Deeper and Deeper

Me being all melancholy n alienated n stuff

Thanks for coming back, or hiya if you're here for the first time.

A Boring Personal Recap

I'm working my way through my thoughts, feelings and politics about our Scottish independence referendum. I'm barely started in trying to piece together anything like a consistent ground for my definite Yes vote but as I fumble my thoughts into some sort of rational order I am becoming more aware that we should all be doing something of this nature. 

No I am not a saint or guru leading the way to the promised land Don't follow me for heaven's sakes (well follow me here and on twitter but spare yourself in a spiritual sense). All I'm reflecting is that to find my rational choice, rather than the emotive one I feel guilty about, I need a better political education/consciousness to underpin reason. 

As ever, bear with me.

Back to My "Issues"

If I am going to justify to myself that I want a new nation-state of Scotland (it's currently a stateless nation) then I really do have to be sure that the existing nation-state of the UK isn't usefully salvageable - it's not, I'm sure of this, but need self-assurance I am not delusional. 

"I'd be voting Yes because it's got some hope about it"

That's me on an imaginary psychotherapists couch talking about my Indyref vote.

"because it's beyond f...ed. I can't see a way to save it without more pain for the most vulnerable. In fact I feel utterly powerless to do anything about it."

That's me telling my inner therapist the essence of why I can't stay with the nation-state arrangements of the United Kingdom. I did say I was not the full shilling didn't I? No? Oh well. Back to the angst...

There's so much I am horrified, angry, concerned and powerless about. I'm not alone, I know it fine. Here's something from one of the finest speeches ever passionately spoken, forty years old and achingly relevant right now:

Alienation is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problem in Britain today. People feel alienated by society. In some intellectual circles it is treated almost as a new phenomenon. It has, however, been with us for years. What I believe is true is that today it is more widespread, more pervasive than ever before. Let me right at the outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It's the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision-making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies. Jimmy Reid - A working Class Heroes Finest Speech

I'm tempted to go into my "Ed Miliband, Ed f...ing Miliband" schtick and rail against the poverty of decent options. See my earlier posts for that stuff though. It's this, when Jimmy says this:

"The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies"

God, that gets me deep. That's me that is, and surely so many of you too. I've got to hope so or I'll be hopelessly alone in my horror at the way our world is. Right, here's my deal then, I need to be personally committed and trusting of the assertion that my alienation and anger can't be sorted by UK wide reform, beyond the gut feeling response of "it just bloody can't!".


Confessions of a Selfish Fool

"I just can't. If you're saying to me to wait, and achieve my goals by working within the Labour movement and Labour party to achieve broad social and economic reform then I fear I might have to tell you to f..k right off and awaken yourself to some harsh realities"

That's me responding to my inner therapist asking me to consider a reformist route within the UK - I fear he may have referred me on after this session, poor soul. It's familiar stuff for anyone who's read my previous dribblings I've been round that roundabout a few times now though. I need to get past it. Why can't I trust or hope for Labour renewals? Let's go there a bit more.

I was in the Labour Party for a while in the 90's. Donald Dewar's constituency. Steven Purcell was the branch chair, lovely bloke and I have huge sympathy for his path and difficulties of recent years despite not being in touch since those 90s days - side avenue though, sorry. 

I think I left because I wanted to talk about politics, ideas, society, and what we usually talked about was anything but - party machinations, internal stuff or even worse, deliberately avoiding having a debate by using a technical point. That's what happened when I turned up with "Clause 4" on the back of my membership card and instead of us debating whether the party should bin this historic commitment to some sort of socialist ideal the discussion was held till the next meeting (after the Clause 4 vote) because a member of decades standing had "never heard of Clause 4 and needed time to find out more about it before a proper discussion". Aye right. Pure mince so it was.

That's a petty wee insight and reflection on a personal experience. I know that. It doesn't capture lots of good things about those days and the Labour party, not least the comradeship. However, I do think it represents a tiny microcosm of a bigger picture. The Labour party in the 90s weren't interested in fostering debate, they were interesting in reshaping themselves to be palatable to the electorate and keen to ditch ideas, principles and any other "baggage" needed to become electable. I don't think that's a controversial reading of party history and I am happy to be contradicted, fire in! 

If I move on though then the loss of principle, sidelining of debate, centralisation of party power away from the control of "the movement" etc. brings me back to this place:

"The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies" Jimmy Reid

As I say, I am happy to argue the toss with anyone who wants to, but that's my personal experience and perspective on where I stand in relation to my one real hope in UK politics. So it strikes me that I feel EXACTLY the same way about the Labour party as I do about the problems of the UK state. I am deeply and completely alienated from it and by it. It doesn't feel like my party, doesn't speak for my hopes and can't empower my voice. In fact it denies me all of those things.

Other folk will be alienated in different ways. Their loyalties and histories will be theirs, not mine. Their analysis will be different, but I am convinced that they'll not find a sense of connectedness and humanity that dissipates their alienation in any Westminster party. That's why I see no hope there. 

I'm still voting Yes because like Jimmy Reid and so many others too, I am of a mind that the best way to lose my alienation, anomie or pissed-offness is to stop being part of the "rat race" - it's for rats, not humans. For me, the Labour Party and the parliament it sits in in Westminster have become utterly co-opted by that rat race. They are part of what alienates and de-humanises me and us. Their politics, policies and ambitions are part of the thing that makes me angry and us all ill as a society. I can't place my trust for us re-humanising our political world in Labour or any Westminster parliamentary party. It turns out they're the source of my despair at our inhuman society. 

Still thinking, stay tuned

Stevie

P.S. of course I'll address the "but Scotland won't solve all those problems Stevie" stuff. Gimme a break you slave-drivers 

Resistance is Futile

Let’s begin with a couple of bold assertions:

1.       Nigel Farage is what happens when your political parties are rotten and disconnected from the people who are expected to vote for them.

2.       Ed Miliband is what happens to a political party and its leader when everything about your parliamentary party has to be geared towards winning a few hundred thousand votes in key marginals, across mostly the midlands and south of England. Allow me this further ranty type observation on Ed, he’s an injection molded, soulless  manifestation of a “leader” that media analaysts and party strategists think certain sorts of voters won’t want to hang. So are Dave and Nick.

Farage and those injection moldings we have as party leaders are politically connected. The politics of our union offers Ed Miliband, David Cameron and Nick Clegg as leaders we’re meant to believe will identify what’s wrong with our British world and put it right, or at least have a good bash at doing so. That’s the sort of thing an ideology used to give us in quick cultural shorthand – “a political party believes society has X problems and must do Y in order to make a better future that will look like Z”. In very broad terms that used to translate as Labour will pursue “socialist”/social democratic type policies, the Tories will support business and try to veil their inherent racism, and the Liberals will be nice – sort of Greens without a purpose.

Well the Liberals lost their niceness, the Tories stayed the same and the Labour party became the Tories with cheaper suits. There is no vision, no future, no way the world should be, just a bland acceptance that capitalism is a natural law of the universe and the best we can manage is leaving soulless clones to fiddle with its levers.

Ed Miliband tells me he’ll freeze energy prices or give transport companioes a jolly big row and I find myself screaming at the telly “but I want you to nationalise them!”. You might not be screaming the same thing, but I know you’re screaming, right? Right. And Ed’s the one I’m supposed to like.

Then there’s Dave. Dave tells me the NHS is safe in his hands, does anyone believe him? Anything he says? Trust his motives? Feel some bond of kinship or sense of fellow-traveller on the good ship UK? No me neither.  I’ll leave aside descriptions of the telly-watching/responding scene when Dave’s on. Rest assured it’s not pretty. 

Lastly of course there’s Nick. I can’t remember experiencing Nick Clegg in any way whatsoever since he replaced that decent sounding bloke with the red hair. When Nick tells me anything I fail to care. He’s the neutrino of the political world, except I don’t despise neutrinos for being so weak and poor at interacting – top physics gag there. Yass!

Those are the leaders of our main UK political parties, our supposed vehicles for hope and change.   Seriously, does anyone believe they’re capable, or even remotely interested in big change? I can’t be alone in thinking the three of them, and currently their parties, could not be further from the sort of thing I want or feel is necessary in terms of representing my political life and aspirations.

And when our leaders, their parties and our whole political system lets us down this way? Cue Nigel Farage as a walking, talking two fingered salute to the British political establishment. He captures the same rancour, pissed offness and spite about the world and what it does to us as the London riots (other cities were available for rioting activities too).

Nigel Farage is a riot, and not just in the photo mugging, blokey, jokey, smokey,  down the pub sense either. He’s a physical embodiment of the outburst of “free speech” we saw when London kids rioted. Farage just lets older people smash and burn their “town”/England in a “fuck this” political sort of way. It’s lashing out, it’s blaming others, it’s visceral and raw. What it really is though is bloody worrying if I am expecting Ed Miliband and the Labour party to sort it out by painting a vision of the future that gives hope.

Goodness that’s a bleak picture I paint. If only there was some political mechanism I could use to change things.

Stevie

Waiting on Labour

In my first fumbling attempts at blogging my Indyref mental turmoil I said “hiya!” and then admitted that I’d given up on the United Kingdom before disappearing up my nether regions about my discomfort with nationalism . I’ll return to the nationalism/ist bit in due course. I want to have a wee think about why I I’ve given up on the United Kingdom as a hopeful thing.

Why not our Union?

It’s hard to know where to start. I’m genuinely struggling to begin to capture what it is that causes such a lack of faith, despair and alienation in me when I consider our British political society.

UKIP, let’s start there then. Nigel Farage, what’s that all about?

How can Nigel Farage and a party of xenophobic grotesques more suited to Little Britain than real life be polling as highly as they seem to be in England? Farage and UKIP represent a reactionary right wing political force playing on the same fears, and driven by many of the same factors, as the libertarian right in the US. Anti-“other”, anti-government, anti-welfare and anti much else. I am horrified by him but it’s important to hold onto the fact that people turn to figures like Farage when they have nowhere else to turn. They find hope or a protest when they have no way of otherwise expressing  themselves. Farage and his merry band of “Littlejohns” are with us because our Westminster parties are failing to represent the interests of English people and give them a political voice, vision and future that they trust - the use of "English" wasn't a slip. I'll have a think about where Scotland is in this circus sometime soon.

As an example of this Farage-ness consider why he’s always on the BBC? Simply, because he’s different from the rest of the party aparatchiks who pollute our screens with mind shrivelling dross. He gets a reaction, he makes politics seem interesting to people who've come to hate politicians, even if it’s just to hate him. He’s an interesting, charasmatic clown. He might have the strong whiff of racism about him, but he’s more engaging and entertaining than the rest of our politicians who could (deliberately) bore the arse off you at fifty paces.

Why do people engage, react, or wake up with Farage, while turning away from his soporific political peers? Simply because he’s talking in a language that doesn’t deliberately exclude people from his conversation in the way that others do, you know the “you’re too silly to understand interest rates and bond markets so leave it to us experts” type stuff? Farage is trying to connect with and address people’s real issues. In a stinkingly blokey, xenophobic, right wing and nasty sort of way, but nonetheless he’s trying to connect and having some success in doing so. That’s a pretty damning indictment of our political process. The UK has produced a Farage because our politics and politicians are so bad that a load of us would rather pay attention to a xenophobic charlatan .

Where is Ed Miliband or any progressive, left or even social democrat voice? Even that question makes me shudder. We have a populist xenophobe rising in the polls and throwing bread and circuses at the masses and my biggest hope is in Ed Miliband. Our NHS and post war welfare state are being dismantled, sold off, financialised, commoditised, opened to competition...yada yada and I’m thinking “where’s Ed Miliband?” Bloody hell, that’s a rum do. I could spend months on where Ed Miliband is, but I think it is very succinctly captured by rembering Ed Miliband  eulogising Tony Benn. Ed couldn’t bring himself to use the words “socialist” or “socialism” in a reflection on a man whose whole life was defined by those things. Instead we got a belly full of navel gazing management speak, buzzwords and key phrases. Bland, safe, unintelligent, grey, boring pap fed to us by a man who’s all of those words while he eulogises a man who was none of them . That’s where Britain, England, Westminster, Ed Miliband and the Labour party are at, right there in that nutshell. I’m to put my hopes for societal change in a man, a party and a system that cannot bear to hear words and concepts, hopes and aspirations that define me and my own personal politics. Sure many folk won’t be socialists, won’t be of the same mind as me and won’t feel the same revulsion in exactly the way I’ve described here, but I am convinced that revulsion is what they do feel. Maybe not in the same way I experience my alienation and revulsion, but certainly in a similar and related way. To put ones hopes and future in something that feels so utterly alien, not us, not caring, not even bloody human, that’s what Ed, Labour, Westminster and the UK have become for me. That's why folk turn to something as nasty as UKIP. If that's what's on offer it's not for me.

I’ll need to think about it some more.

Stevie