Has anything Really Changed?

Once again, a new Prime Minister neither I nor my country ever voted for is kissing hands with the Queen this morning.  Once again, as of last night, the Labour Party is running a leadership contest between the unelectable and the unspeakable – between a leader who is heartily despised by one wing of the Party while being endorsed by another.  Admittedly, not the usual way round.

But has anything really changed?

This may sound like a peculiar question after the most extraordinarily nerve jangling political-drama nerdfest of a fortnight we`ve just been watching open mouthed down the wrong end of a Scottish telescope.  But the truth is that the biggest substantial change – The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland disentangling itself from the foreign contamination of the last forty years, as some would see it, has barely begun to have the legal, social, economic, cultural or constitutional impact that we all feel it is GOING to have but that none of us can really anticipate.

All we have is the feeling, (probably from the majority by now, despite the win for the Leave campaign), that whatever it is, it`s going to be bad. Except for those who are directly engaged with the immediate fall out, on the currency market and University`s watching European co- sponsors and research partners take their money up and walk away to take a look elsewhere, for example, we simply don`t have any meaningful idea what happens when you attempt unpick something as intricate and all pervasive in our lives as the EU has become by hitting it with a fucking big hammer.

Hitting delicate and complex mixes of social relationships with fucking big hammers is usually something the British Empire reserves for hot countries like Iraq. Of course, it occurs to me, as it has occurred to many people, that had we voted “yes” in 2014, we would have been looking again at a situation of hoping that everything will turn out all right in “the negotiations.”

We learn that, once again, as they did in regard to Scotland, that the British Establishment has made only the sketchiest preparations for a referendum result they didn`t want and weren`t expecting.  But it is a reasonable bet that the underlying reason for the Tory`s grateful avoidance of democracy in their leadership campaign (or succession) was dire warnings from Mark Carney at the Bank of England and elsewhere that with another shock about to hit the Eurozone in the shape of a run on the Italian Banks that now was not the time to be farting around with whether or not being a Mum made you a better person.  The Tory party membership is no more to be trusted than the labour party membership these days to be guided to the “correct” decision about important things. Look what happened last time they made the mistake of consulting “the people” about something that mattered?

The grateful relief with which the media and other out-liars of said Establishment have greeted the advent of St Teresa is above all predicated on the as yet only superficial intuition that she is “a safe pair of hands” to guide us through the choppy waters that lie ahead of the good ship Britannia. Her credentials as a “leader” seem consistent with a certain lineage of lower class Tory leadership that has wrested control back from the Etonians.  This is not the end of her resemblances to Margaret Thatcher, who, though likewise married to a millionaire, gathered a good deal of impetus from her status as an outsider to the charmed circle of ancestral privilege which Cameron re-installed atop the Tory party.

How that superficial resemblance plays out in Scotland, where the nuances of inner and outer circles that so pervade the life of the Oxbridge/Westminster bubble are opaque at best, remains to be seen.  The fate of the Labour party, itself mired in what in some ways is a continuation of its own perennial internal contradiction between representing of the “movement” and doing a passable imitation of a “government in waiting” is rather more emotionally charged up here in the wilderness. The alternatively degrading and hilarious spectacle of Angela Eagle calling on journalists who were already absent doing something more important competes with Cameron humming like Winnie the Pooh off to spend more time with his Hunnypots as the soundbyte of yesterday.  But the humiliation of the Labour Party in England promises, at this stage, to be every bit as thouroughgoing as the slow, self-destructive twitchings undergone by its Northern Branch Office, which, let us not forget, even at this late hour, is one bad tempered phone call (between the leader and her deputy) away from splitting down the middle just as decisively as the wider party is now fracturing on regional as well as ideological fissures.

It is surely impossible that anything resembling a unitary, British National labour party is going to emerge from this acrimony and embarrassment.  The last possible repository of anything resembling a positive and inclusive British Populism has now surely divided into a handful of socialist saints, a gang of 172 forming the nouveau SDP and a lot of completely disenfranchised, desperate English electors just waiting for Teresa May to hoover them up with one nation Toryism.  And that`s if we`re lucky enough that the Tories get them and not whatever vile successor Farage leads to replace UKIP

(Hint – Either way, that nation doesn`t include the likes of you! Tam, Mick or Khaliq!)

I have friends in South London who feel as estranged from the North London radicals who have coalesced around Corbyn as does any Northern English middle of the road trade unionist who is now thinking despairingly of voting UKIP.  If those Tories around may who can smell the blood that Labour is so conspicuously spreading all over itself can persuade Teresa May that, Brexit or no Brexit, now is the moment when they can shove Labour`s head so far down the toilet that they`ll forget what breathing was even like, and if enough Labour Turkeys can be persuaded to vote for Christmas…well, we could find ourselves in a one party Tory state setting nostalgic sail for the glory Days before we know it, certainly before we get around to what is the central order of business for Bella Caledonia and her band of fellow travelers in a very different direction.

What about Scotland?  You may well ask.  We are sure as hell not top of the agenda at the moment.  Even all those noises commentators were making a week or so ago about the “inevitability” of a second Independence referendum were included as more as a measure of the depth of the Brexit crisis than they were out of any real thought let alone considered familiarity with our circumstances.

Nicola Sturgeon took skillful advantage of the window of opportunity left by Tory disarray to do her very best to get what happened to us onto the wider European as well as British agenda. As is Alec Salmond this week attempting to make hay with the Chilcot report – that other epoch marking indictment of the failed experiment of high-minded globalization that I`d just about forgotten to mention.

But in the broader contexts of Europe`s on going crisis, and Britain`s contradictory impulse to tear everything up and keep it exactly the same as it was, Scotland, as it did way before the Union of 1707, is having to do what small countries do – dart about between the legs of warring giants, looking for advantage.

There is a pleasing simplicity about the slogan “You do what you want, we`re not going anywhere” that “we” have now adopted in regard to Europe…but we simply cannot anticipate yet what the broader context will look like by the time we could practically get round to another referendum, let alone what the political complexion of Scotland, never mind the UK or Europe will look like even 18 months from now.

But the Establishment in the shape of this morning`s feudal succession has gone for safety as it`s priority.  Its own safety that is, which is, of course, not at the same as ours.  And when the winds of Brexit DO start to blow, every instinct tells me that it is towards safety, whoever looks like providing it, that the electorate here in Scotland as well as in London and Wales and Doncaster, will be looking. The snake oil salesmen have been taking a couple of weeks off as they gleefully survey the damage they have wrought.  Expect some dark forces to be out on the prowl for our anxiety any time soon. 

The Somme, the really short 21st Century...the end of globalization...and Scotland in the storms of Brexit.

There are moments in history, two now, in my lifetime…when everything falls apart and, conversely, everything seems to fall into place.

100 years ago this morning, at the battle of the Somme, the international system that had lasted since Waterloo, more or less, came to symbolic and actual bloody and catastrophic grief. Those years of war, at which, for the British, the Somme sits as a particular trauma of local remembrance as well as global import, remade the world…initiated what Eric Hobsbawm called the “short Twentieth Century” - years of crisis and conflict that ended, he felt…and we all felt, I think, came to an end when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and European Communism, which had seemed like a permanent factor in our lives while I was growing up,  collapsed like a house made of dried cowpats in less than two years thereafter.

Thus was born the global world.  It was the End of History.  The rule of the universal market, with universal democracy, with enshrined universal equality, policed by the forces that no longer needed to hold the red beast at bay, would settle upon us like a blanket of security and conspicuous consumption.  Why, we might even be able to address climate change…

So here we are now in our own wee corner of Globalization and its Discontents.  And if Boris Johnson (now exited stage left, pursued by a Gove) was the flag waving buffoon at the centre of the UK comedy Stage of the last few months, Gordon Brown has been the hero of his own tragedy on another part of the stage. He wrote last week in the Guardian, trying to put all this chaos in the context of the New Global Order…and suddenly, all that seems like so very long ago

Brown it was, along with Tony Blair, who in 1994 became the Globalisation Project leaders of the UK Labour Party, who would steer us into the brave new world where there were no countries any more – just a single market inhabited by identical consuming ants whose only collective identity was as individual players in the global game of buying and selling whatever we could lay our hands on, our industry, our labour, each other, our kidneys, our blood. Owing no loyalty except to themselves…oh, and the maintenance of the necessary “stability” of course, a stability that, it soon became apparent, could tolerate no other self-identification that its functional insects might be tempted to come up with or cling to.

Globalisation had its good points, don’t get me wrong.  It was predicated on human equality, universal assumptions about legality, property…oh yes, and “freedom of worship” if you were still interested in that kind of thing.  Now that the communists (at least the Russian ones) were out of the way of a universal ideology of the individual and the global market, in the early 1990s, we were setting sail into a peaceful, uniform sea where there would be no more storms, where calm…or “stability” as the “markets” like to call it…was hard wired into the ocean.

Of course, it was never quite like that. For one thing, the economic and manufacturing dynamo of the whole system was Communist China. But back then, John Major’s Euro-hating “Bastards” were a Thatcherite nostalgia cult at the edge of the Tory party, as apparently marginal to the future as the UKIP nutters who got themselves going back then, or indeed the SNP -irrelevant throwbacks to old political conflicts from the seventies, and even more buried tribalisms - no more to be considered as players in the new world than…say…Islamic fundamentalists.

Look where we are now.

Well, what do we know, and what remains to be found out? Let`s start in the middle of the scale and work our way up and down.

Theresa May, who kept herself wisely off the radar and off the telly during the referendum campaign, is going to be the leader of the Tory Party who, quite happily I expect, but with a concerned looking face on, will steer the UK into mid-Atlantic where it will presumably be sunk with a flag on top as a warning to shipping. Barring of course, some unforeseen series of accidents which will land us all in the shaking hands of Dr Liam Fox.

The Labour party, whose devotion to the values of fellowship and solidarity have been on such prominent display in the last week, will run the leadership contest they have been so desperately trying to avoid.  If Corbyn wins, the Labour party will plit in two…leaving 30 odd socialist saints on the one side, and The Gang of Two Hundred Zombie SDP on the other.

What both of these leviathans of the world`s leading democracy will try to avoid like the plague, of course, is the people…who have just proved they cannot be trusted. There will be no snap election if anyone can help it.  Though it will be tempting for the Tories to grind their heels into the faces of the Labour party or what remains of it, wiser heads know that an election right now, with UKIP hoovering up votes from Labour like demented hausfraus, isn`t worth the risk.  After all, getting rid of UKIP was the whole point wasn`t it? 

Last week seems long ago and far away.

As for the wider context of Europe, the threat to the EU is on the one hand, existential, but on the other hand, hard to measure.  After all, without the Brits there to be annoying and tell everybody else in Europe what they`re doing wrong all the time, the prospects for a revived and redesigned EU are possibly brighter than they were last week in the lost epoch of one rule to rule them all.  It may well be that a multi-tiered Europe emerges from all this.  Or the whole thing will fall apart and France and Germany and the Benelux countries will start again from scratch.

Crystal ball gazing has never been such a murky activity as it is now.

I think it is safe to say, however, that if the twentieth century of hot and cold war was short, the twenty-first, that of Globalisation and the Series Box Set, is already definitely at the end of season one even if it hasn`t quite been cancelled yet.  Can we be saved in any form of civilisation before the climate gets us?  Ask the Chinese…I`ve got no idea. This is the century of newly invented nationalisms…and as we know, and as the UK establishment has just found out, nationalisms come in many guises.  And English nationalism has just declared its independence day as June 23^rd 2016.  Who knew it was that easy?

One thing I do know, though.  That amid this chaos, Scotland needs its own voice, its own place, its own presence.  We need to be a distinct, visible factor in whatever comes next. And that we are, that Nicola Sturgeon is now getting profiles written in newspapers all over the world, just like she did in the UK press last year is yes, a tribute to her.

But it is mainly a tribute to “yes”, to the campaign of 2014, without which nothing, and of which this presence in the world`s consciousness , is a tangible result.

Scotland's Feet on Shifting Ground

There are large historical events that have been going on beneath our feet, I think, for a long time. But, like an earthquake, tension builds and the ground suddenly shifts…and temples come crashing down.

36 hours on from the shock of Friday morning, more in sadness than anything else, the new reality is sinking in. It’s everywhere in Scotland this morning. 

“We didn’t vote to leave Britain in 2014.  But Britain just voted to leave us.”

There’s a lot else to talk and think about. In England, in London, in Ireland (!) in Wales (!!) as well as in Scotland and Brussels.  There’s still a lot of nuances and caveats. There is some mourning to be done for the hopes of unity that suddenly seem self-evidently delusional.  But that little formula feels like a simple statement of democratic fact that now lies behind every other consideration of Scottish life : We didn’t leave Britain, Britain left us. 

It isn’t a new thing to say.  It’s a bit like when Nietzsche announced that God was dead.  “You mean you haven’t NOTICED?” is the question behind the observation. And of course, the shifting of historical tectonic plates underneath the British Isles hasn’t gone entirely unremarked from the time when Britain first joined the EU as a desperate substitution for the lost Empire that sustained the welfare state back in the seventies.  Tom Nairn, my particular hero, wrote the Break Up of Britain back then, putting what was happening in Scotland in a wider geographical and historical context with a degree of force and insight that no one has come close to matching since.

(When IS someone going to re-publish that?  My copy is getting really tashed)

But something seemed to come to a sudden end on Friday morning. And no one should feel happy about it. The failure of the British project is not in and of itself a good thing, any more than is what might come next in Europe. Everything suddenly feels terribly dangerous, and suddenly, the people for whom safety came first in 2014 aren’t feeling anything like safe in Britain any more.

And that’s really the difference in our politics at this moment.  Scotland remaining in the EU seems like the sdafe choice compared to whatever they get up to South of the Border as London recoils in confused horror from the “heartlands” as the Leave campaign called “the real England” with Farage’s “real people” in it.

(Real people…you just KNOW that doesn’t mean YOU, don’t you?)

The wish for safety, for a context in which just to get on with life, with making a living…should not be despised by hyper-active political types.  The wish for safety used to be what it was an uphill struggle to cajole and persuade.  No voters are turning towards the idea of Independence now…like it’s a port in a storm.

Which is exactly where the notorious “competence” of the SNP…it’s actual ambition to govern, to stay in power, to be “normal”…is of much more political importance for this moment than anything else.

(Compare the SNP for a moment with half-hearted English nationalists like Boris Johnson, who looks like a rabbit in the headlights right now, like Donald Trump will if he actually has to walk into the Situation Room like Martin Sheen.  Let alone with genuinely barking haters like Farage.  Boy, did the Labour party get THAT wrong…but that’s a digression for another time)

Right now it seems evident to me that Nicola Sturgeon got the sad but determined tone of her announcement yesterday exactly right.  It IS a sad thing that the Great British project has come to grief , tripping over such a preposterous pebble as Nigel Farage to come crashing down.  It is sad that the house of cards was already that precarious that it could come to ruin over something so ludicrous in itself. 

But if there is going to be another move towards independence, it is vital that the former Yes movement understand and respond to how times have changed. And that stability, unlike last time, is the key to winning.

The priority right now is for that steady sense of competence and continuity, of respecting the mandate for staying in Europe that the voters of Scotland so decisively delivered – that vote for safety - be projected internally in Scotland, but that it also, as a matter of urgency, should insert itself as a distinct element into the thoughts and strategic deliberations of some very, very angry European diplomats. Scotland has to be a player,, and a source of good sense and stability, not just for the sake of winning over the No voters, but for Europe.

With the same crashing arrogance that decided that English Votes for English Laws was the only thing of substance or interest to come out of the Indyref, Both David Cameron and Boris Johnson would like those chaps in Europe to hang on a minute while they get the Tory Party sorted.  After all, sorting the Tory Party was what this whole debacle was about for them. (Has a “them” ever felt more like a bunch of idiot Martians)

The Europeans, understandably, like angry head teachers ,have said :”Who the hell do you think you are?  Get your mealy public school arses into my office right now!”

My ideal scenario is that when Cameron or Johnson or whoever come in to see Angela Merkel, Nicola Sturgeon is already there tutting at them.

Historical forces, musing on the decline of the social fabric of welfare-ism that defined modern Britain after the Great National Moment of the election of Labour in 1945….on the failure of globalisation to engage democratically with the people of Wales let alone of Libya…all that comes later.

Scotland’s feet need to get under Merkel’s desk.  Right now.

Morning After the Night Before - First Thoughts

I have got a few bullet points...for things to think about.

First, unequivocally good things, in no particular order.

1) Andy Wightman

2) No UKIP

3) SNP win

After that, everything gets a bit nuanced.

First, the SNP got 150 000 more votes, and fewer seats, losing their overall majority.  (six Greens means there IS a pro-Independence majority...just barely) This Yes majority could unequivocally have been MUCH bigger. One cannot, of course, blame the SNP for wishing to maximise their vote, and the Greens did okay in getting the idea of the SNP 1 and Green 2 model across...but maybe could have done better.

RISE didn't happen at all.  Neither did any of the other left parties.

Looking back, SNP absolute Majority in 2011 (and the consequent Indyref) is now clearly to be seen historically and arithmetically as a freak result, in that the SNP did WELL in the constituencies but not TOO well, which meant that, unlike this time, their massive list vote counted for enough to push them just over 65 seats.  They gained votes and lost seats, indicating that it is impossible for them to game the system except in the way they DID game it, which was pretty much at the expense of the Greens, and, incidentally,  the salvation of Labour, and the triumph of the Tories.

Like Labour, the SNP's instincts are territorial.  Independence is their baw.  And naebiddy else gets to play with it.  As an issue, however, and as an immediate prospect, as indicated in their manifesto, another referendum is definitely OFF the table.  

The effectiveness of the Tories in opposition will be, i think, a factor in the next few years, in cementing the No vote. in the Tories natural constituency which they are now on their way to recovering after the anomalies of the Thatcher/Major years. (The Tories having no representation in Scotland was demographically nonsensical...there IS a Scottish Middle Class which now dares again to speak its name.)  However, i don't see the Tories improving on this next time around...but i DO expect them to do much better than laboutrr did in terms of pure parliamentary gamesmanship.  They have adjusted much better to devolution than Labour have.  They have, ironically, achieved much of the local responsiveness that Murdo fraser asked for last time round.

The factors that might "materially" change the circumstances enough in Scotland to provoke another referendum are all, i think, external.  Everything depends on UK politics...which is ironic, because if you look at the Welsh and regional English results, there being any such thing as a United Kingdom any more is at least debatable in terms of the landscape of politics.  (For example, what has happened to Labour in Scotland has absolutely NOTHING to do with Jeremy Corbyn or Ken Livingstone).  On the other hand, it will take an acceleration the Balkanisation clearly under way in the rest of the UK (in London, Wales and the rest of England as at least three distinct polities) , which Brexit and a Tory victory in 2020 would accomplish, to affect the constitutional question

As for Labour, like Britain itself, they have lost an Empire and are yet to find a role.  There seems to be a split emerging between those who still dream, after all this time, that the last ten years haven't really happened and they can wake up one morning and everything will be fine again, to those wanting to take the party further to the left...which doesn't seem to have done anything for them this time, to those who want to take the party in a "new" Blairite direction...and eventually displace the SNP in the centre. One almost doesn't want to look.

Ironically, a feeling that this "hasn't really happened and we'll wake up back in Labourland" also afflicted a lot of SNP activists which i think accounts for a lot of the jitteriness over the last week or so...

Part of the Tory triumph, maybe, is that they have made the psychological journey towards coping with the new normal of ongoing devomax with the SNP in charge...much more completely than even have the SNP themselves.

As for the bigger, historical picture, if the 2011 result was anomalous, and independence really is off the table for the foreseeable future, both of which seem to be true this morning, then this result for me speaks of a wish for stability. We want to be boring.  We've made that collective decision.  For the SNP as a safe pair of hands, and for the Greens to prick their conscience once in a while, and the Tories to push them further towards competence as an end in itself, I guess I'm not unhappy this morning, though i'm a little disappointed for Zara Kitson.

I'm not massively entertained, however.

THAT photo

                                                   

In the same week as the Hillsborough Inquest finally delivered its verdict to an outpouring of solidarity and shared celebration – and of renewed vilification for the slimy sods of News International, Nicola Sturgeon poses for THAT picture...holding up a copy of the Sun, endorsing it as it endorses her...

Now, in the left-Indy- Yes voting corner of the local twitttersphere I inhabit, this has, of course , provoked some comment. “It's a fake” yell some...”she was tired”...say others...”it was a joke” say yet more, and then, most ludicrously of all...”It was an accident”

Please don't try to tell me there was no thinking behind it, or that the SNP electoral machine , especially that surrounding the First Minister, is anything other than professional! Now that really is stretching the envelope of credibility...Nicola Sturgeon poses for a photograph...by ACCIDENT!?!

Next you'll be saying that's not really Ruth Davidson on that tank because she has no taste for her self image on various eccentric forms of transport.

So, given that what we've just seen is a piece of old fashioned machine politics, that responding to the endorsement of the biggest selling paper in the country with a wee bit of endorsement of the product is just the expected quid pro quo, is just business as usual...what was the thinking behind it?

Oddly enough, listening to Nicola Sturgeon this morning on the Today programme, effortlessly batting around that old Welsh Harumpher she was talking to, there was a bit of a clue.

It's not about Independence she was telling him. Over and over. Loud and clear. “I know YOU and my political opponents think we're obsessed with nothing else” she seemed to say, “but the truth is that you're the ones who keep going on about it. This is about a programme of government, and, by the way, the top item on the list is education.”

Now, in 1997 Tony Blair talked a lot about education...

(BANG..there we go...that's the trouble with politics at the moment...you just mention somebody's name...Hitler, Tony Blair...and you find yourself in hot water)

...as part of the New Labour project for occupying the centre ground of British Politics. And, in UK terms, of course, New Labour was hugely successful. The problem was, that in endorsing, as Blair and Brown did, the Thatcherite “revision” of the post war settlement that held “Britain” together as a cohesive social unit, New Labour continued the fissuring of that project, the Break Up of Britain...and opened the door, in electoral politics in Scotland, to the SNP strategy of replacing the Labour party on the centre ground of a distinctly SCOTTISH politics that was different from the UK.

The trap for Labour was that to do what it took to win a UK election, it had to abandon it's base of support in the “regions”...and in THIS particular region, there was someone waiting to take their place, someone who would dress in the left wing clothes that they had shed in order to win seats in the South East of England.

Thing is...that story is over now. The replacement job is done. If there is one thing that this election definitely signifies, it is that we have come to the end of that particular old song.

This is the New Normal of Scottish politics, the new centre...with the SNP in the middle, the Tories on the right, and contested territory on the left...and fr a political party, the centre is EXACTLY where you want to be.  Ask Tony Blair.

What is going on is that the SNP no longer need to wear the clothes of the left, because, though it may offend the twitter sphere, they know that there are more votes in a Sun endorsement than there are votes to be lost to people who will probably vote Rise or Green or Labour on the list vote anyway. They know that the people of Scot;land are not nearly as left wing as the noisier folk among us would like to think. 

They know that Blair was right.  Elections are won in the centre.  But that was in the UK...then.  This is Scotland now.  And the centre is wherever Nicola says it is.

This election is about consolidating the centre ground.  Competence is the name of the game.  And independence, to the degree it is on the agenda at all, is in the gift of a UK electorate who may well vote for Brexit, and relect the Tories in 2020...and will come as an award for that competence, as what we used to call "the settled will" of the Scottish people. 

We'll see on Thursday night if they were right to make the choice. We'll see over the next few years if nemesis follows hubris the way it usually does. But please don't give me any nonsense about “that photo” being the equivalent of Ken Livingstone making an arse of himself over the weekend.

They know exactly what they're doing.

Normal Times Include the Future? Who would have thought?

We want to be taken care of. We want to be included. See all that “cradle to the grave” stuff that Tories so despise that we got from the the Labour Government in 1945-51? Can't get enough of it. That government was (at least in popular memory) the high water mark of Britishness in its short lived meaning of “everybody” - and a good part of the appeal of the SNP is as re-creators of that sense of “social security” that the British State has been abandoning by painful increments ever since their introduction.

(45 seems to be our magic number – just a thought.)

The SNP's baby boxes are a precise, welcome (and let me say quite brilliant) symbol of the emotional underpinning of Scottish political life as well as a bloody good borrowing from Scandinavia of which, I hope, there many more to come. They have sewn up this latest election to Holyrood even if it wasn't sewn up already. The SNP manifesto is much more ambitious than expected in terms especially of policy towards the young through education as well as childcare. (With the interesting and provocative proviso that the extra spending on tackling the social divide in education is to be entirely in the gift direct to schools of the Executive and bypassing district councils). Its headlines on a reform of the social security system, on land ownership and social ownership of climate change technology are all well votable for by the “coalition” of progressives who came together for the referendum campaign.

So who needs to even consider doing anything other than giving whole hearted electoral support to anyone else on the left? The Green Manifesto doesn't pretend to a programme for government...it's a direction of travel document. Rise seem to be failing to make any cultural mark that translates into electoral success. The rump of the Labour Party in Scotland will have to wait until this busy series of elections is over before they can even catch a breath. They may even decide to wake up and smell the coffee. 

Meanwhile the centre, where all political power resides, of Scottish politics as well as everywhere else's politics, is well and truly captured. And the centre, the consensus points and principles, of that politics, reflects in a more secure and believable way than it has in years, what remain the expressed priorities of the electorate. The Labour Party, who dominated our electoral decisions so very recently, have been replaced by an altogether shinier, more hopeful and as complete a hegemony.

Perhaps the same thing in us that demands “security” of our politicians also pre-disposes us, culturally, to the dominance of a protector. A protector in Westminster, to shield us from the Tories. And a protector in Holyrood  to...well...protect us from the Tories. Our politicians are our home and away shield bearers...and we've decided, in both cases, that the SNP are a better bet. And I think we're right about that. That was certainly why I voted for them in 2015, and why I'll be voting for them in my constituency in Glasgow. (Not that I think my MSP, Nicola Sturgeon, is sitting on a knife edge or anything.)

So why, if everything in the garden is lovely, (and I hesitate a little to go over this again) am I voting Green in the List vote?

Because for the first time, I think, it feels to me like a third area of interest has been added to the defensive mindset of Scottish politics. I'm talking about the future. About the direction of travel. I'm talking about aspiration.

If all Scottish politics has been dominated up until last year by a territorial dispute between the Labour and SNP about who best to save us from the Tories in the two areas of Holyrood and Westminster (and the less conspicuous but equally bitter heartland of local government) then “the future” is the new territory that has been under dispute online.

The future? Jings! How un-Scottish is that? How un-British is that?

Nonetheless, the direction of travel is now a legitimate sphere of dispute. (I think, by the way, that the online pages of Bella Caledonia are the ideal forum for that dispute.) I believe that the Greens having a significant presence in the parliament will sustain that optimistic exploration of possibility. I think you need only take a glance at the SNP manifesto to see that it already has.

We are no longer in referendum mode, no matter how nostalgic we all are from our different pools of experience. The referendum is off the cards (and out of the SNP manifesto) unless the British vote for Brexit, and the demand for Indyref2 is so palpable and general (which it isn't, sorry) that it is both unavoidable and a slam dunk 60% Yes.  Nicola and Co. are far too canny and competent (and, it seems, ambitious for getting on with the job in the here and now) to deliver that particular hostage to fortune just because their core vote want it from them so much. They know that competent, progressive management is the core of their support outwith the contant 25-30% of the electorate who prioritise Independence above everything else.

For everyone who was involved in that binary politics of the Yes/No campaign, we are now back in the analog world.  Baby boxes and all. This is the new normal. And it could be a hell of a lot worse.

--

Peter Arnott

Dead Sharks

The Herald this morning ran with a partisan story about the yes movement being best advised to split it's vote...keep the SNP strong on the constituency vote while voting elsewhere (Greens, logically) on the List vote. To which Wings has responded in full conspiracy mode.

The gloves are coming off today, I think. Rather as the Southside of Glasgow is preparing itself psychologically for a resumption of normal fucking service this afternoon (under our changed circumstances) so a "New Normal" is defining itself in Scottish politics.

I joked earlier today that whereas I used to write a fairly large essay most weeks in 2014 to attempt to cope with/describe what was going on in Scottish politics but that nowadays a single tweet pretty much does it.

Here it is: "The New Normal. Labour have been replaced in the centre. Scraps available on the left and right. Vote Green on list"

So, you see that the Herald's story was a partisan story with which I agreed. I'm voting for Nicola Sturgeon as my constituency MSP (one still votes for an individual with that vote) and Green on the Glasgow regional list. I happen to know, because I'm a bit of a nerd, that this is a vote, in practice, to keep Patrick Harvey as an MSP and, I hope, to have him joined from Glasgow by Zara Kitson.

It hasn't honestly occurred to me that I am therefore part of a unionist/federalist plot to undermine the new found (and evidently thrilling, if largely imaginary) POWER of the SNP. But so, I fear, I am.

(A power which, it seems to this consumer of some quite brilliant campaign videos, like that of New Labour, that is consolidating itself by an entirely ruthless and unacknowledged...but demographically and electorally unimpeachable...rush to the centre ground. New Labour have well and truly been "replaced")

Now, I'm only a small player in this nascent stooshie. But I am an SNP member (albeit not an active one) who is splitting my vote. I was sanguine in the non receipt (mostly) of shit about this online. (If I send this to Bella, and the indefatigable Mike Small "prints" it, that will likely change).

Also, I've resisted adding to the whole bogus "cybernat" furore which was such a feature of the multiply despicable Better Together campaign (whose moral taint, going well beyond the mere fact of "campaigning with the Tories" has made Labour toxic in Scotland).

But if the story of the last election to Westminster in 2015 was the maintenance of the Yes Movement into the "smart" politics of an SNP landslide that kept the momentum and ideas of the Yes campaign going, the story of this election looks like being that of the whole thing finally going smash, of the split that was already symbolised by the rival events on the banks of the Clyde one Saturday in November 2014 (attached) reaching electoral crisis.

For us or against us. For Nicola without qualification or an agent of Yoonyunist Darkness. Nuance lies scattered on the roadside like a an unfortunate liberal bunny rabbit.

This is not unfamiliar emotional territory from a lifetime on the fringes of left politics here or anywhere. It's normal, in fact. it's how people everywhere are. But I had hoped we'd keep the broader "movement" together.

Because what is happening now is precisely a question of "movement" against consolidation. And entirely predictably and even properly, what the SNP are doing now ( whether in public or not) is consolidating their control (partial though it is) of the commanding heights of our political economy,. They recognise (again, not publically) that devolution mark two is now in for the long haul and are using their electoral base - now much more extensive and deep - to cement the new normal, the new equilibrium of our political culture.

There is no room for "movement" in equilibrium. So, dear friends, the territory for those of us in the Yes camp who enjoy movement for the sake of the exercise has been circumscribed. Behind the scenes, there has already been acrimony among the former comrades...the surface has been cracking...in some ways Loki's recent work has also been symptomatic (as well as pointing at a much bigger and dirtier truth about class and nation.)

But what it comes down to is this: in relation to Westminster, to where the power really lies (and lies) in the UK, it is absolutely essential that the SNP represent us. No one else can do it. They have that mandate.

In Scotland, their mandate is again unchallenged. but should not go unquestioned. The movement that built to 45% of the vote cannot and will not simply be absorbed into a hegemony. Movement, as such, matters. Without it, the shark dies.

Which means the smart vote, I think...is a split one.

http://peter-arnott.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/what-happened-whats-happening-where-are.html