Capitalism fails, yet the left is silent – an eerie vacuum

“The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them.”

The words, not of some leftie like me, but of Charles Moore of The Daily Telegraph, Thatcherite to the core. As Newsnight observes, no such words are coming from the left – global capitalism is in crisis, the crisis forecast for it by generations of left-wing intellectuals, yet the left in Britain is virtually silent. This theme was also addressed at length by Julian Coman in the Observer last Sunday: he comment -

“Intellectuals of the right are making withering judgments that Labour has not dared to make for quarter of a century.”

Charles Moore is calling for the Right to redefine itself, intellectually and morally, while Labour, especially that pathetic thing called Scottish Labour, is engage in endless theorising and speculation about the structure of the party, and why they have now lost two Scottish Parliamentary elections.



The Right knows it is threatened by its record and by what its values have produced.

Labour is in denial over its record, and has no values: it stand for nothing, has no vision for society – it is simply the once highly successful electoral machine called New Labour, now rusting in the desert, out of fuel, with bits falling off it at regular intervals. It dare not look back at its failures, and the destruction it has wreaked – the sight is too awful for it to contemplate. It requires an acknowledgment of guilt, contrition, a repudiation of its key architects, Blair, Brown and Mandelson, and of the parasitic creatures that fed from its bloated body for so long – the the trades union officials, the strategists, the political advisers, the spin doctors and sycophantic commentators and media personalities.

Instead, the parasites now cluster around the machine trying to repair it, crying out in frustration that it had worked before, it can work again, if only they can find the replacement parts. They remember their glory days in the sun, the halcyon days before Iraq, before Parliamentary scandals, before their great leader quietly and obscenely enriched himself and departed, and they yearn desperately to relive them.

The Right, in contrast, know exactly who they are – a successful project that has run for centuries in Britain, aimed at enriching themselves by bleeding the ordinary people. Their only concern is that, in a democracy, however constrained by unelected Lords and patronage, there are limits to what the people will sit still for, and the Right are aware that they have over-reached themselves, that the curtain has been pulled aside revealing, not only the ugly face of the British Establishment behind it, but the very nature of the levers being pulled. The incompetence and venality of Labour over 13 years did not result in the great electoral victory for the right in the 2010 general election, but a messy, inconclusive outcome, and an even messier Coalition with the feeble and vacillating LibDems.

Worst of all, to the north of them, the people of Scotland have made a decisive choice in favour of a political party that has a vision, values and clear objectives, and terrifyingly, a party that is immune to the flattery, the patronage, the bribery, the bullying, the intimidation, the misinformation that is the stock in trade of the Right, a party that cares about the people it serves, and which will act solely in their interests – a centre-left Social Democratic party of the kind that has worked quietly and effectively in Scandinavia for generations. And this party has reduced the Tories and the Liberal Democrats to a pathetic, irrelevant shadow of their former selves, and has successfully challenged the power of the Scottish Labour Party and defeated it conclusively.

Charles Moore memorably describes New Labour’s architects as “the people who adopted vulgar Thatcherism, people who didn’t really understand …. adopting a religion that they didn’t really understand.”

He went on to say the caricature of “the capitalists in the top hats and stripey trousers” ripping off the people was now compounded by the fact that they were being paid by the taxpayers.

Charles Moore concluded his piece by saying “What’s really important right now is that the Right should admit how much it has got on the wrong side of this argument, and somehow those who support the free market have become identified with the powerful, and with  a country that feels to be, at this point, both morally and actually, bust …”. The country he refers to is the UK -  but my country, Scotland, is not morally or actually bust, Charles.

Now both old-time religions – Thatcherism and New Labour Thatcherism – have failed to deliver the promised land, and The Rapture will be a long time a’comin’, brothers and sisters ….

Saor Alba!

A preamble to my independence blog to follow, a kind of scene-setting …

I received this communication today from a long-term friend and colleague, an Englishman, living in England, who knows and understands Scotland deeply from a long association with the country, and one who has made a highly significant contribution in a wide range of fields to the United Kingdom and all its component countries over his lifetime.

You should ignore the Westminster politicians - the YES campaign is already under way in England. If your referendum is extended to voters south of the Border, you can be assured of a landslide victory! Also for Wales and for the rapid reunification of Ireland. On the latter, perhaps HM can do a deal this week?

I quote this to underline the point that nationalism, in its true sense, is not simply the objective of Scots, Welsh and Irish - the great country of England and its people are awakening to the fact that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is heading rapidly towards its inevitable dissolution, and that England must become a nation once again.

The true nationalists in these countries are not separatists - although I confess to rejoicing in that term in the recent past, in an ill-considered reaction to pejorative use of the term by unionists - but are deeply concerned that the ancient and modern ties of blood, family, friendship, and  common economic and defence priorities in certain areas are not damaged by the return of national sovereignty to the nation states in these islands. In this, they are no different from the nation states of the European Union, or the Commonwealth, or indeed of any international grouping based on areas of common interest.

The common thread that unites these nationalists is the conviction that the United Kingdom - and the Westminster Parliament as presently constituted - are no longer fit for purpose, and that the present constitutional settlement cannot hold, containing as it does an increasing and disabling series of contradictions, especially as it relates to devolved government. No form of devolution max or independence lite will remedy this structual defect - only national sovereignty will be sufficient.

The UK is also completely out of step with global events, the Zeitgeist, and the new spirit of self-determination that grips the peoples of the world - confused about its international role, devoid of direction or a vision of the kind of society it wants to be, lost in nostalgia about a lost past, one that in significant part never existed, except in the imagination of the South East of England and rapidly diminishing areas of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and there mainly among the privileged and those among the less privileged naturally dependent on their patronage .

The Banks and the FSA's Adventures in Wonderland - UK Establishment smoke and mirrors

The UK Financial Establishment switches on the smoke machine.

FSA: "We won't publish our findings ..." Cries of outrage. "OK we will, then - but only part of them, and not until March ..."

Nobody is to blame, nobody is held accountable, nobody will be prosecuted, nobody can be sued, but "lessons will be learned ..."

Oh, yeah? Until the next time, when they do it all over again. Are these people beyond the law? Are they beyond shame?

The Americans showed no such mercy to their errant bankers - at least some of them got their just deserts. The US still has some remnants of an accountable democracy and a free press, unlike the crumbling and corrupt United Kingdom.

Achtung! - Have I got a Royal Wedding for You!