Scotland the Dependent

Last week’s Super Friday, a succession of elections across the United Kingdom, has produced some intriguing results, especially in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party (SNP) is now in command, having enough seats in the devolved parliament to govern without the consent of the opposition. There are runes to be read here, signs to be interpreted, though with a message quite different from that which you may suppose.

I’ve seen some alarming headlines about the end of the three hundred year old union between England and Scotland. David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, anticipating a struggle, has already said that he will defend it with every single fibre that he has. Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister, now has enough votes to leap into the referendum on independence that he has long desired, previously frustrated because of his minority ministry. Oh, but there is so much more here. It would be wrong to see the increase in the SNP vote as a mandate for independence.

I look between the lines. What exactly is it that I see? I see a nation that was shamefully taken for granted by the Labour Party, a nation treated like a feudal appanage, a fiefdom by a party mired in corruption, complacency and neglect. In government Labour set up a Scottish parliament with one aim in mind, and it wasn’t greater justice for the Scottish people; no, it was to see off the SNP, who had the temerity to challenge their political monopoly.

Once the Parliament was set up it was treated from the outset as the second division, a place for placemen and political mediocrities. The Big Boys, including Gordon Brown, the man who treated Scotland with the greatest condescension of all, stayed at Westminster, where the real careers were made.

Holyrood, the district of Edinburgh where the Scottish parliament is located, was for the also rans, reflected in Labour’s colourless and second-rate leadership; the leadership of Jack McConnell, the previous first minister, about as memorable as a wet day in Woolwich, and latterly the aptly named Iain Gray, who had not even sufficient residual wit to understand that the greatest challenge he faced during the recent election campaign came from the SNP and not the Scottish Conservatives, a pathetic bunch of blue socialists, Vichy Tories, as Gerald Warner, Scotland’s greatest export, calls them.

Gerald Warner, if you don’t know his work, is a journalist and columnist. Above all he is a brilliant polemicist, one who invariably aims at the Achilles’ heel. His comments on his native Scotland are bitingly exact, his comments on a culture of dependence that will ensure that the country, no matter how hard Salmond may leap and dream, is likely always to be locked into the Union. I have in front of me We’re all doomed!, an article he wrote in the Easter edition of the Spectator, full of eye-opening facts.

The narrative goes something like this. For centuries before the Union of the Crowns in 1603 the Scots mounted plundering raids into northern England by bands of reivers. It was a kind of subsidy for an impoverished nation, unable to live within its own meagre means. There are no more reivers but the subsidies still pour north, tribute from the beleaguered English taxpayers, a kind of Danegeld without the Danes.

The situation is quite intolerable. Scotland currently receives £1600 ($2000) per capita more in public expenditure than England. This invidious position is soon to be ended, as the so-called Barnett Formula, devised by a previous Labour minister, is being revised. So the SNP, riding high on a national wave, faces a budgetary shortfall of some £4.5billion, the reality of which will kick in well before the proposed referendum is put in place. Just at the present Scotland is a place bogus dreams are made on, its little life rounded with a sleep.

As I have said, Labour, which dominated Scottish politics for decades, treated the place like of fiefdom. But there is something more: it also treated it as a kind of Indian reservation, creating a culture of abject dependency with hideous levels of state expenditure, a tradition which the SNP ministry only continued, and has promised to continue still further. Amazingly, as Warner points out, by 2009 Scotland had attained global statistical significance as the third most state-dependant country in the world, after communist Cuba and war-torn Iraq. Out of four million Scottish voters just over half pay income tax. It’s even worse than that: for most of the tax payers are in public sector jobs dependent on tax.

It’s a vicious circle, a spiral from which there is no escape, certainly not in independence, unless Scotland, or Alba, to use the Gaelic name, wishes to go the same route as Albania. Perhaps there is something to be said for pyramid selling schemes after all, when there is nothing else, not even the builders of pyramids.

This is the reality of Alex Salmond’s brave New Scotland that has such people in it, people who have long lost the entrepreneurial spirit of Adam Smith, the technical ingenuity and business acumen of James Watt, have lost almost everything in the way of a free and productive bourgeoisie. Yes, dependent is the key work, not independence. New reivers will ride south, not able to live by their own devices. Can we afford them any more, can we afford Scotland? These are the questions that can no longer be avoided. For our sakes Scotland may have to have independence thrust upon it, even after the country votes no in Salmond’s referendum.

Dead Parrots

I woke up on Friday morning with the determination to get out and vote as early as possible, to vote NO, to reject the Alternative Vote, the shabby compromise which would have replaced the existing first past the post method of sending our representatives to Parliament, a compromise designed to give the Liberal Democrat Party a perpetual hold on power.

I was happy when I voted, quietly confident that the Yes camp had lost. What a change from earlier this year when I thought that the British people were sleepwalking into this change, driven there like sheep bleating about ‘fairness.’ But I love a fight, especially when I’m in a corner, there always at my toughest. I blogged against it here and on other sites; I argued against it at university in debate, with friends, with anyone who was prepared to listen, people whose minds had not been completely befuddled by ‘fairness.’

Perhaps I need have written or said nothing. In the end the public face of the Yesers was probably the best ally the Noers had. There is Corporal Clegg, of course, the leader of the Limp Dumbs and Deputy Prime Minister, a tremendous asset now that everyone disagrees with Nick. He’s clearly set to become a crutch for the sore losers, now advancing the argument that the referendum, their referendum, was a popularity contest in which Clegg got a good kicking, not because the platform was wrong but because he is Clegg! They did not lose the argument, oh no, of course they did not; the whole thing was just so terribly unfair, the perpetual bleat of these perpetual losers.

Yes, losers like the risible Eddie Izzard, one of the celebrities who fronted the Yes campaign, who, incidentally also supported joining the euro, a ‘comic’ who is in fact a clown, and I say that without a trace of irony. There was Dan Snow, who really is a comic, conceivably the most laughable excuse for a historian that this country has ever produced. There is that fat arse Stephen Fry, professional twit and tweeter, a man who has never had sex with a woman but knows all about how women feel about sex. If Izzard, Snow and Fry are yes the answer always has to be no!

Speaking of tweeting, no sooner had I voted than I went online, went to Twitter, just to see the buzz. There were lots of Yes people there, still rising in the dawn of Armageddon. I simply could not resist a counter-attack, could not resist having a spot of fun at their expense. “Don’t believe what David Cameron is saying”, one response came. “I have no idea what Darling Dave thinks about AV, never having read him.” I replied, “But I sure as hell know what I think!” To another who suggested that all supporters of electoral ‘reform’ leave for some place with a ‘fairer’ voting system I said “Try Fiji!”

Yes, I had a spot of fun; I just couldn’t help myself. I had even more fun on Friday evening, more than my usual intake of champagne cocktails, when it became clear that the people had not just rejected AV but rejected it in such resounding terms, consigning it to a political crypt, there never to rise again. It’s as well to be cautious, though, for there is still poison in the system, still the bleating pleas for ‘reform.

The vote was a vote for conservatism, something the Liberal Democrats find impossible to understand. They are still prepared to tamper with the constitution not in the name of ‘fairness’, a political fig leaf, but for their own sectional interests, to get more of their people into positions of power.

Writing in the Guardian, Tim Farron, a Liberal Democrat MP, helpful ‘reminds’ his Conservative partners in the present coalition government that they are wedded to a promise to abolish the House of Lords in favour of a wholly elected upper chamber, based on, based on what exactly? Can you guess? No? Well, it’s to be based on proportional representation. So, electoral ‘reform’ thrown out of the front door is to be introduced through the back. Here we are; they are already suggesting another pointless, expensive and irrelevant exercise, something else nobody wants, nobody but the Liberal Democrats.

Never mind them; they are once again knocking on the door of Nemesis, once again experiencing the strange death that George Dangerfield wrote of so brilliantly all those years ago, torn apart by the fault line in British politics, which does not allow for a flabby centre. David Cameron says that there should be no gloating over the AV vote. To hell with that; let’s gloat! The Lib Dems are the irrelevant party. I’m reminded of something, oh, yes; I’m reminded of dead parrots.

'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e
rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the
bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

Marionettes

To mark the thirteenth anniversary of the death of Pol Pot, the face of genocide, the Spectator Coffee House Blog recently published an article by Michael Sheridan, which originally appeared in September 1996. In this he maintains that France had a part to play in the formation of the murderous politics of the Khmer Rouge.

The thesis is superficially attractive. A number of the senior apparatchiks of this frightful movement were educated in France, not just Pol Pot, whose real name was Saloth Sar, but Leng Sary, Khjeu Samphan, and Hu Nim. They were all there in the late 1950s, imbibing, according to Sheridan, the politics of the Left-Bank during its unyielding existential period.

They absorbed much of their theory, he continues, from the French Communist Party, a thoroughly Stalinist body, steeped in hatred of the bourgeoisie. The Party’s programme included the collectivisation of agriculture, which the Khmer Rouge carried through with a literal-minded and barbarous rigour after they captured Phnom Penn in 1975, which, so says the author, even Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier at the time, found terrifying.

As I say, it’s superficially attractive…and utterly unconvincing. Unconvincing at least so far as a specifically French dimension is concerned. Why on earth should Zhou Enlai, of all people, have found the Khmer Rouge actions ‘terrifying’? After all this man, no more than the abject dog of Mao Zedong, belonged to a government whose actions were no less horrific in the Great Leap Forward, a more exact model for Pol Pot than any theory he absorbed in France. The French Communist Party may have talked about collectivisation – luckily for France it never got beyond talk – but it was Stalin and the Soviets who carried it into practice, with total disregard of the human consequences.

No, the rot is not in France; it is in Marxism itself, in the different mutations of Marxism, - in Lenin, Stalin and Mao, those three monsters of the twentieth century, the Red Century, the most murderous in human history. I suppose it’s possible, though, to argue that there is a more precise French root to the politics of the Khmer Rouge in the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the original monster of the idea, who advanced a thesis based on human perfectibility, an abstraction which turns the real world upside down, one that makes dispensable marionettes of us all.

Foreign fiascos

I wonder if someone can explain the rationale behind the foreign policy of this country at the moment, because I have no idea what’s going on or what our objectives are. I was tempted to write to William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, to ask if he could provide some light, a futile exercise, I concluded, because he gives every appearance of understanding even less than I do.

The problem is this. Here were are, ranged alongside France and the other idiot powers in NATO, attacking Libya day after day, with no conceivable end in sight. Oh, but it’s all about ‘protecting civilians', the cry went, all in pursuit of the wholly admirable UN Resolution 1973, fully supported by other Arab powers, fully supported by Syria, a power now busily murdering its own citizens, a power, incidentally, that has been lobbying for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, with the backing of the Arab League.

So, let me get this straight. We are attacking a country that had renounced terrorism, a country that had also abandoned its nuclear project, all in the name of human rights and ‘protecting civilians.’ Clearly there is nothing cynical at work here, no considerations of our own self-interest, no notion of realpolitik. It’s all about moral rectitude, all about doing the right thing, is it not?

So, what about Syria, what about a country with a far more savage record on human rights abuses than Libya, a country which actively encourages terrorism, a country that has links with Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran? Vague Hague is threatening President Assad with ‘sanctions’, that’s what.

It’s the simple-minded stupidity that I find most unsettling, that we walk into these obvious traps without the least understanding, not the way one expects a government to behave, a government with any strategic or political sense. Set the question of resources to one side, we are attacking Libya because we can, with no heed for the possible consequences; we are effectively ignoring Syria because we dare not do anything else, other than issue Hague’s vague threat of ‘sanctions.’

I’ve said this before but this laughable moral imperialism, this doctrine behind “responsibility to protect”, is shot through with glaring contradictions, act in one place, ignore another; ignore Syria, Bahrain, Darfur, Zimbabwe, the list just goes on and on.

Cameron and Sarkozy, that comic double act, decided to act against the Colonel because they thought the Colonel would be a push over, let’s be absolutely frank about that. The ridiculous Sarkozy wanted to bolster his popularity ratings in a country anxious that it is no longer able to ‘get it up’ on the world stage. That’s a motive, I suppose. What about Cameron, what was he out to prove? Oh, yes, I know – he is the heir to Blair.

Intervention in Libya is even worse in some ways than the Iraq fiasco. No account was taken of the fact that Gaddafi has considerable support in the west of the country, something I’ve alluded to before. Beyond that there is an ancient fracture between Tripoli in the west and Cyrenaica in the east, an historic division we have merely compounded by precipitate action based on ignorance. We found a civil war; we have ensured that civil war may now be endless. If the stupidity and the hypocrisy behind our actions in the Middle East is obvious to me it will be obvious to so many others. Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya, just how many more of these expensive and pointless Pyrrhic adventures can this country take?

Time past, time present, time future

If I tell you a story about a dead man who tries to save Chicago from a nuclear holocaust, that he has only eight minutes to do so by invading the body of another dead man, a passenger on a train, that he has to repeat the same eight minutes time after time until he finds out who the bomber, the snake on a train, is before the whole thing blows up, except that time is not limitless, that there is a deadline in the living world which has to be worked against, you will conclude that I’m either crazy or that I’ve seen Source Code! We are not talking suspension of disbelief here; we are sending disbelief on a very long vacation. :-)

Yes, the plot’s ridiculous and the ending unbelievable but, my goodness, this movie works, an exciting, well-crafted, well-paced, well-directed and well-acted sci-fi thriller. It was prepared to dislike it in the way that I disliked Inception, another dream within a dream, but I was quickly won over, in large part to begin with by the superlative Jake Gyllenhall as Captain Colter Stevens, the man who unexpectedly finds himself on a Chicago-bound train, dead but not dead, living but not living. He has a sort of quizzical, bewildered quality, conveyed by expression as much by word, which carries one along to share in his confusion. Casting is so important here. A wrong move, a wrong actor, say Nicholas Cage, would only have heightened the absurdity of the plot.

Source Code was directed by Duncan Jones, who managed to escape his own alternate reality as Zowie Bowie, the son of the camp old pop queen David Bowie. I’m strongly tempted to avoid mention of Groundhog Day for the reason that just about every other review I have read has mentioned it. But that’s just the thing – this is a version of that time-loop movie, a scene played again and again until the right outcome is achieved. Inception, Groundhog Day and even The Matrix, they are all there, except that Source Code manages to absorb their influence while creating something divertingly original.

Don’t ask me to explain what the actual source code is because I can’t. I’ll leave that to Dr Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright), the mad scientist and even madder bureaucrat who heads the team that guides Captain Stevens on his mission; you will perhaps make better sense of his ramblings than I could, not being particularly sympathetic to scientific mumbo-jumbo…or bogus metaphysics!

The mission begins suddenly and dramatically, with Stevens coming to consciousness opposite a woman on a train, Christina (Michelle Monaghan), who clearly knows him though he hasn’t a clue about her. That’s the start of his first relationship. His second in the real world, the living present as opposed to the dead past, is with Captain Colleen Godwin (Vera Farmiga), his mission controller, with whom he interacts through a computer screen, himself being confined in his non-train moments to a Major Tom Tin Can (Bowie!)

Both of these interactions actually work very well, that with Farmiga, who manages professionalism and compassion with equal ease, in some ways even more effective than that with Monaghan, who supplies the love interest. Yes, one simply can’t get away from that, and the more the peripatetic captain returns to the past, to the dead world, the more his feelings for Christina grow by degrees. He is looking for a bomber; he discovers his bomber and discovers himself, creating in the process a new life beyond death.

This is a movie about paradoxes and metaphysical puzzles, a movie about time, the greatest paradox of all. It’s a movie about alternate realities: the past may not be changed but perhaps it can be diverted to other ends, like a train moving down a siding. In the end Stevens, actually now one Sean Fentress, a history teacher, successfully past those last eight minutes and free from the train, walks with Christina in Chicago’s Millennium Park, there to see a new reality, distorted in a massive stainless steel sculpture of a cloud. This is such stuff as dreams are made on.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

Feeding the beast

Bin Laden is dead. The news is now round the world. I woke up to it early this morning, discovering it not through the usual media but from an alert in my inbox from Bob Mack, a friend and fellow blogger. I couldn't quite believe it - perhaps it was a mistake, maybe the facts are not conclusive. I immediately messaged Bob;

"Bob, I’m just out of bed, just checking my mail and I saw this. I heard it first from you! Is it really, really true? There’s no doubt, is there? Do they have a body? I’m so glad if it’s true. I was tempted to refer to this creature as a rat on two legs, though, on reflection, I thought that unfair to rats."

Yes, he confirmed, it's true, quoting a news report from the Army Times. I gather it was a consequence of an operation by the elite Navy Seals unit, with groundwork in preparation for months. These brave American servicemen are to be congratulated, should be congratulated by decent people across the world, people for whom Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda are an abomination, the work of the Devil, the agents of Iblis. Nothing can ever make up for the attacks on New York and London; nothing can ever bring the many victims of these vile people back to life, but at least some justice has at last been achieved, and some justice is better than no justice. That Bin Laden is off the face of this planet has to be a cause of immediate celebration.

I'm happy; I'm sure just about everyone else who reads this will be happy also, but I think this should be tempered with caution. We should always be aware of the nature of terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda; that they are amorphous, formless, almost like gas; they can operate through multiple locations without any central control. From watching past news reports, from watching Bin Laden's periodic broadcasts from some isolated and indeterminate location, it's fairly obvious that he had lost much of the importance that he once had, that he had become little more, if you like, than an avatar. A head has been cut of the hydra but the beast is not dead; other heads will appear from other places.

I know, it's a sobering thought, not one that perhaps we really want to hear at this point in time, but all the more necessary simply to ensure that we retain a proper sense of balance. Bin Laden is dead; terror is not, we all know that. Al-Qaeda has received an important blow to its morale, but it will soon recover, in possible revenge attacks. This is not the end, it's not the beginning of the end, and, I have to say, it is not even the end of the beginning. I also have to say that it was a gross error to get rid of his body, get rid of the evidence, so quickly. This is the stuff from which myths, and conspiracy theories, are hatched.

There are also serious questions that have to be addressed about the deeply misconceived 'war on terror', questions about our involvement in wars in the Muslim world, places where we have no business, where we achieve nothing; places like Afghanistan and now Libya, where the war on terror has degenerated into terror. The deeper our engagement, the more collateral damage, the greater the hydra becomes, sucking, like a vampire, on resentment, anger and hate. This is something that is not easily defeated, not even by the most careful intelligence and the bravest of soldiers. Yes, Al-Qaeda is a vile organisation but by one ill-conceived action after another we have been feeding the beast, not killing it.

Setting the world on fire

Mary Corry is American. She’s now eight-one years old. When she heard of the engagement of William and Kate she had just had open heart surgery. In spite of her medical condition she flew in to London from Florida on Wednesday, spending the eve of the royal wedding on an inflatable mattress outside Buckingham Palace. “England would not be England without the monarchy”, she is reported as saying in the Times.

No, it would not; it’s part of what we are, part of the warp and weave of this nation. When we lose all other points of reference the monarchy will still serve to define what we are and where we have been. It’s the one guarantee, when Parliament and politicians have been found so wanting, have sacrificed so much of the sovereignty of this nation to an alien Continental power, that we will never be fully absorbed into the déclassé European Union.

Mother and I watched the wedding together on TV, not wishing to miss anything by being lost in the London crowd. I’ve never been so moved by a state occasion, by the majesty and the splendour of it all. We may have lost out in so many areas but we still do this kind of thing superlatively. I was concerned that the anarchists and thugs who recently rampaged in the streets of London would have spoiled it all, even in a minor show of sourness, but they were nowhere to be seen, the police for once doing a splendid job.

I have no hesitation in saying that from time to time my emotions took over, the tears rising to the point of overflowing. Kate looked magnificent in that McQueen dress. But the new Duchess of Cambridge is magnificent in every sense, full of quite humour, humanity, calmness and natural aristocratic poise. She will make a splendid Queen Catherine, the mother, one hopes, of generations of royals to come.

The most moving part of all for me was when the Bishop of London, the Right Reverend Richard Chartres, reminded the congregation in Westminster Abbey that the wedding day was also the festival of Saint Catherine of Siena, drawing on her beautiful words – “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”

William and Catherine will set the world on fire; they have set the world on fire for so many, here and abroad. Princess Diana would have been so proud. How proud the Middletons must be, proud to see their girl, the descendent on one side of the family from Durham coalminers, linked with the ancient royal blood of England. The monarchy does not need to be updated or modernised, does not need the interference of ignorant politicians. It invariably adjusts itself to the atmosphere and to the times. It always has, which is precisely why it has endured when so much else has gone.

I’m a royalist, that much is obvious; I will always be a royalist. I would even say that it’s in my blood, part of my makeup as a human being. My grandfather, an amateur genealogist, was able to trace our family lineage back so far as the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century, to people who served in the royal army of King Charles I. So, we were supporters of the crown then and remain supporters of the crown now, supporters of a wonderful and undying tradition. I’m writing this in a mood of heightened emotion, perhaps more than usually revealing, a measure of exactly how I feel at this moment in time.