Mythbuster no.52 - "Tories with Naked, Merciless Power Run Amok When Scotland Leaves"

The progressive left, socialist and non-socialist, is somewhat divided over Scottish independence. While long standing stalwarts like Jim Sillars and Tommy Sheridan argue alongside the Scottish Greens for a non-nationalistic "Yes" vote to deliver a more egalitarian Scotland, the Scottish Labour Party, with some honourable exceptions, has maintained a stubborn resistance to the idea.

This has of course reached a screeching crescendo in the petulant denunciations of the Yes campaign by former Nu-Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling, though his qualifications to be referred to as a progressive of any sort may be highly questionable. Somewhere to his distant left, George Galloway MP is to be found touring Scotland, having upped-sticks from his temporary base in Bradford, to caustically excoriate the independence cause, citing in its place class solidarity over nationalism - socialists should stay in the Union to fight for a more egalitarian, socialist society.

At the heart of this argument is a supposition, repeated by Laurie Penny of the New Statesman magazine on the BBC at the weekend, that (allegedly progressive) Scottish Labour MPs are essential to delivering a non-Tory Government across the UK as a whole. Ms Penny contemplated the prospect of "permanent Tory Government" in the remaining UK if Scotland was to depart. This echoes Galloway's argument and also is deployed by some in the Labour movement as a decisive reason to be against independence - vote for an Edinburgh Government, and you abandon the people of Liverpool to the neoliberal grip of the Tories and their Lib Dem Orcs.

Can only the Scots stop her legacy?

Terrifying stuff if you live south of the border and have either a social conscience and/or personal vulnerability. How dare progressive Scots be so self-indulgent as to veer off to their communitarian Nirvana while the rUK (remainder of the UK) is mired in the social dystopia that the Coalition has summoned up.

Except, it is (nearly) complete nonsense. As with so much of the No campaign, it relies on combining fear and guilt rather than contemplating the facts.

And here they are:

Since 1945, there have been 18 UK-wide General elections.

At a UK level, Labour have won 8 of these outright: 1945, 1950, 1964, 1966, October 1974, 1997, 2001 and 2005.

At UK level, the Tories have also won 8 outright: 1951 (although Labour won more votes than them), 1955, 1959, 1970, 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992.

Two UK elections - February 1974 and 2010- produced "hung" Parliaments where no one party had an outright majority. In 1974, Labour had more seats than the Tories (although this time the Tories won the most votes) and governed as a minority administration for 7 months before calling another election which they won outright by just three seats.

By contrast, in Scotland, Labour have won more than half the Westminster seats in 16 of the 18 elections. The only exceptions were 1951 when they tied with the Tories on 35 seats each and in 1955, when the Tories won outright by 36 seats to 34 . After that, the Tories declined gradually, with a decisive moment in 1987 when their seats more than halved in number after Thatcherite economics devastated swathes of Scotland. The decay continued all the way to 1997, when they finally lost their last MP in the country. They have since regained one, but remain a somewhat diminished force north of the border - and in addition to Labour, the SNP and (until recently at least) the Lib Dems have held significant levels of support to create a rather different political system and voting culture compared to other parts of the UK, a tendency further embedded by the devolved Parliament.

So Scotland has almost always elected a majority of Labour MPs (albeit their numbers exaggerated by the first past the post voting system) but on numerous occasions has ended up ruled by a Tory or Tory-led Government it didn't vote for.

What about the reverse - the claim that Scottish MPs have been so numerous on the Labour benches that they have made the critical difference for the UK, tipping the Union supposedly leftwards where, in their absence, the Tories would have held naked, merciless power?

Well, from a good look at the statistics, the answer is that Scottish Labour MPs have made the decisive difference precisely once - in 1964, their 43 to 24 lead over the Tories in Scotland trumped the results in the rUK, where the Tories led Labour by 280 to 273. This produced an overall UK total of 317 Labour to 304 Conservatives and 9 Liberals. With such a narrow majority, the Prime Minister Harold Wilson went back to the country in 1966 and won by a much wider margin and although Labour continued to dominate in Scotland, it also won outright in the rUK.

The only other occasions where arguably there has been a crucial impact were October 1974 where the absence of Scottish Labour would have seen the rUK with a continuing hung Parliament - this occurred in any case by 1976 when Labour lost its UK-wide majority through by-election defeats and had to survive via a pact with the Liberals. And in 2010, an absence of Scottish MPs would have produced an rUK Parliament with an outright Tory majority - though how different this would have been to the present Coalition, which has pursued the most extreme rightwing agenda in our history, is anyone's guess.

So it seems quite an act of either dissimulation or of ignorance to parrot the idea that without Scotland, the rUK would be condemned to perpetual Tory Government. All bar one of Labour's post-war victories would still have been achieved without Scottish MPs (which is not to diminish the powerfully positive contribution of many Scottish politicians to the progressive and socialist causes over the years - with some powerful contributors to the advance of the welfare state and to significant social gains in the days before Thatcherism and Nu-Labour).

But in sharp contrast, Scotland has had governments it did not vote for after the eight of the eighteen elections. It's not a happy record and is one that speaks of a country with a basically egalitarian culture that has instead been subjected periodically to ever harsher neoliberal experimentation. The UK is now by some indices the fourth most unequal country on the planet - if Scottish votes could make a difference, there is precious little sign of it; and crucially, the maths show it is an argument that really does not add up. Scottish MPs make up 9% of the total - a small minority and for much of the time an effective irrelevance in terms of any numerical impact.

Radical Independence - ideas for a new society

The truth is that progressives on both sides of the border have nothing at all to fear from an independent Scotland but rather quite the opposite: for those to the north, there is the prospect of building a more equal society freed from much of the block on change posed by the London Establishment and its agents. Movements like the Radical Independence Campaign have been central to promoting this alternative vision of a new country.

For those to the south, there is the prospect of a neighbour powerfully demonstrating the value of a society based on the common weal as opposed to narrow personal interest. Moreover, there is indeed no reason at all to contemplate perpetual Tory Government with Scotland gone. The real challenge it to ensure that there is a genuine left wing alternative on offer to the people of the inelegantly named rUK.

And that's another matter altogether.

The stats:

Election date	Labour (seats won)	Conservative (seats won)	Liberal & successors (seats won)	Others (seats won)
1945 Scotland	37	27	0	7
1945 UK	393	210	12	25
1945Ruk*	356	183	12	18
1950 Scotland	37	31	2	1
1950 UK	315	298	9	3
1950 Ruk	278	267	7	2
1951 Scotland	35	35	1	0
1951 UK	295	321	6	3
1951 Ruk	260	286	5	3
1955 Scotland	34	36	1	0
1955 UK	277	345	6	2
1955 Ruk	243	309	5	2
1959 Scotland	38	31	1	1
1959 UK	258	365	6	1
1959 Ruk	220	334	5	0
1964 Scotland	43	24	4	0
1964 UK	317	304	9	0
1964 Ruk	274	280	5	0
1966 Scotland	46	20	5	0
1966 UK	364	253	12	1
1966 Ruk	318	233	7	1
1970 Scotland	44	23	3	1
1970 UK	288	330	6	6
1970 Ruk	244	307	3	5
1974 f Scotland	40	21	3	7
1974 f UK	301	297	14	23
1974 f Ruk	261	276	11	16
1974 o Scotland	41	16	3	11
1974 o UK	319	277	13	26
1974 o Ruk	278	261	10	15
1979 Scotland	44	22	3	2
1979 UK	269	339	11	16
1979 Ruk	225	317	8	14
1983 Scotland	41	21	8	2
1983 UK	209	397	23	21
1983 Ruk	168	376	15	19
1987 Scotland	50	10	9	3
1987 UK	229	376	22	23
Ruk	179	366	13	20
1992 Scotland	49	11	9	3
1992 UK	271	336	20	25
Ruk	222	325	11	22
1997 Scotland	56	0	10	6
1997 UK	418	165	46	30
1997 Ruk	362	165	36	24
2001 Scotland	55	1	10	5
2001 UK	412	166	52	29
2001 Ruk	357	165	42	24
2005 Scotland	41	1	11	6
2005 UK	356	198	62	30
2005 Ruk	315	197	51	24
2010 Scotland	41	1	11	6
2010 UK	258	306	57	29
2010 Ruk	217	305	46	23

*rUK - "remaining UK" - i.e., combined totals of MPs sitting for England, Wales and Northern Ireland constituencies at Westminster

Data Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Scotland#1945
http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/uktable.htm

Bowie's Britain

David Bowie, international rock star and UK tax exile, stole some headlines this week when his acceptance speech for his Brit award included a plea to Scots not to vote for independence in the referendum this September. His call was delivered in his not unusual absence from these shores by model Kate Moss. It came at the end of a rather disastrous few days for the "No" camp, where a combined onslaught by the UK parties on SNP plans for a post-independence currency union badly backfired with a strong pro-Yes reaction nearly halving the gap between the two sides.

Bowie - Not waving goodbye to Scotland

Bowie, who has enjoyed something of a comeback recently with his first album for some years, has often courted controversy before and it seems unlikely that this stunt has much more to it than a spot of publicity seeking. At any rate, if the anti-independence brigade want to laud his support for their cause, they may want to reflect on some of his past statements, albeit some time ago, about his ideas for the Britain he wants Scots to stay part of.

“Britain is ready for a fascist leader… I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism… I believe very strongly in fascism, people have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership…Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars…You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up.”

These were back in 1976 when the National Front was on the rise and to be fair, he subsequently did distance himself from these comments attributing them to "being out of (his) mind at the time", but it nevertheless seems unlikely that many Scots will be much attracted by the latest calls of this Manhattan resident. If they have any sense, the No camp might sensibly have Major Tom dispatched to Mars, maybe in search of the Missing Inaction Scottish Secretary of State, Brusier Carmichael.

Green Party: We are Facing a National Emergency Now

The Green Party has called for urgent action by the Government to tackle the long term causes of flooding as well as dealing more robustly with the current crisis. Party leader Natalie Bennett has called for Cabinet Ministers and Senior Civil Servants who do not sign up to climate action to be sacked. In particular, she and the Green MP Caroline Lucas called for the dismissal of the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson. (video and press release below)

In more detail, the Greens' press release, issued this morning, sets out the Party's demands:

Ministers who won’t act on climate evidence should go, says Green Party

The UK’s response to the flooding crisis must centre on a long-term strategy to address climate change the Green Party says today, as it recommends a series of ten measures to improve the country’s flood resilience in future. It says sustained political action on climate change is crucial to reducing the risk of severe flooding happening again.

The Party is calling for Environment Secretary Owen Paterson to be sacked and for the Prime Minister to remove Cabinet Ministers and senior government officials who refuse to accept the scientific consensus on climate change (1). The Met Office has said (2) all the evidence points to climate change contributing to these extraordinary floods.

“Politicians who ride roughshod over the painstaking findings of climate scientists (3), sometimes motivated by their inappropriately close links to fossil fuel big business, endanger our future and our children’s future”, said Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett.

“It’s a crying shame more of the recommendations made by the The Pitt Review into the 2007 floods (4) haven’t been taken seriously by Labour, the Tories, and their Coalition government lackeys in the Lib Dem Party. But it is not too late for action.”

Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, said:

“Across the country, homes and businesses are being devastated by the floods, and our hearts go out to everyone whose life is being turned upside down.  Nature is giving us another wake-up call.

“In addition to making sure everything possible is done to help people affected by the immediate crisis, we need a credible long term strategy to tackle the risk of flooding and extreme weather to people's homes and livelihoods in the future.” 

The call to government urges ministers to adopt the recommendations of a major independent cross sector coalition[1]  for  a Cabinet-level committee on infrastructure and climate change resilience and a Royal Commission on the long-term impacts of climate change on land.

The Green Party is also calling for all staff cuts at the Environment Agency to be cancelled, planning rules to be strengthened to prevent further development on flood plains, and for increased levels of spending on flood defences to a level in line with expert recommendations from the Environment Agency and the Climate Change Committee.

And it is supporting the call of campaigners for  the billions of UK fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks to be used to help the victims of flooding[2].

“This redirection will address the underspend and assist the victims of flooding, as well as putting a halt to public money exacerbating the problem of climate change that is making the floods so much worse”, noted Bennett.

ENDS 

When Only The Wellies Are Green...

The flooding in recent weeks in the south west and Wales has now spread eastwards, perplexing our carbon-addicted political class more and more, and even posing a dilemma for climate change deniers in UKIP. Insufficient sea walls, lack of dredging and absence of enough pumping equipment are all routinely denounced as the causes of the devastation, with angry fingers jabbed at the cash-strapped Environment Agency and it's hapless Chair, Chris Smith.

So what to do for our political leaders? Reverse the cuts in energy conservation schemes so we can begin to tackle our emissions? Or ban fracking, which is set to exponentially increase CO2 release into our atmosphere?

No. Instead, much better than that, Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Farage all reached a consensus on their response to the crisis.

They put on some green wellies and went and looked at the water and muttered things like "We'll do everything it takes!", "never again", "we spent more than them", "we are spending more than them" or "that water looks like it came from abroad."

Yes, as our country is gripped by just the precursor of the climate change to come, our future is in the hands of the Wallies in Wellies. But sadly, frighteningly, the only thing genuinely green about them is their designer footwear.

Time to flush the lot of them through the floodgates of history and down into the drain of just-a-vague-memory.

Nigel Farage was available for comment in the pub...

(with thanks to the anonymous web person who created this pic. Please send a link and will add!)

Inside The Mind of Ed Davey

The gasman cometh...

So, our Energy Secretary, Lib Dem Ed Davey, is to deliver a rant today (the plan appears to be for it to be a sort of spontaneously angry one) in which he will attack climate change deniers in the Tory Party as "wilfully ignorant, head-in-the-sand, nimbyists" whose "diabolical" dealings have left us prey to the vicissitudes of the extreme weather events of recent weeks. These are, Mr Davey will screech, the result of the global warming that these Tories deny.

Well, indeed, except Mr Davey needs to take a step back and rather than criticise the allies he and his party have been making common cause with for the last four years, perhaps he should take a look in the mirror. What goes on inside that head? How can one man face so many ways at the same time?

He decries the corporate power of the Big Six, but then defends their right and need to make huge profits. He talks about supporting green energy, but puts obstacle after obstacle in its way while signing up to "incentives" for dirty fuels, whether loans for French owned EDF to build nuclear plants, or payments to local councils and communities to encourage fracking to take place.

But of course Mr Davey, as covered here last year, has expressed his amorous feelings for shale gas most fulsomely (see "Having it both ways") and under his watch and with his blessing, the Coalition have now opened up England to be fracked into oblivion by French oil companies and Tory Party donors. Plans are in motion to release around 130 billion tonnes of shale gas into the atmosphere (via various uses) from English wells over the next four decades and beyond. Not only will this damage the countryside, it will do nothing to reduce our carbon emissions - the very cause of man made global warming he professes to be so concerned about.

In addition, the Government under his stewardship of energy policy (and that of his former party colleague Chris Huhne) has committed to building a whole series of new and long term oil and gas powered electricity power plants. This "dash for gas" ties us  in to continuing to burn massive quantities of carbon fuels for decades into the future and makes it nigh impossible to meet our carbon reduction targets for 2050 - a vital milestone if we are to play our part in the global struggle to contain warming at levels that don't threaten to overwhelm humanity.

Similarly, Mr Davey's department has slashed funding and the feed-in tariff for community owned renewable energy schemes (a sharp contrast to the fracking premia). And his "green deal" scheme for energy conservation, as well as having its funding cut, has been a disaster - a Green Party scheme adopted by the local council in the single district of Kirklees had as of last year insulated over 50,000 houses to barely a dozen under the national Government scheme.

So Mr Ed should perhaps calm down - and get some help for his shale addiction before he turns on the dinosaurs in the Tories - after all, some of them almost certainly will in time form the base material for future shale gas, so a little more respect please. Moreover, unlike many of these corporately sponsored backbenchers, he clearly understands the need for action on global warming and as Energy Secretary is just ever so slightly better placed than most of us to do something about it.

Except that he hasn't. And if fact, his actions are likely to have made things that bit worse.

On the other hand, maybe if we can harness the gales of hot air that is so frequently emitted in large quantities from this man's mouth, we could slash our fuel requirements at a stroke.

Keep East Coast Public - Protecting the People from Privatisation

The Coalition Government has published a shortlist of three contenders for the currently state-owned East Coast rail franchise, which carries passengers between London and Leeds/York and Glasgow/Edinburgh and points between.

East Coast came into being in 2009 when the previous private franchisee effectively collapsed. Since then, it has proven popular and more punctual than its private rivals, scored a significantly higher than average satisfaction rating and drawn on fewer subsidies than the profit-seekers who run all the other franchises in the UK.  

And there is the not inconsiderable point that it has earned over £800 millions for the taxpayer.

Green Party calls for renationalisation of Britain's railways.

But now it faces being sold of to one of First Group, Keolis/Eurostar or Stagecoach/Virgin, the very operators who are hoovering up public funds at nearly three times the rate in real terms that the former state owned national British Rail company required - indeed, the Green Party has estimated that the taxpayer would save over £1 billion a year if the franchises were all brought back into state hands as they expired. Little wonder many see the East Coast move as simply ideological on the part of the Tories and yet another demonstration of political vacuity on the part of their Lib Dem appendages.

The Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, who presented a rail nationalisation bill last summer, has now launched a Public Service Users Bill which aims to protect the public from privatisation of services in areas such as the NHS, education and transport. Devised in conjunction with the campaign group We Own It, Lucas's private members bill would:

• Make public ownership the default option before any services, national or local, are contracted out to the private sector
• Require there to be a realistic and thorough in-house bid whenever a service is put out to tender
• Ensure there is full consideration of public opinion before any service is privatised or outsourced
• Give the public a right to recall private companies running public services poorly
• Require private companies running public services to be transparent about their performance and financial data (as in the public sector)
• Make private companies running public services subject to Freedom of Information requests (as in the public sector)
• Give social enterprises and mutuals, as well as public sector organisations, priority in tendering processes

We Own It have cited examples of how public services function best in public hands, contrary to the mythology perpetrated by usually privately owned mass media whose owners have direct interests in privatisation. East Coast is a fine example in itself - sadly, it is unlikely in the extreme that the Government will not sell it off to private hands, ending a brief but successful return to a public rail service. And with the Royal Mail sold off last year and more and more NHS services tendered out to profit seeking organisations like Virgin, the privatisation of the few remaining state assets we have is drawing every closer.

But this makes it all the more important to not give up the campaign to protect the services that remain in public hands and return the ones we have lost at the first possible opportunity. As with others before, Yorkshire & the Humber Greens were recently campaigning against the East Coast sell off at York station, one of the hubs for the company, and across the progressive and socialist political spectrum, trade unions and civil societies, the challenge now is to tear down the corrupt notion that companies seeking to extract profit from people should play any part in our public services.

TORIES IN TROUBLE: Don't Forget the Matches!

Scottish Green Party leader shouts out to PM Mc-Cameron

When Nigel Farage allegedly swept the fringe elements out of UKIP (which if true would leave it somewhat bereft of members), it seems they may have decanted, in spirit at least, to their old home in the Tory Party. Perhaps a bit like the offspring returning after three years joshing in the Bullingdon. At any rate, the last few days have seen the torch of trouble pass from the Faragistas to the Tories, demonstrating just how ludicrously removed from normal people they really are.

First, Aidan Burley, stalwart of the Hugo Boss appreciation society, announced he would (goose) step down from being an MP. This came after it emerged that, contrary to his claim that he left the infamous Nazi "stag in the forest" party before his friends started shouting their ever-so-funny mein fuhrer chants, photos existed of him still present during the Hitlerite banter.

Next, today, came Dave SuperMc-Cameron, the Man with Seven Months to Save the Union! He desperately wants the Scots to stay part of the UK. If they leave, he says, it will tear Britain apart. And of course, that just won't do, since that's David's job.

Tearfully (not), he delivered an ode to his ancestral homeland, revealing that "Cameron" is gaelic for "crooked nose", which seems rather appropriate. Keen to reinforce the sense of belonging together, to show his deep empathy for the hills and humans of Caledonia, he made the long and arduous journey to...the Olympic Park in the East End of London to deliver his homily to unity. This led to Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond mocking his continuing refusal to debate with him face to face in Scotland, while Scottish Green Party leader Patrick Harvie tweeted "What's that David? I can't hear you from there. Why not come here and say that?"

Yet Cameron apparently refuses to intervene in the Scottish referendum. His speech was supposedly directed to the people of Wales, England and Northern Ireland. But although Dave won't be seen talking to Wee 'Eck Salmond for reasons of lofty statesmanship (!), The Times newspaper, The Voice of the Establishment, suggested he would like the rest of us to phone up family and friends in Scotland and ask them please to vote No to independence.

Hello Ma, it's me!
Oh, hello, we've not heard from you in a while son...
Aye, well, David Cameron asked me to call you.
Oh, that's nice of him. Why's that?
Well, he says we're better together.
Oh that's lovely son. We'll be on the next train down there...
**@@!!#  Cameron!
(dialing tone sound)

It may be something he borrowed from his Lib Dem vassals. Apparently a while back the centrist Orcs thought it would be a great idea to programme their computers to deliberately dial a quarter of a million random numbers and play people a speech from Nick Clegg. Truly terrifying. At least Dave wants real people to make the calls. And Aidan has got some time on his hands now, as long as he can stop them jerking skywards.

But topping it all was this gem, reported in The Scotsman newspaper. Tory MP for Penrith & The Borders, Rory Stewart, wants a human chain of 100,000 English people to stand on Hadrian's Wall with fiery torches in the belief this will encourage Scots to vote against leaving Britain. Steve Arnott of The Point has suggested that this is more reminiscent of Lord of the Rings than political debate, but either way, it would be hard to imagine a more chilling scene than legions of Barbour wearing, green wellied chaps, probably complete with an arsenal of shooting sticks, lined up along the course of the ancient Roman barrier. And then, just as the dark purple twilight falls gently on the silent hills...THEY LIGHT THE TORCHES!

If anyone in Scotland still doubted the case for independence, they almost certainly wouldn't any longer.

Gosh! Awfully difficult finding this Scotchland place. Must be here somewhere...

The midgie in the ointment for Mr Stewart's big idea is that, although he is the local MP, he seems to have forgotten that Hadrian's Wall is situated some miles from the Scottish Border. So in fact, his Angle horde would be waving their flames at their own countryside. Unless, of course, they want to give Berwick back to Scotland, and a fair chunk of Newcastle.

In any case, as the beautiful area around Hadrian's Wall has just been declared a "dark skies park" where lights are banned so you can see the stars clearly, their torches would need to be extinguished even faster than Cameron's credibility north of the border.

But in the event that in spite of all reason it happens, I do hope if Aidan goes along to join in no one mentions taking a bedsheet with his fiery stick. You know, for a "fancy dress" party...

Hadrian's Wall has been declared Europe's largest Dark Skies Park. No flaming torches please.

Bite The Ballot! say Greens for National Voter Registration Day

Cllr Andrew Cooper, who is the Greens' national energy & environment speaker and heads the Green Party's European candidates' list in Yorkshire & The Humber, has urged all people 18 years and over who are entitled to vote, whether they are UK, EU or Commonwealth nationals or citizens, to register to do so. He was speaking ahead of 'National Voter Registration Day', which takes place on Wednesday (February 5th) and which aims to encourage people to sign up to vote.

Non-party campaign group 'Bite the Ballot' are organising this year's campaign, which is timed to mark the anniversary of the 1832 Reform Act which gave many of us (well, many men anyway!) the right to vote for the first time.

Greens' Andrew Cooper - bite the ballot!

'Bite the Ballot!' hopes as many as 250,000 UK residents – especially younger people – will register to vote on Wednesday.

Echoing a similar call from Green Euro-MP Jean Lambert, Cllr Cooper said "All citizens have a democratic right to influence what is happening to our society - and the first step is to register to vote. I hope that everyone who is entitled to do so will make their voices heard this May - whatever party they support. It is all the more relevant when the European elections are being held under a form of proportional representation - so very powerfully, this time at least, everyone's vote counts equally.

"This is about ensuring that all who can vote are able to do so by registering - at least they then have a choice whether to vote or not, or even stand for election."

Elections to the European Parliament, as well as to many local authorities will be held on Thursday, May 22^nd.

Click HERE to Bite the Ballot!

Of Gods & Prime Ministers - Levelling with Somerset

Fix this: Cameron is no King Cnut

As Britain has experienced a warm winter and, in consequence, the wettest January on record, the last few weeks have seen more and more areas affected by serious and persistent flooding, especially in south Wales and south-west England. The flat area of the Somerset Levels, which are below sea level, have been particularly badly affected with one village cut off for a whole month now and warnings from the beleaguered Environment Agency just today of lives being at risk as new storms are set to batter the area.

Farmers have complained that with crops submerged now for three weeks or more, their produce will be rotting in the ground and with a number of sewage planets, septic tanks and silage stores breached, there is a growing risk of water-borne disease affecting both humans and animals. It is a major public crisis, though so far treated with rather casual equanimity by a Government that seems rather perplexed by the series of unfortunate events. The army was promised as a rescue agency, only to be withdrawn before it started any work, and the burden has shifted back to local councils and agencies reeling from financial cuts imposed by the Coalition parties - both of whom have significant numbers of MPs in the south-west.

The ending of dredging of rivers, a move actually taken under the last Labour Government, has been criticised by some as the cause of the flooding, but environmentalists and meteorologists have stressed that the levels of rainfall have been such that had the process still been in place, it would have made very little difference - and indeed conceivably have made it worse by speeding the flow of water from catchment areas into river channels. The fact is that nature has overwhelmed the human-made defences and would have in almost any case - for example, a bus was swept off the road today in Pembrokeshire by a twenty feet high wave; it is difficult to envisage any feasible defence that could have been created against such a phenomenon.

And this perhaps is the hardest message of all that stems from this disaster - but it is one we will hear more and more in the future, and one which politicians and the public alike really need to get their heads around: as global warming takes hold, there are no technical fixes for what is coming.

Some years ago, at a seminar held by a leading social "think tank", I listened to a very coherent and dramatic presentation on the future impact of climate change, especially in that the areas most likely to be most affected in the first instance in this country and elsewhere would be zones of social deprivation. As with so much, the poor will suffer most first.

A question came from the audience, from someone who had been a senior civil servant. She acknowledged the devastating effects outlined by the speaker. "So, what are the steps we need to take to mitigate them?" And she went on to ask about - flood defences, food stores and supplies of breathing masks (a la Beijing).

And this is where our elite, our political class, business barons and bureaucrats are betrayed by their own hubris and ignorance of the severe global crisis we face. Flooding? Build a wall. Extreme temperatures in inner London? Install more air conditioning. Too much carbon emissions from cars, planes, industry? Let's invent carbon capture and storage, somehow, one day... And so on.

It is the same mentality that seriously considers seeding the seas with iron filaments to stimulate photoplankton as a carbon sink; or placing solar reflector satellites in orbit to reflect the sunlight away from the earth to make up for the loss of the albedo effect from the melting of the icecaps and Siberian permafrost. Rather than consider how we are unravelling the threads of our biosphere with our inter-related addictions to carbon fuels, growth and capitalist competition, the thinking is we can go on our merry way as before and somehow find a way to engineer a "fix" with carbon capture or radioactive energy.

It resolutely refuses to contemplate the truth revealed by these floods: that ultimately we are at Nature's mercy and while there is no doubt we can ruin it for ourselves and other species, no amount of scientific genius, financial investment or emergency planning will ever grant as imperfect a creature as homo sapiens the ability to "manage" the Earth. Ending use of carbon and planting millions of trees will have a lot more to do with a solution than expensive, ineffective and in many cases still uninvented "mitigation technology". But of course, it is dependence on such large scale technologies and carbon energy that perpetuates the economic and political power of the global elite - at huge risk to all of us.

Cnut: the King knew his limits.

As our planet becomes increasingly hostile to our continued existence on its surface, perhaps it is time more for humility and asking how we can return to be in some degree of harmony with Nature rather than for planning somehow to conquer it. Unlike David Cameron, his ancient predecessor King Cnut deliberately demonstrated the limits of his powers to his fawning courtiers by failing to hold back the tide of the sea. A thousand years later, we could do with some of his sanity to prick the pomposity of our elites. Leaders who believed themselves to be gods went out with the Roman Emperors - and as so many of them discovered, such unwarranted pride tended to come before a great fall.

Having a Heart Attack? You Shirker...

The Daily Mirror carried a story today with what must be the most twisted and sickening tale yet of the Government's "fixing" of the benefits system. We heard a few weeks ago about ATOS writing to a woman to penalise her for not attending her disability benefits assessment - the fact that she was in hospital in a coma had apparently been lost on their thick skulls (even although they had been notified).

But today, somehow, feels worse. A man was attending a work capability assessment in Oldham when he had a heart attack and even the nurse conducting the interview decided she should terminate it (I say "even" because there have been many bizarre instances of distinctly uncaring assessments by medical staff employed by ATOS).

Two weeks later, he had his benefits stopped because the Department of Work & Pensions decided he had "withdrawn" from the assessment. Twisted beyond all measure of belief, this decision goes to the heart of this pernicious process, the signature policy of Ian Duncan Smith, who is allegedly a deep thinker.

Well, maybe he is and this is all part of his plan. While he sits in front of TV cameras trotting out platitudes of how the reassessments are designed to support people in genuine need and " not leave them unseen for years", the truth is somewhat different - hundreds of terminally ill people denied benefits in their final weeks, other people put through processes where meetings can be (and are) procedurally deemed to have happened even when they have not taken place, and then really spiteful decisions like this one - you withdrew from the assessment because of a heart attack? Man up and get back in there!

The system is dreadful and its effects sick. But that is almost certainly what its architects, the rightwing Tories and their Lib Dem Orcs, have intended.

Yet complicit in this too are the staff who take jobs with ATOS and the DWP and who then reach decisions like this one penalising a heart attack victim and then producing a letter like the one sent to him. It may be argued they need a job, but at what cost? Ian Duncan Smith did not phone up the issuing Job Centre and tell them to send out the letter to the sick man - someone on site did that.

Over two years ago, there was an instance of an ATOS employee referring online to people attending capability assessments as "parasitic wankers". He was roundly condemned. It is to be hoped that his attitude is not the default culture of DWP staff as well now - there is evidence to the contrary, but the Oldham instance begs the question and with much DWP work contracted-out to profit seeking companies, it is not at all surprising if the attitudes they engender are somewhat less supportive and humane than was the case under the old public service.

It seems that the default position, as part of the official, government-set process, is to be as harsh as possible. Otherwise caring staff appear to be being forced into dreadfully twisted decisions and positions. It is obviously down to individual conscience, but ultimately, there is a difficult choice for staff instructed to implement this vicious policy to make, one which it would be easy to trivialise or portray as simple if you don't work there for your own livelihood but a question they really need to ask themselves nevertheless: should you stay or should you go? 

UKIP - the Tea Party of the 51st State

Forecast of Drivel Ahead - Farage has disowned his own party's manifesto

The United Kingdom Independence Party cites withdrawal from the European Union as its signature policy. Puffed up by a right-wing media, it has ridden on the back of xenophobic myths ranging from invisible hordes of Bulgarians battering down the doors of the Arrivals hall in Heathrow to invented tales of conspiratorial Brussels bureaucrats forcing Britons to eat nothing but straight bananas (though no one seems to ask where these are to be found either).

UKIP preys on worries about the poverty and social problems afflicting millions of Britons using manufactured fears about migrants and the EU while covering up the real causes - an ever greater hording of wealth by a tiny, rich elite; the widespread incidence of tax avoidance and evasion by large corporations; and the now near complete privatisation (or at least private contracting out) of our key public services.

But in fact, UKIP have a wide range of policies and stances that do not bear scrutiny set against the "party of the people" tone its leader Nigel "Blokey" Farage seeks to espouse. He is Everyman, supposedly, with his pint in one hand and fag in the other. He rarely promotes the fact that he made his money as a stockbroker (as did his errant friend and former colleague Godfrey Bloom, MEP), nor that he used to be an active member of what was at the time a fairly pro-European Tory Party.

Yet more than his past, which could be forgiven if he had genuinely changed his tune, Farage is haunted by his party itself, even although the party very much is him.

We have heard enough of late of bizarre but frankly quite trivial outbursts from strange UKIP members. The most prominent was Godfrey Bloom with his references to "bongo-bongo-land", sluts and bashing a journalist on the head with his agenda papers; then there was the town councillor who suggested the recent floods were God's vengeance for legalising gay marriage; and the county councillor who used Facebook to ask "Is tuna a real fish like ones that swim in water?"

"Trivial" not in the sense that these events and the attitudes they display are trivial, but rather in the sense that they pale in the face of much more troubling aspects of UKIP, its official policies and its supposedly sensible leader's own views.

Consider these issues, generally overlooked by the media:

- Godfrey Bloom, when a UKIP MEP, appeared in a video praising the French secret services for planting bombs on board the Greenpeace ship "Rainbow Warrior" which caused an explosion and killed a photographer. You can see him in action by clicking here.

- in 2006, the European Parliament voted by 545 votes to a mere 13 in favour of calling on all member states of the EU to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to violence against women, treat rape within marriage as a crime and to ban and prosecute all instances of female genital mutilation. Who would oppose such a sensible, ethical motion? Well, UKIP did. All 7 of its MEPs who voted, including Nigel Farage, voted against supporting such steps to protect women. Doubtless they would claim it was to do with asserting British independence - but what comes first: making a political point or protecting vulnerable women and girls from violence?

- UKIP supposedly stands for the UNITED KINGDOM. But there is little resonance beyond England. Farage complained about being heckled by an admittedly loud and probably counter-productive demonstration when he tried to hold a press conference in an Edinburgh pub (to launch a by-election campaign some miles away in Aberdeen - possibly he didn't have a satnav that covered so far north?). But he might have reflected that the Scottish people who turned out to greet him may have felt slightly aggrieved by the leader of his party's tiny Scottish wing, Lord Monckton, who had described his compatriots as "subsidy junkies", playing on the wildly inaccurate theme that Scotland receives more public expenditure than it pays in tax.

And then just this week, having claimed that he was getting rid of five unnamed "barmy" MEPs (over a third of  his group in the European Parliament), Farage went off the policy rails himself, finally unmasking his inner Tea Party libertarian self.

First, in a speech to his former colleagues in the City of London stockbroking fraternity, he railed against laws curtailing sex discrimination: he insisted that women face no discrimination at all in the City workplace, though he then contradicted himself by saying that women who take maternity leave are by default worth less than men to their employers.

And now, he wants to legalise handguns - pistols - which were banned in 1996 after Thomas Hamilton used them to kill 16 primary school children in Dunblane in Scotland. Nigel feels the ban is "ludicrous" - perhaps he will launch his campaign to change the law in a pub in the town; I will be happy to buy him a map so he can get to the right place to justify his call.

But third and perhaps most telling of all, Nigel Farage has denounced the manifesto he and UKIP fought the 2010 General Election on as "486 pages of drivel" which he had never got round to reading and which he has now disowned.

And no wonder; this was a manifesto that promoted a "flat tax rate" - massive tax cuts for millionaires and substantial increases for everyone else; it opposed any regulation of banks in spite of the wave of bad practice and corruption revealed by the 2008/9 crisis; and it even planned to introduce compulsory dress codes in theatres.

Drivel indeed - but let's get this right: although he was not leader at the General Election, Farage was leader until a short time before, stood as UKIP's most prominent candidate and resumed the leadership a short time later. And for all that time up until today, this allegedly Honest Man of British politics, this straight guy who says it how it is, was standing on a platform of drivel, promoting policies he had never even read. Really? This is the man who plans to restore trust in politics?

Unbelievably, he has now said UKIP won't have any new policies this side of the General Election. So we will be being asked to vote for a party with no policies - apart perhaps from whatever Nigel can scribble onto the back of his fag packet while he queues for his next pint. What are we left with? An ability to say whatever UKIP want to say at the time, but watch out for a change next week? Or, more worrying, a licence to play up any and every prejudice without any accountability? It is rank populism - like the US Tea Party.

If we do ever leave the EU, if Farage has his way, the chances are we would be quickly incorporated into the orbit of the libertarian wing of the USA, a sort of offshore 51st State of America, open for international big business and complete with our own huddled masses to fill the sweatshops. Stockbrokers' stock would rise accordingly.

All thanks to Nigel.

What a bloke. And what a joke. But who's laughing?