*Man, that's a heart-sinking document. Especially if, like me, you're an intimate with the former Yugoslavia.
Labour risks failing the English - just like it did the Scottish
Thursday 7 May 2015 07.00 BST
Irvine Welsh
"The UK is now a pointless entity, existing solely to protect entrenched
privilege and continue the transference of the country's resources to a
global elite. For most citizens it's a failed state, which cannot
guarantee social progress, a decent education, the opportunity for
useful employment or a debt-free life. With Scotland cast in the
role as the conscience of Britain, or a running sore on its politics
(delete to taste), as it continues to both manoeuvre and be manoeuvred
out the UK door, the unionist rightwing desperately proclaim that the
Scots have "gone mad".
"Neoliberalism, austerity, the preservation and protection of a
secretive nonce ruling class, and the destruction of a Britain founded
on the welfare state: it seems inherently sane to want independence
from all of that. The real madness lies in tolerating this twisted
nonsense, while assuming it's going to fix itself.
" If it could, it already would have done so. Ed Miliband proclaimed, to
party conference Groundhog Day cheers, that Labour would abolish
the House of Lords.
"But there is no inherent desire from Westminster parties for major
constitutional reform. The UK can't go for the full-out federalism it
probably needs to save it: that just wouldn't play in the populous
south-east region, financially bloated with private money from Russian
and Saudi oligarchs on the back of the public investment by the rest of
UK, through our unitary state. So don't look for real change there,
expect more of the same anti-immigrant drivel that's been churned out
for years. (It's not really the billionaires that are driving property
prices up, and working people out of the capital, it's those pesky
minimum-wage Polish cleaners.)
"That the Conservatives, as Lord Forsyth admits, are now overtly
abandoning Scotland in order to shore up core support in the south,
should surprise nobody.
"One of the biggest myths is that those "unionists" actually care about
the union. If they can't have it on their own terms, it's little more
than an inconvenience to them.
"Bottom line: they want to win elections. If you are a Scottish Tory the
news that you do not matter to your party ought to have registered
years ago. But the Conservatives now have nothing to lose by
alienating their remaining Scottish voters; for Labour, who opted to
follow suit by hanging Jim Murphy out to dry, with Miliband, Balls and
Umunna literally queuing up to publicly humiliate him, it's much more
serious.
"Of course, Labour had already made the massive tactical error of
standing shoulder to shoulder with the Conservatives in Better
Together, during the seismic referendum campaign. This greatly hastened
a secular decline, giving generations of Scottish leftists the excuse
to jump ship. For many Scots, publicly supporting the SNP even last
year would have felt like taking your secret lover to your long-term
partner's funeral. Once it was confirmed that this partner had been
screwing around with your much hated, corpulent boss for years, that
outing turned from one of shame into a joyous party. With the devo max
ship probably having sailed, Scottish Labour are now in the position of
fighting the Tories to be unionism's top dogs north of the border.
"But for the London-based parties, Scotland is now about overt posturing
while drawing everything towards the steady conclusion of political
separatism. The real emerging issue is about the sort of democracy
people want to build in England, and the attendant struggle for English
national identity. We have an avaricious pro-establishment rightwing
nationalism playing the Johnny Foreigner card in all its
manifestations, in order to provide easy non-answers to the more
gullible subjects.
"This Greater Englandism has replaced Britishness as the major cultural
force in the south, and it has redrawn the border, de facto excluding
Scotland.
"With the Tory/Ukip/establishment right calling the shots on the issue
of English national identity, the left has been way off the pace, and
for understandable reasons.
"In any grossly inequitable society the real, substantive political
cleavage must always be class and wealth, and there is the natural
tendency to be suspicious of anything that seems to cut across that
divide. So while rightwingers regard Scottish nationalism as some kind
of Marxist, separatist threat to the empire, the English left have
traditionally tended to view it as a reactionary smokescreen with poor,
gullible Scots being bamboozled by opportunists and chancers.
" The problem is that this London-centric perspective hasn't squared with
the reality of the last 30 years. Left-minded Scots, who saw Labour's
Blairite ditching of clause four as radical reassignment surgery rather
than the bad hair day some party apologists tried to push it off as,
have at first steadily, now dramatically, been throwing their lot in
with the SNP. Figures such as Nicola Sturgeon would have been
natural Labourites a generation ago. Now it's impossible to imagine
Scotland's brightest political talents being attracted to a party
largely the preserve of expenses-guzzling bloaters looking to get on
the career structure, culminating in an ermine-wrapped, gin-soaked
tenure in the House of Lords.
"But the traditional English left view of the SNP has been undermined by
the demonstrative "people power" exhibited during the Scottish
referendum. Now the Westminster establishment's worst nightmare (of its
own making) - that this, and every other election in Scotland becomes a
rerun of the referendum - has come to pass. One problem in affecting
disdain with an emerging nationalism is that it stops you from
conceptualising the longstanding one that you're already an integral
part of: that type that leads us into slaughtering Iraqi children,
based on lies. Yes in your name, citizens of the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
"What gave me, and many on the left, the biggest problem with Scottish
independence, was the idea that we were running out on our English
comrades, leaving them to the mercy of a built-in Tory power block. But
this view rested not only on bad arithmetic, but, more crucially, a
misunderstanding of political forces as static. When you take Scotland
out of the UK, you are left with something very different from just
Tory seats. You have a more focused and hopefully inspired English
left, which instead of doing a half-arsed lackey job of trying to
contain Scottish independence for the establishment, should have
those real villains firmly in its sights.
"In the absence of a British or English consensual national identity,
the shouty, rightwing, media-sponsored Greater Englandism wins by
default. So it's up to the left in England to start defining and
negotiating for a civic English national polity, based on citizens'
rights, in a democratic, decentralised, multicultural state. As
counter-intuitive as it seems, perhaps it's time to take that white
flag that has been the real symbol of the mainstream left in Britain
for the last 30 years, and paint a flaming red cross on top of it. The
SNP evidently scares the establishment to a greater extent than a
tawdry, complicit Labour, which is essentially competing with the
Tories to serve it. How much more would a populist, leftist,
decentralist, civic nationalist party in England?
"However, the Labour insistence on playing the rigged Westminster game,
despite the waning enthusiasm for it from many of the party's own
supporters, shows how its incorporation into the establishment has
enfeebled and constrained its imagination. English Labour is a rough
coalition between London and the north and West Midlands. Its
comfortable middle-class leadership has never been at ease with
working-class voters who don't do as they say and think the way they
want them to.
"When I insist to leftist friends in London "don't call me a
nationalist", it doesn't mean I'm comfortable with the smug, wistful
and complacent title of "internationalist", which is too often simply
metropolitan myopia. When one country not 500 miles to the north was
trying to liberate itself from a vicious neo-liberalism and the
governmental system that promotes it, many on the London left scoffed
and sneered. However, few really cared: it just wasn't their party. The
notion that you can stop, rather than help to just precipitate, a
cultural shift to the SNP by promising to "get the Tories out" and then
(presumably) reforming a corrupt, centralist state in ways you won't
even discuss, is beyond nonsense…."
