the Whitehall regime.  No appeasement, and an iron fist state is now a popular message among the enemies of political and economic democracy in these islands.  It is not part of any centrist liberal party's official programme, but UKIP advocate such an approach, and along with the reactionaries of the DUP, they may yet be in government before the next Holyrood election.

We as a continent face a choice.  We can embrace the Green New Deal, and win greater economic democracy, or we can push regimes into reaction and outright fascism, by forcing their citizens into penury and desperate hopelessness.

There are those who argue that the proposals of Sinn Fein, the SNP, Syriza, Podemos, Plaid Cymru, the English Greens and other parties who would kill austerity are insufficiently radical, do not address fundamentals and so on.  There is no doubt that they are often right, or at least partially correct in their specific concerns.  There is no doubt too that space created by discrediting these parties of a reformed Europe would allow a yet more radical challenger, a less centrist voice, to emerge and articulate these demands.  Again this is true.  But political space in an era of revolution (no less a reactionary than Iain Duncan Smith terms our times such), where the centre of politics is collapsing due to the generalised misery it is enforcing, is also a crisis for the left.  History has shown that where the left fails to capture the centre in times such as these, the Brown Plague is very happy to fill that void.  A few wrong steps here and there, a miscalculation, a defeat in the negotiations for Syriza, or a demoralisation of the democracy movement and the SNP, and it could be Metternich or a jackboot. 

Several countries in Europe (the Ukraine and Italy) have already fallen to foreign backed dictatorship.  Recent polling in West Germany is unlikely to weaken the resolve of Germany's Tories to see Southern and peripheral Europe burn, and, amidst the depression caused by following the failed economic strategies of the early 1930s with predictable conclusions, many centrist governments teetering on the brink in the austerity consensus are egging on the smashing of Greece out of pathetic sectional interest.

A generalised defeat for the forces of progressive change in Europe, here in Scotland with the SNP, and abroad in Ireland, Greece, and Spain, may prove all the succour that the Serpent's Egg, now hatched and napalming housing schemes in the East of Europe, needs in order to hatch in Europe's South and North West.