Where are we Now?

Scotland, and its now gloriously liberated neighbour, seems like an odd place to live in this late summer. Elite rule has failed but we don’t seem to know what to replace it with. We can sneer at the Trump memes flooding our timelines, but we laugh a little more nervously as North Korea fires a missile over Hokkaido island and on the other side of the Atlantic sits a child-President, revelling in his own obscenity, relishing his own slack-jawed ignorance. The insanity of Trump’s America was summed up by Frankie Boyle a few days ago:  “Imagine standing up in Arizona and talking about preserving white culture: a state so recently colonised that the dry cleaners still offer a smallpox cleansing service. White guys have only been in Arizona for 150 years – that’s not even enough time to fill a Costa loyalty card.”

But the right and the far-right don’t like being exposed as the shambolic rhetoric of the Tory Brexiteers and the dismal Trump presidency has done. We can laugh at Trump but we have our own authoritarian emboldened politicians to worry about. English Irredentism is rampant – the virus of “taking back control” and the passionate and random outbursts of nationalist fervour is everywhere latching itself to Big Ben, the Bake Off or whatever symbol of instant nostalgia it can invent with more and more desperation. English nationalism is inchoate -half-formed – par-boiled – misshapen – but it’s visible. And it’s closely tied to the far-right’s re-emergence and spasmodic outbursts against being exposed to the light of day.

Attacks on feminism are ongoing and barely deserve  a mention – but the theme of an ideology-under-attack just oozes out of this re-telling of Taylor Swift’s legal victory into a Isn’t Feminism Bad attack piece in the Spectator’s bizarre Coffee House thing “Taylor Swift’s sexual assault case reveals feminism’s guilty secret”).

In The Telegraph Norman Tebbit does some neat work shifting the moral equivalence of Alt-Right and Alt-Left manufactured  by whoever is operating The Donald into something fresh and new: the Left are actually the Fascists not the right (“Today as in the 1930s, real fascism comes from the Left“.) The Chingford Skinhead has form but the fantasy politics aren’t confined to unreconstructed Tory grandees.

In the Scotsman, a columnist seems to be gripped by a revived Reds under the Beds state of fear, arguing against the coming crisis of Cultural Marxism Malcolm Parkin writes:

“Social guilt is promoted, particularly by television, which has become the organ of the Left by virtue of its EU funding, and from the influence of its journalists and editors, mostly of the bien pensant and anti-British view.”

If you were unaware that the EU funded your Commie telly service, now you know. But it’s worse than that it seems that the floods in Houston are an elaborate lefty hoax:

“Schemes to disrupt and distract abound. Man-made climate change has been invented as the successor to the hole in the ozone layer and its predecessors global warming and the rising of the sea, and sold to governments and to the Greens, who have become unwitting tools of the Marxists, and taken us back to windmills and wood burning as a means of providing energy that is inadequate for industry, and a further step towards the destruction of capitalism.”

But before you get out your flint and start twirling your windmill, consider this. Trump seems like an idiot because he is an idiot and if he comes over as coarse and clumsy boasting about his wealth and schooling its because he feels the need to. Our elite don’t feel the need. We all know the schools they went to.

Stuart Patrick, Chief Executive of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce twice last month commented on the homelessness problem in ‘The Times’. In one, a news piece entitled ‘Beggars are ruining city centre shopping, says business leader’. As commentator Gerry Hassan pointed out: “Patrick was quoted and claimed that the rising number and visibility of beggars had a negative effect on businesses and was putting off shoppers.” Patrick said: ‘It is a problem if you are a retailer in a city centre outlet and you are comparing what you might get in an out-of-town shopping centre.’

Human debris is essentially how the Chief Executive of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce is framing people.

But the logic is there. If everything is sacrificed to the altar of capitalism then a logic flows from that.

The rise of the new right isn’t just finding outlets in splenetic pieces in what used to be called the broadsheets, and it’s not just contempt for the poor or wildly-unhinged denialist rhetoric that is being published. Gross inequality is hard-wired to the system. Taking a breather from panting-no-thought required ‘Business journalism’, the Herald describes Executive pay as a ‘Monument to Greed’:

“Scotland’s top chief executives are pocketing pay packets worth more than 24 times the salary of the average worker…The highest paid CEO among the 39-strong cohort was Ross McEwan of Royal Bank of Scotland, who earned £3.5 million last year despite the bank posting a loss of £7 billion. His salary is the equivalent to that banked by 152 average workers.”

Oh well that’s those pesky nationalised industries for you isn’t it?

If Trump dons a red MAG cap our leaders are draped in £1000 leather troosers or Saville Rowe chic. One’s dumb the other’s sleekit.

The contempt shown for ordinary people is the same, even if the Trump phenomena is dressed up as a Redneck Revolt.

It pours out of the Scottish Conservative Party like ooze after lancing an abscess:

Councillor Alastair Majury: “Why is the Catholic Church against birth control? Because they’ll run out of children to molest.”

Councillor Robert Davies, posting a photo of black people waiting next to a plane with the caption: “No, I am not your lunch. I am your flight attendant.”

Councillor Donald Gatt “Why do I have to pay for meals for those who chose to have them? If you can’t afford children buy Durex.”

Now we’re told that these are low-level Tory operatives, councillors from rural corners of little substance. But there’s no doubt these attitudes are reflective of the mainstream of high-command. Jacon Rees-Mogg wants to preserve white culture too. Rees-Mogg, son of William Rees-Mogg, former editor of The Times, spoke as guest of honour at the Traditional Britain’s annual black tie dinner at London’s East India Club only the other year.

The Telegraph reported: “The group is run by Gregory Lauder-Frost, a former leading light of the Conservative Monday Club and a well-known figure within the British far-Right. He previously ran the Western Goals Institute, which had links to European neo-fascist parties.

He calls for the “assisted repatriation” of ethnic minority people whose families have moved to Britain since the Second World War, as advocated in the 1970 Conservative Party manifesto. He singled out Doreen Lawrence, Baroness Lawrence, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.

Lauder-Frost, 62, told the Daily Telegraph: “I feel this woman has done the British nation no favours whatsoever. If these people don’t like us and want to keep attacking us they should go back to their natural homelands.”

But if we can unite around a coherent response to the Conservatives, can we transcend the wider attitudes and forces they represent?

Sectarianism, racism and contempt for the poor aren’t exclusive to the Tories. They’re part of our society, nurtured and inculcated by a toxic media, shouted from the terracings and muttered by your granddad. Bigotry is basically tolerated as art of the landscape of Scottish society. Very little is done about it. A rank racism was fuel to the fire of the Brexit campaign and sells millions of papers a day, and the kind of rhetoric about ‘benefit culture’ is just normalised now.

Climate denialism is rife, as is a complete opposition to taking action to prevent or mitigate it.

Even people who acknowledge the reality will baulk at taking actions that will actually affect their own lives. The problem is always somewhere else, whether that’s laughing at Trump, projecting all evils neatly onto the Tories, or imagining that the climate crisis will impact somewhere else, or demand real change from other people, (maybe the Chinese).

The stories we’ve told ourselves aren’t true and don’t work any more. This is true globally (our lifestyle is sustainable, our economy is viable, progress is linear), and true locally (we are progressive and downtrodden, our culture is thriving and respected, our government is radical and ambitious).

Our stories of Scottish selfhood: we are romantic failures, our education is peerless, our people are bold and innovative, need updating.

Maybe we need multiple stories to replace these shibboleths? As the Nigerian  writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche said at the Edinburgh Festival: “When we realise that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise”.

Where are we now? Adrift and settling into self-satisfaction and comfort-tales.

The fantasy world of the far-right is certainly worth lampooning but it’s up to us to go beyond that and actually construct alternatives that face-up to the multiple crisis that we’ve inherited,  a broken economic system, disfiguring poverty and a climate crisis that can’t be wished away.

New stories required. Storywriters can apply here.

 

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Comments (18)

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  1. bringiton says:

    The main problem is that elitism may have failed but they are still with us and deciding what we can and cannot do.
    The British state is completely incapable and unwilling to undertake meaningful reform and why should they when it has worked very well for the elite for a very long time.
    Corbyn is living in cuckoo land if he thinks there is any prospect of “Federalism” or anything approaching that being accepted by the British establishment.
    We the people might vote for it but the establishment will ensure that it doesn’t happen.
    Brexit will only allow these relics to deepen and extend their domination of the political process and ensure that people can never threaten their position in future.
    Scottish independence would probably provide the earth shattering event which would force the required changes but that is why they will do whatever to ensure it never happens.
    I am afraid it is going to be Rule Britannia for some time to come.

  2. Brochan says:

    Absolutely excellent article but “Irredentism”. Semi literate people like myself should not have to consult a dictionary when reading Bella. Irredentism -WTF?

    1. LOL – sorry Brochan! I liked it though!

      1. Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh says:

        In Irish “irredentism”=”iridinteachas”.

        However, Irish dictionary yet lacks word for “the far-tight” (same paragraph) 🙂

        1. Sorry, publishing on a phone on a bus …

  3. Hogster. says:

    Maybe we need multiple stories to replace these shibboleths? As the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche said at the Edinburgh Festival: “When we realise that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise”.

    The Arch Nationalist Mike Small is a very confused man.

    1. “Arch Nationalist”, thanks ‘Hogster’ I think I’ll put that on my business card.

  4. Charles L. Gallagher says:

    Brochan, this means us who want INDEPENDENCE for Scotland must be ‘irredentists’. I prefer straightforward ‘SCOTTISH NATIONALISTS’.

  5. IDL says:

    Having not read ‘The Scotsman’ since 1967, when, as a callow youth, on the Edinburgh/Kirkcaldy train, (in boredom), I picked up a discarded one, I was curious to read the linked article by Mr. Parkin, only to discover that the articles have not really changed in the intervening 50 years since then.
    Remarkable.

  6. w.b.robertson says:

    Worth keeping a cutting of Mr Parkin`s piece…its yellowing message will be just as relevant and topical in 50 years time as 50 years back!

  7. Matt Seattle says:

    Yes, it’s a sorry tale, this mankind business.
    But I smiled at “the far-tight’s re-emergence” – a typo, or stingingly accurate re-branding?

    1. Ha! Are you not familiar with the far-tight? They are known for their skinny jeans and lycra …

      1. Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh says:

        Of course there’s also the recent even more radically irredentist (“reclaim the roads”) breakaway faction: “Far2tight”.

  8. gun ainm says:

    PS Tebbit’s ‘Nazis/fascists are leftists’ ravings (un)fortunately gated behind the telegraph’s ‘Premium’ paywall. If folk are looking for something perhaps more insightful on the nature of fascism (I’m guessing) I’d recommend Umberto Eco’s excellent piece ‘Ur Fascism’ (reproduced here http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/)

    1. Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh says:

      Thanks for the Umbert Eco link. Very informative and thoughtful article. Published in 1995 apparently, which adds interesting prophetic distance. Even the following low-key passage resonates, for me anyway:

      “There was only one Nazism. … But … The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. … Consider the following sequence:

      1 2 3 4

      abc bcd cde def

      Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.”

      1. Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh says:

        Umberto!

  9. Duncan MacGregor says:

    The far right, I’d characterise the tories and ukip in this bracket.

    I understand and see how the tories enact policies at the behest of the far right, but I’d really like to know who the individuals pulling the strings are and why.

    What is their end game?

    Perhaps an expose here? I don’t think any of us would be around if we wait for bbc with an FOI or our MSM to expose them.

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