There is no escaping the national question at the end of empire

"Scottish Independence and Brexit have gerrymandered the vote"

​When England lost an empire it joined the Common Market, screwing over its remaining colonies, as imperial preference gave way to the European market. England had been in parlous financial states and there wasn't the stomach to butcher every colonial independence fighter, or concentrate whole nations into camps, altho they did a bit of that. What they had instead was to be America's European outpost, endlessly diluting European unity with economic liberalism and weakening European consolidation, while peddling arms and latterly mercenaries, affording an outsized geopolitical influence, despite the loss of empire.

What has taken place in England is that that influence has now been destroyed and the actual reckoning of the loss of empire in the post war period is now playing out ideologically. This also happened before, when England stopped including parts of France, there was a big old war to sort it all out and the end up was the Tudors and their piracy and unsuccessful foreign wars that ultimately started to come good for imperial coffers once everyone wanted manufactured goods, and this helped to finance a new wave of genocides and protection rackets, which ultimately led to a hegemonic bloodthirsty empire, which was to see the 20th century be 'The British Century'.

 My takehome from all this historical blethers is that the fascists understand the deep modal forces that underpin this wave of reaction. They've harnessed latent English imperial discourses that the obfuscation of post windrush inclusive "Britishness" made no attempt to reckon with. The national question in England is alive and well simply because for a huge cohort of people, the British empire never ended and restoring the project of whitey global governance in the English language is of absolute paramount importance, trumps all other policy concerns and baked into that set of ideas is also the British imperial system of racism (which differs markedly from American racism, which for some reason the English left is more interested in). This is why we are seeing reports of racist maniacs shouting at black people, but we have a far right British Gujarati MP as Home Secretary leading the charge on official racist attacks.

I described what was going on in England in 2016 as a Nationalist paroxysm. The last one on this scale in England lasted for a generation. We are sat here as bystanders in England's end of empire psychodrama.

 

[not so much about 'racism' as a hierarchy of 'races']

 

Why I Am European, #1

HEARD ye o' the tree o' France,
I watna what 's the name o't;
Around it a' the patriots dance,
Weel Europe kens the fame o't.
It stands where ance the Bastile stood,
A prison built by kings, man,
When Superstition's hellish brood
Kept France in leading-strings, man.

Upo' this tree there grows sic fruit,
Its virtues a' can tell, man;
It raises man aboon the brute,
It mak's him ken himsel, man.
Gif ance the peasant taste a bit,
He 's greater than a lord, man,
An’ wi' the beggar shares a mite
O' a' he can afford, man.

My parents are pro-European; today they are semi-retired and divide their time between Dundee and Andalusia.  Growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was always their ambition when they reached retirement to move to rural France to retire.  I think to some extent that was the zeitgeist of aspirational retirement at that time; we certainly listened to a many talking books in long car journeys with just that theme.  Nevertheless they lived the dream as far as they could.  We would always holiday in Gîtes.  Over the years I got to see a lot of rural France.

The first Gîtes I stayed in was in a quiet rural part of Pas-de-Calais, a place with an unusual name, Hermelinghen.  The village then housed an auberge that was rarely open.  Locals said that the proprietor had had a bereavement and was an alcoholic.  It had a kirkyard, and it had the empire of Monsieur Alphonse, an old man who I had few conversations with over three stays in his peasant/capitalist empire.  I was a very young teenager, and my French was poor.  My dad's French however was and remains excellent, so we always knew what was going on.

La Voix du Nord:

Chaque week-end, ils sont des centaines à venir goûter
au pittoresque des trois circuits partant d’Hermelinghen.

M. Alphonse inherited his farm from his father.  It consisted of white grape vinyards which were sold in bulk to the local bodega to be homogeneised to produce a low quality table wine.  It was not hugely profitable.  But there was space, and an ample amount of it.  What he did with it was to demolish one field of the poorest vinyard, and turn it into a caravan and camping site.  Pas-de-Calais is fairly near Paris, so that was a very sensible plan.  The local area is full of beautiful countryside and *very* fine dining  (I've never eaten better than in rural France).  As tourism flourished he used the revenue from this business to transform a number of derelict farm buildings into Gîtes (by British standards Gîtes are highly affordable, with costs per night similar to youth hostels, but they're better, much better, and higher profit than campsites).  As his empire expanded, and he received repeat business, he increased the size of his campsite, demolishing another field.  Now his remaining grape vines were the best ones he had.  He used the money from his burgeoning business to invest in them.  By the time of our first visit he was producing more income from his wine than he had when he inherited the farm, and it was of a quality.  He'd launched a political career, becoming Le Maire.  A man in his 60s, he seemed full of plans.  I'd love to find out what happened to him twenty years later.  I did a search for this article, and while I could not find much out about him, I found Hermelinghen is at the centre of a major rural cycling route that's recently been established.  I wonder if he or his progeny had a hand in it?  The peasants of France really can make a kirk or a mill o it.

I'd studied the French Revolution in primary school.  Our primary school in Dundee, Craigiebarns, had a head teacher who was an ex operatic singer.  We were chosen to perform a piece by the Scottish National Opera.  We trained for what seemed like forever.  I played the role of one of the new patriot soliders.  We sang La Marseillaise.  This gave me the frame of reference as a young lad to understand quite why a farmer in rural France could have the opportunities Scottish farmers can't afford to dream of.  Geography at school and a focus on rural development and human geography and diversification and the barriers faced by tenants provided another piece of the puzzle.  As the years went on I visited much more of rural France and many, many Gîtes.  I will always be grateful to my parents for this.  It is an anchor of my European identity.  As well as teaching me about rural life in a warmer, much much freer country, it also taught me a very great deal about international affairs and Scotland's position as a colony, which in better days once played a far nobler role in international affairs.

I recall when we rocked up to a Gîte in Picardy, in our clapped out white Peugeot saloon car, with family friends Carol and Steve, the proprietor, behaving rather stuffily showed us how various metres and appliances worked.  He was quite perfunctory, and somewhat dour, almost miserable, with warnings and so on.  Walking across the courtyard, back to his farmhouse rather quickly he wished us a pleasant stay until our return to England.  We told him we were Scottish.  He stopped, and turned around.  His face melted.  He came forward to greet each of us, smiling.  At once he insisted we attend his house tomorrow for a soiree.  It was night and day.  I recall the soiree itself with great affection.  The language barrier made the occasion more about body language and facial expression, as only my dad was fluent in French.  Nevertheless it was a genuinely pleasant and hospitable experience, and we considered it an honour. I was still quite young, but to see this dour hulking proprietor transformed into a friendly diplomat is a memory that will live forever in my mind.  This is a legacy of Scotland's role in international affairs, particularly as *good Europeans* a role we have not had for 310 years.  It remains able to make dour men smile.

I can and will bang on about this point, because I have this experience more times to remember since then.  However we need to remember we are a country which embraced Europe more fundamentally than most of the pro-EU countries in the EU, just as our 'compatriots' in England embraced ultra Nationalism, race hate and myths of superiority and dominion over others.  Just because we are lashed to England by forces of our own self-doubt promulgated by our own domestic reactionaries, as England travels down a reactionary path towards humiliation, xenophobia and self-destruction, we must never forget that *we are Europeans*, first and foremost.  We are not servile little sub-Brits who hate the world.  I hope one day our English brethren can dispose of their superiority complex and embrace their position as a leading European economy, and a country long linked to France, Rome and the Baltic states, but the best way we can encourage this sensibility is by leading the change.  We are the world, and all men are brothers.  Globailisation and universal brotherhood has been the national mission of the left in Scotland ever since we began to try to undo our semi-colonial status.  The seed of rebellion in Scotland is the seed of the Tree of Liberty.

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

My thoughts on the main issues for the YES movememt

Three things;

1) Some people think raising taxes and nationalising things is what makes something left wing. This is simply untrue. The left seeks to change the political economy of society to empower workers. That's why the Salmond era SNP government was to the left of the Sturgeon one, even tho the present government has shown willing towards nationalising, raising taxes and increasing social welfare. Money is made, then taxed, then spent in that order. What matters is the first bit. Nobody is going to be very impressed with an economy based on rentier capital with high degrees of economic insecurity just because the trains are publicly owned or the social welfare provision is improved, because everyone in the shit has no hope and no future of economic security. To fundamentally change that is a question of *industrial policy.*  It is about moving away from a rentier economy.

2) A lot of people who consider themselves socialists seem to have drank the koolaid. They believe that tax and spend and doing unpopular things for totemic reasons are urgently important. The SSP used to have this ludicrous doctrine that pursuing 'a battle of ideas' was a more important focus for its activism than whether the economy is unionised, whether workers have power. At their height they had 3000 people which they used to promote ideas. As a result they have lots of brand recognition still, but they did not create any powerful residents associations or develop the unions, altho some individuals within them did, no thanks to their potential power as an organisation. The much larger and more powerful SNP has never set itself up as a socialist party, and official party ideology is in favour of 'social partnership' as a social democratic party. This works both for reasons of pro independence expediency which requires a broad based movement to secure victory in a vote, and based on the Nordic model and idea that more equal nations are better for everyone, which sits well as a fudge between Nationalists, social democrats, liberals and socialists. There is however little appreciation that social democratic parties only tend to do well when socialists are pushing an economic programme, as that is liberating for those at the bottom of the pile in unequal societies, allowing them to do a 'reverse Blair' and expand rather than contract the electorate.  Politicians schooled in 90s era political calculus seem to have little appreciation of this, and as a result have been blindsided by the role of socialists in England of late. For many liberals the general ideas of the 'gang of four' in the 1980s, that socialists have 'gone too far' and so on are accepted as political gospel. Socialists in turn have tended to see this as 'the radical centre' trying to enforce neoliberalism against the will of the working class. However, because many socialists have drank the koolaid, what they propose as a remedy is redistribution and doing things that nobody sensible would advocate, such as behaving like a government of protestors.

3) A fixation on the headline employment rate has been seen as a sensible focus or a proxy for addressing working class concerns about insecurity. In the post cold war era it was widely believed that nothing could be done to address deindustrialisation, but if folk were working and so on, they would not be 'excluded'. This idea has morphed into something else, as the Tories have destroyed the welfare system, while a rentier economy has expanded relentlessly. Now that the headline unemployment rate is low, the idea is that we have somehow limited or tamed misery. We have reached an increasingly fair society. I suppose it is much easier to believe this if you considered the 90s/00s focus on tackling social exclusion as a matter of finding work to be sensible, and also if you don't live in an area of 'social exclusion'. I do, and frankly the idea that someone working in insecure employment where they can be asked to work unpaid overtime, work shifts during their scheduled childcare, and be endlessly "flexible", in order to earn a wage where they can never hope to retire or amass any savings or advance themselves and their family, that somehow this is a success is insulting. This is why industrial policy is at the root of what it is to be left wing. If the economy is one in which workers have no power, this can never be "full employment": a far better measure of success on that front is whether wages and conditions are improving for workers. There are practical limits to what workers in the service sector can achieve in terms of civilising the companies they work for. There are also severe problems for trade unions organising in that disrupting the sale of produce of somewhere else is difficult and likely to have limited effect on raising standards of pay and conditions for workers elsewhere.

The orginal set up (failing rubber plant)

The original set up

The bit I kept for a cutting

What is left

Lexit, and the left embrace of facist, Nationalist and nativist politics

Fighting neoliberalism!  Distilling the core message.

This week my mother in law got her Irish citizenship thru. Both my mother and father in law have a long relationship with the Netherlands. My mum and dad have recently bought a home to retire to in Andalucia. My auntie and uncle retired to Spain 15 years ago. My cousin lives there too. I have several mates who live in the rest of the EEA. My next door neighbour is an Irish Belgian. A number of my comrades, neighbours and friends are rEEA/EU citizens. I have been a socialist since I became an adult.

I have visited or passed thru most of the countries in the EU. I have never once considered myself British - as a state, I've always felt the United Kingdom is a compound colonial crime. This to me seems as simple and logical as breathing air, or rolling my Rs - why would I want to be trapped here, if there is no progress on Scotland becoming a democracy?

A popular movement for hard Brexit?

I have long been interested in, as a result of being Scottish, and trying not to be a complete idiot, how a polyglot society can have a monoglot world view stamped on it by state power.

The EU has played an important role in fighting back against Nation state imperial Nationalist chauvinism towards sub-state nation and regional and minority languages. It helped, alongside a longstanding popular movement, to cajole the UK into adopting devolution against a Prime Minister in Tony Blair who deeply resented the idea.

Some more #Lexit.

Today we see very clearly in the starkness of the Brexiteering scions of society: they are the shits - the Tories, the racists, the 'no to indyref2' bottom feeders, who in Aberdeen, seek to wreck Aberdeen, because they despise the poor, despise change, despise foreigners.

These people have presided over the biggest rise in hate crimes in recorded history. They have terrorised minorities. They have described 3,500,000 or so people living here in this state as "immigrant labour" - the party which claims to represent labour has been most forceful in explaining that they are the reason employers have lowered wages, casualised industries, jeuked social responsibilities, attacked collective bargaining, and swicked the taxman and their employees out of countless millions that they have given shareholders, but it's the workers fault the party of labour say. Just like it is women's fault they entered the workplace, and lowered wages (I heard nobody say, yet)?

Some more of the progressive consequences of #Lexit

And in so doing they have empowered the most right wing political movement since Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech set loose a very similar reactionary movement, and their supporters have not so much whimpered a note of contritibn.

Indeed they think attacking and destroying the lives and plans of millions is an entirely honourable thing to do, because many workers back them. And many of those workers are salivating at the entirely inaccurate idea that if they sack and deport the "immigrants" those jobs would go to "the native born".

Who will listen to the forgotten white working class?

I'm sickened by it all. What sickens me most is that people who claim to be socialists are gravitating more and more to ideas which an gramme of backbone would ensure they'd never countenance.

Apparently the EU is neoliberal, the single market is neoliberal, freedom of movement is neoliberal, so a neighbour, a comrade, a friend, a colleague - their existence is neoliberal. So they'd back a nativist movement whose core ambition is 'repatriation' (ethnicly cleansing the UK) because they've told themselves a childish morality tale sufficient in black and white thinking that they are unable to recognise all these millions of souls that they are desperate to do harm to as somehow fully human like them, with lives, families, futures and needs.

More opposition to neoliberalism!  Fab.

Not only that, these "comrades", these "socialists" have done this during a febrile time of the rise of the right, just this weekend backing the party of "labour"'s attacks on migrants which were tactically designed to put clear xeniphobic water between them and the Tories on free movement, bouncing the Tories into a more extreme anti-immigrant position this week.

So much for the left wing opposition - they are acting more like a right wing ginger group, riding a wave of populist resentment against immigration, forcing the right wing coup that has taken the Tories into ever more extreme positions. I have come now to the point where I literally cannot stand 'the left' and their rudderless ambulance chasing, they venal inability to recognise international political, diplomatic and economic complexity and interdependency, or above all their total inability to parse the politics of the situation or seek and cite historical example.

And if we send them home, then the bosses will be nice
to the workers again, wages will rise, and there will be
jobs for all.  That's totally how capitalism works, right?

They are helping to lead us all into state and a society the likes of which Enoch Powellites would have considered a great victory. They have airbrushed out the fascist assassination of a pro-immigration MP.  They have ignored, minimised or explained away a massive rise in hate crimes, an imperial dismissal of Scottish and Irish democracy.  They have collapsed a peace process in Ireland.  They have legitmised the terrorism, attacks, and indeed murders that many vulnerable minorities have experienced as a result of this 'movement' they are tagging along with. The worst part of it is that they cite that the 'native working class' is for this, and so that means it's progressive, as if that same 'native' working class was up in arms and universally protesting about imperialism, chauvinism and genocide in this fousty empire's glory days.

On today's Yougov poll and the predicament of the Anglo-Scottish Union

The Yougov poll today about the Union.

1. Concern about yougov poll, and oversoon elation from terrified British nationalists. Poll shows a rise in support for independence, asks if vote were held tomorrow (we know Scots want to wait until they know what Brexit means and any deal on the table for Scotland from the EU is available as a counterpoint), excludes 16-18yos, does not have a correct % of EU nationals, and is weighted on the EU referendum (where we know embarassed LEAVE voters claim they voted REMAIN). Poll shows SNP voters are most likely to change views against independence if it's UK vs EU. Petulent essentialist nationalism that will collapse in a campaign, when independence is on the table. Nonetheless poll shows a rise in support for independence, before a campaign has begun.

2. Until Brexit the logic of strategists was that the SNP could not afford to lose a second independence referendum as it would risk killing the issue for a goodly while. This was broadly true, but only in the context of the life of a Westminster 'long regime' type of government. The issue can never go away completely while Scotland exists, and never has. But this logic is now dead. Were Scots to vote NO in a year's time, it would not be by an enhanced NO, and it would continue to tear lumps out of remaining institutions which support the Anglo-Scottish Union. It would also likely be on a false prospectus of the UK offering continuity and stability in uncertain times. Five to ten years of post Brexit collapse of England's empire, and the knock on effects of this, plus demographic change (the children of YES voter millenials getting a vote, less entrenched baby boomer British nationalists about) would surely trigger the world's biggest 'I told you so,' particularly as the Tories stay in power and England moves to the right, and people discover what having your citizenship and rights ripped up and economy destroyed by a foreign vote actually means for them.

3. Thirdly and most fundamentally of all, the vote on the 23rd of June to destroy England's empire in a last gasp of xenophobic exceptionalism killed the empirical basis of the Anglo-Scottish Union. The impact of the EU vote was never fundamentally about public opinion. It was about elite opinion. The Anglo-Scottish Union is not a British nationalist project. It is an alliance of ruling classes. For the Scottish ruling class the Anglo-Scottish Union delivers (A) continued liberal government, despite working class and labour aristocrat Scots' utter hatred of liberalism. (B) It opens up financial markets thruout the empire, which latterly was buttressed by being the USA's man in the EU (and the various alliances, networks, and markets this afforded). (C) It provides a chance for ruling class Scots and Scots on the make to control the reins of power not just in a small Nordic country, but in a global superpower. By dint of England's successful xenophobic collectivist rebellion, they demonstrated that the era of Union with England guaranteeing liberalism (A) is over. The geo-political effect of this is to isolate England, to fillet its empire, and to cause an unprecedented loss of markets, so that's point (B) over. Plus, with England now effectively in an utterly desperate battle to just stand still as a power, with its economy contracting vis-a-vis the other European empires (and this is before the filleting of Brexit is done and by), does London rule really guarantee a career ladder into a superpower (C), more than being a special daughter of Germany? Obviously our ruling class is integrated into London power networks, but there is widespread talk (even among men such as the Director of Virgin Money) of rapid disintegration being in the best interests of Scottish finance capital for instance. None of this will affect Scottish public opinion, but it is the empirical class basis of the Anglo-Scottish Union, which is now completely dead, unless some British nationalist Bismarck or Napoleon can reforge and repurpose this ruling class deal. Theresa May is not that person. 

The facebook post detailing James Nebitt's assault of me, which Nesbitt or friends had removed from facebook by autocomplaint

I posted this post to facebook.  It was removed around 3am on the 29th of July by Facebook for a "violation of community standards."  As it contained no spam, or links this must have been as a result of a report by a facebook user that the content was malicious or whatever.  Here it is again, on a blog.

I've just been assaulted in the street, leaving the offlicence after leaving the gym at Charing Cross by James Nesbitt, the original leader of the socialist group, A Thousand Flowers. He came at me saying, "What have you been saying about me? You been saying I raped my ex girlfriend, have ye?" Before swinging wild punches at me. He clocked me on the nose and the left eye. I brought him to the ground and he nutted me from the ground, as I tried to dissuade him of his nonsense. Nesbitt has a conviction for knife crime I believe, so I was a bit cautious with going at him. I assured this foolish man that I have not been claiming he raped his ex girlfriend, and that I couldn't care less about him. When the foolish man appeared to come to his senses I let him up again. He immediately tried to attack me again, and I had to bring him to the ground a second time. I held him there pinned for a while, to make it clear to him I am a good deal stronger than him, altho I didn't hit him, in part because I was a bit concerned he might be carrying and so I wanted to know where his hands were, and in part because he is a very silly man and I just want to go about my business and not get dragged into silly people's blood feuds, and by pinning him to the ground twice I think I made my point. This man James Nesbitt is a danger to himself, as well as to others around him. For the record I have no idea whether he raped his ex girlfriend, and have never heard this claimed. He does assault people in the street based on flimsy rumour tho, so do be careful folks. What a silly man.