A radical, ecosocialist take on the climate change crisis and the challenges confronting humanity in the face of global warming, resource depletion, religious intolerance, media manipulation and social injustice.
Bullingdon Boys - Cameron (2nd left back) & Johnson (front right) at Oxford together
"This is the most important decision Britain will make in a generation," quivered the worried voice of Tory grandee Lord Heseltine on the radio this evening. "But it is turning into something nasty."
Remain have deployed the Project Fear tactics of the Scottish referendum (forgetting how that in fact almost lost Scotland from the UK). Unlearning, the Remain camp has choreographed an endless succession of bad Brexit days on what would happen if the Eurovote is to leave the European Union: we will all be £4,000 worse off, we will pay more for our goods, we won't get a trade deal with the USA, we will lose influence, European scientists won't talk to British scientists any more, and, today, according to Prime Minister Cameron, the bloodthirsty terrorist leader of Daesh will apparently be delighted if Britain opts for Brexit.
So far, so fear.
Brexit are no better however: we are long used to Farage and Co proclaiming the imminent death of Britain as more Bulgarians and Romanians than actually exist allegedly prepare to decant to Margate. But now we are also told by the increasingly hysterical Boris Johnson that the EU is in fact the realisation of Napoleonic and Nazi dreams of conquest (although curiously he seems to applaud the Roman invasions) and now today he has claimed Cameron has been bribing business leaders to support Remain in return for public contracts.
So what are we seeing here?
Just two men define the debate: David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
All along, the referendum has been David Cameron's high-risk tactic for managing his party. Aware of how Euroscepticism and "bastards" round the Cabinet table did for the last Tory PM, John Major, his offer of a referendum was only ever designed to rally his own dissidents and take the sting out of the rising UKIP. But, now that the time is here, the real reason for this national vote is as clear as crystal. The debate they really care about isn't Europe, but rather who will be Cameron's successor?
Boris Johnson supported remaining in the EU until over a weekend in February he decided to campaign to leave, largely to give him a platform to promote himself to succeed Cameron as leader and PM when the latter stands down, as he has pledged to do sometime before 2020. Similarly wearing his convictions lightly, Cameron reportedly prepared two articles for publication, one for staying and one for leaving, until he assessed his chances (and those of his friend and desired successor George Osborne) after the concluded his notional negotiations with other EU leaders.
So now, instead of a meaningful debate of the merits and possibilities of In or Out, their shrill, personalised and ever more ridiculous baiting of each other exposes not only the immature level of their European debate, but also the truly nasty natures of both men. This should be of little surprise, of course.
These men were contemporaries at Eton and in the infamous Bullingdon Club at Oxford University. The latter institution, which takes stipends rumoured to be up to £10,000 pa from each member, distinguishes itself with schoolboy rituals, such as smashing up the rooms of new members, holding an annual breakfast involving such excess that each person is given a sick bag to allow them to vomit without leaving table and, allegedly, burning money in front of a homeless person.
Our protagonists were no exceptions. Boris Johnson's biographer notes: "I don't think an evening would have ended without a restaurant being
trashed and being paid for in full, very often in cash. A night in
the cells would be regarded as being par for a Buller man and so would debagging anyone who really attracted the irritation of the Buller men." Meanwhile Cameron has reminisced fondly that,“Things got out of hand and we'd had a few drinks. We smashed the place up and Boris set fire to the toilets.”
These men are bullies. They have grown up in a culture where self-entitlement and bullying (thinly disguised as upper-class joshing) are de rigeur. It has shown in how Cameron has run a Government targeting the vulnerable with his relentless austerity economics and in how Johnson allegedly ran City Hall via eclectic demands for half-baked ideas to be implemented and then growing angry with those who failed him.
Both men have tried hard to cultivate more positive self-images - Cameron as a regular family guy, Johnson as a happy buffoon on a bike. All too often their masks have slipped for a moment - such as when Cameron described a handful of desperate refugees as a "swarm", like human insects; and Johnson when he screamed abuse at a taxi driver for no reason other than his own pomposity. But of course, there is nothing as bitterly vitriolic or fascinatingly unpleasant than two former allies scrapping jealously with each other. Whatever the outcome of the Eurovote, the medium term future not only of both men but of their party and its Government must now be in serious doubt. We can but live in hope.
In the meantime, however, we will have been required to make a major decision on our national future with the arguments mired in mutual loathing between different wings of the Tory Party. It is to be hoped that in the weeks remaining more sensible voices, on all sides, can come to the fore and debate the issues without the distraction of either of these smug egotists.
Let them go back to Bullingdon, shout bullshit at each other and vomit together. Then the rest of us can get on with the grown up stuff. Like deciding the future of our country and Continent.
Weeping refugee in Kos with his children - the face of the future?
This week has seen yet more appalling news about the deaths of hundreds of refugees trying to flee from fighting in the Middle East to the alleged safety of Europe. While over 200 were feared drowned when yet another over-packed boat sank, 70 were found suffocated to death inside a small freezer truck in Austria, having been abandoned by Hungarian people smugglers.
Yet in the UK, which has taken barely 200 Syrian refugees compared to Germany's 800,000, our Prime Minister's main concern this was was that he and his wife had been swimming in shit off the coast of Cornwall. Poor Camerons worried that their own Government's failure to dispose of human waste properly might lead to them getting tummy bugs after surfboarding in the sea. At least they made it to shore and when they did the people waiting for them were there to protect rather than arrest or abuse them.
Cameron was a leading proponent of the bombing of Libya in 2011. In a few short weeks, British, French and other NATO jets inflicted some £20 billions of damage as well as helped plunge the country into anarchy. After a quick trip to crow over his work and tout for business for his mates in "reconstructing" the country he had just helped devastate, Dave retreated back behind his English Channel defences. And now, although arguably breaking the law in ordering British military action at present in Syria without parliamentary approval, he has continued to refuse to contemplate the consequences of his actions.
Syrian refugees reach Greece. Ordinary people in extraordinary times.
One in four Syrians is now a refugee, while in Libya, millions have fled one part of the country or another. In both places, ISIS and/or al-Qaeda or their offshoots are growing. Gaddaffi may have been brutal in his own way, but under him we never saw Christians paraded on the shores of Libyan beaches and beheaded; women were not burnt alive for alleged witchcraft and black Africans in the country were accorded some degree of equality - whereas now they are routinely murdered. And similarly, in Syria, while in no way endorsing the corrupt cronyism of the Assad dictatorship, a complex web of different faith groups co-existed in peace until weapons from the West's great ally, Saudi Arabia, flooded into the country and helped fuel the rise of ISIS and other extremist groups.
So having participated in making the world infinitely more dangerous, what is our Government doing? Well, the Prime Minister himelf has mainly spent his time stigmatising a mere 3,000 people in Calais who want to come here as a "swarm" threatening to undermine the very way of life of our country. The only idea on any actual action to date seems to be that the Tories want international agreement to invade Libya solely to destroy boats as opposed to do anything about putting right the mess they helped make. If they indeed have their way, how many fishing communities might be destroyed when the invaders decide to sink their boats as well given that they will, of course, become a target for people traffickers whose own boats have been sunk? How will that help anyone?
The bottom line is that our world is now a world of refugees. Earlier this week, I listened in disbelief as a senior BBC journalist questioned a UNHCR representative with "I can see why young men might board boats to Europe to take the risk, but why would a woman take her young children on board?" He seemed either incapable or unwilling to comprehend what it is that people are fleeing from - in Libya, trapped on the narrow strip of inhabited coastline and facing persecution and death, you have three choices: stay and die; go south into the Sahara Desert or go north across the sea to Europe. Which would you choose if it was you, or your children? Or are Cameron and his coterie seriously saying people should stay or even be sent back to exist in the midst of civil wars or under the black flags of al-Qaeda and ISIS?
This is not "Europe's migrant crisis" and even with the large numbers
coming, we do not face hordes compared to other countries. But there is a
global refugee crisis and it will become much, much worse.
Razor wire, patrol boats, hostile media and populist politicians will not solve this. Refugees move primarily for two reasons - to escape poverty and violence. These are growing and with the developed world's cavalier approach to rapidly increasing inequality and the rapacious destruction of our natural resources, both of which have the greatest impact first on the poorest, the numbers now crossing the sea to Europe from Africa and the Near East will be as a trickle compared to what will come.
And the deluge to follow will not be halted unless we take real action to tackle the causes of flight. For that, we will need new international leadership, unbound by the interests of arms-dealing multinational business and free of the prejudice and bigotry of the Trumps and others who are setting the western political agenda for now.
And as for Cameron, as he sits on a sea of crap without a paddle, may he perhaps take some time to reflect on the consequences of his actions. May he consider that the people grasping onto their drowning children as their own lives fade away are coming in an apparently hopeless bid to appeal to him and others of his ilk for sanctuary in a troubled world. It is unlikely, but we can hope that if he does so, he may just
conceivably temper his sociopathic hubris with some small
degree of compassion towards not a swarm, but rather a tide - a tide of fragile flesh and blood, a tide of lives broken and hopes lost forever; a tide of humanity.
Greece has voted decisively to reject the latest demands from the European Union for austerity economics.
The Hellenic people have today dealt a huge blow for all Europeans against the corporate interests that over the last 8 years have foisted the political choice of austerity economics across the Continent. The 60%-plus vote to reject the latest demands for massive cuts in public services and welfare to the poorest represents a major victory in the struggle to reverse the "mainstream" view that the monetarism first adopted by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s should be the default form of orthodox economics. It is a massive vote of confidence in the Syriza government and the stewardship of Prime Minister Tsipras and Finance Minister Varoufakis, but it leaves huge questions for them to tackle in terms of next steps. For although Greece has spoken loudly and clearly, the anti-democratic forces in the European Central Bank and the IMF, backed by the neoliberalism of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are unlikely to deviate from their obsession with reducing the public sector and increasing the wealth of the rich across the Eurozone. The economics of austerity will not go quietly or quickly.
This is a particularly pernicious form of political economy - it holds that balanced budgets are key for governments, whose involvement in society should rarely extend beyond basic policing and the military (although in practice it actually extends to providing subsidies and handouts to the big corporations that fund our political masters, either via bailouts viz the banking system or "private finance initiatives" and outsourcing of services such as health and education at criminally high costs to the taxpayer).
Syriza's Varoufakis and Tsipras
In this scenario, there is a fetish about reducing the deficit even when sucking money (and demand) out of a becalmed economy will simply lead to a downward spiral with huge costs to the lives of ordinary people. Its proponents however claim that, in the long-run, a harmonious equilibrium of supply and demand will be reached - although this is somewhat incredulously to be determined by the mystical invisible hand of the market rather than any socially-conscious intervention by humans. We are to serve economics, it seems, not the other way round.
The counterpoise to this - the investment-led approach of Keynesian economics - is somewhat more humane (albeit not necessarily an exclusively socialist response). It sees social objectives, primarily the minimisation of unemployment, as a key objective. Here, Governments will borrow or even just print new money to keep demand going in the economy, keeping activity moving so that people stay in work - this reduces the cost of out of work welfare and increases tax take, so that in time, if useful, the deficit can be reduced or eliminated without ruining the lives of ordinary people. As Keynes said of those who would leave things for the market to somehow work things out in the longrun, "In the long run, we are all dead." Economics should serve society; social objectives should be their sole purpose, not the enrichment of an ever -smaller circle of owners and shareholders.
However, the neoliberal elite who came to dominate our political landscape as well as the economy during and since the 1980s have made several key changes that undermine the potential for investment-led economics. They removed many of the controls on money and globalised the movement of capital; and they gave banks the right to create new money out of nothing - a ludicrous and highly dangerous arrangement that led to the 2008 crisis and continues to this day.
And into the midst of this, although Britain is outside it, the Eurozone came into being and countries like Greece surrendered their economic and monetary independence to the European Central Bank. This now determines the economic policies not only of Greece but in effect all Eurozone states. And with its decisions in the hands of austerity-obsessed bankers whose sole objective has been to increase the power and wealth of the elite, the social needs of the poor in Greece, or Spain or even Germany have been of no concern. Hence their belief that Greece should cut and cut and cut and simply keep on bleeding.
In this context, we have seen Greece previously be forced to accept an unelected Prime Minister to impose the diktats of the ECB on its people. This was being openly contemplated again in Berlin last week as Merkel and her gang felt bullish about a Yes vote in the referendum cutting the legs from under the elected Syriza government. This is the same mindset that reportedly led to some bankers allegedly opening a book on whether or not there might be a military coup d'etat to "solve" their problems with the irritant of democratically elected Greek politicians not going along with inflicting ever more misery on their people.
Greece has said no to the austerity that is at the cold heart of Europe now. But the only real option for the Hellenic democracy is to now leave the Eurozone as quickly as possible. With the drachma restored, they would be free to adopt an investment-led recovery, restore their battered public services and revive their economy. In doing this, they would be leading the way for democratic forces across Europe to rise and turn our fractured societies away from the austerity that has left Britons to choose between heating and eating, Spaniards to watch their health services crumble and youth unemployment soar, and Greeks to see their country unravel around them, their young and their rich taking flight abroad.
For some of us on the progressive left in Britain, until now reluctant supporters of the European Union as at least some form of minimal defence against the corporatocracy, the treatment of Greece (and of Portugal, Spain and Italy) demands we revisit our views ahead of the British referendum. The Europe we seek, one that puts people and planet before the profit of big companies and the demands of our elite, is not on offer.
It may feel uncomfortable to be on the same side of the fence as the likes of UKIP, but is it any easier standing alongside the three pro-EU, pro-TTIP, pro-austerity parties coalesced under David Cameron? At the very least, the debate must be had - why should any progressive wish us to remain part of this "ever closer union" that would willingly, even enthusiastically, destroy one of its own? Can this project be saved from itself? How do we get a social Europe genuinely on the agenda? Or do we need to break away to come back together in something more constructive and sustainable?
The No vote for the Hellenes is no negative result. It is a terrifying but optimistic vote that says society must be for everyone. That the collective need, the common good, must come before the apologists of robber-capitalism who hold power in the boardroom, banks and Cabinet offices in capitals across the European Union (including London). It is a line in the sand, but will need to be the first of many.
It is a vote for a future that is about people, not profits.
From the birthplace of democracy, it is a vote for all of us.
Athens was the birthplace of European democracy: this ballot said "No" to Themistocles in a vote 2,400 years ago.
The Tory election victory was of course a desperate disappointment to many of us, even if there was a sneaking sense in the final days of "1992" , recalling when so called "shy Tories" who would not disclose their political views to opinion pollsters plumped for the Conservatives in the anonymity of the polling booth. It was slim, of course, with just a few hundred voters scattered over a dozen seats making the difference between a hung Parliament and a Cameron regime with untrammelled power on just 37% of the votes cast.
And how untrammelled the Conservatives are promising to be with that power. Never has Britain's lack of a written constitution been more apparent: unlike every other country in Europe, none of us have any inherent rights as citizens of our country. Instead, as subjects of the Monarch, we are held to whatever freedoms, or lack thereof, are graciously granted in the name of the Queen through powers exercised formally on her behalf by the Prime Minister who, constitutionally, is the King-In-Parliament.
It was adopted by the member states of the Council of Europe, a much larger body than the EU, via the European Convention on Human Rights and was intended to extend to all people the protections that had been denied them in the years of Nazism and fascism. It represented the very values that so many British servicemen and women fought to defend (whilst of course the Daily Mail pre-1939 was infamously supportive of the German Fuhrer). Never again should it be possible for a Government to legally detain and suppress its citizens in the run up to the brutal excesses of internment camps and gas chambers.
Churchill's legacy - architect of human rights declaration
If anything represents British values, or what we like to think of as British values, surely it is the European Declaration of Human Rights? It is framed to ensure that all of us are safe from arbitrary treatment by powerful governments. It is overseen by the European Court of Human Rights, which can instruct signatory governments to amend their domestic laws if they are held to be out of line with the letter and intention of the Declaration.
The Tories of course draw on two sources to attack this - the first is the widely held but completely false assumption that it is imposed on us by the European Union: if fact, we signed up to it over a quarter of a century before Britain entered the EEC as it then was. If the HRA is abolished, we will still be covered, if less clearly, by the Declaration/Convention, but many Tories are signalling a desire to get out of this too - so the current highspeed legislative plans are likely the first of two or three intended stages of dismantling human rights protection altogether. Both the current and previous Tory Justice Secretaries have made clear their wish to opt out of the European Court of Human Rights if the Council for Europe does not agree to their new legislation, which includes an intention to prevent the ECHR from instructing changes to British law. Any redress Britons might seek for breaches to our human rights would become harder and harder to obtain - a process likely to be deepened exponentially if we leave the EU, which would open the way to opt out of the European Convention completely.
Secondly, they highlight a handful of cases where terrorist suspects have made sometimes spurious claims for protection citing either the European Convention or more recently the HRA to avoid extradition. The most infamous case was Abu Qatada's long legal wrangle before he was deported to Jordan. The sticking point? The Jordanians had refused to guarantee he would not be tried using evidence obtained under torture.
However, the fact was that, in the end, he was deported to Jordan (where he was subsequently acquitted of the charges brought against him, although he faces prosecution on other unrelated matters). And for every Abu Qatada or Abu Hamza dragging things out, there are hundreds of thousands, millions even, of the rest of us - innocently seeking to exercise our rights in what is supposedly a free society.
And yet is it? Or will it be?
Introducing the Government's plans to conflate abolition of human rights with the "war on terror", David Cameron said this week that as the act is abolished, to be replaced with something much less comprehensive and non-universal, he is now concerned not just by terrorists but by "non-violent extremists" as well. These, it seems, are people whose views undermine our society - how this is defined is of course anyone's guess. Is it fascists? Islamists? Conspiracy theorists? People who believe the Queen is a lizard? People who advocate a different economic system, such as ecosocialists or communists? How about Scottish Nationalists, whom Cameron's lackeys have portrayed as the greatest threat to the UK since, apparently, the Abdication Crisis of 1936 (you'd have thought they might have come up with something better than that, to be honest)?
Along withHome Secretary Theresa May, he has stated an objective to interfere in the lives of people holding extreme views whether they are violent or not, or, by implication, even if they are not breaking the law. As well as "disruption orders" to silence individuals and groups deemed extreme, the so-called Snoopers Charter will be reintroduced, allowing the authorities to monitor all of our electronic communications whether or not there is a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity. And of course woe unto anyone who goes "off grid" and stops using mobile phones or email as these are likely to invite an immediate assumption of wanting to hide some undesirable activity. Taking a break from Facebook? Hmm, presumably to attend some sort of dodgy training camp. Or maybe off reading some really dangerous philosophy or economics tracts!
In a distinctly Orwellian twist, May claimed that all this would help to protect British values of tolerance and free speech. Black is white and four is five in Tory Britain.
Were the new anti-extremist plans being brought in with the Human Rights Act still in place, there might have been some comfort that they could at least be subject to legal challenge. That the Act will be gone makes the developments particularly threatening to free speech and liberty, especially set against Cameron's comments.
Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany legally. He used methods such as anodyne "protective custody orders" to suppress people he deemed to be extremists - ie, opposed to his interpretation of German society and values. Cameron is not Hitler, but alongside some of the post-9/11 powers brought in, ironically, by Labour, his actions create a framework for abuses of power by British Governments to go unchallenged and unchecked. It may start with ISIS and al-Qaeda supporters as its proclaimed objectives, but as with all too many all-encompassing laws covering legally vague concepts such as "extremism", it will be able to be interpreted and re-interpreted by state officials, inevitably extending its scope and impact and the degree of interference in perfectly law-abiding, peaceful citizens lives.
Imagine one truly nightmare scenario - a politicised police force run by a private corporation, implementing a watch on people it deems extreme for campaigning to end privatization of the police.
In the USA, under some laws, perceived threats to the nation's economic wellbeing are now treated on a par with terroristic violence. If Britain treads the same path, what future for those arguing for a different type of economics, or to counter the overweening power of giant business corporations? Will we be designated hostile to our way of life? Will it be dangerous for you to read this blog, and for me to write it? How will we know if we can be peacefully following all known laws but still deemed beyond the pale as far as someone like Theresa May is concerned?
And whoever polices the new approach, it will almost certainly be very counter-productive. In recent weeks, in my own town, two 17 year old school boys ran away from home to join ISIS in Syria. Their families expressed their dismay, while the local rightwing paper took the entire Asian community to task for not somehow knowing the adolescents' intentions and stopping them. Quite aside from the complete impossibility many parents face in anticipating the actions of teenagers, when I discussed the episode with some local community members, they told me that many in their community are too scared to discuss ISIS at all, fearing it will lead to them being seen as potential troublemakers. Consequently, there is no clear dialogue that allows them to identify vulnerable individuals at risk of being seduced away by the terror group's slick internet videos and social media grooming techniques. The new climate being created by the Government seems unlikely to improve this situation.
Britain's history is one of tolerance of different views: Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, German anti-semites, Italian anarchsts and many others of many hues were all granted asylum in Victorian/Edwardian Britain in spite of their being wanted by our then-Allies in Czarist Russia and elsewhere. Karl Marx's opus magnus, Das Kapital, was written in the heart of the British Library during his exile from Germany. Tory Governments were as open as Liberal ones to the exiles' presence, at least until the Aliens Act of 1905, although even this still permitted entry to those facing prosecution for their political views regardless of what these were. And throughout the 20th century, however imperfectly, there has been no official attempt to suppress peaceful expression of even the most odious views unless they have sought to promote active hatred or violence. Cameron's rolling back of human rights at the same time as extending his intention to "interfere" in the lives of peaceful, law-abiding people smacks of the thin end of a very long, very dark wedge.
You may of course think it has nothing to do with you. After all, if you've done nothing wrong, why would they do anything to you? Except that is precisely the threat Cameron is making. Doing nothing wrong will no longer be enough.
As I stared in the shaving mirror this morning, Radio 4 announced that Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg AND Nigel Farage had written to David Cameron urging him to take part in the Leaders' TV debates without the Greens' participation, otherwise they would go ahead on their own without him. Aping Have I Got News For You's "tub of lard" wheeze some years ago on Roy Hattersley's non-appearance, they threatened him with asking the broadcasters to set up an "empty podium" to highlight the Prime Minister's absence.
Momentarily, I paused from assaulting my hirsuteness (just as Cleggie apparently did 5 years ago when he secretly converted to austerity during his morning shave after apparently confusing the UK with Greece). How coincidental, I naively thought, that these three rivals would write to Cameron on the same day.
But my naivete was short-lived. Was the write-to-Dave stunt co-ordinated? Well, yes. In fact, it was so co-ordinated that they all sent the same letter. Yep; "Red" Ed, whom Labour supporters keep claiming has put Blairite Nu-Labour behind him shacked up with that betrayer of progressive politics, Nick Clegg. And then they got new best mate to join in. Yes, former stockbroker and doyen of the populist right, Nigel Farage.
So, finally, all the claims from Labour and Lib dems over the months that their leaders had not refused to involve the Greens now stand naked and clear - these self-interested, anti-democratic trough-swillers are prepared to actively work with UKIP to exclude the fourth party of British politics, the Greens, in order to shore up their crumbling grasp on the political stage. All on the same day that the Greens' total paid up membership figures overtook those of UKIP and on current trends are likely to overtake the Lib Dems' by early next week - over 2,000 people joined the Greens today alone.
They may be right when they claim Cameron's stance on the Greens is rooted in his own self-interest; but what is even more evident is that their own stance is so completely self-centred and exclusivist that Miliband and Clegg are prepared to debate with Nigel Farage but not with Natalie Bennett, let alone Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP or Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru.
The only cold comfort in this most cynical of moves is that our electorate is somewhat more intelligent than these machine manipulators realise. And with 300,000 signatories to a petition calling for the Greens to be given a platform and 80% support for a Green speaker in opinion polls, the voters are infinitely fairer and more inclusive that the three men who audaciously refer to themselves are the "leaders" of the people.
Shame on them, then. And may they face a full reckoning on 7 May.
This is not news as such - Cameron first said this back in the summer when the BBC and other broadcasters issued a proposal for three debates in the run up to the polls, one of which would include UKIP but none the Greens. Ofcom's ruling covers not only the debates but all broadcast media - TV and radio news programmes and party political broadcasts in particular.
Ofcom's convoluted reasoning holds that UKIP is a major party deserving of coverage while the Greens are not. Hence we will have four pro-austerity, neoliberal parties covered, more than ever creating an illusion of choice for voters which bears just more of the same in reality. The Greens, who oppose austerity and campaign for greater equality would provide the only different narrative in any debate.
Cameron is not, of course, staking out his position for reasons of principle and fair debate, although unsurprisingly this is the argument he claims. With UKIP rising until recently largely at the Tories' cost, he has calculated that a Green presence would counter that any damage Nigel Farage inflicted on the Conservatives by the Greens impacting on Labour and the Lib Dems. Alternatively, with him as the incumbent, he knows that he is more vulnerable to attack from other leaders and so may be quite content to not have any debates while posing as a champion of fairplay.
So, all day, the media have been interviewing his confirmed opponents for the debate - Farage, Miliband and a rather hysterical Clegg (who briefly soared after the first "I-agree-with-Nick" debate last time). Why, they keep being asked, do they think Cameron is doing this? And of course, without exception, they say that he is keen to avoid the debates altogether and using the Greens as an excuse.
A more interesting question might have been to ask each of them for their reasons for not wanting the Greens to have a place. Why don't they just call Cameron's bluff and agree to have the Greens take part? Why won't they debate with the Greens?
After all, the Greens had an MP four years before UKIP won their first one (a Tory defector who stood again in his own constituency as UKIP). Greens outpolled the Lib Dems across the UK at the European elections last May and won 3 MEPs to the Lib Dems' one. They reached 10% in the opinion polls before Christmas, one point ahead of Clegg's party and just three per cent behind UKIP - they are particularly popular among younger voters and are in second place to Labour among students. In Scotland, there are now more Green Party members than individual members of the Scottish Labour Party, while nationally 40,000 people are members of the Greens -possibly slightly more than UKIP and just 4,000 behind the Lib Dems' last declared membership figures. Nearly 300,000 people signed a petition calling for the Greens to be invited on the leaders' debates, while opinion polls show that about 4/5 of voters want them on, with clear majorities among supporters of all parties.
Greens - on rise among students, and everywhere else
So, who is really frit of the debates? Cameron maybe. But, in the absence of any other explanation or view being offered (aside from Paddy Ashdown's absurd claim that a fifth leader would confuse the voters!), Clegg, Miliband and Farage are clearly scared too - scared of a party that stands for the opposite of the dead, elitist agenda they offer. Because, in the end, bar a bit of tinkering here and there, these neolib quadruplets all offer pretty much the same - Britain PLC as a profit-seekers, privatised paradise, its people reduced to low wage service drones. All of them, in the end, have one purpose - to serve the interests of an ever smaller, ever richer and ever more bloated elite at the top of our society.
So, all four of the men (and they are all men) who lead the neoliberal parties are playing a game. None of them, Cameron included, really want the Greens, or other truly different parties, to be heard. Rather, the PM hopes to have no debates at all while his rivals want ones that minimise their other competitors.
No one has asked them the questions that really matter. But then that's not news. Nor is it any surprise at all.
But we can make our views known and voices heard. Ofcom's decision is open to challenge via a consultation process now underway. You can comment by emailing them via http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/consultations/major-parties-15/ or phone them on 0300 123 3333 . The process runs until 5 February. Tweet your views as well using the hashtag #invitethegreens. Similarly, to call for the leaders' of the nationalist parties to be invited too, sign on to #leadersdebates and #fairdebate2015 .
And, whether the decision is changed or not, our fading Establishment can know that one more mask has been peeled away and one more column chipped a bit more deeply as the facade they put up for British democracy slips yet further into its terminal decay.
Ruling classes: faces change but the song remains the same
The Tory Party speaker on the Scottish referendum programme, sometime in the wee small hours of Friday 19th September, could not have been more brazen as he dismissed off hand a question about how soon the "devomax" powers promised by the Westminster leaders would be delivered following the NO vote. Subsequently, his colleagues from the Lib Dems, Labour and his own party stumbled to correct him, assuring people that of course the incredibly tight timescale would indeed be honoured.
But already it hasn't been, nor will it be. Because it was, from the start, a cynical lie. Nothing has been brought forward as promised. Each of the three parties has come up with at least one, in some cases more, sets of differing proposals, while understandably some English MPs have begun to question even more the already existing imbalance in the so called West Lothian question - whereby Scottish MPs can vote on matters affecting England when English MPs have no equivalent say on Scottish matters devolved to the Scottish Parliament. The whole thing is gridlocked and, as many including this blog had predicted, it is almost certain to disappear as fast as snow in summer as the political crisis moves to UKIP and the future careers of David Cameron and Ed Milband.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, the SNP has seen its membership rocket to over 60,000, so that it is now the third largest UK party. The Scottish Greens, in less than a fortnight, saw their membership more than treble to over 6,000, while hundreds of others joined the Scottish Socialists. At the same time, the cultural movements Radical Independence, the National Collective and Common Weal continue to grow and promote a social collectivism that has become a political awakening at the grassroots unprecedented since the rise of the trade unions a hundred years ago.
Across the rest of the UK, there are similar if as yet less precipitate progressive advances - the Greens have grown by nearly 50% in the last year to over 20,000 members, while campaign groups like 38 degrees, the 999 March for the NHS and Global Justice Now mobilise thousands of people to oppose the privatisation of public health and the corporate coup d'etat promised by the TransAtlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP). Building on previous campaigns by Occupy and UKuncut, these extra-parliamentary groups are starting to shine some light on the hollow heart of our rotten, so-called democracy. Many are set to join trade unions on the TUC Day of Action on 18th October - Britain Needs A Payrise - which offers a signficant chance to put social justice back on the political agenda.
Getting equality, or inequality, back on the political agenda is key to campaigning for transition to a fairer, more sustainable society and, crucially, an economics that works for people and planet. For, just as Labour talks about squeezing public services only a tad less harshly than the Tories, and the Tories promise to cut benefits for the poorest and taxes for the richest, Britain is firmly set to move from its already appalling second to an eye-wateringly shameful first place in terms of being the most unequal society in the so-called developed world. Never has our country been wealthier; but never, possibly not even in the Middle Ages, has that wealth been more obscenely and destructively skewed into the hands of a tiny, tiny number of super-rich people.
In the latter days of the Roman Empire and the Royal Court of Versailles, the elite excluded themselves from more and more taxes while imposing ever greater burdens on the rest of society, pillaging the state for ever more destructive privileges. Now, in this century, we see the very people who offshore their accounts and avoid taxes on billions of profits from state-private contracts rewarded with garish medallions and ludicrously outdated Imperial titles, or with seats in the unelected House of Lords. (And still one of them complains their £300 a day allowance is not enough to satisfy her needs).
The corollary of this isn't about the politics of envy - although why should we not be angry about such revoltingly unequal outcomes? - but about its destructive effect on our social fabric and ordinary people's lives. As Hobbes explained four centuries ago in Leviathan and as The Spirit Level demonstrated so conclusively just 5 years ago, more unequal societies have greater violence, crime, ill health and unhappiness than those with a fairer distribution of wealth. From this, people ina poorer but more equal country like Cuba live longer and happier livesthan those living in the superficially more prosperous but far more inegalitarian USA. The only response to poverty in this paradigm is seeking ever more economic growth, regardless of the often irreversible damage done to the environment and without addressing the need for fairer distribution - left unchallenged, the utter conceit of "trickledown" economics will only end when it eats itself, and all of us, in the process.
Thomas Hobbes - he "got it" back in 1651
But it seems our leaders don't get this. Referendum over, forget the crowds and forget the promises. The conventional wisdom likewise for three upcoming English by-elections, where the dangerously populist UKIP is challenging, is that protestingvoters will dutifully revert to type at the General Election next May.
Our intellectually sclerotic, emotionally barren Masters may be disappointed. They may like to think that they can smuggly mouth a few platitudes like the "no more business as usual" mantra so beloved but long forgotten by errant bankers from 2009, but it seems people are listening less and less.
In 1905, facing an existential threat tohis regime from the St Petersburg Soviet, a spontaneously created body of workers and soldiers, Czar Nicholas II conceded a Duma, an elected legislative parliament with near universal suffrage. The liberal parties, such as the Kadets and Octobrists, rushed to sign up, cutting the ground from under the feet of the more radical parties like the Social Revolutionaries that warned it was a ploy to buy time. The Soviet, latterly chaired by Leon Trotsky (at that time not a Bolshevik), was surrounded by Czarist troops and its leaders arrested, tried and imprisoned or exiled. Meanwhile, after reluctantly tolerating but taming the Duma for a few years, the Czar replaced it with an essentially consultative body and returned to business as usual.
We know how that turned out.
1909 Russian revolutionary view of contemporary society. Plus ca change...?
Glasgow's George Square had a certain balmy calm when I arrived on Friday afternoon. The late summer heat had cast a faint grey mist across the sky, and there was a certain air of poignant expectancy as I wandered by the statues in front of the City Chambers, the great Victorian building that has for over a century and a quarter housed the council of Scotland's largest city. I reflected how, with the polls becoming ever tighter, it might be the last Friday that the city would see as truly part of the United Kingdom; for even if a Yes to independence vote still leaves months of negotiations before formal separation, no one would doubt that by Friday coming everything would have changed anyhow. "Scotland on the cusp of making history" read the news-ticker above the corner of St Vincent Place.
Reaching for the future; Glasgow 13 September 2014
And on Saturday, the relaxed atmosphere of Friday evening transformed into something else - still oddly relaxed, yet passionate and positive too. Thousands of YES SCOTLAND supporters, swathed in blue saltires, or blue and white hats, scarves (in spite of the heat), tee shirts and tops, with balloons and flags, gathered on the steps of the Concert Hall. Cheery, singing everything from Flower of Scotland through Proclaimers' melodies to Singing I-i-yippy-ippy-i, there was almost two hours of simple communion. And smiles. Even when two BETTER TOGETHER supporters made their way into the middle of the crowd to hold up their Vote NO placards, the reaction was of mutual amusement and pantomine, not the subliminal violence that the media has darkly suggested. But that didn't stop the Sunday Times the next day characterising the campaign as just so, in spite of offering little beyond some damaged posters and an egg broken across Labour MP Jim Murphy's highly sensitive shoulders.
So much for the traditions of Scottish politics where banter and flour bombs harmlessly demonstrated the passion at their heart. My own great uncle was arrested for impersonating former PM Asquith during the Paisley by-election of 1920 in a stunt that involved driving a coach and two horses through a crowd and ended with an evening in the police station. It was tame stuff compared to some of the events of those days, but likely to have seen him demonised as a menace to public order, or worse, in our era of corporately-owned, sanitised and paranoid politics.
Now, you shouldn't get too passionate about anything, because you need to be reconciled to nothing changing. Now, with this referendum, you are to vote NO out of fear of not being able to get a mortgage/ losing your job/ paying more for your milk and bread/ not being able to see Dr Who on the TV/ your telephones not working/ being more prey to terrorist attack/ facing border posts at Gretna Green/ experiencing massive economic collapse/ oil running out/ zombie plague attack...
But in the end, it isn't actually much about Scotland being separate or not. Not really. It is about a polity, a community democratically voting to defy the wishes of the Establishment - not just the political one, but the economic, the financial, above all the Corporate one too. They could countenance Scotland going - and some Tory MPs such as Nadine Dorries have sarcastically reiterated the old myth of Scottish dependency culture to ask "Why are we paying them to eat deep-fried Mars Bars when we don't have a decent NHS (in England)?"
But what they can't countenance is the massive blow to the Establishment a YES vote would be: at least in part because what has become an extraordinary mass movement might inspire similar demands in other parts of the remainder of the UK, and even beyond - Catalonia especially is following the campaign closely, and on social and regional media the talk is increasingly of who next? Northern Ireland seems likely. Wales, possibly. But also there are stirrings for greater local governance in Cornwall, the North East, Yorkshire, and onwards, reflecting a reaction to the messy hodge podge of half baked devolution arrangements put in place by Labour and untouched by the Coalition.
YES supporters gathered at the Concert Hall
And so, in typical technocrat fashion, a plethora of tired out grey men in grey suits trooped up to Scotland to utter a myriad of panicky promises of future powers to the Holyrood Parliament. Lots of technical details about at least three if not more possible amendments to the remit of the Scottish legislature - a timetable even for its consideration; but nothing concrete, nothing agreed. And just as their pitch has been one of relentless fear of the future beyond a Yes vote, equally they have offered nothing meaningful in return - and nothing at all to foster any notion of a shared future, or celebrate the UK's achievements. It reached a culmination in a performance today by David Cameron in which the Prime Minister pleaded on behalf of the Union - supposedly the most successful democracy in the world, stopping slavery in the 19th century and facists in the 20th.
But no mention of now - no mention of our becoming the second most unequal society on the planet; no mention of his Government's privatisation of our health service (hobbled with tens of billions of debt by the last Labour Government's Private Finance Initiative); no mention of the tax cuts for millionaires and the continuing assault on the poor which have been the hallmarks of the Tory-Lib Dem regime, and are set to continue with Labour signed up to the same spending agenda. And no mention of the true history of the British people - of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, or the Peterloo massacre, or the Matchstick strikes, or the sufragettes, of the men, women and children who fought tooth and nail against Cameron's predecessors to wrest democratic rights and some limited form of social justice from an ever resistant elite.
And so on Thursday, Scotland's voters - people of all religions, origins and social classes -will have a dual potency. First, to Scotland and deciding on a choice to retake their lost sovereignty; and second, to deliver a body blow to the smug, corrupt complacency of the British political class.Whatever the outcome, the political system of the UK is broken irreparably. The three Westminster parties will be - already are - in existential crisis. Fixed parliaments or not, the end of the Coalition and a General Election may be just a few weeks away.
These are the last days of the United Kingdom. However the vote goes - and it is to be hoped it will be "Yes" - nothing will be the same again. Whichever side of the Border we find ourselves on, the challenge is how we fashion what comes next and make it better for all our people, for the poor and the vulnerable, for the creative and, above all, for the generations to come. Whether Britain continues to exist as a political entity or not, surely that would truly be a legacy worthy of the best of what has gone before - the Britain of the NHS, of the welfare state, of free education and of social change? A largely vanished Britain of compassion and progress, now little more than a finally fading memory. A golden isle set in a silver sea, a hope of what might have been, but sadly never was.
“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system,
there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless,
that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.”
- Noam Chomsky
Over a year ago inWeimar Britain and again in April this year in On The Eve, this author, like many other progressives, previewed the momentous times we are living through now. As our world and the societies within it continue to convulse and shatter in the face of the growing crises of an economic system in terminal decline, we have seen the panic of the banking collapse, the wars for oil, and the demolition of human rights to ensure control not only over terrorists but over peaceful domestic opponents as well - in particular opponents of corporate interests.
It was indeed all going as well as the Establishment could have hoped - better in fact, as the electorate continues, on balance, to be convinced by the espoused case for austerity and denigration of the public enemies of migrants, disabled people and the unemployed. With political revolt gingerly contained, even if only transiently, in the even more neoliberal Aunt Sally of UKIP, the private island-owning, off-shoring elite has gleefully seen its wealth grow to become larger and more obscenely skewed than at any other time in British history. The "free trade" TTIP treaty is set to seal it all for good. Divide and rule indeed.
But then, last weekend, a YouGov poll put the pro-Independence camp in Scotland narrowly in the lead for next week's referendum. Of Scottish voters expressing a preference, 51% said they will vote in favour, while two thirds of those still to make up their minds were tending towards the independence option. It was just one poll, though it confirmed a trend of some weeks of rise in the Yes vote. But it slammed a Panic Button among the Establishment in Westminster and ever since, as Alex Salmond has put it, everything including the kitchen sink and the whole lounge has been lobbed frantically at the Yes Scotland campaign.
First we had the faux homage of the three Westminster leaders - Cameron, Miliband and Clegg - to Scotland on Wednesday, dramatically cancelling PM's Question Time to make apparently passionate pleas for the Union to be preserved.
Cameron nearly wept as he begged Scots not to use the vote to "kick the 'effing Tories"; Miliband said he might even stay the whole week; while Clegg dashed just inside the Borders to promise, with the others, the exciting prospect ofa timetable for proposalsto give Scotland's devolved parliament additional powers, although none of them could quite explain what these would be. Labour's Gordon Brown was also wheeled out to remind people that he is Scottish too, although at least unlike John Prescott he didn't need to remind himself that he was supporting the "No" campaign, Better Together by writing its name in biro on the back of his hand.
But much, much more has since been deployed to stop secession. The Governor of the Bank of England, a Government appointee, has warned of financial chaos for Scotland after reiterating that there will be no common currency; while Lloyd's Bank and RBS (bankers to the Tory Party) have said they will move their headquarters south if there is independence. Next, at Cameron's prompting, Asda has said its milk prices might go up in a separate country. Morrisons and John Lewis made somewhat more ambiguous statements about divergence rather than disadvantage, but the increasingly shrilly pro-Union BBC reported these as warnings of higher prices.
And yet, and yet... wasn't this entirely foreseeable? A combination of bribes and threats spawned the Union in 1707, so it seems appropriate and unsurprising that the descendants of the elite that pushed through the creation of the UK would use the same methods to prolong its existence. Even more so, in fact - there is a commonly held misconception that neoliberal capitalism seeks to minimise the state and its powers. In truth it minimises the state only in terms of its responsiveness to the masses and their needs and wishes. It maximises the deployment of coercive state power to ensure the continued dominance of the Establishment - and this has never been as nakedly in evidence in British politics as in the last few days over Scotland.
Bankers, politicians, city traders, journalists and multinational companies have come together to warn of everything from economic apocalypse to "difficulties" for Scottish viewers wishing to watch Celebrity Come Dancing on the TV.
The bankers and traders whose sociopathic greed and lawlessness created the crash of 2008 and nearly busted the world economy; the politicians who deregulated finance so completely that the crash happened, and who then spent tens of billions of tax money and loans to bail the banks out before billing the rest of us for it; the industrialists who rage against any form of consumer or employee protection and who have plundered our society via PFI arrangements, outsourcing and tax evasion; and the journalists who, when they are not hacking celebrities' telephone messages are busy telling us all that there is no alternative to what we have got.
Yes, all the people who obviously have the best interests of the rest of us engraved on their cold, cold hearts and foremost in their absent consciences. These people are stepping forward to tell Scottish voters that they are too crap, too lazy, too...Scottish...to hope to govern themselves. And if they don't listen to their friendly warnings, there will be a less friendly price to pay. The bankers, traders, and industrialists will make sure their political puppets send the bill personally.
The message, of course, is not just for the Scottish voters. Indeed, if Scotland could be got rid off, perhaps tugged out into the mid-Atlantic and quietly sunk, many of the people currently hoarsley calling for the Union to be preserved would be first in the queue to pull the plug. However, as geography dictates otherwise, the last thing the Establishment want the rest of the UK to see is part of it defying our Masters' wishes and giving us ideas above our station. Even a mildly social democratic Scotland would not just be an annoying neighbour - it could become an existential threat to the neoliberal consensus. Hence, it must be strangled at birth - or preferrably before.
The big question is whether enough Scottish voters will be browbeaten or scared into voting against independence to stop it happening. The trend over the last fortnight has been a clear and big upswing for separation - one based on seeking a more inclusive, fairer society than the one emerging in the UK as a whole. It remains to be seen if the crisis response from Westminster and its paymasters will stem the flow, or be seen through as the insincere, last gasp blandishments of panicking machine men.
A frequent refrain from the Better Together camp is that an independent country would be moving into uncertainty; taking risks, and be a journey rather than a destination. But isn't that just life? Life for all of us. Salmond (who is no socialist but is equally no neoliberal either) has ackowledged that independence is the start of something, not the finish. Meanwhile the Radical Independence Campaign of leftwing parties like the Greens and Scottish Socialists as well as cultural groups like the National Collective positively embrace the nascent potential of such a future.
Besides, if there are no guarantees for a free Scotland, what is guaranteed about Britain as it is? A
harsh, low wage, "flexible" economy increasingly unkind to the poor and
vulnerable, suspicious of strangers, and selling off what little remains of its public services? A State whose main functions involve spying on its own citizens and vying with the USA for the number one spot as the most unequal developed society on the face of the Earth?
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