Unemployment fell in Scotland on yesterday’s new figures, while it rose everywhere else in the United Kingdom. There is no doubt that the difference was caused by the fact that the Scottish government has a (limited) ability to effectively spend forward and thus postpone the results of the Osborne public spending cuts. But the interesting result of that, is that the employment increase in Scotland was in the private sector, not the public sector, while private sector employment fell in England.
The Osborne theory – that public sector employment “crowds out” private sector employment, and cutting public sector jobs will somehow automatically increase the production of private sector jobs – appears, in this large scale example in the actual UK economy – the opposite of the truth. Cutting public sector jobs cuts private sector jobs too. That is intuitively correct – people who have just lost their job, their car and their home are going to be spending less buying things from other people.
As Miliband’s appearance before the TUC reminds us, the truth is that, were New Labour in power, the difference between what Osborne is doing and what New Labour would do is very marginal indeed. Only in Scotland do the voters have a real alternative, and they have flocked to it in droves.
While some old people will die this winter because they cannot afford to heat their homes, the Westminster government has had no trouble at all in finding over £100 billion to burn in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, in the interests of the wealthy elite in charge of a few mega-corporations. These wars have been solidly supported by all the unionist parties, with a brief wobble by the Lib Dems under the good Charlie Kennedy, quickly disposed of.
The SNP have provided the only electable alternative to extreme neo-conservative policy (including neo-liberal economic policy) available to electors in the UK. They have had stunning electoral success as a result. The Lib Dems were perceived briefly in England as opposing the neo-cons, with some justice, but were hijacked by the right wing Clegg, and their wider leadership was bought up by the present and future riches office brings in our corrupt system. But in the period the Lib Dems did seem an alternative to the neo-con Tory and New Labour parties, they rose to new heights of popularity and support.
The almost 100% correlation today between unionism and neo-conservatism among professional politicians and media pundits is why I am absolutely confident Scotland will achieve independence very soon. That neo-con recipe is well and truly rejected by the Scottish people.
But where does that leave a newly independent England? (presumably still attached to Wales, but I leave that and Irish union aside) Political progressives in England have traditionally been the most hostile to English independence because England would have a permanent Tory majority.
Well, I am not so sure it would. Only ten years ago Scotland seemed to have a permanent New Labour majority. Things change. But also, how thick do so-called progressives have to be, not to see that New Labour is absolutely another neo-con party?
Who launched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Who introduced university tuition fees? Who brought in control orders and 28 days detention? Who sanctioned kettling? Who gave unimaginable sums of your money to the bankers? Who massively expanded the Private Finance Initiative? Who invented Academy schools? Who was complicit in torture and extraordinary rendition? Who presided over the greatest ever growth in the gap between rich and poor in this country? Answers: New Labour, New Labour, New Labour, New Labour, New Labour, New Labour, New Labour, New Labour and
New Labour.
The truth is that, within the union, there is no practical chance for England to have any government other than a government of neo-cons. It needs a seismic shift to break this up. What we have seen is that the party system is resilient even to moments when its corruption is revealed to all, as in the MPs’ expenses and Murdoch scandals. The United Kingdom as an entity is in the power of a corrupt political class controlled by corporations, for whom perpetual war, hydrocarbon dominance worldwide and access at will to taxpayers’ pockets are the necessary conditions of their existence. Only a truly seismic shock in the political landscape can save the English from this. That much-needed shock can be the break-up of the United Kingdom. Who knows how politics in England would fall out afterwards, but it cannot be worse. A shake of the kaleidoscope is a moment of great potential. England needs that.
“While some old people will die this winter because they cannot afford to heat their homes, the Westminster government has had no trouble at all in finding over £100 billion to burn in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, in the interests of the wealthy elite in charge of a few mega-corporations. These wars have been solidly supported by all the unionist parties, with a brief wobble by the Lib Dems under the good Charlie Kennedy, quickly disposed of”.
OK, in a democracy the citizens not only have power and rights: they also share all responsibility for what their government does. Sovereignty cuts both ways. So we are all in the unpleasant position of sharing responsibility for the ultimate war crime: aggressive wars. If anyone attacks us, we have only ourselves to blame for electing such disgusting governments. That’s the argument that is used about WW2, for instance, when some innocent asks why the civilians in Hamburg, Dresden, etc. deserved to be burned alive.
So – if I want to exercise my right and duty of electing a decent government that will not arbitrarily start aggressive wars, for which political party should I vote? As far as I can ascertain, there is NONE. Even UKIP states that it supports NATO, and says that we should decide (find out?) what our mission is in Afghanistan. (As opposed to just apologising and getting the hell out).
What kind of “democracy” can this be, in which citizens are forced to accept responsibility for the worst of war crimes – and have no recourse?
“It wouldn’t be the first time tanks were on the streets of Scotland.
Glasgow 1919 ,”
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Click onto any of the pictures and they will enlarge.
http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/redclyde/redclyeve14.htm
And this
http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/redclyde/redcly025.htm
Let’s deal with the point about England being doomed to conservative governement in perpetuity if Scotland leaves the Union. Here are the last several election results, with and without the Scottish contribution. Clearly the Scottish effect on the overall outcome is marginal at best and usually irrelevant. Of course even if it were otherwise it would not constitute a reason for remaining in the Union – English affairs are English affairs.
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1966: Labour majority of 96. Excluding Scotland, Lab majority of 4
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1970: Conservative majority of 15. Excluding Scotland, Con majority of 40.
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1974a: Labour largest party, no overall majority. Excluding Scotland, Labour largest party, no overall majority.
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1974b: Labour majority of 4. Excluding Scotland, Lab largest party with no overall majority.
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1979: Conservative majority of 44. Excluding Scotland, Con majority of 71.
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1987: Conservative majority of 101. Excluding Scotland, Con majority of 153.
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1992: Conservative majority of 21. Excluding Scotland, Con majority of 71.
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1997: Labour majority of 177. Excluding Scotland, Lab majority of 137.
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2001: Labour majority of 166. Excluding Scotland, Lab majority of 127.
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2005: Labour majority of 65. Excluding Scotland, Lab majority of 43.
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2010: Conservatives largest party with no overall majority. Excluding Scotland, Con majority of 20.
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As for an independent England, that is too big a unit. The Scottish border is fortuitously placed to define a small unit of population which has some chance of being close enough to its government to hold them to account. Small is beautiful and (I regret to inform Mike Cobley et al) where there is no pre-existing ‘line on the ground’ you will have to draw one. Cornwall, The North, Wales, there are many possibilities. You could start with devolution – we did.
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Bravo Joe Kane for arguing with the deluded Little Englanders – I can never be bothered.
Joe Kane, I didn’t engage with your arguments because you misrepresented me. Nowhere did I say that an independent Scotland ‘would automatically be ruled over by the SNP’ though the trend would appear to be in that direction. Neither did I equate the SNP and Alex Salmond with Hitler. I made that clear in my last sentence because I thought if I didn’t somebody might think I was doing that. I’m happy to engage with anyone in a friendly manner but at the moment Scottish independence seems a long way off to me, so it is probably futile to be talking about passports. Scotland has given our islands some great culture, some exceptional football managers, bagpipes and haggis, and whole lot more. Ireland and Wales have made similar cultural contributions. I am proud we are united. I am proud to be English, and when we don’t go to war, I am proud to be British
I don’t believe in barriers or boundaries on a map preventing integration. That is what I tried to make clear. That does not make me supporter of the British Parliamentary System as it stands, but I support individual MPs, who make a genuine effort to improve the quality of life for everyone, not just a favoured few.
“The UK as a force for evil in international affairs? – without Scotland, the gloves would be off.”
But the arms throwing the punches would be weaker.
Vronsky, ‘where there is no pre-existing ‘line on the ground’ you will have to draw one’. You could build a wall – there used to be one. There used to be one in Berlin too. Is that the kind of independence you seek?
“with a brief wobble by the Lib Dems under the good Charlie Kennedy, quickly disposed of. ”
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just watching the media manipulate the public and the public being happy to be manipulated is quite shocking.
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all this indicates that we really do have puppet regimes, be it uk or usa answerable not to the public but to those above.
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i suppose at least charlie is till living to tell his tale unlike so many others.
Can someone (John & Jon) please point me to where the Nazis got tied into the SNP, think I missed it.
About thirty years ago a Socialist mate of mine did a thesis (I think at Sunderland) which compared the demographics of early supports of the NSDAP and the SNP. But as I said it was a very long time ago.
Mary
OT Hari
I can’t say I’m surprised. I was a contemporary of his at Cambridge, and though I didn’t know him personally I read the student papers and knew others who worked with him. I was ASTONISHED when he was taken on, pretty much straight from University, as a columnist by the Independent.
Since then I’ve come to learn that it’s very hard to underestimate the British press.
@John Goss
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I don’t think you really understand this.
“but were hijacked by the right wing Clegg”
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I will be kind to you Craig, what you said is UNTRUE!!!. Clegg could not survive as leader of the Lib Dems without the majority of the Lib Dem membership supporting him, and you know it!!!. You are making up excuses for your own shortcomings in supporting them, trying to make out things will somehow change, thats it not the party but the leader and a few of his bent cronies. You are seriously deluding yourself, you have an awful bad habit of doing that!!!. They are all Tories now, in truth they always have been. Judge not a party by its words but by its actions.
@Mary:
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Nomen est omen. Can New Yard boss Hogan-Howe see the Louise Hackgate, dead Duggan to-do list ominously concealed in his own name: Whore, Gun, How?
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Note to Commissioner H-H:
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Strange phenomenon’s known, apparently, as nominative determinism. Urge you to bone up on a recent volume containing much of the research data: ‘Wilful Blindness — Why we ignore the obvious at our peril.’
From 1945, after the Labour Party had beaten the Liberal Party at the polls, the political establishment of the imperialist United Kingdom morphed into the Conservative-Labour Governmental Coalition playing the same old, highly successful, ‘democratic’ game of Government Opposition Alternation.
What makes anyone think that a independent, capitalist Scotland would play a different game?
“What makes anyone think that a independent, capitalist Scotland would play a different game?”
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Because it plays a different game already, and has done for some time. Whence the anxiety of some posters that the conservatives would rule England forever if there were not a perception that Scottish political preferences are different? In England people predominantly vote Labour, Conservative and Liberal – in Scotland two of these parties have almost disappeared and the third is shrinking rapidly. Any challenge to the SNP will have to come from the left, and may not appear until after independence: the right does not fare well in Scotland. Tip: don’t say pigs can’t fly when their wings are darkening the sky.
I can remember when Scotland returned an almost sea of blue to Westminster.
http://uk.ask.com/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_1955?qsrc=3044
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Sad days, sad days, and they are all getting sadder by the day…
$2 billion fraud at UBS. Arrest of ‘rogue trader’ has been made. Nothing changes and investment banking, as it is euphemistically called, has not been reigned in as promised by the ‘COALITION’.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14927432
‘But the arms throwing the punches would be weaker.’
Spot-on, Quelcrime; that is the main reason why the political elites in each of the big parties, and the media claques that cheerlead for them (Aaronovitch et al for NuLab, Matthew D’Ancona et al for the undisguised NeoCons)are convinced Unionists (at least as far as Scotland is concerned). They WANT, for peculiar factors relating to collective self-esteem, to belong to a neo-Imperialist entity that ‘punches above its weight’, as the cliche goes. I don’t- and neither probably do most UK citizens,whether they live north or south of the border.
Having said that, I find it difficult to worship at the shrine of Tom Nairn, as Craig and Joe Kane appear to do. A clean break between North & South Britain (England & Wales will certainly remain together, whatever the Scots decide) will not proceed painlessly along the lines of the Czech/Slovak velvet divorce of 1993. There are several flies in the ointment that could stymie a clean break, including-
1. A negative reaction from the Eurocrats. The support base for Flemish Nationalism in northern Belgium is even higher than the support base for Scotch Nationalism in North Britain. Any move by the constituent countries of the UK to separate will be resisted because of its likely effect on one of the original ‘six’. England & Wales will be regarded as the sole successor state to the UK,and an independend Scotland would likely have to re-apply for EU membership- and the terms would be tough. Any hopes that the Peterhead fishermen entertain about gaining greater control over Scotch fisheries will be smashed.
2. The settlement in NI will probably implode if one of the 2 principal guarantors (the UK), ceases to exist. The RoI will defend the interests of its own citizens in NI, whilst simultaneously refusing to take up the slack financially when UK subventions end (as they will, if these subventions are deemed to be the sole responsibility of English & Welsh taxpayers). A newly independent Scotland could thus end up with several thousand ‘pied noir’ Orange refugees on its hands, with deleterious knock on effects to the sectarian problem in Scotland (which, more bluntly, is essentially rooted in anti- Irish racism).
“I can remember when Scotland returned an almost sea of blue to Westminster.”
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Only because their policy was (and had been for some time) the ending of food rationing. Labour wanted to keep it – I wonder if that wasn’t a very early clue.
“Any challenge to the SNP will have to come from the left.” – Vronsky
And what left would that be? A lot of different pigs who may start darkening the sky?
Vronsky. Your own comment shows that you don’t fully understand it. You point to previous governments and whether they would have been Labour or Conservative without Scotland, whereas the point, as I understood it, was that there is no difference between the Conservatives and Labour, in fact they are all neo-cons.
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Parochially I am a Yorkshireman. Nationally I am a British subject (according to my passport). In my mind I am a human being. Coming from the North of England I am well aware of how London is the source of power and gets the lion’s share of everything; that often regional areas are neglected and underfunded; and at the same time Westminster can cap local governments to prevent them taking independent action. Do I think it would be a good idea for Yorkshire, or Warwickshire, to independently take decisions of national importance? No. I think it would be impractical. We would end up with so many conflicts of interest, and even more bureaucracy than we have now. It would cause division. It would be nice to think that war could be prevented by separate geographical areas, making their own decisions, but I cannot see each regiment taking independent action out of line with other regiments.
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I realise a lot of this talk is tongue in cheek, drawing lines, issuing passports, &c, but despite the neo-cons of whatever colour being in charge it would be better to work together to depose them than work separately on our own garden patch.
“I find it difficult to worship at the shrine of Tom Nairn, as Craig and Joe Kane appear to do. ”
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Rather unlikely that either do as like me they probably find it’s rarely possible to understand what he’s saying. Bernard Crick once offered a prize to anyone who could precis one of his pieces in the London Review of Books. I suspect the prize went uncollected.
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http://www.lrb.co.uk/v17/n06/tom-nairn/on-the-threshold
(see letters at end)
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Interesting comments on sectarianism – I expect this to be the principle unionist line of attack – you’re in early.
“whereas the point, as I understood it, was that there is no difference between the Conservatives and Labour”
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I was answering a point frequently made by others, not one I’d support myself – I agree, they are the same. You may have missed my post where I pointed out that in response to a choice of Labour, Liberal or Conservative the Scottish answer is increasingly ‘none of the above’.
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I respect your concern that neo-con politics is a problem for more than the Scots but I believe it can only be rolled back by local action to fragment the political and fiscal power bases. The neo-cons agree, else why is their opposition to Scottish/Walloon/Basque/Catalan/Timorese/Whatever separation so violent? It cannot be because they share your high ideals, can it?
If you add up ALL the MPs from Scotland/Wales/NI, they are out voted by the number of English MPs. It has always been a very one sided union, with NO built-in get out clause!. But let us not forget, how many Scottish PMs have we had, hmmm, that bodes ill for Scotlands future, so far they have all been a load of CRAP.
‘Bernard Crick once offered a prize to anyone who could precis one of his pieces in the London Review of Books.’
I’ve read a couple of Nairn’s books, including his classic ‘The Break-Up of Britain’, and found him relatively intelligible- at least when compared to several other Marxist ideologues. Clearly a highly intelligent, sensitive man, I ‘ve nevertheless found him over the years to be something of a reverse political weather-vane – his tentative predictions usually coming true, inside-out fashion.
He wrote ‘The Break-Up’ at a high point (the mid 70s)for the celtic nationalist parties which they didn’t see again for another 30 years (and ,in the case of Plaid, will probably never see again). Similarly in the late 80s he bemoaned the possibilty of popular republicanism taking root in the UK- just a few years before Queen Liz’s ‘annus horribilis’ and the rise to journalistic prominence of that king of demotic republicanism, Richard Littlejohn.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/sep/13/youve-been-trumped-scotland-golf-course
Why do you think that Alec Salmond is a better politician? He’s just as power-mad and unscrupulous. Gone to his head.
The Kintyre golf course developed sensitively on a SSSI (see http://www.machrihanishdunes.com/) may be praiseworthy though.
I find it difficult to understand what John Goss is talking about, as he mentioned Hitler in relation to the SNP, only to say it isn’t important, then claims he didn’t imply that an independent Scotland would be ruled over by undemocratic and unelected SNP, which he did.
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Now he’s talking about Berlin Walls being built on the Scotland-England border.
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As far as I am aware, Yorkshire doesn’t have its own national church, system of law, health service, education system etc etc – Scotland does hence the reason any analogy with regions of England is inappropriate and doesn’t follow.
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I get the feeling a few commenteers on this thread have a lot of catching up to do with regards to the debate on Scotland’s future.
OT: The Economist on the keystone, along with ‘tax havens,’ to corporate & sovereign criminality:
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http://econ.st/nF4WS7
Someone should ask how many SNP MSPs have got offshore accounts (and if they have, how much is in them), I would like to know the answer.
“Don’t say pigs can’t fly when their wings are darkening the sky.” Vronsky.
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Bad acid trip, Vronsky? Reminded me a little of the cartoon version of ‘1984’.
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“Marshall law”. Nasir.
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Nasir, I think you meant, ‘Martial Law’, unless possibly you meant, ‘The Law of the US Marshall’ (!)