Whatever It Is, Bring It On!

A Tale of Two Traps or “What the Hell are We Supposed to do Now?”

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. 

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.

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.

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!”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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?

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 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.  The attitude of the SNP has to be, to any of these, no matter which comes first, bring it on.

The White Man Coup Versus Humanity

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.

Then came this, the most blatant support so far given by the new Supreme Court of the United States for racially based voter suppression. 

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/jun/11/supreme-court-ohio-voting-rolls-inactive-electors?CMP=share_btn_tw

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. 

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. 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. 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.

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.

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. 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.

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

(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.)

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 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.

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.) 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. 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.

White Man, prompted by the Immigration Crisis, has come to believe that only the jungle is the territory of their survival. 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. 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 then we are heading into years of darkness.

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.

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.

Another Day Closer to Brexit.

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. 

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. 

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. 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. 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. 

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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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. 

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.

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.

So THIS is what they meant by "Taking Back Control!"

"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.

Our elected representatives...our opinions....and our votes...will amount to exactly nothing.

So THIS is what they meant by "Taking Back Control!"

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. 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.  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.

(Surely there can be no one left who thinks that this generation on West Indians were targeted by accident!)

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.

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.  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." 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. What matters is the irritation. All that matters politically is that the irritation be soothed or removed.

The Labour Party have now removed Wales from any future consideration as a stone in the pathway of a "Smooth Brexit."  And the voters of Wales will reap the harvest of obedience. But Wales at least VOTED for Brexit as well as devolution. 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? 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.

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.  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?

http://www.holyrood.com/articles/news/keeping-barnett-formula-not-appropriate-after-brexit-warns-institute-fiscal-studies#

There are lots of things about Brexit we in Scotland can’t do anything about.  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.  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.  Are they really happy to give it away for the slim chance of a Brexit supporting Corbyn government?

No wonder Carwyn Jones resigned as Welsh Labour Leader rather than countenance cancelling devolution till we "sort" Brexit?  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?

What Does Brexit Mean for Independence? What does “ Independence” mean in the context of Brexit?

The period from 2011 to 2016 might be characterised by future commentators as the Independence Moment in Modern Scottish History. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

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.”

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...

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.

Buit these are not those times.  This is not the Old Normal no matter how hard Scottish unionists pretend to believe that it is.  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^st Century.  And our corresponding 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.

The crashing disappointment of Brexit both now and in that future, for the English, is something of which those of us who still perversely 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.

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. 

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^th century concept comes to meaning what we think it does in the here and now…

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. 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.  As natural as rain. There will be people on the fundamentalist wing of Scottish Nationalism who will complain that it’s not the Real Thing.  But as with Brexit, one of the things we have learned in the New Normal is that the “Real Thing” doesn’t exist.

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^th 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.

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.  The chance will come again, but it won’t look like any of us think it will.  Prepare for fancy footwork. Reality is bound to make a comeback sooner or later.

Janis Joplin is Seventy Five

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.” 

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. 

A Lesson from History

By any measure, the Battle of Britain stands with the October revolution as among the most historically decisive few weeks of the 20^th 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.”

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.  

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.  

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.) 

So the RAF had to be bombed and blown out of the war. 

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.

A close run thing.  At the time, entirely unpredictable 

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.

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... 

They don't just do kitchens, you know.

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...

Sometimes history doesn’t quite teach the lessons that everybody thinks it does.