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THE DROUTH
WINTER 2012 / 2013 ISSUE 44
WINTER 2012 / 2013 ISSUE 44
THE DROUTH
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Andrew Tickell
The Radical Radisson
“What do we want?” A waste management system organised along Basque lines. “When do we want it?” In the medium term, after a referendum, elaborate constitutional wrangling, and a leftinflected victory in the Scottish Parliament’s first election after independence. These are not, perhaps, slogans to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood, but in some ways, the left-wing Basque nationalist’s contribution, dwelling on how political autonomy had been used in quotidian, practical ways in the devolved Basque country, captured something important about the inaugural Radical Independence Conference, held in Glasgow late this November.
The Radisson Blu hotel in Glasgow city centre is not, perhaps, the most obvious spot from which to begin a radical revolution in Scotland. Heaven knows what all of the black-heeled suits clipping past the throng of left-green-socialist-anarchistfeminist delegates made of their temporary colodgers in that afternoon. Although the Radisson’s guests may have retired on Friday night through the handsome, glassy, impersonal space, come sun up on the morning of the 24th of November, the swank glass atrium was a hubbub of folk pressing in with a familiar air of anxiety and expectation. Above them, the Conference legend – “Another Scotland is Possible” – was stretched, a banner in conscious echo, perhaps, of the familiar anticapitalist slogan, than “Another World is Possible”, that has been emblazoned across countless demonstrations in rather less convivial settings. More elementary human appetites were suggested by the hotel’s squat Christmas tree, which was pleasingly garlanded over with spangly red and silver – Tunnocks teacakes baubles – which made one wonder if you were entering an unlikely Festive fantasy entertained by the First Minister, whose appetite for Mr Tunnocks’ products is reportedly insatiate. You could only be in Scotland.
The Conference’s explicit self-conception is a “movement of movements”, of various distinct strands pulled together, and this was clearly reflected in the initial chaotic sociability. Some folk tarried companionably outside for a fortifying fag. Other companionless characters affected an insouciant interest in the many stalls stuffing the antechamber – from CND, to the Scottish Socialist Party, to an outpost of Yes Scotland itself, dispensing slick paraphernalia not saying a great deal. Trade Unionists for Independence marry the red flag with the saltire, while others hawked pamphlets of critical theory and radical tomes, as other folk seized the opportunity to dispense times and dates for upcoming protests and demonstrations. Many more quickly formed familiar little huddles of old acquaintances reunited by the thronging crowd, as each of us was lanyarded a “delegate” and corralled into the yawning conference chamber, for the opening plenary session. Squint about the capacious hall, and you find a marvellously mottled, interstitched clanjamfrey of people, and by no means easy to read, aesthetically. Knots of middle aged women in smart, boxy jackets in the spectrum of primary colours bustled between workshops. Hipster-looking souls, with a modish close-honed hair with a topfroth, or the slurp of a quiff, sloped between leftie stalls on grasshopper legs, narrowing tenuously in calf-clenching jeans. Dowdier boiled leather boys in thickening middle age went jowl by cheek with hazardous hippy-nests of hair perched on top of boney, gangled teens in torn t-shirts. Spry old customers in tie, cardigan and tweedy flat cap were stewarded about by bright young volunteers, both of whom enthusiastically applauded calls for the collective ownership of Scottish renewable energy, vigorous denunciations of the Westminster coalition government’s programme of welfare reforms, and the excision of trident nuclear weapons from the Clyde.
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Conventional, anonymous mackintoshes and woollens muddled with checked keffiyeh, and slightly primmer-looking sorts in suit-jackets, worn open-necked in deference to the general informality of the occasion. From fronds of pink hair to heads polished bald, the hall sprouted blonde, brown, red and black and white; from an isolated, knitted, afro-supported capsicum in bright wool, to home-dyed purple mops, cut horizontal across the forehead. I even thought I caught the ghostly wisp of a mullet in the middle distance. None of these elements predominated. The nine-hundred strong crowd, each laying out a tenner to attend, might simply have stepped in randomly from off the streets of Glasgow, with its thoughtless fusion of the old and young, the trendy and the dowdy, the striking and the unremarkable.
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THE DROUTH
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and actually persuading your fellow countrymen and women to embrace the constitutional reforms you are proposing is – to be generous – not exactly obvious. If, as Robin McAlpine argued in his summative speech, this conference represented “the Scottish left coming out of its ghetto”, the next stage of the argument – convincing other folk to join your campaign, and share your convictions – remains work very much yet to be undertaken.
this score, incorporating speakers from the French Front Gauche, and the Greek Syriza, who had very little to say about struggles for self-determination, but whose speeches were a wealth of opportunities to play “neo-liberal” bingo, with an abundance of left-wing nostrums and familiar anathemas against European capitalist states, which rooted the conference’s sense of political self-identity in terms of global and European political struggles – but critically, offering Scottish national solutions.
Practically speaking, the Conference was formed of a tightly organised day of three plenary sessions, and an overabundance of workshops on everything from gender, to culture, from ‘civic Scotland’ to the green economy, the set-up itself was nevertheless conventional. A series of outward-facing panels dominated, while the crowd – the audience, really – stared mutely back, their interventions limited to slapping their paws together to express approval for a point made by this speaker, or that. This, incidentally, provoked an ongoing, low-level rhubarbing from delegates throughout the afternoon, unhappy about the ‘top-down’ political assumptions inscribed in the structure of speakers and spoken to, which do not neatly marry with the conceptions of a participative, democratic process which the Conference hoped to advance. In fairness, however, here the organisers proved a victim of their own success, and the formidable scope of the throng of interested lefties which they managed to assemble. That said, such anxieties also speak to a generally unarticulated anxiety about the whole enterprise. What, precisely, is the Radical Independence Conference for? What is to be done with this impressive assembly of people? Is it simply a declaratory forum for folk of like mind to articulate their dissatisfaction with the SNP’s “safety first” approach to advocating for Scottish independence, or a more practically-minded gathering, keen to identify ways in which those attending might contribute, and contribute practically, to delivering a Yes vote in Autumn 2014? Is their primary aim to elaborate the pro-independence side of the debate, or to provide a locus around which to organise and actively campaign, across the country? Explicitly, the Conference aims to foster “a campaign that will strive to ensure a radical vision of a new Scotland under independence is heard loud and clear in the referendum debate”, which seems to favour the declaratory over the practical ends which the folk assembled might bend to achieve.
This meeting of more grizzled and tyro strands of the Scottish left found technological expression in the war between old-fashioned fliers, etched simply with socialist stars and CND symbols, vying with the constant snap and crackle of iPhones and pads, and the brief flashes and fading of light as frames collapsed and expanded, and the constant sentinel presence of official cameras, sooking in speeches and bagging reactions.
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Certainly, a declaratory model predominated on the day, and the conference stable was full of left hobbyhorses in contemporary colours. Several delegates brought their own. “Independence to stop Iain Duncan Smith’s reform to the disability living allowance”. “Independence to reverse Mike Russell’s cuts to the further education budgets of Scotland’s colleges”. “Independence to reform the Stasi-mentality of Dundee City Council”. “Independence to eliminate the injustice of pre-pay electricity meters”. “Independence to increase the conviction rates for rape”. None of which is to imply that these aren’t urgent or interesting topics – but the connection between these diffuse personal traumas and frustrations,
Of course, you heard a great deal about some larger-ticket items as well – independence to eliminate nuclear weapons and British military adventures abroad, independence to roll back anti-trade union laws, independence to resist the squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching hand of austerity – but it was the principles of public ownership, generous provision of public welfare, and “justice close to home”, which generated the most spontaneous applause, not the naked proposition of a sovereign Scottish state. There was little to no discussion, for example, about how these outcomes are be to achieved, and independence delivered. As a consequence, it was curiously easy to envisage a very similar anti-capitalist, anti-Nato, anti-trident gathering in England, with only the legerdemain of replacing the motto about another Scotland, with another Britain. The international plenary session was telling on
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As is often the case, what is taken for granted and unquestioned is often more interesting than the noisy articulations which dominate. What is taken as axiomatic? While the Radical Independence Conference was not primarily a didactic or discursive enterprise, and I doubt many folk were there with a view to informing undecided attitudes on the national question, it certainly reflected important developments in the journey of a very large section of the Scottish left, in embracing independence. In politics, it matters what you are fatalistic about. The conservative is classically fatalistic about the human character. He sees a crooked-growing shrub, precariously rooted, new buds popping from a stem of greater antiquity, which requires cautious cultivation. Oftentimes, he is fatalistic about the capacities of directed human ingenuity to solve intractable problems. The political optimist is fatalistic about that fatalism. And so on. What was interesting, however, about the discourse emerging from the Conference was another of its unarticulated, uniting features: absolute fatalism about the political plasticity of the British state. This is an analysis familiar even in more politically centrist analysis, but it was striking to see it expansively rearticulated here, in the internationalist nationalism of the Green and socialist-inflected left. The Deputy First Minister and SNP MSP, Nicola Sturgeon, recently suggested that while devolution was “an attempt to renew the UK state”, “the UK’s ability to re-invent itself is spent”. Those with longer memories will hear distant echoes of Tom Nairn, who was harping on just this string forty years ago,
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in The Break Up of Britain, but the conference seems persuasive evidence that the notion has arguably matured and generalised. Fate need not be taken to be immutable, of course. Of course the UK could, potentially, maybe, theoretically reconfigure itself radically, but pessimism about a broader a left strategy within the United Kingdom, and what, if any practical vehicle it might have, is an absolutely essential postulate of Conference. Of course there will be a few folk who see this practical devotion to socialism in one country, as abandoning internationalism for the sake of some tiny, sectional advance in the struggle in a country in the north western corner of Atlantic periphery, who would encourage us to haul up another red flag, gargle the first few bars of the Internationale, brothers and sisters, let’s turn Britain scarlet. You struggle, however, to find many folk persuaded by that. Indeed, if November’s conference is anything to go by, the organised Left in Scottish politics has very substantially made up its mind. Independence it is. Which suggests a couple of pertinent questions, which are easy to overlook, given the contemporary prevalence of left nationalism. At what point did the Scottish left collectively decide that Scottish independence was the answer to the political struggles which they are invested in, and why do these left-wing internationalists, anxious in many cases carefully to qualify the nationalist thinking underpinning their convictions, believe that a practical nationalism in Scotland is the only realistic means to serve these broader ends? At what point did campaigning for socialism in this one country become their preferred strategy?
WINTER 2012 / 2013 ISSUE 44
THE DROUTH
For the Conference, these shifts were, for the main, taken to be axiomatic. In one sense this theoretical economy facilitated discussion. It takes for granted what may reasonably be taken for granted at a gathering devoted to a left-wing analysis of and agitation for Scottish independence. It is telling however, how difficult it is to envisage this gathering’s shadow. A Radical Unionist Conference, addressed by Alistair Darling and perhaps straplined with the enthusiastic motto, “Another Britain is possible”.
the sort of canny directed efforts folk made on his behalf. Trying to convince an ex-marine to vote Democrat? Have a retired gunnery sergeant to call him up, and make the case for the President.
What effect, if any, might the gathering have on the fate of the campaign? That rather depends on whether the gathering fully embraces its expressive or practical goals. Overall, however, the emergence of an organised campaign of left activist seems to be a promising development for those who support Scottish independence. Yes, the Yes campaign must carry the country nationally, and yes, its triumph or disaster will be measured in nationwide terms in the autumn days of 2014. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the campaign is to capture the minds of one Scotland, one audience, one public. Of course, choices must be made about national messages, and in this respect, one critical detail remains unclear. Will Yes Scotland be a locus of practical effort, a coordinating outfit with branches across Scotland, maintaining lists of activists, offices in the field, maps of the districts covered, and how they canvass, and all the usual paraphilia of organised, well-resources political campaigning? Alternatively, will its efforts be focussed on the Message, the argument, the prospectus for independence, with all of the ideological hazards and room for dissent that that entails? It seems to me essential that the campaign focus on the first of these potential activities, building up a fearsome ground campaign of organised labour, chapping doors, meeting people, making the case household by household. The folk I met at the Radical Independence Conference can surely work productively within that framework. There is a latent, left-inflected Scotland which the Conferences activists may productively address. There are folk they can persuade. While there are good reasons to be sceptical of much of the esoteric wisdom promoted by the gurus of social media, it would be churlish to ignore the lessons which might be taken from political campaigns elsewhere, trying to build a majority within a binary political system, faced with a choice very similar to the a or b deliberation, Scots will be called upon to undertake in 2014. After the 2012 US Presidential election, the press has been full of tales of Obama’s ground campaign, and
This targeted sort of approach is creative, but also profoundly philosophically tricky. It is one thing to issue vague nostrums about a campaign for independence being broadly-based, and inclusive in scope. It is quite another fully to pursue the logic of that inclusivity and breadth to its fullest extent, and recognise that our national campaign must address different Scotlands, which will be convinced by different – incompatible – reasons, to support independence. Being Janus-faced can be no vice. We need wee fierce socialist wifies, the floppy and the ecologically sensitive. We also need to dispatch smoother, besuited advocates to urban bourgeoisie, than we would employ to persuade the rural labourer. Each needs to be, in general terms, to make their case to the Scotlands they know and understand, to find the right accent and ideas to speak to the experiences and lives of disillusioned liberal-voting Highland farmers, to the more conservative pastoralists which edge the Scottish Borders in, in blue. We need to find arguments which will tell with urbanites from Dundee and Glasgow, and where necessary, different stories to tell to small town Scotland, betwixt and between a civic world of pavements and illuminations, and the gaunter moors and less sociable wilds. Whatever its electoral might, radical Scotland is a resource which nationalists cannot afford to ignore. If November’s conference is anything to go by, we’ll find innumerable powerful allies on our left flank, to make the case.
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