Definitely Maybe

It is, several radio programmes and broadsheet articles inform us, twenty years since the 'Summer of Britpop'. I was there, young and music-loving. Comparisons with earlier golden ages are inexact; it can't have been like the 60s, since I can remember it. It involved, as I recall, inordinate amounts of Guinness combined with indelicate swaying to the dulcit tones of What's The Story Morning Glory. We weren't aware that it was the Summer of Britpop at the time. It was just summer, the school holiday. Nor did we, by which I mean my friends and myself, think there was anything especially epoch-making about the music we were listening to, or rather the music that was played at us, in pubs and clubs and on the radio; my own tastes were slightly more eclectic. It was alright, it was just there. We hadn't known any different. Nostalgia, however can transfigure the most quotidian of times, and so here we are, two decades on, keeping the anniversary of something called the Summer of Britpop.

There is something distinctly unsettling about people feeling nostalgic for periods within one's living memory. Nostalgia is always for people older than oneself. It is more a matter of not being able to get bananas in the war, or the electric tingle as a beehived girl rubbed against your chinos than of the Verve or David Blunkett. The jarring intimation of mortality repressed beneath the surface of this discomfort might go some way towards explaining why I have greeted public celebration of Britpop's birthday with a mixture of incomprehension and blind rage. So, when 6Music announced that they had made Oasis' Knebworth performance available on Iplayer, I tweeted this:

NO I DON'T WANT TO LISTEN TO OASIS AT KNEBWORTH. Like New Labour it deserves to remain two decades away.

— (((Latte Labour))) (@LatteLabour) 15 August 2016

This perhaps demonstrated a temporary inability to think both sides of the question, but then age does funny things to you. A good proportion of my digital fury was entirely justified, but before we get onto the reasons for that the other side of the balance sheet needs addressing. The Britpop phenomenon, either in its musical origins or promotional narration (if it's even possible to disentangle the two), issued from a perfectly correct sense of the American dominance of rock and pop music, and a legitimate resentment of this. Even though there is a good case to be made that the Smashing Pumpkins were better than Suede, and in spite of the awkward fact that, like the mods before them, the Britpoppers could only respond to rock's wrapping itself in the stars-and-stripes by wrapping themselves in the Union Jack, there was something praiseworthy about the urge to kick back at the bigger country. There was too  a sense in which working class identity was cool within Britpop culture. This didn't necessary translate into working class people themselves being cool, nor did the working class identity that was enacted on stages and lauded in the NME commonly bear much resemblance to anything that would have been recognised by many inhabitants of that class. Still, compared to today's hipster scene, where one gets the distinct sense that working class people are regarded not as voguish aliens to be emulated nervously, but as Brexit-voting, commercial music listening, racists who wouldn't know a good craft beer if they tasted one, it wasn't so bad. These things are relative.

Britpop was also capable of voicing discontent in a more or less articulate fashion. Admittedly, it most often came down on the 'less' side, but it remains the case that the raw anger of 'Is it worth the aggravation/ to get yourself a job when there's nothing worth working for?' has a lot going for it. Gallagher's devil-may-care drawl voices a nihilism more conditioned than staged. Blur were capable of framing their protest in more explicitly political terms. Mr Robinson in his quango is 'the self-professed saviour of the dim right-wing'. Ernold Same was narrated by the man described in the CD insert as 'the right-on Ken Livingstone'. It turns out that Damon Albarn was the source of the band's occasional leftism. Dave Rowntree was meanwhile an enthusiastic supporter of New Labour and ultimately a cheerleader for invading Iraq. Alex James now divides his time between making artisan cheeses and hanging out with the Chipping Norton set.

Alas, Britpop was not simply well-meaning angst and sticking two fingers up to Uncle Sam. It was in other respects, as we learned to say later, problematic in many respects.  This probably wasn't what Adorno had in mind when he said that every tale of civilisation is also a tale of barbarism, but nor is that line entirely irrelevant here (even if 'civilisation' is an optimistic description of Country House, and 'barbarism' an unkind take on Menswear). Culture is a human product, and as such is tainted from the outset with the conditions of its production, which means amongst other things with politics. This much is evident in the very word 'Britpop', a musical subgenre defined as much as anything by the state from which it issued. In this it bears some resemblance to the earlier Krautrock, although the acts generally classified as part of the latter are universally more interesting than Ocean Colour Scene. In both cases, there is a politics to the identification. Germany at the time of Krautrock was not one, but two, states. Britpop, in spite of its name, was an overwhelmingly English phenomenon. The most obvious exceptions are at best borderline cases: the Manic Street Preachers pre-date the movement slightly, and never really fitted in culturally or politically. Catatonia were of the period, but I never recall thinking of them as being 'part of the same thing' as Blur and Oasis. This was, retrospectively, a compliment. Ash were admittedly Irish, but in the face of eight centuries of national oppression the misdescription of a rock band seems a slight matter.

Claiming English idiosyncracies as uniformly British is a national pastime. A peculiarity of British rock music has been, at least until recently, its celebration of a certain kind of imagined working class identity, coupled with the occasional elevation of working class people themselves to superstar status. Britpop satisfied this fetish enthusiastically. Oasis certainly were from working class backgrounds, and spoke in interviews about being on the dole. Blur were from more monied stock in at the time ill-specified parts of East London but spoke like the love child of Dot Cotton and Dick van Dyke's chimney sweep. This was class as a marketing method; the proletariat were in this season, just as ripped jeans had been a few summers previously. The working class as presented in the posters and at the gigs was a pastiche, packaged for quick consumption. It was a matter of cheeky smiles and the hint of attitude, without taking the latter far enough to be intimidating. You expected Damon Albarn to shout 'oi, get orf me barrow' at any point. What the working class as adapted for Britpop certainly didn't lower itself to doing was work. Whilst The Who, the band Oasis wanted to be when they weren't busy trying to be the Beatles, could make a film in which a young man gets away from the drudgery of London toil, only for the hero of a mod dance floor to be revealed as a bellboy, by the 90s five days of the week were almost entirely absent from British musical output. Oasis, quite reasonably didn't want to work (Eagleton describes this as a good reason to be a socialist), but lyrically it was mostly a matter of falling in love, falling out of love, taking drugs, being a rock and roll star, and - in the case of one Blur song - listening to the shipping forecast. Put like this it sounds not unlike the life of a full time rock singer. Imagination was not a notable feature of the period.

The band often counted as part of Britpop who were better on class, in every sense in which a band could be, were of course Pulp. They are exempt from my criticism,  but were never really part of Britpop. The band predated the phenomenon by a long way, and accidentally hit the big time on the back of it. I've written about them before here. Whether or not 'nobody loves a tourist' was aimed, consciously or otherwise, at what their musical contemporaries were saying or doing, it captures some of the truth of an era. Even more dispiritingly, it speaks also to subsequent eras.

Candida Doyle's role in Pulp also distinguishes them from the run of Britpop star acts, which whiffed of Lynx and testosterone. A blokish, cliched working class masculinity suffused the genre. There were female fronted bands: none of them got the headlines and the best known, Elastica, obtained that status not least because their lead singer was sleeping with Damon Albarn, which doesn't suggest that Britpop represented a feminist high point. The best, and most under-rated, of the bands insufficiently male to be canonised were Kenickie. Notable for having singing in a regional accent that was, on the one hand, neither Cockney or Mancunian, and on the other genuine, they were musically and lyrically excpetionally. Misleadingly naive in content, their songs communicate a reality airbrushed by the comic book capers of Albarn and Gallagher they had this in common with Pulp. Lauren Laverne's wilting voice on 'People We Want' captures a darker side to the Britpop era, boredom and anxiety combine as insecure, in spite of cocaine, a young woman wades through a night out as though it were quicksand. 'This life, it's taking too long', she sings; and you know what she means.

The fear that life might not be worth living is not one that haunts the male Britpop oeuvre. It is fundamentally upbeat, macho even - although not aggressively so: with the possible exception of the Gallagher brothers, Britpop frontmen presented as new men. This did not make them averse to the odd nod and a wink. This was the era of new laddism; young men were busy learning from Loaded magazine that what, to a casual observer, might appear like sexism was in fact both ironic, and empowering for women. The apparently contradictory nature of these claims seems to have passed by for these born again feminists. The masculinity of Cool Britannia was resolutely heterosexual. In this respect it was less diverse than any other significant rock movement for a couple of decades. Brett Anderson performed an ambivalent androgyny: yet Suede were John the Baptist figures for Britpop, teetering uneasily on the brink of the New Covenant, quick to diminish so that Blur, Oasis, and countless derivative acts could take to the stage. When the messiah came, he was butch. On one occasion Alex James wore an Oasis t-shirt on Top of the Pops. He might just have well sported the slogan 'I've got a bigger dick than Noel Gallagher'. The intensity of the gender retrenchment in 90s music was in many respects laughable, even though it reflected, and fed back into  a much more dangerous backlash against feminism in society at large. It would be a cold-hearted person indeed, however, who didn't laugh - and not in the manner intended by the authors - at the ridiculous spectacle of 'Vindaloo' competing with 'Three Lions' for the number one spot, as the cultural icons of the period jockeyed to demonstrate their authentic football-supporting laddishness. It has always been unclear to me which team Alex James supports, but then I don't follow Chipping Norton Swifts closely, so I may be missing something. We should, I suppose, be grateful that Keith Allen allowed his mum and his gran to share in the bucket of vindaloo.

Singing about Goan food might have been de rigeur, but too many English people have always been more comfortable with Asian food than with Asian people. Britpop was white in its makeup and its cultural reference points. This in itself communicated something about how Britishness was understood at the time. The period coincides, for example, with Asian Dub Foundation's first releases - far more enduring and musically interesting than anything sung at Knebworth all those years ago, yet never counted as part of Britpop. This is both an injustice and a liberation.

The simplistic image of a white, male, straight, salt-of-the-earth, urban, sexual but not threatening, impish but never straightforwardly rebellious, working class was tailor made for New Labour. A wave of populism and flagwaving ushered Blair through the Downing Street gates, riding high on the legacy of forgotten protest and ageing hope. Elected, in large part by a class (contrary to much speculation, there are in fact working class people in marginal constituencies, even in the south of England), he wanted to govern a mass. A heady mix of 'progressive' nationalism and condescending ordinariness spewed forth from government onto a society already drenched with the same concoction by its rock stars. This was a Britpop government. And the Blairites imagined that the working class was as contemporary rockstars presented it: monocultural, in many ways reactionary, white, but with a sense of fair play and fun. The result was as politically ambiguous as Britpop itself was culturally: it gave us increased public spending and ASBOs, a minimum wage and asylum detention centres, the Human Rights Act and the invasion of Iraq.

There's a reluctant admission on the part of their sometime supporters that the Blair/ Brown governments did not usher in the New Jerusalem. Yet even this is narrated in terms of the working class as imagined in the Britpop era. We hear a lot about the forgotten people of the period, as indeed we should, the betrayal of core supporters by New Labour in government was real and deep. Quickly, however, this shades into talk of the white working class, the need to understand traditional values, generations of male pride lost to unemployment, concerns about immigration - in every way imaginable real and urgent social and economic crisis is renarrated in terms of a backlash against the gains of the past two decades as regards race and gender politics. In this way we end up with Blue Labour and its lingering influence. Nostalgia for Britpop fits in perfectly with this use of an ideological construction of class to defuse the politics of class. From the perspective of this project the immediate enemy is an out-of-touch metropolitan obsessed with the politically correct agenda of earlier times and unaware of the concerns of ordinary, hard-working, people. His name is Jeremy Corbyn.

Twenty years have passed, then. Were it not for the remarkable elevation of a socialist to the Labour leadership, it would be tempting to say that the most notable change is that privately educated rock aficionados no longer feel the need to adopt working class accents. These are not times in which Etonians lack confidence. That, more than the whimpering of Owen Smith, ought to serve as a cautionary tale for left-wing ebulience.

Not to choose is to choose

...so argued Jean-Paul Sartre. He may very well have been right. But I want to advocate something slightly different from not choosing. I want to make a case that in the biggest political debate that the UK will witness in the next five years, the radical left should actively refuse to choose. That is to say, we should go out of our way to broadcast the fact that we reject either of the options we will be presented with, and use this as the opportunity to engage people in debates about political possibilities beyond the bounds of official sanction.

Rewind. What the hell am I talking about? The EU referendum - the returning of a Conservative majority government in last week's orgy of electoral masochism means that we will see one by 2017. I've been thinking about this question since then: neither of the options seem very attractive, yet many on the left feel will undoubtedly feel obliged to pitch their red flags behind either the 'Yes' or 'No' camps. By inclination, no doubt nurtured by reading a lot of Tony Benn at an impressionable age, I feel the pull of the 'No' brigade more. Yet I'm troubled, not least by the prospect of a debate dominated by the jingoistic right. A very helpful session on the issue at today's They Don't Represent Us conference (organised by rs21) concretised my train of thought on this - the left should actively abstain in an EU referendum.

I'll explain what I mean by active abstention in a bit; but first, the cases against 'Yes' and 'No' votes respectively.

Should I stay?

People younger than myself, a distressingly growing proportion of the population, tend to associate support for EU membership with left-of-centre politics. Those older than myself recall clearly  a time when opposition to the EEC, as then was, indicated a suspiciously socialist orientation. We'll return to this latter group presently; for the more youthful, the EU is associated with an outward-looking, metropolitan confidence, an internationalist retort to the Little Englandism of Ukippers. It is upwardly mobile and forward looking, an upmarket brunch in the face of Nigel Farage's beans-on-toast. It stands as the Guardian to the Daily Express. You get the idea.

All of this is so much ideology, and like any successful ideology, contains a good deal of truth (albeit partial and one-sided). The EU certainly is a dynamic, relentlessly modernising, entity - and as such appeals to those liberal-minded bourgeois who have little to lose and everything to gain from change - and in this it reflects the capital whose creature it is. Neo-liberal capitalist accumulation is nothing if not international, generously cosmopolitan in its preparedness to exploit anyone regardless of nationality. It is also a regime of accumulation that is characteristically imposed by international institutions. The World Trade Organisation, the G20, the IMF, and the World Bank are the better known amongst these. The EU is another: from its free-trade origins, it has gravitated towards more explicitly liberalising constraints on member economies, passing competition legislation that renders nationalisation difficult, and imposing tight budgetary constraints within the Eurozone. The organisation is utterly institutionally bound up with liberalisation in the cause of its constitutive capitals, the latest manifestation of this being the TTIP treaty proposed with the US. The EU is no economic friend of the left. It is a unity of states in the cause of big capital. This is not our internationalism; we look for an internationalism of workers.

Nor is it, whatever impression the bigoted denizens of UKIP-land might imagine, a soft touch on immigration. Whilst treaties guarantee free movement within the EU (although this can be, and has been, suspended), for migrants from outside the EU, that is - almost universally - from poorer parts of the world, very often ones affected by wars waged by EU member states (and adversely affected by non-preferential trade arrangements with the EU), the story is very different. Hence the term 'Fortress Europe', which doesn't begin to catch the horror of people drowning in the Mediterranean trying to reach a Promised Land that doesn't want them. The EU's response to this relentless human misery has primarily been to increase funding to Frontex, a border agency. Let's be clear, this is not a pro-migrant institution; it simply wants to draw the boundaries of exclusion in different places, and on a different basis, from UKIP and the Tory right.

Yes, but, the left advocate of a 'Yes' vote might urge, doesn't the EU offer benefits in terms of human rights, and in particular workers' rights? Wouldn't exit threaten these? In part, this line of response is based on the misapprehension that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is a creature of the EU. It isn't; the UK is a signatory in virtue of its membership of the Council of Europe, a body to which states can belong without being EU members, as indeed several do. The EU Social Chapter certainly does afford workers certain minimal rights, as does the Working Time Directive. The UK, however, already permits an opt-out from the maximum 48h-hour working week of the latter legislation, and it would be naive to suppose that workers aren't put under considerable pressure in some industries to do just this. Meanwhile, increased international competition in a capitalism still struggling to restore profitability combined with the marked core-periphery development of the EU (and especially Eurozone) economy will create intense pressure from government and business to revoke, modify, or ignore social legislation. In the face of this workers will only be protected by our capacity to organise to fight these attacks. Yet, if we had the strength to do that, the EU would no longer appear as a beneficent safeguard against unscrupulous employers. "No saviours from on high deliver".

Regardless of all this, forget the suggestion that the 'Yes' campaign will be some kind of internationalist counterpart to the xenophobic right. Enthusiasm about the EU is perfectly compatible with member-state nationalism, and Cameron -- having negotiated some no doubt deeply reactionary concessions on migration from the Commission -- will go to the electorate claiming to have 'won a good deal for Britain'. He will line up alongside the Labour front bench and the CBI in a union-jack wrapped Better Together revival, promoting 'Britain's interest in Europe'. It is likely to be as much a poisoned chalice for Labour as its Caledonian forebear. The left should have none of it.



Or should I go?

Nor, of course, should the left line up alongside the other union-jack clad campaign we will have the dubious pleasure of witnessing two years hence. Farage and the Tory right will fight a deeply reactionary front in referendum battle, focused in immigration and a populist anti-bureaucracy directed against the modest provisions of the Social Chapter and similar legislation. It is likely to drag the centre of political gravity further to the right, and may well succeed in cementing UKIP's electoral constituency, winning them new seats in 2020. All the while the hard right will be lurking in the wings; racial attacks will increase, as they always do when the 'threat' of immigration is talked up. In no way can the left do anything other than condemn utterly this coming carnival of reaction; there can be no repeat of the 1975 referendum campaign, which saw left-wingers share platforms with the likes of Enoch Powell. Groups like Stand Up to UKIP will need our support in the run-up to the referendum.

But, hang on, you might say: surely nobody on the left is advocating arguing for a 'no' vote on the basis of the xenophobic and socially reactionary positions of UKIP and the Tory right? We remember the days when the most prominent opponents of EEC membership were figures on the Labour left. Tony Benn, Peter Shore, and their ilk argued that the EEC would make it impossible for a radical Labour government to nationalise industries, and impose controls on capital and trade, in accordance with the kind of programme laid out in the Alternative Economic Strategy. As indeed it would*. Be in no doubt, the kind of reformism espoused in Labour manifestos within easy living memory is incompatible with EU membership. Syriza and Podemos may yet discover this if they ride out the immediate impact of the Eurozone crisis with their principles intact.

Allow me at this point to draw my readers' attention to reality, a region the left sometimes has difficulty inhabiting. The UK is not Greece, nor is it Spain, nor do we live in the early 1980s. We cannot argue that EU membership is all that stands between a radical Labour programme and its social democratic fruition. The most left-wing scenario for Labour in the next few years has Andy Burnham as leader - pause and think about that, Andy Burnham. A vote to exit the EU would not be followed by a latter-day Michael Foot imposing controls on capital and inflating the welfare state, but rather by a right-wing Tory closing borders to people whilst welcoming their openness to money, asa  revival of the City of London casino combines with further attacks on social provision. This would bring in its wake a further shift to the right in political discourse and popular ideas, from which only UKIP and the further right would gain. In the current British political context a 'No' vote will only fuel the flames of reaction.

For this reason it is also  foolish to propose a left 'No' campaign, separate from the official one. This suggestion fails to recognise with due humility the weakness of the left and the hegemonic state of neo-liberalism, combined with a worrying rightward shift on immigration. We could only run a distinct campaign that didn't simply feed the reactionary whirlwind on the basis of significant pre-existing strength. We do not have that; and we can only do politics in the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. In any case, the nature of those elements most likely to push for such a campaign - those behind NO2EU and various Stalinists - does not fill me with confidence that it would be free from chauvinism.

If I go, there will be trouble, and if I stay, it will be double

So I don't think the left should support either the 'Yes' or 'No' campaign. This does not mean I think we should say or do nothing for the length of the referendum debate, tempting though it will undoubtedly be to leave the country as the day draws near. In fact, there's an important message to get out - the inadequacy of these two options: transnational neo-liberalism matched with state-level nationalism, versus Little Englandist reaction married to a more Atlanticist capitalism - points the way towards what I think that message should be, these terms of debate are utterly bankrupt, and this is so because they are dictated by capital. We could argue creatively for active abstention - spoiling ballots, or whatever, the details aren't important - but use the conversations we have and the material we distribute in doing so to argue for a different kind of politics. Against both campaigns, we should argue unabashedly in favour of immigration. Against both campaigns, we should argue in defence of the welfare state, and in favour of orientating the economy to people rather than profit.

Neither is revolutionary. But both are considerably better than anything we'll hear from mainstream politicians, and I think this is probably the best way the left can make a positive contribution to what will be an otherwise absolutely toxic political atmosphere.

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[ETA] I should add, the above is directed at the English debate, partly because this will dominate the UK polity, and partly because, since I live in England, it's the context in which I have to reach a decision. But let me predict now that the SNP, Plaid, and Sinn Fein - all of whom favour EU membership with varying degrees of calls for reform (about which I'm sceptical, but there we are) find a way to stand back from the fray and thus avoid a Better Together style complicity ('we can't decide for the UK as whole'/ 'we will run a separate Scottish/ Welsh/ Irish' campaign or whatever), I assume that the SDLP will fall behind the Labour leadership.


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*I don't think the AES-style strategy was perfect in its day, prone as it undoubtedly was to degenerating into fortress-economy nationalism. What a future radical left programme (if that doesn't already sound too utopian) would need to build in would be international alliances (with the likes of Syriza and Podemos, for instance).

And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race - part II

This post follows up my previous one.

English Nationalism

If the austerity project is a relatively old inroad of reaction into popular consciousness, a newer one is a revived English nationalism. I spent polling day and the previous day in Thanet South. The broad left anti-UKIP campaign there did well, and it is fantastic that Farage didn't get elected. However, what Gerry Adams once said of the Provisional IRA applies to Farage's outfit: they haven't gone away you know. The UKIP phenomenon is real. Labour voters switched to UKIP there, elsewhere, and in particular in a number of northern seats, where the party is now in second place. The talk is now of UKIP's 2020  strategy, with the inroads made last night paying dividends in MPs at the next election.

It's entirely possible that UKIP won't exist in five years time. The British right is famously division-prone; the party has lost its leader, and its solitary MP is a loose cannon. Never the less, the UKIP phenomenon will certainly persist. Populist reaction, with a social base combining abandoned working class communities, the insecure middle-class, and elements of the bourgeoisie proper, is here to stay. Its ideological suture is the standard resentful premise that they are out to get what we have, or had. They want our money, our homes, our culture, our history. Underneath, on suspects, is the nagging fear also that they might being enjoying themselves more than we are.

The nature of them is flexible. They could be the European Union, migrants in general, Eastern Europeans, metropolitan liberals, hippies, benefit claimants, the Rothschilds, the Muslims, or the Scots. As is so often the way with ideology, whether or not they are, in fact, screwing us over is entirely independent of the ideological effectiveness of this pattern of thought. Metropolitan liberals are, as it happens, guilty as charged; Muslims, as it happens, are not. But that is not the point. The scapegoat provides a focus for political opposition, and thereby, like its biblical forebear, carries the sins that justice attributes to another - in this case, capital.

The Scots are the latest lucky targets; English nationalism is on the rise. The Scots, you see, want your money. The SNP, in particular, in a startlingly impolite move want political power. Will the subaltern never learn? UKIP both contributed and tapped in to a simmering English resentment, evident already during last autumn's election campaign. It was the Tories, however, that brought an English identity constructed against a Scottish threat into the mainstream. Indeed, as thought to prompt the political slow-learners who deny that anti-Scots racism exists, Boris Johnson warned of a coming Jockalypse.

The genie of English nationalism has been let out of the bottle. There's a lot of talk of 'English votes for English laws', a proposal which in current political context could only mean a shift rightwards south of Alnwick. There will, inevitably, be noise from Billy Bragg and other elements of the eclectic left about the need to resist the politics of English reaction with a 'progressive' English nationalism. This is premised on a basic misunderstanding of the ideological function of Englishness within the current politics of the UK. The nationalism of the dominant nation of a historic imperial power, currently defined in opposition to national autonomy movements within the same state, cannot be won for socialism by a bit of Morris Dancing. What is needed is a different politics altogether. At the time of writing that is nowhere to be seen.




Labour and the crisis of labourism

Which brings us belatedly to Labour. Labourism is dead in Scotland. It is at crisis point in England and Wales. Labour cannot rely on the votes of even a stable proportion of the working class, and that is only likely to get worse as generational profiles shift. Already the Blairite knives are out; journalists are being briefed that Labour lost because it pitched too left (a theory that, to put it mildly, has difficulty incorporating the data of Scotland), and that a move back to the centre-ground is the only way to restore Labour's electoral fortunes. The Labour left is institutionally weak, dispirited, and increasingly afflicted with cynicism. Intellectually, its Marxist elements are often hopelessly in thrall to a vulgar determinism, for which everything is to be explained by the 'low level of class struggle' (as though this were something independent of human agency) and which counsels riding out the tide, preserving 'the movement', by which is understood the Labour Party and the union link.

This last element is likely to come under attack in the wake of a near inevitable Blairite resurgence. Already the implementation of the Collins Report threatens the link. Meanwhile, the leader of Britain and Ireland's biggest union has openly supported Lutfur Rahman and threatened to form a new workers party in the event of the Labour loss that is now a reality. In any case, if the labour movement doesn't break with the party, it may be that the party breaks with the movement. The link has always been a target for the Blairite right.

Only a fool would take any delight in this. The Labour Party, for all its contradictory nature and in spite of the multiple betrayals of its leaders, is a substantial achievement of the British working class. If labourism were finally to die, even though the more excitable leftists will no doubt wax lyrical about 'great new opportunities', over a century of struggle would be laid to rest. Whether that happens, or whether another narrative plays out, the task that falls immediately to the left is the difficult one of at the same time resisting the assault of the Blairites within the party, whilst looking outwards to unions, the new community-based groups, and the extra-Labour left (the unpreparedness of Labour leftists to work with left groups outside the Party has been a serious brake on the British left). It has to become less white, less male, and less prone to mood swings between despair and pollyannaism.

I have to say, the current Labour left is not well equipped to carry this burden. But then we can never make history in circumstances of our own choosing.

You have nothing to lose but your van

Phraow. Look at him. He's a real man. Not like Ed Miliband.

Well, if nothing else, Britain now has its very own version of Joe the Plumber. Dan the Van, the emblematic man (and, really, notice he's a man - a manly man at that) on the street. He'd be the man on the Clapham omnibus, were it not for the fact that he has a van, and therefore doesn't need to get the bus. But not just any old man, oh no. He's a common-or-garden salt of the earth working class man. And if you diss Dan, and don't you dare diss Dan, you hate the working class. You're a snob. And probably a member of the metropolitan elite. So don't diss Dan, OK?

There is, of course, a metropolitan elite in Britain. It does indeed make up the social base of New Labour, whose rejection of its core electorate partially explains the exit of a minority of that electorate to UKIP.  Emily Thornberry, a decent soft-left sort from a working class background, isn't really part of it. But then car salesman Dan isn't really part of the working class on any reasonable definition either. Core reality isn't important here. This is about narrative.

Richard Seymour here is good on the details of the class issue here; and this blogpost, which I promoted yesterday, is definitely worth a read. I'd just like to make one observation - the reason the forces around the Labour leadership have been so rattled by Vangate is that Thornberry's tweet upsets their preferred class narrative. This issues from the bowels of Blue Labour, and finds expression in the whole One Nation brand. It surfaced around the debate on Scottish independence, is a nationalistic ally orientated, culturally homogenising story about what it is to be working class. It is deeply reactionary in content, and its effect can only be to cede political terrain which UKIP will work more effectively than Labour.

And Ed Miliband's wedded to it. We're screwed.

Scottish Independence : Yes (with no illusions) (ii)

Neither party in last night's depressing exercise in presidential politics should convince anyone. Nor should anyone interested in the politics of human emancipation cast their vote on the basis of which of two white male bourgeois politicians performed better in an overgrown student debate in front of the TV cameras. So let's proceed to ignore Messrs Darling and Salmond. The point is to bring about a world where our collective life involves more than sitting in front of one box before deciding which vote to cast into another.

The immediate issue facing Scotland's electorate is not, of course, whether they prefer Darling or Salmond, New Labour or the SNP, but whether they want Scotland to be politically independent. I argued last time why I don't buy arguments commonly advanced on the Labour Left in favour of a 'no' vote. Now I want to consider reasons to support a 'yes' vote.

National liberation

A standard move in the Scottish (and Welsh) Labour circles is to criticise nationalism - possibly with a hint that it promotes anti-English 'racism' (note to self: do future post on why it is simply not possible to be a racist, as opposed to rude/ dickish/ unpleasant, to someone in Britain on the basis of their Englishness). Here's one recent case in point on Left Foot Forward.

The first point to make here is that support for independence is not the same thing as nationalism. The second is that there is a clear and obvious difference between subaltern nationalisms and the nationalisms of world imperial powers, such as England/ the UK, has been. To fail to recognise this is to fail to recognise asymmetries of power and domination, a failure which should prove fatal for left-wing politics.  And there is a strong case that Scotland stands in need of national liberation. Scotland continues as an politico-economic periphery to the UK, frequently subjected to Tory governments for which its populace did not vote. Anti-Scots racism is more common throughout Britain than many care to admit.

That's the present. Nor do I think the past is irrelevant to the argument here - that we should 'move on' from the past, rather than - say - redeem it, is a liberal commonplace that betrays the emotionally dessicated humanity from which a lot of what passes for politics proceeds. I'm reminded of Walter Benjamin's words about being 'nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.' It is OK to vote 'yes' on behalf of those cleared from their land by English aristocrats, those sent from the Isles to the Somme, the schoolchildren caned for speaking Gaelic. Of course, the story of national oppression and human exploitation of which these are part also includes the stories of immigrants from every corner of the earth - the half-starved Irish immigrant, the Bangladeshi seprated from family by immigration laws. And it is a more compelling story for that reason.




Trident

Probably quite a good indicator of the aforementioned national oppression is the fact that the Westminster government uses Scotland as a storehouse for its weapons of mass destruction. It is is everyone's interests, throughout Scotland, throughout Britain, throughout the world, that the Trident programme is upset. Voting 'yes' is an excellent way to achieve this.


Ireland

Britain's still got part of Ireland in its murky hands. The resulting partition messes with Irish politics on both sides of the border. Scotland leaving the union will weaken the union overall, and given the significance of Scottish identity for unionist ideology in the north of Ireland, could be quite significant there.


Class

Workers, as the old slogan has it, have no country. Actually, the old slogan has it that working men have no country, which should be a warning to us that the hard work to be done here lies at the intersections. Whilst it is perfectly true that working class interests are international, it is equally true that those interests, as they find expression here and now, are mediated by, and distorted by, national politics.

Take Scotland. A significant proportion of the working class vote for the SNP. As a consequence of this, along with the comparative strength of old-style social democracy, the SNP pitches itself left-of-Labour. This in spite of the fact that the SNP is a coalition, many of whose members have interests deeply divergent from those of working people, and support political agendas far to the right of Labour. I merely name Brian Souter at this point.

This is to say that the SNP is a classic populist bourgeois nationalist party. And many Scottish workers are tied to it. This provides a case study in support of a general principle: once a national question has been raised, socialists should support its resolution in order to fracture bourgeois nationalist movements and reintroduce class politics. The current SNP wouldn't survive in an independent Scotland - no doubt something called the SNP would survive, like some kind of albannaich  Fianna Fáil. But the coalition of party activists and voters currently grouped around the bundle of charisma and dialectic precision that is Alex Salmond will not survive in the absence of a live national question. We can expect a split to the left, and a regrouping with unions, people from Left groups, and some Labour people. In other words, something looking like a workers party. Ensuring this would need to be a priority for socialists in a newly independent Scotland.

So there you have it, far from being a vote for the SNP, a vote for independence is a vote to split the SNP along class lines. Something we should all support.

Scottish Independence : Yes (with no illusions) (i)

This is a two-part piece, a polemic,  on why socialists should support a 'yes' vote in Scotland in September. It does not aim to convince people in general to line up behind independence; as it happens I don't think any argument to this effect is possible. There is no such thing as 'people in general'; interests and opinions diverge widely. The kind of reasons that might convince famous homophobe and millionaire Brian Souter to put his not inconsiderable assets behind the 'yes' campaign are very different from those that will be considered here. We'll return to Souter in due course.

This piece is also written by a Labour Party member. It is striking that, whilst the Scottish Left outside Labour has pretty solidly positioned itself in support of independence, the Labour 'Yes' camp is small. If anything this is more true on the Labour Left than for the Scottish Party in general. The balance of pieces in Labour Briefing, for instance, has clearly been pro-union. I dissent from this majority view, although there will be reason to pause and consider why it is the majority view.

At no point do I intend to argue that Scottish independence will transform Scottish society, or British society, beyond recognition, that it will herald in socialism, that it will safeguard the welfare state, or anything else. Over a century ago, in the context of the (still unfinished) Irish struggle for independence, James Connolly penned the purple passage,

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

What was true of Ireland then, is true of Scotland now. Political independence will not disentangle Scotland economically from British capitalism, still less from capitalism in general. A good proportion of the country's land would still be owned by English aristocrats and London-based financial institutions the day after a 'yes' vote (and a miserably small proportion of it owned by anyone other than super-rich individuals and institutions) . Regardless of the outcomes of wranglings over currency, whether or not an independent Scotland remained in sterling, its currency would at least be pegged to sterling (and, if nominally independent, vulnerable to speculative attack on this basis) leaving its government a limited amount of wiggle-room with respect to Westminster's economic policy. For the foreseeable future, "Westminster's economic policy" means austerity. As, to pre-empt it being mooted, does "Frankfurt's economic policy".

But the fact that a brand new world isn't at stake in this referendum doesn't mean that nothing is at stake. And I support a 'yes' vote.

Bad Reasons to Oppose Independence

Let's start by dismissing some very bad reasons to oppose independence. One, often repeated, is that Scotland leaving the UK would leave the rest of the Union doomed to perpetual Tory government. This is simply not true. As this blog showed some time ago, here.

Even worse, and frequently heard on the Labour Left, is an appeal to class unity. "The British working class should fight British capitalism together". The problem here is at least two-fold. First, if the existence of state borders renders impossible working class unity against capital then, faced with global capitalism, we might as well all give up and go home now. Second, the idea that all struggles against non class oppression should take a definite back seat to the class struggle is the worst kind of retrograde workerism. It is not even good class politics, since it fails to recognise the intersection between class exploitation and national, gender, racial etc. oppression. All too recently the British Left has seen the horrors that result from suggesting that feminism should take a back seat in socialist politics. Neither should national liberation movements be shelved until the important business of class struggle has been completed.

A less well-defined Labour unionist tribalism is more common than explicit class politics. This has been cynically exploited by the Party machine up north. It is certainly the case, although to a lesser extent than during the heyday of New Labour's Scottish PLP base, that the Labour leadership benefits from unionism in terms of intra-Party power. However, grassroots support for a 'no' vote can't simply be attributed to top-down manipulation - real, and sometimes comical, though that is. It is inevitable that if Labour activists get used on a day-to-day basis to electoral campaigns in which a significant opponent, often the main opponent, is a nationalist party, there will be a tendency for their politics to take on a unionist colouring. The kind of caricaturing and nurturing of a developed dislike which follows on from any kind of persistent political campaign will be directed at the SNP, and via them to nationalism, and to support for independence (these not being quite the same thing). Nothing short of a deliberate injection of politics will halt this slide into unreflective unionism.

To be continued...