The meaning of Britain's political crisis.

The mechanics of Britain's blossoming political crisis are becoming more obvious. Lord Ashcroft, who funds the candidates in Tory marginals, doesn't think the Tories will win the next election. Pundits have decided that the next government will be another coalition. UKIP snaps at the heels of both Labour and the Tories. The Scottish referendum won't lie down and die. With whatever shade of government we get, there is an enormous crisis over Europe built into the first two years of the new Parliament. And we cannot forget the farce of the 700 plus House of Lords that represents nothing but itself and individual member's and parties' corruption. Finally there is the most vital consideration of all, the deep contempt, derision and alienation felt by millions for all MPs and for Parliament itself. 

This is a ruling class political crisis. But its mechanics do not tell anything like the whole story. As it is a ruling class crisis, it effects all of the society that they dominate. All classes, all sectors are touched, even violently perturbed, by its impact. The British economy, dominated by an overblown global-facing finance industry, will feel the tremors undermining Britain's much vaunted political stability. Scottish independence is not now off the agenda for 30 years. It has instead been firmly located on the political agenda for the next 10. As we examine all the main aspects of politics, economics and the wider society then we see that the Britsh ruling classes' political convulsions and decay mark everything and change everything for all classes in society.

The British labour and trade union movement experienced a deep crisis of direction in the late 1970s and 80's. It was an expression, albeit partial, of the political crisis of the working class at that point (which was itself a product of a new period of heightened class struggle after WW2.) In the event the labour movement bureaucracy was able to defeat, just about, the emerging class-struggle based left wing of the movement. And then Thatcher did the rest. Today it is absurd to imagine that Blair and now Miliband's Labour Party would be the fulcrum of such a key battle (although inevitably even the modern Labour Party would feel some impact should such a battle arise.) The Labour Party therefore is also part of this story. But what has brought about the weakness of Britain's main political institutions today? What has caused the British ruling classes' current political crisis? 

The political collapse in Britain is a result of the general crisis of political representation. This may be a common observation in the debate inside those political agencies that purport to argue for a working class position - but it is actually true of the whole of society. As parliament has expanded, as PM's question time has become more raucous, the actual power of Parliament and its leading parties, and their leaders, has diminished, under peacetime conditions, to a greater degree than at any time since the late 17th century. Globalisation, represented in Britain most exquisitely by the satiric title of 'The City of London' but underpinned by the slogan of all the mainstream parties that 'Britain is open for business', has torn away even the shreds of parliamentary power that was left after WW2. Political power, at least that part traditionally based on the popular vote and Parliament, has little current function in Britain. Of course the ruling class rules. Of course its networks and corporate alliances manage most of our world. But not much is left for elected politicians. 

It is true that Labour does not represent working class people. But In the wider scheme of things that is only a part of a greater totality which could be described (in large areas of the so called democratic west) as traditional 'demcratic' politics not representing society as a whole. Western democracy is failing. And so it becomes a show. Its participants become actors. The media platform is where the show is performed. On all decisive matters and now many subordinate issues, there are, in reality, huge arcs of agreement between main parties - if it is only the agreement that nothing can be done. Certainly nothing of the slightest strategic importance is decided, or mostly even debated, in Parliament.

There are partial reactions to this state of affairs all over the place, between and within different classes. UKIP is one. 'Let's do something! Anything to assert ourselves!' they cry. But these convulsive reactions to our dying democracies are, with the rare exception of the new left formations that are emerging directly from anti-austerity class struggle as with Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, full of dangerous baloney. They get nowhere near the main issue. They signal a ferocious step backwards to a place that never was.

When Parliament was reorganised as the instrument for a new ruling class in England at the end of the 17th century, secure in its compromise with the aristocracy and its new constitutional monarchy and its 'freedom' to trade, it was absolutely necessary for its real debates and for the decisions it had to make on the real and decisive issues, to express the united will of the whole new ruling class. The repeal of the Corn Laws; Imperial preference; working class franchise; all these matters were decisive for the whole of society and had to be organised politically through Parliament and by the ruling class. Latterly, the emergence of the working class, the Russian revolution, anti colonial struggles and women's suffrage meant that Parliament had to become the cockpit regulating key class relations in society. As it was in 1945 to 48 when it gave reform 'or they will give us revolution!' (Quinton Hogg 1943.) 

Today these historic functions have almost dwindled to nothing in Parliament. Repressive law is still relentlessly rolled out and that is a product of a desperately weakened organised labour movement. Parliament and its parties nod through wars with the odd honourable exception but never otherwise address the key issues in society. And at the margins, and always repressively, they still 'manage' outbreaks of domestic social and class struggle through their control of the police. Objectively the ruling class no longer needs Parliament (except to allow its more punitive actions some legitimacy) and the working class, in large part, no longer believes that Parliament and the main parties represented there can change anything important. 

Consider the two decisive issues of our time; the West's wars defending its industrial/military dominance in the world and, since 1978, the massive increase in social inequality. Neither of these questions are frontally addressed by Parliament. Neither of them are presented as the key issues of our time by any of the main parties. None of the mainstream parties have any serious difference on these questions with the others. Parliament and its parties are unable to decide on any aspect of ruling class behaviour in these fields (which is directed more from the Pentagon and the board rooms) and Parliament promotes nothing for the advance of the working class either. It seems that a shaky and rapidly eroding status quo is all that is available to the overwhelming majority in our society - at least from today's Parliament and its mainstream parties. This is the crisis of ruling class politics which has such an effect on both of society's major classes. 

We need some representatives who will speak for the working class and a new democracy.

Welfare crime committed by Osborne

It is significant that Osborne's latest crime against the poorest in society is being promoted by him not as a sad necessity but as a Conservative Party Conference cherry, designed to keep Tory votes and possibly win Labour votes. Why is this possible? Because just as with reducing immigrants, official Labour joined the race with the other mainstream parties to attack welfare 'scroungers.' There was no immediate response from Labour in defence of the poor, or indication that they would reverse this latest Tory drive to increase poverty and immiseration. Osborne's measures are therefore more accurately called a completely mainstream, cross-Westminster party drive to squeeze the poorest, 'until the pips squeak.' The Westminster coalition is much wider than just the government. 

But the dynamics in wider society are shifting and Osborne et al have made a mistake. In Scotland the referendum drew out thousands of those at the poorest margins of society. New social actions, in housing, in defence of hospitals etc., are breaking through, led by groups that traditionally had been excluded from participation in the national debates that have swirled around single mothers, the unemployed, criminalised youth and the millions on the minumum wage or less. The general public now know that the majority in receipt of benefits are the working poor. They are aware of food banks. They know child poverty is increasing dramatically. They watched the TV debates about Benefit Street. They heard the teachers who tell us their pupils need food when they come to school. Bashing welfare is no longer the star turn it once was. 

So the debate is turning again, albeit belatedly, in Westminster. Not against austerity as such in any of the three mainstream parties, (although it is virtually the main feature of all extra parliamentary activity.)  But rather the establishment's discussion centres on austerity's 'distribution.' Even Osborne has to bash the US multinationals over tax in his speech. And some 'experts' are publicly wondering if pensions can continue to be let off 'so lightly'. (But pension changes - in terms of the delays in the access to them, and their low levels compared with most of the rest of Europe - have already provided an additional £500 billion saving to the state over the next 20 years according to the Institute of Fiscal Affairs. Additionally pensioners remain active politically, and those beneath pension age know it was not pensioners that pulled up the ladder.)

With roughly £25 billion already cut and £25 billion to go - none of the pro-austerity options for part two of Osborne's plan or Ball's repeated commitment to no new spending and no reversing the cuts already made, are looking feasible, let alone bearable. The sense of the need for a deep alternative direction is growing. Those who require welfare are increasingly forcing themselves into the argument. We need some new politicians to give the real political life of the country some expression. 

Britain bombs Iraq.

News just in tells us that two British Tornados are off to join the cloud of warplanes above Iraq. The new Iraqi government, that the US has just bought, were told to ask for Britain's feeble support by their masters in the Pentagon. The UK's modicum of high explosive now targeted for Syria and Iraq would not normally give rise to so much as a text message request from a minor Bagdad civil servant in terms of its fire power. But it is, apparently, the UK's wisdom and historical experience in Iraq that was the clincher for Iraq's new Foreign Minister. Perhaps he means the experience of Britain's involvement in Iraq's 36 wars and armed conflicts which, starting with Britain's war against the Iraqi revolution in 1920 (where Britain used some of the stock of poison gas left over from WW1) has involved Britain many times in Iraq's destiny. Such wisdom! Such experience! 

Cameron is not so much interested in Iraq's future as in the future of oil and his relations with the US. He has started to march to the Pentagon's war drum because the US has called. It is a political matter of the continued legitimacy of the whole western debacle in the Middle East that is at stake for the US, and Britain's involvement (or not) in the current charade remains essential for that purpose. 

The military geniuses into whose hands the west's 'fly boys' and their weaponry have been put have already ordererd up the bombing of bits of Syria as well as Iraq. And already we have seen not so much 'mission creep' as mission 'skid'. US ships have 'diverted' some tomahawks to have a high explosive pop at a new group of snarling Islamists that they have called the 'Khorasan'. This little side show was necessary because the Khorasan (that no one with knowlege in the field as ever heard of) were about to move on the US we were told. We might wonder who else will need 'tidying up' on the margins before this latest rain of death is over? 

The word from one expert from the Royal United Services Institute (Today, BBC Radio 4, Sept 27) suggests that the current IS offensive against the Syrian-Kurdish town Kobane is a reaction to the IS having to abandon set bases and concentrate in battle - preventing 'clean' and 'surgical' responses from the US and its allies. And that more rolling offensives are likely to be IS's response to attacks from the air. The US led war has already created the first tentative moves for a common front by all the Syrian jihadis against the West's intervention; a disasterous result for the Syrian people. 

As more civilians die, as more particular scores are settled by annihilation, so the Brits will find that they have been hustled into promoting another disaster for all concerned. Blaire's enthusiastic 'hurrahs' from the sideline tell it all. 

Once as tragedy; once as Farage

UKIP's head honcho believes Cameron has called Parliament back today to take the vote on bombing Iraq (rather than yesterday or last month) to draw media attention away from the UKIP party conference - which opens today, appropriately enough in Doncaster Racecourse. 

Apparently 33 percent of the population regarded Farage as 'weird', which is some solace to Labour as only 31 percent thought Miliband 'weird'. Unfortunately for both Miliband and Cameron, Farage scores highest as the politician who 'comes across most like me' in the same poll. And that is one of Mr Farage's most important qualities. Despite being a rich banker with funds in a tax haven, who does TV adverts for Paddy Hill, Farage has that chameleon quality where many utterly disgusted or disassociated with Westminster politics in England can find in him their own reflection in his 'hale fellow, well met' persona and his amusement with mainstream politics and politicians. His amusement is really cynicism. His cheery bonhomie covers his contempt even hatred for the 'common man' as he would have it, and a deep, not to say furious commitment to complete the Thatcherite revolution. 

It is obvious why such a personality (just like London's 'cheery' Boris) would sound like chalk screeching on a blackboard to Scottish voters - especially those who voted yes in the recent referendum. Their withdrawal from Westminster has a positive, humanitarian and progressive project to define their political choices. Farage appears to them as he is, a rich man taking the piss. To dispossessed and long term ex Labour voters, and even the swathes of Labour voters in northern England and the sea-side towns who have continued up to now to turn out for Labour, a vote for Farage may in reality be an exercise in their own sense of worthlessness and alienation, but it will feel like it is they who are now taking the piss out of Westminster and all of the mainstream political leaders in the British establishment. 

This is Farage's access to elements of mass and class psychology today. He acts for many as the lightning rod for feelings of invisibility, of lack of representIon, of despair. His conference policies will mean little except in their ability to increase fear of foreigners. The tax policies for middle earners will make few inroads among public sector workers who have a real fight on their hands battling austerity. His opposition to today's decision by Parliament to bomb Iraq will not attract a single anti-war activist vote. 'England for the English; hurrah! Thank God we can now say it out loud! And Farage himself, dead weird he is, like me. He'll get right up their noses.' 

Labour has no answer to any of this. It endorses the second (more brutal) half of austerity. It wants British jobs for British workers. It fancies sending messages of death to the Middle East. And Miliband may be weird, but in the wrong way. What the Scottish referendum showed is that when leaders call the people together to fight the establishment, to really move, in action, to take them on for specific and concrete and life changing aims, the sky (way beyond UKIP's dismal dance in the gutter) really is the limit. 

The West's permanent war

In what the media are beginning to call Gulf War 3, the US are leading yet another wave of western destruction in the Middle East. The one time that Labour Party leader Miliband could actually do something significant to effect peoples' lives he bottles it, and the Labour opposition will back Cameron's desire to jump on the US bandwagon, and Britain (of course) will tag along. 

The most recent of the West's wars in the Middle East has lasted on and off, in different phases, for twenty four years. The 8 year war to overthrow the earlier western puppet Saddam Hussain (2003 - 11), itself a maelstrom of death and destruction, has directly created the conditions for the most recent eruptions. And the West's permanent war in the Middle East is now to be upped yet again as another rain of missiles, rockets and bombs stamp their deadly authority on foreign soil. 

The Middle East is a permanent target for the west because of oil (of course), because of 9/11, because the West needs to 'encourager les autres' and because the Middle East is virtually owned by Western Imperialism. The Brits, the French and the US have between them set up virtually all of the countries in the region and, over the last century, populated their ruling houses. The west needs to keep 'tinkering.' The set up they created keeps fraying, first at the edges and then falling apart. 

But the mechanism is bust. As all the western war mongering has already revealed you cannot burn, bomb and torture the missshapen Frankenstine that you have created (and continue to create) into life. Instead your interventions, piling mistake onto mistake, just create new versions of hell. 

Surely the first humanitarian 'task' for the world to achieve is to get the west out of the Middle East. The local tumult, even civil wars will continue and may even spread on such an exit.  Genuine humanitarian aid - as in the Syrian case today - will be essential. But without the direct, constant and deadly pressure of the western imperialist war machine there is at least a chance that the nations and peoples' of the Middle East will find their way to a transregional and muti-ethnic and multi-faith solution. The faint echoes of the historical goal of the first revolutionary nationalists that fought imperialism in the 19th and early 20th century for a united Arab nation in the Middle East, can stiil be heard even now. For example while the sectarian warlords of IS face the west's technological terror with their own medieval brutality even in that repository of reaction the urge for a new Caliphate, a new, wide, Arabic centred civilisation surfaces, albeit in a distorted form. Even in the dust of destruction there can be building blocks for the future, if we can stop the west's latest bout of military madness.

Miliband's ten year plan.

Miliband senior was no Stalinist so Ed didn't get his idea for a plan from dad. Commentators round the Labour Party Conference in Manchester made some sad jokes about Stalin only having 5 year plans. Was the steely Miliband twice as good? 

Stalin and his successors had a lot to answer for as a result of their undemocratic, brutal and often disastrous planning regime, but at least the memory of the revolution had given them some ambition!  Miliband's ten year plan proposed meagre outcomes and contained no planning whatsoever.

The only significant suggestions that Miliband made were that his NHS proposals (for 36000 new personnel by 2025, when the projected population rise will mean Miliband's plan will provide about the same ratio of NHS staff to patients as now) would not require any increase of the deficit. Tax loopholes would be closed (again.) Houses valued £2 million plus would attract tax (the LibDem policy) and tobacco companies would face a profit tax. (Unless they were centred in a British tax haven.)  The rest, like a Green Bank or an unspecified housing policy that would provide 'as many houses as we need' by 2025, were purest fluff, or, like the reaction to Miliband's statement that his plan was to deal with 'the biggest fall in living standards since 1871' there would be a 'bigger reform of banks' and that the 'unions and government should cooperate.' As Balls made clear yesterday, unions will need to cooperate with austerity for the foreseeable future. 

Miliband junior is no Marxist. Nevertheless you would have expected him to make an attempt at a link between the economy and his political and social projects, however empty they may be. Admittedly Miliband understood some of the lessons from the recent Scottish independence vote and proposes enfranchising 16 and 17 year olds. (One wonders if they will lose their vote again if they refuse a £3 per hour apprenticeship - also to be widely 'on offer'.) He has also honoured a new factotum aiming to bring the rest of the world up to speed with Britain's apparently enlightened LGBT policy! But nowhere in his epic peroration did he tell us Labour's 2 year, 5 year or 10 year plan to shift the wealth and power between the super rich - getting richer, and the rest of us. What will he DO about the £ billions of NHS resources now in the hands of the privateers?: what will he do about the annual £4 billion subsidy to the private railways - for an overcrowded and overpriced service?: what does his ten year plan say about wage freezes; anti union laws; foreign wars and the £40 billion cost of nukes? Nothing. They are not part of Ed's 10 year plan. They are all part of the 'business as usual' silent part of his speech. 

Miliband hopes that his £2.5 billion a year for the NHS (which will not cover the planned £20 billion deficit in 2015) and his promise that he is sticking to the EU will cover both the working class vote AND big business's interests. 'We'll do it together' he says. Do what? Plan to keep the status quo. Plan to get Miliband into number 10. But I'm afraid Ed, it's all gone much further than you planned. 

Miliband - the firebrand fizzles out

Miliband speaks tomorrow at the Labour Party conference. He was advised to say something bold last weekend by his advisors in order to shake the media clear of Cameron's 'battle for England' and turn attention Manchester-wards.

His announcement, that a Labour government would increase the minimum wage to £8 an hour by 2020, did produce a flurry of interviews with assorted Mancunian youth, working in fast food chains, all saying that yes, £8 would be better than £6.50 (the minimum wage as of the end of October '14). It was 'not good enough' fumed Miliband, that one in five people in the UK were on low pay. His proposed increase would be higher than the rate of inflation. 

The current inflation rate (August) is 1.5 percent. Miliband's raises will be higher. But every Economist and certainly every low paid worker knows that a percentage increase, even one slightly higher than  our currently record low inflation figure, but that starts from a very low pay baseline, is guaranteed to amount to peanuts.

Miliband's legal minimum wage - will rise by 30p an hour each year for the next five years. (Of course this legal minimum is only one of the 'legal minimums.' If you are forced to take a full time working apprenticeship you are on a 'legal minimum' of under £3 per hour.) But just in case this lurch to the left by the worker's friend, Miliband, worries the bankers, shadow Chancellor Balls will announce today that Child Allowance will be frozen for years. 

Who are these people? 

On October 18 we must march against austerity among other things to make sure that the TUC stands by its policy of £10 an hour for the minimum wage today! 

The UK's political system is in big trouble

One theme that has been picked up by this blog (among other sources) is Britain's political crisis. (See 30/5 and 5/6.)

There is a new twist in this story but before looking at this in detail it is worth stepping back for a moment to consider what is at stake. It has been the proud boast of British capital for more than a century that it has established a secure, stable and flexible set of state institutions that have always been the 'envy of the world.' From 'the mother of parliaments' to the incorruptible civil service, British rulers have managed to crow about their historical achievements most credibly in the political sphere. Political stability; no domestic revolutions for centuries; checks and balances; ingenious compromises like the House of Lords; a well worn route for the most trusted candidates to gain access to state and judicial power via specific schools and universities; incorporation of potentially disruptive forces (e.g. women and labour); avoidance of either communism or fascism; this is the package that sells the City of London to Arab Sheiks and Russian billionaires. 

Of course for centuries imperial Britain exported its corruption to its overseas possessions, along with its savage, counter-revolutionary violence and despotism. That allowed the political state 'at home' to retain its liberal fringe and meant that any poison in particular institutions was definitely the product of the odd 'rotten apple' rather than an endemic feature of the whole hypocritical set up.  Britain's imperial enterprise is dying (although its wars, its financial chicanery, its slavish association with the US and its continued possession of most of the world's tax havens, still exports poverty and chaos to parts of the world.) And Britain's political system, embedded in its state machine, is beginning to show signs of wear and tear.

What to do in England, Wales and Northern Ireland after Scotland's referendum? A large part of the 1.6 million Scots voted yes because they despise Westminster politics, politicians and control. This popular mass movement generated (even in the account given by the leaders of the no campaign) a tremendous and unparalleled surge of political interest and participation in Scotland. These two facts, the rebelliousness of a significant and mainly working class section of the Scottish population and the fact that they had access to the means, at least start to carry out their rebellion, have thrown British politics into a new turmoil. Cameron short sightedly wants to make Labour pay for their devolution experiment by slicing away any potential Labour control over the whole of Westminster's business from now on. He also believes that waving the English flag will stem UKIP. 

Cameron's clownish response has the potential to do serious damage to political stability by strengthening Britain's right wing in a contest to promote Englishness and the English. If he gets away with it he will have also contributed to the beginning of the dissolution of the Labour Party as it would no longer offer a route to national, institutional, political influence and thereby begin to dissolve the main raison d'etre for a large part of the labour bureaucracy. Under conditions of the likely continuation of a coalition government after May 2015, AND the EU referendum, the famous and historic British political stability, will begin to look distinctly like a thing of the past. And the City (whose base is paradoxically entirely global despite its highly valued British credentials) would consider its next move.   

Britain has not been in a political crisis like this since the need for the National Government in the 1930s but this time Britain is without the immense resources available to underpin bold political manouvres and shore up the system. 

The contest between Britan's classes has now very prominently spilled into the establishment's political sphere - an arena which despite, or perhaps more accurately, because of the new Labour Party, is virtually unavailable to the modern working class. The Scots have challanged all that.  It is now more critical than ever that there are some voices in this unfolding crisis who, by the elections next May, have the credibility and political reach to represent those who want an end to austerity and a chance for a fresh start. We urgently need new voices to be heard from inside the new mainstream political arena as the ruler's crisis unfolds and, as Scotland shows, that will be based on a mass movement that is capable of creating its own new political reality. 

Scottish referendum result - 18 September and 3 new saws

1.  The pattern of yes votes did not conform to the SNP's main bases of electoral support. The biggest yes votes came in areas most associated with traditional Labour; Glasgow, North Lanarkshire, Dundee etc. Previous elections were therefore not a guide to who voted for independence in Scotland. It was working class areas that wanted the most radical solution available and on offer to deal with their problems.

2.  Besides the historical myriad of fissures in the left, there was a new and major split. Virtually all of the official movement backed a vote for the union. Most of the trade unions (with the honourable exception of the RMT who held a ballot among their scottish members) the Labour Party and the Communist Party argued that a yes vote would divide the british working class. In the event, their claim was rejected and contradicted in practice by a million or so Scottish working class people. The official movement's leadership was unable to lead a large section of the class that they purport to represent in Scotland. They became the sectarians.

3.  The referendum campaign has turned the independence issue into a class issue. The genie will not go back into the bottle. (See blogs from 8 & 14/9.) The national question is no longer 'a dangerous diversion' but will be picked up again by the Scottish working class as the new 'powers' granted to Holyrood do nothing to reduce poverty, to reign in inequality, to remove Trident or to save the health service. The reaction of the national and international 'markets' to Scotland's no vote were not a result of their relief that we still had 'class unity' in the UK. The response of big Capital was a gut reaction to the continued unity of the British state which they had (correctly) seen as the main issue in the referendum. 

It is also of note that Cameron echoed Salmond's own words in his speech commenting on last night's vote. He said the issue of independence was settled 'for a generation.' Unlikely. As austerity conditions bite deeper courtesy of whichever combination of the mainstream parties occupy the House of Commons from May 2015, so the Scottish working class will demand a rerun. They will seek whatever instruments they feel are available to resist. And they will remember the mass movement that was built and the possibilities for deep and rapid change that they had felt were in their grasp. It is also clear that the SNP, as well as the traditional British labour movement chiefs, have barred themselves from leading such a struggle and so another leadership will need to be built.  

Best wishes from England, for the Scot's own future.

Scotland's vote happens tomorrow. A rare moment of genuine democracy in Britain. The vote will not just determine the future of the Scots but effect everybody in Britain.

In Scotland the vote opens the door to a different sort of democracy where the millions mobilised by the independence debate can go onto discuss and argue about what sort of country they want and need. And an enormous favour would have been done for rest of us if the Scots vote yes because at one (peaceful) blow England, Wales and the bit of Ireland still ruled by Westminister will cease to be the puffed up, over stretched, US side kick its rulers have made its identity since the end of Empire. 

Instead a medium sized country will need to deal with the parasitical, overblown City of London and reorganise a properly balanced economy - based in the first instance on the sort of state investment that was made instantly available to the banks in 2008/9. It could cut back on its inflated, embarrasing pretensions, at the UN security council, in the 'chambers of Europe', at the G8 and in NATO's nuclear club. At a stroke the 'terrorist threat' would disappear as the remains of the UK withdrew its sorely used soldiery from countries whose people did not want us there. The rest of the UK would become free from the remnants of empire. And then we could work out, as the Scots would be able to do, how to look after all of our population properly and how to be helpful and friendly neighbours. 

Gordon's big lie

Gordon Brown argues that the UK is better for Scots than independence because 63 million people sharing their resources according to need is better than only 5 million. He points to greater funds for the Scottish NHS and Scottish pensions because their need is greater than other areas across the UK - only available because the Scots are in the UK.

This argument is a rank lie and Brown knows it. He bailed out the banks. He was the first to give the banks the £3 trillion that they ended up with, courtesy of the UK taxpayer. 

Brown knows that the issue for Scotland, indeed for Britain and the West as a whole, is not how state funding is distributed between welfare priorities and between different areas, regions and, as in the case of the UK, countries. It is how state funding as a whole is raised and who it is raised from and then it is about what the priorities for state spending are. 

Brown knows full well that the diminishing budget for health, education and welfare is unevenly distributed across Britain - but not according to need rather mainly according to political priorities. He also knows that the costs of his bail out of the banks are being paid from the health and welfare budgets, especially in frozen wages, and that there is an enormous shift underway of wealth from those who work for their living and the main beneficiaries of his bank bail-out, the super rich. 

Tomorrow 5 million Scots have the opportunity to break away from Brown's vicious circle and start something different. 

And after the 18th?

Previous blogs (besides, perhaps nostalgically?, renaming Gordon Brown as George Brown - another entirely different but equally dismal Labour figure) have pointed out that a major and unique popular movement has been built in the struggle for independence in Scotland and that It is inevitable that this movement will continue in some form beyond the vote on the 18th. It will characterise politics in Scotland for some time to come. 

Voting will be close. Huge numbers of Scots will vote and that fact is of tremendous significance for what happens next.

Should Scotland vote yes, then a mass movement will be needed more than ever to help remove the obstacles to real independence, to real equality and to real security. The negotiations with Westminster will be like peace talks in the middle of a battle. Moving Trident will take enormous resources that Westminster will insist that Scotland pays. Struggles will need to take place against punitive price hikes, big business blackmail and EU and US recalcitrance. The terrible (and deliberate) mistake of the Obama machine, to demobilise the huge groundswell of support and community action immediately following his electoral victory, predetermined the paralysis of his regime and his inability to remove the Congressional obstacles to all and any reform. If the vote is yes in Scotland, the movement, with its first task of rising to the leadership of the whole nation, is utterly indispensable for progress towards true justice to continue and be consolidated.

Should the majority vote no, then the movement for change, equality and self determination, the yes campaign, has to force 'devo max' as far as it will go and be ready, at the first signs that Scotland is being bent yet again in an undemocratic direction by a Westminster government, to raise the banner of independence immediately. It is complete hogwash that the September 18 vote has to be a final decision that, for the next 300 years, guarantees union. While it is true that independence needs decades to finally show its merit, being as it is, the beginning of the process (as all pro independence leaders now loudly claim) on the other hand the Scots have already seen 300 years of union within the UK. A vote for independence is the start of a new period that will need time to flower. Staying in the union is just a continuation of current and historical experience, of Westminster politics and City of London economics, an experience that goes deep and is very well known throughout Scotland.

Yet, what's this? The Westminster parties are all promising real change in the direction of Scotland's needs in the event of a no vote. It is their main prize offered to Scotland's no voters. There will be change, they say! And because of previous disappointments with such promises made in the past (Thatcher said her regime would be better for Scotland than devolution in 1979, when a majority voted yes, which was a lie worthy of Goebbels) this time change will come in months! That at least is Gordon Brown's claim. Well, so be it. That is certainly something that can be judged, even dismissing Brown's fantasies, in a matter of years and does not require decades, let alone centuries. The assessment of whether Westminster has delivered the change they have promised needs to be made by the people of Scotland. And such accountability requires the maintenance of a movement of the people testing whether they are advancing towards equality, good living standards and security. It will become very clear, very quickly. And if it turns into another piece of baloney as some might suspect, then Scotland will need a new referendum as quickly as possible. 

Germany comes to the rescue

When was the last time that the British political establishment welcomed major economic advice from Germany over what it claims to be its own affairs? The most recent information we have about PM Cameron's views of any German role in the Scottish independence debate is from today's Glasgow Herald's article which states that 'it emerged at a private meeting earlier this week that Mr Cameron issued what one (attender) described as 'a call to arms' evoking the defeat of Hitler as he addressed more than 100 business leaders.'

But things have changed. Today Germany stands for austerity (in other EU countries) and a strong euro (for German exports.) And it is the fear that anti-austerity, not to mention an attack on inequality, that could emerge from an independent Scotland, that gives rise to the recent comments from Berlin. We can be sure that Cameron was consulted, even that he perhaps initiated the most recent intervention from Germany into Scottish and Britsh history. 

In the Deutsche Bank report, David Folkerts-Landau, the bank's chief economist, said;  'a Yes vote for Scottish independence on Thursday would go down in history as a political and economic mistake as large as Winston Churchill's decision in 1925 to return the pound to the Gold Standard or the failure of the Federal Reserve to provide sufficient liquidity to the US banking system, which we now know brought on the Great Depression in the US.

These decisions, well-intentioned as they were, contributed to years of depression and suffering and could have been avoided had alternative decisions been taken.' 

Indeed the depression in Germany provided a major impulse to Nazi progress. Vote No in Scotland ... to defeat Hitler, twice! 

This would all be laughable if it were not tragic. It is worth noting however just how important for both main classes in society that real votes can be. And how our rulers call on aid from all their allies when substantial questions are at stake, tossing aside their own 'principles' of sovreignty and democracy. It is for the Scottish people to decide, the main party leaders clamour, while building their now international avalanche of fear designed to choke off hope and self determination in Scotland. How different all this is to Britain's general elections in the last 35 years, where precisely no issues of who has the wealth and who has the power have been addressed as the big party consensus on austerity has become embedded as a poisonous type of common sense. Yet how remarkable is the courage of those Scots, still standing firm against the ruling class sunami. Half the nation hold out. All they have is their own intelligence, their own resolution and their support of each other. They are truly a potentially great leadership for a new nation. 

Nick Robinson, BBC political editor, exposes Cameron

Ex chair of the young Tories, now BBC political editor, Nick Robinson, told us all yesterday that it was PM Cameron that had recently mobilised supermarket chiefs to claim the prices would rise in an independent Scotland. This is a small item in the absolute barrage now underway as Britain's rulers try to weaken the resolve of Scotland's pro-independence voters. 

The barrage appears to be having some effect. The politics of fear often work initially - look at post 9/11 USA. But Scotland is at the end of a two year debate. It has politicised a whole nation. The quality of the discussion is higher than at any time anywhere in Britain since the centres of the miner's strike in 1984/5 and before that, 1945/7, across the whole of the British population as it struggled to create a new country, free of fascism and the insecurities of the 1930s. The seed is well planted. Millions in Scotland have a good idea of the conniving, self-seeking and cynical character of the current British political establishment. And they have renewed hope; for a better life, for a better country and they want to do something that really means something. Like all huge offensives, the current onslaught is meant to terrorise, to paralyse, to reverse the advances that the Scots have made. But there will be a fight. The people of Scotland will resist. Whatever the outcome - a movement has been built.  These are moments at the pinnacles of real human history. 

So Robertson's revelation simply confirms what millions already know. If you want and need change you will be fought to the end by those who hold power; you will need to face the fears they try to create; you will need to assert your right to your own destiny. 

Effing Tories (and their Labour fellow travellers) fire the big guns

The Royal Bank of Scotland (owned by us) just decided - along with BP, John Lewis, Lloyds and Standard Life - to bomb the Scottish Independence campaign. Surprisingly perhaps they congregated the announcement of their 'risk reduction' measures on the day that PM Cameron's heart bled in public at the thought of life without the Scots. The multi £billion financial dinosaurs, Standard Life, RBS and Lloyds, need to huddle round the old lady of Threadneedle Street for calm and comfort. Note; apparently the banks and finance companies cannot get Bank of England backing when they fail (again) if they moved to Newcastle, Leeds or Manchester. Meanwhile BP is worried that if it held its assets in Scottish pounds or whatever currency the Scots choose they might see them devalue! Lucky for them that their cash is held mostly in offshore tax havens then. So they have no reason to worry. Perhaps they are more scared of some higher Scottish taxes on their North Sea profits - but if they are they dare not say so. And John Lewis are frightened that their prices will have to rise in an independent Scotland. There's a thing. (But you can get a great Chianti in Lidl these days!)

Salmond is right when he says that these orchestrated moves are designed as frighteners. But that is not enough. Nor is the response of the SNPs finance minister John Swinney. (He argues that Scotland WOULD get currency union, thereby dealing with the worries of the big banks and companies and the SNP had always been ready to 'make concessions' so that tax and spend policies could be agreed with the Bank of England.) 

Whats going on? The unelected Tory leadership and their never elected brothers and sisters in the City of London have decided to stop the Scots' movement towards independence in its tracks. Nobody can deny this is a powerful cabal - the most powerful in Britain. The opposition to independence is coming from the very centre of those who now rule. They are afraid that an independent Scotland could get loose from and then, in time, even challenge their control in the rest of the UK. The yes campaign in Scotland are leading a political revolution. It is a moment parallel to the first steps in the 1948 foundation of the welfare state. 

The argument about independence in Scotland has already shifted onto the question of 'what sort of country do we want to be?' rather than the technicalities of financial structures. The current barrage is a cynical and conscious attempt to push the argument backwards. The establishment threaten: If you go for your own democratic freedom then you will pay! Big banks and companies are lined up in the fight. The yes campaign needs a response. 

The yes campaign should say, we got here because we are tired of you pushing us around. We are turning our back on rulers we don't know and that we never voted for - whether they happen to be in Westminster OR in the City of London, a bunch of crooks, by the way, that nearly destroyed us all. Seven years later we are still paying for the banks and the City's greed and corruption. There are millions of us. Maybe a whole country. If you try to stop or wreck our democratic decision then it is you who will pay! We will set up our own Scottish Peoples Bank, based on our reserves and our latent wealth (including in the North Sea). BP will pay fair taxes, keep its nose out of Scottish democracy or find that they have some problems with their franchises. There are plenty of countries and companies looking for high grade oil in the world today. And as for John Lewis, we'll see what the partners who do the work for you say about your intervention into Scottish politics. Meanwhile we've heard on the internet that there's a good Chianti to be had in Lidl for under £6!

A central part of the yes campaign's struggle is for a real democracy. The Scottish people have taken hold of politics and their own destiny like nothing we have seen in Britain since the end of WW2. A few failed bankers and the odd oil billionaire need to learn that there are much more powerful forces in the world than their self appointed authority and corrupt self interest. 

... and now John Major!

Following hot on the heels of Labour's most distinguished Prime Ministerial failure, George Brown, now John Major, the modern Tories' most hopeless PM, has entered the Scottish Independence debate. If you listened to his interview on this morning's Today programme (BBC Radio 4, September 10) Sir John has used the opportunity of the end of the cricket season to give his strident message of doom regarding the consequences of Scottish independence for Scotland - and for the rest of the UK. 

The interesting part of his solemn, unctuous warnings is that they were mostly focussed on the future troubles facing a specific part of England and the English in the event of separation. We would lose our special relationship with the US because the Scots did not want Trident; we would lose our seat at the UN 's top table; our ability to negotiate a good deal with the EU would be damaged - leading to withdrawal; woe, woe, thrice woe! 

Sir John feels the last threads and binds of Empire being gently pulled away from the hands of Westminster and the City. He foresees his blessed England drifting down the first division of nations settling somewhere way below France and even, possibly Italy! 

A lot of Scots clearly already feel that they would rather do something for the local health service than follow the US into another one of its wars for the 'willing.' Perhaps they are already happy with the prospect of being a smaller country giving priority to looking after its citizens. Sir John's words may well strike deaf ears. As a large section of the English share such sentiments, perhaps Grammar School outsider Sir John will find that his cosy assumptions about post imperial greatness cut little ice with most of the English too. That's why the Bullenden boys don't discuss such things in public. 

George Brown

Son of the Manse, ridden by his own ambition, George Brown will manage to go down in history as the man who tried to save the banks from themselves and the unequal, austerity ridden United Kingdom from the Scots.

The Bullenden boys will dump again him once he has danced to their tune. George Brown; from Blair's wars to keeping the most backward political system in the West together, the man who has made an art form out of his wrong choices, is the last ditch symbol of the 'no' campaign at this moment before the Scots vote on the 18th. Brown has tried desperately to make the transition from a traditional social democratic, moral 'do-gooder' to the leadership of the political class. His ambition has tortured and destroyed him. Not a Greek tragedy though; rather a sad, modern farce.

A new opportunity is emerging; a breakthrough is possible

Len Mcluskey told his UNITE union conference that nothing 'in the next 12 months' was more important than the election of a Labour Government. Nothing more important than the election of another pro-austerity government? Really? It would certainly be a defeat for the Tories, and that might make people feel they could fight more. But we would still have to do all the major lifting, defeat the main government policy, and therefore the government that enacted it. Is getting Miliband elected really the most important thing we can do in what is now the next nine months? So, building the anti-austerity movement remains the priority whoever is elected. But does that mean there is nothing much of interest for the left in the coming election itself?

On the 13 of July this blog pointed to the institutional political crisis now effecting Britain. It was not the first time the point had been made here or elsewhere but as the vote on Scottish independence looms the characteristics of the British political crisis sharpen and become clearer. The independence vote, the rise of UKIP, the referendum on Europe, the austerity consensus of the three main parties and the relentless, excoriating public disgust with all things parliamentary are already shaking the British political class to the core. 

We can now see the shape of the potential wreckage emerging out of the miasma of decay, hypocrisy and corruption that calls itself British democracy. But we can also see clear steps through the fog-allowing the anti-austerity left the potential to take a decisive new political direction and thereby offer a new lead to the wider society. 

Scotland's vote on independence is already changing Britain's political landscape regardless of outcome. The surge for 'yes' has forced new concessions and guaranteed (whatever the upshot of the vote) that anti-Westminster hostility will be front and centre in Scottish politics for some time to come. Scotland has now embarked on its own political dynamic and line of struggle. And now we can also clearly see the potential consequences for the British Labour Party. The removal of Scotland's Labour MPs from Westminister in 2016 would finish Labour's possibility of governing Britain. Whatever UKIP's advances at the cost of the Tories, at a stroke the seductive promise of the possibility of governing, the absolute keystone in the arch of the traditional, bureaucratic labour movement, would have been removed. (It is interesting to note Mr Mcluskey's reaction to such an eventuality. After fuming publicly against any LibLab pacts, he says that would be the only circumstance for him in which he could support a Labour coalition with the Liberals! It is access to government that overturns all of Mr McLuskey's other principles.)  

The first impact of Scottish independence would be for Labour to fragment. Its internal ties and loyalties would loosen. Direct contact would need to be made between potential MPs and their constituents. Left candidates would seek close ties with union and campaign objectives - to guarantee supporters and finance. Links with other groups and individuals would strengthen inside Parliament. Individuals and small political currents (eg the Greens) would have a higher profile in Parliament. And the overall political crisis in British politics would still have only just begun. 

UKIP threatens a regroupment of the Tory right as well as a hemorrhage of some traditional Labour votes, and as Britain would be committed to an EU referendum, an economic crisis would rapidly follow on the heels of acute political change. 

Reality, as a very, well read revolutionary once put it, is always richer and more surprising than any theory. Sketching in some consequences of the current political contradictions inevitably produces just a sketch. But there is a line of march emerging which makes sense of Britain's political crisis and which would test its its potential for the left to advance its cause on a wider political stage. 

The Greens in England have held their most radical conference ever. Besides re-nationalisation of transport, defence of the NHS etc, then have made the bold call for a drastic redistribution of wealth via a citizens wage, paid for by the billionaires. They are anti-nuclear in peace and war. They have a much better record on equality issues than any mainstream party, most unions, institutions and voluntary associations.  And Caroline Lucas consistently wins polls in her constituency. 

Lewisham hospital campaigner, Louise Irvine, has just announced her candidature against Jeremy Hunt on the NHS question. Louise has led the most successful campaign yet to defend the NHS, building a local alliance which embraced virtually all strands of the left AND the local population as a whole. 

Up and down England and Wales there are well known campaigners. They represent the people in their area and they represent anti-austerity - at a time of great party political weakness.

Left partial breakaways from Labour, towards direct union groups in Parliament, representing campaigns and various local coalitions, are becoming possible and will accelerate among certain traditionally Labour MPs and candidates if the Scottish vote yes. As extra-parliamentary activity grows, and even if the Scots vote no, it will be possible to create some 'semi-detached' relationships on the edges of Labour. 

In short, the anti-austerity left should have an informal policy towards the 2015 general election. It is surely NOT the most important thing in the next nine months to secure Ed Miliband his premiership. Out of the industrial action and campaigns against austerity we can identify a group, perhaps one or two, perhaps more, of potential MPs who can genuinely represent the anti-austerity struggle. Under conditions of the general political crisis, the disaggregation of the main parties, their voices are much more likely be heard. Of course it would require some reconsideration in parts of the anti-austerity left of their existing electoral policy - essentially to represent themselves. OK. Let's hope they come along. For the rest of us, there's some work to do. We have to get some MPs elected that really represent something.

NATO's crisis

As NATO met recently by a Welsh golf course this once mighty engine room of the cold war looked like it would fail its MOT. NATO remains the armed wing of US led imperialism and its current fragile state reflects the tentative reach of US power following the bloody shambles it has bequeathed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is western power in every sphere is on the wain. Which is not the same as saying that its current opponents are dedicated to serving the interests of humanity. It would be more accurate to say that they are part of the toxic residue deposited in the wasteland that imperialist madness has created in parts of Asia and the Middle East. The Taliban and now Islamic State put a minus wherever their previous oppressors put a plus. The result is that their creations of hybrid states appear as grotesque inversions, captured by a distorting mirror, of the societies they claim to abhor. Their factional lines simply reverse those that applied in the previous puppet regimes. Their murders are personal rather than engineered by remote control. Technology is used to defend modern caricatures of medieval social and political structures. 

Of course I.S. is also a desperate response by a section of the oppressed to fight hell-fire with hell-fire. The mass destruction of the drones and the jets, the annihilation of any sense of self-determination, the blood sucking international corporations are all still at large in Iraq, (with the hard won exception of the Kurdish enclave) and in Afghanistan, still representing the overarching presence of the most powerful forces on the planet. But fire is rarely overcome by fire. And recently, near Cardiff, the US leadership of NATO was edging towards a new regional alliance in the Middle East, making military training deals with Jordan, financing a 'non-sectarian' government in Iraq that can 'credibly' call in NATO to 'defend' the country, preparing a noose around the neck of I.S. pour encourager les autres. The US has already bought and paid for the State of Israel, the Egyptian army the Afghan government and its army and countless bases in the region. It now wants Jordan's army (a problem for the Brits), a new dictator in Syria and a (very expensive) deal with Iran. 

At the centre of all this is the complete disaster that western imperialism has meant for the peoples of the Middle East and now Afghanistan. Chopped up land spaces turned into countries based on western oil 'concessions'; deliberate fomenting of religious differences among Arab peoples to ensure western control; 'solving' the Jewish question at the expence of the Arabs following Europe's ethnic cleansing; it is difficult to see a whole people (the Africans?; Latin Americans?) who have suffered more at the hands of the great western powers. 

From an immediate and humanitarian point of view NATO and its friends in the oil business and the security business and the rest, need to be thrown out and then kept out of the area. Yet  I.S.'s provocative beheadings are precisely designed to draw in the West, to force a change in local allegiances in the region, courtesy of another western invasion. An invitation that should be firmly rejected in any form.  (It is ghoulish to note that the famous western bastion, Saudi Arabia, supports I.S. informally and itself beheaded 113 people in the last 20 months without the slightest murmur from the west.) On the other hand it is surely right that the Kurds should be able to defend themselves against factional religious armies, a struggle which could help to create nations defined by all those people who wish to be part of that nation rather than by ethnicity, or by imperialist map makers.

We should be aware that as the world and the struggle for its resources becomes a more and more acute, and the great policemen of the twentieth century world shrink in their power and pomp, so the struggle for fairer divisions will erupt more often, but mixed together in more and more wild and extreme forms. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the debasement of the world's first coherent and analytic ideas of human liberation have rendered the battle for justice all the more chaotic for now. But that stage is not eternal. Humanity only poses questions when the conditions for their solutions exist. And without the battle, without the struggle to be managers of our own fate, as a species we are finished.

UKIP - a wide political regroupment.

Most commentators have picked up that the Labour Party also has a lot to loose from UKIP's advance. They no longer believe that UKIP is mainly to be understood as the current Tories version of what was Labour's nightmare in the 1980s, the SDP. Cameron may be sick with worry that he is never going to be PM again but in the longer term Labour is more at risk, and if Scotland goes independent, both the English and the Scottish Labour will be holed below the waterline. (Which is one of the very good reasons why the anti-austerity left will need to develop some intelligent tactics regarding Labour Party MPs, towards and through the next elections.) 

We will return to the Labour Party and the general question of MPs very soon but UKIP's rise is also a critical new fact in the arguments going on about political tactics inside the British anti-austerity left, most particularly among some of its more overt political formations. Establishing a new party to the left of Labour, whether the emphasis has been placed on the new party's potential British working class organisational roots or its possible parallel success given the rise of a new left in mainland Europe, preoccupies significant parts of the far left today. In fact it is an idea that first emerged in the late 1980s and its current popularity seems to echo the British Military General Staff's inevitable enthusiastic adoption of a war plan that might have won the battle that preceded current hostilities. 

There are three components of what might be termed the British working class movement today - four if you include Scotland. This claim is made in the sense that these are groups of people defined socially and economically as working class and who are in active political movement. Key trade unions spearhead anti-austerity action. A potentially enormous group, led by south Asian heritage communities, is anti-war. In Scotland the political choices of west coast working class people will determine whether Scotland becomes an independent nation. Finally an unknown section of mainly older working class people who used to adhere to Labour are shifting to UKIP. 

In Scotland, Labour's monopoly hold of the working class has already broken - whether or not independence wins. But the anti-austerity left, initially led by Sheridan's Scottish Socialist Party, fouled its own nest and missed the chance to challenge the hegemony of the SNP's left among the shifting politics of the scottish working class. Britain's enormous anti-war sentiment in parts of its population has not yet moved party political allegiances among these groups and one, ultimately farcical attempt, Galloway's Respect, has made that less likely in the near future. The RMT remains isolated even among radical unions in its disaffiliation from Labour.  Its chosen route to a new 'mass working class party' a campaign led by the Socialist Party, that has had a minute impact, seems to underline the futility of such an approach.  And finally, the disaffected millions that fell out of Labour's grip in England, that were an initial target for Scargill's failed SLP, that have even dropped out of the franchise as Blair evolved into Brown and then into Miliband, are currently regrouping around UKIP. 

The debate about new parties in the far left in Britain has mistaken important political shifts in and between the classes in society for a one way street in the case of the labour movement. Mass action against austerity and war has yet to become the centre of gravity for all the political movements with in the working class (a possibility that would be immensely strengthened by a new country in the UK at least initially defined as anti-Tory, anti-nukes and pro welfare state.)  Yet such mass action taking a central role inside the thinking of the working class has not yet happened and yet is the single biggest condition for any successful future substantial political regroupment of the left. 

Half and half

The Tax Justice Network has recently made the calculation that the corruption industry cost us about $30 trillion over the past 15 years - about half the entire world's gross domestic product.
'So for every $1 of output, 50 cents is being siphoned off in bribes and other illicit payments.' Alexander Lebedev - ex Russian billionaire writing in 'his' Evening Standard (1 September.)

Lebedev goes on;
'Between 2000 and 2011, just from China $3.97 trillion is thought to have disappeared, much of it the profits of corruption, channelled into secretive financial offshore financial havens. From Russia the figure is close to $1 trillion. In the EU the total lost is put at $1.2 trillion ($150 billion from Italy alone.)'
'Sadly' he adds 'London is at the very epicentre of this web.'

Leaving aside the 'no editing of the owners copy' privilege that Lebedev obviously makes use of in his article, his proposal is to create a new agency; an international anti corruption force. He estimates it would need a budget of $70 million a year and 'at its head I would appoint someone of global credibility and stature.' Who might that be we all wonder?

Lebedev (of course) misses the point. The whole developed and developing capitalist world now has the stature of one of those third world kleptocrcacies that the Bullenden boys so like to denounce.