Reservoir Dogs
Years ago people predicted ‘resource wars’ as natural resources like food and water became more and more scarce due to climate change. We’re in that future now, deep into it, and seemingly oblivious. As weeks of torrential rain is followed by more record-breaking heat, we go on.
In Mexico they have elected today Claudia Sheinbaum, its first woman president: a left-wing climate scientist, and a contributing author to a report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and former mayor of Mexico City. Not all of the political trajectory and momentum is towards authoritarian populism and fascists. The world is dividing between those who know what’s going on and those who know but don’t want to face it and turn instead to scapegoating ‘others’ for our predicament. Sheinbaum is in the former camp.
Mexico City is facing a dire, climate-fueled water crisis that could see the city run out of water as early as next month. Grist reports (‘As reservoirs go dry, Mexico City and Bogotá are staring down ‘Day Zero‘): “In Mexico City, more and more residents are watching their taps go dry for hours a day. Even when water does flow, it often comes out dark brown and smells noxious. A former political leader is asking the public to “prioritize essential actions for survival” as the city’s key reservoirs run dry. Meanwhile, 2,000 miles south in the Colombian capital of Bogotá, reservoir levels are falling just as fast, and the city government has implemented rotating water shutoffs. The mayor has begged families to shower together and leave the city on weekends to cut down on water usage.”
This is the start of the resource wars, as climate breakdown accelerates and its consequences are revealed.
Of course, at least at some level, you know all this. Sheinbaum’s election is a breath of fresh air in a dystopian present, but like much of the climate breakdown it may be too late. When you’ve reached the stage of these levels of crisis its often way beyond the point of redemption. Electing Sheibaum may be too late – the reservoir is dry – but it’s better than not electing her.
Here there are no such options. The choices at this election seem more desultory than ever before with today’s announcement by Nigel Farage adding to the atmosphere of miserable decline. Even in post-Brexit England Faragism and his bizarre Reform party has some political momentum. What do they want to do, do Brexit again? Celebrate what a success Brexit has been? Actually you won;t find them talking about Brexit much now, they will just talk about immigration. Nigel’s latest 360 turn is all about the far-right fighting over the bones of what will be left of the Conservative Party in a month’s time. Voters in some constituencies are being offered a choice between three parties of the right and far-right – all who agree on the substance of policies from immigration to Europe to social policy to Rwanda to nuclear weapons. This is a sham democracy.
Today Labour re-committed themselves to the nuclear deterrent, arguing in a baffling logic that we can’t rebuild our public services if we don’t have nuclear weapons. It’s a level of cognitive dissonance that is breathtaking. After fourteen years of the Tories we are faced with an alternative that is no alternative. Labour’s slogan is ‘Change’ but they offer No Change. The party offers ‘peace and stability’ by committing itself to nuclear weapons. Its a moral psychopathy that’s presented as centrism. Labour are on-course to win by a landslide but nobody seems to know why – the SNP tell us that only they will stand up for Scotland – but nobody really seems to know how. The Liberal Democrats are led by a man who flounders at the most basic question about Scottish democracy …
Scottish Lib Dem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton tells The Sunday Show that voters on the doorsteps “don’t care” about a second independence vote.
Read more ➡️ https://t.co/BnQ3kizyjr pic.twitter.com/aCORbV4eKk
— BBC Scotland News (@BBCScotlandNews) June 2, 2024
Even D:ream have given up.
Stuck in the Middle with You
We are infested with a new model of ‘centrism’ that is actually far to the right of any modern British politics with consensus around all of the major policy issues and the reduction of current affairs to a pathetic discussion of personalities and the hyper-banal dissection of Sunak’s disastrous campaign, Starmer’s latest u-turn, or in the pub with Nigel.
It’s the electoral equivalent of being the police officer in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs as Michael Madsen dances and sings along to “Stuck in the Middle with You” while slicing your ear off.
Nobody seems to be telling the truth in this election. I know this is an age-old truth about politics but it seems to have deteriorated further. Posturing as the ‘change candidate’ Starmer announced: “Two different countries, two different futures,” this week. But his own economics suggest otherwise. His Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves and he have sworn themselves to budgetary rules that are practically identical to those currently enforced Sunak and Hunt – which leaves both sides on the look-out for huge spending cuts.
Britain is already broken, its social fabric crumbling, grotesque inequality and destitution is thriving. In response Labour are offering four new nuclear submarines at Barrow-in-Furness.
🇬🇧 Vote Labour on Thursday 4 July for a stronger, safer, more secure Britain. pic.twitter.com/rh1CD41www
— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) June 3, 2024
One of the hilarious things about Labour’s recent re-commitment to Trident is that it’s not subject to the same rigorous costing as everything else. The list of social policy options that has been ruled out is endless – but Trident? No problem at all.
Trident cost about £21bn in 2022-23 prices, according to a House of Commons Library briefing. The new Dreadnought boats that feature in the Labour ad are being built at Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, at an estimated cost of £31bn. According to the Scottish Fiscal Commission Scotland’s total budget for 2023/2024 was £51, 674. (1) This means that the cost of Trident is easily more than the entire Scottish budget.
As David Lammy said on Jan 20, 2015: “The money being spent on Trident could fund up to 850,000 new affordable homes, or 9,000 new schools. Public services must be our priority.”
This is stealing from Jackie Baillie’s playbook. Normally it is Scotland that is being sold the idea of Weapons of Mass Destruction as a job creation scheme. But, as in most things Scotland doesn’t really matter in this election. We all know it, and John Curtice keeps (re) explaining it, but Scotland really doesn’t matter. Starmer is sailing into No 10 on a high-tide of revulsion against the inept and corrupt Tories, but we have to keep up the pretence that Scottish votes matter. 200,000 + Scots will be in Germany in June and damn few of them will be thinking about a postal vote. But, who cares?
It’s not true, as I have said earlier that Labour offers no change at all. They have successfully re-packaged British nationalism, re-framed a bellicose militarism in celebrating Trident as the basis for a social contract, hollowed-out any remnant principled MPs and remarkably successfully managed to be complicit in support of live genocide with, apparently, no discernible negative electoral impact.
(1) Scotland_s-Economic-and-Fiscal-Forecasts-May-2023-Summary-revised-June-2023.pdf
We are supported only by our readers. We don't have corporate backers and we don't take advertising, so we rely entirely on your support.
Help to support independent Scottish journalism
If there are “200,000 + Scots… in Germany in July” I expect they’ll be there as neutrals, but Problem of Other Minds and all that. Yes, its possibly no wonder if people believe we’re secretly governed by radiation-loving lizards, but let us at least take responsibility as a species for this anthropogenic planetary catastrophe.
I don’t understand – that’s the number travelling as the Tartan Army.
Group stages are in June….
Of course. Thanks.
Munich police are anticipating 200k Scottish supporters. Btw, they know the game is being played in June too.
Your final paragraph aptly captures the kernel of the matter. Well done.
Tories have gone walkabout and Labour are desperate for power so they are adjusting their policies to avoid any attack from media which is right wing/centrist.
If Labour stick to these policies in power public services will continue to deteriorate and public disenchantment will rapidly follow.
If they adjust their policies to more traditional Labour priorities such as funding public services they run the risk of being attacked by media.
The election is avoiding the big issues such as climate change, reversing negative impacts of Brexit and funding of infrastructure, public services (especially NHS)etc in light of ongoing demographic changes. The discussion around immigration is cartoonish and xenophobic and does not address the balance between needing additional workers (and tax payers) due to demographics with the increased demand on housing and services that immigration causes in localised areas.
Scotland does not really matter at any Westminster election now as there are few Tory/Labour marginal seats and history shows the election is decided n England – not surprising due to the larger population there. With no feasible route to independence Scotland is virtually irrelevant in this Westminster election and Tory ,Labour and Lib Dems are happy to concentrate on running the GE in Scotland on Holyrood issues to attack SNP which again shows how irrelevant Westminster is becoming to Scotland.
All the above issues are excacerbated by the FPTP system which means that parties concentrate their electoral appeal to a section of voters in ‘swing’ English constituencies which normally decide the election.
I for one am grateful Euro’s start next week as it will distract from what is a turgid and largely irrelevant election to many in Scotland. Scottish supporters will no doubt be back home well before 4th July though you never know – hope springs eternal!
The socialist argument (the one that both the Soviet Union and Britain deployed in 1945 in order to justify spending vast resources on the development of a nuclear deterrent) is that a) nuclear deterrence is the bedrock of our national security and b) national security is a necessary condition of wealth creation and the [re-]establishment of a welfare state through which that wealth can be justly distributed.
Discuss!
Joseph Stalin was a brutal dictator, he didn’t have to justify anything to the people of the Soviet Union unlike the Attlee government which was elected
Yes; he was. But what bearing does that have on the socialist argument for maintaining a nuclear deterrent?
@John Learmonth, the hereditary monarch of the British Empire is still unelected, and British Prime Minister Clement Atlee used royal prerogative powers to secretly arm the British Empire with nuclear weapons, and do all sorts of other dastardly things, among them:
making destruction of the USAmerican copy of the ‘Windsor File’ “a major objective of British foreign policy” expending scarce political capital and irritating their allies (according to Norman Baker);
rejected the just demands of the 1945 Pan-African Conference (according to Priyamvada Gopal);
suppressed critical journalism when British troops were outraged by South Korean police massacres of men, women and children in 1950 under British occupation (according to John Newsinger);
posed (along with his Ministers) no threat to the social cheating of British public schools (according to Francis Green and David Kynaston);
instituted racist employment policies during labour shortages (according to David Olusoga)
spread anti-Communist propaganda, targeted students, and bullied the BBC for control over World Service through his Information Research Department (according to Richard Norton-Taylor);
etc etc
It’s amazing how autocratic a dictator the British Prime Minister can be by utilising the anti-democratic monarchistic core of the British quasi-constitution. And it hardly began or ended with Atlee, who Wikipedia characterises thus:
“British atomic bomb research was kept secret even from some members of Attlee’s own cabinet, whose loyalty or discretion seemed uncertain.
“Although a socialist, Attlee still believed in the British Empire of his youth. He thought of it as an institution that was a power for good in the world.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee#Legacy
Yeah, lots of these funny kinds of imperialist-socialists about, apparently, including Stalin.
It’s a matter of public record that the postwar Labour government didn’t once invoke royal prerogative (i.e. act against the wishes of parliament) in the creation of a welfare state, the development of a nuclear deterrent to secure that state, and to begin a process of decolonisation; it used instead the large majority it enjoyed in parliament to impose its particular will in relation to these on the country generally.
Stalin likewise used the control that his government exercised over the soviets to impose its socialist policies on the country generally.
The difference been that the Attlee government was elected, Stalins wasn’t.
A profound difference, do you agree?
@John Learmonth, the USSR had elections, such as this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Soviet_Union_legislative_election
The British public did have a choice in domestic policy between Labour and Conservative at the time, but almost none in foreign policy (and such reserved royal prerogative areas). Historian Mark Curtis has covered this in some detail, drawing on official declassified British records of policy planning. A one-and-a-half-party system may be better than a one-party-plus-cowed-independents system, but not by much. Elections usually have very little to do with democracy (the phrase ‘elective dictatorship’ generally applies).
Because I went to a real university and studied politics there, including the Soviet Union, instead of the university of talking out your own arse, I can tell you what my set textbook says (Soviet Union: Politics, Economics and Society by Ronald J Hill). Women were well represented at lower echelons of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), which was apparently very selective about members, with annual elections that are more than symbolic but less than open. An anti-Stalin campaign was launched three years after Stalin’s death in 1953 (the year in which the British helped the USA overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran following Attlee’s planning). In the same year (1956) that the triumvirate at the top of the British political system (the unelected head of state and beneficiary of a personality cult that makes you think ‘Josef who’?, plus Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary) conspired to invade Egypt with France and Israel and blame it on the Egyptians.
Hill describes the Stalin Constitution of 1936 “to all appearances an impeccably democratic document” in which the Supreme Soviet was the highest state power, with secret ballots and universal adult suffrage, reinfranchising some excluded categories like priests and former landowners. And a bunch of other supposedly admirable human rights which Hill describes as ‘largely cosmetic’ and should be seen in the context of the great purges Stalin conducted under this constitution. Political power did not develop from the elected Soviets, while Stalin exerted executive power through secretive organs like Beriya’s KGB, bypassing both Soviets and CPSU. A new Constitution was adopted in 1961 which was supposed to refresh the representative bodies.
Hill notes that scholars were divided over whether the Nomenklatura were the actual ruling class during phases of Soviet history. Possibly the most obvious example of party Nomenklatura to hand is the way Keir Starmer’s faction now runs appointments and recruitment in the Labour Party.
@John
To repeat what I’ve already said: Yes; Stalin was a brutal dictator (as the material conditions in post-revolutionary Russia required). But what bearing does that have on the socialist argument for maintaining a nuclear deterrent?
@ SD
Democracy’s downfall in the Soviet Union was largely due to Stalin’s success in weakening the formal institutions of governance, in both the party and government, as codified in their their respective constitutions and their revisions. Stalin’s election as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party gave him the power to place his supporters in positions of authority, and he used this power establish a neopatrimonial network of loyal lieutenants through which he could effectively by-pass the Council of People’s Commissars (the executive branch of Soviet government) and the All-Union Congress of Soviets (the legislative branch). According to historians like Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, rule through the regular machinery of party and government apparatus gave way under Stalin to the rule of personal agents and agencies, over whom Stalin had supreme overall control, and the democracy he undermined has never since been restored.
” … rule through the regular machinery of party and government apparatus gave way under Stalin to the rule of personal agents and agencies, over whom Stalin had supreme overall control, and the democracy he undermined has never since been restored.”
Yes indeed; but there was no need for democracy to be undermined in the UK, because rule by personal agents and agencies has always characterised government here. Initially parliament was only for the aristocracy – all of whom owed their position to the king; the church hierarchy, who were also effectively royal appointees (a key part of the medieval administration); and the ‘commons’ – who were the wealthy merchants and professionals, including the bankers who lent the king the money he needed. The peasants, landless labourers, women, everyone else had no voice at all, including during Cromwell’s military dictatorship.
The industrial revolution created the urban working class who started to threaten the power and wealth of the industrialists, and couldn’t be bankrupted and bought off as easily as the old so-called ‘elite’. So they were slowly given the concession of a vote, bringing an illusion of power. In reality any concession was hard won and easily lost; and the Whigs and Tories were just two sides of the same coin, both bought and sold for the same gold. The population could be led to believe that their votes mattered but as we all know, with candidates carefully selected, a growing party machine of control, and a first past the post electoral system, the one thing we can guarantee in any UK election is that the majority of voters will never get the candidate they want. We are all reduced to voting for the lesser of two evils, conveniently forgetting that – lesser or greater – evil is still evil. Meanwhile we are ruled by personal agents and agencies who have all sworn personal allegiance to the king. How much control Charles III really has over the Privy Council, secret services, the armed forces, the Quangos, the freemasons and others is unclear to us ordinary mortals, but I guess it’s a lot more than is ever admitted to. Kings cannot help but be kings, it’s in the genes, and that includes ruling their ‘subjects’ by any means, fair or foul. I can imagine Charles having a copy of Machiavelli’s Prince on his bedside table for years as he waited for his mother to die. Our kings rule by ‘divine right’ – it’s why the coronation is a religious service – so do not need a democratic mandate. Behind the scenes, the monarch meets the Prime Minister very regularly – I just wonder how much the Prime Ministerial use of the Royal Prerogative is actually exercised at the instruction or at least the suggestion of the monarch? Charles did announce the Great Reset in 2020, but that is fast unravelling, and those responsible must be getting nervous. I can’t see Charles being very happy about being associated with recent Conservative policies like the Rwanda scheme or the general abandonment of the rule of law. It can’t be good for his royal public image around the word – and he already has a few family issues there. The sudden reappearance from nowhere of his cousin David Cameron as Foreign Secretary was surely not a coincidence. I have wondered recently whether Sunak’s sudden appearance standing in the rain, announcing an election might have been because he was quietly told to go? But he might just be running for cover.
Of course like all monarchs in modern times, Charles is actually beholden to his bankers, who will do whatever it takes to feed their own addiction to absolute power and wealth. And the super-rich cannot help but fight each other because every one of them wants to control all the others. This is why the World Economic Forum and its plans for world dictatorship are doomed to failure.
Anyway, democracy has always been a mirage in the UK, in pre-Union Scotland as well as in England, Wales, and Ireland. Political parties are just part of a game played to distract voters. Whoever you vote for, the same people hold onto and even enhance their private wealth and power, they do not share it. In Scotland neither the present UK Government, nor HM’s ‘loyal opposition’, nor the useless Liberal Democrats have any democratic mandate at all.
Life in Scotland is still immeasurably better than Stalin’s Russia, thank goodness. But that could all change very quickly. A true democracy would elect independent candidates who actually stood up for their constituents before any other interest.
@John Wood, plus of course Stalin’s reign was both a reaction to the much more progressive popular forces behind the October Revolution of 1917, and a continuation of Tsarist methods/organs of state. Stalin was trained in hierarchy, after all. Otherwise the Soviet Union might have had female leadership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhenotdel
Perhaps your reference to kingly genes was a throwaway; I entirely reject the proposition that the European royalist breeding system aimed at creating a ruling caste was ever a success. So many duds. So many regressive defects caused by inbreeding.
A major difference between European monarchs and Stalin was that Stalin changed focus to ruling within one state, whereas the Euro-royals were typically expansionist/imperialist/colonialist. Stalin was much more cautious internationally, even deferential to the Allies when the Germans broke their pact of convenient truce. But partly that was because Stalin resorted to covert measures like obtaining intelligence on Nazis and nuclear secrets through spies, as far as I can tell.
BTW
Take a look at Gorlizki and Khlevniuk’s Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953. Hill’s book’s 40 years old now and much outdated.
@ JW
That’s precisely the difference, John; our constitution (the so-called ‘Westminster system’) has evolved to limit the ability of tyrants to rule through personal agency. Stalin succeeded (though a combination of terrorism and populism) in overcoming the checks and balances of successive Soviet constitutions in ways and to degrees that no British monarch in either England or Scotland has been able to do since the Stuarts ruled the roost in both countries.
Of course, we should never be complacent; we need to facilitate the continued evolution of democracy in Britain through expanding our checks and balances on the personal exercise of power and to guard against practices like cronyism, which tend to undermine our existing checks and balances by by-passing the regular machinery of government.
Anyway: the socialist argument (which no one is addressing) is that a) nuclear deterrence is the bedrock of our national security and b) national security is a necessary condition of wealth creation and the [re-]establishment of a welfare state through which that wealth can be justly distributed, so c) we need to maintain a nuclear deterrent.
(Hint: a counter argument to this is that a) the risks associated with having a nuclear deterrent far outweigh the benefits of socialism (conceived as the just distribution, through the [re-]establishment and maintenance of a welfare state, of the wealth we grow through our collective labour), so b) we shouldn’t maintain a nuclear deterrent.
Stalins Russia was democratic?
You may have been to University but you really do talk crap.
The benefits of a higher education.
@John Learmonth, evidently I didn’t dumb down my comment enough for you. As my brief summary of our set text on the Soviet Union should clearly convey, neither a democratic Constitution nor regular elections makes a democracy. The latter a point George Monbiot made in the Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/06/general-elections-democracy-lottery-representation
I am struggling to understand how my comment that “Stalin exerted executive power through secretive organs like Beriya’s KGB, bypassing both Soviets and CPSU” can translate in your… mind… to “Stalins Russia was democratic”. I have just described autocracy.
Feel free to address any of my substantive points, while thinking up a reason for supporting an unelected head of state in the British Empire.
Well said Mike. I couldn’t agree more.