Article 50 and Identity: what can we learn?

How European do you feel?  How does that feeling manifest itself?  Does that feeling really require to be validated by membership of supra-national institutions?

One of the things that struck me reading a lot of the response to the triggering of article 50 was how much of it was about identity.  People who had voted Remain felt personally bereft.  I found that remarkable for a number of reasons.

Although I personally feel European – that somehow Europeanness is part of my cultural background – I don’t feel the need for that to coincide with governmental structures.  I don’t feel less European today, nor do I expect to feel any less European in 2 years’ time when and if the UK finally leaves the EU.

Culture and government

Indeed, I don’t feel any facet of my cultural identity needs to coincide with governmental structures.  Quite the reverse: I am deeply suspicious of the idea that government maps onto a culture in any way.  Not only do I think that quite impossible, since cultures both overlap geographic boundaries and vary greatly within them, I also think it a dangerous idea for a state to adhere to.

Nor do I assume any unity of interests with governments or with state structures. Instead I work from the assumption that a government is something with which I will be in conflict when I fight to represent my interests and values.

Neither Leave nor Remain seemed worthy of my energy

I did not feel engaged with the EU referendum. Neither side seemed worthy of my energy. When I voted Remain, it was with no enthusiasm, and it was a last-minute decision.  In the end, it was a reaction against the tenor of the Leave campaign.  I was no heart-and-soul Remainer: I cannot bring myself to feel any love for the institutions of the EU.

The EU is a neoliberal project. The Lisbon Treaty of 2007, which we were led into by Gordon Brown, is a codification of neoliberal principles.  Far from being about protecting workers’ rights, it is about protecting the interests of the business elites. It is a prospectus for privatisation and deregulation, for eroding public health services and free education, and for decimating pension provision.

If Scotland becomes independent after a second independence referendum, I’d want it to follow policies that took a very different direction: that is exactly why I support it.  Not through some kind of misplaced civic pride, but because I want there to be change.  I’d want to see utilities, transport, and the mail service nationalised.  I’d certainly hope the EU’s illogical and wasteful agricultural and fisheries management could be avoided. And I’d strongly argue that a separate Scottish currency would be a necessity in order to avoid constraining the economic levers open to government.  All of this would be far easier within EFTA than within the EU; I fail to understand why a headlong dash back into the EU is seen by so many as a given.

If I can’t work up any enthusiasm for the institutions of the EU, nor can I give any backing to the Tory Brexit team.  They do not represent me or my interests.  I fear the outcome of David Davis’s “great repeal bill”, the effects of the sweeping powers we’re told it’ll bring.  I predict those powers will be used to benefit the already powerful, not the working class.  I do not trust Theresa May to represent me in any negotiations.  I do not expect the Tories to represent any interests other than those of capital.

That Letter’s No Mine

The Twitter hashtag that took off yesterday and which features on the front page of today’s National was quite correct: that letter’s no mine.  I will never unite behind a Tory agenda.

But on the other hand, as I read through the contributions to the hashtag, I had the uncomfortable feeling that the hashtag wasn’t mine either.  It was full of an identity politics that made me uneasy.  Too many contributions seemed too uncritical of the intuitions of the EU.  Too much went unexamined.

I know: it was an in-the-moment reaction.  But it seemed one based far more on identity and emotion than on either analysis or practical concerns.  When the independence referendum campaign is finally launched, I hope that the Yes side does not operate from the assumption that EU membership is a given.  And I sincerely hope that arguments in favour of membership would not be predicated on identity.  We are European no matter how governments choose to do business with each other, no matter what treaties are struck, no matter what grouping an independent Scotland joins.

However, there is something we can learn from the outpouring of emotion: identity does matter to people.  And if Yes wins, there will be identity Unionists who might feel just as bereft as the identity Remainers did yesterday.  We need to show people that the arguments are about practicalities and policy, and that they can still feel a sense of belonging to these islands, this archipelago, even if the polities within its geography change.  If we don’t do that, we risk an unhappy minority – perhaps a very large one.  That would be the payback for giving validity to identity politics in our campaign.

The EU referendum: is there an anti neoliberal way to vote?

The EU referendum is on Thursday, and I’m still undecided as to what I’ll do.

This campaign has been in stark contrast to the independence referendum campaign.  It has been un-engaging, unedifying, and I’ve felt no connection to it whatever.  The public reaction has seemed to me completely different from my experience of the independence referendum, too: this time nobody has talked to me about it at parties, in the pub, in the barber’s shop, in the street.  There is no excitement, no spontaneity, no feeling of mass participation in a debate about what kind of future we’d like to see. The level of “debate” on social media has been lacklustre, the official debate from our political class has been uninformative, and the coverage in the mainstream media has seemed to me to belong to a different planet to the one I inhabit.

We’re being asked by some to vote in favour of remaining in the EU on the basis of a description of the EU that really doesn’t match the reality.  It is not the great protector of migrants, it is not the champion of the workers, nor is it even a bulwark against the far right, as just a glance at the far right in EU countries will show you. For me to vote to remain in the EU would require a level of cognitive dissonance I don’t think I could maintain.

I think it's worth saying that the project that some people think they signed up to - a Europe of cooperation, of solidarity, of mutual aid, of democratic institutions we can all be part of, etc - is a good and worthwhile project.   It's just that the EU has demonstrated that it isn't it.

I've always favoured a closely linked Europe of solidarity between peoples.

The EU has shown, in its treatment of Greece, that it is not the institution to deliver that. It is instead a bankers', bureaucrats' and technocrats' tyranny that can overturn the democratically expressed wishes of any member state it feels deserves to be humiliated for daring to question the austerity consensus.   In or out we get austerity, and “remain” austerity has demonstrated it’s no friendly affair.

The EU has shown, in its treatment of migrants, that it is not the welcoming place it paints itself.  The razor wire, the grubby deals to deport Syrian refugees from Greece, the German and Danish border controls, the Calais “jungle”.  That is all happening within the EU.

The EU is a neoliberal project. The Lisbon Treaty of 2007, which we were led into by Gordon Brown, is a codification of neoliberal principles.  Far from being about protecting workers’ rights, it is about protecting the interests of the business elites. It is a prospectus for privatisation and deregulation, for eroding public health services and free education, and for decimating pension provision.

None of that looks like evidence of solidarity between peoples to me.

I’ve been amazed to see on social media people who were pro-Yes suggesting that voting Leave necessarily makes you a xenophobic bigot; have they got such short memories?  Voting Yes did not necessarily make you an anti-English bigot – that was part of a smear campaign.  And frankly it made me more determined to vote Yes.  Why on earth would recipients of that smear tactic think it will have a different effect on me this time?

It’s true that there has been almost no space at all given to a left case for exit.  The mainstream media has been dominated by volleys between the Cameron-led neoliberal camp and the Johnson-led neoliberal camp.  I have no horse in that race.  The fact that this version of the race is pretty much all there is to be seen in mainstream media coverage probably accounts for the blanket disengagement from the process I have experienced out here in the real world of bus stops and barbers.

People on social media say that a vote for Leave will give succour to Farage and Johnson.  Does a vote for Remain not by the same logic give succour to Cameron and the CBI?  I don’t want to give succour to either pairing.  But is that the best argument for voting either way?  That you don’t like some of the people who are also voting that way?  I’m tempted to say “a plague on both of your houses”, although I’m aware that this seems little better than wishing a plague on one house more than the other.

My choice seems to be to abstain.  I may still be undecided by this time on Thursday.


Update: Undecided until the evening of Thursday, in the end I voted Remain through fear that a Leave win might be seen as a vote of confidence in the UKIPpy right.   Now that a Leave win has come to pass, I hope it will not give legitimacy to a xenophobic lurch to the right.

Here's what Yes achieves; where does No get us?

It can be infuriating as well as exhilarating  to be part of this debate we're having.  But I'm never in any doubt what side I have to be on - just a look at who backs and funds the No campaign reaffirms that.

I've written elsewhere in this blog about what I think a Yes vote immediately achieves, or leads to us achieving. Useful things, too: defending the Welfare state, defending the NHS, getting rid of Trident, renationalising the mail service. And it delivers a shock to the status quo, both here and in the rest of the UK, providing working class people with the chance to upset the neoliberal consensus.

(See these posts for a fuller discussion:

- "Will it actually make any difference to us if Scotland becomes independent?"

- "We can defend the Welfare state: we can vote Yes". ).

That's what it achieves.  What it does not achieve is a fair society and a restructuring of democracy. We do not automatically get equal access to resources, participation and decision-making for all in our society.  On the 19th September, those inequalities will still be there.  On independence day, 24th March 2016, those inequalities will still be there. Food banks will still be needed, services will still be unequal, local democracy will still be distant and unresponsive, and so on and so on.

Some Yes campaigners talk as if voting Yes solves all that in itself. It doesn't.  Yes is not a panacea; it's an opportunity to start building a better Scotland.  It starts a process.

That doesn't make it not worth doing.  It's very much worth doing.  It's a great opportunity to break the neoliberal logjam; perhaps the only such opportunity we'll have in our lifetimes.  Certainly the only such opportunity available to us now.

You might think that's obvious, so why even bring it up? Well, some people have said to me that because a Yes vote doesn't automatically bring us a fair and equal society, it isn't worth bothering with, that it's therefore a distraction.  This is a purist position I can't agree with.  We have to take what's in front of us and see what we can do with it.

To those people I say: look at what we can do immediately, and look at what we have to chance to build towards. Does voting No achieve that?  Voting No doesn't even start a process.  If No wins, then we keep WMD, we continue down the road to losing the welfare state and the NHS, the Royal Mail stays in private hands, the neoliberal project marches on uninterrupted, and we keep the institutional rightward bias of Westminster. I say it in person when I meet them, and I try to reach them through social media, to open a dialogue with them.  I don't expect one tweet to change anyone's mind, but just tweeting to the converted definitely won't.

So, I'll continue to say it: these immediate gains are worth having, so let's take them. Then let us push further and take the rest. That's what Yes achieves. Where does No get us?

ARE SCOTS “NATURALLY” LEFT WING, (AND THE ENGLISH NOT)?

It’s sometimes said that Scots are more naturally “left wing” than voters in England. It’s widely believed, but it is nevertheless a myth. However, exploring the reasons the myth arose is a good way of understanding why it is that the Westminster system is dysfunctional, and why the Union is broken.

First let’s put to bed the idea that Scots are “naturally” left wing. If that were the case, why did a majority of Scots (50.1%) vote Tory in 1955 (returning 36 Conservative and Scottish Unionist Party MPs to Labour’s 34)? That is an outright majority of the popular vote, not just the largest party.

The party of Scotland

It’s true that in that same year the Conservatives won an outright majority of the popular vote in England, but in that same year in Wales an outright majority voted for Labour (57.6%), something that has never happened in Scotland. That’s right: Labour has never had an outright majority of the popular vote in Scotland. It wasn’t until 1964 that Labour began to overtake the Conservative and Unionists in Scotland in terms of share of the vote. In that year, though, the Conservatives still managed 40.6% of the Scottish vote, compared with 44% in England.

So what happened? Why the apparent divergence between Scotland and England that we see today?

Well, first of all it is worth remembering that just as Labour has never had an outright majority of the popular vote in Scotland, so the Tories never had an outright majority of the popular vote in England after that 1955 general election. Thatcher never once had a majority of the popular vote in England. In each of her general elections, a majority of English voters voted against her party.

True, the Tory percentages in England during the Thatcher era were in the 40s, while in Scotland they began at 31.4% in 1979, and began to slip into the 20s. But even in 1992, more than a quarter of Scots were still voting Tory. (By 2010, it was only 16.7%).

The Tories have never had a majority in England in more than 50 years

However, hold onto one salient point here: in more than half a century, the Tories have never managed more than half of the votes cast either in the UK as a whole or in England alone.

First Past the Post

The reason that they have had government majorities (that is, a majority of seats in Westminster, as opposed to a majority of votes) is the first past the post electoral system (FPTP). It’s seats that count, not votes. There are a huge number of seats in Westminster that are safe seats. It’s around 400, give or take, depending on various factors. They tend not to change hands. And even then, some don’t “matter” as their MP will not form part of a government majority (eg SNP seats). In 2010 there were 650 constituencies, but only upwards of 150 seats – 23% of seats or so – were “marginal”. The average Westminster seat has not changed hands since the 1960s; fewer than one-in-ten seats has changed hands in 12 of the last 17 general elections since 1950. Furthermore, marginal seats are not evenly spread. I don’t want to get into the complicated algorithms, but there are more marginal seats in the South of England than there are total seats in Scotland. It is in the handful of marginal seats that Westminster elections are really fought.

It is thought that there will be around 190 marginal seats in the 2015 general election; 29% of constituencies. Nor are all of these as hotly contested, with only a tiny proportion seeing the highest campaign spending, usually in three-way marginals.

Nor is that the end of the matter. Within each constituency in that handful, only a small margin separates the first placed party from the second placed. And it is influencing those margins that Westminster politics tailors itself towards.

Keeping the centre-right orthodoxy

The majority of seats can be relied upon, so the policies are tailored towards placating those swing voters in that handful of marginal seats. Traditional Westminster wisdom holds that these represent “Middle England”, and all three Westminster parties calibrate their policies towards not offending them. The media, especially press, but also broadcast, plays its part in perpetuating this traditional, individualist, centre-right “common sense” orthodoxy. The New Labour phenomenon was built on that. As is Miliband’s promise to ape Tory austerity ideology.

However, although no party will step out of line for fear of losing those swing voters, the funding of big business, or being called “loony” by the press, the majority British public - including the majority of Conservative voters – hold very different views to those of the parties. The vast majority of the British public, including English voters, wants the NHS to stay in public ownership. They also support re-nationalising the energy and rail companies, and they opposed the sale of Royal Mail. However, there is no party with a chance of winning offering those policies that English voters can vote for. There is a democratic deficit in England as well.

People of England not out of Step with Scots

The people of England are not so out of step with the people of Scotland. It is the Westminster political classes that are out of step with the people. There is a perfect storm of inter-party ideological homogeny, business funding, media manufacture of consent, and neoliberal consensus in the ruling classes. The UK public has no choice at elections but neoliberal a, b or c. The parties are all vehicles of the neoliberal project.

This is an important point for two reasons: first it exonerates the British public: whichever party they vote for is “right wing”; secondly, it begs the question of how accurately we can describe Scottish votes as being for “left wing” parties. In the 2005 Westminster general election, for example, 39.5% of Scottish votes cast were cast for Labour.

How left wing is Labour anyway?

However, by what measure was Tony Blair’s Labour government “left wing”? It was a government that had two years previously led us into an illegal war in Iraq, along with the US. Blair had an easy alliance not just with George W Bush, but also with Berlusconi and Aznar. Blair preached across Europe about selling off public services. The Blair government accelerated the demonization of the disabled, the poor, and the unemployed, not least with the rhetoric around welfare-to-work. Labour in government spent 13 years consolidating Toryism. So that 39.5% was not cast for a left wing party. Nor were the 22.6% of votes that Scottish voters cast for the Liberal Democrats. Already that is more than 62% of votes cast for non left wing parties, and we haven’t yet added the Scottish Tory vote, or dissected the policies of the SNP.

So, this idea that Scots were voting for left wing parties is looking a bit shaky. However, the same mitigation applies: what were the choices on offer?

That the choices in a parliamentary democracy are limited ought not to surprise us. As one of America’s Founding Fathers, John Jay – head of the Constitutional Convention and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court - used to say, “The people who own the country ought to govern it” (quoted in Chomsky, Understanding Power, 2002, p315). The purpose of government is not therefore to represent the interests of the working class, but of the owning class. That is why choice in elections is limited to a narrow band of “acceptable” opinion in the US, as it is in Westminster.

No wonder, then, that Howard Zinn said of voting that it was “a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens”.

So why bother?

Why, then, should we hope for better in an independent Scotland? Well, first of all, the 19th of September is not the end of a process, but the beginning of one. It must be the beginning of a process where we seek out and understand the self-activity of the people, and articulate it in ways which contribute to community empowerment. We will also be dealing with a government of a much smaller state, with the levers of power therefore closer to the people. And it will provide us with the opportunity to force our political leaders to listen to us, to respect the social democratic consensus that is bringing them to government, and understand that a new consensus is being demanded. (I have talked about this at greater length in another blog post). We have, in short, a rare opportunity to break that Westminster neoliberal log jam, not just for ourselves, but for our English neighbours. If we pass up this opportunity, then we condemn both Scottish and English working people to continue in the same faux democracy, with the illusion of choice, and the interests of the owning class thrust upon us by the Westminster charade.

http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/11/04/nationalise-energy-and-rail-companies-say-public/

http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp2003/rp03-059.pdf

http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/images/dynamicImages/file/ERS_Penny%20for%20your%20vote_Final.pdf