tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29319650830573851942024-02-19T03:54:42.202-08:00Normal TimesPlaywright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.comBlogger57125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-26277921183714540552020-05-21T05:23:00.002-07:002020-07-07T07:55:33.111-07:00Mono-Logue<br />
<br />
<i>(Note: Any performer of the piece should feel free to reassign the appropriate gender pronouns as they see fit)</i><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are two of us<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He is always watching me<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As I start to feel anxious or happy<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He tells me what's happening to me<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He can read the signs<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He’s clever that way<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don’t know which of us is saying that<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It doesn’t sound like me.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of us knows he’s going to die one day<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No, better!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of us knows that both of us are going to die<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am not sure if we both have names<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or if it’s the same name.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Once, when we were young<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And didn’t know that there were two of us<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We used to weep together<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When we thought that God was angry<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He’s our Father<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We didn’t know then<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And don’t know now<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
don’t know if there were two of Him<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
then or now<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There may have been…<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We learned before we knew there were two of us<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That there is no way to tell what anyone else is really like<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We’re our own company<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our own best friends<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s better that way<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
I don’t know which one of us said that.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is no doubt a kind of safety in it<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Being locked down and alone, just the two of us<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A security and a community, suddenly.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When we go out for a walk in the park, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And see other people seeing us<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When we see that they are as alone as we are<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Swerving to avoid us, trying not to be seen to.<o:p></o:p><br />
Avoiding being looked at.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We appreciate their agility<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And wonder for a moment if they feel now the way that we do<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The way we feel<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Alone in our rooms, these few, comfortable rooms<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
With all our books and ghosts for company.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Father , son and holy ghost.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can hear a voice<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It could be my voice<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or his<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He could be hearing my voice<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or I could be hearing his<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I used to be very sure that it was my voice he overheard<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And not his voice that I overheard <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That we spoke<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Whether he wanted to or not<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Looking at me impatiently in the mirror<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I took my heart medicine.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don’t know as it matters much whose voice it is.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don’t know if he feels the same.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He reads me better than I read him<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It doesn’t sound like my voice<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can hear a voice.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is nothing else for me to hear<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I used to like music and old movies on TV<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or I told myself to like them<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But I never really did<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
I’m ashamed of myself now<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of my old enthusiasms<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For games of doubt and conjecture<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Infinities and such, journeys…<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I look on myself now as I was then<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
With affectionate contempt.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or is that him? Is that how HE sees me?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The other one.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I remember when I first discovered him<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or he discovered me.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was unwell, and feverish<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I did not feel like myself<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I had been reading<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the way that I used to, before I stopped reading<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Before all these books, these voices trapped in them<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Started only to appal me, shouting at me for attention<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Vulgar whores, exposing their ideas at me<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Tempting me<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Till I saw him watching me<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or he saw me looking up at him<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sweating there in bed while he looked down on me<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Passive, maybe secretly smiling in a way I didn’t like<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Knowing things I didn’t know<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Understanding the course of my illness<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Clinically. Scientifically, like he understands everything<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Not “knowing” - he would eschew the pseudo religious
etymology <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of the idea of knowledge –<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But observing me as a subject within the evolutionary
paradigm<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Me and my virology, as equals, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Worthy co-inhabitants of this fleshly envelope<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bacteria and myself being coeval phenomena<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
in the sweated torture of limbs<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
my harsh breathing, my fear and conviction<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
that I would never breathe alone again<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I spoke of him, of course<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To others<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To parents, God and doctors<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I asked who that boy was who floated above my bed, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So wise and assured of his uniformitarianism<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was told he was an hallucination and would go away<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But no, they were wrong<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He has been with me ever since<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A constant reminder of my inconstancy<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
All through my recovery<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Past the point when I came to see him<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
See his face was mine. See he has my face<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don’t know any more about him now than then<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Not really<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I do not know which one of us is saying that about us.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I do know that recently I’ve been seeing more of him<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He’s been easier company now that I no longer resist him<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And I no longer pretend to any life without him<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No activity he does not mock<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No learning his very presence in my life<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Does not belittle<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nothing about me he does not make small.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I hate the other one secretly sometimes<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don’t know who said that<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But I know he heard me say it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Good!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good , then!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If I am to subsume myself to him, let him subsume himself
to me<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Especially now that illness everywhere <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Has made him and me so commonplace<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I see it in the eyes, when I catch the eyes, of the
people in the park<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
They know now what I have known for years<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
They’ve discovered that they are haunting themselves<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You know too.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You do know.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You know I’m not crazy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Even so, it was a thing to do,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To undertake becoming<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To silence all the noises I once used to use<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To distract myself from myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To lose them all, the books, the music<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The flavours of food<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To abjure all that<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Deny all that to myself in order to hear him, see him
properly<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It wasn’t easy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There were times I even thought I was wrong.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I wasn’t wrong. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s so clear to me now<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I feel so light and free<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Unburdened by pain or hope<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the present tense forever<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No memory, nor future<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Living here and now<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Just the two of us! <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Is this a state of mind?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
An observable phenomenon?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You’d have to ask him.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For me it is pure experience!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I do not even doubt myself anymore!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I leave that to him!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have always been this way!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is the way I have always been!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That is the key to this revelation!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You wouldn’t understand. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can see that<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But sometimes when I see the eyes of the strangers in the
park<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lidded and terrified, struggling with their own secrets<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The desires and fears that define and confine them<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That they don’t understand<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That they can never see, not themselves<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then I can see that the despair I felt as a child<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Helpless as the illness raped me<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Shamed me, exposed me<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To him, to his gaze<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And that when I opened myself to him<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I left off my reserve<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Left the last shred of dignity<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In my soiled pyjamas<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That it was freedom<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Freedom to surrender myself to him<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I know what you’re thinking<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And there is a superficial resemblance between <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Religious epiphany and my inevitable embrace of the other<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I understand your confusion<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And I forgive you that you know not what you do.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When you insult me and degrade me so<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As to compare my new understanding of the cosmic duality<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
With some mere Pauline revelation.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My sickbed was not my road to Damascus!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But I can see why you were thinking that.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Surrender to some all-knowing deity <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Has been relief to many a tortured soul<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But this is not that.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is no relief to my despair<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of the burden of a meaningless, purposeless life.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is merely the acknowledgement that <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Meaning and purpose are not MY problem<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
They are HIS problem<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That there is no soul or self as there is no God<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What life may mean or what its purposes may be are no longer
my concern.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can see him, or rather, not see him<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Smile at me in his secret way of his<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
when I say something as naïve as that! <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As gauche as that!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can just see him.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I love and hate him all at once<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Like it or not, he, like God, or the soul or self<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or any such notion of that which is beyond<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Immediate experience<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That which cannot be touched but which sometimes felt<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Like a holy ghost on a darkened stair<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I found him, all of him<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I looked up when I was ill and saw his face<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Which was of course, my face<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But which was part of the world, the universe<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Outside of me<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Me!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My unconscious, lived, animal experience of being.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He was the wanderer and wonderer, not me.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He was the one who looked and saw my illness<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As some Darwinian contest of atoms and quanta<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of the virus and myself.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Him, not me!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He was the one to whom it mattered what it meant.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And I don ‘t think that my giving myself to him<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was too high a price
to pay for my recovery.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Me!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My recovery! My
taste, touch, sensation!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My joy! My love!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My
music! My poetry!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And if he has demanded since<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That these should all fall silent and tasteless to me<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then that too is part of the price<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of this continuing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If all I can see is see his face<o:p></o:p></div>
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Which is, of course, my face<o:p></o:p></div>
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If all else is silence and darkness<o:p></o:p></div>
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Going forward<o:p></o:p></div>
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Save his secret smile<o:p></o:p></div>
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Benign or maleficent<o:p></o:p></div>
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Then that too is the price of recovery.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And if for him, there is nothing to see but me<o:p></o:p></div>
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This fleshy envelope of impulses and competing bacteria<o:p></o:p></div>
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This empty universe of death<o:p></o:p></div>
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This mere appetite<o:p></o:p></div>
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This mere instinct to cling to palpitation<o:p></o:p></div>
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That I can no more wish away than I can wish away wishes.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Then that is his burden<o:p></o:p></div>
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That is what he accepts from me<o:p></o:p></div>
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That is his peace which passes understanding<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I do not know which one of us is saying that.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I do not know which one of us is saying that.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-50819090138033680222020-05-15T03:09:00.005-07:002020-05-30T07:28:58.423-07:00After the Darkness, Should There Be a New Deal for Scottish Theatre? We'll Need to Make Sure We Deserve It.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY_TiAI5vi0ZHcqe4rxI_muR-vztwVqnAs8_sXR_y8r4caV9BYrSDqwZhxM_eTuQ9tI96HX0gAhpFPyc4sX-3wY286hHSQ51WwQ5N0PRaKrDa2ZKvRvfhf3NNlVciOXnNj-0NfRUX_8gE8/s1600/seats.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="799" data-original-width="1200" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY_TiAI5vi0ZHcqe4rxI_muR-vztwVqnAs8_sXR_y8r4caV9BYrSDqwZhxM_eTuQ9tI96HX0gAhpFPyc4sX-3wY286hHSQ51WwQ5N0PRaKrDa2ZKvRvfhf3NNlVciOXnNj-0NfRUX_8gE8/s320/seats.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Whisper it. The closure of the Lyceum in Edinburgh until at
least the spring might be just be the start. You see that “New Normal” everyone
keeps talking about being just round the corner? This might be it. It might already be here. The
Titanic may already have hit the iceberg. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I’ve just started work on a long promised commission of a
script for the National Theatre of Scotland. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m hugely grateful for the faith and
support. I also have to face the fact that
I might be writing an adaptation of a well-known Scottish novel for a cast of
eight to ten actors who will NEVER perform the play in front of a full, live
audience. They might have to tell the story on a studio set, sitting and
standing at least six feet apart from one another. I suppose there MIGHT be an audience of some
kind there, at about one fifth of capacity, who’ve all signed an indemnity form
and got their temperatures taken as they went in.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Or maybe the audience will consist solely of three or four
television camera people on a set no doubt brilliantly designed and lit, but
never to be seen by a live audience at all.
What I might be writing is a 100 minute television feature, perhaps
played “as live” but all shot in a controlled, socially distanced space that in
six months’ time, or a year’s time…or TWO years’ time…be what “a theatre” is. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Now I can do that. I might even get quite excited, artistically, by the prospect of
doing something like that. But, and this is the real point I’m pursuing with
this daydream, who the hell is going to pay for it? It won’t make any box
office income…and even the budget of the National Theatre of Scotland is going
to have to deal not only with that restriction of income, but also the
recession which is already accompanying the epidemic and which right now has
shut down a third of everything without anything resembling, as far as I can
see, a realistic plan for eventually re-opening restaurants on an economically
sound basis, never mind theatres that people might actually want to go to for a
good night out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We don’t KNOW anything for sure, of course, our destiny,
like everybody else’s, is not in our own hands.
But even if it’s only for the next six months, this is what the world of
theatre, TV and film production, is already ACTUALLY like. This IS
normality. And even if a political
decision is made now that means theatre DOES still exist in Scotland next year, it’s
going to be under wholly different economic and societal circumstances to those
that prevailed ten weeks ago. And what
those circumstances are…a universal and trusted vaccination programme being
underway or not…is radically uncertain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Therefore, I am arguing that right now we in theatre need to
make the case for ourselves collectively as a public good. We may very well need to break the fiscal and
organisational structures created after World War 2 to do it. If we insist on
doing so from our own separate islands of funding and governance, very few of
us are going to make it. It’s not just
the Lyceum. And it’s not just an echo of
what is happening in theatre in London or the English regions. We already have a distinct corporate
identity, and it is time to use that identity to tell government and people in
Scotland their own particular story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We need to make sure that live performance is part of a
sustained and collective effort to revive the educational, retail, tourism and
leisure sectors of our economy and culture...as well as entertainment. We won’t make it on institutional special
pleading. I also believe we will respond better and with more agility if we
respond together and we respond publically and early. And that we might be a damn sight more
successful at attracting corporate sponsorship, for example, if we get a bit
corporate ourselves in the demonstrable public interest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Realistically, I expect a whole series of “New Normalities”
of which where we have been and where we are now…EMERGENCY and CRITICAL…are the
only two stages of recovery we can yet begin to describe…for the theatre as for
schools and shops and everything else. Even
if we are lucky enough to escape CRITICAL shading back into EMERGENCY once or
twice, I think we still have the CONVALESCENCE and RECUPERATION Stages of
Recovery to come. I think we’re going to have to adjust ourselves to each new
normal in turn for I don’t know how long …and nor does anyone else. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But if we want the “new normality” to be healthy when it
DOES come, maybe even healthier than normality was when it died forever ten
weeks ago, then we need to involve everyone with a stake in Scottish Theatre in
what Scottish Theatre becomes. That’s
more than just the writers, directors, designers, actors, crew, front of house staff and administrators.
That’s audiences. That’s everyone who pays tax or buys a Lottery Ticket. That’s funding organisations locally and
nationally. That’s the governments who pay the funders’ wages and set their
parameters. Whether you know it or not yet, and whether you like it or not, this
conversation includes you. We are either part of an integrated new vision of
society, just as the Arts Councils were in 1947, or we can put our heads
between our legs right now and kiss our ass goodbye. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">If we really are as necessary to society as we
like to think we are, we’d better start making the regional, social and
national case for ourselves now. Or reconcile ourselves to a future entirely
consisting of posting stuff on YouTube. And longing for a gig on Shaftesbury
Avenue</span><span style="line-height: 107%;">.</span></span></div>
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Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-20172167080398080612020-05-08T05:14:00.001-07:002020-06-05T01:40:55.899-07:00Plays in the Time of Corona - Some Reflections and a Possible Framework For Discussion of How We Might Think About Theatre While Theatres Are All Shut<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQRsWDCcy4RyeiL8SWiYLvKPUQvGkSqQsb3CUJ4-VsmTkmn6E9r2I_BvthJUX1UDqw73jzLbItkKZrtTtB7qmwgyF9U7_3MZL0-TfpjjI7Nm3BuibOdH1_tXdw5hSx6lH88Z5Uric0_6rc/s1600/empty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="290" data-original-width="435" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQRsWDCcy4RyeiL8SWiYLvKPUQvGkSqQsb3CUJ4-VsmTkmn6E9r2I_BvthJUX1UDqw73jzLbItkKZrtTtB7qmwgyF9U7_3MZL0-TfpjjI7Nm3BuibOdH1_tXdw5hSx6lH88Z5Uric0_6rc/s320/empty.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I’m one of the lucky ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I have got an active commission for a script, even if I and the
producers have no real idea when if or how any production based on this script can be contemplated. I can work at home, like I usually
do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nonetheless, working with NTS, the
Scotsman and Pitlochry Festival Theatre etc on the wee emergency bits we can
currently produce for online and TV broadcast recently has got me thinking that
it is incumbent on me, as a freelancer in this wonderful business we call
“show”, to attempt to intrude upon conversations that I am sure are already
happening within and between organisations. <o:p></o:p><br />
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To wit…after the “critical” phase of shutdown in response to
the pandemic, what happens next in Scottish Theatre?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know that these conversations are happening
in London.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am unaware of similar
coordination here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am more than happy
to be told that thinking is already collectively well advanced.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I merely want to point out that nothing any
institutions or organizations come up with that does not take the freelancers
and, most importantly, audiences along with them, are unlikely to be effective.<o:p></o:p><br />
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It is of course more than possible that dramatic production,
whether for stage, screen and radio is effectively not going to happen at all
if and until there is an effective vaccination programme, and that our future
planning, personally, organizational and collective, has to face that distinct
possibility. If this is to be the case, then we will need to look at
governmental and sectorial choices predicated on there being SOMETHING we can
do somewhere down the line in whatever circumstances are allowed us by the
circumscriptions of whatever the vaunted “New Normal” turns out to look like.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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While there is a certain comfort in throwing a duvet over
our heads until someone comes to makes us all better, I would argue that we
need to respond to our circumstances publically and collectively in a
coordinated way so that audiences, artists producers and governments ALL come
to a shared understanding and consensus of what a total shutdown in new
dramatic production across all media means, and what baby steps we need to take
us through the next period…possibly quite a LONG period...to reach whatever the
“new normal” turns out to be.<o:p></o:p><br />
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This is urgently the case if the path we choose is one of a
tentative and gradual lifting of emergency lockdown.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has to be said that there is an emerging
management consensus within Scottish Theatre that we should declare a uniform
shutdown right now, probably until the New Year…and await developments. I am
not sure that’s right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m not sure
that’s sustainable or practical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m not
sure that there is going to EVER be a vaccine universally available or we are
going to reach the dreaded “herd immunity” without one for a good deal longer
than that.<o:p></o:p><br />
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I think we might have to progressively re-invent the entire
economy and cultural/political justification of Scottish Theatre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I think its touch and go whether we can
do that or not. This is, I feel, the critical phase in this pandemic in which
we find out.<o:p></o:p><br />
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In any case, being neither a doctor not a prophet, I am
writing this letter openly because I believe whatever approach we adopt in the
short, medium and long terms will need agreed and understood guidelines…and
that these guidelines and parameters once again require a coordinated strategic
understanding, at least, of what’s involved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And that the basis of this understanding is that it is MOST likely that
a staged and cautious lifting of lockdown conditions for drama production and
attendance need to be planned for in the various stages that will almost
certainly FOLLOW current emergency conditions but which will NOT be a
restoration of the status quo, either now, six months from now or a year from
now. <o:p></o:p><br />
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It seems certain that at the very least that drama
production on stage and screen is going to be circumscribed for some time.
Minimal cast, crew, locations...and theatres and TV studios operating, if at
all, at very reduced capacity. We need to examine and agree those terms with
unions, funders…insurers…and freelancers …as well as managements.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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Up till now, in the “emergency” and "critical"
phases of this epidemic, it seems to me that we in the "business"
have been limited, more or less, to waving frantically to assert that we still
exist. But I think we are increasingly aware that we will need to have
strategies for the "convalescent" and "recuperation" phases
too...and that we're not going to "get back to a fully healthy
normality" any time soon. Indeed, it may well be that what we mean by
"normality" will be something very different from the situation six
weeks ago...and that right now we have no way of reliably predicting what
"the new normal" will look like. But it will be upon us before we
know it.<o:p></o:p><br />
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If we are going to have a chance to shape whatever happens
THEN, we need to find the people NOW with the imagination and honest grit
to think about what convalescence and recuperation might look like in
terms of performance, live and broadcast. I think we need to find and recruit
people in broadcasting as well as theatre.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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I think the Scottish government are going to
have to be involved in making any economic modelling beyond the “critical”
phase of furlough and grants to the self-employed etc. I am among those
waiting with bated breath for what HMRC come up with in the SHORT term for the
self-employed. But what I am also doing, among other things, is making my own
isolated theoretical stab at thinking about what comes next for the public
facing industry I work in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I want to
see who is out there to talk to about getting practical.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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I realise that the shell shock of the first critical stage
of the pandemic is still with us, but I do think we need to get a bit strategic
as well as to think about how to look after ourselves in the convalescent and
recuperation phases too…we cannot simply WAIT for the new normal to come
along.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We need, however clumsily, to try
to shape it by how we handle what comes before it. What I'm talking about
applies to me, of course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it ALSO
applies across the board to production companies, and agencies as well as
“freelancers.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Current emergency
measures will not and cannot last forever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We need to look at what happens next.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What I am saying is as true of the tourist industry, for
example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bars, restaurants, clubs,
museums etc etc etc. Conversations will be had and are being had about all of
these. I think it likely that the more public those conversations are the more
likely they are to find support in institutions and local and national government,
as well as, in our case, with the public who come who came and watched the
shows once upon a time, and paid their taxes to make the shows happen.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is why I’m sending this out to folk I know now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And will be looking to find a way of
publishing it shortly. It might well be that we’re just shut, not just for
weeks or month, but for years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I
think that is a counsel of despair and I hope we can do better and we should
ACT, at this moment, AS IF WE HAD FAITH that we can do something now, and in
the medium term…to prepare for the long term.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This, in rough draft, is what I have tried to set out below.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quick note: I say “we”
quite a lot in what follows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What I mean
by “we” is those who want a future for publically supported theatre (and
broadcast) making in Scotland.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That this
“we” matters at all culturally, let alone politically and socially, is the
most flimsily imaginable working hypothesis. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Meanwhile…<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<br />
Illness is our guiding reality at this moment. So I am going
to borrow its categories for a first attempt at prognosis for theatre…and
performed drama…in Scotland in the wake of the continuing pandemic. I’m going
to start by using this framework to think about where we’ve been and where we
are…and then where we might go next.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
<b>First Stage – Emergency</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
The social and political priority at this stage is to
protect the health service from being overwhelmed. Everything else is
subordinated to this aim and can wait to even be thought about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hence the economy, including, of course,
theatre, TV and radio drama production, abruptly stops. And our government,
temporarily, and only because, for the moment, this is a rich country, plug the
gaps…and put everything in deep freeze.<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But everything is frozen as it was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The health and basic supply “functions” of
our society are kept going, but we ACT AS IF the rest of the life that we knew
until six weeks ago can simply be restarted as if the pandemic would be “over”
before we knew it…as if there were such a thing as “over”…and as if a return to
“the old normal” was possible.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But it isn’t going to be like that, and the more used to
emergency conditions we get, the more we come to understand that we are going
to go through a whole SERIES of crises …that each of what I have called “the
stages of recovery” is ITSELF a crisis where everything we used to take for
granted about how we did everything has to get reinvented. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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ALL of the government’s loan and furlough schemes, for
example, presently scheduled to take us till the end of June, are likewise predicated
upon a return to the world of the beginning of March.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As if that were what’s going to happen when
the “lockdown is over.”<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It isn’t. And we know by now it isn’t…which indicates that
we are moving into the next stage…which is, in every sense of the word, the
“critical” one.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For theatre in Scotland, our first response to the emergency
was to wave and shout that we weren’t out of our depth, that we could cope…but
all of it was waving with a deep fear that we were actually drowning. There are
companies and institutions already going to the wall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ironically, the more reliant on Box Office
they are, and hence often the more popular, the worse they are getting hit. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Meanwhile, the NTS, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, and the
Scotsman newspaper have all, in various ways, insisted on “aliveness” as our
Facebook Status. The Scenes for Survival, PFT’s reaching out to its audience by
phone and to writers by way of mini-commissions, and Joyce MacMillan’s efforts at
the Scotsman website, at a limited “substitution” for small scale work (like
the tour of my own “Signalman” play with Tom McGovern that was supposed to be
happening now) are all basically gestures towards survival as a wish, rather
than strategies towards securing it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
This is not to knock any of these organisations and
initiatives. I have happily and enthusiastically contributed to all three
initiatives. And there are probably things going on that I don’t know about…But
we should not mistake any of them for being more than what they are. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
What we decide, what we argue about in the NEXT phase, is
going to be decisive.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<b>Second Stage – Critical<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
This is where I think we are now. Key industries only are being
opened or are about to be opened piecemeal. Precautionary lockdown and social
distancing measures effectively remain in place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are glancing very uneasily at the finances
of what happens next…and theatres and broadcasters are no different from
everybody else. Except that we are uncomfortably aware, and must now openly
face and acknowledge, that like tourism, the bars and hotels and restaurants,
our business only exists through discretionary spending, not as a necessity…and
there are huge, ungainly questions that no one quite dares ask yet about what we
do next.<br />
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And make no mistake, the same basic questions are going to
be asked right across society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
really matters? What are the values upon which we can take agreed, necessarily
political choices as to how we try to attain the “new normality” where we will
inevitably arrive, now that the Old Normality is a train that has definitively left
the station and disappeared round a bend.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The thing about being in the critical phase of an illness,
is that you might THINK that you’re okay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But actually, you could still die at any minute. Even now that the NHS
has been saved from immediate calamity, It will STILL take a value driven
policy decision to decide our individual fates…whether you get onto a
ventilator or not…and the way in which Scottish Theatre proves that it deserves
saving can only be by thinking very, very clearly about what comes next…in the
CONVALESCNCE and RECOVERY stages that will come before, finally, the “new
normality.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Make no mistake, in order to influence that normality,
however long it takes to arrive…six months, a year, two years…is not just going
to be decided by, say, the timetable for the availability of a vaccine or
effective treatments (there is no vaccine for AIDS…which was the last “plague”
to hit showbiz this hard) and is going to be determined by how we act right
now. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Now that we have checked that we are still breathing, we are
starting to look around at each other in the shared understanding that our
future can be measured exactly by how immediately and urgently we screw on our
thinking caps right now about what we think those next stages will be like… and
if we are to EARN our survival at all.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
My instinct, I think widely shared, is that if we simply
“leave it to the market”…or pull the duvet over our heads and wait for whatever
comes to get us…to use the model of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” we
are going to find that Bedford Falls has come under new ownership and is to be
re-named Pottersville. Even forgetting the lovey’s film reference, those with
the deepest pockets and the smallest consciences will control everything even
more completely than they do now as small businesses go to the wall, as mass
unemployment cripples trade unions even further and standards of safety and
hygiene are jettisoned along with any last symbolic attempts to arrest climate
change.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That is a path we could take, but I don’t think Trump World
is a real option for the future. I think it will ensure that this future is
nasty, brutish and short. I think it is decisions we make now, made in this
second, critical phase of the pandemic that will shape our recovery, should we
be fortunate enough to make one, in a progressive…or at least not too painfully
REGRESSIVE, a direction. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If this is true of society as a whole, it is VERY true of
Scottish Theatre as a microcosm. If we are EVER AGAIN looking to have our
public spaces open to as big an audience as we can get, with that audience
happy to come to mass events where they are going to hear someone coughing two
rows behind them and not think about leaving immediately…at ANY point in the
future, I think we have to DECIDE TO SURVIVE and to make concrete plans right now
for what we do next.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">INTERLUDE – a putative
timeline<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This timeline is
necessarily contingent. Of course it is. But I think we need to put rough
estimates in place, based on the dribs and drabs of information and rumour
available to us, in order to think realistically about keeping our “performance
culture” alive. The periods also, of course, overlap as well as being only
guesses. These are where we’ve been and where we are, as explored above:.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I am suggesting that
there are three “stages” or “phases” of what comes next…with no firm
predictions as to their duration, but some indications as to their nature. Here
they are with a tentative timeline which may be realistic, pessimistic...or
optimistic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your temperament may well
determine your response. I briefly reiterate the two first stages before moving on to numbers three and four.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">EMERGENCY – March to
May 2020.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Stay at Home and
Save the NHS.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Emergency is what we’ve just been through.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it’s basically deep freeze followed by an
understanding that we can’t stay frozen forever…and that the rules of the game
have changed forever.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">CRITICAL May to
August 2020. <o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
The question everyone in the whole country is asking is
basically this : “How do we stay alive under severe mandatory restrictions
WITHOUT necessarily the same level of direct government economic support to
employees, including the self-employed, now that “the lockdown has been lifted”
but that many kinds of work and economic activity remain impossible.“<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
I can’t pretend I know what the answer is, but I do know
this is the time for a prognosis and a suggested plan of treatment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think we have to face reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that the reality is that we simply cannot
WAIT for a vaccine or a miracle. We are passing through one crisis into another
crisis…and there are least two crises still to come.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">CONVALESCENCE (August
2020 – April 2021?)<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
“Convalescence” as a medical concept involves an “imitation
of life.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It means flexing your muscles
so they don’t atrophy because you CAN’T do the real thing for a while. In this
particular instance, it means theatre people doing what they can do to work
their creative muscles…but that ISN’T theatre…but hopefully doing some work
that is valuable in itself and will put us in a good place to do what comes
next.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
The basic assumption
I’m working from is that nothing resembling theatre as we’ve known it is economically
possible or plannable for a considerable period to come. And that it will be
some time after THAT that we start getting audiences who are comfortable to
come back…if they do…and perhaps initially under circumstances of “social
distancing” which are hard to envision when one thinks of those dear distant
days of a few weeks ago crowding the bar at the Traverse or the Tron.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
(I have heard talk of
opening for Christmas…and that MIGHT be possible…but the economics of running a
Christmas show on a box office capacity of a socially distanced 25% (for
example) don’t merit more than a cursory glance. The logistics of schools going
back will likely preclude block bookings…etc etc etc)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
So in the immediate future…maybe for six months, maybe for a
year…our choices range between a bottle of whisky and a duvet on the one
hand…or making some kind of plan on the other, however tentative.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
And that means, in this case, using theatrical skills to
make material of BROADCAST quality and potential to be shown online and/or
broadcast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It probably means work
featuring small or even very small casts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But it should be substantial in terms of content, challenging,
niche…possibly elitist…and, in broadcast terms, extremely CHEAP but nonetheless
do things to a broadcast quality for showing on TV or online that exploit the
strengths that WE have that standard TV production doesn’t.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
In terms of what that might be, as a playwright, of course I
have some ideas. Scottish Theatre has a deep talent pool of designers, directors
and builders as well as actors…and it should not be beyond the wit of ANY of
them to be producing new work (or imagnatively and excitingly recycled OLD
work) under these challenging circumstances. All we need, I suggest, is
broadcasters willing to take it on, and that means producers, TV and Theatre
producers, who are willing to take a punt on it…and funders and sponsors
willing to back it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
This in turn means institutional backing…from government,
from broadcast management, from institutions like Creative Scotland…but it is
hardly rocket science. If I can see how it might be possible to produce work of
genuine quality that would be an exciting and challenging experience to
watch…even if it isn’t theatre and cannot aspire to be theatre, even if it’s a
whole new art form, and if I find the prospect exciting rather than
daunting…then the same is surely true for my colleagues and for a wider
audience of which, after all, I am a member. I am not interested in making
anything in the theatre or on any other medium anywhere I don’t want to watch. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
I think we should be getting designers and scenic artists
and lighting teams to create sets for extraordinary individual performances of
extraordinary and substantial work that is tailor made for what we might call
“guerrilla” studio production. I think we should be thinking of each of these
shows as unapologetic low budget films for immediate broadcast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Monologues spring to mind, of course, but so
do small scale plays.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
We need to take over a space…or spaces…theatrical or
otherwise…and make ourselves a place where we can write and direct and design
and act without ANY sense that this is an apology or second best.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, that this is a dramatic form
especially invented and curated for the express purpose of keeping our creative
talents limber.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
The real test, of course, is whether or not we might want to
keep this kind of broadcast/online production going AFTER the pandemic does
finally, definitively ease.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That it’s
not just a substitute, not second best, but a new, evolved dramatic form…the TV
studio play reinvented for the 2020s…<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The rule of thumb, as with all that I’m suggesting for this
“stage” and the next…is that if we don’t think we should do it when it’s NOT an
emergency, we maybe shouldn’t do it at all.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
But in the meantime, if we can invent a new form that might
actually survive, we should absolutely go for it while we can. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
And to do that, I think we need to pool resources as a
whole, collectively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That “we” I’ve been
using is possibly rhetorical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I
honestly believe that if we don’t want to all hang separately, it is imperative
that we hang together…and that we take a deep breath and accept that this means
leadership, collective and consensual if at all possible, but essential without
peradventure.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are also already instances of theatre spaces being
used not with the aim of a full house at 7.30pm , but as spaces where you can
welcome a rotation of smaller audiences (maybe fifty in a space which normally
seats three hundred) for maybe 30 minutes at a time to a space that’s open all
day…for exhibitions, installations, maybe even short performances…all in spaces
that can be made all the more extraordinary in lighting and design BECAUSE they’re
not full!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Numbers can be limited on and
off stage and the safety of this new form can be advertised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
The theatre is a public space where art is made before your
eyes…and there is no real reason why that has to mean cramming in 600 folk at
7.30pm…when you might pull in the same crowd over a twelve hour period. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
A group of designers convened by Tom Piper is already working on an idea like
this.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">RECOVERY (April
2021-April 2022?)<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Proceeding with the necessary caveat that the further we get
away in time, the mistier is our crystal ball, if and when we do open our
theatres…or however many of them are left, it is likely to be for a restricted
audience and with restricted resources for putting stuff on, we will need the
same collegiate or collective consciousness mandated and supported politically
and institutionally as we move from convalescence to recovery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again, in medical terms, the recovery phase
is when you start to do the things you used to do, and possibly go through the
learning process of doing them differently from the way you did before. My
instinct is once again, towards a collective value driven approach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
Which requires, among other things, some
agreement as to what those values are or might be. Hence talking about it now,
once again.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Anyway, I think we should treat this period, (which I
suppose MIGHT be coming as soon as Christmas…if the epidemic doesn’t flare up
again…although I doubt it) as one for experimentation…because we sure as hell
won’t be making any money.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
But if and when it does come, like the “convalescent” stage
before it, there are two essential pre-conditions, two sets of criteria.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
First, it has to be “good,” not just “good,
considering.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And second, it will need a
different financial structure to what is asked even now of theatres like the
Lyceum and Dundee Rep. Indeed, as I observed previously, it is exactly those
companies who have followed recent funders’ injunctions to be more reliant on
box office and sponsorship, the most successful venues by those criteria…who
are in the most trouble now.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
This of course is leading us towards the even murkier mists
of defining now in these early days of the crisis what the “new normal” (with
or without an active virus) is going to look like aesthetically and
economically.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
I would argue that it is still worth looking now at what an
“interim” theatre …or “live performance culture” might look like…on the
assumption that social distancing will still apply on stage, as well as back
stage and in the auditorium.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
What kind of public space we’re talking about and with how
many people in it, what time or times of day…these are the logistical
parameters within which we can present…well…present what?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is an impulse, of course, to put on in 2021 what was
supposed to go on in 2020.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is both
honourable and laudable…but it may not at ALL be practical. It may represent a
wish for normality more than it does a practical forward facing plan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And normality left the station six weeks ago
and has since disappeared round a bend in the rail track, I suspect never to be
seen again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least it seems very
unsafe to simply assume that this is a hiatus after which everything will
resume exactly as it did before.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
I think that the theatre that we find and invent to work for
our audiences under the new set of circumstances will be the theatre through
which those audiences regain the theatre going habit, if they ever do.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
And what kind of shows will go on?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What will be popular and cheap and easy to
produce? Perhaps in unconventional spaces?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Perhaps in a year’s time. And perhaps for another year?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
I think we need to talk about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think designer, writers and actors have to day dream a little.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But we will also need to deliver something
which our funders think it is essential we produce.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think it will involve much more education
and outreach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think it may involve new
media…and I think may be being performed for an audience who are economically
as well as socially challenged by what is happening to all of us.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
The live theatre, live storytelling…these arts will have to
prove themselves and earn their corn and their place to eat it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t think it’s rocket science.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think we can do it. But we need to be
planning it now and setting up the political and institutional networks of
support to enable it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The New Normal April
2022 – whenever.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
On a personal note, the “New Normality” on this schema
corresponds to my sixtieth birthday. I should face the distinct possibility
that I have already retired, but will act, for the moment, as if I’m going to
live forever.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
On the same theme, if he have to do some necessary dreaming
about the immediate, short and medium terms of our stages of recovery, perhaps
when it comes to the new normal, delivering world class live performance and
storytelling to the full social and geographical range of the people who live
in this country…and beyond, telling our stories to the world…maybe “effective
dreaming” is where we can afford to be for a little longer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think I know some of the features of the
“new normality” I’d like to see. I think it would involve regional hubs in our
towns and cities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think it would
involve a regular and reliable touring circuit. I think it would have a
regulated proportion of the cake available to the new and untried and the risky
as well as a far more flexible responsiveness to audiences than seems available
to us now in the era of the well filled form as the highest and most useful
form of “story telling.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
But maybe that really is a conversation for another
day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Except to say, on the one hand,
that is precisely the values of that “Scottish Theatre that is yet to be” that
will get us through the accidents and alarms of the next couple of years, and that
the brutal truth of this epidemic and its economics are that not everything or
everyone is going to come through it in exactly the same shape. That there are
going to be job losses, and fights…and blood on the carpet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a job to do with our cultural and
political infrastructure before we can even BEGIN to day dream effectively.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
None of it means we shouldn’t make a start.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, literally, there is NO time…there will
never BE a time…like the present.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-21136836218618046292020-04-26T02:40:00.001-07:002020-04-26T02:40:25.897-07:00"Progressive Survival"? We need a BIG conversation!<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>WHAT </b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want
to do here, for myself at least, is to move past mourning the theatre we
can't have anymore and trying to come up with a model for what kind of
Scottish Theatre we CAN have under the conditions with which we are going to
find ourselves confronted and conditioned by for the foreseeable
future...before we get to the "unforeseeable new normal" that is
going to be our future. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I profoundly believe that we have the chance of
fashioning a sectoral and strategic plan for our own small country...But I as strongly
believe that if we leave responses simply to the individual initiative of
individuals and producers, we might miss out on our own collective
survival. As with the virus itself, it is only concerted collective
action that can protect some...perhaps most...individuals. But that this
collective effort needs to be led. And it is leadership I think, however
uncomfortably, we need to think about.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We know what the problems are. If and when public
spaces do re-open, it will have to be with social distancing on and off
stage. We are not going to be re-opening the Tron or the Lyceum or Dundee Rep
at full capacity for some time well beyond the immediate
"fire-fighting" that the Westminster and Edinburgh governments have
put in place for different kinds of employers and the self-empolyed who make up
most of the workforce of the media...printed, broadcast, theatrical. This
may last a year...it may last two till a workable universal vaccine is in
place. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(We hope!)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We will need a strategy that goes past
"fire-fighting." And sector by sector, as we partially lift the lockdown,
it is those who work WITHIN parts of our economy, from farming to tourism to
Eden Court...we need to inform how it's done...<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This will mean, of course, the Scottish Government, among
others, making a selection...more or less painful choices about which
institutions to preserve and protect for the happy day, however long hence,
that they can fully re-open their doors. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We could, of course, leave it to the marketplace...SOME form
of selection is surely coming...but I fear if we don't get organised NOW,
Rupert Murdoch will end up owning whatever is left...<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(Mr Potter buying up Bedford Falls after the Wall Street
Crash springs irresistably to mind...which makes us the Bailey Building and
Loan, if you follow the torturous movie reference)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Anyway...I think it is important that we establish a set of
agreed social and artistic "values" around which this selection can
be organised. Without those values, without leadership, without
agreement...then I'm not sure survival can be done...or at least not done
"progressively." <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It could be that "progressive survival" is the
descriptive phrase for what I want to talk about for Theatre in Scotland.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But that it is exactly the notion of “progressive
survival” that we need to coalesce around in the WHOLE economy…from housing to
health to manufacture to fishing to the “Bide a Wee “ B and B. And that those
who WORK in those sectors must inform the knowledge base for the recovery, as
collectively agreed values inform the rationale.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the meantime, back in MY area of expertise, if "sold
out" means that the Lyceum has sold 125 tickets, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>or the Tron has sold 50...(and
the decison is made by local and national government that these
economics are bearable in the meduium terms for a limited number of spaces) we
also have to think about what that means for the sector as a whole.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Longer runs of hit shows? More performances? A core
ensemble of actors at maybe six or seven high profile venues? Employing
otherwise unavailable telly and movie stars? A change in the balance of
organisations directly in receipt of government support...and thus no
longer reliant on the increasingly bust looking "reactive" model
of Creative Scotland for strategic arts provision?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I think one way or the other, one way or the other, the
centre will probably hold...given a few mortgage holidays...and maybe a hike in
already uncomfortably high ticket prices. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
BEYOND that, culturally, socially and and geographically...BEYOND
those spaces whose importance to the great and the good will probably ensure
some kind of survival...I think the NTS "Scenes for Survival", the
Scotsman's short filmed performances and Pitlochry Theatre's commissions of
monologues ALSO point a way forward that I think needs to be explored
STRATEGICALLY in the wake of the immediate impulse to stay alive.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This is where I think "vlog-casts" might come
in. Where I think we might get Sam Heughan or Karen Gillen to do fifteen
minute story reading slots for download on mobile phones and broadcast on BBC
Scotland, where "pop up theatres" might perform "survivors'
cabarets" in NON theatrical venues, where we look creatively at the spaces
and technologies that are available...rather than longing for the creative
spaces that are not.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In order to monetise and promote and pay for these
activities...these opportunities...we need to think beyond our own bunkers...is
all I'm saying. We need to look at pooled advertising revenue as well as
government funding...and to do BOTH of those things, I do not believe it
is possible NOT to act collectively. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Or indeed without the broadcasters...<o:p></o:p></div>
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It may well be that these conversations are already
happening in the hierarchies above and beyond my paygrade as a freelance
playwright with a drawer full of delivered and now un-performable scripts…. And
that some folk who read this you are among the ones already doing the talking.
But I have been inspired by being lucky enough to be involved in all three of
the initiatives undertaken by Pitlochry, The Scotsman and the NTS. I have
also been hugely moved by some of the personal stories that I've been
hearing on radio and TV and online. And all of these experiences have made me
at least START to think positively about what the hell comes next?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Also, I have to say, the way that Nicola Sturgeon's
admonition to treat the public like adults has found a resonance, and the way
that this line is now being parroted all over the UK, gives me hope that the
leadership the likes of you can offer is going to find supportive echoes in the
corridors of power. And her piece in the Herald on Sunday 26<sup>th</sup> April
is a general call to which this open letter is a response. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Our conversations in the theatre isn Scotland, as elsewhere,
need to be adult, wide, democratic and inclusive...and involve artists AND
audiences. To survive at all, let alone survive “progressively”, we are
going to HAVE to get our heads together. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Then just maybe we can make something better than a
Survival, and make something we're proud of...that puts in a good place for the
day after the day after tomorrow.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-42322017122372479472020-04-21T02:44:00.004-07:002020-06-21T07:38:59.463-07:00Lifting the Lockdown and the Veil of Ignorance<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="bd38r" data-offset-key="22msl-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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It is now a notorious truism that it is a lot easier to impose “lockdown” than to end it. You don’t need to
understand how society works in order to shut it down, you just have to shut it. But it turns out that you cannot re-open it without considering in what order in which to do that…and that the order of opening implies an understanding, even a consensus about the ordering of the things that make a society work.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This potential re-ordering of what is important actually started with the lockdown itself. The lockdown was never – of course not – anything like total. We have already made value judgements between the rate of infection and societal coherence. To give an obvious example, the Health Service was not shut down. The National Health Service underpins, it transpires, absolutely everything else.The protection of its workers, facilities and capabilities turns out to be a good to which all other goods must be sacrificed. <o:p></o:p></div>
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(Not that this is surprising, necessarily, but the revelation that hospital porters and cleaners outrank everyone except doctors and nurses in societal - if not finance of indeed immigration - status,
has, or bloody well ought to have, occasioned a bit of a rethink.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Rather less comfortably, but illustrative of priorities that we are now forced to actually LOOK at, it transpires that the effective protection of the GENERAL health service also trumps the safety of those who live and work in care homes for the elderly and vulnerable. In order to make room for a potential “tsunami” of Covid patients, hospitals had to be emptied of patients who were not at that moment in need of critical care. And if the consequences in our care homes were tragic, then the Darwinian pragmatics of the ordering of society and its priorities were disquietingly exposed as a consequence.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Similarly, it turns out that people who work in delivery and food retail are actually “essential” to all those bankers and playwrights who can work from home. And as lockdown is eased on the deceptively consensual idea that “the economy needs to get going again,” similarly brutal realities are exposed. Such as, you have to open schools or provide childcare before people can go to work. Thus, according to the
Daily Mail, “teachers (and children) must be heroes.” <span style="font-family: inherit;">To which the predictable responses of teachers, (as well as children and their parents) is “you first, mate!”</span></div>
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hat we are doing in the easing of lockdown, in putting our societies back together in a specific order of re-openings is that we are making conscious, practical choices about how those societies actually function, in the order of what we actually value most. Postal workers and delivery drivers are modern aristocrats by this measure. This understanding was quite impossible when we were stuck in the Trumpian universe we used to live in, where handing out free money to people who were already rich was the answer to all of life’s little difficulties. But it is, however briefly, possible now.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As I write, it appears too that it is currently the judgement of the Prime Minister that it is more important to the nation that he hangs on to his personal focus group Svengali than the entire public health
strategy of the last ten weeks is fatally undermined. All of which goes to show that one consequence of the beginning of the end of lockdown, or at least the end of the beginning, is that value judgements about what matters in the ordering of society and what matters most to us, indeed, who “we” are, is no
longer a simple matter of vapid rhetoric about all being in it together. We are bound to get a bit controversial.<o:p></o:p></div>
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"The Veil of Ignorance" might be a useful thing to think about as we plan to lift the lockdown. The idea, associated most with American thinker John Rawls, is that, as a mental exercise and way of judging what happens in the "real world," you set about designing a social system with no foreknowledge of your own position in it.Given that "normal,"for a lot of people (as in the phrase "back to normal") was and is
pretty crappy, the idea is to imagine a just economy (in terms of housing, health, cultural activity etc etc) where you and your ethnic or social group have NO guarantee of being at the top.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Most people who get to design societies, from Solon to Solomon or Jefferson to Lenin, (let alone UK civil servants) have imagined themselves to be in charge of their dream projects...because, through violence or the inherited benefits of violence, they WERE. But we live in a democracy, and in a democracy, we theoretically get to debate and agree how we want to live: what matters most and in what order. <o:p></o:p><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I suggest that we are in the the "Vale of the Veil of </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ignorance" right now...in that we know everything is going to change, but none </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">of us has the first idea to what. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">We are getting to debate and agree on some of this stuff </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">right now...from the explosion of food distribution charities, to clapping for </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">carers and as we come out of lockdown, we have a </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">limited window of choosing what we actually WANT from the New Normal, of </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">speaking aloud the unspoken consensus we are actually already using to make </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">decisions.</span><br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">To illustrate the uncertainty personally, playwrights and others have been asking Arts Councils and government ministers for years to consciously and openly decide whether they really want a professional theatre sector in Scotland or not, and to act on that choice. Guess what? Something </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">like that decision about whether the kind of theatre we have been making in the kind of way we've been doing it actually matters is actually GOING TO HAPPEN in the next year or so! </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">As the Prime Mnister will no doubt learn this week, the answers to your questions may not be what you thought. I only hope my bcolleagues and I can make a better case for ourselves than he did.</span><br />
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Less myopically, lifting lockdown on a whole society brings, I think, an obligation to at least partially articulate the principles on which we can agree to its functioning. And that we MAKE those choices without knowing where in the new hierarchy we ourselves will end up! And if it turns out that the "new normal", is lazily indistinguishable from the rotten, corrupt old one, well, it will turn out that that is who we are, that is who we choose to be.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It may well be that this is already happening. Maybe we should be talking about it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-7662606419290281102020-02-24T02:34:00.000-08:002020-02-24T02:57:16.542-08:00Postcard from London...from A Foriegn Correspondent<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Scotland is SUCH a foreign country here now. Folk here are INTERESTED in Scottish poilitics, getting vague echoes of "something going on with Nicola Sturgeon" but in the same way as they might quiz a Hungarian visitor for their views about Victor Orban. As something happening somewhere else. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Union is already dissolved…but like The Death of God, this has yet to be announced officially in Church. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For Scotland, the consequence is, paradoxically, that now, for the FIRST time, it is ONLY possible for London to rule us as a colony. For our institutions and cultures to be politically neutered and rendered harmless to the imperial centre by means of collaborators at home and threats from elsewhere…or, alternatively, for our relationship as EQUALS occupying areas of these islands to finally be recognised. (But given the way twerps like Toby Young still think about Ireland, let alone Kenya, I wouldn’t hold your breath, my people.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The strange thing is that what was once a self-serving caricature of the Union from 1707 to 2019, of the Scots as “the oppressed” rather than as “salaried employees of the oppressors” has become, accidently, a valid description. There is NO WAY for a the Brexit Britain I am visiting to accommodate a Scotland with any degree, however limited, of political self-determination. One need only think of what a UK-EU trade deal will mean, if one is even possible at the same time as a UK-US deal with contradictory terms. Is Boris Johnson really going to undermine his precious “hostile” points based immigration system to help out hotels in Invernessshire or potato farmers in Fife? Or fish processors in Fraserburgh? Don’t be silly! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You can have Brexit or you can have Devolution. There is no way to have them both.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Brexit Britain means that the cartoon version of Scotland as an erased and colonised culture…which was bullshit till now (apart from the Gaels up till about thirty years ago)…is now going to come true for everyone who thinks of Scotland as distinct. It may be that it was only while we were part of a Britain as an externally facing PROJECT of first, resistance to “Catholic Europe” and then an Empire and finally a Welfare State paid for out of the surplus value of international exploitation, that a Britain as an inward looking COUNTRY, as a “community” and a “culture” was coherent at all. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The latest draft of “British” self-definition, a strange brew of John of Gaunt’s “sceptr’d Isle” and George Orwell’s “Airstrip One” so deliberately chosen when Johnson got his eighty seat majority in December, feels like entirely someone else’s business. Except that, with no reference to our distinct identity whatsoever, it is about to be imposed on us too.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The alternative, however we engineer it, is going to be some form of Independence. Indeed, I think we will DEFINE what independence MEANS in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century (as opposed to the 19<sup>th</sup> Century version of sovereignty we blurred over in the dress rehearsal of 2014) exactly by the degree from which we can make our own path in 21<sup>st</sup> century Europe “independently” of whatever England chooses for itself in the meantime. If there has been no other achievement of the Sturgeon "era" of the SNP, (Indyref 2 before 2021 always having been a pipe dream for the birds) , then re-defining the Independence MOVEMENT as an avowedly pro-European outward facing one, then that (hopefully!) lasting achievement is, all by itself, an enormous cultural advance. What it means to be Scottish NOW as opposed to the White Only Heather Club of my youth, is, all by itself, a transformation we should be profoundly grateful for.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We will define our independence, I think now, unlike in 2014, NOT with reference to “Britain” or “England” primarily, but with reference to Europe and the world, as world citizens with a distinct Scottish profile which may never get acknowledged by the Toby Youngs of this world, but which may well be marked and appreciated in the much wider world beyond the London media village. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Which APPEARS, to this visitor anyway, to be being run by an anonymous cabal of refugees from mummy’s basement with a part time and possibly alcoholic clown haired front man occasionally dragged out as a distraction.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Which is INTERESTING of course, but in the same way Victor Orban is interesting. As the chap who is unfortunately in charge of another country’s capital city </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I’ve had great times in, where I know some great people…but whose dilemmas…about Lisa Nandy and Kier Starmer, for example… I no longer feel I share.</span></div>
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Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-5827274258579640452019-12-16T02:50:00.003-08:002019-12-16T14:25:45.520-08:00Shit Got Real<br />
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Last Thursday, as the Americans say, shit got real.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, to be slightly more “European” about
it, reality got real in a subtly different way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>History, politics, everything.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Like Scottish Independence in the months before September 18<sup>th</sup>
2014, before last Thursday, Brexit was a threat or a promise, depending on your
preference. On Thursday December 12<sup>th</sup> 2019, unlike voters in
Scotland in 2014, voters in England made it real.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In retrospect, it turns out to have always
been clear that in order to become a real process in the UK as it already was
in Brussels, it needed BOTH the mandate of the 2016 referendum and a
parliamentary majority to lift leaving the EU from the category of abstraction
to that of “Oh Crap, this thing is really going to happen.” For the first time in
the whole process what Brexit actually means in terms of the practical management
of trade, of the economy and of the politics of the Union, is actually on the
table. Till now, it was a game. On Thursday, as the Americans say, shit got
real.</div>
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The other shit that just got real, of course, now that the
issue is done and dusted in England by the electoral will of the people…twice…once
as an idea and again as a willed practical process, is that we in Scotland need
to decide properly whether we’re going along for the ride. It was always the
case that it was only when one piece of shit got real that we would find
ourselves having to get real about the other one. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Now it’s here. What was a bad joke in 2014, that Prime Minister
Boris Johnson, armed with a ten year majority, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>would drag Scotland out of the EU and make devolved
government a functional impossibility in the process…is no longer a half-baked
threat of a worst case scenario for a No vote …it’s actually going to
happen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s actually already
happening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shit, undoubtedly, got real. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Everything with which one might make a progressive case for
the union, the prospect of a UK labour Government before 2030 and of meaningful
federalist constitutional reform in the context of the necessary centralisation
without which it is inconceivable that Brexit can happen coherently seems to be
for the birds. Though it seems entirely possible this weekend that the Tories
will bring forward some palliative constitutional tinkering next year in order to
head off the threat of independence, I for one simply cannot see how even the
limited “principle of consent” within the devolution settlements of Scotland, Northern
Ireland , Wales and even London can be honoured within the context of having to
make comprehensive trade deals (with the EU and the USA just for starters) that
will absolutely demand renegotiations of the health and welfare markets, let
alone farming, fishing and retail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
short, I can see it being possible for Scotland to take a full part in Brexit,
or to have an effective devolved government. I cannot see it having both.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The “half way house” of devolution and full participation in
a Full English Brexit simply cannot live together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are either fully and whole heartedly on
board the good ship Brexitania or we are in the lifeboat of independence. This
has been the case in the abstract since 2016, of course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But shit, as I may have said before, just got
real.<o:p></o:p></div>
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One of the consequences of this altered sense of reality is
that you suddenly see your own history differently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, it was May 2011 when the
election of a majority SNP government suddenly made the prospect of a independence
referendum a really possible future event, and not just something for individual
daydreams and wistful collective longing in the pub. But in retrospect, the
immediate test back then was of devolution itself, not yet of independence.
Would the result of a Scottish election be taken sufficiently seriously in
Holyrood and Westminster for a referendum to actually happen?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was the question then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Up until the last few weeks of the campaign
in September 2014, Scottish Independence itself seemed, like Brexit until last
week, an abstraction, a threat or a promise, depending on your point of view.
In practical political terms, the real priority for the Yes campaign was to
ensure that the seemingly inevitable victory of No Thanks or Better Together or
What You Will was not so overwhelming as to remove the threat of independence
altogether for the foreseeable future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>After all, for both Labour and SNP administrations, the name of the game
from the seventies onwards was to extract concessions from Westminster with the
use of a prospective threat to the status quo of the British order of things,
and if Indy had been defeated 70/30 as seemed entirely possible in the early
days of the campaign, then Scotland as a political entity within the union might
well have been fatally compromised. If anyone had offered me 55/45 at any point
before August 2014, I’d have bitten both their arms off. <o:p></o:p></div>
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That result, though it was a decision not to make the Indy
Shit real just for the moment, kept the leverage real…and the electoral success
of the SNP since, with a wobble or two, has maintained that reality of Scotland
as a political entity, a factor in the calculations of any UK government, with
a majority or not.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What really makes the difference is the vote; <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>what England has just done. All those Labour
voters who either stayed at home last Thursday or actually, unbelievably, voted
for the Conservatives…have just done something very analogous to what the
Scottish electorate did in 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
have killed the Labour Party stone dead as a serious electoral force for the foreseeable
future (though as in Scotland then, the Labour party in England, left and
right, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>will spend probably the next ten
years in denial) and they have crucially decided that their democracy, their
referendum, expressed though Brexit, is more important to them than
anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Than Party loyalty or the Union
or any other comparative abstraction. In closing one story, in “getting Brexit
done”, they have knowingly opened up another door, another pathway which only
seems to lead one way.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Like I’ve always said, Breaking up the Union has always been
a job for the English.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And now that Belfast has got three out of four nationalist
MPs, now that Scottish voters have once again, and with a renewed sense of
purpose, entrusted the SNP to navigate our way through the stormy weather to
come, (can I take it that the subterranean mumbles about the SNP leadership
will shoosh for a while?), we are faced in a subtly different way with
defining, asserting and protecting our identity in these islands. And, as in
May 2011, I would argue that here and now in the real world, the choices to be
made are not yet about independence, they are once again about devolution. Is
devolution a real thing or not, is Scotland at THIS moment a real entity within
the UK or not. If Boris now has a real mandate for a real Brexit, can it possibly
be argued that Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t have one too?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I don’t think so. I think, once the mince pies are digested,
and at least SOME of the civil service can be dragged away from the all-consuming
process of Brexit, that even this Tory government will settle on a consensus
that, in the event of an SNP/Green…and maybe even LABOUR super majority for a
second, binding Indy Ref after the elections of 2021. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And this time, unlike in 2014, the referendum will be
different. This time, right from the outset, with a real possibility of
winning, the real possibility of real independence will be on the ballot paper.
Shit will be real next time. So everybody on all sides had best be ready.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And despite online assertions to the contrary, I don’t think
anyone on either side is nearly ready yet. Getting ready, getting all the real
arguments in place for a real world future as either an independent country or
a fully subsumed status as a region of Boris’s Brexit Britainnia Inc. is the
real job for 2020.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-56772874434303722722019-06-27T03:09:00.000-07:002019-06-27T04:20:20.252-07:00Boris Johnson and The Ice Flow<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
If and when the Tory Party in England chooses Boris Johnson (or even Jeremy Hunt) as the next Prime Minister, in theory this doesn’t really change much in
Scotland. In practice though, what it will tell us about England, and what it
tells England about itself, changes everything on both sides of the
border.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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It’s not the men themselves who will change things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not as if Boris Johnson (or even Jeremy
Hunt) can instantly change either the parliamentary arithmentic on Brexit in Westminster
any more than they can change the negotiating stance of the European Union. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s what the Tory leadership election tells us about the Tory electors that really matters…even…or especially…because “we” (the
Unions of England with Scotland and with Northern Ireland) are almost wholly uninvolved
except as a whiny and annoying distraction from the serious English business (or
total fantasy world) of Brexit.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The only way Brexit was ever going to “work” was if it
precipitated a general collapse in the institutions of the European Union.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> You may have noticed that this hasn't happened, despite what its paymasters were hoping. </span>Britain outside of the EU is still part
of the European economy and is therefore bound to make a deal with the EU at
some point, as long as the EU still runs that economy.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No Deal Brexot is thus as chimerical and unreal a prospect as
Brexit itself has turned out to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
will matter in the long term, in the words of the Clash is “Something about
England.” Which will in turn matter to Scotland, Ireland North and South and Wales. Not necessarily in that order.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Just as the referendum in Scotland in September 2014
changed forever who gets to make the decsions about Scotland’s constitutional
future, (no matter what the outcome was) so the Brexit referendum in June 2016 changed forever how sovereignty
works in England.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now nowhere in these islands is the Crown in Parliament Sovereign
any more. We have become “Europeanised.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The people, the electorate are sovereign.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What is more, they are sovereign in each of the four nations of the "only
just United" Kingdom.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This brings us back to Boris. Just as the next Prime Minister
will have a choice of accepting the Brexit terms of the annoyingly still
existing EU sooner (the May Deal, backstop and all) or later…(the same only
slightly worse)... so he will only really have two choices about the next general
election.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He, whether it's Boris or Jeremy, will either have to call an election
sooner, in order to get any version of Brexit through the Commons…or later,
hoping against hope that Brexit will have been such a huge success as to ride the
Tories to victory on a wave of relief and patriotic enthusiasm. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Wherher he goes for sooner or later, the decisive factor is, of course, not Nicola Sturgeon but Nigel
Farage. Either Boris or Jeremy will have to gamble that they can make such a
success of Brexit that they can call an election next year having eliminated
Farage as an electoral factor…or they can make a deal with him now, secretly or
otherwise, and call an early election.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<o:p></o:p>If I had to bet the house on one of these options, I'd bet on "sooner"...and that means that Boris will have to do a deal, publically or not, with Nigel Farage.</div>
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<br /></div>
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If that scenario seems far fetched with Jeremy Hunt
as Prime Minister, to me it seems downright inevitable once Boris Johnson has
his feet behind the desk in Number 10.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
would be astonished if talks between his people and Farage’s were not
already well underway. </div>
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<br /></div>
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I would also be astonished if such a prospect didn't give an almighty boost in popularity to the idea of a second Indyref in Scotland. But what else might Boris Johnson in Number Ten mean for Scotland, where, you’ll
remember, sovereignty of decision on the constitution unarguably passed to the people in 2014?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I think it means two things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>First, if and when the electorate of the Tory party in England choose Boris Johnson
as the next Prime Minister for Scotland, a second independence referendum
becomes absolutely inevitable in the next five years. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Further, if, with or without a deal with Farage, Boris
Johnson calls a general election and wins it, inevitably entirely on the back of
votes in England, then the result of that referendum in Scotland is going to be very
different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is not because of Boris himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One English Tory Prime Minister more or less is not the
decisive factor here. What is decisive is England’s choice<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the Tory party in England choose Boris Johnson they are consciously choosing to ignore the Union. If the English electotate subsequently confirm him as their Prime Minister, they are just as consciously voting to end it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The beginning of the union was England’s choice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The End of the Union will be England’s
choice as well. The Independence referendum in 2021, like the devolution
referendum in 1997, will be a vote to effectively ratify an End of the Union
that has already happened. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(It was always thus. It wasn't the Easter Rising itself that was fatal to the Union with Ireland in 1916. It was the brutality with which England chose to respond to it.)</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Just as Nietszche discovered with God in the 1880s, so the British
people will discover in the 2020s that the Union is already dead in the hearts
of our contemporaries. Indeed, the "deadness" of the wholly negative"Better Together" campaign ion 2014 was as much a clue to the condition of the corpse as the Remain campaign in 2016.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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My guess...for what it ends up being worth... is that the Scottish elections in 2021 will ratify
a decision to hold another referendum, with Westminster’s consent (which will
be given by a new Labour or Tory administration in London) My guess for a date is
September 2021…and long, boring negotiations will then begin with both London and Brussels.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Anyway at that point the hard work of redefining our relationships
with the rest of these islands and with Europe will begin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> This will be a job for the next generation of Scottish political leadership, probably. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Whether we call this inevitable change
Independence or not in a few years is another question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> No doubt we'll have lots of esoteric and hugely irritating fights about it. </span>But, insosfar as such a thing is meaningful
in 21<sup>st</sup> Century Europe, Independence is what it will be.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When “we lost” in 2014, history did not come a stop. The ice
kept flowing. The accident of the Tory leadership contest in 2019 shows us where the ice has already reached, just like the accident of the death of John Smith did in 1994. And its direction, as I suspect he and Donald Dewar both knew, is as sure as the rise and fall of glaciers. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-2105671775193219192019-02-11T04:24:00.001-08:002019-02-11T06:59:18.995-08:00For Scotland, the next vote, referendum or not, is Do or Die.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/10/mps-peter-kyle-phil-wilson-decent-brexit-proposal?CMP=share_btn_tw
A referendum POST Brexit, to confirm leaving the way that 1975 confirmed joining, seems sensible. It would also give Scotland the chance to make its own choice. This morning, I wouldn't give it a snowball's chance in a circle of hell of happening. It might, however, be the standard against which to judge which of the Nightmare Before Christmas Assortment of outcomes we're faced with at the moment, insofar as it would offer the electorates in the UK and specifically in Scotland a chance to think again.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
First, obviously, do the "British People" really want to entrust their fate to Boris Johnson Globalism, when, to judge by this morning on @BBCr4today , he, like most other Leavers is actually relying on pretty much remaining when it comes right down to it. (Just as a brief aside, it strikes me, and it must strike EU negotiators, that having kept buggering on about wanting this Brexit malarkey for year after year, British politicians seem to be constitutionally unable to treat it like it anything that is actually happening...)</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
A post Brexit referendum at the end of transition confirming whether the UK REALLY wants to leave, would give voters in Scotland a specific challenge: Do we REALLY want to go along with whatever England does, or do we REALLY want a Scotland specific relationship with the EU? </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
Reflecting on the Scotland-Specific meaning a putative "Confirmatory" EU referendum in the UK would have rather forces on me the following assertion that I want to test: the next election, no matter WHAT it is, is effectively a referendum on the constitution. Without necessarily meaning to, let alone planning it, it seems to me that we have arrived at a place historically where it is inescapably the case for what we used to call "the Yes movement", including the SNP, that the next vote we get is a decisive one for that constitution. Any election we take part in has to be about the decision we make on the question of our relationships with Europe and with the UK. An existential crisis is going to happen next time we vote, like it or not.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
I have never been a fan of a simple repeat exercise on the 2014 referendum and "getting it right this time." I don't think the SNP Leadership is either. This is not a source of frustration to me. A second referendum loss is far more likely than a win. But more importantly, it is a principle of history that you can NEVER stand in the same stream twice. The 2014 Indyref came out of a very special set of circimstances among the most important of which was David Cameron's rock solid certainty, (advised by Labour) that he was going to win it. As far as Cameron was concerned, Project Fear in Scotland was a rehearsal for the really IMPORTANT referendum, which was the UK one on EU membership. Many books have already been written about both calculations and both outcomes. But we MUST remember that when it came right down to it, the 2014 referendum was a Tory scheme to DESTROY the Nats...and the fact that it didn't work and that we're even TALKING about a Scotland specific response to Brexit isn't actually bad going. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
More important than the simple observation that time has moved on since the first half of this decade is the equally simple observation that it has moved on a LOT, very, VERY fast...and that any prescription for what we do next predicated on a past model is likely to come unstuck. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
So I return to the new premise I want to test: that the next electoral test, no matter what it is, needs to be approached by the SNP (and others of the Artists Formerly Known as the Yes Movement) as seeking a mandate for a specific Scottish relationshop with the EU. Now...this sounds terribly dry and boring and unimportant...but then, until 2016 so did the EU itself...(hence the ease of the Leave vote winning and the unreality in which Leave leaders have dwelled ever since)..and now we know it's really important to who we - Brits and Scots- ARE in the world. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
For example, the Brexit process has revealed that shared EU membership was absolutely CRUCIAL to the success of devolution in Northern Ireland...and, it will soon clearly emerge, in Scotland and Wales too. At its simplest, the "return" of trade and standards regulation from Brussels to the UK...to WESTMINSTER...is an absolute bureucratic consequence of any form of Brexit, hard or soft. Brexit will centralise power in London in a way that is unthinkable in the context of devolution. All those who created and supported the devolved settlement under which Scotland has been governed for the last twenty years will very soon find that without the roader context of EU membership (for the last forty five years) devolution simply won't work. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
It should be a maxim from now on: You can have Brexit or you can have Devolution: you CANNOT have both. No Tory or Labour administration of Brexit Britain will be able to tolerate the notion that somewhere in these islands, someone can do things differently.
But this, of course, is where the whole project falls apart...on what was always the Achilles heel of Empire: Ireland. That failing Ireland leaving the EU on the day the UK does, just as it joined the EEC on the same day in 1973, the entire Brexit project is incoherent. Ireland will do no such thing. And, it is my contention, that the next line of defense of ANY kind of "democratic control", whatever we call it constitutionally, is for Scotland to insist on an independent relationship with the European Union. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
We need to make decent trade deals that protect the identity of Scottish Branding. (Glass of British Glenlivet anyone?) We need to control the big stuff too, like immigration policy...and agriculture, tourism...Every defender of devolution knows that devolution itself is a defense against the excesses of a UK government which cannot arithmetically reflect our views on matters of health care, education policy and on and on and on...What is really historically significant about Brexit in the context of devoluition, is that Brexit will wipe that line of defence out. We will helpless in whatever breezes Boris Johnson blows whichever orifice he blows from. And THAT is what the next election, for Westminster or Holyrood or the EU is about. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
The next election, whatever it is, is a question about who governs Scotland. And if, to draw a final seventies reference, the answer to the SNP is "Not you, mate"...then so be it. But make no mistake, if the SNP win the next election in Scotland, then everything must change.</span></span> <span style="background-color: white; color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
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Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-90153628094000152092018-10-15T02:43:00.005-07:002018-10-15T02:54:56.497-07:00Taking the Cure<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Despite the best efforts of Irish, Welsh and Scottish
nationalists, the process of Breaking Up the Union of Great Britain and Ireland
is a job for the English, and always has been ever since the process really got
started<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in Dublin in 1916. Now, by an
irony of history, it turns out that our shared membership of the EU across
these islands was not only the essential underpinning of the Good Friday
Agreement, it was the last glue that held together the devolved Union within
the island of Great Britain as well. One of the battles yet to be properly
fought is over the respective roles of the devolved Parliaments in Cardiff,
Edinburgh and Belfast. Meanwhile, it is of totemic importance to the DUP’s
ongoing dance of glee and grievance that the Assembly in Stormont is currently
shut.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That the Parliament in Holyrood
has been effectively sidelined by…well, what shall we call it nowadays…the
Imperial Parliament?...in London, is essential to what is laughingly still
referred to as a “smooth” Brexit.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The discomfort of calling Westminster either the Imperial
Parliament (of the past) or indeed the English Parliament (of the future?)
points to the structural dysfunction that Brexit is newly and ruthlessly exposing. The
centre, to quote Ireland’s poet of 1916, cannot hold. To misquote England’s
great poet, there’s quite a lot in a name. The names we call things are what
all this boorach is about.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What is as old as the hills, or as Sherwood Forest, is the
insouciant ease with which the words “England” and “Britain” or “English” and “British”
are still apparently regarded as comfortably interchangeable, as,
unfortunately, they still are in an essay on the English roots of Brexit
published last week in the London Review of Books. This lazy identification has
never been possible in any of the other constituents of the Union of British
Nations. For one thing, we’ve always had our own patron saints and emblematic
outlaws over and above St George and Robin Hood, potent though those symbols of
Englishness are. My own profoundly loyal North British grandparents were
wearily familiar with the phenomenon, and always regarded a hybrid identity as
both Scots and British as being intrinsic to who they were – they regarded the
Scots as the Best of British - whereas George Orwell, for example, in his
justly famous panegyric on Englishness, The Lion and the Unicorn, acknowledged
awareness of the uncomfortableness of the identification of the English and the
British for his Scottish, Welsh and Irish readers in a rather irritated
footnote.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No exploration of the very English roots (and likely
destination) of Brexit can even remotely come to terms with any of it actually
means if it doesn’t start with the insight that all four nations are going to
have to learn how to name things all over again. No matter how irritating it is
that the Scots, Irish, Scots-Irish and Welsh have got a head start in adapting
to a new world of multiple rather than subsumed identities.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Unionism, for example, cannot be understood unless it is
understood that the same word means subtly different things in all four nations
that make up that union. And that hybrid rather than merged identity has always
been the syntactic rule in three of them. Englishness needs to learn how to
speak its name if it is to face the world with confidence. As Antony Barnett
has argued in his excellent book “The Lure of Greatness”, it is only as the
European English that the English will find a future.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Britishness, like every other national identity, was a
series of projects, not an essence. Starting as a Protestant bulwark against
dynastic Catholic Europe, it successively evolved into a commercial Empire
and a Welfare State. When it ceased to be any of these three things then it
ceased being a useful way to think about what it means to live on these
islands. It became a distorting mirror in which to see ourselves. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But just as in 2014, the status quo, despite appearances, is
not an option on the ballot paper. Just as there was no way “back to normal” in
a No vote in the Scottish referendum, the events of the past few years have
permanently let the English genie out of the British Bottle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Brexit process, like the process of the
referendum in Scotland, has shone a ruthless light on tectonic change. There is
no way back to the relationship with the EU that the UK used to have, and there
is no way back to what Britishness, civic or civilising, used to mean. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Brexit is only the symptom. “Britain” is now the disease
that awaits a cure.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-75393531560060450912018-10-04T03:35:00.001-07:002018-10-04T03:39:16.928-07:00The Last Redoubt<div class="gs" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 20px; width: 616px;">
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Bizarrely, the image that comes to mind for the politics of Brexit for the rest of 2018 comes from the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879. Maybe it's may age...and seeing "Zulu" on the telly on so many Sunday afternoons.<span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;">T</span>he defence of Scotland's place in Europe is a series of redoubts...fortified positions that you have no confidence of being able to hold. But you have to do all you can to hold one position before you are forced to retreat to the next one.<span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span>he first line of defense is the simplest...and yet, for many Independence activists the most troubling. Keep the UK in the EU. You have to do everything you can by every means. In every arena. Westminster, Holyrood, the courts, public opinion.<span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span>At this moment, there even seems to be the glimmer of a chance of a referendum to decide between whatever deal HMG can cobble together...</div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">So, for me, to be logically consistent, and to take all possible allies with you, we have to wholeheartedly try that.</span><span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Remember, there is no realistic expectation of the first line of defence holding...but if and when you have to retreat to the second line of defence, a vigourous attempt to hold the first defence will have helped enormously in organising allies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Those aliies will include...and here's the tricky part for many Nationalisits...Unionists.</span></div>
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<span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">In the case of Scotland and Brexit, the second "redoubt" is specific to Scotland: defending the existing devolution settlement and a differential Brexit deal for Scotland...as, no matter what Arlene Foster says about blood lines...there will have to be for N Ireland and Gibraltar. Again....and again Devolution supporters who oppose Independence will have to be part of that defence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Do you see where I'm going with this? That to make every line of defence the strongest it can be, we need everyone with us.</span><span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">What this means is Independence supporters doing everything they can in these first two lines of defence to bring as many allies with them as possible. And THIS means refuting the accusation of "really being interested only in independence" by making sure it is seen not be true.</span><span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">If we can hold the "British Redoubt" and keep all of the UK inside the EU, then that is what we should commit to do. If it is Devolution we can successfully defend then that is what we should wholly commit to do.</span><span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">I believe that if we do both of these things, without any other agenda, then when the time comes (as it probably will) to retreat to the third and last redoubt, which is seeking to rejoin the EU or EFTA and thus protecting what we have been trying to protect all along...</span><span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">...then the means we need to do that, political Independence of the UK State will be self-evident and consensual...and will get support rom a lot of people who don't support it yet.</span><span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">But here's the more difficult argument to make when there's an SNP conference at the weekend...for this journey to work for the people who voted No in 2014, the SNP case must genuinely be above suspicion at each redoubt. We must be genuinely commmitted to the successive defences of the whole of the Uk...and then devolution. And if those defences hold, that has to be enough. That's where we have to stick. This journey cannot start with independence, even if we think it probably ends there. If what we propose is Indeopendence Now...we lose everyone else. And I believe that we lose the EU...and we lose a referendum that Unionists will boycott anyway, a referndum that even if we win...we lose..</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Therefore, I believe that right now, when the idea of a "confirming referendum" is current, we have not yet exhausted the "all UK" defence of Scotland's relationship with Europe. #I think the SNP needs to as near as damn it commit to that campaign. And do all we can to hold that line.</span><span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I think that this means, along with a commitment to a second EU referendum...and here is where we need to take a deep breath... taking a second Independence referendum of the table if a "UK Remains in the EU" defence succeeds.</span><span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Now, before I get shouted at...consider this. There is NO other way to persuade non-Independence supporters of a genuine commitment on our part to the aim of Remaining in Europe.</span><span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Second, more importantly, the mandate for "Indyref 2" was a "material change" in ther circumstances of the UK...then that will be a material change which we will have PREVENTED from happening.</span><span style="background: rgb(245 , 248 , 250); color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">As I say, I have no particular expectations as from week to week, the blathering chaos of Brexit gets more and more disorienting. But I want to see my representatives and my government adopt a realistic and clear posture that can hold the line and carry wide support no matter what comes next.</span><span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 16.1px;">I think this might be the way to do it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Finally, whatever the next electoral test is...a general election, a second EU referendum, even the Scottish elections in 2021, the issue of Independence will be on the agenda. For me, to insist on Indyref 2 right now before anything else betrays an unjustified lack of confidence that the logic of the developing situation is entirely on our side. But if and when it comes, what is wrong with Independence being on the bais of consensus? What is wrong with taking people who voted No in 2014 with us? </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">What is wrong with a walk in the park in five years...even if we we need to be confident enough to behave a little strategically now?</span></div>
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Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-33903603350487086252018-09-10T05:37:00.000-07:002019-02-08T16:51:30.856-08:00A Bespoke Deal for a Scottish Brexit. A tactical argument<br />
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I wish I could draw graphs...or flow charts...as I think it
might help clarify my argument on a Scottish Brexit Deal being the probable way
forward - but I'll try to set it out verbally step by step.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Right now, with everything still up in the air, we still
need to oppose the UK leaving the EU by whatever means. A Westminster vote to
remain, a UK wide <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“People’s Vote” with
remaining as an option. IF/WHEN these both fail…<o:p></o:p></div>
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Put forward a specific Scottish Brexit plan…more or less the
Norway option…with the aim being to deliver what the Scottish Parliament agreed on…and has NEVER rescinded, Scotland staying in the single
market... by itself if necessary.<o:p></o:p></div>
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(It is of no small significance that a bespoke deal for Northern Ireland is well within the bounds of possibility, and if the DUP were less important to the Tories numerically, it would almost certainly have happened by now.)</div>
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If the case is made for this by the SNP and the wider Yes
movement, it will...or should... get the support of Remainers…it will look rational by
contrast with Boris and Co and it will not scare off 2014 NO voters…because Independence will not be on the agenda.<o:p></o:p><br />
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Indpendence will not be the prefix to every argument. It will be the conclusion. And that is the right way round.</div>
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In the course of this autumn and winter, we will either get
an exit deal on Brexit agreed by the UK government or we won’t. In neither
scenario will any attention necessarily get paid to a specifically Scottish demand. This is
not a reason not to make that demand. Loudly and repeatedly. And to stick with
it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Why? Because an exit deal for March 2019 is not the end of the story. In March, in theory, we enter into a transition period which ENDS in a new
relationship between the EU and UK in 2021. Our argument is that at the END of this transition period
that Scotland insists on a deal that keeps us in the single market.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Even now, even after March, it is theoretically possible
that the UK will see that kind of sense, but it’s very unlikely. In practice, that would probably need to be a bespoke, specifically Scottish deal. Again, our
sticking to the pragmatic outcome would be politically very strong.<br />
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Even if the dreaded “No Deal” happens, there would in
practice need to be SOME deal. This is what the Rees Moggs and assorted loonies
are shooting for. It is absolutely no more unrealistic for Scotland to shoot
for a Single Market deal at the same time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So…this time in 2019, the Scottish electorate would have a
continuing mess of screaming that will constitute Full English Brexit…and, by contrast, a calm,
pragmatic ambition which the Scottish political parties would find it difficult
not to support. Because it wouldn’t have an IndyRef label stuck all over it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The fact that Independence is almost certainly the only way
for Scotland to maintain a healthy relationship with Europe would then be
demonstrated rather than merely asserted. <o:p></o:p><br />
Once again, Independence would be the conclusion not the predicarte. And that makes conversation possible with those who voted No in 2014.</div>
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In summary, I think that through any imaginable set of
circumstances…and an awful lot that can’t be foreseen yet, a stated position right
now that Scotland will only accept a Single Market Deal at the End of Transition, is far and away the strongest card we can play. And keep playing.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-68449801050800536662018-09-09T02:15:00.000-07:002018-09-09T02:15:01.472-07:00A Brexit Deal for Scotland? A Scottish Deal on Brexit.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">As we enter a new Parliamentary term both in Holyrood and Westminster, to describe matters as being a wee bit “in flux” is something of an understatement. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">It’s like those of us living on this cluster of islands off the coast of Europe are inhabiting different political worlds while remaining on one piece of territory.</span></div>
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While Boris Johnson calls Theresa May a suicide bomber in cahoots with Michel Barnier, that other famous Moslem, blowing a dog whistle to racists out of both ends of his ridiculous body, here in Scotland, we seem to be tearing ourselves to bits out of boredom and impotence, just for something to do. We aren’t having the fight we’d like to be having, it seems. So we’re fighting about something else…the timing of a second indyref, which can’t possibly be decided on… just for wanting something to fight about.</div>
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In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, they’ve got a governng party whose sole interest seems to be on insisting that they don’t want to govern anything. The DUP have opted for Direct Rule from Westminster by default as part of the same bargain which is dragging those islanders whose constituent nations voted against Brexit over the cliff with those who voted for it.</div>
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Because next door, we’ve got both an England and, inexplicably, a Wales where, despite recent shifts in opinion polls, exit from the EU remains, or at least is treated, as the “settled will of the people”...without any real thought as to who “the people” might be. The people insist that the politicians “sort it out” and “get on with it” without, apparently, the slightest idea what “it” is. </div>
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It is still possible that opinion will shift yet further…in favour, ultimately, one hopes, of what might at least be a comparatively Sane Brexit, but to be honest, I’m not sure I've got the imaginative energy to spare to give a lot of thought to the UK dimension of what’s going on any more.</div>
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I wish the nieghbours well, of course, but much in the same way as if I lived in say, Belgium. I don’t actually wish any harm on them, I respect their decision – just about - however much I regret it. Here in Belgium, I hope you in Scotland (and they) don’t suffer too much from the consequences of their decision…but it’s kind of up to them. There doesn’t seem to be a lot I can do about it.</div>
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You’ve tried. You’ve argued that you think it’s a really bad idea…and, to be fair, they just might sort themselves out…they’ve got a few weeks left to do that, but their political parties seem to be totally paralysed by internal division and personal ambition and choosing Blind Brexit chaos by default.</div>
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In Holland and Belgium and the Republic of Ireland stability within the EU 27 seems to be the absolute strategic priority for the remaining members. Brexit will be a shock, but the collective decision seems to be that maintenance of the Union of 27 far outweighs any other consideration at this moment.</div>
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So imagine being Belgium for a minute. Or being Ireland. Imagine being in a position to ask : if they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do…what are WE gonna do?</div>
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Luckily, we in Scotland already have the answer. The Scottish Parliament, in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum, (albeit in a moment of briefly collectivised shock) already voted for what we’re going to do. Right across the chamber. Even the Tories.</div>
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We’re going to stay in the Single Market and the Customs Union. That’s the Scottish Deal. Whatever else there might or might not be a mandate for in Scotland, there’s a mandate for that. We’re going to stay, by some means, in the same trading arrangement with our Irish and continental nieghbours that we’re in now. Just like Holland or Belgium or the Republic of Ireland, we’re going to continue to respect the four freedoms movement of goods, services, money and people…just as we do now.</div>
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Imagine if we could do that!</div>
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I’ve got news for you. We CAN do that. We SHOULD do that. We MUST do that.</div>
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We must say to our nieghbours south of the border that we respect their decision, but it’s THEIR decision, and not ours. </div>
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But it’s too late, everyone says…we’re out of the EU in March next year! That’s what the law says! That’s what the constitution says! We voted to remain in the UK in 2014! We’re trapped! We trapped ourselves! We failed!</div>
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Not quite. As part of the UK, we are indeed leaving the EU in March next year, but only as a matter of form. What actually HAPPENS in March (unless there is the dreaded NO DEAL…) is that we enter a transition period, nominally until the end of 2020, during which all the changes to the UK relationship to the EU Single Market and Customs Union take effect.</div>
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All we do right NOW, as Scotland, on the assumption that by hook or by crook at some point there WILL be a UK deal on leaving the EU,is to insist that at the end of that transition, whenever it really comes and by whatever means we get there, when it comes to defining a NEW trading relationship between these Islands and the EU, Scotland will remain in the Single Market and the Customs Union. Just like the Republic of Ireland.</div>
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We insist right now on the same end result no matter what Boris Johnson led chaos there is until there IS a deal…that at the end of the process of leaving, we “implement” or “transition to” a situation where Scotland maintains a status quo ante bellum relationship with the EU as far as trade goes. Come what may, by whatever route it takes, Scotland stays in the Single Market and the Customs Union.</div>
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Because even if the worst comes to the worst and Boris is PM by Christmas, even if we do crash out initially, there will still need to be a deal on leaving, because there needs to be a transition period that will end up with a yet to be negotiated new relationship between the EU and the UK. Everyone, even Boris, actually knows that.</div>
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In any case. That’s not our problem because we’re not leaving. Like they do in Belgium, we respect the decision of the Parliament in Westminster In the name of democracy. But we in Scotland demand the reciprocal respect that our decision to maintain our relationship with the EU also be respected. Because that is what our people and our Parliament voted for. <span style="font-size: 11pt;">If we do that, if we are clear and unequivocal about that, then everything else will follow. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Whether we get treated with respect, or we don’t, after all the shouting, it all ends the same way. With a rewritten relationship between Scotland and the rest of these islands, including the bit that is already uniquivocally staying in the EU.</span></div>
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There are many, many variations on exactly what happens on the basis of this principle, but here are a couple of things that will happen in the short run.</div>
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What will follow first is the following refrain of voices:</div>
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“But Scotland staying in the Single Market would mean a hard border between England and Scotland! That will mean an end to Free Trade and movement between England and Scotland!”</div>
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Really? Seriously? Is that all you’ve got?</div>
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If it is the insistence of the British Government that Brexit will mean no such border will exist between Northern Ireland and the Republic, which are ALREADY two separate States with different currencies…(and it is) ….one inside and the other outside the Single Market and Customs Union…then on the basis of what possible logic can such a border come into existence between a Scotland and England who will still, in 2020/21, be part of the same State?</div>
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The Brexiteers are similarly hoist on their own petard with every single argument they’ve got against a distinctly Scottish Deal on Brexit on the gallows of the Irish Border. But never mind the shouting and squealing and the talk of suicide vests… we can be very clear and decided on one thing: that no matter what the UK Parliament comes up with, Scotland is staying in Trading Europe. That is our deal with Europe, that is what is going to come at the end of any “transition” or “implementation”. We’ve already decided that. Just let Ruth Davidson vote against it. Nobody else will.</div>
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What the nieghbours do about it is up to them. They might decide to abandon us as carelessly (and without knowledge or thought) as they appoint Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland who don’t have the first clue as to the culture or history or even existence of that Province of the Empire. They might send a gunboat. They might even decide to kick us out of the United Kingdom completely!</div>
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I don’t have a crystal ball any more than anyone else does.But i<span style="font-size: 11pt;">f we simply do the right thing right now, if we make the simple assertion of democratic self government that when Brexit comes, whether it’s Blind, Batty or In Name Only, Scotland is staying, by some means yet to be negotiated, in the Single Market and the Customs Union, then it is in the practical discovery of what those means of staying turn out to be - for example, in a new, direct negotiating relationship with the EU and with London, on the basis of our soveriegn trade policy - that we will rewrite the British Constitution. All we need to do is be clear in our own intentions. Through that simple assertion of self government will self government come.</span></div>
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Which is probably why we feel we have the time to get cross with each other about the timing of Indyref 2. For what it's worth, I genuinely think that argument is a distraction, a repositry of frustrated energy. I genuinely think that Brexit is doing all the heavy lifting we need to be effectively an independent 21<sup>st</sup> Century European country by the end of the next decade.</div>
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No matter what the apparent complexities of the political boorach down South, if we stick to our guns, by some way or other, we’ll get there. I genuinely think that it’s as simple as that.</div>
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Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-87626309418323879162018-07-19T02:35:00.000-07:002018-07-19T02:35:03.843-07:00Whatever It Is, Bring It On!<b><br /></b>
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<b>A Tale of Two Traps or “What the Hell are We Supposed to do Now?”</b></div>
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As the Mother of Parliaments packs its ineptitude for the last summer holiday its members are going to get before they and the rest of us need a Visa to pop over the Channel to the seaside, the sense of futility and uselessness that has afflicted the group of 36 SNP MPs since last year's election, introducing ignored amendment after ignored amendment to protect Scotland from the shrill hysteria of what feels more and more like somebody else’s problem in somebody else’s country, has become universal. </div>
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Desperate futility is written across the pasty features of Honourable Members from every corner of Englandshire also. No wonder they want to run away from it all and attempt to forget it from the bottom of a jug of Sangria somewhere. And the temptation to say “The hell with the lot of them” is particularly strong not just for SNP MPs but for the 62% of Scottish voters who uselessly voted not to have ANYTHING to do with any version of this post imperial bullshit.</div>
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English Brexiteers, now loyally supported by a Scottish cohort of vapid nodding wally dugs, are actually winning the race to nowhere that the voters of Scotland decisively rejected at the ballot box not once, not twice, but three times since the election of 2015 bounced David Cameron into preferring a wafer thin Tory Majority to the good of not just our country, but of his.</div>
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And 45% of Scottish voters can quite rightly grab a hold of the 55% who voted No in September 2014 and point and say “This is your fucking fault, you dopy bastards! You handed our future to these maniacs and LOOK what they’re doing with it!”</div>
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But Scots, even “Yes” voting Scots who want and feel they deserve NONE of this lunacy, are trapped by arithmetic too. Just like Parliament in London, we are paralysed by our own national division. We feel we need to do SOMETHING, but every avenue of escape seems blocked. There are calls for SNP MPs to boycott the UK Parliament for all the good they are doing there. But this looks like an empty gesture in the face of a Brexit Event Horizon that is fast becoming completely real. Unionist voters would simply not take part in an “unofficial” referendum on Independence. It would be nothing but a PR stunt…and these things are all very well and have their place under some circumstances, and might even make us feel better, might even let us cry out “Nothing to do with us, gov”…but nothing would really be changed. Brexit would still come and take us kicking and screaming with it.</div>
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I think the SNP need to respond right now to the change in Westminster circumstances right now. And, however reluctantly, I think they need to join in with a Westminster response to the increasing hopelessness that is being felt all across the chamber. I think the SNP has to declare in favour of another UK wide popular vote on the “Brexit Question.” Despite the strong and understandable temptation to say “Nothing to do with us, buddy” to the lot of them " I think something is changing in the political weather in the whole UK. It is not just six weeks of unbroken sunshine that is freaking everybody out.</div>
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Don’t get me wrong. It’s still an outside possibility. Up until two weeks ago, both the Tory Brexiteers and Jeremy Corbyn were happily planning to postpone the leadership crisis in the Tory party and the subsequent inevitable General Election, until AFTER March next year, when the UK electorate would be given a choice of who they trusted to pick up whatever pieces of the UK had landed wherever they are going to land when the Europeans finally boot us out, deal or no deal. This was what Theresa May was attempting to cue up with her ludicrous “Chequers Brexit “ Package…it was an entirely symbolic exercise in party Management, not any serious attempt to deal with the Upcoming Omnishambles…but, after a fashion, it seemed to be working for a while, having factored in the even more vapid spectacle of Davis and Bojo biting the dust, and Michael Gove keeping his ambition warm for another day. For the SNP and the wider Scottish electorate, a 2019 General Election would be yet another UK election which would be differentially experienced and interpreted in Scotland, with an inflection of the National Question in that new context of "Oh My God It’s Actually Happening!” Brexit Britain.</div>
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This is still most likely to be be roughly how it goes, but at THIS moment the summer fevered chatter in the tea rooms of Westminster by those who belong neither to the Corbyn minority in the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Tory MPs who haven’t drunk the Brexit Kool-Ade of their own Brexit extremists, are desperately circling another scenario. And they are doing it together.</div>
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Step One is to give up on paralysed parliamentary procedure altogether, and throw the Brexit “problem” back to the electorate with a popular” Yes/No/Forget the whole thing and stay in the EU” referendum sometime in the Autumn. I am sure the thought of Step Two is also occurring to them by now that it might be possible to interpret this vote as a mandate from “the British people” for a particular soft flavour of cuddly Brexit …and to attempt to form a National Unity government in order to deliver it.</div>
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The question before the SNP this morning is “How do we respond?” Do we denounce the whole stupid pack of them? Do we say, “Unite your own Nation, pal…this has nothing to do with our Nation?” Do we boycott the People’s Poll on exactly the same grounds as Scottish Unionists would boycott Indyref 2 (without a Westminster agreement like last time) as “Nothing to do with us.”</div>
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Or do the SNP strategically embrace the idea. And call for it. One last throw of the British Electoral dice. One last chance to avoid the cliff jump…with the implicit or explicit proviso, that if England chooses to go cliff diving this summer, we might just have other plans.</div>
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Now, there are big problems with this idea, as has been pointed out by Kenny Farquarson among others. If it has not been feasible up till now to interpret Scotland’s vote against Brexit IN PRINCIPLE as a vote for Independence IN PRINCIPLE, then how would that change if there were a second Brexit vote BEFORE a second independence vote?</div>
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To which the answer might be that a) an independence vote isn’t going to happen before either another another UK General Election or said Brexit Vote 2 and b) it wouldn’t be a vote IN PRINCIPLE any more, on either question. No. It would be absolutely specific on both. </div>
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To vote FOR the specific Brexit deal the Union ends up offering would include, in effect, a vote for the Union itself. To vote AGAINST that deal would be to vote against the Union. Because within the Union, we are GOING to get whatever England decides we’re going to get.</div>
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We are genuinely trapped by arithmetic into choices we didn’t want to make. All of us. For this morning, if there is to be a call for a People’s Vote, I think the SNP has to support it. If there isn’t, I think the SNP has to call for it. And to show willing to throw the dice as a British political party one last time. That way, the 2014 result is "respected", and , under new and highly specific circumstances framed in advance of a "new" British vote on a specific Brexit deal that implicitly INCLUDES the continuance of the Union, and is EXPLICITLY framed that way by the SNP...the actual question that is actually put before England and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland is all rolled up together. </div>
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A British Future, which explicitly includes Brexit, or the End of the UK itself. A third choice is only available till March. So the SNP needs to call for the British people to face that choice and face it now. Because after March, there are only the other two...The SNP needs to make the call on behalf, ironically, of those who vote against it...because no one else is offering them any choice about ANYTHING.</div>
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This summer of stupidity can’t go on. Something is going to break. The weather is going to get messy. There is going to be a lot of shouting. But the next vote, whatever it is, is, I think decisive on both questions. <span style="font-size: 14.6667px;">Another vote of SOME kind, whether a General Election, a Scottish election, a second Brexit referendum or even an independence referendum, WILL include the national question no matter which comes first.</span><span style="font-size: 14.6667px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14.6667px;">The attitude of the SNP has to be, to any of these, no matter which comes first, bring it on.</span></div>
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Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-43156022422270299222018-07-02T02:53:00.001-07:002018-07-02T05:46:45.333-07:00The White Man Coup Versus Humanity<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This little essay started with the thought, prompted by the fact that the Trump Organization has directly profited from the Trump Presidency to the tune of $500 million dollars - so far - that we need a new word for "corruption. " Despite protestations, made on both the left and right, that "they" are all the same...they are not all the same. With Orban and Trump and Brexit, to name but three, we are moving into new territory...or perhaps, revisiting some old territory that we really thought we'd put behind us in 1945.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Then came this, the most blatant support so far given by the new Supreme Court of the United States for racially based voter suppression. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/jun/11/supreme-court-ohio-voting-rolls-inactive-electors?CMP=share_btn_tw</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In the State of Ohio, anybody who has not voted for three years can be removed from the electoral register. This, of course, disproportionately affects the poor and the young and the non-white...which is precisely the idea. The Supreme Court, before even the introduction of Trump's next nominee, has granted legitimacy...and maybe permanence... to what I am calling, from now on, The White Man Coup. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">The White Man Coup is an act of demographic panic. The Obama Presidency alerted White Men that unless they did something radical, America would cease to belong to them. So they looked around and they hired Trump to do the job they needed done. </span><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">They knew that maintaining White Man Supremacy in the USA would require thuggery, corruption and bigotry. So they hired a thuggish, corrupt bigot to do the job on their behalf. White Men knew exactly what they were doing and why. </span><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is why even Trump's palpable idiocy and borderline mental illness, his bone idleness, his delusions...as well as his naked, brash criminality...matter not a whit to his White Man support base. You don't hire St Francis when what you need is a gangster.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Changes in the racial make up of the United States (and Europe), currently dramatised by the politics of immigration, are a specific set of circumstances that required, for White Men, a specific response...and this is true everywhere in White Man World from the Kremlin to Cincinnati, Ohio.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">The White Man Coup, or "Brexit", as we call it here, is impervious to accusations of criminality or of Russian Interference because it is based on Racial Panic rather than what we used to call Patriotism...which would involve some respect for the rule of law. </span><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">Any and all means of self defense, (as the White Man Coup sees it) is permissible. The struggle is existential. This is why the manipulation of the Brexit vote, for example, is hardly being reported in the news.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/amp/2018/06/the-british-russia-collusion-scandal-is-breaking-wide-open.html?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-t&__twitter_impression=true</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">(Putin sees himself as the leader of a phallocentric defense of White Christianity, a version of the post Napoleonic War Holy Alliance against emerging democracy, and is acknowledged in his leadership by Banks, Trump and even Victor Orban...which is a hell of a stretch for a Hungarian Nationalist.)</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course, White Men may find the crudity and corruption of a Trump or a Farage a tad embarrassing (in public), but being crude and corrupt and a little absurd, even, is part of the job description. It certainly was for the dictators in the 1930s. But because The </span><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">White Man Coup treats all politics now as a zero sum game of political survival vs political extinction (beneath a Muslim, female, Mexican Gay tide), so do the hired guns of the Coup treat political victory as an imperative that justifies all measures, and are fully supported by their electoral bases in any amount of crudity, corruption and absurdity. Cruelty is the accepted price of survival, as is the shared guilt of internment camps for immigrants, for example.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">As for the hired guns themselves, they know, as dictators have always known, that the alternative to staying in power forever is prison at best. So just as their supporters will go along with any amount of cruelty for the "survival of the race", so Orban and Trump et al will embrace any legal or extra legal means, any lies, any necessary measures, to stay in power forever. (Or to assure that they are succeeded by people every bit as guilty as they are.) </span><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">Trump in particular knows that defeat at the ballot box means prison, and White Men fear that defeat of their coup ("Making America Great Again") means extinction, just as the Germans did (or as they told themselves in justification) in the 1930s and 40s. </span><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">Democracy and the Rule of Law are minor collateral damage. Hence voter suppression, breaking Trade Unions funding (as the Supreme Court also just did) and , crucially the dismantling of International Legal Frameworks from NATO to the EU. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">White Man, prompted by the Immigration Crisis, has come to believe that only the jungle is the territory of their survival. </span><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is why the only possible redress against the Coup, the only defense for Humanity (a concept specifically rejected by the Coup, along with any other globalism, including climate change) is the force of numbers. </span><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">Unless America votes decisively against the White Man Coup in November, unless we find a way of stopping Brexit, unless the EU finds a way to deal with the politics of migration that don't involve Europe (like Trump's America) becoming a xenophobic fortress </span><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;">then we are heading into years of darkness. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The institutions set up after WW2, the UN, the WTO, The EU...were all attempts to guarantee us against jungle warfare. They have lasted for nearly eighty years. They have months left to live unless Humanity defeats the White Man Coup.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">ps
the term "White Man" is deliberate. The women and members of ethnic and gender minorities who support the agenda of White Man Supremacy, in this rubric, might be called "enablers" who think they know which side of their bread is buttered.
pps
I am a white man.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-28925700335979383032018-06-06T00:45:00.001-07:002018-06-06T03:52:54.053-07:00Another Day Closer to Brexit.<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Labour put down an amendment on Brexit Withdrawal Bill that LOOKS, for a couple of minutes, like it might mean something. That Her Majesty's Opposition, unlike Her Majesty's Government, might have made some sort of decision about some sort of Brexit.</span> </div>
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<span style="color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;">But no, there they are spinning and briefing against each other as usual. And we are still nowhere. It can't just be because both parties are made up of loonies and feckless bastards, can it? Why does no one ever decide anything? Because they can't. It's the only explanation.</span> </div>
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<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Brexit CAN'T be done. Not SHOULDN'T be done. Can't. We are on a set of islands off the coast of Europe. Europe is run by the EU. We are going to remain in the EU...just not members of it. It's a lie. A delusion. This is why neither party ever makes any decision as to policy.</span> <span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Any decision the politicians make...ANY decision...is pure fantasy. We decided to leave the EU. That was our LAST decision. That was the last decision the UK is ever going to make.</span> <span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">All we've done is abdicated ourselves from any future decision making. The EU will decide the terms on which we leave and redefine the relationship. This was ALWAYS how it was going to be.</span> </div>
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<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe it's a good thing...for Europe...in the end. The Brits were never comfortable in the real world. Always moaning about their place in the sun, always opting out of everything. Very tiresome. They will be...they already are...glad to get us out of the room.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The EU will decide on Britain's future status. Britain imagining otherwise was an illusion born of the same imperial nostalgia as our "special" status within the EU. We were indulged in that rubbish for forty years. That's done now. <span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; font-size: 12.8px; letter-spacing: normal;">The only strategy the UK had was trying to pick off EU member states one by one for "special" deals, as if our leaving would make the EU fall apart. The moment that strategy failed (by about mid day on June 24th 2016)...we had NOTHING else to bring to the table.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; letter-spacing: normal;">This is why the Tories have spent two years fannying about while the Labour party fannied about letting them. This is why we've made no proper preparations for any Brexit realities. Because there's NOTHING we can do. This is why BOTH major parties have already fallen to bits.</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; letter-spacing: normal;">They can't talk about Brexit seriously, because to talk about Brexit seriously would be to admit that they, like Wyle E Coyote have ALREADY run off the edge of the cliff...but they haven't looked down yet. They KNOW what will happen if they do.</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; letter-spacing: normal;">The implication of REAL Brexit is that we hit everything with a hammer...smash it all to bits and start again. Now there are some on the far left and some on the far right to whom apocalypse/revelation is a consummation devoutly to be wished.</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; letter-spacing: normal;">In their imagination, a lean capitalist beast with no foreigners or a socialist paradise with no bankers will ensue next March. Let us be clear. NOTHING like either is going to happen. Tories and Labour have both dropped the Brexit ball and are waiting for the EU to pick it up.</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
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</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; letter-spacing: normal;">Eventually, the EU will be forced, out of self interest, to save the UK. What will then happen is that the EU decide both the terms on which we leave, and the terms that suit them as to how we continue to trade. The truth is that both parties are COUNTING on this happening.</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.27px;">Both main political parties and the entire media are meanwhile complicit in a bizarre conspiracy of pretending otherwise, of "agency." But they know that Britain will decide NOTHING. I suspect sensible parliamentarians, and even David Davis and Bojo, KNOW this.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12.8px; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is why we've handed over ostensible political control to the loonies. It's why Jacob Rees Mogg is never off the telly. It's pure showbiz. I guess we might use WTO Rules for a year or two...then we'll be back at the EU table, BEGGING for them to sort it for us.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;">But I suspect we've already "chosen" the easy way, the lazy way...deciding nothing at all, so that the grown ups in the EU will decide everything for us in time for next year. Playtime will go on. The delusion will go on.</span><span style="font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;">Of course, the Tories will still bitch and whine about the beastly Europeans, and Labour will bitch and whine about the beastly Tories. But British politics will be pure theatre even more than it already is.</span><span style="font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.27px;">Things will be a bit harder. Living in Britain will be a bit crappier. London will continue to be a city of huge, dodgy wealth pit with a servant class in deeper poverty. The North of England will continue to rot. The racists will continue to blame everyone brown.</span><span style="font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; font-family: "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif;">What do we do next? "We" meaning Scotland this time? We might well choose to do nothing but whine and bitch about the Labour Party while Labour whine and bitch about the Tories while the Tories whine and bitch about the EU. After all, in 2014 we also chose not to choose.</span></div>
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It might be that we are the ghost of a country attached to a ghost of a country. The only difference..maybe...is that Scotland's ghost is MAYBE...maybe... a ghost of the future as a small country in Europe, not of an Empire lost in the past.</div>
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Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-36009399930457490462018-04-26T02:22:00.006-07:002018-04-26T02:36:14.056-07:00So THIS is what they meant by "Taking Back Control!"<br />
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"A presumption of acting with consent"...what that means is that if the Scottish Parliament does NOT consent to anything decided by Westminster in the context of Brexit...(which can mean ANYTHING), for the next seven years, politically forever...it will be treated if it did...Thus breaking every principle upon which devolution is founded.</div>
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Our elected representatives...our opinions....and our votes...will amount to exactly nothing.</div>
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So THIS is what they meant by "Taking Back Control!"<br />
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Actually, that's not just a flip remark. "Take Back
Control" worked so well as a slogan in the Brexit Referendum because it
answered a very specific social and psychological need. For the English people
to take back something they felt they'd lost. The globalised economy was felt
to have robbed economic life of a sense of identity and purpose. The systematic
destruction of the welfare state over the last thirty years had robbed people
of a sense of "us"...the people "they" were supposed to look
after. Brexit, ever more explicitly , is an English nationalist moment...and
Scots should not be entirely surprised by it, or feel unconnected to many of
the impulses behind it. After all, many Yes voters also voted to Leave.<span style="background: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span>However, it is now becoming clear
that a suppression of the qualified autonomy represented by the Scottish
parliament is very much among the things that Brexit is "taking back
control" of. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Resentment of noisy
jocks is absolutely smack dab at the centre of the agenda. This English
national Moment is, in the usual confused way, mixed up with BRITISH hegemony. What
the next few days and weeks will tell us is just how explicit the consequences
of the English National Moment are for us…and whether this grotesque insult to
the principles upon which we thought devolution were built is as accidental and
unthinking, or a deliberate act of bureaucratic violence springing from the
same poisonous source as the Windrush scandal.<o:p></o:p></div>
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(Surely there can be no one left who thinks that this
generation on West Indians were targeted by accident!)<o:p></o:p><br />
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The events of the last few days in Scotland and Westminster,
and the provisions of the bill now published, are an absolute vindication of a
simple proposition. You can have a unitary Brexit, or you can have effective
devolved government. You cannot have both.<span style="background: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Brexit, as I’ve indicated, is an expression of English
national feeling...which is hardly something in itself to criticize from a website that supported the Yes campaign in 2014.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it is taking the twisted form of a nostalgic
resentment of 21st Century reality. Part of the Resentment of Empire is the visible…hence annoying…limited autonomy of the "regions."<span style="background: white; color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 20.5pt; letter-spacing: 0.2pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span>The fact that all
that was really "added" to the constitution in the late 1990s was a
democratic element to a federalism that already existed...is neither here nor
there. The Union settlement itself is a triviality in contemporary British
politics.<span style="background: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 115%;"> What matters is the irritation. All that
matters politically is that the irritation be soothed or removed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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The Labour Party have now removed Wales from any future
consideration as a stone in the pathway of a "Smooth Brexit." <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the voters of Wales will reap the harvest
of obedience. But Wales at least VOTED for Brexit as well as devolution.<span style="background: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span>Scotland voted decisively against
Brexit and for at least a measure of democratic participation in specifically
Scottish matters...such as agriculture, fishing and energy policy that were
themselves partially devolved to EU coordination. Can those who devised that Parliament
now act with the Tories to strip back that measure of democratic self
government in the name of a Brexit that the country voted decisively against?
On what possible grounds?<span style="background: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span>The
devolution settlement of 1997 is now untenable. It cannot survive Brexit. The
alternatives are either an absorption into a unitary UK State that has never
existed in this form before...(the Barnett Formula, for example, is unlikely to
survive)...or fundamental re-negotiationThis may or may not be called
"Independence." , itself a very 20th Century term in a very different
set of realities in the 21st Century. But be sure that unless Scotland remains
as a "problem" for Brexit, Scotland will cease to exist politically
in the UK except as a footnote. Any consideration of the needs of the people of
Wales in the context of agricultural or regional policy is already fading into
irrelevance. Everyone who supports devolution as a meaningful element of
Scottish life HAS to stand firm with the Scottish Government, or face oblivion.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Just as a footnote of my own, the influential Tory think tank, The Institute
of Fiscal Studies has just reporterd that they see no future for the Barnett
Formula after brexit. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Taking control of the
portfolios coming back from Brussels is very much the thin end of the wedge. This
is the essential context for the "deal" that WM has offered Scotland.
If we take the deal, we are handing all control over ScotGov funding to Tory
Government discretion. Not just a bit of it. All of it. Is that really okay
with everyone except Nicola Sturgeon?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black;"><span style="color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black;"><a href="http://www.holyrood.com/articles/news/keeping-barnett-formula-not-appropriate-after-brexit-warns-institute-fiscal-studies">http://www.holyrood.com/articles/news/keeping-barnett-<span style="color: black; mso-style-textfill-fill-alpha: 100.0%; mso-style-textfill-fill-color: black;">formula-not-appropriate-after-brexit-warns-institute-fiscal-studies#</span></a></span></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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There are lots of things about Brexit we in Scotland can’t
do anything about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If this point of
principle is conceded on the Continuity Bill, there will be nothing we can do
about any of it – which is precisely the idea. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What we can and must do right now is defend
the devolution settlement itself…and hold accountable the Labour and Liberal
MSPs whose predecessors designed it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are
they really happy to give it away for the slim chance of a Brexit supporting Corbyn
government?<o:p></o:p></div>
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No wonder Carwyn Jones resigned as Welsh Labour Leader
rather than countenance cancelling devolution till we "sort" Brexit? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A time frame of seven years “while they sort
Brexit out” is a political eternity. Brexit is a car crash that can't be
sorted. Do we really just amble on with our heads in a light proof rubber sack
till the Tories win a General Election in 2022?<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-23573907365321023542018-03-06T01:56:00.001-08:002018-03-06T02:09:40.651-08:00What Does Brexit Mean for Independence? What does “ Independence” mean in the context of Brexit?<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16.8667px; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
The period from 2011 to 2016 might be characterised by future commentators as the Independence Moment in Modern Scottish History. </div>
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The experience was a little how I imagine surfing to be…catching a wave of what felt like unexpected then irresistable momentum that carried its passengers towards a golden shore that seemed so close we could touch i Even defeat in the referendum in Sept 2014 scarcely seemed to dent the euphoria for long. Through the 2015 SNP electoral landslide we went, scarcely even noticing that something beyond our ken was stirring elsewhere in the pond, a corresponding yet very different, diffuse wave of English Nationalism…with Jeremy Corbyn riding one surf board, and Boris Johnson another. </div>
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Then all the waves crashed at once. Like Wile E Coyote, we looked down and saw that there was nothing holding us up, and we plummetted into the confused, confusing wash of a brand new reality. Brexit was happening, and Donald Trump was in the White House. And as we tried to stand up in the surf, spitting out a mouthful of seaweed…with a jelly fish trapped down our Speedos, we had lost all sight of the beach.</div>
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There are those among us who claim to still see it. That all we need to do is get back on the surfboard and another wave will come to lift it home. But most people aren’t so sure. We look around like we don’t know the rules of tides and gravity yet…and we hesitate.</div>
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To attempt to escape the metaphor in which I seem to have trapped myself as completely as Scottish Constitutional politics is stymied at the moment, let me suggest that the political hesitation is purely pragmatic. We had an election in 2017 in which the result was multiply equivocal and confused on both sides of the border. We have a Brexit process that is itself mired in the strange feeling, even now, with a year till we are supposed to be leaving, that it’s not really going to happen. The electorate are nothing if not nervous of change. At this moment, if anyone came along with a claim that they could make it all go away, they might win a couple of by-elections.</div>
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Like the Trump presidency, none of this was supposed to happen. There was a much cleverer and more lucrative scenario where Trump and Farage could shout “Treason” and “Fraud” after they lost...and go on to nice, comfortable careers on Fox News. Even now, nobody leading the Brexit campaign in 2016 or the shambolic sham negotiations over the divorce that have been going on in a pretendy kind of way for the last year or so is acting like any of this is actually real. I think that from the perspective of the helpless and futile periphery (to which status the 2014 vote condemned Scotland as a political entity) of a process that is quite so surreal, “hesitation” is not only natural as a political strategy, it is unavoidable. In an era of Red Lines being invisibly drawn all over the place, the Red Line that the Scottish Government have drawn around the transfer of powers and the principle of the Single Market make exactly as much symbolic sense as anything else going on.</div>
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But here and in Wesminster, a sense of unreality prevails. The Scottish Government are trying to finesse a rider to a UK Deal with the EU that still doesn’t feel as if it is really going to happen. In these circumstances, to try to summon back into being some nostalgic reboot of a previous epoch in the shape of “IndyRef2” seems chronologically inept as well as politically dubious. There is no sense in the air that anyone beyond the Faithful are remotely interested in that wish attempting to become real.</div>
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“But if we wait till after Brexit happens, it will be too late!” comes the anguished cry. To which I can only respond, “It IS too late. The vote in 2014 was a vote to put the decision out of our hands.” The helpless rage this makes us feel is quite real.</div>
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Because undeneath the layers of unreality with which the Brexit Slippage is encircled, still feeling like an “if” rather than a “when”, something real is nonetheless happening. The EU are responding to reality rather than the vague and impossible wish list which is still the only available (and quite hopeless) articulation of what Brexit might look like from the UK point of view - the picking of cherries from the cake that the unicorns are baking somewhere in Empire 2.0 – by producing legal documents for the divorce. “You told us you are leaving, “ they say. “So sign here.” And Westminster howls with outrage that the Eurocrats would dare to introduce anything so vulgar as “consequences” to an entirely imaginary decision - a decision that they simultaneously insist is “sacred” and must be “respected.”</div>
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The very use of terms such as “respect” and “democracy” is a dead giveaway, perhaps, that none of this, as with Trump’s Tweets, is meant to be taken literally, that nothing is real. In such a context, there is nothing to be done specifically in Scotland but to defend devolution, which is our local political variant on the theme of “You can have Brexit or reality, but you can’t have both.”</div>
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The upshot of all this is that we are condemned, like it or not, to a long game in which we have little practical say. This was the “Old Normal” of Scottish politics before 2011. Trying to finesse whatever situation the UK got itself into, for good or ill, for Scotland’s benefit, or at least to minimise harm. Devolution itself started as such a gambit, before the SNP's victory and the blithering response from London made it into something else, maybe...</div>
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It was a game played with a mixed record of success and humiliation from Whigs through the Unionists through Labour to the present: a sequence of local hegemonies in constant negotiation with where the power REALLY lay.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Buit these are not those times.</span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">This is not the Old Normal no matter how hard Scottish unionists pretend to believe that it is.</span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Because one of the things that is REALLY happening with Brexit is the discovery, by the English, of what the limitations of “Independence” are in the 21</span></span><sup style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">st</sup><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> Century. And our </span><span style="font-size: 14.6667px;">corresponding</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> future discovery, perhaps, that power doesn't really lie where we thought it did. That the very nature of power is changing. That the very meanings of "Nation" and "Independence" are in flux.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The crashing disappointment of Brexit both now and in that future, for the English, is something of which those of us who still </span><span style="font-size: 14.6667px;">perversely</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> cling to the expectation of serious constitutional change somewhere in Scotland’s near if not foreseeable future must most carefully attend. The "moment" is going to change again...in a way that is as hard to see into now as it was in say, 2008, to foresee a Scottish Independence referendum getting pretty close to a Yes vote in 2014.</span></span></div>
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My guess, for what it’s worth, about the NEXT few years, is that there is no avoiding the realities of Brexit, despite the concerted efforts of Corbyn on one side and May on the other to clamp their hands over their eyes as they walk us off the cliff. My second guess is that we will have another UK General Election which will elect one more UK government to try to “make a go of it” no matter what “it” turns out to be. And that meaningful constitutional change, a decisive transfer of sovereignty from London to Edinburgh, which may or may not be called “Independence” will happen as part of the recovery from this catastrophe, and not, as we hoped, as Nicola Sturgeon hoped, in its anticipation. </div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">In short, I think that we are going to have to wait for the wave, for the reality, AFTER this one. And that it is quite impossible to anticipate exactly what that moment will look like. My hope is that that when that time comes, it will be ALL of the historic nations who are asking themselves questions about what "nationhood" might mean in the future...and that the answer will involve as few torchlit parades and as little broken glass as possible. but which will nonetheless be as near as that 19</span><sup>th</sup><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> century concept comes to meaning what we think it does in the here and now…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">In short, that all this will come, if it does, will not come as part of the UK’s exit from the EU in 2021, but as part of the process of getting back in somewhere around 2028. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">And it will seem as natural as did the referendum to establish the Parliament in in Edinburgh in 1997 that the UK will be reconfigured.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">As natural as rain. There will be people on the fundamentalist wing of Scottish Nationalism who will </span><span style="font-size: 14.6667px;">complain</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> that it’s not the Real Thing.</span></span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">But as with Brexit, one of the things we have learned in the New Normal is that the “Real Thing” doesn’t exist.</span></div>
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This is a counsel of hope , by the way, not of despair. The Break Up of Britain is coming closer faster than anyone could have anticipated on September 19<sup>th</sup> 2014, let alone after the 2017 election. But it will not look like the past. It will not look like yesterday’s dream no matter how fervently some of us might wish. It will look like something wholly new, something that is already happening in Scotland, and Ireland…and London, actually. Reinventing nationhood is one of the real things that is happening to all of us. Brexit is an attempt to use nostalgia and hatred as a template for that change. We can do better. We already have. We may be restricted to holding action for the moment…the 2014 vote saw to that…but change is underway. It is up to us to be inventive as we go through it, and to insist on a principle of Scottish Popular Sovereignty as a rock to cling to.</div>
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Whatever else the vote in 2014 meant, it established that our future, in the long term is up to us, even as it condemned us to a present tense of helplessness and apparent stasis. <span style="font-size: 11pt;">The chance will come again, but it won’t look like any of us think it will.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Prepare for fancy footwork. Reality is bound to make a comeback sooner or later.</span></div>
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Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-9591222969561591062018-01-21T03:55:00.001-08:002018-01-21T03:58:21.038-08:00Janis Joplin is Seventy Five<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Janis Joplin would have been seventy five years old on
Friday. It seems impossible to think of her as ever being that old. It also seems impossible that all this time
later, she would still have been that young, that all that was effectively only
yesterday. She died, as everybody knows, as the great wave of “the sixties”
broke, leaving the debris of those whose vulnerability as well as talent seemed
to define that still extraordinary era. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Even at the time, there was something of an air of ritual
inevitability about it. First there was Jimi…then a few weeks later there was
Janis…then Jim Morrison a few months after that. All damaged, all publically
bearing their wounds to the hungry world, all burning out with a rapidity
contiguous with the brightness of that burning. All 27, of course, famously,
and all, too, in the process of renegotiating the congruence of personal,
cultural and world history that focussed on their unready persons, and devoured
them raw.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In Janis’s case, there was never anything private about what
was happening to her. Heart on her
sleeve wasn’t in it. The whole basis of her sudden fame had lain in what she
had represented as female, freaky and young.
Bewildered hurt was what she did, it was her schtick. In the way she
sang, tearing at herself to find and display her damage, in her rambling but
poetically focussed monologues in between songs on stage, in her alternately
reckless and needy personal relationships, at any time and place, Janis Joplin
would have been a troubled soul, dangerous to know, or know too well. But it
took a very particular time and place to take her out of the provincial, hip
coffee bars of Austin, Texas, and make her personal pain into the global cultural
commodity that it was…and still is.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What happened, basically, upon the discovery by corporate
America that there was money to be made out of “rebellion”, was that the
outcasts and losers…they self-identified as freaks…who have always and will
always be on the failed fringes of home owning consumerism, were handed guitars
and money and the very best of them conquered the world. Whenever you watch film of them, something
like the Band’s great, elegiac concert movie, The Last Waltz, for example, you
find yourself thinking, “would any one of these funny looking fuck ups have
been signed to a record label at any other time in history?” The answer is
probably “no.” It was a particular
moment of cultural dislocation combined with economic expansion that brought
these culturally dislocated people into the economic mainstream. For a giddy year or two, in their early and
mid-twenties, still children, really, with the Beatles at the top of the
pyramid, these glorious inmates had the run of the asylum…and produced what are
still some of the most arresting and brilliant “moments” in the history of popular
culture.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The version of Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain” on Janis’s
“breakthrough” album with big Brother and the Holding Company is one of the
musical highlights of the century for me, never mind of the decade. A voice breaking into chords over Sam
Houston’s visceral, tearing guitar, reinventing the personal in the
appropriation of a black woman’s blues by a young white woman that, for me
anyway, transcends a later era’s cross-cultural queasiness through the sheer
force of that individual witness. It couldn’t have happened before the moment
that it did happen. And it sure as hell
couldn’t have happened afterwards.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The dumb accidental tragedy of her death, which is brought
to mind by thinking of her as alive today - a cackling, life affirming firebrand
of a certain age, on her fourth marriage to a younger guy with a hell of a
stock of memories and who can tell what other achievements - is that like all
the icons born in the first half of the forties who burned brightly in the
sixties, she was in the process of re-negotiating her own life. They were all doing it, that whole generation
who suddenly found themselves nearer to thirty than twenty…<o:p></o:p></div>
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Some reinvented themselves as corporations in their own
right, some found a niche in the rather quieter, less dangerous world of jazz
or country rock (Janis was heading in that direction). But every change, as in
the case of the Beatles, had a price of breaking something. Perhaps it was easier if you in a group, that
you had to break up the gang…or turn it into a brand… in order to survive into
adulthood.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And maybe somewhere in there is where we find the real link
between members of the 27 club. Not so much in their numerology as in their singularity,
their isolation. Janis changed bands three times in three studio albums, but it
is in her unaccompanied “Mercedes Benz” song that she most wistfully yet definitively
sang to us of her plight. Unable to fit in with what she had been, and with her
very existence defined by her being estranged from herself, she called herself
and her last Album by the name of a black prostitute, , “Pearl.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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That her she destroyed herself just at a time when she had
put the worst of her self-destructiveness behind her, and that her lonely death
on a hotel room floor is so synonymous with her very real achievements as a
musician is every bit as much our tragedy as much as it is hers. It would have
been better for all of us if that remarkable person still lived on, rather than
what we do have left of her…the comparatively cheap currency of a legend. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-1464584172333626592017-12-18T07:21:00.003-08:002017-12-18T07:47:45.680-08:00A Lesson from History<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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By any measure, the Battle of Britain stands with the
October revolution as among the most historically decisive few weeks of the 20<sup>th</sup> Century. Little wonder its
spirit is evoked so often in our national mythology and popular culture. It really was, bu any reasonable measure, “Our
Finest Hour.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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As a playwright I try very hard to look at historical
stories in the present tense, as if we didn’t know how it was going to come
out. Because that’s what it must have
been like at the time. And in the late
summer of 1940, what had happened in the past year, from a British point of
view, was not going to fill you with confidence. </div>
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True, the Chamberlain Government, which would
have almost certainly have made a deal with Nazi Germany rather than fight on
alone, had been replaced by Churchill leading an unlikely coalition (still
forming) consisting mainly of the Labour Party and a few Tory rebels. The most
dangerous potential Quislings had either been interned, like Mosely and the Tory
MP for Peebles, Colonel Ramsey…while other less immediately
dangerous but untrustworthy individuals, including the ex King, were being put
out of harm’s way. True, the British
Army and a good chunk of the French had escaped from capture and death at
Dunkirk…but even a successful retreat is still a retreat. </div>
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To the shock of the world and the Germans…and
the French…Churchill had recently ordered the destruction of the French fleet at Oran …with the loss of 1500 French lives…partly to keep the ships from being added to the German navy, but also to show the Germans…and the Americans, crucially, that
he wasn’t going to mess about, that he could be as big a criminal as he had to
be to win. At this point, the Germans were forced into serious preparation for
invasion of Great Britain…the prerequisite of which was, of course, air superiority, without
which an invasion across the Channel was unthinkable. (As it was in 1944.) </div>
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So
the RAF had to be bombed and blown out of the war. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Had we lost the Battle of Britain, then, the Germans would
almost certainly have invaded the South of England before the bad weather came
in October 1940…Roosevelt would likely have lost the Presidential election in November. And the King...or his older brother... would have shaken
hands with Hitler on the balcony of Buckingham palace. The Americans could never
have supplied the Russians when the Nazis inevitably turned on them and the
Americans would have had no forward base in Europe from which to launch the
invasions of North Africa, Italy and France.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A close run thing. At the time, entirely unpredictable <o:p></o:p></div>
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So far, excepting with a few minor details of interpretation,
I imagine I’d be in agreement with Boris Johnson and William Rees Mogg…at least
in the summary of what was at stake when “we” took to the skies over the South
East of England to take on the Luftwaffe in August and September 1940. Where we might differ is in recalling the
details of who “we” were…who WERE the “few” to whom so much was and is still
owed by so many.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Nearly three thousand pilots – fought in the Battle of
Britain. Nearly 600 of them, 20%, were not born in Britain. Around 300 came
from the Commonwealth…Canada, New Zealand, Australia…Jamaica, India… Nearly 300,
however, came from future EU countries. France, Belgium, Ireland…and from
Poland and Czechoslovakia. The most "kills" by any Squadron during
the fighting was 201...by 303 Squadron. Who were ALL Polish...<span style="background: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; font-family: "segoe ui" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
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They don't just do kitchens, you know.</div>
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So the only REASONABLE conclusion from
the Battle of Britain...and of the fact that 20% of the few weren't British...and that 10% of them, including the single most effective group of them...were from Europe... is that it was a jolly good thing they were here. And that Britain was saved from Nazi Invasion in 1940 not
by standing alone, but by welcoming immigrants...<o:p></o:p></div>
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Sometimes history doesn’t quite teach the lessons that
everybody thinks it does.<o:p></o:p></div>
Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-8249795177516612442017-12-16T05:59:00.004-08:002018-01-29T01:11:56.605-08:00Speak for England, Jacob!<div class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">
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On September 2<sup>nd</sup> 1939, as Neville Chamberlain sat down in the House of Commons, his speech having delivered distinctly equivocal support for Poland, invaded the day before by the Nazis, despite all the previous promises of solidarity, Arthur Greenwood was rising to his feet to reply for Labour when an angry voice came from the Tory Government backbenches, and shouted possibly the most famous and most spine tingling set of four words uttered in that Chamber during the Twentieth Century : “Speak for England, Arthur!”</div>
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The words were spoken by Leo Amery, an anti-appeasement Tory MP in a moment of angry shame that, in his judgement, his Conservative and Unionist colleagues were preparing to bow the knee to the Nazis, that the terror of another war with Germany was about to push The United Kingdom into further acquiescence in the Nazi take over of central Europe that had begun in earnest with the unopposed invasion of Czechoslovakia in March that year. Those words were spine tingling for a reason not usually part of the story we tell ourselves about Our Finest Hour…that right from Munich in 1938 until the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, it was by no means a settled certainty that the hour in question would have been anything other than one of shame, betrayal and collaboration. It was, as the Duke of Wellington observed on another European occasion, "a close run thing."</div>
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I’m thinking of this pivotal moment in our national history (as the UK of GB and NI) partly because I am dead certain that Leo Amery’s defiance of a weak and vacillating Tory Prime Minister is not ever far from the thoughts of Jacob Rees-Mogg as he characteristically - and not without the courage of his own convictions - identifies so clearly what is at stake as we go into “Phase Two” of the Brexit negotiations. Jacob Rees Mogg, in his heart of hearts, knows he is speaking for England, and that what is at stake is what “England” and the “UK”…mean. </div>
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This second stage of talks with the EU will focus on the so called “transition” after the UK putatively leaves at the end of March 2019. The Chancellor , Phillip Hammond, confirmed yesterday that during this period, the UK will follow EU Trade Rules…even though it will no longer have any say as to what those rules are. Rees Mogg, and the rest of the “Conviction Brexiteers”…still a minority in the Tory party in the Commons, if not in the country, are horrified. Rees Mogg has described this transition status as being equivalent to the UK being a “colony” of the EU. (Able and highly educated though he is, irony seems to be entirely lost on this scion of a newspaper dynasty and the 18<sup>th</sup> Century.) </div>
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Mildly absurd though the rhetoric is, it does point us to the beating heart of what Brexit means to its advocates, both consciously and unconsciously: The Independence of England. If that Independence is sacrificed to expediency and pacifying the Irish, why then, Old England really is Done…as the song nearly says at the beginning of Dad’s Army.</div>
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When Amery used the word “England” in 1940, he meant Britain, of course. An England equivalent to Britain…and Britain a Greater England… was as natural for him as it was for George Orwell, who in his own defining statement on the war in 1940 had to add a rather irritated footnote to the effect that Scottish, Welsh or Irish readers might object to the lumping together of the four nations under the name of one of them , but that he thought they were being a bit silly about it. Thing is, that in 1940, and for some considerable time afterwards, most Scots would have agreed with him that the differences between us added to our cultural richness and “diversity” (to use a later term) but were of no real political account. This was and remains the opinion of those who campaigned most coherently for a No vote in 2014.</div>
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What has changed in the last couple of weeks, I believe quite by accident, is that Ireland’s refusal to contemplate a hard border with the North, and crucially, that refusal being comprehensibly and unequivocally backed by the 27 countries of what we will need to get used to calling the rEU, combined with the risible mixture of incompetence and arrogance that somehow persuaded the Tories that the DUP would ever contemplate a functioning border between Holy Protestant Ulster and the Motherland, has catapulted us into UK wide “Soft Brexit” territory quite without plan or expectation…to the manifest relief of the Remainer majority on the Government benches.</div>
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Ireland has saved England from itself. I always thought that was our job!</div>
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Anyway, Farage is quite openly spitting out his own teeth with rage, while in rather more civilised tones, Rees Mogg, on Newsnight last night, drew the battle lines for the next stage in the Tory Civil War that has landed us all here in the first place.</div>
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“We cannot be a colony of the European Union for two years from 2019 to 2021, accepting new laws that are made without any say-so of the British people, Parliament or Government,” Jacob Rees Mogg said on Newsnight last night. “That is not leaving the European Union, that is being a vassal state of the European Union, and I would be very surprised if that were Government policy.”</div>
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With Rees Mogg, as with Enoch Powell before him in the story of the break Up of Britain, the choice of language is fascinating. But I want to concentrate on the word “we.” </div>
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“We” are “the people”…to coin a phrase. And the people are being betrayed and hoodwinked by what Nigel Farage, despite more than twenty years salary and a fat pension on its way from the European Parliament, calls “professional politicians” - involved in a conspiracy against the nation.</div>
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But that nation is not the place Leo Amery wanted Arthur Greenwood to speak for in 1940, it is not not the place with a Global Empire that decided to create the Welfare State in a moment of nation defining solidarity when the Labour Party, fired with a sense of <i>British National</i> certainty and purpose it has not had before or since, (despite “White heat” in the Sixties and “Cool Brittainia” in the 90s) swept to popular and political power in 1945. That Vision of Britain held itself together while <i>begging</i> to join the EU from the late fifties till the early seventies when it finally succeeded. But one part of that Britain was never comfortable with subsuming itself into the greater whole, was never comfortable with the diminution of its “place in the world”, clinging onto past greatness through folk memories of the 1940s as much as to its seat on the UN Security Council and a “special relationship“ with an increasingly bemused and indifferent United States - ALL, of course, products of that war and it's victorious but complicated conclusion. The complications of that Victory came crushingly home to the UK (and France) in Egypt just ten years after that part in a World War that came out more or less right.. I believe that "Brexit in 2016" will have the same resonance for future historians as the words “Suez in 196” do now…as a self inflicted slap in the face to British Exceptionalism based on folk memory more than current reality. And will stand with the same symbolic certainty for the difficult acquisition of self-knowledge.</div>
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Part of this learning curve is that you cannot simply pretend that the other three nations of the UK don’t exist, or rather, that they only exist when they’re being “silly” and annoying. The debacle over the Irish border saw to that. But to KEEP Northern Ireland and maybe Scotland and Wales and, crucially, LONDON, within that Greater England…then England will have to KEEP the Single Market and the Customs Union and quite possibly Free Movement as well. (Ask the 27...you can't have the first two without the third) </div>
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So to keep the Kingdom United, England can’t leave the EU, in any terms that Rees Mogg and his like would accept, at all. England can’t leave the EU without leaving the UK as well.</div>
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As has been observed before, England cannot abide being “just another country in Europe.” “We”…in the Rees-Mogg sense of “we”…stood alone and unique in 1940. What Rees Mogg and his fellow Brexiteers insist upon is that once more “we” can stand alone despite the traitors and equivocators of appeasement among us. But “we”, in my view, isn’t what it used to be. “We” no longer convincingly mean the same “us.” For example, I don’t think that even Unionist Scotland, here and now, has a problem with being “just another country.” In fact, in Nationalist Scotland, I think a considerable number of us rather <i>aspire</i> to being “just another country.”</div>
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But we learned in 2014 that Breaking Up Britain was too big a job for the hesitant, equivocal Scots. Breaking Up Britain was always a job for the English - who went ahead with Brexit without, really, a second thought.... This despite the warnings (not entirely delivered with conviction, admittedly) that a Brexit vote in 2016 was a decisive step along that road. </div>
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But now, as we move into the next phase of the divorce, the question of English Independence that was implicit in 2016 (Farage didn’t use the word till the next morning) is going to be explicit as the “transition” (to what?) is negotiated not just in Brussels, but in the Cabinet room, the pubs and the Parliament of England.</div>
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If Rees Mogg inter alia do decide to “speak for England” in the way I describe (though they will still call England “Britain”)…and insist that a hard, clean break with Europe is what “the people” voted for in June 2016…they will likely bring down their own government, of course. But they will also, I think, do something else of rather more historic significance. They will declare that the English Independence they believe in, is not only a “liberation” from the EU, and from its daily insult to English Exceptionalism. Brexit is also, in effect, an English Declaration of Independence from the UK. </div>
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Are they really ready for that? Because the light will dawn in the course of 2018, that Breaking Up Britain is the price of a meaningful Brexit. </div>
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Fasten your seat-belts and pass the popcorn.</div>
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Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-52941522884279139112017-12-01T01:01:00.003-08:002017-12-01T01:59:58.435-08:00Speech During Wartime<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
What this is about, after the 48 Hour news rumble which I'm sure Trump loves, is the degradation of public speech. Of the defeat of evidence by noise.</div>
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Trump and his people are inviting us not to care about whether a Britain First video is "real" or not because Trump retweeting it "elevates the conversation." This elevation is clearly not intended in any sense that Jane Austen or Henry James might have recognised elevated dialogue. No. What Sarah Huckabee means by "elevates" is "make louder." In Trump world, in what is increasingly "our world," all that matters is that an opinion be loud. That it garner re-tweets and follows. Britain First understand this principle of the new media, which is dragging the old media along behind it like your "other" Grandad, the one who isn't the boorish, embarrassing one who rants about women and immigrants and Muslims over Christmas dinner. Nice Grandad goes along with the distasteful crudity of the boor who carves the roast simply because he no longer has the conviction or energy to tell the man to shut up.</div>
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Why does the degradation of public speech matter? What is wrong with the loudest voice being the most important? With there being no agreed standards of ,if not "truth" then at least ethics in what people in positions of power carelessly chuck onto social media because it gives them a warm feeling in their tummy as their own worst, weakest most bigoted instincts are confirmed? Or indeed offers the opportunity to sneer loftily at the idiots on Twitter, one of whom happens to be Dipstick In Chief? Isn't it all just a bit of fun, reduced like all consumed news product to titillation at one level or another? Does it really matter if Rupert Murdoch was right all along? That the most cynical, bleakest view of all human conduct, elite or not, turns out to be right?</div>
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What matters to me, I think, most...is that The Triumph of Energy that Trump represents is also the Death of Hope. The triumph of prejudice over evidence, of the triumph of loudness over intellectual process is the Triumph of the Will over Reality. Reality itself gets bent out of shape so that stuff which was unthinkable a year ago is normal times now. God knows about five years from now when he's in his second term.<br />
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It isn't just Trump. It's the making of the machinery of government into his echo chamber. The reduction of government itself into loud, cheap lie machine to protect the hatreds and stupidity of a cheap crook. That a White House staff would calmly dismiss the promotion of a Neo-Nazi Hate Group as "elevating the conversation" is more than absurd: much more dangerously, it is what you have come to expect. As each line of decency is crossed, as each decline and fall of what it is publically possible for the President to say and retweet is crossed and normalised, the more we really are, as a civilization, handing over our future to the successors of the Trumps and Farages simply because they seem to have more get up and go than we do.</div>
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In the same way, cherished liberal elitist notions of "Balance" - that the media can offer a neutral platform for the debate of ideas within a commonly agreed window of responsible disagreement - are blown out of the water when you interpret this to mean giving equal time to climate change deniers and fascists on an equal footing with actual scientists and ...well, let's just say Nicola Sturgeon, or Vince Cable, or Hillary Clinton. Whatever complications one may have about any or all of these, surely we can agree to recognise that there is a qualitative difference between them and Nigel Farage and Donald Trump? "But what can we do?" bleat the newsminders. "We can't be Reithean Policemen of the Public Good anymore! This is what the democracy has chosen, it is what the new media has thrown up, this is what the market wants!"</div>
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The apparent energy of the faux authentic...of the "good bloke in the pub" Nigel Farage, and of the "No nonsense Man's Man" Donald Trump seems to just floor the equivocating, desiccated toffs who have lost all conviction about their role as "keepers of standards." Even the fact that I am putting so much of this little lament into inverted commas tells me that I too am hidebound by deadened language, crippled by quotation, unsuited by my own civilised, pussy footing irony to properly face of the enemy. It feels like dereliction of duty even to try to explore an idea rather than reach for a baseball bat.</div>
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Of course, one reaches for past parallels. One is gaining from the present debacle a tremendous insight as to what the 1930s must have felt like at the time as we drifted in apparent hopelessness towards war and genocide. But what requires no retrospection or gazing into a crystal ball is the observation that right here and now we are in real trouble. That if we continue to hand over the field of public speech to the boors and thugs then maybe will get the future Trump, the Future Farage that such equivocation deserves. Maybe it really is time to finally abandon ideas like "balance" and "truth" rather than simply imprison them in quotes. We need a new set of weapons to take these people on. Right now it feels like life during wartime. And only one side is suited up.</div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/30/trump-tweet-anti-muslim-far-right-white-house</span></div>
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Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-59602921578491937922017-09-20T00:40:00.003-07:002017-09-20T00:43:23.044-07:00Boris, Brexit, England and Reality<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: small;">
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England, Their England – 20<sup>th</sup> September 2017.</div>
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In The Lion and The Unicorn, his great 1940 essay on the nature of Englishness, George Orwell, in Hampstead, as the German Bombers flew overhead, was trying to define the identity of something that was in real and present danger of being lost. Perhaps this is why it is the definitive statement of identity that it is, why it had to be definitive. The very survival of England was at stake.</div>
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(It wasn’t just England whose survival was in question, of course…the survival of Europe and of civilisation was up for grabs…but we’ll get to that, and Brexit, in a minute.)</div>
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Among Orwell’s most memorable observations was that the support of the “average Englishman” for the British Empire was expressed by being barely conscious that it existed, and that this blithe disregard for the complex reality that supported “his” simple way of life was one of the things foreigners found so maddeningly incomprehensible about the English. It wasn’t a wholly new thought. The essayist Sir John Seeley in a book of 1883 made the famous and connected observation that the British had “conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” Absence of mind had extended to historical matters nearer home too, of course. The name of the book in which Seeley had made this observation was “The Expansion of England.”</div>
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Orwell, in a rather irritated aside, addresses the anomaly, when he acknowledges that readers in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland may object to the expansion of Englishness to include them in his essay on identity. He argues, with some justice, that to the rest of the world, the differences between us are insignificant to the point of invisibility, and moves on, having dealt with the absorption of the minor Celtic nations into the big one purely as a matter of identity, and not as a series of political, historical and cultural events. Rather in the way he fondly accused his countrymen of their not knowing that the British Empire existed, Orwell treated the Expansion of England as a fact of nature, rather than as a political process that could, as is the nature of processes, be reversed.</div>
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This is all in my mind this morning as we approach what future historians of identity in these islands may, (or may not, depending what May does in Florence on Friday) identify as a defining moment as much as 1940 – “Dunkirk and All That” – was definitive for the relationship of 20<sup>th</sup> Century Britain to itself and to everybody else. It seems to have been on Boris Johnson’s mind as well. Not only is he ferociously, personally ambitious, he is also rather a gifted and passionate writer on English history and identity. Churchill is his hero and role model in this as well as, he hopes, finding himself summoned to the Palace to assume the office of Prime Minister in Our Darkest...and Our Finest Hour.</div>
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May was being widely trailed as finally making the statement of British Intent on Brexit that the aforementioned Maddened Foreigners had been waiting for. Finally, it was promised, more than a year after voting for it, they would be told definitively, what the British wanted out of Brexit. There would finally be clarity in the negotiations because there would finally, actually be a real and conscious policy that Britain was pursuing.</div>
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And this is where we get back to absent-mindedness. The entire historical success of Britain, or England, has been in not really being conscious of what Britain, or England, was doing. The famous preference for “muddling through”, “buggering on” and so on, is not just a charming cultural trait like warm beer and cricket on the green. It’s actually at the heart of how Britain, or England, gets things done.</div>
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The centre of things, the way things are, must not be challenged. The way to deal with change is always, ALWAYS to act as if nothing had changed. The Scots, Welsh and Irish may have been conscious of the particular circumstances of their absorption into greater England, but it is the genius of England barely to have noticed. The British Empire was not only absent-mindedly acquired over two centuries, it was as inconsequentially and easily abandoned in two decades in exactly the same way, as if it had never been.</div>
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The perennial question, since 1950, of “why are all these immigrants from India and the West Indies coming HERE?” is testimony to this sound cultural policy of forgetting. In a similar way, the consequences of the End of Empire on the immediate borders - the slow and differential self- assertion of the previously quietly absorbed peripheral nations of Scotland, Wales and Ireland over the last century or so - has been equally irritating and inexplicable.</div>
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As for Europe, and what is or is not going to happen on Friday, Greater England joined the EC in 1973 with exactly the same strategic self-persuasion that “nothing has really changed” with which she has been attempting to leave the EU. “Britain” – the economic and administrative oligarchy that bestrides Greater England like an invisible colossus – may well have known that joining the EC was absolutely essential, if politically inadmissible, as a SUBSTITUTE for Lost Empire in connecting to the imperative yet invisible wider world. But England, like Ireland, Scotland and Wales, is inevitably, as the Empire fades from memory, asserting a distinct identity, and will be having none of it.</div>
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It turns out that Britain understood “England” just as poorly as it understood its other colonies, and with catastrophic results.</div>
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What the other Europeans, the foreigners, may have failed to understand is that unconsciousness, NOT having a fixed policy on Brexit, was absolutely essential not just for holding Britain together, but for Theresa May holding her cabinet together. David Davis was never specific in his negotiations with the EU because he and the Cabinet had never been specific with each other. They had never even really discussed it outside of algorithmically isolated cabals of Europhiles and Eurosceptics who only ever talked to people they already agreed with.</div>
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All that, by force majeure, was due to change on Friday. The Prime Minister was going to get specific in Florence on a phased transition deal that once again try to keep the cracking edifice of Britain, and the cracking edifice of Her majesty’s Government together, that once again, would change everything, while changing nothing at the centre. And Boris Johnson, on Saturday in the Daily Telegraph, spoke for England, and said he and England were having none of it.</div>
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This is only Wednesday, as I write. Not, like Orwell, with German Bombers flying overhead, but just before what might be the next moment of crisis in Britain’s long, more or less managed post war decline. Boris has drawn a line…the moment we get specific on Brexit, hard or soft, one way or the other, the Cabinet and Government split like an over ripe melon. It is entirely possible, even probable, given past precedent, which Theresa May will follow in the grand historical tradition of putting off till tomorrow the reality that she would rather not face today, and that her speech on Friday will be as gutted of content and specificity as almost everything else she says. But if Theresa May screws her courage to the sticking post and goes ahead with Speech A, make no mistake, the Tory Party Conference in Manchester in the first week of October is going to be a bloodbath that it is hard to see her Minority Government surviving.</div>
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As for the Labour Party, every bit as split on Europe, every bit as dependent for unity on “not really talking about it”, they must be thanking God and the Ghost of Clement Atlee that their conference isn’t the week after, but the week before. They will be able, if it happens, to fully enjoy watching the Tories explode into acrimony and accusations of treason while pretending to be unconscious of the thought “there but for the Grace of God…and the traditional scheduling of Conference Season…go I.”</div>
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As a footnote the subject of reality, it has just occurred to me that the name we might give to England leaving Europe on its own might be just "Exit"...but that's a thought for another time.</div>
Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-45862724104993317392017-09-06T01:29:00.003-07:002017-12-16T09:07:41.429-08:00"To Govern As If"<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
I won’t be the the only person to say this, on this blog-site and elsewhere, but the Programme for Government set out yesterday by the First Minister is far and away the most progressive and ambitious that the chamber has ever heard. An awful lot of it makes welcome reading to an awful lot of people involved in the broader Yes coalition over the last few years. From a primary to tertiary strategy on education, to a positive and manufacturing and export based vision for the economy - all underpinned by a publicly owned and run investment bank - from an unashamedly optimistic, joined up programme going from infrastructure to green targets to taxation and welfare, this PFG represents nothing less than an aspiration to transform this small country.</div>
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That this is being done in the doomed, minimal expectation atmosphere of Brexit is to dissociate Scotland from the UK without even mentioning the Constitution, and it left opposition parties floundering, responding to the speech that they were expecting, not the speech they got. Within the narrow confines of the Holyrood Bubble and it’s attendant commentariat, it was something of a game-changer.</div>
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We’ve had a few months now since the election of denial and wound licking. And the document produced yesterday is of course still ambition rather than achievement. The question of how it will play in the wider world of Scotland, let alone the wider world beyond will probably come down to what the “story” is. And that may comer down to nuance and feeling as much as the very firmly holistic and grounded “culture of government” that the PRG sets out. It unashamedly looks to a Scottish State to coordinate and shape a holistic vision of what a country can be. In the contemporary context, this is almost thrilling in its heresy. It is also entirely, unashamedly, optimistically European.</div>
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It is a Programme for Devolved Government with the ambition we’d look for from Independence. In fact, in many ways, it is far MORE ambitious than was the White Paper produced for the 2014 Referendum Campaign.</div>
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And this, to me, is a sure sign that the Sturgeon Government has moved on. In retrospect, the perpetuation of the “Indy Mood” BEYOND September 2014 and through 2015 and 16 (until the Brexit vote, in fact) , that sustained and promoted the fortunes not just of the SNP, but of the rather more numinous “mood of optimism” in our political culture, was bound to come to cultural if not arithmetical grief in the unexpected election of 2017. The wave had been stoked up and kept going by a mixture of stubborn ineptitude and arrogance in the Cameron government, and charisma in the person of Nicola Sturgeon…and the wave was bound to crash at sometime.<br />
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But what was clear yesterday was that the twin realities “external” to the aforementioned Holyrood Bubble of the increased uncertainty of Brexit on the one hand and the mercurial rise of Corbyn on the other may well have taken the immediate constitutional campaign of “IndyRef 2” off the front burner, but they have also opened a space for a far more specific and identifiable “left” programme of government by the SNP.</div>
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Thanks to an astonishngly positive response to the new circumstances that seems to be very much led from the front, the SNP government have hit the ground running in a New Normality that I, at least, was slow to see coming.</div>
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Buit make no mistake. This degree of radicalism in government is only possible if the political priority of building a referendum coalition which includes, (as Salmond so cautiously did) a very Not-Radical proportion of the Scottish Electorate that is simply arithmetically essential to a Yes vote, has been decisively dropped. Ironically, we and Nicola Sturgeon may be being afforded this vision of Scotland’s future only because The Independence Campaign - as we have understood it up until now - is off the agenda.</div>
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The “Indy Moment” of 2011-2016 is over. We are in a new phase now. There are things happening over which we have control, as evidenced by the leaking yesterday of a Home Office paper on future UK Immigration policy as suicidal as it is illiberal, as oppressive as it is impractical. The contrast of confidence that was displayed yesterday between Edinburgh and London is absolutely stark. . For my money, it is exactly what needed to be done to positively change the story we need to tell ourselves as a culture. The way to prove to ourselves our fitness to govern ourselves…is to do it. </div>
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To govern "as if "</div>
Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2931965083057385194.post-63022465655583538532017-06-09T02:24:00.001-07:002017-06-09T03:03:36.190-07:00Democracy? You've got to love it!<div class="MsoNormal">
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I spent most of last night in an impressively improvised TV
Studio for Broadcasting Scotland in the same kind of incoherent shock as has
been displayed by Theresa May ever since her tight wee circle of acolytes
launched her manifesto, and the damn thing sank like a boat in a Buster Keaton
movie. But come the dawn, and the Tories
having lost their majority, and Jeremy Corbyn talking about forming a minority
Labour government with a mischievous plausibility that will have most of his own
parliamentary colleagues reaching for a fresh pot of paint to daub a frozen smile
across their masks of despair...with the EU now in a position to absolutely
dictate whatever form of Brexit they feel like, even with Ruth Davidson’s Scottish Tories and the DUP
combining forces to put whoever is leading the Tories next week over the line…I
have got a smile on my face that I don't have to paint on.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This election, on both sides of the border, has worked out really
well. In fact, even with the loss of
some real talent from the SNP Parliamentary group, in terms of what comes next,
I’m not sure how it could realistically be any better.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Think of it this way.
35 SNP MPs matter FAR more in THIS context, than 45 or so MPs would
have mattered had the Tories achieved the thumping majority they were
after, or than 56 mattered until yesterday. I don’t believe any more than
Jeremy Corbyn really does that Labour can REALLY form the next government…His main cause for celebration today is that the Blairite hegemony in his own party is now decisively over. But even if they did try to form a government, they would absolutely now need the SNP to pass a budget, and to renew Trident…to
name but two. </div>
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As it is, yes, of course, the Tories will form the next UK government…and this is not a good thing...but did anyone really expect them NOT to? The real news this morning is that the UKIP/Tory fusion Party which Theresa May had decided was the way to keep
her safe from having to make deals with ANYONE, her own party very much
included, is as dead as a door nail, even if TM tries to hang on as a deeply
damaged PM.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But what about Scotland?
Symbolically, if in no other way, this is a surely a huge comedown from the
heady symbolism of the Tsunami two years ago?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Firstly, I’d argue that this is no bad thing in and of
itself. Symbolism, after all, is only symbolism. If this election has taught us anything it is surely that real life continues anyway, and that the vast majority of the electorate, God Bless 'Em, don't give much of a toss for it. The Yes/No divide in Scottish
politics is what produced that tsunami…the 45% for yes had somewhere obvious to go, and
the Unionist vote, under the illusion in 2015 that Scottish politics could back to a
status quo ante referendum led to them coming unstuck. What has happened, paradoxically, in the highly
successful reorganization of the Unionist tactical vote that has STILL left the SNP
with a healthy “majority” of Scottish seats is first of all, a predictable and
salutary catching up…better reflecting our divisions and no longer allowing the
2015 result to allow some in the Yes movement to imagine that we’d sort of won
in 2014 after all…and secondly, it's a confirmation of the re-focusing of Scottish
politics as an entirely distinct entity from politics South of the border, as having changed forever. Scottish politics now is ALL about the
constitution, and in the long run, that’s exactly where the nationalists want
it to be.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But what about the second referendum? So that Scotland gets
to decide on what kind of Brexit deal we want?
Well, first of all, the EU are in the driving seat on that one, and not
the UKIP/Tory merger…and second, can we now admit that it was never a very good idea in the first
place? Calling a referendum when you don't know the result in advance may make for exciting television, but it's no way to run a government. It may be that democratically
there was no option but for Nicola Sturgeon to announce that there should be some specifically
Scottish say on the shape of the Brexit to come…but still, we're better off without it being any kind of immediate promise let alone prospect...in terms of running Scotland properly, if nothing else.</div>
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Calling a second referendum when you can’t predict the outcome was always a very dangerous strategy, and one doomed to a second defeat, on this timing, in my view. Now that, first of all, the Brexit process is itself completely up in the air, and we have even LESS idea what we might be voting on in that referendum in 2019, in terms of narrow politics, iit makes even less sense. So when Ruth Davidson triumphantly demands that Indyref 2 get off the table NOW, I think we should let the baby have her bottle and think that we've just dodged a very nasty bullet.<br />
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In another wonderful paradox of democracy, by making this election campaign in
Scotland about NOTHING but the “threat” of Indyref Two…the Tories have won some seats, but in the longer term, even in the medium turn, have done the SNP an enormous favour. It may be that Nicola
Sturgeon, after due consideration of the changed UK posture on the Brexit talks,
can concede that “while the Brexit deal is so uncertain, there will be no referendum in the course of this parliament
“…and breathe a sigh of well deserved relief. This is a chance to remove am electoral millstone
from around the neck of the Scottish Government, who can now take part in the Brexit
process with a MUCH better mix of Westminster parliamentary arithmetic and a secure Scottish government for years to come.</div>
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What's more, with the Tories relying on MPs elected from Northern Ireland, there is absolutely no way that the "hard Tory Brexit" that justified that referendum can happen. The "fringe" nations, including Scotland are in a FAR better place to negotiate a soft, even differentiated Brexit, than they were yesterday. Time to blow the dust off that proposal that Theresa May so arrogantly dismissed a couple of months ago. If Indyref 2 is off the table, it's because a differential Scottish Brexit is now back on. </div>
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Crystal balls probably belong in the trash…but
by re-aligning Scottish politics so decisively along constitutional lines, and
insisting as the “prize” of “SNP defeat” that the SNP drop a second referendum
which I strongly suspect they never really wanted in the first place... and with
pressure on the SNP in Holyrood coming from a Labour Party which entirely owes its revival
to its own left wing, I don’t see, beyond the improbable “Coalition” that
people may have considered in the wee small hours last night, that this could
be any better.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Democracy, as well as being a ruthless bugger, as Theresa
May and Alex Salmond have both found out, also has a fantastic sense of humour. That’s one of the reasons you’ve got to love
it.<o:p></o:p></div>
Playwright in the Cageshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06290328327968341106noreply@blogger.com0