Alas piffle Jones

The mere fact that something is a truism does not imply that it is true. One example is "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger", a thesis it would be interesting to test out on Polio victims. Another is "the pen is mightier than the sword". I'm not actually aware of any historical instance of a writer taking on a fencing master armed only with a Parker fountain pen, but if this did happen, I suspect it did not end well.

The point is, of course, supposed to be about the power of ideas, and to that extent there is a certain truth in it, which is a comfort to those of us who are far more comfortable inserting semi-colons into sentences than we would be thrusting rapiers into a foe. Amongst this legion of geeks I count myself. Still the kind of ideas with which I am concerned here, political ideas, are powerless in the absence of a political movement, and are only formed reliably in close critical relationship with such a movement. This is, understandably in the wake of the SWP rape crisis, the kind of talk which evokes nervousness on much of the left; yet it is often the most vital maxims that require the most careful handling. Whatever is meant by 'a movement', it has to be more than the whims of some central committee. But that is a matter for another day. When ideas come apart from a movement which they can inspire, and which can test them in the crucible of daily life, then they become lifeless things, phantoms and illusions.

Which brings me to Owen Jones. I am, I should say, angry about his intervention in the Labour leadership contest. The Labour left which gave rise to Jeremy Corbyn, and which is currently being tried in his person, also provided Owen with a hand up to his career as a commentator. I remember well him cutting his teeth in the pages of Labour Briefing and his early political days as a co-chair of the LRC's youth wing. He was born of the movement to which he has delivered a timed slap in the face. It is sometimes said that the Left speaks too easily of betrayal, and there may be something to this. Yet a sensitivity to treachery is the flip-side of valuing comradeship. If you are prepared to show solidarity with me, I should be similarly prepared to take you into account in making my own decisions. This might be uncomfortable talk for those for whom individual freedom, or career, or whatever else is the highest conceivable good. Others of us think that the freedom to shout lonely in the desert is no freedom worth having.

In what does the betrayal consist here? A political writer who views their writing as an intervention, as opposed to, say, a means to a better CV has to consider not only what they want to say but whether this is the right time to say it. There is much that could be said and asked about Corbyn and the movement around him; I have myself been far from uncritical. The time for articulating that is not, however, when the man is seeking re-election as leader of the Labour Party in the wake of a concerted attempt to wrestle the Party back into the hands of the Blairite cabal. There is a question we should ask ourselves before we ask questions of others. That is the question implicit in every picket line, "which side are you on?"; and the answer we give to that provides the context for our subsequent questioning.

Owen has chosen to lay bare his soul on the internet; that is his decision. I have nothing to say about it. Of more interest are the nine questions he asks at the end of his piece - without, one notes, offering much in the way of answers. Marx said that each age asks only the questions which it can answer. He might have added that the way those questions are understood, and for that matter framed, constrains the answers that are considered admissible. Nowhere is Jones' descent into a bland safe parliamentariansim more apparent than here, the sense he gives of what an acceptable answer to each of his questions would look like. I do not consider myself similarly bound by the norms of Westminster nicety, and for what it's worth I think that the primary reason the inhabitants of Westminster's famed bubble (amongst whom Owen must now be numbered) are disturbed by the member for Islington North is that he has refused to play the game of Westminster politics as normal. For all that, Corbyn is still a reformist, and some kind of answer to Owen's questions is probably needed, given that they have now been asked.

Here, off the top of my head, is a first attempt. 

1. How can the disastrous polling be turned around? Well, a few of us have been expressing concern about the polls for a good while. There's a lot that I would want to say about the need for forming a movement that works at community level to form 'public opinion', rather than receive it as a passive given. It is the model of politics as an exercise in customer relations, rather than social transformation that needs to be challenged above all else by any Left movement that takes contesting elections seriously. The point is not that we should not want to win elections, but that we need a new approach to how we win elections.

All of this said, Labour's polling really warrants the term 'disastrous' during the period since the EU referendum and the beginning of the relentless attacks on Corbyn from within the PLP. Outlandish though this idea might seem, perhaps Labour might do somewhat better in the polls if those attacks were to stop.

2. Where is the clear vision? I don't really understand the question. There is a reading of "clear vision" on which the phrase is as oxymoronic as "thoughtful Sun journalist". Vision is the stuff of motivating principles, big ideas, and utopian imagining. Vision is not meant to be clear in the sense that Owen seems to demand. The parable of the Good Samaritan presents a vision of how human beings might live, but it wouldn't necessarily be much use on the doorstep. It would certainly be a brave minister who gave it to a civil servant as indicative of the government's intentions. I think anyone who believes that Jeremy lacks vision in this sense hasn't been listening to him. Much of the British population has a good excuse for this, since much of what Jeremy has said hasn't been reported. If only there was, for example, a left-wing writer with a regular column in a national paper who could help on this front.

Perhaps, though Owen is concerned with policy rather than vision. Some of these have been forthcoming: think about John McDonnell's announcements on matters macroeconomic, providing a clear alternative to the Conservative programme. But there have been relatively few detailed policies, this is true. Is this a bad thing? It depends whether you are happy with what one might call the Thick of It model of policymaking: policies arising ex nihilo from the heads of special advisors and the cars of front bench politicians en route to press conferences. Once upon a time the Left argued that policy should emerge from the labour movement, through its democratic structures. If this is right then it is a good thing that there hasn't currently been much policymaking in Owen's required sense. Here we see the double bind in which Corbyn is being placed: if he doesn't do politics as usual, he is criticised; if he does do politics as usual, what is the point in Corbyn?

3. How are the policies significantly different from the last general election? See answer to previous question. Jones does accidentally touch on the interesting area of economics. Here McDonnell is quite right not concede to pseudo-Keynesian nonsense about the deficit. Yet in the background lurks a more troubling issue: capitalism can no longer afford social democracy. It's not simply a question of "the money being there", as the familiar leftist refrain has it, but rather of whether capital views the money being used for [insert favoured social spending here] is consistent with the reproduction of capital. This was the case during the long (and exceptional) post-war boom; this is in general no longer so. That doesn't mean nothing can be done - here again, I have not been uncritical. McDonnell is not, that criticism aside, not without good ideas - to with redistribution, investment, and productivity. Far more importantly, Corbyn's Labour is committed to setting working people free to fight for themselves, to do what the state can increasingly no longer do. The repeal of the Thatcher era trade union legislation is far, far, more important than anything a Shadow Chancellor can do.

4. What is the media strategy? Once again, the assumption of politics as usual pervades the question. "Most people", that most useful of demographic categories for a columnist with an axe to grind, don't get their news from social media. They get it from the mainstream print and broadcast media. This is probably right. It does not follow that it is written into the grain of the universe that this is so. What if people had more opportunity to talk about politics through the presence in their communities and workplaces of a real mass movement? 

At this point, I feel slightly as though I'm lapsing into John Lennon territory: you may say that I'm a dreamer. So let's allow that what is said in the mainstream media matters. As indeed it does; hence all those books by 80s Marxist sociologists on the press. It is a difficult question what a socialist electoral movement might do to get the best media coverage. Even putting it this way, though, assumes that the traffic between media and politics is one way. The media follow as well as lead; the Scottish Sun at crucial points cannot get away with carrying the same line as its southern cousin - witness the vastly differing attitudes towards the SNP and independence in recent years. Newspapers need to sell in order to survive, and political consciousness determines what they can say and still sell. Allowing even that, there's still some kind of question: how might we get nice things said about Jeremy in the papers? Again I can only express my wish that there was a reasonably well-known left-wing journalist about who could help in this respect.

5. What's the strategy for winning over the over-44s? Well, as the man himself says, pensioner poverty and social care are important issues. And I simply do not believe that the interview Owen describes is the first he has heard from Corbyn on these questions.

6. What's the strategy to win over Scotland? Labour needs a really big rethink on Scotland and the national question. With this proviso, it would be pretty easy to make the ad hominum point that the people who presided over Scotland's reduction to a solitary Labour MP, namely the Labour right are not likely to be the best people to win it back for the party of Keir Hardie. However, it's not clear that Labour needs to win over Scotland. It held a majority in England in 2005.

7. What's the strategy to win over Conservative voters? Liberals can be useful in spite of themselves because, much like stopped clocks, they sometimes tell the truth accidentally. Thus Bill Clinton, "it's the economy stupid". There is good evidence that a good number of swing voters opted for the Tories because they didn't trust Labour on the economy. An economic strategy of the sort McDonnell has in fact crafted is a good start here. The task now is to communicate it, a task from which this leadership contest is an unhelpful distraction.

8. How would we deal with concerns about immigration? It's not because of immigrants that you can't get a hospital bed, a job, a council house... Talk about immigration, but talk about it precisely in terms of its function to deflect attention from the Tories' attacks. To say this is to treat the electorate as agents, who can be engaged politically, rather than as passive consumers to whose "concerns" we need to appeal. I'm terribly sorry, I should say in passing, that Jones' dire liberal baby, the Immigration Dividend, went nowhere, but them's the brakes.

9. How can Labour's mass membership be mobilised? This is the crucial question. I'm not really sure that it's a question for Jeremy Corbyn, though. It's a question for all of us. Over to you, Owen.

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The task that remains

...the whole history of the Labour Party has been punctuated by verbal victories of the Labour Left which with some few exceptions, have had little impact on the Labour Party's conduct inside or outside the House of Commons, but which have always been of great importance in keeping up the hopes and the morale of the activists              
     Ralph Miliband - Parliamentary Socialism

Miliband was writing in 1961. Little that has happened since gives us cause to question his account of the Labour Left's victories being pyrrhic affairs. The dust has now settled since Jeremy Corbyn's triumph in the leadership election. It is time to ask the hard question: will the election of the most left-wing leader in the Party's history buck the trend of purely nominal high-points for the Left? Or will something of lasting value come out of it? What could that even be?

False hope is a subtle enemy, so let's start by coming down to earth. Things do not look good. The fundamentals haven't changed since May's election defeat: there is not an automatic mass audience out there for the ideas on which Jeremy won the leadership. It simply isn't the case that Labour voters will automatically flock back to the Party now it has a 'proper Labour' person in charge (of course, with a nod to the elder Miliband, we should insist that Corbyn isn't a proper Labour leader; he's much better than that). We need to win the battle of ideas, and that's a job of work. Still less will Corbyn solve Labour's Scottish problem: indeed, the saddening truth is that his attitude towards Scotland has been unionist business-as-usual, an approach which fails to understand either the scale of what happened north of the Border, or the reasons that it happened.

Winning the contest of ideas is not easily done with a substantial proportion of the PLP openly hostile to varying degrees towards Corbyn. Senior MPs are regularly briefing against him, and front-benchers are distancing themselves from policies like nuclear disarmament. The plan is clearly to replace Jeremy as leader before the 2020 general election: I think it's likely the knives will come out as early as next year. Meanwhile, CLPs remain largely in the hands of the right - Corbyn may have won the leadership, his opponents control the party. True, there are thousands of new members who joined to vote for him. But even assuming that their politics are uniformly of the left - a dangerous assumption, I think - they are in the main inexperienced in Labour politics, and their resolve to fight the often brutal, and more often dull, battles that will be a feature of Party life over the next few years is untested. Certainly the failure of Diane Abbott to win the London mayoral candidacy and of the left slate to get elected to the Conference Arrangements Committee shows that we can't simply assume that intra-Party politics will now shift left.

So, two questions. What those on the socialist left of Labour expect from the Corbyn leadership? And how do we go about getting it? Three bullet points in answer to each

• Jeremy for PM! It may be a dream, but it's good to dream, and even better to fight for our dreams. A government based around Corbyn's programme, whilst it would meet with determined resistance from day one, would have great potential to improve the lives of the majority of people in Britain, and to provide a fertile ground for socialism.
• Developing a movement and ideas. The surge of support for Jeremy is a potential new activist base, which could be the foundation of a left movement for the next generation. The established Left can, and should, both learn from it and feed in socialist ideas born through political experience.
• ...which interacts with struggles outside parliament I do not think capitalism can be overcome by parliamentary action alone (there is a danger, which we have to acknowledge, that Corbyn's victory could fuel this illusion). So it's vital that the Corbyn surge feeds back into struggles outside parliament, in workplaces and communities.

Those are the things I think we should aim for. How to get them?

• Get involved in the Party Whether old or new members, we all need to get active in our local Labour Party, support Left candidates in internal elections, and argue for the policies on which Jeremy won. If you're new to the Party, learn about how it works. Join a trade union if you're not a member: unions are crucial to Labour's life, and to the defence of your rights. Subscribe to Labour Briefing which carries, from a Left perspective, news about what's happening inside the Party and how to get involved. Whilst I have concerns about its seemingly top-down nature, I also think it's worth being involved in Momentum, and seeing how it develops.
• Political education The established Left within the Party has to get its act together quickly on this one. We can't lose the new support. In an open and non-patronising way, we urgently need to communicate the nuts and bolts of Labour Party politics as well as putting across our ideas about socialism.  
• Don't ignore extra-parliamentary action. The focus on the Labour Party can't be at the expense of action outside parliament. In particular, the government's attack on trade unions has to be met.

Let's get cracking.

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

The pervasive immaturity of the left is nowhere more evident than in the emotionally frigid aphorism "don't mourn, organise". In saying this I am criticising myself as much as anyone; I resorted to it during those endless hours last night. But mourn we must, mourn for those who have died alone and starving, for those who will yet die, for those who will be denied an education. We should mourn for the lost hope and the lost futures. Mourning is good, because it speaks of persisting humanity, as well as of the extent of our loss. Mourning is also productive, for it is very close to that precious emotion, anger. Nothing is more revealing of the class nature of our political system than the convention that those who have lost should be gracious in defeat, as though a contest for state power were a public school cricket match. Anger is the refusal to be polite, to let bygones to be bygones, and to wait five years. Anger is the recognition that the bastards who now have a parliamentary majority in this country are indeed bastards. If anyone doubts this last point, evidence will, alas, be forthcoming quickly enough.

We have to direct our anger. In order to do that we need to understand what just happened. I was disastrously wrong about the direction of the election campaign. In fairness to myself almost everybody was wrong, a notable exception being Richard Seymour here. I'll come back to his thoughts below. Meanwhile, less adept minds on the left are currently demanding PR. In itself this is a striking instance of the failure to grasp the immensity of what we're up against; as though a bit of tinkering with the electoral system will undo the pervasive social sadism about to be unleashed with renewed vigour. In any case, in an ironic disconfirmation of the traditional leftist objection that PR builds in a centrist majority, were seats distributed on the basis of share of the vote we'd be looking at a Tory-UKIP alliance. No doubt there is a certain type of liberal who, when confronted with the reality of this fact, is cretinous enough to insist that the outcome would be 'fairer'. There is no helping such people.

Something more fundamental expressed itself yesterday, not merely the idiosyncrasies of First Past the Post. This was about popularised reaction, hegemony, and the evolving politics of the Union. Understanding this, and grasping as a consequence the awfulness of the situation, is a first step to doing anything useful about our plight.


Scotland

Labour got slaughtered in Scotland, and deserved it. This is the simplest aspect of what happened last night. This was not the artefact of nationalist reaction. A good amount of the SNP's support came from a class based vote for a party standing on an anti-austerity ticket. Seats in the West of Scotland held on derisory turnouts by parachuted-in Blairites dripping with entitlement fell to the SNP, as people enthused by the referendum campaign went to the polls, sometimes for the first time in their lives.

We can admit this much without having any illusions about the nature of the SNP. It is a bourgeois nationalist party, with left elements, pushed to a social democratic programme by circumstance. Alliances with, and appeals to, the better elements of  the SNP have to be part of what the left does next, on both sides of the border. The longer run has to involve an alternative politics for Scotland, a project whose last flourishing was sacrificed to Tommy Sheridan's libido.

Anyway, I've written at some length about the emerging politics of Scotland on this blog before. So I leave this topic with possibly the best speech of last night from probably one of the best MPs now in Westminster:



Popular Austerity

If the overwhelmingly best thing that happened last night was the election of a nationalist party on the basis of a manifesto broadly akin to the kind of thing Roy Hattersley would have signed up to c. 1989, it must have been - to use a technical phrase - a fucking terrible night. And so it was.

Labour lost seats to the Tories outside London. Before the sneery London is more sophisticated/ intelligent/ generally all round intelligent and liberated brigade get over-excited about the relatively good results in the capital (which didn't extend to unseating the Tories' pantomime villain in a target marginal), let me put it on record that I put Labour's London gains down to the issue of house prices. Its a swing that speaks more of desperation than enthusiasm. Across the country, 33.9% of those registered didn't vote. That inevitably hit Labour more than the Tories. Cameron's party increased majorities in a swathe of seats. Already the various 'Why I voted Tory' surveys are showing clearly that those who decided to vote Tory at the last minute did so, in the main, because they trusted the governing party on the economy.

There is no reality-based way of making sense of this results that doesn't recognise that a significant section of the working class is committed to austerity. I say this because a damaging myth persists on the left, in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary, which says that faced with cuts the working class will shift left. The opposite has been the case in the past five years. People want 'the economy' to be 'safe'. As, in a certain sense, it is:

Thatcher, of course, won popular working class support, and in so doing set in motion a hegemonic austerity project whose fruits we are now reaping. Council house sales were the most obvious sweetener under her governments; it may yet turn out that the promise of right-to-buy for housing association tenants was a cause of yesterday's Tory victory. More pertinently yet, she established with brilliant success an analogy between the national economy and a domestic budget in popular consciousness; 'Why don't you look at it as any housewife has to look at it?'



This, patently false, parallel already explains some of the appeal of the Tories' call for a balanced budget, and of the trust placed in the party. In isolation, however, it doesn't suffice. It's not as though the problem is simply that people have a number of wrong ideas about the macroeconomic facts, as if simply making A-level Economics compulsory would usher in a Labour victory. Popular austerity is as much a matter of the heart of the head. The left loves to talk of 'false consciousness'. In order to understand why voters opted for the Etonians against their own material interests, we need other categories, 'false emotions', 'false values', 'false aspirations'. From childhood onwards we now learn business studies, we are taught to view ourselves as entrepreneurs. Even the act of compiling a CV to apply for an oversubscribed minimum wage job is an act of personal entrepreneurship. If we fail, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. We should be more competitive. Once considered a vice, competitiveness has become a virtue, again inculcated in the school system.

We are, then, to identify with those who cherish competition. Out go solidarity and collective solutions, in comes individual self-advancement. If the affective pull of the entrepreneurial dream weren't enough, there are financial disincentives to stepping out of line: student debt is now 40k-50k per. student, whilst mortgages burden those lucky enough to have them in the first place. Who'd go on strike, or get a reputation as a trouble-maker? Yet, there's apparently hope -- if we are all players in the game of life, we are tempted to believe that we might win. Thus the cultural politics of aspirational identification: perhaps if I vote like Richard Branson, perhaps one day I might be like him. Meanwhile property porn gives us a voyeuristic glance at lives beyond our purses and encourages us into the masochistic idiocy of treating our homes as assets. Who knows, one day we might be hit by the Mansion Tax?

It's entirely beside the point to object that none of this is rational. Of course it isn't, but then neither are we. We are complex, contradictory,  beings, often strangers to ourselves, half in control of emotions and desires which, far from being private, are precisely the point at which ideology grabs us by the throat. Austerity is written into our very being. Knowing a few more facts will not expel it. The only writer on the British activist left who in any way understands this is Richard Seymour. I urge you all to read his Against Austerity as a matter of urgency. In an odd way, the other group of people who understand the extent to which austerity as a project dominates working class life and thought are the Blairites. Their solution, of course, is to give the people what so many of them seem to want. Even in the narrow terms dictated by electoral politics, this approach is likely to fail. If Labour don't challenge the economic narrative offered by the Tories - as, indeed, the unlamented Ed Balls basically didn't - there is a real possibility people will opt for the real thing - as, indeed, they did.

Nor will the 'build an alternative' cheerleaders set things right by a few public meetings and a new electoral front. Our enemy is inside peoples heads and written in their hearts. The ghost of Margaret Thatcher has possessed the souls of millions. Exorcism, the construction of a counter-hegemony will take a generation and in order to succeed must be as all-pervading as the austerity project it seeks to displace.

We haven't even begun to realise the immensity of the task we face.


Coming next: English nationalism 

Election campaign going well, and then there's Scotland

I thought I'd take a few moments out of my Easter holiday to share my thoughts on the election with you all. It was either that or continue watching my way through Buffy on Netflix, and to be honest I can take or leave the middle seasons.

These thoughts are, perhaps uncharacteristically, positive, at least from a UK-wide perspective. Labour has moved ahead of the Tories in key polls, with the Tories negative campaign against Ed Miliband seemingly backfiring. Labour's welcome attack on non-dom status has proved popular, confirming the position beloved of this blogger that more clear red water will not damage Labour's electoral standing. On that basis, the Tories' latest bung to the wealthy will do no harm at all.

There is, of course, a but. Scotland.

Labour will be slaughtered up north. To be frank, we deserve it. Annihilation has been on the cards since senior Party figures shared platforms with Tories as part of the Better Together campaign. It has been assured by the collective backtracking by the Westminster parties on devo-max.

Like a wounded beast in its final throes, Murphy-led Labour are fighting a vicious campaign. Mud is being thrown at the SNP in the hope that some of it sticks. There was the claim that Nicola Sturgeon wants David Cameron as PM. Then there is the disgraceful tabloid attack on Mhairi Black, a pleasingly straight-talking young SNP candidate, being shared on Facebook by Scottish Labour campaigners and their English supporters. There are a raft of attacks on the SNP policy, largely from the right, regardless of the nominal position of those making them. Such are the contradictions of post-referendum Scottish politics, with Labour forced into a position of opposing the SNP from the right. To my mind, it is highly doubtful that anything like labourism will survive much longer in Scotland. The best hope would be if Labour were to neutralise the national question, by officially admitting a plurality of views. Yet it is too tied into a unionist logic to make that likely.

This matters outside Scotland. Why? Because Labour is likely to be the largest party, yet without an overall majority in May. This means the leadership will be looking for someone with whom to do a deal. There are basically two options here: the LibDems and a rainbow coalition of the SNP and others (SDLP, Plaid, Greens). Such is the level of anti-SNP animosity that has trickled down south, that the latter option doesn't have the level of grassroots support than it deserves. Left MPs were more hostile than they needed to be at the suggestion of an SNP pact recently.

This should be a no brainer. Socialists in the Labour Party want two things: working class representation and left-wing policies. The LibDems offer neither, and any kind of deal with them should be ruled out. The SNP are qualitatively different in both respects. The grassroots left should prepare now to exert pressure in favour of the more left-leaning option in the days following a close election.

In good old tub-thumping left-wing fashion, that pressure ought to be exerted on MPs with two demands in view:

No to a deal with either Coalition party.

No to austerity.

Now, Buffy.

Jim Murphy : forerunner of the death of labourism?

Well, the votes are in, and the remaining few members of the Labour Party in Scotland have voted for Jim Murphy as their leader. As did, pretty enthusiastically, the MPs and MSPs. The affiliates, which is mainly to say unions, didn't - of which more presently. Cue obligatory comment about Turkeys and Christmas.

I have form with Jim Murphy. He was president of the NUS and a big thing in Labour Students when I was an undergraduate. He didn't seem to like me. In fairness to our protagonist, the feeling was mutual; I thought he was terrible then, and he is beyond terrible now. Be quite certain, this is the most right-wing person ever to be elected to a leadership position in the Labour Party, and I include Blair in that reckoning. An unpleasant political fixer avant la lettre, he is, quite incredibly, a member of the Henry Jackson Society. The immediate consequence of his election will be Labour haemorrhaging votes to the SNP next year, when the now certain strategy of opposing them from the right will go down like a lead balloon with the Scottish electorate.

Murphy did not win amongst trade unions, in spite apparently of some SNP trade unionists voting for him as an act of political euthanasia. Calls are already being made for unions to disaffiliate from the party in Scotland. More intriguingly, there are rumours of significant unions - I've heard Unison named - taking this call seriously. 

Working class politics in Britain has been dominated for over a century by the unique phenomenon of labourism. The dual premises of the labourist settlement are the link between trade unions and the Labour Party and Labour functioning as the 'natural party' for working class voters. The correct answer to the question, "is labourism a good or a bad thing?" is a resounding "yes and no". On the one hand, labourism has kept class allegiance in focus in British electoral politics, given a certain political voice to trade unions, and won reforms, most notably the welfare state. On the other, labourism has undoubtedly functioned as a political brake on the working class, at once forcing a division of labour between the political and industrial wings of the labour movement whilst making trade union bureaucracies unhealthily beholden to Labour leaderships. Either way, labourism is real, and has needed to be reckoned with by anyone serious about socialist politics in Britain. The two word answer to the question why I remain in the Labour Party is "labourism persists".

But for how much longer? Labourism is under pressure throughout Britain. It was deliberately targeted in the New Labour era, and faces a renewed threat from the implementation of the Collins reforms. Meanwhile we're witnessing a certain fracturing of traditional party allegiances, with the rise of what has been misleadingly christened 'anti-politics', the Jeckyl and Hyde personae of which are Nigel Farage and Russell Brand.

What is somewhat true throughout Britain, however, is true with a vengeance in Scotland. The SNP has already undermined Labour allegiance in a layer of the working class, and the impact of the referendum, and the major parties back-peddling on their 'vow' to implement devomax will hasten this. With Jim Murphy, who opposed even a referendum on independence, behind the wheel the acceleration will be great indeed. Labour will be fighting the next election in Scotland as the major opponent of the SNP from the right, and this will push their status as a party of reform to breaking point. Meanwhile, the union link is threatened north of the border with more immediacy than in England and Wales. Remember that the disaffiliation of the RMT from the Labour Party throughout Britain was a product of Scottish politics; history could yet repeat.

It is foolish to make predictions in this area, but it is not beyond the bounds of imagination that yesterday's election result was a decisive moment in the death of labourism.

Johann Lamont resigns

Last month's referendum certainly has the politicians dropping like flies. The latest to go is Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont. See the Graun here. George Eaton's analysis here deserves a perusal as well.

Much quoted are Lamont's scathing words about the Westminster leadership:

The Labour Party must recognise that the Scottish party has to be autonomous and not just a branch office of a party based in London.

She's right, and the criticism of over-centralisation is all the more telling coming, as it does, from someone who is a long way from being a left-wing rebel. The lording it over Scotland by Westminster Labour isn't utterly unique: absolutely definitive of New Labour was a paranoid centralism and utter fear of any public Labour figure saying anything that lacked the imprimatur of the leader's office (Lamont herself was apparently prevented from criticising the Bedroom Tax). This centralisation in the cause of the New Labour project is a good part of what lies behind Miliband's tethering of Lamont, and is equally apparent in dodgy selections, on-the-hoof policy decisions bypassing Conference and the NPF, anti-democratic 'reforms', and a good deal else on top of that.

This having been admitted, the Lamont saga cannot be entirely explained as the fallout of UK-wide institutional power-grabbing by the Labour leadership. There is a distinctively Scottish element to the tale. And with this in mind, I leave you with a question: might it not be the case that it is inevitable, for as long as the Union persists, that the London offices of UK-wide parties will be forced, by the logic of union itself, to severely restrict the autonomy of their colleagues north of the Border?

So farewell then...

Alex Salmond; well you've got to feel sorry for him today. An unremarkable social democratic politician, heading a party that isn't even that good, thrust into the limelight by the national question and the dreadfulness of New Labour.

The SNP, under a new leadership, could be set to storm home in Scotland next year. For years, Labour has relied on West of Scotland seats returning Labour MPs on derisory turnouts. Yesterday these seats turned out at around the 75% mark. And they voted 'Yes'. If I were Ed Miliband, I'd be worried.

Something could have happened

And something did happen, to the extent that the Yes campaign galvanised wide support and showed us a different way of doing politics. Turnout was incredible, especially in Glasgow and as a friend reminded me, this at least has the virtuous effect of undermining the complacency with which dull, leadership loyal, Labour MPs have treated West of Scotland seats as sinecures. It also shows up commonplace assertions about 'apathy' to be the over-simplifications they are. Start talking about things that matter, and people vote.

All of that said, it was a decisive 'no' vote, at the time of writing looking about 54%, 46%. Your host is tired, hungover from whisky and hope, and doesn't have too much to say at this stage. A few bullet points then:

• The secure result was secured on the basis of panicked promises of devomax, and threats about currency and business exodus. 
• That said, it was probably too secure to undermine Cameron's position.
• Expect, however, Tory infighting and attempts to retreat from the promises of the campaign's last week. 
• The UK's third largest city voted decisively against being part of the UK, as did Scotland's own third city. This should prompt a bit of reflection.
• UKIP are already positioning themselves as a 'pro-English' party with respect to debates around devomax, federalism, and the Barnett formula. This is concerning and needs watching.
• It looks like the 'yes' vote was higher amongst younger people. If that is right, then this has not been settled for good.
• What McDonnell said:

Can say it now polls have closed.Never again should Labour go in with Tories in a campaign coalition.Disillusions & divides our supporters.
— John McDonnell (@johnmcdonnellMP) September 18, 2014

Vote 'yes' in Scotland

And when I am in the boards
my words will be a prophecy.

They will return, the stock of the crofters
Who were driven out of the sea.

And the aristocratic 'beggars'
will be routed as they were.

Deer and sheep will be carted away
and the glens will be tilled;

A time of sowing and a time of reaping,
and a time to reward the robbers.

And the cold ruined houses
will be built up by our kind.

The last poem of Mary MacDonald, marking the end of an artistic life set against the horror of the Highland Clearances.

If you are registered to vote in Scotland tomorrow, you have the chance to redeem some of the bloody history of that country's oppression. You should do so, and vote 'yes'. And, wherever you are, the ultimate task is to consign to history the capitalist system which destroyed lives for profit years ago in the Highlands, and continues to do so today.

The working class is better together, the British state isn't

I've already explained why I support a 'yes' vote tomorrow here and here.

A brief post, then, merely to deride the last desperate recourse of the red-tinged wing of Better Together. It is about class unity. Don't divide Britain and Scotland! That will divide the working class. So say the dimmer recesses of ultra-leftism, and, um, Ed Miliband.

The thought that working class solidarity can, and does, cross borders doesn't occur. Nor does the thought that, if solidarity stops at borders then - given global capitalism - we are all well and truly fucked. Already.

Look, however, it the version of 'working class' identity that is being offered by, at least, the Labour leadership. It is a distinctly Blue Labour vision of a class whose solidarity stops at national borders (there, is, for instance, no question of solidarity with undocumented workers). Wrapped in the Union Jack and nostalgic talk of togetherness and community, like some kind of past-it mod revival, the proponents of this view lecture a 'yes' movement that has been marked by left-wing politics and internationalism about the dangers of nationalism from a position of British chauvinism. Their picture of the working class belongs in a living museum. Let's put it out of its misery, and breathe life into the real thing.

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...

Happy Burns Night!

Fareweel to a' our Scottish fame,
Fareweel our ancient glory;
Fareweel ev'n to the Scottish name,
Sae fam'd in martial story.
Now Sark rins over Solway sands,
An' Tweed rins to the ocean,
To mark where England's province stands-
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

What force or guile could not subdue,
Thro' many warlike ages,
Is wrought now by a coward few,
For hireling traitor's wages.
The English stell we could disdain,
Secure in valour's station;
But English gold has been our bane-
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

O would, or I had seen the day
That Treason thus could sell us,
My auld grey head had lien in clay,
Wi' Bruce and loyal Wallace!
But pith and power, till my last hour,
I'll mak this declaration;
We're bought and sold for English gold-
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

Labour for Independence, here

Better Together? A note on Scottish Independence and British Labour

The last UK general election won by Labour was, you will recall, that in 2005. Here's an electoral map of the result:

Quite a lot of red in Scotland, right? And thus an argument I've frequently heard within the Labour Party against supporting Scottish independence - "if Scotland gets independence, the rest of the UK will be doomed to perpetual Tory government".

So, let's break down the figures behind the map. UK-wide, we have:

Labour (inc. SDLP): 359
Conservative: 198
Lib-Dem: 62
Others: 28

Now let's look at Scotland's contribution. This is:

Labour: 41
Lib Dems: 11
SNP: 6
Conservative: 1

OK, so let's subtract the Scottish figures from the general UK ones. This gives us:

Labour (inc. SDLP): 318
Conservatives: 197
Lib-Dem: 51
Others: 22

This gives Labour whippable MPs 318 seats out of 588, an absolute majority of 24 (21 if we discount the SDLP). This is an election in which Labour didn't do particularly well compared to its recent form.

This argument is dead, it has ceased to be.

What is interesting to note, however, is that a Labour government for England, Wales, and the north of Ireland, whose majority was not supported by Scottish MPs, could depend of the support of a lower proportion of parliamentary leadership loyalists. With the honourable exception of Katy Clark, the Scots MPs are a supine bunch.