Just as the SNP sweeps to utter domination of the Scottish presence at Westminster, the future of Scottish nationalism must move to a rejection of Westminster rule as illegitimate. That is the victory paradox.
There is no doubt that this is the best possible election result for achieving Scottish independence in the near term. The one thing that I believe might have postponed independence for decades, was a Labour Party government of the UK with SNP support, governing as Tory Lite but making the dreadful repressive UK state that little bit less openly vicious, the abuse a little bit more disguised, the wealthy corporate elite less openly triumphalist.
I know that Tory rule is going to be dreadful for many decent people who are struggling to make ends meet, that the heartlessness of benefits sanctions will cause despair and suicide, that asylum seekers will be detained and abused. But Scotland has absolutely rejected the entire Tory system, and the scene is now set for the kind of extra-parliamentary resistance that we saw to Thatcher’s poll tax. We have to refuse to let Westminster do this to people. In this circumstance, those SNP MPs are relevant insofar as they use their platform to help build the popular resistance, not in terms of anything they do in that appalling haw-haw club.
Labour would have lost and we would have a Tory government even if Labour had won every seat in Scotland. Labour’s abject failure was in no sense caused by the SNP, whatever the appalling journalists of BBC Scotland may say or imply. And Labour is now going to underline, still more than the Tories, the urgent need for Scotland to be independent. The airwaves are already buzzing with London comment that Labour’s problem was that it was not right wing enough for English opinion. The next Labour leader must be more Blairite, they say. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper or Chuka Umunna are touted to fit the bill, they suggest. This is completely a false analysis. If England were given a chance to vote for an SNP style, more left wing, offering then very many of the English would vote for it. But it will not happen. Labour will lurch ever further to the right and it will become undeniable that the Scottish people can only express their political aspirations through independence.
Even the best people are still human, and I have to confess that I am absolutely delighted that the SNP leadership have been neatly removed by this election result from any temptation. Exercising power within the United Kingdom state can be heady and addictive. An insidious agenda was quite blatantly propagated by Alex Bell in Bella Caledonia, a man who has been very close to the party leadership, and who actually celebrated the idea that:
The fascinating story of this election is how the SNP is ‘Britishing’ itself, gently playing down the big constitutional stuff in favour of real power over the austerity agenda.
Mr Bell goes on to make the ludicrous proposition that to support the creation of a small state is in itself a conservative agenda. He is profoundly wrong. To dismantle an aggressive imperialist state is not a remotely conservative agenda. I have frequently expressed the fear that there is a careerist core in the SNP who are more concerned with troughing in the political class and being big-wigs in the UK than with achieving independence. Bell’s insidious unionism – very lightly disguised as support for “utilitarian nationalism” – had the potential to be much more corrosive to the cause of independence than anything which the Tories can do. Fortunately Bell’s thesis is totally stuffed by the election result, and his pseudo-intellectual rationalisations of the status quo can now be safely confined to the dustbin of irrelevance. The SNP has no “real power over the austerity agenda” and has zero chance of gaining any within the United Kingdom.
There is now no course to take but root and branch opposition to the consequences of a Tory rule which Scotland has just declared anathema. The only way forward is now independence and the only route is through a mounting extra-parliamentary opposition over the next few years. I am absolutely delighted for all those SNP MPs, of whom a large number are personal friends. But if you want to remain relevant, you have to forget about Angus Robertson telling you what suits to wear or how to put an approved knot in your tie (yes, that really happened), and you have to inspire the street in the way so many of you did during the referendum campaign.
Can anyone inform me as to why Georgeous George lost to Labour so badly?
Best wishes Craig and Scotland from the Antipodes 🙂
JimmyG
It’s not just FPTP but the whole democratic process itself, it just does not represent the people ! Fiddling round the edges will not make it right. PR would be a start as it is common throughout the world.
“Ed Milliband just threw in the towel ! Clegg, Balls, Farage, Balls, all gone today”
What, both barrels of Balls?
The Tories have just gotten 326 MPs, an absolute majority (and probably will get some more). An official Conservative victory, and with perfect timing Cameron is with HM at this moment.
End of Story, for now.
Can anyone inform me as to why Georgeous George lost to Labour so badly?
Well, obviously the huge majority of Zionists in Bradford were entirely responsible…he says.
This is a more balanced and informed analysis:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/generalelection/george-galloways-dirty-battle-in-bid-for-bradford-west-seat-10233584.html
Note the mention of a bloc voting tendency, and this quote:
Shah has called Galloway a “one-man messiah” that the city can do without. Nabib Hussein, 32, would most likely agree with her assessment but Shah has still not done enough to persuade him. “I’m not voting,” he says. “My polling card is still in the car. It’s all about clan in Bradford and I’m sick and tired of it. Galloway is taking Asians for a ride.”
At last, they realised.
Balls. Unfortunately Yvette Cooper remains.
Does it prove that Kant was right? Even if all BUT one agree it is good, it does it mean it is good for all.
It may be the case that good proportion of people in England are in fact doing very well under banksters rule. Despite all the pain caused to so many, Cameron and his mates are back. What else could explain these results?
The worst is that now getting mandate to (f..ck them even further) Cameron and his mates will be unstoppable. I expect decline in everything people in the UK have been fighting and working for and massive increase in wealth of around 2% of the population. There will be many more BTL landlords, estate agents, property developers and all that who is going to see their capitals increase by many folds. Those on median income are really f.cked. Those who are on lower income are f.cked twice hard.
Thank you democracy.
Everyone assumed there would be a hung parliament. So, all the polls and experts and non-experts were completely wrong wrt the overall UK result (they were correct though wrt the Scotland result, though they’d have had to have been asleep not to have been right about that). Same thing happened in 1970. I don’t think the UK is remediable.
Labour have not thrown off the curse of New Labour with Blair’s illegal wars and Brown’s shambolic management of the economy still leaving a nasty taste in the mouth and with the fear that Labour would lead us back down that catastrophic tax, borrow and spend policies. At least with Ed and Ed gone they can turn a new leaf but I fear they will be in the wilderness for ten more years if FPTP is maintained and they don’t go with their grass roots.
Just sent this email to the SNP. This is how it feels to be English today…
—-
Dear SNP,
Full and deepest congratulations from an English supporter and (very modest) donor. I hope the SNP and Scotland will be the bright light we desperately need to contrast the gloomy, dire abyss England will become in the next five years. (Or more – fortune save us.)
It is strange indeed to be looking from England to Scotland, to the SNP, for some bulwark against the venal, rapacious and opportunistic Tory dismantling of our hard won, cherished institutions; our social fabric.
And please! Don’t gain independence too soon! We need you. Help us by being the guardians of the values, social equity and institutions which we will one day need to emulate again, to regain our dignity, rebuild our communities and throw off the neo-liberal straight-jacket in which the Tories will bind us.
In particular, please, please, guard and cherish the NHS. I fear now that it will no longer be a matter (in England) of saving the NHS, but rather of rebuilding it from the ashes of the coming Tory funeral pyre.
Deepest regards,
Paul L.
Oxfordshire
P.S. No chance of an English ‘SNP’ in the near future, I suppose?
🙁
Thomas G. Clark’s (Another Angry Voice) take on this.
http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/
Kind regards,
John
Labour would lead us back down that catastrophic tax, borrow and spend policies
As if the Tories were any different, except in their choice of taxation targets. The power of propaganda!
Sorry Paul L., your the wrong gender, where’s your kilt?
Scotland has voted for fema-fascism… you go girls!!!
Suhayl: Good to hear from you, even on such a dispiriting anniversary of VE Day (though the Russian/Soviet anniversary is 9 May, for incipient Cold War reasons). As a political physician, what’s your expert and fundamental diagnosis of the UK’s sickness? As a citizen I feel myself to be in the position of someone with a chronic severe pain of which not all the skills of the NHS or private medicine have been able to find the cause. The only relief of the symptoms are increasingly ineffective injections of anti-biotics or morphine, leaving me groggy and my immune system shot to pieces.
As a would-be expert whose predictions (largely based on my own local interpretations of the polls) were so wrong, I need to find a way to spot the next disaster (which will probably be the choice of the next leader of the Labour Party).
@JimmyGiro: “you’re” – not “your”. Still, you got one of them right.
“Labour would lead us back down that catastrophic tax, borrow and spend policies”
Actual record.
Average spend as a proportion of GDP:
1980 TO 1997 (TORIES) = 43.5%
1997 to 2008 (NEW LABOUR) = 39.8%
2010 to 2015 (TORIES AND ORANGE BOOK LIB DEMS) = 44.6%
Borrowing, average per year:
1997 to 2008 (NEW LABOUR) = £30 billion
2009/10 (NEW LABOUR) £158 billion to bail out the too big to fail banks.
2010 to 2015 (TORIES AND OB LIB DEMS) = £108 billion.
Since the conclusion of the 2010 GE the national public debt has doubled to almost £1.5 trillion.
Meanwhile, private UK debt, which was found by that well known infamous raving loony left wing outfit Price Waterhouse Coopers in 2010 to be around £10 trillion, continuous to dwarf the public debt.
You were saying?
I had that reaction to Alex Bell’s article too Craig and feared that if the SNP were assisting a minority Labour government they would get sucked into the venal Westminster system, become corrupted and lose their edge. As a party of opposition they may be locked out of government but they are not locked out of political influence. Cameron now has no legitimacy in Scotland, no legitimacy to impose austerity or fracking or TTIP on a nation that has decided it does not want it. This will raise many moral and constitutional issues which the SNP leadership will hopefully have the skill to elevate and this will surely act to focus minds in Scotland of the uselessness – no, the destructiveness – of the Union.
It remains to be seen whether the Tories will be idiotic enought to carry through their EVEL and austerity plans.
“Everyone assumed there would be a hung parliament. So, all the polls and experts and non-experts were completely wrong wrt the overall UK result (they were correct though wrt the Scotland result, though they’d have had to have been asleep not to have been right about that). Same thing happened in 1970. I don’t think the UK is remediable.”
The reason for this was quite straightforward. All the polls pointing this way were national polls taken across all constituencies in England, Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland. The blatant clue to the pollsters error can be found in the fact that in these national polls the SNP were polling about 5% because they were only standing in Scotland rather than across the country nationally.
Consequent to the under stating of the SNP vote nationally, the figures for New Labour were overstated because it included New Labour voters in Scotland. This mixing of two different sets of stats. into a national UK wide pot had the effect of inflating the number of seats New Labour would get in England and misled everyone into thinking there would likely be a hung parliament.
Votes per seat works out at 26,000 for the Scotch Nats.
3.83 million for the UKIP.
Anon1 : “Votes per seat works out at 26,000 for the Scotch Nats. 3.83 million for the UKIP.”
Those who live in an establishment glass house propped up by FPTP should not throw stones.
Aknob1:
How very inefficient of UKIP.
Wait for the Tories to split asunder on Europe.
Cameron has a very small majority of 12.
It’s a wonder he didn’t do a re-enactment of Thatcher’s ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.’ paraphrasing St Francis of Assisi apparently.
13:54
David Cameron’s number 10 victory speech – verdict
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2015/may/08/election-2015-live-labour-and-libdems-crushed-in-shock-election-result
@
Paul L.
8 May, 2015 – 1:04 pm
I think it’s fair to say that today the left in England are feeling much the same way as the nats did the day after the referendum. If you told the nats last September that in 8 months time that would take just about all of the seats in Scotland, they would have looked at you as though you were mad.
Cliche alert, when I say that a week’s a long time in politics.
We all know what’s coming with this new Tory government, and it might lead to widespread civil unrest south of the border.
Gawd knows what’s going to happen over the next five years.
The dog that didn’t bark in this election was the old English radical tradition which, for many years, found a comfortable resting place on the left, and in the real centre of, the Labour party.
Now the question is where will it next emerge? Its Scots equivalent, is going to be the left of the SNP, which should make life in that party interesting for the apparatchiki who will simply want to reproduce the machine politics which Labour practised and which go right back to Dundas.
There is room in England for a nationalist party of the left practising the traditions of Cobbett- a welfare state, a real concern for the environment, including organic horticulture and farming, independent and anti-imperialist foreign policies and withdrawal from the EU and other trade pacts impinging on sovereignty.
There is a vulgar fear of nationalism, on the left, as if it were a primitive stage of politics outmoded by the inevitable “march of progress” and the polar opposite of international solidarity. In fact nationalism of the anti-imperialist, minding our own business, is the basis of internationalism and in every sense opposed to racism, whose roots, in turn, are to be discovered in imperialism.
The likelihood is that a large portion of those who voted UKIP are really looking for great change without feeling that they want anything novel- they want to retrace their steps to a post war era which does indeed take on a roseate hue in retrospect- as Craig’s pre-vote piece did- a time not of perfection but of movement in the right direction, away from empire, towards a better health service, to a maturing of those council estates which were becoming rich communities, where most had steady jobs, children could grow up to be Alan Bennett or Raymond Williams, the elderly aged in modest comfort and the young given every assistance, in terms of diet, advice and medicine to thrive. Are they irrational to associate entry into the EU and subservience to NATO with the reversal of the progress they sensed in their youth?
As to the Green vote it is obviously, in large part, a billet for left radical voters who cannot any longer stomach the Labour party.
Obviously Labour’s fate in England and Wales is to follow what has happened in Scotland- all that is necessary is a place for it to go.
Does anyone suspect that among the very first moves of the Tories will be to give themselves a comfortable majority by disqualifying SNP members from a whole range of “English laws”?
Harman is temporary Labour leader.
Cameron did start off ‘One Nation, one United Kingdom’ – but stopped short of adding ‘one leader’. Wonder why??
The main players, Cameron, Clegg, Miliband, Sturgeon et al are all at the Cenotaph for the VE remembrance. Her Maj represented by P Andrew!
Sturgeon stood alongside Cameron, Clegg and Milliband right now celebrating the war machine.
Bevin: good post. I particularly liked the bit about children growing up to be Alan Bennett or Raymond Williams. Remarkable to think that between 1964 and 1997 we had five successive PMs who had all been educated at State schools. Can’t imagine that happening again soon.
MBC. It would seem reasonable to sum up the argument that the Coalition of forces that is currently the SNP (both inside and outside of the Parliamentary system) will need to be the “Good Example” for those across these islands who are not neo liberals and who are not taken in by the unworkable and unrealistic policies of that cult.
Some further observations:
– The overall result changes nothing fundamental. The practical real world outcomes of the policies arising from Conservative ideology cannot succeed, cannot work and they have been shown as such in example after example across the world. On economic policy they had to abandon austerity targets in 2013 because it was killing the patient. Putting the foot back on that particular pedal will not only cause great suffering it will trash an already dangerously unbalanced economy which is under performing because the ideology behind those policies is not congruent with reality.
Ideologues can huff and puff all they like but cannot escape the practical reality that the premise on which economic policy is based, that it is possible to continue unfettered exponential growth on a finite planet is unachievable and continuing on that path, with its attendant outcomes of man made global warming, increased pollution levels, mass un and under employment through zero cost production methods and technological substitution of labour at all skill levels, and rising acute inequality amongst other easily predictable results, is a zero sum game for our species.
That is the reality even if every seat in the HOC was painted Blue and everyone in the country voted that way.
– On the evidence so far it seems reasonable to conclude that New Labour will learn the wrong lessons here. The argument seems to be summed up by, I think, the editor of the Mirror newspaper, who seems to be saying that it is not possible for a Labour Party to be elected in England if it contains any policies that are considered (by whom, one wonders?) as “left” (defined by whom, one wonders again?).
The logic of that argument has to be that a Labour Party can only be elected in England on the basis of right wing policies. It is at this point where two aspects of reality kick in to undermine the bullshit that this argument represents.
Firstly, because we already have a political party who represents right wing policies. Its called the Conservative and Unionist Party (although given the current situation they might want to drop that last part on the grounds of false advertising). Although there are a number of smaller pretenders such as the Orange book Lib-Dems and UKIP also operating in that terrain. What is the point of voting for wannabees when you can vote for the real thing? The whole purpose and raison de’tre of the Labour Party completely disappears up its own anal retentive triangulation going down that path. Its too crowded already.
Secondly, it has already been down that road under Blair and Brown. The point of getting into power is to change things and progress. If you are going to follow the same ideological narrative and policies of those you are supposed to be opposing and abandon your constituency without arguing your case on the basis of your constituency has nowhere else to go the result is that over time they will find somewhere else to go, as they have in Scotland.
Since Dennis Healey publically on TV argued venomously against the traditional Labour platform on which he was standing in 1983 Labour have followed the narrative and policies of the right. And it has only got them nowhere – it cannot be seriously argued that the austerity light offering of Milliband and co was any sort of recognisable left agenda (they could not even be arsed to refute the bollocks thrown at them about the comparable economic record, some of which I’ve posted above).
They have argued on a largely Tory based set of premises which are not convincing. That is why they are where they are right now.
Arguing that their abandoned traditional constituency in Scotland was not listening and blaming the voters is not a good omen. Following the path argued by the Mirror and others of similar ilk is opting for oblivion because faced with a choice of real Tory and pretend Tory in the absence of putting a rigorous and vigorous argument for an alternative the Real Tory Party will prevail whilst those that can will opt for an alternative (as in Scotland) and those that are not presented with one will either vote Green/TUSC/Independent or just not bother, as so many did again this time around.
– It has long been argued that we are two countries. Often the basis is the North/South divide whilst more recently the focus has been on Scotland/England. Whilst not decrying the importance of the current Scotland/England scenario it would seem reasonable to argue that the real split is more fundamental, between, for want of a more pithy soundbite, progressives and reactionaries. Long term and short term thinking. Inwardly selfish and intellectually lazy, and outward looking and inquiring. Socially responsible and co-operative, and atomised individualism and competitive.
At present one part of these islands is now well represented by one set of values (Scotland) and the other part of these islands (England) is well represented by its opposite. But people make the bed they have to lie in as well as the bed of others who do not want to be in that bed. In ten years, after the inevitable clash of unworkable ideology and reality, when the shit is hitting the proverbial, it will be difficult to find many in England who own up to having put their cross in the Blue or Purple boxes yesterday.