Economics and the case for Scottish independence

There is, as far as I can see, absolutely nothing whatsoever that can be rescued from the wreckage that is the economic argument for independence. Today the Scotsman repeats the point that given the sheer size of the Royal Bank of Scotland's balance sheet, an independent Scotland simply wouldn't have had the resources to rescue it from collapse in the way the UK government did. What was newsworthy about the reiteration of this nose-bleedingly obvious observation was that it was John Kay, a member of the First Minister's Council of Economic Advisers who did it.

If we dismiss as idiotic the argument that, "but we wouldn't be starting from here", I would have thought there are only three rational responses a Nat could make to this:

1) The RBS should have been nationalised without compensation - a necessity since we know an independent Scotland wouldn't be able to compensate even if it wanted to.

2) The RBS should have been allowed to go to the wall - along with an explanation of why this wouldn't have a) spelled disaster for the Scottish economy, b) sparked a run on the banks everywhere.

3) An independent Scotland would have to go cap in hand to the IMF or something.

Rational but not particularly attractive - although I find myself leaning towards option 1), along with guillotines and stuff. But - and correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not really that familiar with the 'cyber-nat' community - neither the SNP nor their supporters in the blogosphere have addressed themselves to this question.

There are, in my view, two reasons for this. One is that the Nationalists are not interested in economics or economic history, nor have they ever been. Economic arguments are used pick and mix to reinforce a position they hold for other reasons. Because taken collectively they don't cohere and now don't hold any water anyway. I've heard Salmond, for example, complain that the Union is holding Scotland back from membership of the Euro, which was bad, according to him, because it meant mortgage holders were paying a higher rate of interest than they would in the Eurozone. I haven't heard him updating this view in light of recent events - but does it really need pointing out how completely crass and stupid it is to base a constitutional argument on something as ephemeral as short-term interest rates and currency fluctuations?

"We could be like Ireland", isn't anymore an argument that any Nationalist with even the most cursory acquaintance with reality now makes. But my point is, it was never made by anyone with any sense of economic history.

Don't even mention Iceland...

Except to point out that Salmond & Co conveniently forgot about their line on the virtues of being part of the Eurozone - on account of them not being members.

Surely this is enough to make the point? No-one sits and pores through economic data dispassionately and concludes that nationalism is the cause that is to propel them through political life. Economic arguments are mobilsed to support a cause they have made for emotional reasons. I'm wondering why so many unionists allow them to behave as if this was not the case?

The other reason that the SNP have not addressed themselves to this question is that they themselves do not really believe in independence. Or at least the more intelligent ones don't. I appreciate this may seem controversial but I'm increasingly convinced that this is the case. Does Salmond really think Scotland is going to go its own way - take complete responsibility for its own borders, defence, fiscal and monetary policy? It's not going to happen: they know it, we know it. They just don't know that we know it.

Actually, I'm not sure enough of us do know it. This allows them to continue to pretend that they believe it and extract the political advantage this gives them. It might seem perverse to say something in defence of the hapless Wendy Alexander at this juncture but despite the fact that she did it in an incredibly ham-fisted and incoherent way with her "Bring it on" embarrassment, the spirit of what motivated her was correct: I'm unsure of the form it should take but it's about time we started calling the Nationalists' bluff.

Open footnote to Nationalists: No Nat has ever been able to answer the following questions to my satisfaction but here's an open invitation for anyone to have a go:

a) Why should the boundaries of the nation also be those of the state?

b) If a policy is good for working people in Scotland, why not also for people in Newcastle, or Liverpool, or Manchester, or London? Or anywhere else, for that matter?

Dots on the knuckles

An old school friend of mine had dots tattooed on his knuckles. It used to be quite common amongst vaguely criminal elements in Glasgow. This was a cipher for 'APAB' - which stood for 'All Pigs Are Bastards'. Replaced because the polis worked out what this stood for, although it wasn't long before they worked out what the dots meant too. It's heresay but the same friend told me of someone who got his fingers broken for having these. I dare say it wasn't true - or if it was, no doubt he was resisting arrest or something.

So to the G20 and the death of Ian Tomlinson. As the footage shows, he viciously attacked tooled up riot police with his back. Despite this egregious violence on his part, medics could have saved his life were it not for the hail of bottles that obstructed their rescue.

Or maybe it shows something else.

I can't tell you how depressing I find most of the commentary on this issue. Have these people spent most of their lives indoors having tea with mother? This thread is particularly dispiriting. In the eighties, reactionaries used to say, "Go and live in Russia", if you had the temerity to criticise Thatcher's Britain. Fast-forward to today and cut and paste Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea - foreign places, y'know?

Now looky here: all pigs polis are not bastards - they're just like the rest of us, which is to say for the most part complete assholes. Like the cop in the video. How anyone can imagine that what they've seen here is something exceptionally aberrant is beyond me. Nah, the only unusual things here is a) someone died, b) it was caught on camera. Other than that, all you're seeing here is same old, same old - it's what happens when you give people a uniform, some tools and some power. I wouldn't disagree that society requires people to be given a uniform, tools and some power but given the human condition and all its failings, I don't think it's out of place to suggest that this should be kept to a bare minimum. It may be presumptive and over-arching to suggest that human history has taught us as much as this but please remember Ian Tomlinson the next time you mobilise some bullshit prolier-than-thou argument to justify the expansion of police power in what is indeed still a relatively free society.

On the politics of protest

The Flying Rodent has some pertinent comments about those who dismiss the G20 protests on the basis of the sociological profile of the protesters themselves:

"I've seen this wheeze deployed in defence of war, ID databases and antisocial behaviour orders. Crack a gag about the dishonesty of the tabloid press or about immigration and deportation, and within minutes some joker will be along to condemn your revolting elitism in blisteringly self-righteous tones. So it goes for taxation, petrol duty and professional sport - football's fine, but rugby's the preserve of howling Hoorays."

Indeed. While not as offensive as the "no, you're the Nazi" non-technique of winning political arguments, the prolier-than-thou card is used almost as frequently - and is as a consequence almost as boring. It doesn't help that the people who use it almost never qualify as horny-handed sons of toil themselves.

Having said that, along with a number of others, the protests struck me as being rather unfocused and, frankly, to be something of a waste of time. Johann Hari argues here that when the history of this time is written, those who protested will be remembered with more sympathy than those who stayed at home. I don't mean to trivialise either the issues here or the fact that one man appears to have lost his life as a result of his participation in the demonstrations but I'm wondering if history will remember the protesters at all - except as the symptom of a wider phenomenon.

I'm repeating myself here but I don't agree that participation in demonstrations of this nature are examples of a fresh political or civic engagement on the part of our youth; I think it has to do with the opposite. The membership of any collective organisation you care to mention - be it trades unions, political parties, friendly societies, charities, clubs, youth movements, religious organisations - is in decline. Yet demonstrations grow larger every year. Some see it as the growth of a new form of politics where people engage directly with trans-national corporations that have grown beyond the control of nation-states but personally I find it difficult to see it as a form of politics at all since it doesn't for the most part seem to represent either the exercise of any actual political power, nor does it embody the expression of any coherent alternative to the present power structure. Zizek was perhaps a little harsh when he described the present politics of protest as "nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left" but the protests do have a ritualistic feel about them.

All of this got me to thinking: what constitutes an effective political protest? The left is naturally sympathetic to this form of political action because it is understood that it stands within a tradition where people fought for causes that were just - effecting political change by creating a space outwith the conventional political mechanisms from which pressure was exerted on those who stood within. But there's a danger, I think already long succumbed to, of creating a mythology of protest and then imagining oneself standing within it without asking what, exactly, makes a political protest work?

1) It helps if there is one specific and achievable goal - like extending the franchise to working men, as was the cause of the Chartists - or votes for women, which was the cause that motivated the Suffragettes' campaign of direct action.

Now, leaving aside the question of how effective these movements were - there are clear differences between this strand of popular movement and the kind of 'anti-globalisation' protests we've become accustomed to. One is that the reason to stand outside the normal political process with the former is obvious, with the latter less so. I'm not, for example, clear what anarchism has to say about either the credit crunch or environmental degradation. Surely here any critique has to incorporate the lack of government in these areas? And for those who were not anarchists, it was difficult to discern a clear objective or programme of any sort.

2) Even if there is one specific goal, historically it is unclear what role protest has played in achieving success. Where it has been credited with this, it is usually because protest was symptomatic of a wider refusal to co-operate. So, for example, the anti-Poll Tax demonstrations were an expression of a situation where people simply refused to pay a deeply unpopular tax - and, decisively, I would argue - back-benchers and Cabinet ministers were increasingly reluctant to support a Prime Minister who refused to acknowledge her mistake on this matter. It is difficult to see how the form of protest we have seen recently fits into this trend. You could, I suppose, put your money under the mattress but the reality is people will continue to borrow from banks, have their wages paid into banks, pay their bills via direct debit through banks. You could say banks are pretty much essential in the modern age and it might be considered a significant failing of most governments in the OECD that they haven't been able to get this simple fact across.

3) As well as having a specific goal, it helps if the protesters have the ability to cause significant disruption or inconvenience. Fuel protesters can blockade the roads network and workers can deprive the economy of essential products or services. The history of the miners' strike should remind everyone of the limitation of this - how much more when even this isn't available? What does non-participation in Britain's nuclear deterrent look like? In the eighties I marched and then hung around in Kelvingrove park listening to bands for a while. This was to no avail because the government does not require my participation in order to have nuclear weapons.

4) The fact of the matter is that protests of this nature are simply not violent enough. I'm not arguing this from a moral point of view - just making a utilitarian observation. Windows are smashed in RBS to no end whatsoever. It does nothing to make this institution not function as it did before the protests and more generally they did nothing to make the city and its populace less governable. I'm not saying that it would be justified if it had, just that since it obviously didn't, it was completely and utterly pointless.

It should be understood that this has nothing to do with delegitimizing the feelings of anger that people have about the state we're in; it's just that if anger is all it is, without any analysis, programme, ideology, or alternative - it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the demonstrations at the G20 served a therapeutic rather than a political function.

Teacher-speak

One of my pet-hates in this ridiculous job is when other teachers - almost always management - say, "Do you think that's appropriate?" when they actually mean, "I don't approve". Because despite the fact that the latter formulation isn't a question, it is more open to disputation than the former, which pretends to be an appeal to some universally agreed standard, rather than one person's opinion.

Which is why this story made me laugh:

"A PE teacher faces disciplinary action after pictures of her in a range of "completely inappropriate" poses appeared on a modelling website.

In one photograph, Natasha Gray was shown wearing a thong and lying on her front on a bed."

A bit like this...



Ben Slade, the headteacher of the school in question, was not amused. Miffed, even:

""They were completely inappropriate for somebody who is a teacher," he said.

"They were absolutely not pornographic but do you want to see your teacher in that way?""

Um, if you were an adolescent, obviously the answer to the question is, "Ooh, yes please" - which is presumably why they are thought to be "inappropriate". But Mr Slade, inexplicably, seems to think the answer is "probably not". Honestly - if you can't count on teachers to speak plainly, what hope is there for the future of our civilisation - yea, even mankind itself?

Teaching to the test (again - sorry)

Perhaps by the time I've retired and am happily dribbling away in a home for the bewildered in Duntocher or somewhere, eventually the tide will have turned/pendulum will have swung, [delete/insert cliche of choice] on the whole death by asessment culture in modern education. Presently there are signs of glacial movement, like the criticism of SATS from the head of a school in Engerland that actually did rather well in them:

"Lorraine Cullen, head of Hall Meadow Primary School, Kettering, said drilling pupils to pass only achieved short-term success.

It follows high-profile attacks on the existing examinations system which critics claim forces schools to "teach to the test" to maximise their scores."

No doubt people will say no-one's forcing them - and this particular headteacher claims they don't do much of it - but I wish people would understand the bureaucratic inevitability of it; if there are tests, people will teach to them - period. The institutional pressure to do so is almost irresistible. If you don't want a narrowing of the real curriculum, then the amount of formal assessment in schools has to be reduced. It's as simple as that. Perhaps this sort of thing is a sign that the penny's beginning to drop. On the other hand, the Torygraph wouldn't have repeated the opinions of a headteacher whose school performed badly in the SATS, now would it?