Posts Tagged ‘Scottish independence’

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Nicola Sturgeon has gambled with her move for independence. It’s not such a bad bet

14/03/2017, 03:39:53 PM

by Atul Hatwal

There are three stages to processing the news that we seem to be heading for a sequel to the Scottish independence referendum.

Stage one: why the shock.

What is surprising about a Scottish nationalist politician calling for independence from the rest of the UK? Surely, the clue is in Nicola Sturgeon’s party title.

Brexit offers a justifiable opening to ask the question which was meant to have been answered for a generation. The fundamental circumstances of Britain’s position have changed and the post-2014 settlement was predicated on a United Kingdom in Europe.

Stage two: Sturgeon has miscalculated.

But once the campaign begins, the same economic pressures will be brought to bear again on the electorate. Set aside for a moment the ludicrous hypocrisy of a Tory Brexiteer government running a facsimile of the Remain campaign’s economic arguments about leaving a union, the threat that will be articulated is not only real but potentially greater than in 2014.

Many will talk about the importance of identity and nationalism but that doesn’t pay the mortgage or put food on the table.

There was a reason the SNP lost in 2014 by 10%: the economy, stupid.

Stage three: hang on, what if the UK is about to crash out of the EU without a deal?

The kicker for unionists comes courtesy of the Tory government’s approach to Brexit.

At the weekend, Boris Johnson was on our screens giving his considered view as Foreign Secretary that exiting the EU without a deal would be just fine.

If, and it’s a big if, the SNP could promise some form of ongoing EU membership while the rest of the UK wilfully stepped off the trade cliff, babbling about empire, the nineteenth century buccaneer spirit and British pluck, which outcome would represent the greatest economic danger for Scotland: independence or remaining in the UK?

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The UK, the EU, Labour – all are fragile; all are worth preserving

31/08/2016, 06:21:25 PM

by Will Brett

Nabokov’s incestuous lovers Ada and Van have a scheme for appreciating the good things in life. When something lovely happens, it is known to them as a ‘real thing’. When three ‘real things’ happen at the same time, they call it a ‘tower’ and revere it above all else. One morning on a balcony, Van observes Ada eating honey on bread. “Real thing?” he asks. “Tower,” she replies. He understands that the honey is one real thing; she tells him that a wasp, whose “body was throbbing”, is the second; but what is the third? “She said nothing. She licked her spread fingers, still looking at him. Van, getting no answer, left the balcony. Softly her tower crumbled in the sweet silent sun.”

Political alliances are fragile, beautiful things, made up of several parts. And if one of those parts is removed, the tower will crumble in the sweet silent sun.

The compromises required to form one of these alliances are always vast. Take three of them: the United Kingdom, the European Union and the Labour Party. The UK brought together warring nations locked in mutual antipathy. The EU is a pan-continental response to the largest slaughter in history, requiring eternal enemies to come together at last. And the Labour Party, formed in response to mass industrial hardship, required delicate negotiations between trade unionists (of both the closed-shop and radical kind), intellectual Fabians and radical socialists.

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The hypocrisy of Brexiteers who moan about Project Fear is ridiculous

09/03/2016, 10:33:56 PM

by Samuel Dale

A few years ago I had an interesting lunch at the East India Club in Pall Mall.

I was a guest of then-Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom and was joined by Janice Atkinson, before she was an MEP.

It was an enjoyable meal and they were both good company.

But look at us now. Bloom was kicked out of UKIP just days later when he hit Channel 4’s Michael Crick over the head and called a room of women sluts.

Atkinson became an MEP but was expelled for expenses irregularities. She had also insulted a Thai constituent as a “ting tong”. She later apologised.

And me? A forlorn Blairite journalist in the era of hard left Corbynite dominance. All of us disgraced within our own parties!

Politically, I couldn’t be further from Atkinson and Bloom but they are not always wrong.

For example, at the said lunch Bloom told me that UKIP should support Scottish independence as so much of the SNP’s arguments resembled Ukip’s anti-EU points.

At the very least, Bloom opposed UKIP campaigning forcefully to keep the UK together.

He pointed out how easy it would be to brand them hypocrites when big business opposed an EU exit in the same way they opposed Scottish independence.

Godfrey, we don’t agree on much but you were right.

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The questions for #Lab14

22/09/2014, 07:00:06 AM

by Jonathan Todd

In 2010, Ed Miliband won the Labour leadership and started talking about the squeezed middle. The following year he gave us producers and predators. 2012 was the year of One Nation Labour. And last year the energy price freeze was the big thing.

Party conferences, as Kierkegaard might have understood, must be lived forwards but only understood backwards. There are various questions to reflect upon as we think how we might come to look back on this year’s conference:

Will Labour’s line on a constitutional convention hold?

“The vow” jointly made by David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband poses questions for Labour. The issues are whether the powers promised to Scotland will be granted and what the implications for the rest of the UK will be if they are. Cameron is clear that Scotland can have these powers but they will need to be accompanied by balancing reforms elsewhere, in particular provisions to ensure that MPs for non-English seats cannot vote on matters only impacting England.

Tom Freeman has explained why English votes on English laws could be destructive of good government and potentially even the UK. He’s also proposed what appears a sensible solution, which responds to concerns raised outside of Scotland by “the vow”, while avoiding the problems associated with English votes on English laws.

Freeman’s solution is not yet Labour’s solution. Labour doesn’t yet have a solution. Labour proposes a constitutional convention to find a solution. Such a slow paced approach is consistent with the preference of Vernon Bogdanor, Cameron’s ex university tutor, for not rushing. It’s not clear, though, that those outside of Scotland will have the patience for this.

Many have seen “the vow” and want to know how their rights and interests can be reconciled with it. Labour can’t tell them. Cameron can. With a response that creates the dangers Freeman flags. If Labour wants our line on a constitutional convention to hold, we might want to stop talking about “two classes of MP”, which we’ve had since 1999, and start talking in the terms of the problems Freeman describes.

How to play the A-Team away from Westminster more often ?

Keeping the UK together was arguably Gordon Brown’s finest honour. Jim Murphy also emerges enhanced. If they’d left the fight to Labour MSPs, Yes might well have won. Alex Salmond was given over a decade to dismantle the B-Team that Labour kept fielding in Scotland. We would be foolish if we think that we can allow Salmond’s successor the same easy ride.

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If Labour’s serious about devolution, why not enshrine the commitment in a new Clause Four?

21/09/2014, 04:14:42 PM

by Kevin Meagher

It’s quite feasible that the Scottish independence referendum may be seen, in time, as merely a prelude to a much bigger reconfiguration where power sits and how it is used in Britain. For now, at least, the battle is on to grab the commanding heights of the debate about how we devolve power from Westminster and Whitehall to English localities.

Yet, the pursuit of English devolution, or localism, (or whatever we’re calling it these days) does not fit neatly on either the right or left of British politics. Both parties have had their moments. Labour introduced regional development agencies and planning strategies while the Tories have given councils more economic freedom through their city deals.

Equally, both have black marks against them. The last Labour government loved its top-down targets, while the Tories have always been happiest governing from the centre, stripping councils of their powers (particularly with the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering in the 1980s) and even going as far as abolishing the Greater London Council.

For Labour to fend off siren calls for an English Parliament, Ed Miliband needs to embrace devolution from first principles, accepting that in future the centre should not be able to dictate to local and devolved authorities and this may, in turn, lead to postcode lotteries in service provision.

Yet, the very thought of not being able to use the machinery of the state to drive micro-outcomes offends the Fabianist impulses of many Labour politicians. After all, it was Labour minister Douglas Jay who remarked that “the gentleman in Whitehall is usually right”.

Its twenty years ago since Tony Blair stood before the Labour party conference and signalled his intention to rewrite Labour’s constitution to “say what we mean and mean what we say.” Ed Miliband needs to do something similar this week. He could use his leader’s speech on Tuesday to make the case that Labour ‘s default impulse is now to devolve power from the centre to the lowest practicable level.

The revised version of Clause Four that was finally agreed by the party in 1995 pledged to create a society where “…power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few”. Miliband could propose an alteration, committing his government to building a country where:

“…wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few, and where power is exercised at the lowest possible level at all times.”

A political race is now on to make sense of our lopsided devolution settlement and symbolism matters. If Labour is serious about winning it, then, once again, it needs to say what it means and mean what it says.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Uncut

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Gordon Brown is wrong. We need to scrap Barnett and allocate funding based on need

19/09/2014, 10:51:13 AM

by David Lindsay

There is no West Lothian Question. The Parliament of the United Kingdom reserves the right to legislate supremely in any policy area for any part of the country. It never need do so and the point would still stand, since what matters is purely that it has that power in principle, which no one disputes that it has.

The grievance of England, and especially of Northern and Western England, concerns cold, hard cash. What, then, of those who bellow for an English Parliament to bartenders who cannot follow everyone else and leave the room? They fall into two categories. There are the Home Counties Home Rulers. And there are those wishing to live under the Raj of the Home Counties Home Rulers.

On the one hand are those from the South East, Essex, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. Their definition of England is the South East, Essex, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, or at least a certain idea of that area. Give them something for that, and they would be perfectly happy, at least until the votes started to be tallied up. Everyone gets a vote. Even the people whom they have bawled out.

On the other hand are those from everywhere else. Their definition of England is also the South East, Essex, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, or at least a certain idea of that area. Although they are often professionally “local” to elsewhere, especially in Yorkshire but also in pockets of other parts of the country, the basis of their political position has always been that they were a cut above their neighbours.

That made them Conservatives until recently, and it increasingly makes them UKIP supporters. That is who the UKIP supporters in the North and elsewhere are. They were never Labour. That is also the context for the fact that there has been a UKIP MEP in Wales for some years and that there is now a UKIP MEP in Scotland, too.

They may never have elected an MP or even a councillor in their lives, or they may live in the only ward or constituency for miles around where their votes ever elected anyone. But enough MPs were returned from elsewhere to make the Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister. That suited them down to the ground.

Quite wrongly, since it would be run by Labour as often as not, they see an English Parliament in the same terms. Their more numerous and concentrated brethren elsewhere would deliver them from the rule of their neighbours. It is very funny indeed that those brethren think that they are those neighbours.

In 1993, 66 Labour MPs voted against Maastricht, far more than the number of Conservatives who did so. Yet there were far more Conservative than Labour MPs at the time. Of those 66, at least three campaigned for a Yes vote in the Scottish independence referendum, including that campaign’s chairman, Dennis Canavan.

While it is true that several of those from Wales went on to be among the strongest opponents of devolution, the 66 also included the late John McWilliam, one of the first campaigners for a North East regional assembly.

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The No campaign will squeak home, but, really, it shouldn’t have been this close

18/09/2014, 07:00:12 AM

by Kevin Meagher

There are no perfect campaigns and while it’s a tad premature to start the post-mortem, you have to ask why Better Together ends this race wheezing and red-faced.

At the start of August it was leading Yes Scotland by 20 points. Yet despite superior assets in terms of money and foot soldiers, as well as existing relationships with the electorate, the multi-party No campaign has not been able to make these structural advantages count and that lead has melted away.  So it’s not just Gordon Brown biting his nails to the stump.

Majoring on technocratic arguments, Better Together has lacked emotional punch as well as good basic organisation. The evidence? Brown’s last-minute rescue operation promising “devo-max” after postal ballots had been sent to a fifth of the electorate. A panicked move that, to be properly effective, should have come weeks before. (As, indeed, should Brown, who was left on the subs bench for too long. His speech yesterday is described by Steve Richards in The Guardian as “mesmerising”).

So, in a spirit of evaluating why we are where we are and positing why we shouldn’t actually be here, let me offer the following:

1) It should never have been this close. Alistair Darling is fond of saying that he warned people it would go “down to the wire”. If, indeed, Darling was planning for a tight race then he has got this campaign wrong, strategically, from the very start. The aim should have been a thumping victory to close the issue down for good and avoid the so-called “neverendum”. If devolution in 1998 has given nearly half of Scots a taste for full independence just 15 years later, what sort of ratchet effect will “devo max” have on Scottish voters’ identity and sense of otherness in a few years’ time? If as many as 45 per cent of them vote for independence today, the matter will not rest. Make no mistake; we’ll be back here again within a decade.

2) Westminster should have been alive to the danger much earlier. Since 2010, there have been three secretaries of state for Scotland. Each of them, Danny Alexander, Michael Moore and Alistair Carmichael are Liberal Democrats. And each of them has been asleep at the wheel. The role should have been used to help counter the SNP’s advance in the Scottish Parliament. (It would be fascinating to see the Secretary of State’s diary entries between 2010 and 2014 because so little of value to this campaign seems to have been achieved in that time). Carmichael, especially, should have been galvanising the Cabinet to tee-up a more considered “devo max” offer much earlier, or, indeed, have that option put on the ballot paper.

3) The Tories have not delivered. Despite David Cameron’s heartfelt please to Scots in recent days, his party’s meltdown in Scotland in recent decades has meant that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has, incongruously, had limited purchase in this debate. That said, despite only having a single MP, half a million Scots still voted Conservative at the 2011 Scottish parliamentary elections. Tory strategists should have spent the last few years cultivating this base and their party’s organisation for this very moment. Unfortunately, David Cameron’s detoxification of his party never included a meaningful attempt to regain a foothold in Scotland. (This is presumably why he surrendered the Scottish Office to the Lib Dems). (more…)

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Labour must overcome the Terrible Simplifiers

16/09/2014, 09:42:16 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Ben Watt recently won best “difficult” second album at the AIM Independent Music awards. In the chorus to the album’s closing song he sings that “the heart is a mirror where it’s easy to just see yourself”. One of the verses tells of a redundant man undertaking childcare and domestic responsibilities, while his wife is the bread winner. All this man can see in his heart is the pain of redundancy, which distorts his relationship with his wife, causing him to see her as a threat to his sense of himself.
We are awash with pain: the economic pain of unemployment, struggling to get by and dead end jobs; the social pain of loneliness, dislocation and addiction; and much else besides. All of which breeds anger and takes potent form in the politics of grievance.

This fits snugly and powerfully within the essential political narrative. The elements of this narrative are a critique of the status quo, a vision of a better alternative and a route map for moving from the status quo to this alternative, often accompanied by identification and condemnation of those who frustrate this transition.

Grievance politics trades on anger with those supposedly forestalling a better world: the EU that denies the ale sodden, sunny uplands of UKIP; the English oppressors of the Scottish. UKIP and the SNP, though, converge on a shared enemy: Westminster and the political class. The faraway elite chain us to the Brussels cabal; conspire against the Scottish.

These claims are ridiculous and are mocked. Daily Mash reports on a UKIP councillor being proud to announce “that Doncaster will be freed from the yoke of EU membership with immediate effect” and on a film called 12 Years a Scot, “the brutal but uplifting story of Brian Northup, a free man who at no point is forced to work on a plantation”.

When trust in Westminster is at an unprecedented low and the pain of everyday lives feels unending, unendurable and beyond the capacity of these mendacious leaders to eradicate, what is absurd – that the EU is an oppression, that the Scots are oppressed by the UK – gains traction. These kind of all encompassing narratives are not alien to Labour’s history.

Clause 4 socialism, for example, explained all our problems in terms of private ownership and saw all our solutions in its elimination. In the belly of the Labour Party, we always knew that this violated what David Mitchell later proposed as a liberal tenet: the instinct to offer, “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that”. Tony Blair’s revision of Clause 4 communicated to the wider electorate recognition of this.

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The fight for the union goes on, whatever happens on the eighteenth

15/09/2014, 12:08:26 PM

by David Butler

“If we fight 100 times and beat him 99 he will be King still, but if he beats us but once, or the last time, we shall be hanged, we shall lose our estates, and our posterities be undone” – Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester

The future of the Union hangs by a thread. A partnership that has lasted three hundred and seven years, and achieved many wonderful things, could be extinguished. Better Together can still win on Thursday and I’m hoping it will. If No does indeed win, there can be no let up in the struggle. The nineteenth of September 2014 must be the first day of the next battle for the future of our country.

The words of the 2nd Earl of Manchester were spoken at the height of the First English Civil War in November 1644. The fate facing opponents of Scottish independence is not death and penury, but the point stands: the SNP must win only once, by a single vote, to separate Scotland from England forever. We must win every time.

Alex Massie, in a recent Spectator piece, charted the increasing acceptability of independence as an idea. As Massie correctly observed, the idea of Scottish nationalism cannot be killed, not now, not after all this time. If 47% of the electorate vote for separation, that is a sizeable bloc who wish to tear apart the existing polity; only a minor swing would be required to make that a majority opinion.

Perhaps the SNP, like Quebec separatists Bloc Quebecois, would eventually collapse and be consigned to a future behind Labour in Scotland. This seems unlikely given their current poll ratings. Even if they were weaker in the polls, it would not be something we could just wait and hope for. Nationalism must be fought and driven back with ideas, policy and organisation. It is worth remembering the remarks of Neil Kinnock that “the victory of political ideals must be organised”.

The SNP would not be a majority party in the Scottish Parliament (and hence able to call a referendum) were it not for the collapse of Labour and the Lib Dems in the 2011 elections and the Tories long-term decline. Patrick Wintour in The Guardian tracked the decline of Scottish Toryism during the Thatcher era and their subsequent failure to reassert themselves during New Labour (unlike in England and Wales). Labour’s decline was, on paper, more sudden and stark. However, it was rooted in the talent exodus to Westminster and SNP positioning themselves as moderate social democrats appealing to a conservatism about the institutions people valued (such as the NHS or universities).

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Scotland: The madness has to stop now

12/09/2014, 08:06:04 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Mental health is said to be a ‘Cinderella’ service, lacking resources. Friedrich Nietzsche maintained, though, that madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule. He would be unsurprised, therefore, that I’ve received an email from a friend in Scotland who reports the Yes campaign is coming across “like a millennial cult”.

Similarly, Carol Craig has lamented that the approach of Stephen Noon, chief strategist for Yes, “is nationalism laced with a heavy dose of what looks like a whacky personal development philosophy”. Yes vehemently insist that doubts about UK breakup evidence only a lack of belief in the Scottish.

The then European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said it would be “extremely difficult, if not impossible” for Scotland to rejoin the EU after UK breakup. The Royal Bank of Scotland will leave Scotland if the UK breaks up. Given concerns about the currency, Ultimo, the company of the Scottish business woman Michelle Mone, would also follow them south.

Scottish nationalists will insist that the Royal Bank of Scotland doesn’t really believe in Scotland. That Barroso knows nothing of the EU and simply lacks faith in Scots. That Mone is full of it. She probably isn’t actually Scottish. There is no concern that can’t be dismissed if you are a true enough Scot.

Sadly, Mone, born and raised in Glasgow, no longer feels safe in Scotland having been targeted by Siol nan Gaidheal, an ultra-nationalist group that boasts of ‘in-your-face-confrontations’ with Jim Murphy. Friends also tell me of Better Together posters resulting in smashed windows. Sections of the Scottish population have thuggishly moved beyond reason.

The exasperation of Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, speaking earlier in the week was palpable. Currency union in the event of UK breakup would be “incompatible with sovereignty”, he observed, wearily referring to a speech that he’d given earlier in the year. He might as well have said, “I don’t know how many times I have to say this”.

If the treatment of Mone and Murphy is anything to go by, he’ll never be heard by some. Maybe heard but not accepted. Perhaps they think he’s bluffing. Or having a laugh. But this is not a stag party or another occasion for laughs. It’s even less of an occasion for laughs than a general election.

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