I know some people will say ‘What’s this got to do with independence?!’ It has everything to do with independence. Winning the battle for Yes is NOT about competing on the same economic terms as Britain and the failed models, it’s about creating something far better. This is Richard Wilkinson, author of The Spirit Level on: How economic inequality harms societies…
Hat’s off to the amazing folks at Blipfoto…
By Mike Small
Pundits seem to be coalescing around the idea that a ‘positive message’ is an essential part of political campaigning (nothing new here, see Pat’s Juggernaut of Joy thesis). Whether it’s Obama’s upbeat derivative (but ultimately empty) Yes We Can, or, as critics had it, Salmond’s indy question (characterised by some as some sort of Derren Brown-style mass hypnosis), the idea of positivity is the key, or so we’re told. It’s simple: people who whinge and moan all day become a bit of a drain to be around. We naturally gravitate towards those who bring a bit of sunshine and light into our life.
This presents the Unionists with a challenge. How to oppose the Yes Campaign with a positive? What is the positive case for the Union? Well it’s about security, continuity and stability. All good things, but in stressing these you have to also sort of pretend it’s all okay as is, and that’s where they get unstuck. The nationalists have to say things will be okay, the unionists have to pretend things are okay. It’s not jam tomorrow but it’s a set of ideas – a vision – based on hope. Now we know that this might not work out but we have aspiration whereas in the HERE and NOW we kind of know perfectly well what things aren’t working. UK Plc has nationalised the banks and given our money away to the super rich. People can’t get the homes they need, and there’s an outbreak of mass unemployment, fuel poverty and a generalised economic insecurity that strikes into the heart of peoples well-being by the residual stress it creates. Continue reading
By Thom Cross
Scotland does it all the time. We were taught it at school and in the street, by grannies and the meenister; more significantly (ominously?) by our Scottish? media the BBC, The Herald, The Scotsman (and for us in Fife) the Dundee Courier. ‘It’ is to honour the conservative way; to be cautious; to play nine-men behind the ball, especially when you are a new manager; a new boy or a new woman. The unheralded underground historical Glaswegian conservatism was a powerful (samizdat) ideological tradition not confined to Orange politics. Remarkably it even produced socially conservative radicalism, remember ‘nae bevvying’ during the Clyde work-in. Much of the support for the USSR on the Clyde was due to the very fact of soviet caution, its orthodoxy created entrenched institutional statist ‘socialism.’ Continue reading
By Mike Small
As the date for the liberation poll is announced the need for clarity is needed. Liberation from what, for what? A replica mini-state is not what we need from this process. We need a new operating system, not a new computer. What social software do we need? What political apps are required? What could Scotland 3.0 look like?
Number one on my list – and I suspect the vast majority of us, is a response to the crisis in child poverty outlined yesterday as figures suggest 13 Scottish councils have wards where more than 30% of children live in pockets of severe poverty. Equality needs to be hard-coded into the new Scotland. The ‘worst areas were in Glasgow, the west of Scotland, Edinburgh, Dundee, Fife, Aberdeen and Stirling’, in other words right across the country. Continue reading
…we are entering into a period of increasingly massive social dislocations and disorder which harbors within it countless risks, defeats, dangers, false dawns and fake defeats. But…we are all coming to the powerful and simple realization that human beings acting peacefully together in concert can do anything–and nothing can stop them.
Something is happening. Something is shifting in the relations between politics and power. We don’t know where it will lead, but the four-decade ideological consensus that has simply allowed the creation of grotesque inequality has broken down, and anything and everything is suddenly possible.
Simon Critchley asks: What is Normal?
By Mike Small
Dave’s Big Adventure yesterday has the Tory right and far-right dancing with glee. He’s being compared to Churchill for walking away from Europe (as far I remember Churchill stood by Europe but let’s not quibble it’s the action they’ve been ganting for for decades). For some this is a great bat to beat the nationalist movement. But to the Twitter question ‘Why would Scotland want to join an unelected superstate?’ the answer quickly came, ‘We’re part of an unelected superstate, called Britain’.
Angus Macleod of The Times was ‘rubbing his hands at the deafening silence’ from SNP HQ, but we reckon that he and Kenny Farquharson of SoS have got this one far wrong. Even the struggling mega-bland Eddy Miliband has it right: “We should be under no illusions about the import, the impact or the reasons behind the decision. The significance is that we have chosen to let 26 countries make crucial decisions without us. The prime minister’s apparent warning at the meeting that they “couldn’t use this building for their meetings” would be laughable if it was not tragic.”
This is a terrible decision for Britain but potentially good news for Scottish independence. A reconstituted eurozone could offer a safe haven from the crazies of big business Bullingdon and hedgefunds represented by British Govt PLC. As news seeps out (shock horror) that RBS boss Fred the Shred will escape ‘further’ (sic) sanction, what Cameron’s antics expose is a reckless xenophobic ideologue posturing as Tory New Man. Gone are the Huskies, Sam Cam and Hug a Hoody, back are the Same Old Tories. Continue reading
This from the Evening NEWS.
A CROSS-PARTY “Keep Scotland in Britain” campaign is expected to be launched in the new year to counter the SNP’s drive for independence.
Reports today said former Chancellor and Edinburgh South-West Labour MP Alistair Darling could take a prominent role in the campaign along with former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy.
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Bella loves the possessive phraseology of the campaign slogan and wishes these two stalwarts all the success in their campaign. Hearts of Oak.
Huge hearty Bellalicious congratulations to Martin Boyce for winning the Turner Prize 2011 with his wonderful spooky installations. This completes a hat-trick for Scotland, following fellow Scots artists Susan Philipsz and Richard Wright, who won last year and in 2009 respectively.
Boyce is known for re-imagining items from places like parks and public spaces and using them in atmospheric installations. Born in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, Boyce was among the first graduates from the Glasgow School of Art’s now famous environmental art course. His peers include Douglas Gordon (best known for film works such as 24-Hour Psycho and Zidane ), who won the prize in 1996, and Nathan Coley, who was shortlisted in 2007.
The Glasgow-based sculptor was announced as the winner of the £25,000 award for his piece Do Words Have Voices? in a live televised ceremony at the Baltic gallery in Gateshead, the first time the event has been held outside London in its 27-year history.
But the odd thing about this is that the Scottish media – normally ready to celebrate any home-grown success – is pretty muted about this. Is it because society has fallen out of love with art? Is it because the Turner itself has become a bit of an early panto? Is it because the tabloids hate contemporary art? Is it seen as metropolitan clever-stuff unpalatable to our endemic anti-intellectualism? Dunno. But we bet that his achievement gets little more than a brief mention before Sally Magnusson shuffles her papers and moves onto Sunshine and Sweetie. Take a look at the links below…
Martin Boyce (2011 winner)
Karla Black (nominated 2011)
Susan Philipsz (2010 winner)
Richard Wright (2009 winner)
Nathan Coley (2007 nominated)
Douglas Gordon (winner 1996)
Enjoy Susan Philipz Lowlands (short extract) here:
By Douglas Strang
In ‘The Great Tablecloth’, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda conjures for us the sensual pleasures of the plate – “In the blue hour of eating, / the infinite hour of the roast,” – contrasting them with the solitary experience of a peasant in a field and his “poor quota of bread,” eating with “grim teeth, / looking at it with hard eyes.” The poem is radical, visionary, and it politicises the simple act of sharing a meal:
Let us sit down to eat / with all those who haven’t eaten;
let us spread great tablecloths, / put salt in the lakes of the world,
set up planetary bakeries, / tables with strawberries in snow,
and a plate like the moon itself / from which we can all eat.
Despite being written in the 1950s, ‘The Great Tablecloth’ serves as an eloquent abridgement of the aims and concerns of the many ‘food movements’ which have gained prominence in recent years. Movements such as Fair Trade, Slow Food and the many urban food-growing initiatives; the latter often deliberately based in inner-city schemes, reaching out to those who have suffered most from the commodification of our food. All of these movements and projects, in their different ways, seek to redress the injustices of the global food industry and to celebrate food as a means of revitalising individuals and communities, and of repairing their relationship to their culture and to the land.
Last month, in Kinghorn, a small coastal town in Fife, an international conference examined some of the inequalities around food production and consumption. FoodRevolt, brought together around two hundred activists, NGOs and food writers, as well as chefs, food producers and, of course, consumers. It was an intense day of talks, films and workshops focused on the politics and the joy of food. FoodRevolt was hosted by The Fife Diet which, with more than 2,000 members, is the largest project of its kind in Europe.
To read this post in full at Open Democracy click here: The Justice of Eating
“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” - Aldous Huxley, 1958, in the article The Capitalist Free Press
Two things, of very different severity and importance and that I would have thought were very unsurprising, seem to have struck people as very surprising this week.
One of them is worthy of serious study and one of them is not. Most people have chosen the wrong one in order to get into a lather about.
The 2 things to which I am referring are the assessment that Anders Breivik is insane. The BBC report that this is causing some consternation in Norway and the second, which is of no importance compared to the first but is receiving a lot more publicity, is that Jeremy Clarkson is a twat. Continue reading
Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination
Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Yet faced with this prospect, the knee-jerk reaction is often to cling to what exists because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even more oppressive and destructive. The political imagination seems to have reached an impasse. Or has it?
By Doug Strang
Opening Kandinsky in Govan: Art, Spirituality, and the Future, at the Pearce Institute, curator Alastair McIntosh cited Damien Hirst’s piece ‘For the Love of God’ as an example of the degenerate state of the contemporary art world. The piece, a cast of a human skull encrusted with over 8000 diamonds, cost £14 million to produce. The obscenity of the cost of such ‘bling on bone’ as it was called by performance artist Nic Green, is keenly felt in a place like Govan where under-funded community arts projects face a constant struggle to survive. Hirst is an easy target and yet it was brought home again and again over the weekend, the disparity of investment in art for the elite and in art for local communities.
Inequality is nothing new of course, but given recent world events and the continuing unfolding of economic collapse, it seemed timely to participate in a conference whose aim was to challenge the role of art in our society. In his address McIntosh was unequivocal, condemning “elite pretentious art that is up its own backside” and calling instead for “art as service”, that “can speak in places of poverty.” Continue reading
Occupy London SX on steps of St Paul's
by Kevin Williamson
The distinctly un-Christian attempts to evict the Occupy London Stock Exchange protesters from outside St Paul’s Cathedral have been an eye-opener, revealing ungodly facets of the modern day church’s worldly affairs.
Take the St Paul’s Board of Trustees. It reads like a who’s who of Money Lenders Inc:
Trustees
– The Right Reverend Graeme Knowles: Dean of St Paul’s
– Dame Helen Alexander DBE: Deputy chair of the CBI, director of Centrica plc
– Lord Blair of Boughton: Former Metropolitan Police Commissioner
– Roger Gifford: Investment banker, big in City of London
– John Harvey – ?
– Joyce Hytner OBE: Theatre director
– Gavin Ralston: Global Head of Product and leading international asset manager at Schroder Investment Management
– Carol Sergeant CBE: Chief Risk Director at Lloyds TSB, formerly Managing Director for Regulatory Process and Risk at the FSA
– John Spence OBE: Former Managing Director, Business Banking, LloydsTSB
To those lot we should perhaps wish them good luck in their attempts to get through the eye of a needle.
“To all intents and purposes St Paul’s owner, the Church of England, operates as an international corporation, with an investment fund of around £5.7bn secured through private equity income, stock exchange investments and a vast property portfolio.”
“For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness” Saint Paul, Ephesians 6:12
Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944) was a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist, so what’s he doing in Govan?
Alastair McIntosh, the organiser of the three day festival celebrating ‘art, spirituality and the future’ explains the need to explore “art as service”:
“With keynote speakers including leading art experts and the Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, we will be exploring how art can speak in places of poverty today. The conference will challenge the narcissistic nihilism of contemporary art forms that have turned their backs on beauty and, perhaps arguably, lost sight of art’s deepest function.” Continue reading
By Fiona MacInnes
I never thought student politics mattered much although I had a nominal position of ‘welfare officer’ at Edinburgh College of Art which enabled me to stand up in front of all the new first years from the lofty position of second year and sport my latest arty outfit, which I recall on that day included green, rope-wedged espadrilles worn over coloured socks. The Students’ Association as it was called, was so moribund that there was no danger of having to face an election, so filling the roles was more a case of who you could drag into them rather than anything else. An early lesson in the sorry state of participative politics perhaps but other than an early flirtation with the Lauriston Place fire station (now a museum) when we made the student common room available to the striking firemen, like most I didn’t understand what politics was about, despite my tribal family loyalty to the labour party, till it affected me. Continue reading
Theresa May may be getting confused again. George Osbourne’s ‘We’re all, in this Together is’ not the same as Bobby Gillespie’s ‘Come Together’. This is more Mad Cow than Madchester.
The Tory minister left the stage to the strains of the band’s 1994 single Rocks after giving her speech in Manchester. This morning the band issued the following statement after learning of the track’s use:
“Primal Scream are totally disgusted that the Home Secretary Theresa May ended her speech at the Tory party conference with our song Rocks. How inappropriate. Didn’t they research the political history of our band?
Hasn’t she listened to the words? Does she even know what getting your rocks off means? Primal Scream are totally opposed to the coalition government, Cameron, Osborne, Gove, Howard, Clegg, etc.
They are legalised bullies passing new laws to ensure the wealthy stay wealthy, taking the side of big business while eradicating workers rights and continuing their attacks on young people, single parents and OAP’s by slashing education and social security budgets, in effect persecuting the poor for being poor.
We would like to distance ourselves from this sick association. The Tories are waging a war on the disenfranchised. They are the enemy.”
Internationalism From Below – from John Maclean to Tahrir Square? Talks, films and discussion with:
Allan Armstrong, Unity, Maud Bracke, Camcorder Guerillas and Deryck de Maine Beaumont.
7pm-10:00pm, Wednesday 12th October 2011, Kinning Park Complex 43 Cornwall Street Glasgow FREE
The current struggles across Arab-speaking countries, the crises created by trans-national financial corporations, and protests over ‘austerity’ and education in Europe and the US, have vividly brought the global and inter-connected nature of power and politics to the foreground. Issues of self-determination, the political agency of non-governmental groups, and ad-hoc assemblages of ‘the people’ and other populist constituencies are shaping political discourses on various levels. Continue reading
A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future. The spirit of this fresh tactic, a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain, is captured in this quote:”The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people.”
— Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain
The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people’s assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.
This interview with David Graeber expands on this simple idea.
“One thing that helped a lot was a smattering of people from Spain and Greece and Tunisia who had been doing this sort of thing more recently. They explained that the model that seemed to work was to take something that seemed to be public space, reclaim it, and build up an organization headquarters around that from which you can begin doing other things.”
EK: This movement is organized rather differently than most protest movements. There isn’t really a list of demands, or goals, or even much of an identifiable leadership. But if I understand you correctly, that’s sort of the point.
DG: It’s very similar to the globalization movement. You see the same criticisms in the press. It’s a bunch of kids who don’t know economics and only know what they’re against. But there’s a reason for that. it’s pre-figurative, so to speak. You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature. And it’s a way of juxtaposing yourself against these powerful, undemocratic forces you’re protesting. If you make demands, you’re saying, in a way, that you’re asking the people in power and the existing institutions to do something different. And one reason people have been hesitant to do that is they see these institutions as the problem.
EK: So if you say, for instance, that you want a tax on Wall Street and then you’ll be happy, you’re implicitly saying that you’re willing to be happy with a slightly modified version of the current system.
DG: Right. The tax on Wall Street will go to people controlled by Wall Street.
EK: By which you mean government.
DG: Yes. So we are keeping it open-ended. In a way, what we want is to create spaces where people can think about questions like that. In New York, according to law, any unpermitted assembly of more than 12 people is illegal in New York. Space itself is not an openly available resource. But the one resource that isn’t scarce is smart people with ideas. So we’re trying to reframe things away from the rhetoric of demands to a questions of visons and solutions. Now how that translates into actual social change is an interesting question. One way this has been done elsewhere is you have local initiatives that come out of the local assemblies.
EK: It also seems that the tradeoff here, from an organizational standpoint, is that if you say you want, say, a tax on Wall Street, then the people who aren’t interested in a tax on Wall Street stay home. So remaining vague on demands can make the tent bigger. But it also seems that, at some point, people are going to need to be working towards concrete goals and experiencing dicrete successes in order to sustain the energy of a movement like this.
GB: As the thing grows, new organizational forms will develop. At this point, the New York occupation has 30 different working groups for everything from handling sanitation to discussing labor issues and tax policy. So we’re trying to set up ways that people with different interests can plug into the movement. There’s even a newspaper. The ‘Occupied Wall Street Journal.’ Of course, this is nothing compared to what happened in Tahrir Square, where they even had dry cleaners…
