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