The March

Saturday March 26th

Then the tears came: gushing quite unexpectantly and without compromise. I felt myself sob with all the associated chest pains that made me rush to take the tablets. Why?

The march.  I was watching it on TV and I was not there. I saw old yins like myself and so many... so many with their flags and banners and hearts. It is the heart that makes you march...and it is mine that let me down today. Oh, how I wanted to be there! Why?

 First for my old man. It was the lungs in him that gave out after 35 years shovelling coal and anthracite-that was the wicked one. 35 years in the union and secretary of his branch for most of that time. It was the old NUPE... I keep his union card and take it out and wave it at the f-impotent telly. I can’t quite see the screen just now ---the bloody tears are coming again. When was the last time this happened?

But I stand up and raise my fist as I see the Clydebank boys and wumen go by. All that history marches with them.  And I think (and thank) Jimmy Reid.

4.500 police in attendance-they announce. Why? They should be in the march not planning to kettle it.

It is the sense of the pathetic that hurts too. The contradiction of the hopelessness of it all;  yet it is all we (sic) have to march for-the hope of better.

I wrote several letters (some published) to the Herald constantly warning of the serious implications of allowing George Osborne to run our economy.  He is not a Thatcherite...far worse.  She understood the aspiring middleclass as she was one. She was the Daily Mail made flesh. But Osborne is fundamentally different. He is an impassioned extreme market fundamentalist from that Chicago school much beloved by Pinochet. Osborne (not Cameron who is only the PR pitcher) wants to so transform this country in five years that only markets and finance capital will dictate policy, including social policy, health, education, and foreign policy.

Read some of the neo-con or Tea Party blogs out of the States. Their policies find favour with Osborne and a small clique of ultras to whom he listens intently.

The march has to show the (reasonable & rationale) coalition members that they are going in the wrong direction and will lead us into calamitous circumstances.  How the hell can we have sustainable growth while cutting £84 Billion from the economy? Unemployment will creep (perhaps jump) to 3 million shortly, requiring more public expenditure...not less. My old man used to say they just don’t know because they have no experience or understanding of the other life-in his terms the life of working people. With 22 millionaires in the cabinet how can they possibly begin to comprehend why these hundreds of thousands are marching?

In my youth I wrote a cultural column for a political paper called Struggle. Here I am close to 40 years later wanting to put on the red (hair) shirt again.

The heart will not let me. So I will sit and watch the box and hope. And wipe these bloody tears.

Thom Cross

Carluke

 12:30 Saturday of The March

Once again Ed Miliband (accompanied by his ‘consigliere’ Ed Balls) visited Scotland last week to help shore-up Iain Gray's weak leadership. For two-Eds are better than wan Gray apparently. The visit was more than a canvass for the Scottish May elections. The Scottish Labour Party cannot be allowed to offer Scottish people any political option that does not rely on it being thirled to London Labour. Even in what is a new post-British political culture (especially after the Welsh referendum), Scottish Labour still needs the clout of the control and command centre of London Labour even for a Holyrood election. Partly, it is London’s absolute dependency on the Scottish 50 plus seats at Westminster Labour in Scotland has three strikes against it. It is not Scottish enough. It is not Labour enough. It is more of an Italian-like social network than a party Across Scotland, especially in my neck of the woods in Lanarkshire, the desperate poor will, once again, be urged to offer their votes to Labour, as others kneel, in the desperate hope of personal salvation. Yet, the all too familiar ‘have- nots’, will still be macro-governed under the distant disdain of the Westminster Tory ‘haves’. So is Scotland once again living under the democratic deficit of the Thatcher years?It was Willie Shakespeare who asked in his ‘Scotch Play’ the related penetrating question-‘Stands Scotland where it did?’ The answer still haunts the nether regions of my disquiet-‘Alas poor country, almost afraid to know itself’. ‘Knowing oneself’ is deep philosophical profundity, linking ancient Cabalistic theosophy with Jungean psychology and enlightenment epistemology . But WS wrote ’almost afraid’. Is that where we are now in 2011? Are we now still ‘almost afraid’ of knowing ourselves ? Pablo Freire suggests that this societal ‘knowing onself’ is a process inherent in social consciousness. Conscientization is what he called the process that animated an understanding of our relationship with society, its rulers and the ruled. ‘The process of developing a critical awareness of one’s social reality through reflection and action. Action is fundamental because it is the process of changing the reality’. WE are coming to the close of a Scottish Government-the first of its kind- who proclaimed that its vision was /is a PROCESS of national consciousness , leading to national sovereignty for Scotland-changing the reality. This suggests that Alex Salmond and company at least and those who have voted for the SNP (and other pro-Independence parties) are no longer afraid to know themselves a s participants in this other political process. By voting for pro-Independence many have shown that they have developed such a critical awareness , that they are willing to move into active participation towards establishing an autonomous Scotland.This active process ,best described a constitutional decolonization- at least offers an alternative vision, with an accompanying alternative narrative. Or, is Scotland’s future underdevelopment and fear, under the hegemony of Westminster power? Devolution has attempted to alter the power relations within a new culture of post–British politics. By its very enfeebled nature, Holyrood was born to be self-inhibiting, shorn of autonomous history-making powers. The idea of an autonomous Scotland, urgently needs realization through a political programme at Holyrood. It is the only way forward for a social-democrat Scotland. No amount of visits from the Eds of March will change that reality. Holyrood. It is the only way forward for a social-democrat Scotland. No amount of visits from the Eds of March will change that reality.

Thom Cross

64 Market Place

Carluke

Reply

Forward

Libya

Letter to Herald Libya UN Security Council resolution 1703 has given western powers the cover of international legitimacy for military intervention in Libya. The UK and US forces have extensive (some might say serial) historical expertise in not dissimilar circumstances with unfortunate results. It does raise concerns that the UK/US once again appear to want to indulge in the exercise of military power in defence of humanitarian intervention without knowing outcomes. The recent episodes resulted in millions killed in Iraq and over 50,000 deaths in Afghanistan. In the act of preventing a humanitarian disaster in Libya can we be assured that we are not witnessing one being created? Greater UK constitutional parliamentary controls are urgently required. Currently, engaging in armed conflict is a prerogative of the crown and does not require parliamentary approval.The Libya intervention did receive overwhelming Commons support, though once again after the event. On-going democratic accountability and scrutiny will surely be necessary to prevent the 'creep' into post-conflict management that we have seen elsewhere. The other concern must be the fact that the new world powers of the BRIC countries have not supported the UN resolution. Indeed China, Russia and India have raised quite hostile voices. It would appear that the old west might be creating another bi-polar world with the new east which can lead us into parlous consequences. Finally, at the precise juncture when the commercial legitimacy of Atomic energy is being questioned, the 'wests' Libya (read oil) military operations might suggest opportunism.

Scotland – A State of Consciousness? Scotland ought to be more than a virtual nation with a popular cultural consciousness. Scotland is a subsidiary nation within the UK state. It is currently engaged in the process of incremental devolution which ought to lead inevitably to greater sovereign authority.Scotland ought to believe in/ have sufficient cultural confidence, to express national consciousness that includes the need for a nation state. Scotland is a neo-nation with national civic institutions, national cultural characteristics and intellectual sensibilities (ways of feeling) that are and can be shared.Scotland ought to have self -determination as a fundamental principle of natural justice and as a common good. Scotland is intellectually sovereign, yet politically subservient. This contradiction inhibits, represses and indeed prevents an empowering collective sense of national consciousness that should be able to translate into liberal nationalism. It is this journey from national consciousness to a progressive liberal nationalism that is the task of this generation. The ‘ought’ and ‘is’ dichotomy , dialectal in essence, is used and profoundly explained in the first two pages of Questioning Sovereignty by the wonderfully erudite Scot , Sir Neil Mac Cormick whose passing we should remember on the 5th of April. Born in Glasgow on the 27th May 1941, Prof. MacCormick had a quite remarkable academic career in legal philosophy with over 30 years of academic leadership to the law faculty at Edinburgh University and indeed at universities around the world. But he did more. He engaged his immense intellect actively in studying, campaigning for and demanding self-determination for Scotland. As an MEP from 1999 to 2004 he became increasingly involved with European policy particularly with respect to the growing demand for autonomy from latent nations within larger states. (He also looked after Scotland’s whisky, ferries and fisheries while starring as a piper.) His work on re-defining and re-formatting the concept of national sovereignty is vitally important (see his essay A Kind of Nationalism in his book). He argues (with enormous skill) the case for the development of a liberal nationalism- ‘the just state’. This draws a very sharp line in the sand from the chauvinistic, cultural and ethnic nationalism seen elsewhere. He also worked assiduously in redefining sovereignty within the wider pan-European political commonwealth in which sovereignty might be expressed within political arrangements beyond the boundaries of the traditional nation-state. His defining nationalist principle is ‘ the members of a nation are as such in principle entitled to effective organs of political self-government within the world order of sovereign or post-sovereign states.’He was profoundly influenced by Yael Tamir whose book Liberal Nationalism impressed him greatly. In particular a politics of national belonging, comprising societies of individuals with a shared consciousness, which Tamir calls ‘contextual individuals’. It is as ‘contextual individuals’ that conscientization takes place as we can see and feel in contemporary Scotland. Mac Cormick should be remembered again on his birthday (May27th) and his work celebrated by being made known. But a greater tribute to the great man would see a devolved assembly in Edinburgh after May 5th with a mandate to hasten the process towards a liberal national sovereignty.