Arrogant Tosser (2)
Seumas Milne is shameless hypocrite if you ask me, because the Guardian's privately educated comment editor urged Scottish voters to reject independence in the recent referendum, yet now tries to associate himself with the success of Yes campaign as evidence that the people are desperate for his brand of old-fashioned, left wing socialism.
Now I had a vote in the referendum and I completely ignored Seumas and his dumb advice to cast a Yes vote because the big issue was not so much left or right wing politics, but the need for greater accountability and democracy.
Which Seumas is none too keen on if you ask me, Seumas being a big fan of the old Soviet Union (pre Mikhail Gorbachev) and discredited trade union bosses like Arthur Scargill who allowed his political views to get in the way of doing what was best for NUM members.
But the reason Seumas is such a shameless hypocrite is that in a recent piece for The Guardian on Scottish independence, Seumas sneered at Alex Salmond and the SNP for being in the pocket of big business.
Yet here Seumas is wrapping himself in the flag of the Yes campaign and blaming big business for frightening Scotland into voting No!
Proof positive that when it comes to politics, at least, Seumas really is an arrogant tosser.
Austerity has failed, and it isn’t only Labour’s core voters who want change
After Scotland, the need for Ed Miliband to make the case for radical reform couldn’t be clearer
By Seumas Milne - The Guardian
'In the real-world Labour conference, Ed Miliband lurched nowhere. He was a picture of studied caution.' Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
If you’re in a fix, create a diversion. That will be the watchword of David Cameron’s Tories next week. George Osborne may have presided over the weakest recovery on record. He may have spectacularly missed his fiscal targets. The deficit may be growing again. Real wages may have fallen for the longest period since the 1870s. But Ed Miliband will certainly be the man in the frame at their Birmingham jamboree.
The Labour leader even forgot to mention the deficit in his conference speech, the Conservatives will hoot – tax cuts at the ready – so Labour can’t be trusted with the nation’s finances. And fresh from bringing Britain to the brink of breakup, Cameron will play the English nationalist card as his winning ace. Miliband isn’t quite one of us, the dog whistle will have it.
The media has been playing warm-up act all week. Labour has “lurched to the left”, the Tory press complained, yet again. Miliband is pursuing a “core vote” strategy. He must return to the “centre ground”. The Telegraph even reckoned that £2m houses – which Miliband plans to tax to pay for more doctors, nurses and home care workers – can be “relatively modest”.
In the real-world Labour conference, Labour’s leader lurched nowhere. He was a picture of studied caution. Sure, there were plenty of commitments welcome to most people across Britain, from a boost to the minimum wage and restoring the 50% top tax rate to scrapping the bedroom tax and clamping down on zero-hours contracts. And Miliband’s attack on the grip of the “privileged few” would certainly never have been uttered by Tony Blair in his New Labour pomp.
But there was little evidence of the determination to break with the past seen in his earlier Labour conferences, when Miliband denounced predatory capitalism and promised an energy price freeze and compulsory purchase of unused developers’ land banks. Instead, Ed Balls’s pledges of undying austerity and 1990s-style New Labour policy fixes set the tone. Eight months before the general election, the “shrink the offer” merchants are back in the ascendant.
The timing of that shift, though, could hardly be more jarring. Last week nearly half the Scottish people voted for independence in an insurgent campaign fuelled by rejection of austerity, privatisation, illegal wars and the grip of the Westminster elites. Working class and Labour voters went for yes in droves.
Those same sentiments are of course present among traditional Labour voters across Britain. The question is: who will represent them? In England, unless championed by Labour, they can just as easily be harnessed by Ukip – or used to justify a Tory constitutional sleight of hand that could derail a Labour government and leave Liverpool and Newcastle at the mercy of a Farageist southern suburbia.
If any New Labour nostalgic still had the idea that its core vote had nowhere else to go, Scotland has surely demolished it for good. The platform Miliband set out in Manchester this week could only be regarded as a core vote strategy from a particularly sheltered metropolitan vantage point that refuses to face up to how most of the population actually live and think.
How is taxing hedge funds, mansions and tobacco giants to protect the NHS, used by the vast majority, a core vote policy exactly? Or reducing taxes on small businesses and strengthening the rights of the self-employed?
But after losing 4 million working-class votes between 1997 and 2010, it would be a suicidal Labour leadership that didn’t learn the lessons. Without its core vote, at the heart of an alliance of working-class and middle-class voters, Labour can’t win.
But the lesson drawn by Douglas Alexander, Labour’s election strategist, from the political establishment’s near-death experience north of the border is not so much to woo working-class voters but to appease the kind of corporate giants that frightened Scots into the no camp with threats of closures and job losses.
Along with Ed Balls and Chuka Umunna, Alexander has formed a kind of corporate praetorian guard around Miliband to pacify the City and CBI and rein in the Labour leader’s instincts for building a new economic model in a post-crash world.
The shadow chancellor, who can’t be doing with new models, went a stage further this week. Not only did he promise five more years of austerity, he pledged to cut child benefit in real terms for another year and dropped any commitment to extra capital investment.
Activists reported that the child benefit announcement, designed to demonstrate fiscal rectitude, went down especially badly on the doorstep in the Heywood and Middleton byelection campaign – where Ukip is looking like a potentially serious challenger to Labour next month.
Labour has still left itself room for more spending and borrowing than Osborne has lined up. But not only do Balls’s austerity gestures fail to appease Labour’s opponents while alienating its natural supporters still further. They also ignore the disastrous record of austerity in Britain and across Europe, even on its own terms. Osborne’s four-year squeeze delivered three years of recession and stagnation, a forecast deficit of £75bn instead of a balanced budget and the longest fall in living standards since the 19th century.
Unsustainable growth has only been achieved by pumping up housing credit, while stagnating private investment and austerity have generated a productivity crisis and an epidemic of low-paid, insecure jobs. Only the public sector can now fill that gap, taxing the corporate cash mountain and using publicly owned banks to deliver the investment the private sector won’t make.
But that would mean Miliband taking his still fragile plans for new forms of intervention and public banking further, instead of reverting to business as usual. Without radical economic reform, as François Hollande’s French socialist government has shown, austerity can only pave the way to political failure.
For all the chorus of sceptics and Miliband’s dire personal polling, Labour could clearly still be propelled into government next year on the back of falling living standards and revulsion at Cameron’s Tories. Which only makes it more urgent that the Labour leader brings his corporate guard to heel – and offers his party’s lost supporters change on the scale they desperately need.
As I read Seumas Milne's woeful contribution to the independence debate I couldn't resist a wry smile as I came to the view that his expensive private education at Winchester College was a terrible waste of money.
Because what his little essay boils down to is the ridiculous conclusion that Scotland doesn't deserve to be independent because it's not nearly 'socialist' enough for Seumas - that the political culture north of the border is really no different to that in England and Wales.
Which is completely daft because there's no doubt that the Scottish Parliament has changed Scotland for the better by being much more representative, democratic and accountable than the Westminster Parliament which has managed to drive the reputation of politics (socialist or otherwise) into the ground.
The Scottish Parliament has actually managed to energise politics in a way that Seumas can imagine only in his dreams because the referendum is about asking the people what they think and what they want - as opposed to the Milne version of democracy which is that citizens should get what Seumas believes is good for them.
So this former communist who supports Russian separatists and self-determination in the east of Ukraine at the point of a gun isn't prepared to to stand up for home rule and independence in Scotland because it doesn't suit his narrow, hidebound and left wing political agenda.
What an arrogant tosser.
Salmond’s Scotland won’t be an escape from Tory Britain
Scots voting yes for social justice won’t get it from a party signed up to corporate tax cuts as the recipe for independence
By Seumas Milne - The Guardian
The reality is that the left and Labour movement in Scotland, decimated by decades of deindustrialisation and defeats, are currently too weak to shape a new Scottish state. Instead, a victorious SNP and its business friends would be likely to do that – in a neoliberal world where small states are at the mercy of corporate power without an exceptionally determined political leadership.
That weakness is mirrored south of the border, of course. Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said at the weekend that workers on both sides of the border had “more in common with each other than Edinburgh bankers or English aristocrats”. It’s the decline of such class politics that has fuelled the rise of nationalism in Scotland as a kind of anti-establishment proxy.
By failing to make a clearer break with New Labour and embracing austerity lite, Ed Miliband has left many Scottish voters without the sense of a real alternative. But however inspiring the yes campaign and whatever other reasons there might be to back independence, Salmond’s Scotland clearly doesn’t offer an escape hatch from neoliberal Britain. In fact it looks like more of the same – but under the saltire.
If you’re in a fix, create a diversion. That will be the watchword of David Cameron’s Tories next week. George Osborne may have presided over the weakest recovery on record. He may have spectacularly missed his fiscal targets. The deficit may be growing again. Real wages may have fallen for the longest period since the 1870s. But Ed Miliband will certainly be the man in the frame at their Birmingham jamboree.
The Labour leader even forgot to mention the deficit in his conference speech, the Conservatives will hoot – tax cuts at the ready – so Labour can’t be trusted with the nation’s finances. And fresh from bringing Britain to the brink of breakup, Cameron will play the English nationalist card as his winning ace. Miliband isn’t quite one of us, the dog whistle will have it.
The media has been playing warm-up act all week. Labour has “lurched to the left”, the Tory press complained, yet again. Miliband is pursuing a “core vote” strategy. He must return to the “centre ground”. The Telegraph even reckoned that £2m houses – which Miliband plans to tax to pay for more doctors, nurses and home care workers – can be “relatively modest”.
In the real-world Labour conference, Labour’s leader lurched nowhere. He was a picture of studied caution. Sure, there were plenty of commitments welcome to most people across Britain, from a boost to the minimum wage and restoring the 50% top tax rate to scrapping the bedroom tax and clamping down on zero-hours contracts. And Miliband’s attack on the grip of the “privileged few” would certainly never have been uttered by Tony Blair in his New Labour pomp.
But there was little evidence of the determination to break with the past seen in his earlier Labour conferences, when Miliband denounced predatory capitalism and promised an energy price freeze and compulsory purchase of unused developers’ land banks. Instead, Ed Balls’s pledges of undying austerity and 1990s-style New Labour policy fixes set the tone. Eight months before the general election, the “shrink the offer” merchants are back in the ascendant.
The timing of that shift, though, could hardly be more jarring. Last week nearly half the Scottish people voted for independence in an insurgent campaign fuelled by rejection of austerity, privatisation, illegal wars and the grip of the Westminster elites. Working class and Labour voters went for yes in droves.
Those same sentiments are of course present among traditional Labour voters across Britain. The question is: who will represent them? In England, unless championed by Labour, they can just as easily be harnessed by Ukip – or used to justify a Tory constitutional sleight of hand that could derail a Labour government and leave Liverpool and Newcastle at the mercy of a Farageist southern suburbia.
If any New Labour nostalgic still had the idea that its core vote had nowhere else to go, Scotland has surely demolished it for good. The platform Miliband set out in Manchester this week could only be regarded as a core vote strategy from a particularly sheltered metropolitan vantage point that refuses to face up to how most of the population actually live and think.
How is taxing hedge funds, mansions and tobacco giants to protect the NHS, used by the vast majority, a core vote policy exactly? Or reducing taxes on small businesses and strengthening the rights of the self-employed?
But after losing 4 million working-class votes between 1997 and 2010, it would be a suicidal Labour leadership that didn’t learn the lessons. Without its core vote, at the heart of an alliance of working-class and middle-class voters, Labour can’t win.
But the lesson drawn by Douglas Alexander, Labour’s election strategist, from the political establishment’s near-death experience north of the border is not so much to woo working-class voters but to appease the kind of corporate giants that frightened Scots into the no camp with threats of closures and job losses.
Along with Ed Balls and Chuka Umunna, Alexander has formed a kind of corporate praetorian guard around Miliband to pacify the City and CBI and rein in the Labour leader’s instincts for building a new economic model in a post-crash world.
The shadow chancellor, who can’t be doing with new models, went a stage further this week. Not only did he promise five more years of austerity, he pledged to cut child benefit in real terms for another year and dropped any commitment to extra capital investment.
Activists reported that the child benefit announcement, designed to demonstrate fiscal rectitude, went down especially badly on the doorstep in the Heywood and Middleton byelection campaign – where Ukip is looking like a potentially serious challenger to Labour next month.
Labour has still left itself room for more spending and borrowing than Osborne has lined up. But not only do Balls’s austerity gestures fail to appease Labour’s opponents while alienating its natural supporters still further. They also ignore the disastrous record of austerity in Britain and across Europe, even on its own terms. Osborne’s four-year squeeze delivered three years of recession and stagnation, a forecast deficit of £75bn instead of a balanced budget and the longest fall in living standards since the 19th century.
Unsustainable growth has only been achieved by pumping up housing credit, while stagnating private investment and austerity have generated a productivity crisis and an epidemic of low-paid, insecure jobs. Only the public sector can now fill that gap, taxing the corporate cash mountain and using publicly owned banks to deliver the investment the private sector won’t make.
But that would mean Miliband taking his still fragile plans for new forms of intervention and public banking further, instead of reverting to business as usual. Without radical economic reform, as François Hollande’s French socialist government has shown, austerity can only pave the way to political failure.
For all the chorus of sceptics and Miliband’s dire personal polling, Labour could clearly still be propelled into government next year on the back of falling living standards and revulsion at Cameron’s Tories. Which only makes it more urgent that the Labour leader brings his corporate guard to heel – and offers his party’s lost supporters change on the scale they desperately need.
Arrogant Tosser (12 September 2014)
As I read Seumas Milne's woeful contribution to the independence debate I couldn't resist a wry smile as I came to the view that his expensive private education at Winchester College was a terrible waste of money.
Because what his little essay boils down to is the ridiculous conclusion that Scotland doesn't deserve to be independent because it's not nearly 'socialist' enough for Seumas - that the political culture north of the border is really no different to that in England and Wales.
Which is completely daft because there's no doubt that the Scottish Parliament has changed Scotland for the better by being much more representative, democratic and accountable than the Westminster Parliament which has managed to drive the reputation of politics (socialist or otherwise) into the ground.
The Scottish Parliament has actually managed to energise politics in a way that Seumas can imagine only in his dreams because the referendum is about asking the people what they think and what they want - as opposed to the Milne version of democracy which is that citizens should get what Seumas believes is good for them.
So this former communist who supports Russian separatists and self-determination in the east of Ukraine at the point of a gun isn't prepared to to stand up for home rule and independence in Scotland because it doesn't suit his narrow, hidebound and left wing political agenda.
What an arrogant tosser.
Salmond’s Scotland won’t be an escape from Tory Britain
Scots voting yes for social justice won’t get it from a party signed up to corporate tax cuts as the recipe for independence
By Seumas Milne - The Guardian
Scotland's first minister Alex Salmond and deputy first minister Nicola Sturgeon campaigning in Edinburgh yesterday. Photograph: Paul Hackett/Reuters
It’s not hard to work out why next week’s referendum on Scottish independence is on a knife edge, and the markets in meltdown. If the Westminster elite had been secretly working for a yes vote, they could hardly have done a better job of it. Issuing threats of dire ruin, the no camp yoked together Labour, Liberal Democrats and Tories in a made-to-measure demonstration of exactly the London establishment stitch-up the nationalist-led campaign has thrived on.
Trading on fear and relentless negativity, the Better Together campaign has left the field open to independence campaigners to offer hope of real change and empowerment. By refusing to include a halfway house “devo max” question on the ballot paper, they denied Scots the option most wanted in favour of a gamble that has already backfired.
Now in a state of advanced panic, they’ve cobbled together more devolved powers and sent David Cameron to Edinburgh to plead for the union: the embodiment of Tory rule without a mandate that is the main reason many yes voters will opt for independence. The prospect of the Protestant Orange Order marching for the union and the chance of a supportive visit from Ukip’s Nigel Farage might just about clinch it for Alex Salmond.
On the other side, the yes campaign is a ferment of energy and grassroots campaigning. With the Scottish National party having long since moved on from its Tartan Tory days to a stance that better fits Scotland’s left-leaning centre of gravity, independence has also attracted a significant section of the Scottish left – on a scale not seen since John Maclean, Lenin’s consul in Glasgow, campaigned for a Scottish socialist republic after the first world war.
After 35 years in which Thatcherite destruction of Scotland’s industrial and social fabric by governments Scots never voted for was followed by New Labour’s “light-touch regulation” and illegal wars, getting on for half the country has had enough and sees the exit as the best way of getting something better. Add in a dose of Caledonian-style anti-politics, and working class voters have been jumping ship in droves.
If Scotland votes yes next week, the sky won’t fall in of course, whatever the costs. Scotland may not have been an oppressed nation in the Irish mould, but it has the right to self-determination and every capacity to make it as an independent state.
Coming from a culturally nationalist Scottish background with a Gaelic speaking father, I don’t have any difficulty understanding the appeal of independence, let alone the demands for social justice and democratic accountability that are swelling support for it.
The message that if you vote yes you’ll never get another Tory government could hardly be a more powerful one in a country that polled 42% for Labour and less than 17% Conservative in 2010 and ended up with Cameron as prime minister all the same.
But the idea that a yes vote would be a short cut to a progressive future in a Scandinavian-style social democracy is another matter. It’s not just that Scottish voters aren’t being offered genuine independence at all. Instead, the state cooked up by the SNP is one signed up in advance to the monarchy, Nato, the EU and a currency controlled from London.
Sure, Whitehall and Brussels will negotiate terms if it comes to it. But that will certainly be on the basis of harsh debt and deficit limits – turning an already tight fiscal inheritance into a turbo-charged austerity that would make the kind of welfare system Salmond is promising impossible to deliver.
On top of that the SNP, which would doubtless rule the roost in the aftermath of a vote for independence it would rightly be seen to have brought about, is still no party of the centre-left. Backed by tax avoiders, hedge funders, privateers and Rupert Murdoch, its central economic policy is to cut corporation tax 3% below the British rate to attract capital to Scotland.
It’s a classic recipe for a race to the bottom, as each government seeks to undercut the other’s corporate taxes to woo foreign investors – slashing the revenues for public services and pensions in the process.
But then the SNP also opposed a 50% top rate of tax, bankers’ bonus tax or mansion tax, while pledging deregulation and cuts in red tape. And a Scottish exit from Britain will make Tory governments more likely, by stripping out 59 Scottish MPs from Westminster, only one of whom is currently a Conservative. On current polling, Labour would lose its majority at next May’s electionwithout them.
The impact of that wouldn’t only be felt across the rest of Britain, most painfully in its most deprived communities. It would also feed back directly into Scotland, as a more rightwing administration in London propelled a weak government in Edinburgh into a wider Dutch auction on taxes, rights at work and regulation – delivering the very opposite of what most yes voters actually want to see.
Progressive yes campaigners counter that the independence campaign is far more than the SNP, encompassing left, green and women’s groups who hope to influence a new Scottish constitution and politics that could offer a beacon to the rest of Britain.
It’s not hard to work out why next week’s referendum on Scottish independence is on a knife edge, and the markets in meltdown. If the Westminster elite had been secretly working for a yes vote, they could hardly have done a better job of it. Issuing threats of dire ruin, the no camp yoked together Labour, Liberal Democrats and Tories in a made-to-measure demonstration of exactly the London establishment stitch-up the nationalist-led campaign has thrived on.
Trading on fear and relentless negativity, the Better Together campaign has left the field open to independence campaigners to offer hope of real change and empowerment. By refusing to include a halfway house “devo max” question on the ballot paper, they denied Scots the option most wanted in favour of a gamble that has already backfired.
Now in a state of advanced panic, they’ve cobbled together more devolved powers and sent David Cameron to Edinburgh to plead for the union: the embodiment of Tory rule without a mandate that is the main reason many yes voters will opt for independence. The prospect of the Protestant Orange Order marching for the union and the chance of a supportive visit from Ukip’s Nigel Farage might just about clinch it for Alex Salmond.
On the other side, the yes campaign is a ferment of energy and grassroots campaigning. With the Scottish National party having long since moved on from its Tartan Tory days to a stance that better fits Scotland’s left-leaning centre of gravity, independence has also attracted a significant section of the Scottish left – on a scale not seen since John Maclean, Lenin’s consul in Glasgow, campaigned for a Scottish socialist republic after the first world war.
After 35 years in which Thatcherite destruction of Scotland’s industrial and social fabric by governments Scots never voted for was followed by New Labour’s “light-touch regulation” and illegal wars, getting on for half the country has had enough and sees the exit as the best way of getting something better. Add in a dose of Caledonian-style anti-politics, and working class voters have been jumping ship in droves.
If Scotland votes yes next week, the sky won’t fall in of course, whatever the costs. Scotland may not have been an oppressed nation in the Irish mould, but it has the right to self-determination and every capacity to make it as an independent state.
Coming from a culturally nationalist Scottish background with a Gaelic speaking father, I don’t have any difficulty understanding the appeal of independence, let alone the demands for social justice and democratic accountability that are swelling support for it.
The message that if you vote yes you’ll never get another Tory government could hardly be a more powerful one in a country that polled 42% for Labour and less than 17% Conservative in 2010 and ended up with Cameron as prime minister all the same.
But the idea that a yes vote would be a short cut to a progressive future in a Scandinavian-style social democracy is another matter. It’s not just that Scottish voters aren’t being offered genuine independence at all. Instead, the state cooked up by the SNP is one signed up in advance to the monarchy, Nato, the EU and a currency controlled from London.
Sure, Whitehall and Brussels will negotiate terms if it comes to it. But that will certainly be on the basis of harsh debt and deficit limits – turning an already tight fiscal inheritance into a turbo-charged austerity that would make the kind of welfare system Salmond is promising impossible to deliver.
On top of that the SNP, which would doubtless rule the roost in the aftermath of a vote for independence it would rightly be seen to have brought about, is still no party of the centre-left. Backed by tax avoiders, hedge funders, privateers and Rupert Murdoch, its central economic policy is to cut corporation tax 3% below the British rate to attract capital to Scotland.
It’s a classic recipe for a race to the bottom, as each government seeks to undercut the other’s corporate taxes to woo foreign investors – slashing the revenues for public services and pensions in the process.
But then the SNP also opposed a 50% top rate of tax, bankers’ bonus tax or mansion tax, while pledging deregulation and cuts in red tape. And a Scottish exit from Britain will make Tory governments more likely, by stripping out 59 Scottish MPs from Westminster, only one of whom is currently a Conservative. On current polling, Labour would lose its majority at next May’s electionwithout them.
The impact of that wouldn’t only be felt across the rest of Britain, most painfully in its most deprived communities. It would also feed back directly into Scotland, as a more rightwing administration in London propelled a weak government in Edinburgh into a wider Dutch auction on taxes, rights at work and regulation – delivering the very opposite of what most yes voters actually want to see.
Progressive yes campaigners counter that the independence campaign is far more than the SNP, encompassing left, green and women’s groups who hope to influence a new Scottish constitution and politics that could offer a beacon to the rest of Britain.
The reality is that the left and Labour movement in Scotland, decimated by decades of deindustrialisation and defeats, are currently too weak to shape a new Scottish state. Instead, a victorious SNP and its business friends would be likely to do that – in a neoliberal world where small states are at the mercy of corporate power without an exceptionally determined political leadership.
That weakness is mirrored south of the border, of course. Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said at the weekend that workers on both sides of the border had “more in common with each other than Edinburgh bankers or English aristocrats”. It’s the decline of such class politics that has fuelled the rise of nationalism in Scotland as a kind of anti-establishment proxy.
By failing to make a clearer break with New Labour and embracing austerity lite, Ed Miliband has left many Scottish voters without the sense of a real alternative. But however inspiring the yes campaign and whatever other reasons there might be to back independence, Salmond’s Scotland clearly doesn’t offer an escape hatch from neoliberal Britain. In fact it looks like more of the same – but under the saltire.
