Trump victory: revolt of the NCO’s

November 17, 2016 at 6:26 pm (civil rights, Democratic Party, elections, fascism, middle class, populism, posted by JD, Racism, reaction, Republican Party, Trump, United States, workers)

 Steve Bell 171116Illustration: Steve Bell (Guardian)

By Barry Finger

The US Presidential election is the culmination of the long-standing economic and cultural grievances of America’s non-commissioned officer class, a subclass largely composed of white men from the rust-belt, whose factories have been asset stripped and sent abroad and whose unions or small businesses, pensions and prospects have been decimated. They are not the poorest of the poor – not even the poorest of the white poor.

But neither was this a revolt led by the white working class rank and file, the many who never fully shared the benefits of life in the skilled trades and ascendant key industries of a dominating economic power. From this platform, they had assumed a quasi-social leadership role over the traditional working class and, through their unions, often fought for broad programs of social remediation within the existing social order that they also jealously defended.

This election was a revolt headed by those who had acquired a modest stake in middle class life and now find that life, and the institutions that made that life possible, disappearing. It is led by white working men whose fortunes have fallen, afflicted by wage stagnation and an ever-widening social disparity in income and wealth that has consigned them to the wrong side of the divide. They prided and deluded themselves that they and they alone had reliably done society’s heavy lifting and were, in turn, entitled to certain expectations. Above all they had the expectation of a well-run and stable social order, an order in which they would continue to enjoy a place of respect and authority and a rising standard of living, which could be passed down to their children.

They had, above all, placed their confidence in the ruling class, who had historically indulged this self-estimation only to find themselves abandoned in an increasingly globalizing economy. This sense of free-fall has been massively reinforced by a shift in equality’s center of gravity owing to greater racial and gender inclusiveness, with which it coincided. That abandonment has become the crucial factor in the increasingly polarized and caustic political conflict, a conflict that can be resolved in a progressive or reactionary direction.

Society’s NCOs asserted themselves. But they did not assert themselves in a vacuum. Nowhere in the developed capitalist world has the left acquired traction. Our manifold debacles need not be rehearsed. Suffice it to say that the left has not provided an oppositional center of gravity that could capture this white working class disenchantment and channel it into a progressive direction.

No one expecting to extract a concession from the system could reasonably vote for the Greens. There are perfectly honorable and noble reasons to cast a protest vote, to put a place marker on a vision of liberation that may yet be. But this is not where concessions are realized absent a massive movement surge from below. And that, unfortunately, does not describe the current American scene.

But the liberal wing of the American ruling class, having neutralized the Sanders’ insurgency, effectively corralled this discontent into the Trump alt-right pigsty, where, they thought, it could be contained. Clinton had something to offer Wal-Mart and fast food workers: a raise in the minimum wage, subsidized childcare, a modified Obama plan. She could offer a path to citizenship to the dreamers and subsidized public tuition. But by failing to derail voter suppression through the South – and even in Wisconsin, and by failing to offer a grand inclusive program of economic reconstruction to restore the white working class and sweep up the multiethnic poor and near poor into co-prosperity, she could not counterbalance the appeal of the far right.

Clinton was perceived, and correctly so, as being the agent of global financial and corporate interests, the very interests that had inflicted this protracted social setback to white workers. She was the face of the status quo.

This is a neo-fascist moment and it is bleeding into advanced economies throughout the world. It was all but announced here by the open intervention of the deep state, in the form of the FBI’s bombshell intervention on behalf of Trump barely two weeks before the election. And make no mistake about it. Neo-fascists, unlike traditional reactionaries and conservatives, are unencumbered by economic orthodoxies and can run an economy. They, like the far left, fully understand that capitalism is not self-correcting and place no faith in markets. They fully appreciate the need for massive doses of state intervention and are fully prepared to blow a sky-high hole through the deficit.

That is why, contrary to Paul Krugman and others, the stock market, after an initial shortfall, began to boom. Massive tax cuts, a protective wall of tariffs, relaxation and elimination of environmental and Wall Street regulations, huge public works in the forms of infrastructural renovation, the promise of a border wall and the spend-up on military hardware all herald and shape the state-led investment boom to come. Caterpillar and Martin Marietta soared. As did Big Pharma, soon free to price gouge without fear of criminal investigation. Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin had field days. Private Prison corporations are licking their chops at the prospect of the FBI and police being let loose on immigrant communities and communities of color. Student loan services and lenders, no longer facing government competition, got a new lease on life. Even too big to fail banks stocks rose with the prospect that Dodd-Frank being repealed. Increasing after tax incomes will stimulate working class demand and in the hands of the wealthy drive up share prices.

Paradoxically, gun manufacturers saw a drop in stock prices. Speculators shorted gun stocks presumably because the threat of gun regulation has been removed thereby eliminating the perceived urgency on the part of gun enthusiasts to stockpile arms in anticipation of that threat.

The Trump insurrection, fueled by this NCO revolt, effectively defeated the two political parties, the Republicans no less than the Democrats. It appealed to white workers equally on the basis of anxiety over economic decline but also on the basis of prejudice, the loss of class status and the promise of a return to class collaboration, a new deal –if you can pardon that usage, with a responsive nativist-oriented ruling class. It promises, in other words, rule by like-thinking CEOs who can be relied upon to restore prosperity within the confines of a retro 1950s-like social order that erases the gains of women – right down to basic bodily autonomy — and minorities. In that regard, Trump will refashion the civil service, the permanent government bureaucracy, on a purely political basis, essentially ending the primary path to upward mobility on the part of minorities who cannot be relied upon to pass a political litmus test. If proof is needed, see how an tea-party Republican such as Scott Walker could decimate the civil service in Wisconsin and then tweak that example to fit Trump’s outsized predilections.

The nominal Republican Party has been effectively transformed into a white nationalist party and if it succeeds in raising rust-belt white incomes and economic security on that basis, while checking the aspirations of Blacks, Hispanics and women, it will have legitimized and institutionalized that transformation.

The Democratic Party has discredited itself. It is an empty vessel, unable to defend the living standards of the multi-ethnic American work class. It is a party of split loyalties, in which workers, women and minorities take a back seat to corporate interests. And the corporate interests they take a back seat to are precisely those global, financial and tech sectors that are decimating living standards and feeding the revolt.

Trump has started the political realignment in this country. Social movements, central to which is labor, can stay loyal to the Democrats and cave, or they can find their way to political independence and make a credible appeal to Trump workers to jump ship on the basis of class solidarity.

Barry writes for New Politics magazine

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Counterfart’s café closes: ha-ha-ha

September 17, 2016 at 6:50 pm (Andrew Coates, apologists and collaborators, ex-SWP, gloating, John Rees, Lindsey German, middle class, Pabs, posted by JD, wankers)

This may have happened some time ago, but I’ve only just heard: ha-ha-ha:

This failed:

… but we hear they are opening this:

H/t: comrade Coatesy

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Glastonbury drivel and pseudery from John Harris of the ‘Graun’

July 1, 2015 at 9:58 pm (Guardian, Guest post, middle class, posted by JD, wankers)

By Robert Greenwood:

If, when I go to Hell, I do not wake up in the VIP buttery at Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Club, I will come to post-mortem consciousness sitting on a waterless toilet in a prayer tent at the Glastonbury Pop Music Festival. John Harris, the floppy-haired pseud who used to be on Newsnight Review and who now writes drivel for the Guardian, has written some drivel for the Guardian about how “political” Glastonbury is:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/28/glastonbury-fields-politics-podemos

Read the last paragraph for an abstract of the rest: N.B.: Older readers may be forgiven for thinking that this was written by the late Michael Wharton, “Peter Simple” of the Daily Telegraph’s “Way of the World” column.

 ” I went out into the crowd and chatted to Francesca Scanlon, an 18-year-old sixth former from Whitley Bay. This was not just her first Glastonbury but her first festival. “I think it’s brilliant,” she said, before telling me she had seen the Vaccines, the Courteeners and Florence + the Machine. But then she talked about the festival’s political aspect. “You get a real kind of leftwing, liberal feeling here,” she said. “It’s really free. Where I’m from isn’t like that: it’s quite right wing.” What came next underlined what old-school socialists would call fellowship: the feeling of being among like minds, and taking inspiration from them. “I feel at home,” she said.”

But if where Miss Scanlon comes from is “quite right wing,” how can she feel “at home” at Glastonbury if, at Glastonbury, she gets “a real kind of leftwing, liberal feeling?” Surely where she is “from” is “home”, and “home” is where she is “from?” Also, the buffoon Harris describes exactly what is, and always was, wrong about “old-school socialists” and what they would call “fellowship”: “[T]he feeling of being among like minds, and taking inspiration from them.” “Like minds” do not “inspire.” Only challenging and contrary minds inspire. Whoever had a mind like Marx or Engels? Who has a mind like an 18-year old sixth-former? John Harris, of course

“At good old Glastonbury the new politics finds a home by John Harris…”

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Labour’s lost working class support

May 14, 2015 at 12:45 pm (class, democracy, elections, labour party, middle class, posted by JD, workers)

By John Trickett (re-blogged from his website)

This is a defining moment for the future, and arguably the survival, of the Labour Party. In the coming months there will be much debate about what went wrong and where next.

In 2005 I produced evidence that Labour had lost 4 million voters since the election in 1997. A substantial part of these missing millions were traditional working class voters. This pattern has continued over the last 10 years.

In a minor tidal wave of what looks like pre planned statements, a group of commentators have argued that what lost the election was a failure to tap into the hopes of “aspirational” voters.

However, there is not a shred of evidence for their argument. The explanations for our defeat are deeper than this simplistic assessment.

The truth is that Labour recovered amongst middle class voters but has suffered a cataclysmic decline among working class voters.

It is possible to scrutinise now the initial voting analysis provided to me by the House of Commons Library.

If we compare the election results for our last election victory in 2005 with the result last Thursday and analyse by social class, a very interesting pattern emerges.

Here are the figures.

2005 2010 2015
AB 28 26 27
C1 32 28 30
C2 40 29 30
DE 48 40 37

It is possible here to see that the proportions of AB and C1 voters who voted Labour in the last three elections has held steady. Indeed Ed Miliband’s leadership led to a mild recovery of these voters between 2010 and 2015, (as it did among the C2 group.)

A full analysis of what happened last Thursday is not yet possible but at least one opinion poll has shown that ‘the election result implied by polling would give the Tories 12.5 m votes and Labour 12.2 million. However, in the event the Tories secured 11.3 million votes and Labour 9.3 million.’ There were almost 3 million Labour identifiers that we failed to mobilise.

Labour’s electoral base last Thursday was by far the most middle class we have secured in our history. A strategy based on a misunderstanding of what is happening in our country will not work. We cannot expect to win an election without reaching out to other layers of the population and equally mobilising those Labour identifiers who didn’t bother to vote.

In the coming leadership election, candidates need therefore first of all honestly to demonstrate that they can develop a three-fold strategy in England (Scotland is a very special case):

A)      Hold on to and indeed increase our middle class  vote

B)      Reach out to working class voters, and

C)      Mobilise Labour identifiers who did not vote Labour.

I will shortly publish further reflections on what we do next. However, the party should not elect a Leader who cannot concretely demonstrate that they can deliver B) above, since they are the largest group of the electorate whose support we have lost.

Those in the PLP with leadership aspirations cannot remain in denial or ignorance of these facts. They do so at their own peril, but more fundamentally fail to understand why the Labour Party exists.

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Complete Idiot’s Guide to Robin McAlpine and the state of Scottish Nationalism today

May 2, 2015 at 6:50 pm (class collaboration, middle class, plonker, populism, posted by JD, scotland)

A Scottish comrade drew my attention to this article, commenting “It’s probably a bit difficult to fully savour if you’re not aware that McAlpine is: a) prized as some kind of intellectual guru by sections of the ‘Yes’ campaign; b) a complete idiot, albeit a pretentious one.”

The article comes from a Scottish blog called Uncivil Society, that describes itself as “reject[ing] the civic nationalist consensus that now pervades Scottish politics.” You (like me) may not have heard of McAlpine before, but it’s a piece that tells us a lot about the politics of Scottish nationalism today – and it’s also rather well written:

By Rory Scothorne (@shirkerism)

What is Robin McAlpine? It’s all the more difficult when you’ve never met the man. I saw him once, at a pro-independence rally on Calton Hill. I was helping out at the National Collective stall, the sort of thing one does when one is 21 years old and the sun’s out. I became aware of a sort of blur, somewhere in my field of vision. The perplexing thing about this blur was that it wasn’t peripheral, or fleeting, as blurs tend to be; it was directly in front of me, and Michael Gray – now a columnist for The National, of course – appeared to be interacting with it.

Focusing more carefully on what was going on in front of my eyes – a rare effort for somebody in the independence campaign – it transpired that this blur was in fact a man, gesticulating feverishly, and the man was dressed like a teenage boy. Scuffed converse and jeans, short-sleeved t-shirt over long-sleeved t-shirt, thick-rimmed spectacles; he was there, in front of me, half-man half-blur, and I didn’t particularly want to talk to him.

In those sunny, optimistic days, McAlpine was like a myth: you know it’s wrong – I had written several critical things about the Common Weal by this point – but at no point do you really bother to grasp it, to work out where this wrongness actually came from. He was a thing you took for granted, and like the many unspoken peculiarities of the Yes Campaign he blended unquestioned into a vast herd of elephants in the room.

But now he is more significant. Today, McAlpine enthusiastically represents all that is left of the Yes Campaign in all its absurd, contradictory unity. The SNP has reasserted itself as the cautious, moderate party of “Scotland’s interest” which infuriated radicals during the referendum; much of the pro-independence left has moved on to campaigns like Scottish Left Project, Better Than Zero and the Living Rent Campaign; the Greens are back to poking around in their allotments, and those honourable captains of industry at Business for Scotland are presumably back to making lots of money. Independence remains on the horizon, but for most it is a horizon deferred. 

Only McAlpine is still plugging away at keeping everything together. His most recent article for Bella Caledonia is a spirited defence of his decision to speak at the “Seize The Day” rally organised by a strange organisation called “Hope Over Fear”, best described as a group of people being waved around by saltires. The involvement of Tommy Sheridan in the organisation’s leadership and as a speaker caused some concern. McAlpine insists that this is what movement-building is all about – building bridges in spite of disagreements – and that the real problem is middle-class nationalists on “social media” getting uncomfortable about how working-class nationalists express themselves. His closing remarks are an elegy for the fading unity of Yes:

Imagine what it would be like if we could fix this. Imagine there wasn’t this problem. Imagine we added to the riot of colour on Saturday the green, the red, the yellow. Imagine if Women for Indy could have joined the carnival. Imagine if RIC could have been there in strength. Imagine if we could have been hugging each other rather than tweeting about each other.

 His commitment to the cause doesn’t explain him, though; it simply makes the need to explain him clear. Below are 3 working hypotheses, offered as a starting point for further research.

Hypothesis 1: Robin McAlpine is really clever

Confucius believed that one of the central causes of disorder was misunderstanding, and he proposed dealing with this through the “rectification of names”. Things with the wrong name would be perceived and dealt with wrongly, and social problems would arise. Giving them names which better accorded with their essence would help lead to better understanding and action.

Is Robin McAlpine our very own Confucius? Two old articles suggest as much. In The Scotsman in 2012, Robin attacked the “endless name-calling” of Scottish politics, and the caricature of Salmond as a “populist despot”: 

In reality, if people properly understood the meanings of the terms populism and small-n nationalism they would realise that Scotland’s long-running constitutional debate has helped to protect us from the rise of the far-right.

McAlpine went on to suggest that all the problems emerging from this name-calling are the result of “confusion”. People think “populism” is about what is “popular”, whereas really “the linguistic root” of the term is “populace”, or “the people”. With this explained, McAlpine goes on to rectify all sorts of misnomenclature throughout history. The Nazis, you see, were populists, not nationalists: “the idea of the German “Reich” was not an idea of a nation but of the more accurate translation of “a Germanic realm”, he says – Germanic being an ethnic and thus populist signifier, not a national one, because the implied “other” was within the nation, not outside it.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Open letter to a socialist supporter of the SNP

April 7, 2015 at 5:21 pm (capitulation, class collaboration, elections, labour party, middle class, populism, posted by JD, reactionay "anti-imperialism", scotland)

By Ann Field (at the Workers Liberty website)

Dear Jimmy,

A few weeks ago we carried a series of articles arguing for a Labour vote rather than a Green vote in the general election.

The arguments in the articles were all very calm, cool and collected, a series of reflections on the fact that whatever the apparent attractiveness of – at least some – Green policies might be, this did not justify calling for a vote for the Greens.

But when it comes to arguing with people like yourself – socialists who are calling for a vote for the SNP in the general election – I don’t think that the same measured and moderate approach is justified.

That’s because I think you’ve simply lost the plot.

It’s true, I admit, that this isn’t a conclusion I’ve reached overnight. It’s a conclusion which I began to reach during last year’s referendum campaign, when your eyes started to glaze over at the prospect of Scottish independence.

From a socialist point of view, your arguments made no sense at all. You seemed to argue – in fact, you did argue – that the referendum was an opportunity to pass judgement on all the bad things British imperialism and the British state has done over the past 300 years.

(As part of the imperialist centre, Scotland had been just as “guilty” of all those bad things as Britain. But that basic historical fact, like so much else, simply passed you by.)

You also argued that the very existence of the British state was an obstacle to democratic and working-class advance in Scotland. (It was the only time that the working class got even a passing mention in your delirious pro-independence outpourings.)

I don’t know if you came up with that argument yourself, or whether it’s something you picked up from the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) website: “The single biggest obstacle to the Scottish people building a better society is the British state, the Westminster regime, the Crown powers.”

(If you did pick it up from the SSP website, I’m surprised that someone who prides himself on being a class-struggle socialist didn’t find anything odd about this statement. Such as the reference to “the Scottish people” rather than the Scottish (or British) working class. Or the vague reference to “a better society” rather than to workers power and socialism.)

Either way, your argument didn’t make sense.

The British state and the “Westminster regime” can hardly be said to be impervious to reform. In fact, they’ve been subject to quite a lot of reforms over the past 300 years.

How else, for example, could there be such a thing as the universal franchise? Something of a step forward, I’m sure you’d agree, compared with the franchise which existed in Scotland (and England) in 1707.

Sure, the British state is an obstacle to achieving workers power. And it certainly does contain feudal leftovers, such as the Crown powers, which are absent in other states.
But the reason why the British state is an obstacle is not because it’s British or because the Houses of Parliament are located in Westminster rather than Milton Keynes. It’s because it’s a capitalist state, and that’s why capitalist states exist.

It’s not really a difficult argument to get your head around.

Your argument – and that of the SSP – that Scottish independence was a necessity because of the nature of the British state struck me at the time as being about as logical as arguing for independence for Bavaria because Article 14 of the German constitution guarantees private property.

Or arguing for independence for Texas because: a) it has a lot of oil (cf. Scotland); b) it would be a blow against US imperialism (cf. blow against British imperialism). In fact, I do recall some members of the SSP advocating independence for Texas for precisely those reasons.

But there was one thing you were crystal-clear about during the referendum campaign.

You did NOT support the SNP. You had NOTHING IN COMMON with the SNP. You were a socialist, NOT a nationalist. It was a GROSS SLANDER to suggest that you were accommodating to the SNP and to nationalism in calling for a ‘Yes’ vote.

But now you’re calling a vote for the SNP.

I will say, however: credit where credit’s due. At least you’re open about calling for a vote for the SNP. Unlike all those people in and around the ‘Radical’ Independence Campaign who are backing the SNP but too shamefaced (and dishonest) to admit it.

Some people might regard it as an impolite way to put it, but I’ll say it anyway: your arguments for a vote for the SNP for garbled, incoherent and completely off-the-wall. (In that sense, I would concede, they are a ‘logical’ extension of your call for a ‘Yes’ vote.)

Argument number one: Labour are Red Tories. There’s no difference between Labour and the Tories.

Not much to say in response to this. Other than that it shows just how far removed you are from reality. To say that Labour’s policies are woefully inadequate is true, and I’d agree with you if that was your argument. But to argue that there’s simply no difference is really quite whacky.

In fact, given Labour policies such as increasing the higher rate of income tax, increasing corporation tax, introducing a mansion tax, taxing bankers’ bonuses, and limiting the use of zero hours contracts, the difference between Labour and Tory policies is probably greater than it has been at any point over the last twenty years.

(I agree to your inevitable objection: Given how far to the right Labour shifted under Blair, it’s not difficult to move to the left from that starting point. But that shift has taken place and needs to be registered.)

And even if there really was no difference between Labour and the Tories – as if trade unions have 50% of the vote at Tory Party conferences! – this would, at most, be a reason not to vote Labour. It would not be a reason to vote SNP instead.

Argument number two: Getting more SNP MPs to Westminster would keep a Labour government on the left and ensure it implemented what the SNP calls its progressive policies.

Logic never was your strong point, was it?

If Labour are Red Tories (argument number one), then there is no way the SNP could push them to the left (argument number two). And if Labour are Red Tories (argument number one), then how could they have progressive policies which could be implemented only thanks to a contingent of SNP MPs (argument number two)?

There’s also the obvious point that you don’t get a Labour government unless lots of people vote Labour (including voting for Labour candidates far removed from socialist politics). Voting SNP instead of Labour makes the chances of a Labour government (which the SNP would supposedly push to the left) less likely.

Yes, the Labour right wing in Scotland is making a big thing out of this argument. And yes, you and the SNP can accuse them of scaremongering (just as in the referendum anyone who pointed out that the SNP’s sums did not add up was accused of scaremongering).

But that does not alter the fact that more seats for the SNP mean less chance of a Labour government and more chance of a Tory government.

Your argument number two also has no more in common with reality than your argument number one.

Example one: Since last September Labour has had a policy of increasing corporation tax (unfortunately by just 1%). SNP policy throughout the referendum campaign was that an independent Scotland would cut corporation tax by 3%. This policy was abandoned by the SNP only last month.

A straightforward question: Has Labour adopted a policy of increasing corporation tax under pressure from the SNP? Or has the SNP dropped its policy of cutting corporation tax to con Labour voters into believing that a contingent of SNP MPS would ensure a Labour government implement its progressive policies?

(In this case: a progressive policy which the SNP still does not support, even if, for the last four weeks, it has abandoned support for a cut in corporation tax.)

Example two: In January 2014 Labour announced that it would restore the 50% rate of income tax for top earners. The SNP has consistently rejected that policy: there would be no tax rises in an independent Scotland. This policy of no 50% tax rate was dropped by the SNP just one week ago.

Another straightforward question: Did Labour decide to restore the 50% tax rate under pressure from the SNP? Or is the SNP’s one-week old support for the 50% tax rate another attempt to con Labour voters into switching to voting SNP?

And the SNP’s promises to work with Labour in Westminster but – heaven forbid! – NEVER with the Tories does not sit very well alongside their record in Holyrood.

Or did you miss that interview with Annabelle Goldie (former Tory leader in Holyrood) in the “Daily Record”, the one where she said:

“They (the SNP) were quite happy to work with us when they needed to. Alex Salmond knew he could not get agreement from Labour. When he had to get support for his budget, I don’t remember him jumping up and down and saying he cannot do business with the Tories.

Alex Salmond took those Tory votes and Alex Salmond was glad to get them. What suited him in 2007 and 2008 and in the ensuing years of minority government is the very thing now he says he’ll have no truck with.”

The SNP is not a political force to push a Labour government to the left. In words of one syllable, John McDonnell (leader of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs) explained why not in an article in the “Daily Record” last week:

“Given their track record in Scotland of supporting cuts in public spending, their attempts to race to the bottom on tax and in privatising rail and now the ferries, there is a huge divide between what socialists in the Labour Party stand for and the nationalists of the SNP.

What we (the Labour Left) want are the exact opposite of the cuts and privatisation programmes inflicted on the Scottish people by the SNP. You can’t be an austerity party in Scotland and expect to be taken seriously as an anti-austerity party anywhere else.

A vote for the SNP is a vote for their version of austerity. Worse, voting for the SNP might help the Tories stay in power. That would be a massive blow for the working class in Scotland and England.”

In fact, it’s really quite sad – although I think a more aggressive expression would not be out of place – to see SSP members out on the streets campaigning to unseat Labour MPs who share John McDonnell’s politics.

Do you really think that unseating Katy Clark and replacing her by an SNP right-winger is going to: a) help bring about a Labour government; b) push that Labour government to the left?

Argument number three: Voting SNP and sending as many SNP MPs as possible to Westminster is a way to fight back against austerity.

That’s an odd argument.

Just seven months ago you were telling me that there was ABSOLUTELY NO WAY that you could fight austerity at Westminster, that austerity was INSEPARABLE FROM the very existence of the British state, and that’s why Scotland HAD TO ACHIEVE independence.

But now you’re telling me that you can fight austerity at Westminster after all! It all depends on who gets elected and on the basis of what politics! I suppose I should be flattered that you now agree with one of my anti-independence arguments, even if it’s taken you seven months to get round to parroting it.

But now you’ve come up against a new problem: the SNP’s own record of ‘fighting’ austerity. Because, for all their demagogy, soundbites and rhetoric, their ‘opposition’ to austerity consists of implementing it.

Since 2007 the SNP have cut 130,000 places in Further Education colleges, the main route for working-class youth into Higher Education. That’s why class inequalities in Scottish education have remained unchanged under the SNP.

More cuts have been imposed on the fire service under the SNP than under any other Holyrood government. The SNP member who was the FBU’s Scottish Regional Secretary got his just rewards for agreeing to those cuts by being booted out of office last year, losing the election by 20% to 80%.

There is a chronic shortage of nurses in the Scottish NHS. Accident and Emergency (A&E) services in the Scottish NHS are in a state of crisis, performing even worse than in England. More people are waiting longer for A&E treatment.

But the SNP government’s spending on the NHS remains proportionately lower than the Con-Dem coalition’s. What has increased under the SNP is spending on private healthcare – up by 47% since 2011, amounting to £100 millions.

Since 2007 Scottish government funding of local authorities has been cut by 24% in real terms, even though, using the SNP’s own figures, the cut in the Westminster grant to Scotland has been less than half that (10%). SNP-controlled councils have passed on those funding cuts by axing jobs and services.

SNP-controlled Dundee Council is currently implementing £8 millions worth of cuts. The SNP-Labour coalition in Edinburgh is now imposing £22 millions worth of cuts, axing 1,200 council jobs, and withdrawing £11 millions of funding for voluntary sector organisations.

When the Procurement Reform Bill was going through Holyrood the SNP voted down Labour amendments requiring that at least the Living Wage was paid by any employer awarded a public contract (although, to better masquerade as the workers’ friend, the SNP has now changed its policy on the Living Wage as well).

This is not the record of a party committed to fighting austerity. It’s the record of a party which implements austerity.

And the SNP’s demand for Full Fiscal Autonomy for Scotland (FFA, which is what the SNP really wants from the next Westminster government) would mean more austerity.

The last Institute for Fiscal Studies report and the last Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland report both confirm that replacing the Barnett Formula by FFA would result in an annual shortfall of around £6.5 billions. This could be plugged only by tax rises or spending cuts involving massive job losses.

In the referendum campaign the SNP’s answer to this shortfall was: oil. But since last September the price of oil has fallen from $110 a barrel to $50 a barrel.

The SNP’s figures never stack up. But they carry on regardless. And when anyone points this out, the response from people like you is: Scaremongering!

Argument number four: Voting SNP, sending SNP MPs to Westminster instead of Labour ones, and the resulting hung Parliament will create new openings for working-class and socialist politics.

This is no more than your referendum refrain of ‘an independent Scotland will create openings for the working class’ applied to the general election. Now we’re supposed to believe that replacing Labour MPs by SNP ones is going to boost working-class politics.

It was nonsense then. And it’s even more nonsensical now.

The SNP is not a working-class party. It has no links to the trade unions. It is not a vehicle for working-class political representation. It does not claim to be any of these things. And it does not want to be any of these things.

Sorry to state the obvious, but the SNP is a nationalist party. That’s why its election material talks about Scotland, not class, and why it appeals to voters’ national identities, not their class identities:

“The general election is Scotland’s opportunity to make our voice heard loudly and clearly. Whatever the outcome in May, only one party is stronger for Scotland: the SNP. More SNP seats – more power for Scotland.”

That’s the message from SNP politicians as well. According to Stewart Hosie: “The general election is Scotland’s opportunity to hold real power at Westminster.”

(Scotland to hold real power at Westminster? Something you and the SNP were telling me only a few months ago was absolutely impossible! And yet the SNP claims that they are the one party you can trust!)

And that’s the message that people are buying into on the doorstep.

That this is not an election in which the different competing parties represent different class interests (however inadequately in the case of Labour). It is not an election in which you vote to decide which party will form the next government. It is an election in which you vote for which party will best represent Scotland.

(If you haven’t noticed that, you should get out more.)

Politics ceases to be a matter of conflicting class interests. Instead, it becomes one of competing national interests. And that is truly fatal to any prospect of advancing a specifically working-class political agenda.

You probably still have enough leftovers from your socialist politics in you to recognise that the statement “You’re a traitor to your country” is an inherently right-wing statement.

But when the SNP denounces Labour Party members as “traitors to Scotland” for having voted ‘No’, you delude yourself into believing that’s the stuff of a working-class break from Labour to the left rather than a collapse into nationalism.

The SNP is not a vehicle for your avowed socialist politics. It’s the object of your fantasies. And your fantasies are a measure of your own collapse into nationalism and your readiness to be a self-deluding satrap for the SNP.

In fact, when I wrote above that you had lost the plot, I was really being too charitable. Politically, you’ve clearly lost the will to live.

Yours, most certainly not in solidarity:

Anne Field

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Milne champions Popular Front with Lib Dems, SNP, Greens and Respect

April 2, 2015 at 8:11 am (Asshole, class collaboration, elections, fantasy, Green Party, Guardian, Jim D, Lib Dems, middle class, scotland, stalinism, wankers)

Above: Seumas getting all excited

The ‘Popular Front’ (ie what used to be called “class collaboration”) is alive and well in the fevered imagination and wet dreams of the Graun‘s tame public school Stalinist:

“[T]he prospect of a Labour-led parliamentary alliance – including, say, Lib Dems, the SNP, Greens, Plaid Cymru, the SDLP and Respect – taking Britain in a more progressive direction wouldn’t be so scary for most voters, to judge by opinion polls. It would risk being unstable and be bitterly opposed by some Labour leaders. Anything of the kind would depend on the numbers, of course, and may well be overtaken by the campaign in the weeks ahead. But it could also offer the kind of government that a large part of the population would actually want.”

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Thornberry’s gift to UKIP

November 21, 2014 at 5:07 pm (class, elections, Jim D, labour party, middle class, workers)

Emily Thornberry's tweet

Above: Thornberry’s tweet.

Given the present state of British politics, and the present state of the Labour Party, it’s safe to say that Labour was never going to win the Rochester and Strood byelection.

Mind you, it’s worth remembering that maverick Labour leftist Bob Marshall-Andrews represented the constituency from 1997 until the last election, and though there have been boundary changes, Rochester is a solidly working class constituency.

But this time Labour knew that the predominantly white electors, with their concerns about immigration and misinformed scepticism towards Europe, were not going to vote Labour in sufficient numbers for the party to regain the seat. UKIP were always favourites to win, but at least Labour could comfort itself with the thought that the Tories were going to be the main losers and suffer the biggest humiliation.

That was until Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney general, and Labour MP for Islington South, tweeted the picture above, accompanied by the words “Image from Rochester”: the accompanying sneer could not be seen, but was all too obvious.

The wise and perceptive Anne Perkins commented in the Graun:

“It may be the most devastating message Labour has managed to deliver in the past four years. It’s already being described as the party’s “47%” moment – a reference to the observation that nailed shut the lid on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, when he dismissed the 47% of American voters who wouldn’t ever back the Republicans.

“It is really quite hard to come up with a more lethal tweet to send out to the party’s core vote on polling day.”

Mark Reckless’s comments on deporting EU migrants have shown that he is, essentially, a racist and (Farage’s half-hearted denial of this being UKIP true policy, notwithstanding) so is UKIP as a whole. But not all – or even most – of the people who vote UKIP are hardened racists.

To sneer at working class people who choose to display the St George flag and happen to own a white van, is to display a degree of patronising, middle class arrogance that only a particularly stupid New Labour career politician could possibly come out with.

As Ms Perkins notes, “One click, just one click, that’s all it takes. Ed Miliband’s Labour is once again the party of the metropolitan elite.”

P.S: At least Skinner’s back on form as he denounces Reckless and Carswell in the Commons: here

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Shameless Milne: Putin’s admirer at the Graun

October 31, 2014 at 8:12 am (apologists and collaborators, class collaboration, grovelling, Guardian, Jim D, middle class, reactionay "anti-imperialism", relativism, Russia, stalinism)

The Graun‘s licenced in-house public school Stalinist, Shameless Seumas, has come out with his most craven exercise in pro-Putin apologetics yet.

This bit is a classic example of Milne’s method; a crude “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”  view of the world that, dressed up in pompous verbiage, pretends to be some kind of serious analysis:

“Putin’s oligarchic nationalism may not have much global appeal, but Russia’s role as a counterweight to western supremacism certainly does. Which is why much of the world has a different view of events in Ukraine from the western orthodoxy – and why China, India, Brazil and South Africa all abstained from the condemnation of Russia over Crimea at the UN earlier this year.”

At least one BTL commenter has nailed Shameless good and proper:

SE24Revolutionary commented on A real counterweight to US power is a global necessity.
30 Oct 2014 8:17am

In the 1930s, people like Seumas would have argued that the infamous Moscow Trials were an antidote to Western influence, that the Nazi-Soviet pact that carved up Poland was a necessary antidote to perfidious Western democracies, similarly the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia etc etc.

It’s simply wrong to counterpose Russian and Western power in the way he does. Ironically, this is simply a variant of the geo-political approach taught in bourgeois universities.

Neither Russia nor the US is a champion of democracy and Putin’s regime is increasingly totalitarian to boot. Socialists counterpose the struggle of workers and their supporters to the reach and policies of the states that oppress them and should never rely on these vary same states to come to our rescue.

Unfortunately, this is one of the most shocking articles I have read in a long time and an abject apology for a nationalist Kremlin regime that praises Stalin and rules for and on behalf of oligarchs.

What’s the betting that Shameless will soon be appearing on an exciting new TV channel about to launch in the UK?

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Peter Tatchell is wrong: gays have the right to be dull and conservative!

July 2, 2014 at 7:54 am (Civil liberties, gay, Human rights, LGBT, middle class, Peter Tatchell, Pink Prosecco)

Beehive Handknits for Men 01

Guest post by Pink Prosecco

Peter Tatchell is an admirable man who has campaigned bravely on LGBT rights and many other issues.  However I cannot agree with the thrust of this post, recently published in Gay London.  To summarise, he regrets the way in which the LGBT community has retreated from ‘radical idealism to cautious conformism’.  He wishes instead that LGBT campaigners questioned the institution of the family and were generally less bourgeois, and complains that more timid types only jumped on the LGBT bandwagon when it was safe to do so.

But this can be turned round I think.  One might conjecture that the handful of LBGT men and women who were prepared to campaign and be visible forty years ago were unusually independent and tough minded.  They were perhaps thus also more inclined to be non-conformist and politically radical in ways that went beyond sexual orientation.

I should note at this point that the ‘pink’ in ‘pink prosecco’ only references my slightly sub-shirazian shade of politics. However personally I don’t see why LGBT people should be expected to be any more or less radical than anyone else.  It’s a sign of progress not regression that people who are dull, or disagreeably right wing, are as happy to identify as LGBT as creative, radical, edgy types. Peter concludes:

“The unwritten social contract at the heart of the recent campaigns for LGBT law reform is that gay people should behave respectably. No more cruising, orgies or bondage. In return, the ‘good gays’ will be rewarded with equal treatment. The ‘bad gays’, who fail to conform to conventional morality will, of course, remain sexual outlaws. Is that what we want? A prescriptive moralism that penalises non-conformists within our own community?”

But why should bondage and a rejection of conventional morality be seen as LGBT specific issues?

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