Work as if you live in the early days of a

Better Nation

Archive for category Democracy

The Ambivalence Referendum

Feb 18

Posted by Jeff in Democracy | 4 Comments

‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ was a political slogan that promised much and delivered little back in the 70s. Like a dry seabed, constant drilling of this message into the Scottish population yielded scant returns for yesteryear’s SNP.

There could be any number of reasons for this but my own view is that Scots don’t like to be seen to be too greedy, irrespective of how rightful a claim either legally or morally they may have over the UK’s particular spoils or how desperate their situation may be.

Today, we are still in the grip of an economic crisis but the regularly heralded ‘mansion tax’ continues to hold sway with the Scottish population for much the same reasons as to why ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ failed to hit home. Similarly, ‘Tax the rich’ has been a Socialist slogan for decades but it has yielded precious few political returns as a result. Even the poorest of Scots don’t want to be a burden, even to the wealthiest of our fellow citizens. That’s noble, but it’s not going to right our country’s many wrongs any time soon.

It seems clear that Robin Hood or even generally redistributive taxes don’t have the power over the working classes that they could, and do in other countries. This may explain why Scotland on Sunday’s Kenny Farquharson was having a rare time teasing SNP activists into coming up with any genuinely redistributive policies that the SNP Government had put forward since 2007. (Tesco Tax and the minimum wage were the only two that I could think of). Indeed, the one party that had a pointedly redistributive manifesto at the 2011 Holyrood election was the Greens and they were unable to withstand the Nationalist landslide, save for a lowly two MSPs.

This is problematic for Yes Scotland for two reasons, and particularly for those arguing passionately that an independent Scotland would be a fairer, more socially democratic, more Scandinavian type of place to live.

(1) there is little evidence that they can point to in the recent past of concrete steps that have been taken to close the inequality gap here in Scotland. Holyrood’s powers may be limited, but it’s easy to get the impression that Scotland would be ‘business as usual’ either side of a referendum victory in the absence of radical change to point to

(2) the lofty promises of a future better nation post-referendum (which I fully buy into) are not being heeded by those who would arguably benefit the most, seemingly due to a resistance to take the power, the resources and the money that could transfom inequality and truly tackle poverty. The stirring, desperate call for a mansion tax are not emanating from deepest, darkest Glasgow and the Cs and Ds certainly continue to turn their noses up at the option of independence.

Thankfully, there is another way to go, and it involves ignoring the Scottish carrot and reacting to the UK stick. Using Westminster decisions that are incongruent with an independent Scotland against them could turn opinion more quickly and more significantly than hazy and seemingly unseemly plans to soak the upper classes. After all, the three biggest protests north of the border have revolved around the poll tax, the Iraq War and Trident, all Westminster policies, all deeply unpopular in Scotland.

This is where the bedroom tax comes in, the badly thought through punishment of those who are struggling the most across the UK in order to save a mere £500m. The Scottish Government is against it, the Scottish people are against it and 82% of Scottish MPs are against it. It is precisely the type of misstep that a Tory-led Government can make that might light the Saltire blue touch paper this side of the referendum.

Scotland’s many have-nots weren’t moved by the promise of riches from North Sea oil, and they won’t be again. They were however moved by a poll tax that directed unfairness at the very heart of Scotland’s weakest.

My main concern is whether enough Scots will be bothered. A UK poll at the weekend contained a hidden warning for Yes Scotland in the regional breakdown. Despite 6% of Scots believing that David Cameron was doing “very well” as PM and only 2% believing Ed Miliband was doing very well as Opposition leader, the region that had the most Don’t Knows in question after question from the EU through horsemeat scandal to the welfare state was Scotland, often by quite a margin.

If Don’t Knows can be read across as Don’t Cares, I don’t see how Scotland will be roused into taking or objecting to anything over the next couple of years, at precisely the time when there is the most to gain if they do so.

“… and Trumped it there with an ace.”

Feb 14

Posted by James in Democracy, Environment, Local government | Comments off

Trump hair“…The Saint took up the pace,
And drove it clean to the putting green and trumped it there with an ace.”
– from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Famous Ballad Of The Jubilee Cup

As reported here some months ago, there’s been a petition in the offing to Holyrood’s Public Petitions Committee, one covering the Trump affair and calling for a public inquiry into the way relations with the Trump Organisation were handled by local and national government.

The petition has finally been posted today on the 38 Degrees site, and you can sign it here. The Parliament’s rules say all valid petitions will be considered, even ones with just one name on them, but a few hundred signatures here would certainly help.

One of the virtues everyone should be able to expect from government at all levels is fairness and equal treatment. You should be entitled to expect that everyone is playing by the same rules, and that those rules should be consistently enforced. Since the Trump saga began in 2005, as covered in Ant Baxter’s film You’ve Been Trumped, local residents in Menie do not appear to have received this kind of fairness from Scottish Ministers or Aberdeenshire Council. And as Quiller-Couch’s Jubilee Cup illustrates, things quickly get out of hand if the rules for a single game are not followed.

The residents, Councillor Ford’s committee, the environmental objectors: they were playing “Planning” according to the official rules as published. Mr Trump and Scottish officialdom, on the other hand, appear to have been playing some other game behind the scenes: perhaps “Beggar Thy Neighbour”, or “Rich Man, Poor Man“. Either way, it’s just not cricket. Please do sign here. Disclaimer: I helped David Milne with the petition text.

The unbearable lightness of being petitioned.

Feb 12

Posted by Dom in Democracy, Elections, Governance, Ideology, Media, Parties, Society | Comments off

Slavoj Zizek lecturing in Liverpool

Slavoj Zizek: Taking stock from the Eastern bloc

Another email into my inbox from one of several campaigning groups, asking me to lend me name to an undoubtedly worthy cause. The mechanisms of such campaigns are fairly familiar – an issue is located and a campaign started to make those who hold power realise that it is in their own interests to listen. It is a strange manifestation of a vaguely democratic mode of thinking with its basis in the idea of a benign but uninformed leader, or if you are more cynical, of a government desperately sensitive about the ability of single issues to define or destabilise.

It is similar to what Slavoj Zizek has called the humanisation of capitalism in his thinking on the way which society is required to ‘highlight’ certain issues through consumerism, the support of charity and the construction of individual everyday people as a moral guide in the behaviour of governments, corporations and institutions. It relies very heavily on the centrist addiction to general social doxa and public opinion which has come to define contemporary British politics, evidenced by the protestations of senior politicians that they are ‘listening’.

It must be said that dogma is just as dangerous as the apparent contemporary  lack thereof (though one might argue that centrism is a kind of dogma in itself). As Milan Kundera writes on the nature of mass protest in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.”

The heart of Kundera’s argument is that any movement reliant on the orchestration of thousands of people shouting in union has closed its mind to the possibilities of dialogue, nuance, and independent thought. It is not desirable to live in a society in which problems are solved by shouting loudly – by protest instead of construction – even if we might happen to loosely agree with what is being espoused.

The same might be said for the process of governance by headline and petition. Pressuring politicians into making the decisions we might wish them to make implies a sense of resignation, or perhaps a lack of self-confidence, when it comes to thinking and speaking for ourselves.

To sign a petition asking the Prime Minister for clemency in one area or another is, on a purely functional level, a good thing. Demonstrably so in fact. The well-orchestrated campaign to save woodland in England and Wales proved that there is indeed a point in letter writing, and that governments do indeed care about what voters think, albeit perhaps only as a means of self preservation.

But to look at the genesis of these petitions is to understand how the spread and cultivation of political campaigns work. There are very few people who see politics as a distinct part of their identity, though they are generally good and fair-minded, and would indeed probably find their views in line with a particular political party when asked. By inviting people to lend their support to various worthy causes they become not instigators but respondents.

Furthermore, the petition-writing masses who operate on an issue by issue basis cannot fundamentally change the way in which a society works. This is why we have elections, and this is also why certain quarters are so terrified by the idea of the British parliament operating a system of fair elections. You might call it the illusion of empowerment. We are invited to approve or reject someone else’s ideas, but rarely are we asked by ourselves to produce a blueprint for the future.

Like Zizek’s analysis of the pitfalls of ethical consumerism, causing a bad government to make one fewer bad decision is as transformative as buying a cup of rainforest alliance coffee from a company which dodges billions in tax, and comes no closer to giving people the agency which should be their democratic right.

Tags: , , , , , ,

A political machine that gives change

Jan 26

Posted by Dom in Culture, Democracy, Education, Equality, Europe, International, Society | 6 Comments

I’m leaving Sweden, again. It feels good to be heading back to my flat in Leith, to Stereo in Glasgow and all my friends, to the Cairngorms, to Frightened Rabbit and Easter Road, CalMac ferries and Scotrail sprinter trains. I would also have put Innis and Gunn Rum Cask on the list, but the Swedish alcohol monopoly sees fit to stock the stuff to an admirable degree.

I’ve been away for a half-year now, watching the independence referendum from afar. I’ve seen TV clips of Johann Lamont declare Scotland a something-for-nothing society before finishing my breakfast and going to work with better paid colleagues at publicly funded Swedish universities. I’ve been forced to turn down Facebook invites to a succession of Nordic Horizons events at the Scottish Parliament, but then had the pleasure of seeing the ideas they promote in action every day.

I’ve heard the Better Together campaign say that modern Scotland is as good as it gets, then walked out of my front door to see a version of urban life which is in many ways better.

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a Green party take its place as the third party in parliament and take on both left and right on the environment, on child poverty and on the terrible state of privatized railways. Every day on my way to the metro station I pass three different council-run nursery schools and men with pushchairs taking their paternity leave whilst their partners return to work.

I’ve been able to live cheaply in cooperatively run housing with district heating and communal facilities, so well insulated that I often don’t even need to have the radiator on.

I’ve met young Green activists who, unlike young people in Scotland and the rest of Britain, seem to have a genuine belief in their ability to change their country for the better.  I’ve hung out with girls from a design school who one day decided that all of the products they made should have zero environmental impact and then set about making it happen.

I’ve talked to writers and journalists who are all part of a vibrant cultural arena, and seen what proper funding can do for political diversity (all Swedish parliamentary parties are given money to stimulate debate and encourage youth politics, as well as to maintain a small staff).

I will be sad to leave Sweden, though it is not a country without its own problems (not least a worrying consumerism which accompanies being one of the world’s richest countries), but I come back over the North Sea with a sincere belief that a Scandinavian style approach in Scotland is not just desirable, but both possible and necessary. Britain today is not as good as it gets.

Tags: , , ,

Hollow lies the head that wears a weightless Crown

Jan 21

Posted by Aidan in Constitution, Democracy, Governance, Holyrood, Ideology, Westminster | 17 Comments

One of the long standing arguments against British Republicanism (and, by extension, Scottish Republicanism in a post-Independence Scotland on the current prospectus) is that the monarch has no actual power.

To quickly deal with a few other arguments:

  • Nobody actually comes to the UK to see the Queen, she isn’t publicly accessible at Buckingham Palace. We could use it for other things, like housing the homeless.
  • Yes, it will mean that we need to come to an accommodation about the current Crown estates and other assets. That’s ok. They didn’t earn them. Those assets were acquired illegitimately through violently undemocratic means. There’s a national debt somebody mentioned we have to deal with and surely it’s better to appropriate unearned wealth that should be held for the nation from the ultra-rich rather than punish the least well off and ruin the economy?
  • The head of state being head of an established national church  is clearly problematic in a multi-religious nation, never mind the rise of secularism, agnosticism and atheism .
  • Yes, the Queen is very old and does a lot of public engagements. So what?

Leaving aside those and other arguments against a constitutional monarchy, such as the inherent injustice and preservation of unearned privilege, the absence of real power has always been one of the central arguments on the pro-monarchy side. It is an argument which is now demonstrably false. A series of stories in the Guardian have exposed that, far from the legally inert and ceremonial role the Queen and her heirs and successors are said to enjoy since  the mid 70’s (between the Australian constitutional crisis and the rather murky goings on around Alec Douglas-Home she played a role in appointing the executive up until then), the monarchy has clearly continued to play some sort of active part in government legislation and policy up until… errr… now.

The “oh, but they don’t really do anything, it’s purely ceremonial” argument prioritises the admittedly useful political and legal fiction of the dignified part of government over the varied and often unclear, vague and nebulous alternatives presented. Admittedly most of the alternatives have drawbacks: an effective President either elected or selected by lot undermines the supposed legitimacy of the Prime Minister (those of an avowedly Nationalist bent can substitute First there and carry on regardless);  a Prime/First Minister accountable to no one save the legislature they control by definition may grow over mighty; a ceremonial President changes little in practice except the abolition of the hereditary principle although I’d argue that this would be worth the candle in and of itself.

The fact the monarchy does do things, and apparently does so with notable frequency and vigour, rather torpedoes that argument for inertia.

However, the current situation has by and large served us well. An elected President, on either the Franco-American or German-Italian models, would fundamentally change the way the country works. One selected by lot, while appealing to my Erisian sensibilities, doesn’t really change much. And it is actually quite useful to have a Crown which, in the idealistic conception advanced by constitutional monarchists, acts as a proxy for the best interests of the people.

Those who protect us from threats mundanely domestic and exotically foreign do so in the name of Her Majesty. The civil servants and elected members who write the laws and the police officers, tax inspectors, lawyers, judges and prison officers who enforce them serve the Crown. They do these things not in the name of the government of the day, although obviously they are accountable to them to a greater or lesser extent.

One of the things that being a programmer has taught me is that when you have a functioning system, and you don’t want to disrupt your existing users unnecessarily, small incremental improvements are better than rewriting from scratch. Given that the Royalist argument that the monarchy doesn’t actually play a role in the government is clearly untrue (and disregarding the counter argument that who cares, they theoretically could and that’s not ok) but removing them would mean unpicking some fairly useful conventions a simple solution occurs to me.

Keep the crown, dispense with the wearer.

If the monarchy doesn’t play a (fundamentally undemocratic) part in government that won’t affect things. If she does play an undemocratic part in government removing her is a clear win. She does, her heirs and successors will. Time to be rid.