Myths Ghosts and The Missing
MYTHS, GHOSTS AND THE MISSING From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn
In the 2024 UK election candidates did not have to prove their identity to the Electoral Commission to stand but voters had to prove who they were in order to vote. In Thurso this resulted in the voting clerk asking me, “Hev ye got yer ID wae ye, George?”.
In Scotland Reform UK put up 57 candidates, the majority never once visiting the constituency they were standing for, but after five years Reform UK will net £164,700 through the parliamentary “Short Money” scheme. This was introduced to level up the playing field for small opposition parties. “Short Money” is given to parties who get at least one MP elected with more than 150,000 votes or 5% of the total vote cast. In Scotland 48 of the Reform UK candidates met this threshold securing 147,947 votes. This means that Farage’s right wing party will get £32,940 every year for the five years that the Westminster Parliament sits. Not a bad return from the sheer corruption of fielding ghost candidates in Scotland. Likewise Labour in Scotland fielded candidates who had little or no connection with the constituencies they stood for, many being shipped in from England. We are still being asked to believe the myth of “Scottish” Labour. Myths and ghosts. They stalk our political corridors.
Just over half of UK adults voted at the 2024 general election, making it the lowest turnout by share of population since universal suffrage. The Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank found that just 52% of adults in Ukania cast their ballots on 4th July, which is the lowest since the vote was extended to all adults over 21 in 1928. Turnout was reported as being the lowest since 2001 – measured by votes counted as a proportion of adults who have registered to vote. However, the IPPR said the figures are even lower as a share of the whole adult population, meaning if non-voting had been a party, it would have the largest share of support by far. Apathy UK. The Labour majority is like Winter ice on a Caithness loch – it reaches from shore to shore but is perilously thin. Myths, ghosts and the missing.
Reform created fake supporters – using photos of dead people.
No-one believes, so the story goes, that any politician has integrity anymore. No-one believes they have a conscience or tell the truth. The British press tells us “they are all the same”. Maybe they are. One thing is certain: everybody is discontented with everything. All votes, including spoiled papers or not turning up, are protest votes. Under the Tories the UK parliament had turned into an embarrassing circus. With Nigel Farage and his Reform UK cohorts now on the back benches the clowns will hog the attention of the press as they prefer their rebels to be on the right. In Scotland nobody expects anything much to change. With one hand tied behind its back the Scottish Government will be thwarted time after time by Labour’s thumping majority, but with less votes than it won in 2019. Despite the this the Unionists are delighted. Ian Murray, our new Governor General, can hardly stop smiling. Scottish independence is off the agenda. It is time to focus on the issues that matter. So runs the narrative. As if independence didn’t matter.
The biggest problem the cause of Scottish independence has in 2024 is the Scottish National Party. During the election campaign the SNP was incoherent about independence as it was about almost everything else. Independence should have been the light which guided the Scottish electorate forward. Unfortunately the light got smashed.
Here is a parable from Atomic City. There was a great turrie-murrie in the street about a streetlight which many opinionated and angry people wanted to pull down. It was the wrong kind of streetlight in the wrong place. It was too tall. It was not modern. It was ugly. As a result there was much noise. A poet came among the crowd and tried to calm them down. ‘Let us first of all consider,’ said the poet, ‘the value of Light. If Light is in itself good…’ But the poet never got to finish the sentence as he was knocked to the ground by the mob, who rushed to the streetlight and tore it down. Then they congratulated each other on their wisdom and courage. Fuck the poet, they said. Then things started to go wrong. Some had pulled down the streetlight because they hated it. Some because they wanted something better. Some because they wanted to smash the Highland Council. Some were just pure bad and needed no excuse to destroy anything. Then they started to argue amongst themselves and began to fight, but because there was no streetlight no-one could see who they were punching. Then the poet got back on his feet, rubbed his bloody nose, and stood and watched for a time this ridiculous lightless rammy. Eventually everyone was exhausted and lay in a bruised and bleeding heap beneath the smashed streetlight. The poet shook his head. ‘Why would you not listen and consider the philosophy of the light?’ he asked, ‘What we could have discussed under the streetlight we must now discuss in the dark.’
This is, I confess, a bowdlerised version of a passage from “Heretics” by G.K. Chesterton (1874 –1936). Chesterton was a complicated Catholic Little Englander, both reactionary and radical by degrees, but had a sharp eye for the human paradox. His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown. Strangely he was a supporter of both Scottish and Irish independence. December 2024 will mark 103 years since the Irish threw off the yoke of England. In 2014 and again in 2024 Scotland chose to remain yoked.
So far our route to independence has been through the SNP. This is going to have to change. Which is healthy. All political parties are characteristically totalitarian. They are machines to generate what the French philosopher Simone Weill called “collective passions”. A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its collective members and the objective and goal of the party is its own growth, without limit. The business of ends and means, in the pursuit of power, become reversed. What are generally considered ends become means. Means become ends. The party becomes its own end which is to secure a vast amount of power, but no finite amount of power is sufficient. Ever. This is what I think happened to the SNP and why the majority of Scots have rejected it. We have desired, up to this point, that our end (independence) be achieved through the party, not swallowed up by it. Instances of good governance at Holyrood and the obvious shortcomings (the financial and political settlement) of devolution are secondary to this.
To many, right now, promoting the cause of independence resembles nailing jelly to a wall. But this is our reality. Scotland I love unequivocally. The Scots, as an example of humanity and because I am one of them, I have to measure and qualify to myself both as a people and as individuals, whilst acknowledging that the institutions of the country dement me. I can rebuke the culture of Scotland but I suspect I will die representing it. I define myself against Scotland as much as I am definitely for it. In any case the mind is always triumphant over matter. Which is just as well as the country, politically, heaves aft and for’ad, from port to starboard, like a drunken sailor. This is a time when Truth is considered subversion and Justice a vague ambition. The country is more of a skeleton than a body. Who said love was easy? We need, as a people, to go far beyond the broken china of the current independence movement if we are ever going to put it back together again. We must disentangle ourselves from the totalitarianism of the political party.
We must weaken, through innovation and subversion, what is forbidden us by the UK state. But there is a catch and one that not many acknowledge: how can we desire and embrace independence, freedom, justice and truth when we have so little or no prior knowledge or experience of them? Like the sea, our future exists in secret. But if you are not in love with life you are in hock to death and we cannot afford that – not in Scotland, not now. Our deepest wish as humans is to survive and so it is that our cause of independence must – and will – survive, no matter what the likes of Ian Murry may say or dream.
In the independence movement we have no need to apologise for our goal – the independence of our country. We must remember that just because the past seems longer than the future that does not mean there is no future. However miserable I feel now, because of recent events, I have to remember how happy I have been in the past and I have to believe in how much happier I can be in the future, when these unhappy events will be a distant memory. None of us should be, to paraphrase Gerry Hassan (here on Bella, 17th July), too sensitive to have “looked away from the resulting carnage”. The debris of political failure is piled up in front of us. It is staring us in the face.
Other carnage and its perpetrators is set out plainly before us. For example, Declassified UK (19/7/24) has revealed that BAE has benefited from approximately £1bn in UK government science subsidies over the last 30 years. At least £27m has been awarded since Israel’s invasion of Gaza. More than 600 research grants for UK universities went on joint projects with BAE Systems and tens of millions of pounds in other state handouts for universities helped fund internships at the company. The death toll in Gaza has now surpassed 38,800 and more than 80% of schools have been destroyed. Will Sir Keir Starmer cut off the money supply to BAE? He will not. Will he, instead, find the resources to remove the two child benefit cap? He will not.
Labour won the UK election by abandoning their core values. The SNP lost the election in Scotland by abandoning theirs. In power Labour will do very little to change anything. In Scotland the SNP can do very little to change anything. The Labour inaction is by choice. No matter who is in power in Scotland real and lasting change is almost impossible because of the way devolution was designed. After the King’s Speech the politicos and journalists got very excited about nothing much at all. The crown on the Kings head could feed everyone in Ukania until they die. If the Kings level of disinterest in what he was reading could be magically transposed into energy (a reverse miracle) it could heat every home from Truro to Thurso. Sadly there is nothing “magic” about the state we’re in. The politics of this new Labour government will keep the poor in their place and the rich in theirs. Their main mission, like all political parties, is to keep the Labour party in power. How successful that will be remains to be seen but England’s profound lurch to the right can only end badly.
Myths, ghosts and the missing haunt our future. They are designed to scare us off thinking for ourselves. They are the spectres that dissuade us from constructing the working structures of our future freedom. We have to rid our minds of the binary partisan energy of being for or against, for who can be against the future? For too long our politics has not been about thinking but of merely taking sides. Such a choice replaces the activity of the mind. Yet our thinking about how to achieve independence for Scotland has to be done in public so that it is open, accessible and truly democratic. We need a Peoples Constitutional Convention which sits in permanent session. It must be a forum where ideas can find their form because new ideas are urgently required. I know that Believe In Scotland are setting up a Citizens’ Convention and I wish them well. Maybe it will be the forum Scotland badly needs at this time. What we do need is to encourage the missing to come back into the political fold and to cast out the myths and the ghosts. We need to stand under the light.
©George Gunn 2024
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I am not alone! Thank f… for George Gunn. An excellent, excoriating article that gets to the heart of things, and says pretty much exactly what I think and feel.
The first three lines of the penultimate paragraph says it all!
Keep the faith, and keep up the good work!
I wholeheartedly agree, apart from this:
“how can we desire and embrace independence, freedom, justice and truth when we have so little or no prior knowledge or experience of them?”
And this: “Our deepest wish as humans is to survive …”
Independence, freedom, justice and truth are concepts that have meaning, and are worth defending. Scotland, in my experience, is currently lacking all four of them. However, having one of them does not guarantee the others. They need to be separated and contextualised.
I don’t agree that we have little prior knowledge or experience of them. They are all matters of perception: we know what we want when we desire and embrace them, and especially when we recognise their absence. They only exist in relation to their opposites. If they were merely abstract ideas or daydreams they would have little traction, yet throughout history people have generally known them by their felt absence. When these things can be taken for granted, they don’t receive much if any attention.
Orwell pointed out that one instrument of oppression is to destroy language and meaning to confuse, intimidate and frighten a population into submission. It used to be called ‘psyops’. It was the basis of ‘Project Fear’ ten years ago. These days NATO calls it ‘cognitive warfare’. We are all subjected to it, all the time. So I suggest it might be worth discussing what we mean by the words, to see where our perceptions agree and where they differ. Consensus is possible. As I have said before another trick of behavioural psychology is to divide people into two or more camps – cancel culture – and to insist that everyone must occupy one or the other. ‘You are either with us or against us’ turns everyone into either an abuser or a victim, or both. But this denies the possibilities of co-operation which depend on being able to agree to disagree on some issues. It is a product of modern nihilism, obsession with power over others, and a classic tactic of divide and rule. Other, more constructive relationships are possible. Let’s explore the possibilities of mutual aid.
The other point is that surely, our deepest wish as humans is not actually to ‘survive’. If that were true there would be no-one laying down their lives for a cause, or testing themselves by leaving their safe comfort zones, or for that matter committing suicide in such horrific numbers. The idea that we are all in an ultimately meaningless fight to survive at the expense of others is the fundamental flaw in the still-dominant 19th century philosophy. In such as world, as Sartre said, ‘hell is other people’, there can be no peace, no happiness, no future. When one person ‘wins’ Monopoly it’s game over for all, including the supposed winner. I suggest that our deepest wish as humans is to be happy in the present moment, free from anxiety, fear, guilt, sorrow, anger, and craving. Our dominant culture and ideology is based on scarcity, demand for products and services offering ‘jam tomorrow’ at the expense of jam today. It is all based on fear. But there are at least elements of, or the potential for, independence, freedom, justice and truth right now. These are the only basis on which to build for the future. A sense of scarcity breeds dependence. A positive future we can look forward to must surely start by recognising the positive resources we already have, in other words a belief in ourselves and a rejection of the mantra so many have internalised that we are “too poor, too wee, too stupid” to do anything positive at all. It is the basis of the so-called ‘Scottish cringe’, which in turn is the product of centuries of colonisation. Every colony and subject people was told the same.
Scotland is actually a very wealthy country, large enough and clever enough to do things differently, for the benefit of people and planet and be an example to the world. We also have the remnants of a co-operative, mutually supportive culture even if it is now becoming buried by neoliberalism. I suggest that we start by waking up to this fact. As FDR said in 1933, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’.
If I remember correctly the most significant factor in how someone voted in 2014 referendum was home ownership.
The majority of the comfortable, polite middle class voted No then a significant number voted for Ruth’s Tories because they seemed reasonable and opposed to independence. The Tories went rogue so they then switched their vote to Sir Keir’s non threatening Labour or Lib Dem’s to keep SNP out or more accurately oppose independence because they think it may hurt them financially.
The basic problem is that the financially secure middle class Scots who consider themselves ‘socially progressive’ are not willing to entertain the idea of independence because they are frightened they may lose the financial and social advantage that the status quo gives them.
They are Scotland’s equivalent of middle England although they swear they are patriotic Scots. The SNP have in some ways tried to pander to them but all they have achieved is alienating other demographics.
Excellent piece. Inspiring and pragmatic both.