Brexit and Devolution. Turns Out You Can't Have Them Both

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-scottish-parliament-legal-right-block-article-50-a7438246.html

Please forgive the Independent's choice of image for a Scottish Constitutional lawyer...and read the piece. It seems that the legal question as to whether the Scottish Parliament has a vote on invoking article 50 or not comes down to a definition of the word "normally." Normally, you see, Scotland's parliament has to give assent to Westminster measures that will change Scottish Law. Which Brexit would clearly do. Times a million. Or three.

So the UK government's argument is that like a war, Brexit is an emergency. It is not normal. (At this point, I'm attempting, and failing, to resist the comment that, No...it's not normal...it's fecking MENTAL...)

But the only thing that makes Article 50 an emergency measure to be steamrollered over the top of devolution...is preventing the Scottish Parliament from having a vote on this matter in the first place. Devolution, which we had thought to be a stable element of the British Constitution (or at least the set of practices and precedents that substitute for such a foreign sounding thing) turns out instead to be the cause of an emergency and so must be effectively cancelled in the meantime.

Supporters of the Union who treasure the achievements of devolution...ie everyone but the Tories and Tam Dayell, theoretically ...should pause to reflect that when the UK has grown up business before it...that devolution can be easily suspended. Power devolved is only a loan that is only good while circumstances permit.

"Normally" of course we'd let you have a say...but not when it really matters, appears to be the message.

This is I think, part of the developing constitutional crisis that Brexit represents. Despite the static opinion polls for Indy Ref 2, and despite the consequence that a second independence referendum is very unlikely by 2019 when all this is supposed to have happened, in the longer term there seems to be no way for the current "devolved settlement" of the "British Constitution" to survive, no matter what happens in the Supreme Court today.

It is probably part of the same set of masturbatory nostalgia fantasies that led to Brexit in the first place that the distasteful spectacle of devolution to the provinces be done away with. If they ever give it a moment's thought, there is no question in my mind that Farage and Co want to erase as a bad dream Devolution to Jockland along with Human Rights and the Barnett formula. Lord Lawson, indeed, mused aloud that Ireland might want to re-join a post Brexit UK. There really is no bottom limit to the stupidity of these people.

What really matters for us though, is this: It turns out you can have Brexit or you can have Scottish Devolution. You can't have both. Not "normally."

My feeling is that this is going to become clearer and clearer to the electorate in Scotland, and sometime before 2030, we are going to be faced wityh the chopice between fully amalgamating ourselves back into the pre-devolutionary (pre Suez!) fantasy land of cream cakes and Union Jack bunting...or of getting the hell out.

Or do those who campaigned quite honourably for a No vote in 2014 and a Remain vote in 2016 really think it is sustainable in the long term to give their support to the creation of The New England that is being dreamed of by those with the whip hand of UK politics right now? More specifically, if it did ever come to a vote in the Scottish Parliament, I can quite see that the SNP and Greens would vote against invoking article 50 and the Tories would vote for it. The real question is what would Labour and the Liberals do? Would they vote with the Scottish government to preserve the relationship with the EU, or vote with the Tories in favour of the Union at any economic or moral cost - including the relegation of the devolution settlement that THEY created to the sidelines of the new "normality". Or would they actually retreat so far from responsibility or principle as to actually abstain?

Place your bets and pass the popcorn.

-- 

Peter Arnott

ONE LAST THROW OF THE DICE

Earlier this week, in an act of possibly futile civic optimism, I wrote a piece which argued, essentially, for an inter-party deal that could, I think, maybe, just…offer a workable way forward for Scotland within the context of the Brexit negotiations…if and when we get past the phony war phase we’re in now.

Roughly it was this. 1) Scottish Labour accept that there is no longer a viable way that Scotland can remain in the EU single market via the UK.  John McDonnell, by removing the Parliamentary obstacle that might have been offered by the UK Labour Party, has sunk that particular boat.

(this was what prompted my writing the piece…just to get the timeline in there)

2) Labour then have to accept that the only way forward for Scotland in this context is a distinctive Scottish Strategy…and fully accept that the SNP government have a mandate for leading that strategy, but that they and the Greens (and the liberals, actually) can strengthen that case by getting properly, fully on board with it.

3) I then suggested, in recognition that this would be a huge culturally abhorrent pill for the "others"  to swallow, that the SNP might consider, reciprocally, in exchange, agreeing to park the independence project (specifically Indyref 2) at least until we make a decent fist of trying to get through the imminent crisis together. 

This last point, of course, was where I expected to get pelters.  And by gum, they have indeed been coming my way.  However, picking the cow-pat out of my hair, even after the bust up in Holyrood, even after the fragile consensus on a strategy for Brexit fell apart with both sides screaming habitual abuse at each other, I do feel I have to struggle to my feet and give one last desperate throw of the federal dice.

I have talked to ardent Nats now about this, and to ardent Labour people. (Yes, it is still just possible to invade the enemy’s algorithms) And both are, I think, still open to some sort of conversation.  Neither one really want to see a Hard Brexit. Neither really want, I don’t think, (he said, reaching for the tin helmet again) a second referendum whose result is uncertain in a context that is already scarier and less predictable than anything I can remember. So neither would really lose from a time limited Brexit truce which would necessarily park Indyref 2 until the next electoral tests.

And what both need to bear in mind is that the others haven’t gone away.  They’re not going to go away.  Magical thought will not eliminate either one of them. Not until the next elections in Scotland and Westminster in 2020 and 2021. 

It is just until then that I’m suggesting a truce. After all, it was Churchill who said of Stalin that he would give Satan a favourable reference in the House of Commons if it would help to beat Hitler. And it was the third question in 2014, the one that the Tories made sure would never get asked, the Federal question, that still commands support across the board, across the tribes.

When article 50 is invoked in a few month, the phony war is over. Brexit happens. Hard Brexit.  All across the UK without any distinction.  And we ALL lose. And by ALL, I don’t just mean the respective activists for Yes and No in 2014.  I mean everyone who lives here.

Labour need to accept that there MUST be a Scottish solution…and the SNP need to accept that this MUST be Federal.  That’s it.  That’s the ball game.

So we need a truce to fight the greater enemy.  It doesn’t have to last forever.  In 2020 and 2021, we can get back in the groove of mutiual contempt. I am suggesting in the meantime we get serious about at least TRYING to come up with a United Front that will push the UK parliament into taking account of our position, and that will convince the EU negotiators that we are worth talking to about a Federal Brexit where Scottish Trade and Immigration policies, for example, are not trapped by Tory infighting into the heavily pensioned wet dreams of Nigel Farage. 

It’s still, only just, worth one more push.  But both the SNP and Labour will, if they’re serious, need to take some sacred Highland cows out the back and shoot them.

Finally, remember that episode of the West Wing where Toby managed to put together an in camera bi-partisan committee to save Social Security…but had to maneuver both sides into doing it by the back door? I know that’s fiction…but give that episode a watch.

It can be done, I think.  And if it can’t, maybe “we” – the chattering classes of Scotland - deserve whatever shit is about to pour on our heads.

Biting the Bullet

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37983948?post_id=10205211307815167_10208721574089630#_=_

In response to the utter meltdown within the government over Brexit as reported in the Times today, John McDonnell for the Labour opposition is making a speech in which he will powerfully urge the government to have a nice Brexit that is nice to people and not a nasty one that is just plain nasty to everyone cos that wouldn't be nice. He is , of course, not opposing Brexit as such but he'd like it to be nice please if you wouldn't mind. He will not do anything nasty like vote against the government or anything icky like that.

It is a bad joke. There is no opposition to a government that is falling apart with its own incoherence...and both Labour and the Tories fall back on protecting their respective electoral bases from UKIP...while Farage is being interviewed over a Full English Brexit by Piers Morgan on exactly how Theresa May should butter up Trump in order to save British Trade from jumping off a cliff.

It is surely obvious to the most benighted, SNP hating member of Scottish Labour that there is nothing to be looked for from the Mother of Parliaments. The government will press ahead with an entirely unscrutinized reflex spasm of an invocation of Article 50 simply because they can think of no better way to cover their own divisions...and UK Labour will go along with it because some of them think it's what Tony Benn would have wanted, and some of them think they'll get their party back when Corbyn fucks up the next election...

Even if Corbyn WINS the next election, Brexit will go essentially unchallenged. There is no solution to this except a Scottish solution. Everyone must see that.

So...there will be those who yell for Indy Ref 2 now...as if that would save us...but it won't work...the electorate will simply not stand for it, not in times like these, not with this level of uncertainty. In the long term, with luck and good management, we are looking at a future of energy self sufficiency from which we can negotiate our way in the world with some possibility of success. But right now? Independence by 2020 after a second referendum is a pipe dream and a distraction from what is actually happening to these actual islands of the coast of actual Europe across the water from an actual President Trump.

So what i propose is this. Starting right now, today, in the Scottish parliament debate on Brexit, we start to work towards an accommodation between the SNP and Scottish Labour. (Yes...I know, pigs might fly...but Hillary might lose the election...okay?)

Take a deep breath...and starting today, right now, in the debate on Brexit at Holyrood today, at the risk of thinking outside the box, we have to ask Scotland's politicians to do better, to think beyond their tribal bases and assumprions about each other...and bite the constitutional bullet

Scottish Labour have to accept that only a strong Scottish negotiating position in collaboration with others in these islands can secure our future relationship with both Europe and the UK being on anything like bearable terms. On immigration, on trade, on tourism, on energy, we have to be FUNCTIONALLY independent from UK policy. Now...you can call that what you like...federalism or a New Union...I don't give a damn, i really don't. There HAS to be a united negotiating position...which means that Scottish Labour HAVE to get behind Nicola Sturgeon one hundred percent, in public as well as quietly...and actually exercise that autonomy that they were granted (without thinking about it) by Jeremy Corbyn.

And in return, the SNP have to agree to park Independence. Yes. Not just Indyref 2 before 2020...the SNP have to undertake here and now to park any move towards Independence until a fresh mandate is sought in the Westminster elections in 2020 and the next Scottish Election in 2021.

That's the only possible deal. That's the only way both parties can serve the people who elected them, and who voted on both sides of the referendum debate. That's the way they can both serve Scotland. But they both have to do it and they both have to mean it. Or we're screwed.

What the Hell are We Supposed to Do Now?

After two hours sleep...this may ramble a little....

Remember on morning after the Brexit vote? Remember the morning after the Scottish referendum? This is so much worse, isn't it? This feels so much more irredeemable, like being handed a prison sentence from which there is no appeal for a crime you never even heard of, far less committed. I suppose it's partly the helplessness of it being someone else's election, plus the humiliation of being so completely wrong about the outcome, that no amount of fact checking or evidence could overcome fear and bigotry and "truthiness". Above all, it is the feeling that the anglo-saxon world , just as it led the way into globalization in the 1980s, is now leading the way into an era of...well...what? Self harm? Toxic delusion? Actual honest to God fascism?

We don't know. We have no way of knowing. Just as with Brexit, the election of Donald Trump is not so much a political decision as a spasm, an ill-fated lashing out, a fore-doomed vote for a Time Machine back to the fifties...despite the laws of physics, let alone the softer sciences of economics and history. Like the Glasgow taxi driver, a man in his sixties, who told me he had voted Leave in June because he wanted to see "full employment come back to the Clyde", you're left not knowing what to say...it would almost be an act of cruelty to tell the poor bastard what you're thinking, tell him what he's done to the grandchildren he wanted to help find decent jobs for life...the way it used to be.

Trump's voters too are looking at the world through Orange-tinted glasses, ludicrous and tragic all at once...voting for change, for agency, for some sense of purpose in a world whose elite are as detached from everyday reality for most of the people who live in America, in Britain...in the world...as were the high officials of the medieval church....talking to each other in Latin about the trans-national global world which only they were qualified to understand.

The very language the elite speak, let alone the "left" (if such a term is still meaningful) is as dead as a door nail

There is little point yet in speculating about what trump is actually going to do with this mandate. I'm sure he has no idea. He wasn't elected because of policies. He hasn't seriously prepared for this any more than Boris Johnson seriously prepared for Brexit. Besides, he's demonstrably psychotic...he has been laying bare his paranoid, self hating Stalin-esque pathology for us every day for 18 months. All we can predict, very comfortably, having had a head start after the Brexit vote, is that anyone who attempts to apply logic or law or any other suspect form of cleverness to public policy in America for the next four years..is going to be loudly denounced as an enemy of the people.

But again, as with Brexit, thanks to the founding fathers this time...we get a period of phony war, of strictly time limited transition on which to try to position ourselves and take a few wild guesses as to what happens after inauguration, or Article 50...whichever comes first.

Because , make no mistake, the Brexiteers have just acquired a very powerful ally. Nigel Farage is now incomparably the best connected , most influential politician in Britain. Just as Vladimir Putin is incomparably the best placed player of what we used to call "The Great Game"

And if that doesn't give you a clue as to what happens next, consider this...if we can't predict what Trump will do, we can make a much more educated guess as to what the Republicans in congress and Theresa May will do. (for starters) The Republicans will; rally round a President who is not really one of them, but with whom they share a few key, very dangerous delusions...one of which is climate change, and others of which are unfree trade and unfree women. While our woman in number 10 will get back on a plane when she's back from India and go and do some very serious bum sucking. An isolationist America which hates the very notion of Europe as a rival world and economic power is about to become the best friend Brexit Britain could hope for.

As for us? On the left? We are all Jeremy Corbyn now. Self regarding, irrelevant and ludicrous. We totally missed this boat. The collapse of globalisation turns out to be a gift for the populist, isolationist right, from the Taliban to Trump and not to smart ass little weasels like us...who share a language of internationalist privilege with the Clintons of this world who turned out to be our best defense. Any notion on the left of coming out of this stronger, or even with a game plan, seems like masturbatory hubris this morning.

The world is in for four years of darkness...so are we. And Scottish Independence? In a word as dangerous as this one has just become? On a pre-Brexit timetable? Don't be fucking ridiculous. Indy ref 2 has now definitively receded back beyond the election in 2020...when, just maybe, Michele Obama will be back to deliver us.

And by then, I suspect, we'll already be well advanced on Plan B...whatever that turns out to be. I suspect, I fear...it's going to be a long, dark haul through a world of shit.

.

We might not need the Tippex

It starts off as a thought experiment...as a bit of mischief even. What if Scotland, with Northern Ireland and Gibraltar, and the Channel Islands...and all the other territorialy distinct bits of the UK that voted to Remain in the EU...REMAIN in the EU by the simple expedient of remaining in the UK...while England and Wales leave? What if England and Wales leave the UK on the same day they leave the EU, and the rest of us stay exactly where we are...in both?

Now, this is amusing enough, if only to imagine the columns that Simon Heffer and Alan Cochrane (inter alia) would write about it, straining every apoplectic muscle in their thundering "how dare you!"

But actually...no...think about it. Game it out, as they say. From the point of view of the EU, with whom a "successor relationship" with the UK will have to emerge, what would be actually wrong with forming a relationship with a successor state? With, as people have been pointing out, nothing more required than a couple of bottles of Tippex to alter all those treaties?

In the first place, such a new arrangement would respect the results of both referenda, in 2014 and 2016. Scotland voted to Remain in both the UK and the EU. If "we" become the successor state (in some arrangement or other) then both objectives are achieved. And England and Wales face the historical consequence that for Britain, EU membership was the successor to Empire as to how "we" kept our "place in the world." To abandon the EU when you haven't got an Empire any more is an act of deluded, senile self harm to which there is no reason why anyone who didn't vote for it would want to be party.

Second, there were many people on the side of Yes in 2014 who campaigned not on the basis of Scottish Exceptionalism, but because we valued the inclusiveness of the idea of Britain as it existed, however tenuously, from 1945 until (pick an historical moment) the defeat of the miners - the enemy within - in 1985. Devolution in Scotland derives its entire purpose from self defense against the Tories and their vision of Britain as some kind of off-shore hellhole of cheap labour and gated privilege. Self defense flirted with self-determination from 2007 onward, I suppose, culminating in the 2014 vote...

But once again, recent developments go to show that Breaking Up Britain was always too big a job for the Scots. It was always a job for the English.

Well, now it's happened. The Brexit vote has done it. We are not leaving the UK, we are being left. Why not make it official? And respect the democratic mandate of the people of England and Wales to leave the EU...as well as the vote in Scotland to remain in both.

If the UK really is a partnership of equals, I can see no logical objection. If the UK is just "Greater England"...well, that's something else again. Rather in the same way as Yugoslavia, despite Milosevic, turned out to be something other than Greater Serbia.

As for the objection that Scotland would be swapping a free trade relationship with the rUK for a free trade relationship with the EU, the rUK has been at pains recently to insist that it wants Free Trade as far as possible with the EU...and we'd be in the EU..so that would include us and our smoked salmon, wind power and single malts.

And all those companies in London...like banks and pension funds...for whom the EU relationship is vital, who have got already, a lot of them, branch offices in Edinburgh and Dublin...all they're got to do is move their head offices (and their tax obligations) a wee bit to the North and West...and they'll still get to speak English...

So that would take care of the "London" problem...a small shift in the admin and most of the jobs can stay in that great and exciting city...which will remain, as it must, an economic hub. Well, it's either that or move the whole lot to Frankfurt and Paris...

Wales...? That's a bit sad. But democracy is democracy, and we are all about respecting the vote.

Now all this pipe dreaming really comes about because no less established and establishment) a boffin as Strathclyde Uni's own, inimitable John Curtice, allowed himself to do some thinking aloud on this topic in the Sunday Herald. And I've been posting a bit about it on social media. (In fact, I got a tweet this morning from a chap called Gordon Innes pointing out that the "Scots/Irish successor state to the UK" in the EU could also take Britain's seat on the UN security council. So we could! We've got the Nukes!)

But seriously for a moment...if maintaining Scotland's place in the EU is the aim of our negotiators in the Brexit process, and minimum disruption is the aim of the EU negotiators...then mightn't this idea have some legs? Might it even be slightly LESS crazy than London, Scotland, Northern Ireland and all the overseas and island territories being dragged out of Europe against their interests as well as their expressed democratic decision?

Maybe there's more to this idea than mischief. We might not even need the Tippex.

Bloody emails

It was like being punched in the solar plexus. Just when you thought Trump was safely consigned to the relative obscurity of starting his own TV network to plug that gap in market between Fox News and the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI release a maddeningly vague letter to Republicans in Congress that "re-open" those bloody emails. The fact that the emails in question refer to a former congressman, whose name is a synonym for "Penis" who sent pictures of his OWN penis to younger women, including a fifteen year old...and that this creep is married to one of Clinton's key advisers, so that the antics of a sexual predator ex-Congressman may result in the elevation of a sexually predatory Reality TV Star to the Oval Office where the husband of the opposing candidate used to act as a sexual predator...takes the whole ghastly mess to levels where terms like "irony" and "House of Cards on Acid" don't come close to doing it justice - let alone that the FBI released this non-material material 11 days out from the election makes the 1972 "Watergate" election look entirely free of inappropriate interference.

When is this OVER? cry 300 million Americans, who must feel that they are trapped in a cross between Guantanamo Bay and a lunatic asylum. While the rest of us watch with our mouths open, feeling as sick and scared as Fredo Corleone in Godfather 2 when he confesses: "Questadt...the Senate lawyer...he belongs to Roth..."

Once again, however, I want to try and tie the semiotics of the email scandal to the way that politics in general seems to be going here in the UK, and here in Scotland. I want once again to observe that we are now living in an era of binary, tribal politics, when we desperately need to remember that we live in an analog world, where just because someone disagrees with you, they're not necessarily involved in an evil conspiracy with everyone else who disagrees with you. Paranoia, as Freud observed, is a form of narcissism...we flatter ourselves when we think we're important enough for the world to be against us. My pleading question, however, like Bob Dylan in All Along the Watchtower is : "There must be some kind of a way out here?!?"

We know how it goes. Hillary Clinton is both guilty of high handed carelessness in using a personal (and insecure) email account for government business, while AT THE SAME TIME, according to Trump, is clearly involved in a criminal enterprise where she attempted to hide "corruption" of a secret, non-government server.

Now, both things cannot logically be true. Doesn't matter. Absolutely doesn't matter. To the total "this explains everything" mind of Donald Trump, entirely contradictory conclusions are no hindrance. Kurt Vonnegut once described the mind of a fascist as that of a broken clock that ALWAYS thinks it is showing the right time. EVERYTHING proves you right. If the FBI now turn around and say "the investigation is NOT re-opened" Trump will say, "they WOULD say that...because the system is rigged after all"...for example.

I trust this is sounding familiar. British politics has followed Scottish politics into our own local versions of the madness of a binary world. Every economic report is read to be in support of pro or anti Brexit positions simultaneously. Liam Fox briefs against his own Chancellor to say that any measures her takes to protect the British economy from uncertainty are part of a Re-Moan conspiracy to talk Brexit down.

Likewise, in Scotland, many Nats take every criticism of the SNP government as proof of an anti-Scottish conspiracy, (Red Tories etc etc etc) while Unionists insist that the same government is only pretending to be interested in health (for example) as a cover for their real goal, which is Independence under any circumstances. Everyone seems to angrily reject the conspiracy theories about their own side while accepting as Gospel whatever simple minded crap anyone, no matter how barmy,  throws at their opponents.

Each side of each of these Manichean divides - Trump vs Hillary, Leave against Remain, Yes vs No, interprets every move their opponents make as proving the case against them. So I repeat my pleading, with the help of the Animals this time: "We gotta get out of this place". How do we do that?

We are here, I think, because there is no longer an arena which is deemed to be non partisan. Both God and the BBC are deemed to have taken sides these days...so balance, on the one hand this, on the other that, is now no longer an editorial principle, but an avoidance of judgement that has led, among other things, to the brute and inescapable fact of climate change remaining a "controversy". One can plead for civility, or course, but there is no going back to God or Lord Reith...or Walter Cronkite, for that matter...as the voice of reason to judge between the voices of increasingly shrill and tiresome partisans...in the US, the UK and Scotland. All that is left is the purely personal distance of irony...and a certain humility. "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, Consider that you may be wrong" said Cromwell...who should have listened to his own advice....

In plays, no one character has all the right answers. The characters argue, full and passionate, and the audience judge...probably not with unanimity...or as a dramatist, you hope not. So it may be that dramaturgy is the essential political paradigm de nos jours...where we no longer hope for certainty and healing in public life, because the only way that does happen is silence.( "if only everyone on the the other side would just SHUT UP" screams everyone on every side). Maybe we do all have to learn to be civil. And maybe we do need to look at referendums and elections as being stops on the way to somewhere rather than thinking "this explains everything" and "this will solve everything" - whether we're talking about Independence or Brexit or not.

We need to acknowledge our own doublethink, that it is partisans who get things done, but it is ironists who live better lives in the world that partisans die for. We have to be both. We have to learn to be wrong, we have to change our minds. We have to embrace nuance as a value in itself in life. While at the same time, in the arena of politics, we need to keep fighting like dogs...but with respect.

Is that beyond us? Maybe it is, sometimes...in the heat of a binary referendum in an analog world. Or an election between a rock and a hard place. But if Caesar had a slave in the back of his chariot whispering "Remember you are mortal"...maybe all of us who've been involved in Scotland's fevered political journey in the last few years, need someone behind us to whisper..."Remember, you may be an arsehole!" And who better to do that job than journalists and writers with whom we may not agree, but who we MUST read.

Britannia Hits an Iceberg

Even on the eve of the final Presidential Debate in this increasingly bizarre campaign, with, it seems, the Trump campaign finally imploding into a welter of conspiracy theories on late night twitter, the question, “Why Do They Like Trump?” remains, even if American women are about to save American Men from making utter arses of themselves. Actually, ‘liking Trump’ is secondary, more of a symptom than a cause of illness. After all, even if seventy percent of American women say they oppose Trump, that still means thirty percent of them support him. The primary question of this American election has been “”Why Do They Hate Hillary So Much that Otherwise Sane People Can Even Contemplate Voting in Large Numbers for an Egregiously Awful Person With Glaringly Dangerous Pathology…” who just happens to be a Second Rate Orange Berlusconi called Donald Trump. Trump will be gone soon, as an electoral factor, anyway.  But the malaise which afforded him the opportunity to stomp his revolting personality all over the airwaves will still be around.

He and his noisiest supporters, despite appearances, are little more than a handful of refugees from daytime television who have made it onto the News.  This in itself is as much a comment on what has happened to mainstream TV – that the medium has abandoned any pretense at being anything other than pornography that sells Viagra- as it is on the recent descent of the Republican Party into the status of The American Taliban raging impotently against the waning of the White Man’s testosterone and sperm count. An interesting blog by David Wong on his Cracked site put the question of Trumpland vs the Rest in an interesting context for me recently. http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/

Wong argues that the Culture War in the States, which has roots as old as the Civil War, has reconfigured under the pressure of globalisation from a simple question of race into a much more nuanced and yet classical dichotomy of “country” and “city”, the metropolis and the periphery.  The metropolis in connected to the world as much or even more than it is connected to the country in which it happens to sit.  It is fast moving, prosperous, exciting, multi-cultural, a bit lawless and Darwinian – everything there is in the present tense.  The periphery has been “left behind”, stripped of its employment and purpose, of any forward looking energy.  Crucially, it has been stripped of anything like ‘hope’.  That word, which was so central to Obama’s election in 2008 was an alien concept, and not just because it was being spoken by a black man.  The schism of race that was opened up by Obama’s victory is again only secondarily a question of racism: primarily the resentment of all those angry men and women is fueled by their exclusion from the global party of self congratulatory “good” people who flatter themselves constantly about how hip and smart they are.  Fuck You is a not entirely unintelligible response to the bland, careless and above all smug privilege that Hillary Clinton so charmlessly represents.

And it’s when this question is put in terms of ‘metropolis’ and ‘periphery’ that the dialectic expands to include not just what is happening in the US in this particular election, but what has been happening everywhere in the world for quite some time. The change in the world from nation states back to city states is the kind of thing that fans of the long view have been talking about for some time.  And within that dialectic it is indeed possible not just to link in Donald Trump and the Tea Party to Nigel Farage and UKIP, but ISIS and the SNP as well.

Now, in this age of Twitter, I realise that to put things in the same sentence is to appear to say “these things are the same…”  So no, everyone, I did not just make an equivalence between these phenomena, what I made was an argumentative connection between ‘responses to globalization’, or rather to the hegemony of the trans-national which was so radically challenged by the slow motion Wall Street/City of London/Hong Kong crash of 2008.  It is in the very nature of ‘localism’ that these responses take on ‘local’ character.

As it happens, the current tensions WITHIN our own particular localism, between Nationalist nationalists and Post-National nationalists, both of which were on display at the SNP conference last week is mirrored by the tensions, for example, within the Tory Party between those who have rather startlingly found themselves in the ascendency recently – the “Hang the Economy, (and a lot of other people) England for the English” brand of Tory on the one hand, and the Managerial Tendency (Market Rules) brand on the other.

Likewise, the ancient Bevan vs Gaitskell conflict informs the pre-history of the Labour Party’s current struggles between Management and Movement, but the pathology of what is happening to the British Progressive Tendency is as globally involved as its inflections are profoundly locally determined by the ‘metropolitan vs the peripheral’ model.

Within this way of looking at things, both Brexit and the surge of Scottish National politics are secondary assertions in response to a historical movement. Both are constitutional consequences of the Break Up of Britain which is itself consequential of the local concentration of all wealth and power in one corner of the islands within a wider, longer story of what we used to call “managed decline.”

Indeed, Imperial Hubris has been sinking since the Titanic ran into that Iceberg…we’ve been frantically bailing ever since.

Two other conversations, one on Twitter and one in Real Life are informing my thinking on all this at the moment. The first is a bit of trolling I’m getting online as to why I think that the EU is more important to Scotland in terms of trade than is the UK.  Of course, I think no such thing and have never said or thought any such thing. Neither the vote on Brexit nor a vote for Independence in and of themselves have anything like those consequences. What is useful about the question is figuring out what is wrong with it: why is it the wrong question? The second was a taxi driver telling me he had voted “Leave” in June in order to bring Full Employment back to the Clyde. That is, he had voted for a Time Machine.

The magical instrumentalism of both perspectives, that a vote is the prime cause of things happening, is one of the illusions that democracy is shedding right now, to all of our costs. Donald Trump, for reasons of purely personal pathology – he is always right and always “the winner” therefore the only possible cause of his NOT being right or the winner is black magic – is calling the election a fraud before he even loses it with possibly dire consequences for American democracy.  That’s what elections are like in far less fortunate countries. To return local questions, the truth of what is happening in Scotland right now is that we are dealing with the consequences, over a prologed period, of the decline from Empire to which British Membership of the EU was itself a stop gap solution. According to Angela Leadsom the other day, the answer is now to sell Tea and Jam to Johnny Foreigner on board the Royal Yacht Britannia.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/18/british-tea-jam-and-biscuits-will-be-at-the-heart-of-britains-br/

Scotland ceased to be the Prime Maker of its own destiny at 10pm on September 18^th a couple of years ago.  What we are doing now, just like everyone else, is attempting to stay afloat in very choppy water driven both by our cultural reaction against the crisis of globalism and in our wish to preserve the best of its values.  The Yes Movement, in that sense, was and remains a cake and eat it proposition. More than ever, we are looking into a crystal ball.  If the Tories make a fearful total hash of Brexit and Britain, , as seems more than likely at present, then the economic, political and cultural consequences for these weary islands will be incalculable.  If they make a slight less than total hash of Brexit while trying to SAVE the only bit of Britain they care about, if the City of London (for example) manages to negotiate its REMAINING a global city-state metropolis while leaving the rest of us to sink into the mid-Atlantic, that will be more a continuation than a schism in our recent history as an economy. But Britain as it was sold to us in 2014 will be profoundly damaged…but if anyone thinks that is unalloyed good news for the National cause they are already as damaged as Liam Fox.

The third option, whereby Brexit is used as the context for a properly reasoned re-alignment of local power and its relationship to the wider world, one of whose aspects is the EU, is of course devoutly to be wished. One can see an idealized federal solution to the “Scottish Problem” where a sovereign Scotland pools that sovereignty rationally with ALL of our neighbours while asserting itself as a small metropolitan centre of gravity and civilised values that is no longer dependent upon those neighbours and so can have a healthy relationship with them. True federalism has always meant mainly that power would be devolved in the other direction with a democratic mandate.  That, for me, was always the logical outcome of the ‘if wishes were horses’ element of the hope in which I participated in 2014.

Whether or not Brexit brings that consummation closer or pushes it further off is not entirely in my gift. Despite the magical thinking of the internet, life doesn’t really work like that. Indeed, those who took the Brexit vote as a signal of ‘job done’ on Independence are already disabused.  And despite being a Yes campaigner, I am no clearer on what ‘Independence for Scotland’ actually means in the 21st than I was two years ago.  What has fundamentally changed, other than the cultural shift that the referendum represented in making our future, at least in part, our choice, is that the alternative, Better Together, must surely look a lot less like a sure thing to its own supporters than it used to.

We have a choice, maybe, between chaos and chaos, and are more concerned about who the Captain is than exactly what we call the boat.  Which, to close the circle, is maybe why a lot of people on the other side of the pond, are looking for a Berlusconi and not a Prodi at the moment.

Still, with a bit of luck, in a couple of weeks we won’t have Donald Trump to kick around anymore, and we can get back to crossing our fingers over more local concerns – and hoping that we’ve got the right Captain, or at least the right second mate on the Titanic who will try to get as many of us as possible into the lifeboats.

  

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Peter Arnott

The Perfect Storm?

Maybe this is just how history works.  The financial crisis of 1929 radically undermined faith in democracy all across the world. In countries where representative government well both new and old, “the people” lost faith in the electorate, as it were.  Democracy was weakened everywhere.  Britain had a “national” government, suspending democratic choice till 1945.  France spent the thirties changing governments so often that democracy was undermined by a different route…making the largest army in Europe helpless in 1940, when faced by a Germany which, of course, had voted democracy out of existence altogether (though the Nazis were very fond of referendums, as it happens). 

America got lucky, and got Franklin Roosevelt.  Faced with a choice between a candidate who embodies “old corruption” to a point beyond the dreams of Herbert Hoover, and a demented orange hate ball, America may not be so lucky in November.  

But the pattern is the same.  Capitalism suffered a "soft" crisis in 2007-8, and the people, across the world, entirely understandably… turned against the governors and institutions that were in charge at the time. 

But unless they get lucky, what comes along to replace the failed, corrupt states are people who are ruthless and psychopathic enough to take advantage of a temporary suspension in reason. 

(For the record, the relatively benign irrelevance to which Jeremy Corbyn seems happy to be leading the Labour Party counts as “lucky.”  An SNP government which until now has been able to ride the anti-establishment wave while enjoying electoral support for actually governing with a reasonable measure of competence counts as a big weekend in Vegas.)

But you can take the thirties comparisons too far.  There was a long and complex road even from the election of Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933 and the apocalypse of war and extermination ten years later…and Trump is, firstly, not ACTUALLY a fascist - he want to be one and have all the personal charm one would associate with such a thing, but he doesn’t actually have any armed, uniformed thugs at his command. Second, the American Presidency is only an effective wing of government if the Congress and the Courts allow it to be…ask Obama…and even if the worst happens, it seems unlikely that the Donald will actually be able to put Hillary Clinton in jail, for example.

No, in the US at least, history is repeating itself still, I hope, largely as farce.  For tragedy one has to look elsewhere…to the Middle East, where a surge of democratic energy in 2011 (in response to economic crisis) has led to wars ruthlessly stoked from within and without…

As for Britain, out little corner of the perfect storm, or the crisis of democracy as a culture, is taking the sudden and ominous shape of a government who have just declared that immigration matters more to them than economic prosperity. It is now the position of Her Majesty’s Government, of MY and OUR government, that the National Interest is essentially embodied in the listing and ejecting of the Foreigner.

It is hard not to feel included in that category of the other. In fact, a friend of mine, Alasdair MacCrone, has suggested that the only possible response is declare that “I am Spartacus.” I think he’s probably right about that.

But step back a moment and consider the change that is signified by the adoption of out and out English Nationalism as the governing principle of British Government.  Are those of us who supported “Yes” in 2014 really in a position to criticize? What, other than smug Scottish superiority really gives us the right to declare “our” nationalism better than “theirs”?  Aren’t they just catching up?

There are certainly some people, within and around the very British Institution of the Labour Party, who would make that equivalence.

For me, Nationalism in Scotland and Nationalism in England have different roots as well as manifestations.  The social politics of Nicola Sturgeon, the attitude to immigration for one, are very different to those expressed by Theresa May last week. But I can understand that they might be seen as the same thing by the despairing rump of the last standing (just!) very British institution of the Old New Labour Party.  This is why it is Ed Milliband (and not a Corbynista) who is touring the TV studios this morning arguing for UK parliamentary scrutiny of the Brexit process. It is also why I salute him for it. There is a lot about Britain that I miss too. “Britain” seems like a long time ago and very far away.

I came to “Yes” because I want to preserve the best of Britain and then do even better. I always felt that Scotland was not leaving Britain, but that it was Britain that was being left.  John Harris wrote movingly in the Guardian this morning about how England needs to recover itself.  How England can’t hide from itself behind Britain any more.

We must remember where we began, with a global crisis of democratic legitimacy itself precipitated by an economic collapse which, while nothing like as sharp or dramatic as what happened between 1929 and the mid –thirties, is nonetheless a cultural earthquake that seems to be shaking us, rather more gently for now, on a planetary scale.

It shook Scotland into resisting the decline of Britishness in its own paradoxical way.  In the referendum of 2014, and the elections that preceded and followed that moment, for example, the Scottish electorate opted for devolved government run by nationalists. This is exactly the kind of ironic, nuanced joke of which democracy is capable: it gets us the most competent coherent government for a time of crisis…while at the same time traps the SNP, against nationalist instinct, into making devolution work.

But now, with this government in power in Westminster, making a 180 degree turn about from the Blair/Cameron “Globalist” era into a full-throated defense of England First, the crisis of democracy is coming home. 

As I've said before, the Break Up of Britain was always too big a job for the Scots.  It was always a task for the English.

And I can't say it makes me happy, despite my past and present allegiances.

Rather, I fear, like the winner of last nights “debate” in Missouri, it’s going to be very ugly and challenge us in ways we can’t quite foresee. And that there is equally little I can do about what happens in London for the next few years as there is what happens in Washington DC

All I know for now is that for all of the difficulties that breaking up the UK in 2014 might have caused, we’re going to look back in ten or so years and wonder why we walked away from the hard way and chose the even harder way?

Corbyn is Back and Nothing has Changed

Here are some thoughts on the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn.  Not entirely happy ones.  I look forward to being contradicted and persuaded I'm a moaning old git.

Like a lot of people, I’ve just been watching Jeremy Corbyn,  overwhelmingly confirmed as leader of the Labour Party, say nothing I really disagreed with and doing pretty well (with comparatively soft questions) on the Andrew Marr show.  The last time I voted Labour was in 1983, which was roughly the last time either Jeremy Corbyn or I were ideologically comfortable with the direction of a Labour election manifesto.  So why do I, along with a lot of people who are much more enthusiastic about Corbyn’s leadership than I am, feel that there is little to celebrate…just yet.

Well, because it is perfectly clear, both from the democratically dished but still disgruntled Parliamentary Party, and from the New Owners and Proprietors of the Labour Brand, that the civil war within the party…and a continuing lack of effective opposition to the divided and dithering Tory government…is far more likely this morning than not.

Jeremy said a lot of things about the Health Service, and about investment for example…but he also talked about the boundary changes which will mean that every sitting MP is up for re-selection.  And if anyone thinks that doesn’t mean that every single CLP all over the country isn’t going to be completely consumed with re-selection between now and the next election, then they’ve never met a left wing activist.  I’ve met a few in my time, I’ve BEEN one in my time, and the overwhelming attraction of fighting for an achievable local victory (as well as for the wider direction of “the movement”) means that the left of the Labour party will be right in its comfort zone, where they’ve always been happiest and most effective - fighting their own right wing and not the Tories – for the foreseeable future.

(The Tories are a damn sight more difficult to beat than the Blairites.)

Sitting as I am in another country, my own impatience makes me shout at the telly “Mother of God, there are going to be two Labour parties by, at the latest, the 2025 election…why don’t you just get on with it and SPLIT already!”

The anti-Tory majority of UK voters have historically allowed the Tories into power because their vote is already split, argue both the Corbynistas and the McTernans in reply to such a notion…the only way to beat them is to UNITE the PARTY…which means the other lot have to agree to cease to exist. And if they’d get on with disappearing it would be much better for everyone.

This is no more going to happen than Anas Sarwar’s plea for the SNP to cease to exist on September 19^th 2014 was met with the acclaim of history. With peace having conspicuously failed to break out, both wings of the Labour Party, having written off the 2020 election, have some similarly vague notion that they will be able either to

 a) overturn Corbyn after he’s beaten like a gong, or,

b) on the other hand, sweep to victory having de-selected “New” Labour without anyone noticing all the blood and screaming in the meantime

– all with just enough time to scrape together a victory for the “Real” Labour Party (take your pick) in 2025.

Oh, and by the way, Brexit means whatever Theresa and the chaps can cobble together in the meantime.

This scenario takes no account, you’ll notice, of Scotland - except that Corbyn granted “autonomy” to the Scottish Labour Party BEFORE the leadership election, and tried to take it away again, unsuccessfully, immediately AFTER.

This invisibility (or Brigadoon status) should not be at all surprising.  One unintended effect of the presence of 56-ish SNP MPs in Westminster is a grand demonstration of the democratic irrelevance of “Scotland” as such in even so patently “national” a question as Brexit. Not quite believing it, having become used to being interesting and important for a bit, we are back on the sidelines where we belong.

Come now, the Tories might say, London too voted to Remain…Scotland is not a special case.

And, if what we did on September 18^th 2014 – the rejection of democratic national sovereignty – was as binary a decision as the referendum made it, that would indeed be the case.

But politics is analog, mixed, complex – despite what Trump-esque demagogues promise.  And a lot of us don’t think that’s quite what happened.  We think that we voted No…for the moment…but kept the right to re-think that position.  That Scotland asserted sovereignty, but chose to pool it within the UK, just as we chose to pool sovereignty within the EU in June of 2016. In both cases, we had a complicated analog answer to a simple binary question.

Besides, be under no illusions, the City of London, ably supported by the Tory government will find a way to do very bloody well out of Brexit.  The brutal, schismatic Break up of Britain, which has been led by The City’s quasi –independence for getting on for thirty years, continues apace.  Wales and regional England voted for London to become the tax haven for every crook in the world, even more than it already is.  So the City, suitably ethnically and economically cleansed of all poor people apart from the messengers and cleaners…will do fine out of Brexit…don’t you worry.

And Scotland, like London, in the context iof the schism in these islands of which the Brexit decision is a part, is also trying to negotiate, via the SNP, on the basis of its own financial sector and of its limited sovereignty, for a “Soft Brexit.”  Realistically, that is what the current phony war on another Independence referendum is about – it’s a negotiating posture. 

And why not?  Using the threat of independence to gain concessions from the Brits is what we do!  It’s our entire economic basis!  (We too accept that London is really the only place that really counts) 

Hard Brexit will probably only come to those who voted for it, in Wales and regional England, and it will hurt like hell. And I don’t believe that either of the two Labour Parties…or the SNP, I fear…will be able to do a damn thing about it.

Unless, of course, Theresa and her Merry Band of Barmies screw up the negotiations so horribly that the virtues of constitutional “Hard” or “Soft” “Sexit” will be blindingly obvious to our bewildered electorate so that we meanwhile have and win very convincingly another referendum of our own…

But unless and until things over which we have very little control change very quickly in support of that strategy…we may be in for a long, dirty haul before that is even a possibility.

We’ll look back on September 18^th 2014 in years to come and say, “Why did we have to pick the hard way?  Why did we give them another chance?” 

Why indeed?