As the networks of corporate influence have incessantly increased in Scotland, the blurring and merger of commercial and political interests have followed. A network of civil servants, lobbyists, think tanks, political groups and the media are now taking the lead in setting the public agenda. In private. This article is from the new issue of Scottish Left Review which is online now.
Spanish Francoists and English Tories are using economic suffering to impose a right-wing populist agenda and if it goes ahead in Britain it will transform the country into a nasty little place. What is worrying is that there is virtually no sign of any strategy that might actually save Britain from this fate.
The apprenticeship-driven recovery strategy was a great strategy for politicians and training providers. But why are they now surprised that a supply-side-only economic measure has failed to create any actual jobs? They never do…
Read More »I’m an apprentice movie star so I’ll be a real movie star next week, right?
Now seems like a good time to point out that four years on and promises that if we leave those who caused the financial crisis to fix it unimpeded all will be well seem hollow. So if they haven’t cleaned up their mess, it is time they were properly blamed for it. We need a reparations movement for Europe.
In the world in 2012 only democratic nation states have the capacity to challenge global financial power. Which means that we will eventual have to choose between the two nationalisms available to us (Scottish and British) on the basis of a careful assessment on whether they are different or not.
Read More »If there is no alternative, we will soon have to choose one nationalism or the other
The Jubilee shows that Scotland and England seem to have a very different social contract with the state, with England’s deference contrasting with a more fundamental social democracy in Scotland. The Jubilee is over but the social question remains. How will the unionist-left resolve this?
It’s time to stop taking at face-value the idea that an independent Scotland would have ‘no option’ but to accept Sterling or the Euro as a currency. The independence debate could be quite different if supporters of independence would be less afraid of talking about the possibility.
The media always believes that what concerns it must concern us all. Twice recently it got this badly wrong – Iraq and the banking crisis where it simply failed to understand what was happening in the proportion of the world not made out of press releases. The navel-gazing over NATO and its difficulty in understand the Yes campaign launch suggest it may be starting to get things wrong again.
Both Creative Scotland’s decision to further marketise the arts in Scotland and Michael Moore’s assumption that lack of neoliberal support for the Yes campaign is a weakness show how much the political mind remains captured. You don’t have to support the Yes campaign to take heart in an alternative voice.
Read More »Creative Scotland and Moore shows how deep is the ‘IMF of the Mind’
Some people have argued that the NATO row is obscure and pointless. But this policy will potentially define Scotland’s future and define what kind of political party the SNP is. These things matter.