By Pat Kane. First published on JUNE 1ST, 2019
NOSTALGIA is a feeling that lingers inside you, like a cloud of smoke you can’t dispel. It’s an interesting question to ask yourself: what do you feel nostalgic about?
Spontaneously, my own response is: radical bookshops. As a GlasgowUniversity student in the 80s, I used to drift between about six of them, studding the town centre and the West End.
By Pat Kane. First published on MARCH 2ND, 2019
THE best thing for me about BBC Scotland's The Nine, after watching three of its five episodes in its initial week, is its opening title sequence.
That sounds dismissive, but it isn’t. When Channel 4 News opens up its swirling graphics and toots that trumpet line, you know that Jon Snow and his colleagues are about to deliver their cool, liberal take on the day’s news. Good: that’s why you’re here.
By Pat Kane. First published on FEBRUARY 16TH, 2019
THE story passed down about my Gran Kane was that she snarled at the mention of Winston Churchill.
One of her Irish family was murdered by a member of the Black and Tans, a regiment Churchill formed when he was British secretary of war in 1919. Recruited largely from shell-shocked Great War soldiers, the Black and Tans struck terror into rebellious Nationalist communities in the North of Ireland.
So even before I became a perfidious independista, inherently sceptical of the call to “Great British” anything, we had a familial line on the great war hero Winston Churchill.
By Pat Kane. First published on FEBRUARY 9TH, 2019
‘I’VE been wondering what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted Brexit, without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.” Thus did the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, wring some extra harrumphing (is that even possible?) from the Brexitannia Chorus the other day.
But I detect a jolt of extra outrage, coming from the specific imagery that Tusk deployed. Coincidentally, as the news flashed everywhere, I was listening to the excellent Talking Politics podcast from the London Review of Books.
By Pat Kane. First published on FEBRUARY 2ND, 2019
BREXIT gets weirder and weirder. And you can rely on the bookies to put a price on it. A few days ago, Paddy Power opened a line on “what the British Government would officially ration first in 2019”. Fuel came top at 4/1, olive oil and bread at 16/1, chicken 66/1, prosecco 125/1.
Next in my twitstream (never better named) was a punter vox-popped by the BBC. Asked about retailers’ warnings of empty shelves after a no-deal Brexit, he suggested that, as far as he was concerned, “it would do the country good to go without for a little while. Make them appreciate what they’ve had”.
By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 17TH, 2018
I HAD to check a few times on Netflix, but yes it’s there. In its opening credits, David Mackenzie’s fascinating film about the degradation and redemption of Robert the Bruce spells its title precisely this way: Outlaw/King.
To my mind, that slash (and yes, there are many other forms of slashing in this gorefest) makes intellectually explicit what is the movie’s implicit theme.
If you are a national community residing within a bigger polity, to what extent should its leaders seek progress (or even maintenance) within the rules – or by challenging the rules themselves? Are you king or Outlaw? Or does that slash indicate how one stance might modulate back and forth with the other, according to circumstances?
By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 3RD, 2018
IT’S beginning to feel stuffy and constricted in here. The two leading African acts (from Mali and Senegal) who have pulled out of this year’s Celtic Connections music festival, due to the “hassle and stress” of trying to secure permission to enter the UK, are only the latest in a recent and disheartening wave.
This August’s Edinburgh International Book Festival – a global republic of letters, if ever there was one – had 12 authors with visas refused, from predominantly African and Middle Eastern countries.
And in the same festival period, with some African acts also unable to attend Peter Gabriel’s Womad event, the veteran prog-rocker asked: “Do we really want a white-breaded Brexited flatland? A country that is losing the will to welcome the world?”
By Pat Kane. First published on OCTOBER 13TH, 2018
THE tweets went round, a little less desultory than usual: “I suppose this seems like a BBC Question Time (#bbcqt) I might watch this week.” And indeed, Thursday’s show – its cast-list scattered all over the HolyroodParliament chamber – looked as if it might rub cliches together vigorously enough to catch some flame.
A strangulated editor of the Spectator, a Duracell-powered young Scots Tory, the near-papal Michael Russell, a Celebrity Who’s Clearly Getting Out Of Here, and Val McDermid (representing literature and humans). Plus a “diverse” audience which we now know is carefully assembled by an “audience producer” (with equally carefully placed “star turns”, in case the pabulum threatens to choke us all). Haud me back.
By Pat Kane. First published on SEPTEMBER 8TH, 2018
THERE’S no doubting the power, symbolic or otherwise, of a mighty bridge. Earlier this week, we saw the initial sketches of a proposal to link up Scotland and Northern Ireland. The shorter option is between the Mull of Kintyre and Torr Head; the longer, between Portpatrick and Larne.
The pencilled impression of the “Celtic Bridge” suggests a design that’s like a copy-and-paste of the Queensferry Crossing over the Forth. Like that bridge, many “cable stays” peak and trough their way across the Irish Sea. But the artist puts it all in scale by sketching in a family, plowtering about on a harbour beach, gazing out at the massive structure.
By Pat Kane. First published on AUGUST 11TH, 2018
IT’S been fun reading the snash around Chris McEleny’s case against the MoD. He’s pursuing them for their poor and punitive treatment of him as an employee when he announced his candidacy for the SNP depute leader position in 2016.
A Glasgow employment tribunal, presided over by Judge Frances Eccles, ruled this week that he could make a case under the Equality Act 2010. This allows certain “philosophical and religious beliefs” to be understood as “protected characteristics”. That is, they can’t be taken into consideration as grounds for dismissal or harsh treatment.
The MoD has appealed to have the decision reconsidered and revoked.
By Pat Kane. First published on JULY 14TH, 2018
THE other day I watched John Cleese – the head of the comedy institution known as Monty Python – announce on Newsnight that he was leaving Britain, because of the “awfulness” of Brexit and the British press.
Cleese harrumphed away about “friendly races” and “I only lived here two weeks last year”, sounding sadly like one of the bumptious blimps he used to satirise. The backdrop on Newsnight was a tidily animated tumble of various Pythonesque symbols: random legs, flying fish, antique pointing hands, coconuts, an old TV.
All too comfortable. Or maybe a bit pitiful. Much of the original Monty Python was about taking such TV talk show moments – those mainstream framings that attempt to make reality stable and sensible – and tearing them to pieces. (The closest we got on Newsnight was Cleese clumsily knocking his pin mike off, with the interviewer, Emily Maitlis, scrambling to fix it.)
But as I watched, a realisation started burning its way to the surface. Monty Python shines a weirdly illustrative light on the coming Brexitannic era. I took myself to Netflix this week, and watched their first series. From Python’s beginnings in 1969, the continuities with the present are startling – and the prophesies sometimes even more so.
I mean, let’s just begin with Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson. Watching these two must be odd for the remaining Pythons, They would seem to be carbon copies of the kinds of stiff-necked (or bumblingly eccentric) members of the ruling class the satirists thought they were delegitimating in the 1960s and 70s (with sketches such as “Upper Class Twit of the Year”). Is this a sign that Brexit heralds a reversion to the power structures of 40 years ago? Wait: it may be subtler and stranger than that.
The Pythons were educated in the same Oxbridge circumstances as their targets. So much of the early humour involves showing off their own intellectual assets, while at the same time subverting them with popular culture.
Take the Philosophers’ Football Match (with Marx on the left wing, Nietzsche on the right, Wittgenstein all over the place). Or their endless pisstakes of pretentious arts shows. Or Terry Gilliam’s cut-out animations, with Botticellis dismembering themselves and doing crazy dances.
The creepy thing to consider is whether our current Anglo-American overlords are actually self-consciously Pythonesque in their strategies, rather than being the dumb targets of satire.
When Rees-Mogg said the current Brexit is “the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Phillip II at Le Goulet in 1200”, it could easily have been a line in a Python sketch (spoken by someone in a suit of armour, holding a rubber chicken).
Yet the true horror may not be that Mogg is being authentic, and that the upper class has returned with a vengeance. It’s more that he’s consciously cultivating an eccentricity that cuts through the modern media maelstrom.
That is, he is as concerned with his affect – the emotional impact he makes, his sheer memorability – as his effect. As Mogg is third in the polls among Tory Party members for potential leader, it shows that something must be working.
Boris Johnson has parlayed the same self-satirical routine for decades (what Python sketch could beat him sticking his mayoral legs out of his flying fox harness, waving a paper Union Jack?).
However, Johnson’s schtick currently seems to be palling, as ministerial office has revealed his laziness and limitations (a well-timed Cicero or Churchill quote doesn’t get you out of geopolitical trouble). But there is an elite-right strategy dimly visible here. As Trump stomps around the world stage, dropping wise-guy logic bombs everywhere, sucking all the media attention to whatever issue he decides to frame, you come to a queasy conclusion. These figures are learning from the satirists – much more than they might fear their tongues.
The theory seems to be: If you can crowd the electorate’s mental reality with as many bewildering and taboo-breaking stances as possible, you can exhaust them enough so that they’ll respond gratefully to the one clear offer you make.
This policy was trialled early in the Vladimir Putin administration by his advisor Vladislav Surkov. Surkov was educated as a theatre director, with a particular love of surrealism. This he decided to apply to the art of political propaganda itself.
As the Russian writer Peter Pomerantsev puts it, under Surkov’s control, “the stage was always changing: a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime. While backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away”.
Surkov was “at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next”, continues Pomerantsev. “It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable”.
This strategy also sounds, to be honest, like a standard Python episode. There’s a sketch in series one, episode five, where a management training interviewee’s sense of normality is completely ripped apart by Cleese’s artful mix of nonsense and authority. It’s more like a harsh psychological experiment than a comedy moment. But it also anticipates the daily surrealism of our current affairs.
So never mind Norwegian blues pining for the fjords. Should we be pining for a new wave of Monty Pythons? But given the deliberate reality-bending already deployed by these oligarchs, how extreme would they have to be?
Chris Morris (with The Day Today and Brass Eye), our own Frankie Boyle, and Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror are probably the only attempts that have gotten anywhere near the requisite intensity. And after Brooker’s pig-meets- prime-minister episode was outdone by David Cameron’s own porcine explorations, the writer was moved to redefine his work as “a documentary series”.
But until we figure out how to disconnect from this brain-seizing spectacle (Scots: there is a democratic device for this in your toolbox), we can still grimly enjoy the Pythons’ capacity for prophecy. If you google “Python” and “Brexit”, the mashed-up video remakes are endless.
Particularly popular is the scene from their movie Life of Brian, where the Judean People’s Front (or is it The People’s Front of Judea?) ask “whatever has the EU” (substituting for Rome) “ever done for us?”. Cue the list of 57% of its trade, environmental and workplace regulations, massive infrastructure investment …
There’s also many droll online comparisons with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. An EU official compares Brexiteers to the movie’s Black Knight – “who, after being defeated terribly and having all his limbs cut off, says to his opponent ‘let’s call it a draw’.”
You can even find an entire mini-film called Teresa May and the Holy Grail. Her face is digitally mapped on to King Arthur’s, saying desperately: “Nothing has changed! Nothing has changed!”
All fun and games, as the phrase has it — until someone loses an eye. And that may be, metaphorically at least, the right strategy. There is a Cleese character in the Kilimanjaro explorer sketch (series one, episode nine), who has to put his hand over one eye to stop seeing double. Indy-minded Scots may have to do the same.
By which I mean that we block out the Brexitannic spectacle (or Trump’s Caligularity) and train our remaining eye on the Scottish prize.
It’ll be less absorbing, perhaps, but the reality distortion game is huge these days: it’s not just Monty Python and the satirists who are flying circuses around.
Scots should start to address the issue of how we define, and thus act, on our own desired reality. Because that’s what everyone else is up to.
You can watch the first series of Monty Python on Netflix
By Pat Kane. First published on DECEMBER 30TH, 2017
WHAT’S coming in 2018? After 2017’s experience – history in the blender, jammed at 11 – it may be best to stick to what’s officially in the calendar. Yet even on the big safe dates, this age of extremes doesn’t stop.
By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 25TH, 2017
BREXAPOCALYPSE rained down another burning bolt from the skies on Wednesday. And one particularly fiery chunk landed right on Dundee waterfront.
A terse letter from the European Commission said UK cities would no longer be able to compete for the title of European Capital of Culture (formerly the European City of Culture). They said it “would not be possible … following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union”.
By Pat Kane. First published on OCTOBER 14TH, 2017
GEORGE Monbiot’s new book, Out of The Wreckage: A New Politics For An Age of Crisis, should be of great interest to anyone with political ambitions to change their country – whatever country that is.
His core idea is that human beings crave powerful stories to make sense of their lives. No matter the facts they corral, any effective politics must have such a story. Monbiot says the most shaping ones are “restoration” tales – heroes coming to repair the collective damage left by identifiable villains.
By Pat Kane. First published on JULY 22ND, 2017
ANOTHER day, another metropolitan front cover with “nationalism” in scare-quotes. This time, at least, there is the merit of a considerable intellect behind the charge.
The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari is the author of Sapiens and Homo Deus – two volumes that together chart the past, present and future of humankind. They are popular enough to sit beneath the crime thrillers in your local train-station newsagent.
By Pat Kane. First published on JULY 15TH, 2017
IT’S hard to take all these WWII movies, as Brexit staggers towards its awkward, broken conclusion.
Before the end of 2017, we will have seen Their Finest (a romantic comedy about wartime filmmaking), two Churchill movies (played by Brian Cox and, in November, by Gary Oldman), and now Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Ridley Scott’s Battle of Britain will land on us in 2018.
By Pat Kane. First published on JUNE 24TH, 2017
‘CATASTROPHE” is the keyword of the moment. And if we want to address the various states of disorder and disaster it refers to, we should dwell for a moment on the usages of the term itself.
It comes from the Greek katastrépho: “I overturn.” Nothing could seem as starkly catastrophic as the Grenfell Tower disaster – a community in the sky quickly “turned over”, via a wall of flaming panels, into a charnel house. It’s also the exact term used by those local activists who had been warning for years of the building’s flammability.
By Pat Kane. First published on JUNE 17TH, 2017
IT’S crazy out there, no doubt about it. Hard to know how to orient yourself, in what sometimes feels like a rattling-apart of many established structures.
In this moment, I think there are psychological benefits in pursuing Scottish indy politics. It allows you to grab on to some of the biggest topics – economy, technology, energy, welfare, the utility of force – and at least connect them to some real democratic forces.
By Pat Kane. First published on JUNE 10TH, 2017
STRANGE “defeat”, when this number of SNP seats would once have passed Margaret Thatcher’s rule — that a majority of representatives for independence in Scotland guarantees a new nation-state. But the rules have changed since — and to be fair, in its pursuit of a legal indy referendum in 2014, the SNP played its part in changing them.
But if this is instead a “victory”, it’s a gey strange one. One that includes both Alex Salmond and Angus Robertson, the vital past and the leading present of Scottish Nationalist politics, being removed from their seats by an overt and covert coordination of cross-party Unionist campaigning.
By Pat Kane. First published on MAY 13TH, 2017
‘MARXIST’ is an old scare word – but does it really work any more? I guess we’re about to find out, in the remaining few weeks of this General Election campaign. The mildest of positive responses from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his deputy John McDonnell, answering leading questions on whether they were followers of the writings of Karl Marx, are doubtless now being fed into the Tories’ message machines. Expect a lurid meme splurting on to your social media feed some time before June 8.
Continue reading "PK column in The National: Reading of Marx isn't suspicious ... it's essential" »
By Pat Kane. First published on MAY 6TH, 2017
‘I BELIEVE we can build a more secure and united nation by taking action against the extremists who seek to divide us, and standing up to the separatists who wish to tear our country apart.”
I guess the first are Corbyn and his lefties. But is the second me? Or you? Or are we both of these terms? And what will “taking action against” or “standing up to” involve, precisely?
By Pat Kane. First published on APRIL 22ND, 2017
‘STRONG and stable leadership... strong and stable leadership...” Theresa May used the term 14 times during her first General Election stump speech, and incessantly throughout the day. We’ve received the message, Prime Minister.
Or, more exactly, we’ve received the message of her master strategist Lynton Crosby, and he didn’t get to where he is today by underestimating the need to drive a campaign line home, like a nail through the head of the distracted citizenry.
By Pat Kane. First published on MARCH 18TH, 2017
AND yet we realised:
Hatred, even of meanness Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice Makes the voice hoarse.
O, We who wanted to prepare
The ground for friendship Could not ourselves be friendly.
– Bertolt Brecht, To Those Born Later”
THESE lines have been running through my head, since the First Minister gravely announced her timetable for a second independence referendum. How can this binary, fundamental, what-kind-of-society-are-we choice become a “friendly” process, this time round?
By Pat Kane. First published on MARCH 4TH, 2017
IT’S not often you get the chance to be involved in the launch of a new political force. But I took it this week, as one of the co-initiators of The Alternative UK (www.thealternative.org.uk), inspired by and connected to Denmark’s Alternativet party, which describes itself as being for “sustainability and entrepreneurship”.
Our soft launch in London was full of the diversity, energy and global embrace which that world city can provide, and which always makes this Scot welcome. (It also shows what a bum steer Mayor Khan was given by his Scottish comrades recently).
By Pat Kane. First published on JANUARY 21ST, 2017
IT’S the stat that drew a collective intake of breath at the Build Indy conference last week.
And throughout Dr Craig Dalzell’s vital paper The Demographics of Independence, it’s the one he’s most anxious about: “The underlying reasons … should be investigated immediately”.
Here it is: Support for indy among women over 55 has dropped from 44 per cent in 2014 to 22 per cent in 2016. “The idea of the UK leaving the EU appears to have affected this group profoundly, as their leaving the Yes group has not resulted in a rise in the undecided vote,” says Dalzell. “Instead, there has been a movement straight to No.”
By Pat Kane. First published on JANUARY 14TH, 2017
"A LITTLE girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality' than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed."
As The Donald inches closer to the nuclear launch codes, this quote from the late Scottish anti-psychiatrist and 1960s guru RD Laing has been rattling around my head. Mad To Be Normal is the title of the biopic of Laing’s life (with David Tennant in the main role) that will close the Glasgow Film Festival this year.
By Pat Kane. First published on DECEMBER 10TH, 2016
A FEW weekends ago, Michael Gove MP, a notable friend of this mighty organ, took the chance to clarify his famous “the people have had enough of experts” statement from the Brexit campaign.
“The point I make is that not all experts are wrong, that’s manifestly nonsense. [There’s] expert engineers, expert doctors, expert physicists,” he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr. “But there are a sub-class of experts, particularly economists, pollsters, social scientists, who really do have to reflect on some of the mistakes that they’ve made.”
By Pat Kane. First published on DECEMBER 3RD, 2016
‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” That’s what the thuggish Dick proposes in Shakespeare’s Henry VI as a means of improving society. And perhaps one way to hasten their end is the sight of lawyers making a killing.
This week in Scotland has provided quite a spectacle of all that. The new Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Gordon Jackson QC, suggested that independence might allow Scots lawyers to “grab some of that [legal] practice cake” from London, which usually secures the major litigations.
By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 26TH, 2016
WHITE, middle-aged, middle-class male. That’s what I am, undeniably. I have long thought of myself as a supporter of women’s rights, of the rights of sexual and ethnic minorities. Yet here I am, the empirical fact of me, appearing in analysis after analysis as the foundation of a poisonous turn in Euro-American public life.
What should I do? What can I do?
The answers to those questions reverberate up and down my own timeline, and across the field of society before us. And before I assume any right as a pundit to suggest anyone else’s course of action or behaviour, I should examine my own path.
By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 7TH, 2015
THERE is one thing to be said for Theresa May’s proposals this week, contained in her Investigatory Powers Bill, to make the UK “the most intrusive and least accountable surveillance regime in the West” (tweets Edward Snowden).
At least the argument is now firmly in the wide open spaces of public debate. We don’t need to wait for a Bond movie to ponder the perennial question of “who watches the watchmen”: that is, how we, the people consciously permit our security to be defended.
The technology in question isn’t invisible Aston Martins or exploding watches. It’s the Tory Government’s attempt to use the all-pervading social presence of the internet, and turn it into the ultimate “dragnet”.
Snowden famously let us know that all our “private” cyber-interactions were being traced, searched and read by GCHQ and other US agencies. May accepts all that – and now wants to be able to pursue it to the max, under some process of judicial and political permission.
I know. It’s hard to separate our heads and hearts from the horror of a Daesh beheading video. Or from the vast shadowy bulks of superpowers like China and Russia, moving purposefully behind the veil of the foreign news pages. How will their actions reframe reality today, tomorrow? Who will protect us from all this?
But we must try to be citizens, and at least deal with the polity that we can directly affect. We can think through the question of how our open digital society relates to the demands of national security. And we can think of it as indy-minded Scots, as well as reluctant Brits.
Take the idea that commercial digital companies should allow the UK Government to build a “back door” into all encrypted software – to be opened only in extremis, of course. There has already been much informed pushback.
Encrypted data is coded by senders in a way that means only receivers can “unlock” what has been sent to them. Nowadays, encryption tools are incredibly powerful. Indeed, some of the most powerful, like Tor, were originally devised by the US Navy. As an openly available resource, Tor doesn’t just enable US spying, but also the activism and plotting of all kinds of radicals – and there seems to be no “back door” installable.
The spectre of Islamist or anti-Western radicals using cryptography to coordinate their attacks is thus enabled, like many other of their angry threats, by our own actions and interventions. A lasting and painful irony.
Cryptography is also pretty banal and high-street these days. Many non-baddies who provide secure online services – like banking, or health, or many of our streamed online entertainments – are just straightforwardly alarmed at how this measure would evaporate their customers’ trust.
But even on their own security terms, the simplest knock-down of the Tories’ scheme would seem to be this. If we let this government, or any government, hold an encryption “mega-key” (the code that unlocks any and all back doors), then what happens if the key falls into the wrong, or at least the alternatively motivated hands?
This would make the principled whistleblowing of Manning or Snowden, never mind the tawdry data-hacking of commercial service providers like TalkTalk or the dating site Ashley Madison, look like minor street scuffles. Data access, for the ill-intentioned, would be total.
Could this happen? Consider our leak-ridden culture: what do you think? The ex-Lib Dem MP Julian Huppert, now teaching at Oxford University, gives a simple example of what could go wrong. (In case you hear “Lib Dem” and switch off ... while in the Coalition, Huppert was instrumental in blocking the last Tory attempt at state cyber control, known then as the “Snoopers Charter”).
Huppert recently wrote about the clumsy pratfall of the Transport Security Administration in the US. In response to passengers who feared their suitcases might be susceptible to interference by random handlers in airports, the TSA created approved luggage locks which only TSA keys were able to open.
Unfortunately, in a Washington Post article praising the initiative, someone in the accompanying photo posed with a set of the master keys clearly visible. The photo had enough resolution to enable people to copy the keys and make 3D copies. The TSA scheme is now utterly useless.
Scale that up to the level of a busy, and ever more digitally reliant society. One all-too-human slip, and the government encryption back door could make us all hugely more vulnerable to cyber-violation – not less.
The question of what security arrangements we would make in an independent Scotland hovers over all of this. Our current situation is a curious mix of the passive and the misguided.
The passive element continues to be the inability for Scots to put some distance between themselves and the interventionist belligerence of Westminster – whether it’s Middle-East raids, or defying nuclear non-proliferation with Trident renewal, or indeed an illiberal and intrusive cyber-surveillance. We wave our fists, then watch them act.
This networked planet is a flow of overt communication and images, as well as covert messages – a realm of “soft power”, as the diplomats call it. An independent Scotland could use its distinct security arrangements as a soft power strategy.
We would tell the world we are a non-nuclear nation, with a humanitarian-only defence force, actively seeking to be involved in conflict prevention and mediation, and committed to transparency and accountability to the greatest possible extent.
Independence would let the frustrated and alienated of the planet know of our good intent, which we’d be wise to follow up with consistent actions. Given how easily anyone’s malevolence can reach anywhere through global network, this may be our ultimate safety strategy.
However, we are where we are. It’s frustrating enough that an aggressive cyber-policy is largely led from the south of England – the major data cables come in to the UK at Bude, Cornwall, and Cheltenham’s GCHQ is the obvious behemoth driving all surveillance.
But even within our narrow powers, I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any favours (the misguided bit).
The world-class computing science departments of Scottish universities would be a research asset to a fledgling nation-state, trying to figure out how to get the cyber-security balance right.
However, as far as I can see, there is already a huge amount of Scots integration with the US/UK security state.
Take Edinburgh University’s Academic Research Institute, which actively works with GCHQ. Or Police Scotland, inviting the FBI over to a cybercrime conference this coming December.
Police Scotland might also be part of the problem in another way. There is a consistent retort to the idea that the internet should simply become a “dragnet” of information, wide open for security forces to freely navigate. The retort is we could be wasting time, technology and resources making sense of an unfathomably giant mountain of data.
“We are unnecessarily expanding the haystacks while we search for the needles”, said one National Security Agency insider this year.
Many experts say that if domestic terrorism and crime is our biggest threat, then it’s the police and security force’s strong social relations with the wider community – and the trust that people place in it – that brings the best results.
Can we say that Police Scotland – centralised away from its localities, strutting its paramilitary uniforms through our high streets and stop-and-searching with impunity, enthusiastically promoting advanced CCTV – is really on a mission to build up trust with the various communities of Scotland?
And as for the real James Bonds … It’s worth noting that the current Spectre movie is, to say the least, thoroughly sceptical about the powers of an all-seeing digital security system.
Entrusting our national security to misogynistic killers like 007? Probably not. And in any case, it still matters precisely what nation we’re talking about.
Pat Kane is a musician and writer (www.patkane.today)
This is a snap blog I wrote for Prospect magazine (online version) about the SNP's massive result in the 2015 General Election, on May 8th, 2015
Sturgeon and the SNP will celebrate today—but the toughest work is ahead.
Pat Kane, Prospect magazine
So was the Tory majority procured through Project Fear II? Just a few bleary hours after the result, that would seem to be the case.
The first Project Fear was the winning strategy in the independence referendum for the No side—a well-drilled, cross-party orchestration between the press and the Coalition government, to blare the klaxons about the systemic instability that a Yes vote would bring.
With a cruel irony, the Conservatives have applied the same scaremongering strategy to their erstwhile No-voting partners in Better Together, the Labour Party—all those primal screens showing Miliband popping out of the pocket, or dancing to the strings, of either Salmond or Sturgeon.
What partly explains the frankly stunning discrepancy between the polling organisations predicting a dead heat, and the final result delivering a slender Tory majority, isn’t just the shy rUK voter, but the tactical rUK voter—previously a Scottish phenomenon (well, they’ve moved on to a different reality altogether.)
And those tactical votes were surely partly driven from a drumbeat of “chaos” and “instability”—and perhaps also combined with a genuine ideological disagreement, among middle-Englanders, with the left-of-centre policy amalgam that a Labour-SNP arrangement would represent.
Is there a genuine note of disappointment from Sturgeon and her team that the SNP isn’t now able to contribute to a majority swirl of progressive forces in Westminster? I think so.
That’s partly because Sturgeon knows this truth: that the gradual build of confidence-and-competence in Scottish government among Scots would have been the most solid route to a robust majority in a second independence referendum. (That positive spirit is what’s powered the Yes voters to keep their movement going, by means of the SNP—or the “YeSNP,” as I call them now).
Independence would have happened best under conditions of optimism, progress and uplift; now it’ll be a harder, grittier route, grimly fighting the sturm-und-drang of a regnant Tory party. But that’s the path that lies before Sturgeon and the SNP—and you might imagine the deep strategising that’s going on in their Edinburgh New Town bunkers right now.
What impact will these 56 SNP members have in Westminster, now that the progressive majority can’t be assembled? Of course they will be automatically enrolled into committees, get their chance at PMQs, benefit from massively increased supports funds—which will doubtless assist with the much needed policy formation for a better, more worldly independence offer.
And we might see a neat turn in the “legitimacy” meme, which is that the scale of the SNP win compels Cameron to make an offer on enhanced devolution much closer to what is now a massive consensus of Scottish opinion.
The Prime Minister’s opening One-Nation speeches throughout Friday would seem to suggest they’ll make some commensurate response. Though there’s weasel-wording in his idea of Scotland as “the most powerful devolved parliament in the world”—which could be far from a coherent federal solution that separates powers, institutes electoral reform, defines the purpose (and location) of a new second chamber, and a’ that.
And the Tories, being the Tories, still have the opportunity to blow it. They could impose some kind of non-gradual, brutal fiscal autonomy that effectively (and ostentatiously) reduces the overall Scots budget, placating the resentments of middle-English voters they so effectively stoked up during the General Election.
So as the Scots Bloc shakes its fist at a spectacle of continued Tory austerity, a renewed Trident (by both Conservative and Labour parties), the miserable shitstorm of European referendum debate, its other hand will be arranging pieces on a chess board, trying to line up a checkmate for the Union.
No Indyref 2 on the SNP manifesto for the 2016 Holyrood elections, I would predict: wrath must be nursed, over a few useful years, to keep it warm. But it’s now very, very likely for the 2020 Scottish Parliament manifestos (and I mean plural—the Greens, and perhaps some new post-Scottish-Labour left grouping, may join the Nats in so proposing).
This will be a bumpier, grumpier road than the Abraham-Maslow-like flourishing towards full self-government that the “progressive” scenario promised. But the last stop of independence is now not so far off as it felt on September 19th, 2014. And it is as hard and clear as a spring day in Govan, Gordon or Greenock.
My early 2015, mid-general-election piece for Bella Caledonia, 5th Feb, 2015
Some Notes Against Complacency
By Pat Kane
In the midst of my own lunchtime cartwheels over the recent Ashcroft polls yesterday – showing Scottish Labour’s potential evaporation, constituency by constituency, by the SNPs rayguns – I received a few sharp throbs of pain from some ugly old Yesser scar-tissue. You’ve been here before, pal, came the message, in distinct morse-code-like pulses.
In response, let me batter out some Notes Against Complacency.
Note 1: You’re not the SNP – you’re the YeSNP – so act accordingly. I’ve already had pelters for minting the phrase “YeSNP”, but I’m going to stick to it grimly for now. “ScotsBloc” might work if there was more than one party in the coming General Election stramash – there’s not. But what does exist is a party swollen by the consequences of the non-partisan, culturally-conscious, community-led activism of the Yes movement. It’s also resulted in a brace of parliamentary candidates, some great pals of mine, who came to the fore in that movement, and who – I hope – will be men and women o’ independent (as well as Indy) minds.
The SNP leadership and its circles must remember that it lost a referendum on a prospectus mostly brewed up in an elite bunker. That bunker explicitly fashioned it as a play-safe strategy, whose keystone – the currency union – was as easily refuted by an implacable British state as Jim Sillars predicted it would be.
The recent appeal for manifesto ideas from the wider membership is a good move. But a wise course would be to keep remembering, more than ever, that it’s the turbulent energies of a diverse movement – and a movement well to the left of the Salmond era – that’s gotten them to this powerful, unexpected post-No position. I’m still calling them the YeSNP. So there.
Note 2: The YeSNP must keep engaging in a “Battle for Britain”. If the aim is to turn this early polling promise into actual SNP (oh, alright, I’ll release you for a moment) seats on the day of the General Election, the UK implications of their policy and ideological positions must be explored and extended. It’s started with the agreed “red lines” positions with Plaid and the Greens (and extended by Common Weal a few days ago).
In the coming debates, I don’t think we should underestimate just how brilliant it will look to see four blustering blokes being elegantly unravelled by three smart power-feminists I’m sure Natalie Bennett will get her act together for the event).
But the SNP should keep searching for allies in the rest of the island, particularly among a) the English non-Blairite labour-movement centre-left, and b) the plethora of English activist networks (like People’s Assembly, 38 Degrees, the anti-war and environmental movements, the gathering Northern regional pressure groups).
Look at the diversity of activists that Compass (used-to-be Labour left pressure group, now an “open tribe”) has brought together for its Change: How? conference kicking off this coming Sunday in London. Apart from the actual presence of Scots-indy figures, what does this mix of arts, workshops, performance, idealists remind you off? Yes, it’s a “National Collective” event in all but name.
The democratic carnival of the indyref has recalled the English left to its interest in the culture of politics – all that 80s and 90s invocation of Gramsci, and latterly Stuart Hall, that unfortunately got translated by New Labour into marketing strategies and Cool Britannia. Scots self-determinists have understood well for the last few decades that pluralism, and the right to self-expression, builds deep political muscles, rather than being “off-message”. We should embrace that the English left are remembering this.
The “anti-austerity” and “more powers” elements of the SNP/Plaid/Green alliance are deeply attractive to these constituencies. Also keep an eye out for a revival in popular anti-Trident sentiment down south as well, enabled by new network tools and with major-name endorsement.
To see and hear the SNP ally itself to these progressive English forces – stationed well to the left of Miliband’s Labour Party – will maintain credibility with those Scottish Labour voters who are actively considering “lending” their vote to the SNP in May. The SNP leadership should be alive to the ways that cultivating these rUK groups can give it a chance of a different story coming through the London-based mainstream media. This will impact on those Scottish voters who are more passive in their media consumption (ie, not the “cybernats” of legend). And on that point…
Note 3: The UK media-establishment complex will play hardball again.So keep consuming and supporting alternative media (including The National). It’s quite a realisation – and on a bad day, a somewhat chilling one – to find that you have entirely lost faith that the BBC’s UK news operation can ever fairly represent the politics of Scottish self-determination.
I’m sure many of you experienced the same shiver of cynical understanding the other day. Were the Ashcroft polls on the ScotLab collapse more like a warning klaxon than a snapshot of opinion – something fired up from one part of the media-establishment complex to awaken the rest? Doesn’t it actually herald the return of the blitzkrieg of lying, loathing and demonisation that we came to call “Project Fear” – and which, as it turned out, actually did do enough to intimidate enough Scots to keep Yes from victory?
Well, if it does, then we are at least as well prepared as we were, if not a lot better. One of the salient factors in Syriza’s victory in Greece was not just its use of social media, but its access to, and support from, both a national radio station and a national newspaper for years beforehand.
We know that Scots voters who were more passive and less interactive in their media consumption – older, more traditional voters – correlated more with a No voting profile. So it is incredibly important that YeSNP (it’s back again!) types and others economically support The National paper in these next few months (and its ideological sister, the Sunday Herald). The National will become, effectively, campaign literature that can be easily obtained at the street corner, and passed to friends who occupy this bracket.
Let me be clear – this makes no request for either paper to change its existing editorial policy. The National needs only be as committed to its desired, front-page outcome – “an independent Scotland” – as the Record is to its “Vow”, “Vow Plus”, or whatever variation of Labour Unionism it traditionally supports.
Yet I don’t want to downgrade that we’ve managed to build, and maintain, an alternative public media sphere in Scotland after the referendum, out of zeros and ones (and the steady commitment of writers and readers). Newsnet.scot has come about as a fusion of the old Newsnet Scotland site, and Derek Bateman’s passionate podcasting and blogging. Bella Caledonia maintains its preeminence as the home of progressive Scottish thinking and writing; Wings Over Scotland continues its necessary and meticulous media monitoring, “watch the watchmen”.
And commonspace.scot a project of Common Weal – is picking up speed as a vital aggregator of progressive-left Scottish (and global) content from across the Net, including these sites and many other independent bloggers. When any of them make their appeals for cash, as they doubtless will in the next few months, respond as well as you can. You literally pump oxygen into the largely airless abyss of mainstream Unionist media in Scotland.
And, at least until May, we do seem to have squeezed two regular, nightly political programmes out of the budgets of STV and BBC (though for how long, who knows). Merely from necessity, these shows have an appetite for new guests and voices, which figures from the indy media sphere in Scotland often provide. We should regard them as targets for intervention with interesting stories, angles and events.
Note 4: Stay awake. Keep talking. Do what you can. Whatever’s happening, and whatever the outcome, it’s better to be busy being born than busy dying in the post-referendum Scotland. And it’s a lot better than I expected it would be. That’s definitely worth a little throbbing scar tissue.
Some Ne'erday thoughts on politics in 2012. All comments welcome. (I will be hyperlinking references in this piece over the next few days).
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We hear that a "prospectus" for the independence option in the referendum is being prepared in the bowels of the SNP - a "little blue-and-white book" which will provide a coherent policy framework, for citizens considering what will probably be the biggest political decision of their lives.
Quite a few columnists have been noting with wry interest how the year's end has brought what seems like the UK establishment's praise of Alex Salmond, as a major political figure on these islands (eg, The Times' "Briton of the Year"). In a gripping stretch of realpolitik, the Labour activist Ian S Smart wonders whether this is an "Ally's Army" episode - the UK building us up for a world-changing moment, ready to catch us in their Unionist embrace as we inevitably fall short of our ideal and reject independence, leaving a quiescent, depressed and tractable Scotland.
Yet isn't it equally possible that a properly-bolted-together prospectus for independence would be one of the more significant cultural "memes" of the next 18 months - one which might reverberate beyond the London media, and become part of a global conversation about democracy and self-determination? Debate about the independence process often talks about the significant "holes" in the SNP's position. As a Unionist tactician, Smart is clear as a bell about how to exploit them. For him, it's only the threat that independence will disrupt the continuity of pensions or welfare benefits, of access to BBC shows or easy financial transactions across the border, that's needed to secure a clear majority against.
Yet perhaps there's a much "higher road" than one where focus groups can be negatively targeted with, in Smart's words, "frightening effectiveness". There's an old saying in Scottish politics about never underestimating the intelligence of the Scottish electorate. Surely some of those smarts come from living through a period where the constitutional question has, at the very least, inserted an awareness of how governance, at a macro-level, matters to the everyday person. Two effective SNP administrations at Holyrood have made that manifest, through a range of tangible policy differences in education, health and local taxation.
Perhaps we should remind ourselves that Scottish citizens have a level of political awareness which is more acute and lively than in other parts of the island. So the challenge for independistas in 2012 is not to nervously huddle around an obdurate minority in the opinion polls for independence, but to intellectually and rhetorically "work as if they were in the early days of an independent nation", to misquote Alasdair Gray. That is, to stretch and develop their existing understanding of the possible powers of a Scottish Parliament, making concrete and clear what extra benefits (and defences against Tory-Coalition policies) come from statehood.
I think one of the tipping points will be a context in which a Eurosceptic majority looks like solidifying in the English polity and returning a right-wing, small-government Tory regime (perhaps earlier than expected). Against that, I'm sure it's possible to present a joined-up welfare-pensions-and-taxation framework for independence which will look more attractive, even more stable, than a status quo which leaves some of these services and functions to a regime which is fundamentally opposed to concepts such as "the social wage" or "social democracy".
An England spiralling into isolationism will also leave headroom for the SNP's development of their diplomatic and geo-political arguments. A real educational achievement in the popular consciousness for independence would be an awareness that a Scottish state, if democratically mandated, would have the right and the ability to situate itself, in a tailored and unique way, amidst European and global political and economic frameworks. If the debate over the border escalates into an near-referendum moment on whether the UK should remain within Europe under current terms at all, would that allow the Scottish electorate to vote for the pragmatism of keeping international options open, both in a Nordic and a EU direction, in a situation of upheaval and chaos?
Jim Sillars' request that Scots (politicians and citizens) start "thinking like a state" has never been more pertinent - however much I might dissent from details of his analysis. And there are aspects of that state-thinking in the coming "prospectus" which I will probably object to strongly. For all Angus Robertson's character as an individual, I profoundly disagree with his discourse around Scottish armed forces under independence. We need much less of the "our-fair-share-of-the-military-spending" rhetoric, and much more vision about the changed culture of a "Scottish Defence Force" - a clear sense of different priorities about participation in future interventions and peace-keeping, a background recognition that the "great traditions" of Scottish regiments should not be so blithely celebrated. Freedom Come 'A Ye, over Scotland The Brave.
I will also probably be unhappy with any kind of "continuity plan" for broadcasting and media regulation, involving BBC Scotland having greater autonomy under independence (while retaining its title and general programming). I don't believe it's beyond the wit of independence policy-makers to sketch out a future where access to beloved programmes is guaranteed, in a time-shifting and digital multi-channel environment, but where the name-change to an "SBC" or some other title signifies the same shift in seriousness as "Scottish Executive" to "Scottish Government". That is, a Scottish "state" broadcasting service which (of course) parallels the BBC in its constitutional distance from political control, but which at least accepts - as the current BBC Scotland essentially cannot - the basic legitimacy of a Scottish state perspective. Meaning less Central Belt murr-durrs on the nightly news bulletin, and more coverage of a Scotland that will exists in the world of globalisation, and covers the complexities of national progress within that. And much more besides, in terms of the cultural, social, energy and business agenda.
But all that aside... If we can seize 2012 as the year of "education towards independence", I think Comrade Smart's sophisticated but depressive view of the insubstantial nature of Scottish political will for independence can be overturned. If he's right about the "Devo Max" option being a non-starter for the Unionist parties - which remains to be seen, and that's another post - then an independence movement has a clear run at a prospect which only asks us to be at our best, as persuaders, thinkers, tactitians and activists. In a world where there are enough grand narratives of despair available, we should enjoy the opportunity to argue for a tangible achievement of progress and modernity.
For 'a that, and 'a that, it's comin' yet...
Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - thinking about the Tories' big idea for their Coalition government, The Big Society, and testing it against not only its most immediate critics down south, but also the Scottish context (to my mind, largely indifferent). As ever, all comments most gratefully recieved.
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I live a bi-polar life on this island: a week in Scotland, a week in London, chasing opportunities and doing family in both. I don’t know whether it affords me any particularly novel insight into the socio-political currents at either end of this landmass at the moment. But sometimes the edges rub together interestingly.
Last week, for example, was dominated by my tentative engagement with the hot idea currently attracting pundits, enterprises and other chancers to its surface, like filings to a magnet: the Tories’ (and now the Coalition’s) concept of theBig Society.
The first thing to say about it, wearing my Caledonian breeks, is how unnecessary it seems in the Scottish context – even in its guise as a detoxification of the Tory brand. With Scotland never having bought into the Thatcherite notion that there was no such thing as society, Cameron’s revisionism – “there is, but it’s not the same as the state” – has very little velcro up here.
Also, our relatively advanced constitutional set-up has meant that the SNP minority government has had to find overlaps with the Tories on their pet issues (bobbies on the beat, support for small business). But in doing so, they’ve dragged the Conservatives into the social-democratic consensus of Scottish policy on public services. They either tacitly or actively support budgets and settlements to extend or defend social provision, in ways that the deficit hawks currently running Whitehall would screech at.
However, in an England under the full writ of Westminster, the mood is much more febrile. My favourite groups down here at the moment are the Compass grouping within the Labour Party – the intelligent centre-left – and the New Economics Foundation, a green think-tank. Both are extremely lucid about what the Big Society means – essentially a cloying ideological smokescreen shrouding an audacious privatisation of public services and the welfare state.
The standard line is that the Big Society’s appeal to the joys of volunteering and social enterprise is incredibly naïve and ill-considered – as if hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed public sector workers somehow “clears the way” for charities and NGOs to fill the gaps left in social services. For example, closed libraries are now offered to communities to run on a voluntary basis – as if a public library service was an amateur activity on a par with craft classes, and should be allowed to prosper solely on the vine of local enthusiasm.
And as the NEF’s Anna Coote says, with much of the debatably-deficit-driven cuts meaning the withdrawal of grants to voluntary organisations from local councils, the Big Society comes to seem faintly pathological. They urge a new age of pro-social activism, while kicking the guts out of the fabric of charities and enterprises that could deliver it.
Even when the Big Society advocates think they’re stealing the clothes of the early socialist movement – for example, encouraging nurses to come together as cooperatives or mutuals, to pitch their caring services to newly deregulated health markets – nobody really trusts them. There have been too many slavering statements from thelarge commercial public service providers, looking forward to picking up business as these inexperienced initiatives crash and burn.
As far as the English debate goes, it seems to be that the centre-left is marshalling its arguments and forces quite well. I attended a Westminster committee-room public meeting on the topic last week: and other than the usual mist-wreathed Hogwarts-like experience of walking through the halls of the Mother of Parliaments, the speakers sounded completely tooled-up and ready for the coming few years of battle.
But I’d had a strange experience with the writings of the single Tory represented in that meeting, Jesse Norman MP (author of a book on The Big Society) – an experience which I agonised over in a lunchtime seminar to the Young Foundation last Tuesday. On the Monday, I’d been wearing another of my London hats as a creative consultant – devising strategies to convince large companies that they should adopt a play-based approach to their ad and marketing expenditure. We cited the work of computer-games analyst Sebastian Deterding, for whom the test of a great game experience is that it allows “meaning, mastery and autonomy”.
That evening, preparing for the next day’s presentation by reading Norman’s book, I came upon a passage where he talked about the main motivational drives behind the Big Society, which were – you guessed it – “meaning, mastery and autonomy”. I worried away at this for about an hour, in discussion and slides, with the collected wonks and wonkettes.
So, shock-horreur: does this mean that my play-advocacy, after all these years, is really an example of blithe New Tory incoherence (at best), or mendacity (at worst)? Ehm, no. But what it did sharpen up is my sense of how unscrupulous the Cameronistas are in their attempt to unravel English social infrastructure before the next general election.
It’s very easy to see the Big Society as an attempt to gull the aspirational and “creative” classes into supporting widescale privatisation, by talking their beloved language – specifically, appealing to their desire to achieve personal wellbeing through pro-social activities.
Even if one puts to the side the accurate objections of the centre-left, the Big Society falls down on its own terms, unravelled by the Oscar Wilde one-liner about the problem with socialism: “it will take too many evenings”. One might imagine that there could be a joyful, playful volunteerism to be pursued – if the Conservatives got tough with business and regulated for a shorter working week (say 30 hours), without a directly proportionate wage reduction.
This would provide a rich systemic support to all that volunteering which, of course, has already been going on (one of the sharpest objections to the Big Society is that it’s an opportunistic re-branding of what already exists). But really, can you imagine a party that’s brazen enough to preach democracy in Egypt, while hawking arms to Arab autocracies, taking that kind of stand against squealing employers?
So, an odd few days in Londinium. I regularly meet many good, solid and intelligent people there; but I’m gradually becoming aware that – even before any constitutional upheavals – there is already an inexorable break-up of Britain going on, in terms of basic policy agendas.
Some places are even odder, though. The two headlines that met me at Glasgow Central Station were, on the progressive side, Scottish Labour falling in with everyone else on the end of tuition fees; and on the regressive side, the snarling pointlessness of Old Firm machoism. “I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be/Whaur extremes meet”, Hugh Macdiarmid once wrote. Exhausting, but true.
