Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
The subject of this essay is the Labour Party of which Jeremy Corbyn is leader, and its implications for the left in Scotland.
I'm impressed by Corbyn, despite his total failure to understand the situation in Scotland and his schoolboy errors — perhaps passed to him by someone else — about the SNP's alleged 'privatisations'.
He is, I believe, genuinely a person of the left; genuinely a person of peace, of sharing, of consensus building, of honesty and of egalitarianism. I suspect that he would name Ghandi as one of his inspirations; I think that he would mean it.
Breaking young minds
This morning I listened to a radio programme. Before it was half finished I was screaming in anger and anguish at the radio; by the time it was finished I was sobbing. For the rest of the day I've felt headachy and ill.
The programme was called 'mending young minds'. You don't mend young minds, you break them; and once they're broken it's extremely unlikely that there will be any road back. Of the twenty or so kids who were in the Young People's Unit of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital with me forty-five years ago, I'd be extremely surprised if half a dozen are still alive. Those who are will, like me, have suffered a lifetime of mental illness.
Being mad just isn't fun
It isn't fun for anyone
It isn't fun if you are mad
It isn't fun it it's your dad
If it's your child it's just as bad
There is no fun in being mad.
whoseBBC?
This is the whole of my response to the government's consultation on BBC charter renewal. You can find the consultation, and make your own response, here. **** **** **Q1: How can the BBC’s public purposes be improved so there is more clarity about what the BBC should achieve? **
The BBC is intended to be a public broadcaster and not a state broadcaster, but the actions of successive governments have reversed this and we now have the worst of all worlds: a state propaganda arm paid for by the public.
Bright sun, and a bitter wind
Scotland wakes to a morning of bright sun, and sharp, cold wind. To a morning of elation and of shock. We've won an historic victory: but every great victory hides within it a great tragedy. For many — and not just here in Scotland — much has been lost, and many things which were treasured are put at risk.
We must not overwheen. We must keep the heid. This victory — enormous and overwhelming as it is — is a product of an electoral system we all know is deeply flawed: First Past the Post. In fact, only 51.5% of votes cast in Scotland were for pro-independence parties; under a fair electoral system we would still have won — might, in fact, have won a slightly bigger share of the vote — but we would have won only thirty of Scotland's fifty-nine seats.
The seeds of this victory and this tragedy were planted in 1979, when Labour, urged on by old Etonian Tam Dalyell, stole from Scotland the referendum that we had fairly won. They were nurtured in Sedgefield in 1983, when Fettes and Oxford educated Tony Blair was appointed Labour candidate to represent Durham miners. Blair calculated that, given first past the post, the left had nowhere to go and must stay loyal as he moved his party to the right; and so, he destroyed it. Because the left in Scotland did have somewhere else to go, and we went.
For those in peril on the sea
Migrants, many of them displaced by wars caused by the West's meddling, others driven off their land by climate change, are drowning in the Mediterranean. This isn't a new problem. It also isn't a temporary problem: as climate change makes tropical regions increasingly hostile to human life, more and more people will seek to move to temperate zones, even if capitalism doesn't continue to rape Africa's economy and the West doesn't continue fomenting war in the Middle East.
So stopping people drowning in the Mediterranean is not a quick fix. Population movement out from the tropics is inevitable and will continue, and it will continue to be resisted — as we see with the Zulus in South Africa as much as with UKIP in England.
There are a range of responses we can make. We can kettle people up in Africa and let them cope as best they can, occasionally holding concerts to send some meagre 'aid' over like Lady Bountiful. We can make positive efforts to ameliorate economic conditions in Africa, and to build peace in the Middle East in the hope of slowing the movement. We can work to welcome and integrate migrants into economies across the temperate zone — which, from our point of view, means Scotland, because Scotland is where we are.