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Social Justice & Scottish Independence. Part nineteen.

9/13/2014

22 Comments

 
19. Tactical Voting

During the Decade of Dissent, the potentialities of democracy could be witnessed in streets being blockaded against warrant sales, or in the ditches were anti-nuclear activists hid whilst waiting for the next nuclear warhead convoy; it could be witnessed up in the trees and down in the tunnels; in the occupied community centres and the council offices as men, women and children demanded they be listened to. But these campaigns were not the only medium by which Scots expressed their dissent. If the Scots were proving to be bold and boisterous protesters, they were just as a bold and boisterous when it came to elections; put a ballot box in front of a Scots voter and there was no telling what manner of trouble would arise.

Having voted for, but been denied, a Scottish parliament in 1979, Scots used voting in an increasingly sophisticated way. At first votes were simply seemed best placed to shake up Thatcher. Those with long memories will recall that an early beneficiary of this tactical voting was neither the SNP nor Labour. Rather, in the 1982, Roy Jenkins won the Hillhead by-election for the SDP.

Over the 80s and into the 1990s, the party that benefited most from the ‘kick the effing Tories’ culture was the Labour Party. However, whilst Labour was top dog in Westminster elections, voters were happy enough to lend their vote to the SNP at by-elections. The SNP also began to make slow inroads at local elections; whilst the left wing individuals and groups that would later coalesce into the Scottish Socialist Party also had surprise victories at local level.

The warning signs were there, if only Labour chose to read them. Scottish voters wanted the Labour Party, but they wanted a Labour Party that was left wing and that put the needs of Scots and Scotland at the top of its agenda. Yet, after the Labour victory of 1997 and the reconvening of the Scottish parliament in 1999, it became increasingly obvious that Scottish Labour lacked the will to stand to the New Thatcherism of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Incapable of creating its own autonomous agenda and under constant surveillance and interference from UK Labour loyalists the party in Scotland began to rip itself apart. The beneficiaries of this were left-wing Independents, the SNP, the Green Party and the Scottish Socialist Party. By 2007 the SNP was in control of the Scottish parliament, though as a minority government.

In the 2010 general election the Tories and Lib Dems formed a coalition government in Westminster. Labour again won the most Westminster seats in Scotland. At the following Scottish parliament elections Labour assumed that they would win power in Scotland, as Scots would want a united anti-Tory front in Scotland. Labour expectations were high and, in part its analysis was correct: Scots did vote to send a strong signal to Westminster. However they chose to do this by backing the SNP. The overall vote though remained low, at just over 50 per cent. Nonetheless the SNP won a clear victory, taking votes from Labour, Greens and the Scottish Socialist party.

It would appear that Scots, rather than being settled into set political blocks, were content to switch between SNP and Labour, to use one to give fair warning to the other.  One possible explanation could be that most Scots (like many people in the UK and internationally) believed that there were certain aspects of society - education, health, social housing - that should be protected from the vagaries of the markets and the interference of private corporations. To many Scots this simply seemed common sense.

Though it had become much debased over the decades, Labour had a long heritage that chimed with these values. In the early years of the Scottish parliament the Labour and LibDem coalition reflected these values. When those values came under threat by the UK Labour government, the SNP was given a chance. The SNP in government not only protected but built on the original socially progressive legislation of the Labour and LibDems. 

Scotland’s SNP government looked and acted very different from the austerity dominated legislatures of the UK and Ireland: scrapping student charges, freezing the council tax, creating new apprenticeships, extending free school meals, building council houses and affordable houses, ending the right to buy council houses, and promoting renewable energy – by 2014 an incredible 40 per cent of Scotland’s energy was from renewable sources. All which was achieved with a balanced budget within the restrictions of the devolved parliament.

Yet, there were glints of an anti-social justice streak in the SNP notably the centralisation (and increased arming) of Scotland’s police, treating sectarianism as a class issue – rather than as anti-Irish racism institutionalised in the politics and policing Scotland – and of course the desire to lower corporation tax. When challenged on these matters, SNP ministers would often display an irksome arrogance.

Nonetheless, both SNP and Labour provided Scottish voters with political options that spoke the language of a socially just society and provided proof of having legislated to create such a society. If Labour was a party that had betrayed its social justice heritage , it retained for many voters the potential of rediscovering its roots. Conversely, while the SNP was seen to have partly fulfilled its own social justice heritage, the potential remained that this could be compromised.

For many voters the ballot box was not then a place then to choose between unionism and nationalism; it was an instrument to promote a socially inclusive society by using either party to warn the other of the electoral consequences of failing to stand up for a just society in Scotland.

The SNP understood this. Labour, blinded by a vision of itself as the majority party in Scotland, did not. Nor did Labour understand that there were other performers on Scotland’s political stage. While Labour and the SNP performed up front in the shiny lights, those other actors (as well as the prop hands, make up staff, cleaners, set designers, lighting engineers and a fair chunk of the audience) were already weighing up the advantages of exiting stage left.

 
Stay tuned for more in this series
All these blogs can be read from beginning at: Social Justice & Scottish Independence
Follow me on twitter

for on my published books see: Rab’s Books

* * *
There’s a wheen o Yes campaigns and campaigners out there on twitter. But you might want to check out these to start with

@NewsnetScotland @bellacaledonia @WeAreNational
@Radical_Indy


22 Comments

Social Justice & Scottish Independence. Part eighteen

9/13/2014

31 Comments

 
18. Labour’s new cunning plan

When it became clear that a Referendum was unavoidable (the 2011 election had given the SNP a clear mandate), Labour failed to engage with local communities or grass roots organisations. Instead in 2011 Labour MP Iain Davidson suggested that nationalists and undecided voters should be ‘bayoneted’.  Far from being the colourful language of a colourful character, the remarks articulated vividly the anger, frustration and hatred in Labour for the SNP and anyone who in any way associated with them.

Labour still operated under the illusion that it was the majority party of Scotland. But this was an illusion founded on a lie. Labour had never been the majority party, it had simply been, for a while the biggest minority party. Having swallowed the New Thatcherism of Blair, Brown and Darling the party steadily lost voters and – of far more serious consequence – members and activists. That it was reduced to being the second largest minority party in Scotland was confirmed in the 2012 local elections. The SNP took the most seats. However, Labour remained control of Glasgow. For all its failings, Labour remained a formidable political machine that would use any means to keep power. After the local elections it was revealed by The Herald that Glasgow’s Labour leader had met with cheering Orangemen during the campaign and promised that he would overturn Glasgow’s restrictions on Orange walks. 

Later that year the new leader of Scottish Labour, Johann Lamont, made clear that she would be an advocate of the poisonous and self-defeating New Thatcherism. Labour, she declared would defend frontline services by ending the ‘something for nothing’ culture of the SNP government   Yet much of what the SNP government supported and protected – no tuition fees, no prescription charges – had actually been introduced in the heady early days of the new Scottish parliament run by Labour and the Lib Dems. It was such policies that had so threatened the New Thatcherism of the Blair and Brown government that they deliberately interfered with and undermined the autonomy of the then Scottish government. Now it appeared that Miliband had a leader in Scotland that would finally get rid of those embarrassing reminders of heritage that Labour had long since jettisoned.

Though it was resented, the referendum was seen as providing a golden opportunity for Labour.  A No win would leave the SNP broken. It would allow Labour to return to power in the UK in 2015. The austerity programme of Miliband’s government’s would be copper fastened by a Labour winning the Scottish parliament election in 2016. A victorious Johann Lamont would be free to rip out the deadwood of social justice legislation introduced by the SNP and the earlier Labour/Liberal administration, and replace it with new shiny Westminster friendly austerity measures.

This new cunning plan was as utterly divorced from reality as Scottish Labour’s previous cunning plans. It was a plan that showed the Labour Party lacked any understanding or appreciation of the recent transformation of Scottish politics. It was a plan that mixed idiocy with arrogance and contempt.

Now read Part Nineteen. Tactical Voting
All these blogs can be read from beginning at: Social Justice & Scottish Independence
Follow me on twitter

for on my published books see: Rab’s Books

* * *
There’s a wheen o Yes campaigns and campaigners out there on twitter. But you might want to check out these to start with

@NewsnetScotland @bellacaledonia @WeAreNational
@Radical_Indy


31 Comments

Social Justice & Scottish Independence. Part Seventeen

9/8/2014

24 Comments

 
17. Scandal and intrigue

Wendy Alexander’s political demise was curiously similar to the former Labour first minister Henry MacLeish.

Henry MacLeish had made the mistake of trying to use the Scottish parliament to promote traditional Labour values of equality and social justice. This plan was in complete contradiction of the New Thatcherism being pursued by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. An expense scandal erupted concerning the letting out of his constituency office and Henry MacLeish resigned from office. He had been leader of Scottish Labour for only eleven months. He later resigned his seat and left active politics.

Wendy Alexander’s ‘Bring it on’ plan explicitly recognised the right of Scots to decide their own future – a position flatly opposed by Gordon Brown and the UK Labour leadership. Wendy quickly changed her tune, but the damage had been done. An expense scandal soon followed and Wendy resigned. She had been leader of Scottish Labour for nine months.

In the aftermath of her resignation Henry MacLeish was quoted in the guardian newspaper as saying that Gordon Brown should accept Scotland’s "new politics" allow a "distinctive Scottish Labour perspective" to develop, but that: "Westminster has not been good in allowing that to happen."’

Of course, no right minded person would ever believe the scurrilous rumours that it was the Labour Party that leaked the Henry and Wendy scandal details into the public domain. Rather, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, it is best if we accept that the loss of one Scottish Labour Leader was a misfortune, and the loss of two an act of carelessness.

The next Scottish Labour leader, the fourth since the establishment of the Scottish parliament, was Iain Gray, who was tasked with creating a new plan that would defeat the nationalists, but would not challenge Labour’s pro-austerity ideology or recognise the sovereignty of the Scottish people. Iain did eventually come up with a plan and shamefully it is the plan that Labour has pretty much stuck with ever since. 

In 2008, in expectation of SNP governmental incompetence, the Labour party came up with a strategy of Disagreeing and Shouting. No matter what the nationalist government proposed, no matter what any of its ministers said Labour MSPs would respond with sneers, laughs, sarcasm and cruel jibes.

A better strategy would have been for Labour to use its time in opposition to come up with a coherent political narrative of its own. But by now there were no wise heads left in the higher echelons of Scottish Labour. In the 2011 election, the SNP manifesto again included a commitment to an Independence referendum. This was met with great hilarity and faux outrage by Labour candidates. Bolstered by four fun years of Disagreeing and Shouting, and with hugely positive opinion poll ratings, the Labour Party went into the 2011 election with not a doubt that they would be returned to power.

The SNP won again. This time by a landslide.

Labour, devoid of any strategy or any coherent political narrative, responded with a furious rage that often slipped into absolutely blinding hatred. In the Westminster parliament Ian Davidson accuse the SNP of being ‘neo fascists’ .

Yet the simple truth is that the SNP is not a Nazi organisation. Nor are the people who vote for them Nazis. The reason people re-elected the SNP in 2011 is that since 2007 the nationalists had been seen to be a party of competent and socially just governance.

Ironically, the sheer volume of Labour’s Disagreeing and Shouting strategy allowed no space for Labour to distinguish between the SNPs achievements and SNP failings. By lumping successes and failures together the Labour party has repeatedly highlighted its own lack of political discernment and strategy. As voters grew comfortable with the SNP in government, the more Labour’s indiscriminate and angry opposition was seen to be not just an attack on the nationalists, but an attack on the very idea of respectful Scottish autonomy.

 
Now read: Part eighteen. Labour's new cunning plan
All these blogs can be read from beginning at: Social Justice & Scottish Independence
Follow me on twitter

for on my published books see: Rab’s Books

* * *
There’s a wheen o Yes campaigns and campaigners out there on twitter. But you might want to check out these to start with

@NewsnetScotland @bellacaledonia @WeAreNational
@Radical_Indy


24 Comments

Social Justice & Scottish Independence. Part Sixteen.

9/4/2014

0 Comments

 
16. The Great Helmsman

Saint Andrews is a beautiful town, filled with medieval buildings, incredible coastline, and vast golf links. It is where Britain’s elite families send their intellectually challenged offspring to go get degrees. (Prince Harry met Kate Middleton there). It is most certainly not a bastion of radical politics as I discovered many years ago when standing at a CND stall in the town. The locals were incensed at the presence of peaceniks, with one dearie declaring to the nods of her companions: ‘As long as they have the IRA, we need to keep Trident’.

In the early seventies it was also a hot bed of good nature Maoist intrigue amongst the student body. Top dog amongst the cultural revolution on the links was Alex Salmond who ever since has been known to his opponents (and a few of his admirers), as The Great Helmsman. Whether Wee Eck ever actually swam across (or fell in) the Kinness Burn in emulation of Chairman Mao’s dook in River Yangtze remains a political mystery. What cannot be denied is the man’s incredible resilience and capacity to bounce back even after the worst of defeats.

By 1990 he was the leader of the SNP. During the Decade of Dissent protesters blockaded streets, occupied council offices, defied bailiffs, and in one famous incident anti-nuclear activist (and braw piper) Craig ‘Haggis’ McFarlane swam into Faslane Naval Base and managed to get inside one of the UKs nuclear submarine. The SNP, riven by divisions between progressives and fundamentalists, was incapable of providing leadership or even a coherent strategy. In 2000 Alex Salmond took a scunner to his party, resigned from the leadership and, like Winnie the Pooh, went off to have a long think, think, think. After the disastrous 2003 Scottish Assembly election the Great Helmsman returned, won the leadership in 2004 and began the slow Herculean task of trying to sort out the Scottish National Party in time for the 2007 Scottish election.

Well, we’ve all been there: Trying to get oor weans presentable for first day of the school term; combing their hair and fixing their collars; reminding them to play nice with the other boys and girls; checking the pockets of the oldest for matches and inflammatory materiel; telling the little one at the back not to eat spiders in front of teacher ‘because you know what happened last time’. And then when the children have finally stepped into the school yard you sigh a little and think ‘ah bless’.

So too it was with Alex Salmond as he fashed and footered and pleaded and cajoled the SNP into some form of readiness for the 2007 Scottish Assembly election. The Great Helmsman grandly announced that he was standing for election too, thereby showing his commitment to the devolved parliament (as well as allowing him to keep a beady eye on his charges). The SNP looked good and all its candidates behaved themselves. The hope was for a credible result that would allow the nationalist to begin the slow arduous task of building up the support and credibility needed to eventually take control of the parliament. However, the Scottish electorate had different ideas. To the surprise and dismay of all the political parties, the SNP included, the nationalist woke up the morning after the election to find themselves in power. 

The Labour party was as shocked as everyone else. But dismay quickly turned to hope as wiser heads among the comrades realised here was an opportunity to defeat nationalism once and for all. In August of that year Wendy Alexander was elected new leader of the Scottish Labour Party. She declared her intention for confronting the nationalist head on. In a bold move she agreed to accept the SNP challenge for a independence referendum in 2010. In fact, declaring 'Bring it on' she demanded the referendum be held sooner. Given that the SNP were new in office,  a premature referendum campaign would have stretched the nationalists capabilities to breaking point. The No side would win a referendum easily. It was a good plan. Unfortunately for Wendy, the UK Labour party had different ideas...

Now read: Part Seventeen. Scandal & intrigue
All these blogs can be read from beginning at:
Social Justice & Scottish Independence
Follow me on
twitter

for on my published books see:
Rab’s Books

* * *
There’s a wheen o Yes campaigns and campaigners out there on twitter. But you might want to check out these to start with

@NewsnetScotland @bellacaledonia @WeAreNational
@Radical_Indy

0 Comments

Social Justice & Scottish Independence. Part fifteen

9/1/2014

1 Comment

 
15. A Legacy Betrayed

When I was a boy the local clenny man was held in high esteem. Not only did he take away the rubbish, he was a ballroom dancer of some repute and the local organiser for the Communist Party. When I was a teenager he asked my parents to pass on one of his books to me. I have always been a voracious reader and a great fan in particular of myths and adventures and tales of great deeds and heroes triumphing over the odds. The book I was given by the clenny man had all this and much more. For the heroes in this book were not princes or nobles or kings. The heroes of this book were serfs, sailors, bakers and tailors. They were ordinary people struggling against princes and kings, nobles and villainous merchants. The book was called The History of the Working Class of Scotland. It touched me more than any book I had ever read and made me what to be as great a hero as those in that rousing narrative.

The book was written by Tom Johnston, a towering figure in the history of the Labour Party. As well as supporting the great social struggles during the era of the Red Clydeside , he campaigned against the treatment of John MacLean, who endured imprisonment and hunger strike in protest against the first world war. Though he was to soften his politics in later years and supressed his own book, Tom Johnston remains an influential and admirable figure in the Scottish and UK labour movement. As secretary of state for Scotland from 1941 to 1945 he was sensitive to the needs of Scots (and the threat of nationalism) and was proactive in using the state to create jobs and spearhead innovations like hydroelectric power.

Tom Johnston’s ideas were very much part of a wider European consensus, especially after the horror and deprivation of the Second World War, that the wealth and power of states should be used to invest in health, education, job creation, affordable housing and welfare support. Though governments switched between left and right in the decades following the war, the social foundations of the new Europe seemed secure. With the triumph of Thatcher in 1979, this consensus began to crumble. The collapse of communism in eastern Europe in the late 1980s was used as justification for a further shift to the right – as if the workers, students and artists who campaigned (and endured violence, arrest and death) against totalitarianism did so simply to promote neo-liberalism.

From 1989 the Labour Party increasingly accepted the ideology that free markets equal freedom. When in power Tony Blair and Gordon Brown deepened the cruelty and inequalities of the former Tory regime, and stamped down hard on those Scottish Labour members who dared to use the Scottish Parliament to promote a socially inclusive society in Scotland. With every year since then the Labour Party has moved ever deeper into the rank quagmire of neo liberalism. But it was not only the social consensus within the UK that was attacked by the Blair and Brown. Backed by the wealth and weaponry stored in Scotland the Labour government set about trying to reshape the world according to Labour’s vision of neo liberalism; thus the industrial scale slaughter inflicted on the people of Iraq in 2003.

The economic collapse of 2008 showed how flawed neo liberalism was. Yet, instead of a change in direction, the political elites of the UK and Europe used the financial crisis to deepen and justify the ongoing attacks on social inclusivity. The big lie now promoted by political elites was that the increase in poverty and inequality did not result from bailing out banks and bankers, but rather from too much money being spent on health, education and welfare. As the propaganda of rulers grew ever more disconnected from the reality of citizens other darker Big Lies were disinterred from the graveyards of Europe’s ugly past. In the UK, Prime Minister Gordon Brown adopted a slogan of the extreme far right ‘British jobs for British workers’. It did nothing to save his government, but it did embolden a new political party, the ant-migrant anti-EU UKIP.

It was a long journey but the Labour Party had finally cut any last remaining ties with the legacy of Tom Johnston and men and women who campaigned to create a socially just United Kingdom. Looking at the world that Blair, Brown and Alistair Darling helped to create, a world of violence, insecurity, desperation and poverty, the words of John MacLean resonate down through the decades with a terrible and sorrowful clarity. As he stood in the dock in 1918, John MacLean - Marxist, Internationalist, Scottish Republican, teacher, activist and anti-war campaigner - declared:

‘No human being on the face of the earth, no government is going to take from me my right to speak, my right to protest against wrong, my right to do everything that is for the benefit of mankind. I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot.’

Now read: Part Sixteen. The Great Helmsman
All these blogs can be read from beginning at: Social Justice & Scottish Independence
Follow me on twitter

For on my published books see: Rab’s Books

* * *
There’s a wheen o Yes campaigns and campaigners out there on twitter. But you might want to check out these to start with

@NewsnetScotland @bellacaledonia @WeAreNational
@Radical_Indy

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    I enjoy playing with words: making poems, plays, stories, songs, rants, whispers and jokes. All while I'm cooking or looking after my children...

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