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.