Down With New Atheism!

"I don’t want good causes like secularism and scepticism to die because they’re infested with people who see issues of equality as mission drift. I want Deep Rifts. I want to be able to truthfully say that I feel safe in this movement. I want the misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and downright trolls out of the movement for the same reason I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner or to play Mario Kart: because they’re not good people.

Now it’s time for a third wave – a wave that isn’t just a bunch of “middle-class, white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied men” patting themselves on the back for debunking homeopathy for the 983258th time or thinking up yet another great zinger to use against Young Earth Creationists.

by Jen McCreight

 

I can't remember the exact time I realised I never believed in god. I went to church with the rest of my school as a child, and never really enjoyed it. But at the same time, I never really thought about the existence of god until I was a teenager. At that point, being vaguely sceptical about the whole thing, I bought a copy of Dawkin's The God Delusion*. And I lapped that shit up. I bought Dawkins book at exactly the right time for it to have a positive effect on me - I was an inquisitive teenager exploring a belief system which often comes in-built with smugness, and here was a book which explained complex scientific matters to me in a way which I understood, thus making me think I understood them because I was intelligent, and not because they'd probably been simplified for a mass audience composed mainly of people like me.

So I read The God Delusion, and for probably about a year of my life I attempted to immerse myself as much as possible in the world of Dawkins. I think I re-read the book a couple more times as well, just for good measure. I was at that point, officially, an atheist. I still am. But now I hate atheism.

You see, that quote from Jen McCreight about is just a quick stop off in the unsavoury world of New Atheism. For a movement that prides itself on forward, progressive thinking, many of the figureheads (deitys?) of the New Atheism movement display attitudes which stretch beyond the usual realm of smug superiority and into, as McCreight lists above, misogany, racism, homophobia etc. I'm not going to trawl throught the examples, just pluck a select few to display:

Elevatorgate: Rebecca Watson is proposition by a man at an atheist conferance in a lift. She complains about this online, giving the context that she a) doesn't expect this type of Laddish behaviour at an intellectual gathering and b) she had just given a talk about feminism at said intellectual gathering. Of course, the online vitriol followed (as is to sadly be expected) by Richard Dawkins also got involved, saying she should 'stop whining' and related a (fictional) story of a woman who was beaten and genitally mutilated by her Muslim husband, so being propositioned in a lift isn't that bad after all.

Ah, that old 'you-aren't-in the-worst-situation-in-the-world-so-stop-complaining' trope.

Moving on, the entire career of Christopher Hitchens could be responsible for McCreight's list. He famously wrote an article for Vanity Fair about how woman aren't as funny as men. He supported British wars in the Falklands and the countrys recent excursions to the Middle East. This, he claims, was due to his anti-authoritarianism, so he neatly avoided the issue of authoritarianism implicit in the imperialistic attiudes displayed by Britain in both these wars.

Oh, and here's a good blog illustrating the less-than-savoury attitudes of Bill Maher.

(And, oh fuck, that's not even mentioning the subhuman waste of skin and webcam that is vlogger The Amazing Atheist).

For longer than I've been sceptical about religion I've been left wing to some degree, and perhaps because of that I used to believe that atheism and left-wing politics were meant to be together. I used to mis-appropriate Marx's 'opiate of the people' criticism of organised religion, before I found out that actually, he called it 'the heart of a heartless world', and referred more to opium's use to mask pain you acknowledged than hide from the truth. This article from M-L-M Mayhem! explains it better, but capitalism and religion are not one and same, not always intertwinned.

The reason that New Atheists are unable to chime with some of the Left (like myself) is that they see the world through a fixed lense, where religion is the only, or at least main, problem. Marxists could well be accused of seeing the world entirely throught the class conflict - that is our main reference - but anyone who wants to consider themselves part of the 21st century Left must realise that racial inequality, misogany etc are all intertwinned with the class system.

The New Atheism movement lacks this sort of thinking - as I said, it is concerned only with the effect of religion, a debate largely removed from the political sphere. Hitchens won many fans on the Left by proclaiming himself a Marxist, and stating that Lenin and Trotsky were great men, but his support for Lenin stemmed largely from his admiration of Lenin's fight against religious Orthadoxy in the USSR. His support for the wars in the Middle East him hoping to wage a holy war against Islam. If the Crusades weren't ordered by the Pope he'd probably have used them as a blueprint.

Quite why the New Atheists have chosen religion as their only societal battleground, that I don't know. I suspect it reinforces their intelligence if it seems like they only ever talk about things that they know a lot about. It's easier to 'debunk homeopathy for the 983258th time' than have a go at racial inequality, for sure.

So I'm backing McCreight's call for a Third Wave of Atheism. New Atheism has got comfortable, appointed itself some backwards-thinking figureheads and settled in for the book deals. Compared to other movements, atheism is still relatively recent to the public eye. It still has to evolve, and this time we cannot let it be run by a small group of bigots, comanding a larger army of internet troll who just sneer at anyone who goes to church.

Hitchens, a fan of Trotsky, would no doubt appreciated this wish for a permanent revolution within the atheist community.

*Thinking about my reasons for choosing this particular book, considering it came as part of a wave of anti-theism publications, I just realised how much The God Delusion seems like the type of book specifically designed to shift copies. It's got a provocative and slightly enigmatic title, and the cover has an explosion of red on it. It looks like a novel you'd see in Tesco, and I wonder if it was designed to look related in some way to The Da Vinci Code.

 

Galloway Is No Friend Of The Left

The left has a bit of a problem with George Galloway. On the one hand, he is a successful politican for the hard-left - he's been elected on a broadly anti-capitalist stance, both in the Labour party itself, and as an independent and as leader of his Respect party. He's a showman, someone to get the bored public talking about politcs again. On the subject of the Labour party, he clashed with the right-wing New Labour movement, again endearing himself to the left of the party.

But he's also a problem. He is perhaps too much of a showman, in politics for the attention and not to actually do good. Plus, any support he does get tends to evaporate pretty quickly. He's been tossed around consituencies across Britain, waiting to be brought back in for another few years before he's on his way again.

This argument was settled today as Galloway waded into the Julian Assange row - the British left can no longer welcome Galloway with open arms.

During a recent edition of his creepily-named Goodnight With George Galloway broadcast, he gave his opinion of the rape allegations made against Assange, he said:

"Let me tell you, I think that Julian Assange's personal sexual behaviour is something sordid, disgusting, and I condemn it. But even taken at its worst, the allegations made against him by the two women – and I'm not even going into their political connections, I'm going to leave that for others and for another day. I'm going to leave the fact that one, maybe both, of his accusers have the strangest of links to the strangest of people, organisations and states, I'm going to leave that entirely aside.

Even taken at its worst, if the allegations made by these two women were true, 100 per cent true, and even if a camera in the room captured them, they don't constitute rape. At least not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it. And somebody has to say this.

Let's take woman A. Woman A met Julian Assange, invited him back to her flat, gave him dinner, went to bed with him, had consensual sex with him. Claims that she woke up to him having sex with her again. This is something which can happen, you know.

I mean not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion. Some people believe that when you go to bed with somebody, take off your clothes, and have sex with them and then fall asleep, you're already in the sex game with them.

It might be really bad manners not to have tapped her on the shoulder and said, "do you mind if I do it again?". It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning. . .

I don't believe either of those women, I don't believe either of these stories."

George Galloway, condoning and then dening rape. The comments he makes are too vague and general to be specifically about the Assange case itself (although his spiel does use this as a jumping off point). To try and bat around different definitions of the word rape is pointless - contrary to what Galloway claims, people do need to be asked before you have sex with them. Asking gains consent, and without consent - rape.

Reading between the lines, and another belief of Galloway's emerges - once a man has had sex with a woman once (in his words, they are 'in the sex game') he is entitled to have sex with her again, any time he wants - implying some sort of ownership.

Galloway's old-fashioned approach to relationships and feminism makes him part of the identity of the left which it should strive to leave behind. People on the right use the phrase 'dinosaur socialism' to refer to what they believe to be an outdated form of politics, but the real dinosaur socialism is the kind practised by Galloway - politics for the working man, emphasis on man. How are left wing movements going to build up a strong base of support if it intends to continue to welcome views like that of Galloway? Patriarchy is implicit in capitalism, but the equality of socialism means equality not just for men, but for women too.

'A Serious Man' and social change

The Coen Brothers continued their flirtation with nilihism and existentialist philosophies in 2009s A Serious Man. Larry Gopnik suffers a series of unfortunate personal and professional events which cause him to question his faith - his life leaves him for Sy Ableman, his kids show him no respect, his brother Arthur sleeps on the family couch and spends most of his time draining a cyst on his back, and Larry's aim of getting tenure is being set back by anonymous letters critising him.

It's generally accepted that A Serious Man draws Camus' theory of the absurd - the message is that we shouldn't try to decode or understand life. Events happen, we exist within the confines of these events. Larry's quest for answers, and the inability of him to find these answers, is underscored by the tale of 'The Goy's Teeth', a seemingly allegorical story without an ending, or, as we eventually, realise, any real meaning at all.

To take any Coen Brothers' film at face value though, is missing half the point of the film itself. The key to a great understanding of A Serious Man is the setting: 1967. The late sixties, especially 1968, have become an infamously turbulent time - the Vietnam war escalated far beyond control. American forces peaked in number during the Tet Offensive, and the spread of the conflict into Cambodia was on the horizon. The opposition to the war led to a wave of student unrest, most famously leading to the May 68 protests and riots in Paris, during the which a wildcat general strike was called and the country brought to a standstill. Any optimism gained at the 'end' of the Cold War would surely have been lost by this point.

Culturally, something was changing as well. Mark Harris' Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, a book about the 1967 Oscars, argues that American cinema was changed forever by the new range of films that were chosen in the most desired film award in the world. The Best Picture Catergory that year was contested by Look Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, Doctor Doolittle, Bonnie and Clyde and the eventual winner In The Heat Of The Night. The influence of the French New Wave, and changing attitudes to race, sex and relationships, as well as a huge shift in the traditionally successful Oscar genres are all represented in the shortlist, which covered the '67 and took place in the spring of '68.

This is the volatile setting of A Serious Man, one which the conservative and resigned Larry Gopnik, in his conservative and resigned Wisconsin town, could hear banging at the front door. The transitions which the world is going through are symbolised in two major ways in the film. The first is the bar mitzvah of Larry's son Danny - the Jewish journey from boyhood to manhood, and the younger generation coming of age as they discovered their political might over the next year. Danny is already engaging in acts of rebellion - he spends  a great deal of the movie, including his bar mitzvah, stoned.

The final scene of A Serious Man, which a tornado is seen approching the town, is again a huge piece of symbolism - the tearing up of everything that Larry knows.

As mentioned at several points in the film, Danny has signed Larry up to the Columbia Record Club, who begin hassling Larry to buy albums - specifically, either Santana's Abraxas or Creedence Clearwater Revival's Comso's Factory. Given the Coen's constant use of a period setting in their films, and fantastic reconstuction of an American small town in the late sixties seen in A Serious Man, it seems strange that they would include two albums released in 1970. Again, another reference to an emerging counter-culture, something underlined by what might be a genius bit of intertexuality by the Coens. Comso's Factory is the Creedence tape which The Dude has in his stolen car in The Big Lebowski. The Dude is the antithesis of Larry, and symbolic of the counter-culture discussed above (The Dude says in the film he was a member of the Seattle Seven, and is based heavily on real life Seattle Seven member Jeff Dowd).

Overall, I don't think A Serious Man can be considered entirely by either of the two train of thoughts talked about above. It has the mark of the a great film, in that it makes you want to discuss the true meaning of it, teasing out clues, like I have in my analysis above. I don't think that the aburdist nature of it can be denied, but to settle on that being the meaning behind the film is missing out on a whole lot more.

The 2012 Olympics draws to a close today. It has succeeded in charming the vast amount of cynics in Britain who were waiting for it to be a disaster. It has been hard to look anywhere and not see Union Flags fluttering en masse. The constant cacophony of cynicism has now been replaced with a din proclaiming that Britain is once again united.

This argument, poised after a long summer of ‘national celebration’, has three main strands:

1.       That Scottish athletes like Chris Hoy and Andy Murray chose to pose with a Union Flag after winning gold medals – a blow to the nationalism of Scottish pro-independence activists

2.       That immigrant athletes like Mo Farah winning the gold is a major blow to racist groups like the BNP and the EDL.

3.       That this show of national unity washes away the still-present stain of last summer’s England-wide rioting.

The first argument is merely an aesthetic victory for the Better Together campaign – essentially like them wheeling out other celebrities to back their cause, like the pro-independence campaign did at their launch party.

The second two arguments tackle more entrenched problems faced by Britain in the 21^st century. The divide between Scotland and England, flared up since the announcing of the 2014 referendum, is still largely polite, fought as a democratic political argument between a number of centrist parties on the public stage.

The Olympics would face a much bigger task trying to remove racism from British life. In the aftermath of both of Mo Farah’s gold medal people tweet Nick Griffin to ask how he was feeling now that an immigrant was representing Britain on the world stage. Same for the EDL. It’s a strange belief, the one the racism only exists within the confines of the members of a few fringe political groups. It ignores the entire racial structures of society, and this argument is like saying patriarchy has been finished off because women are now allowed to box. The Daily Mail, which contains more racist influence than the BNO could ever wish for, still campaigns against what they call ‘plastic Brits’ – athletes who do not sing the national anthem cannot, in their view, really be British.

Similarly, the same racist structures, as well as class structures, which led to the 2011 riots still exist. An Olympic village does little to remove this – if anything, the lavish spending so close to deprivation will increase the anger felt by thousands of people in London and beyond. The Olympics does present an opportunity to use sport as a way to help people, but this could only be achieved with a long, sustained effort that is highly unlikely in an age of austerity (no matter what David Cameron has said in the last few days). In Brazil football is seen as a way to lift people out of poverty from the favelas, but when this, on the scale of poverty in these areas, hardly make a difference. People need more than a sports centre to help them.

The ‘real Britain’ that has been talked about so much – the one sans inequality – is an interesting media construct and nothing more. Like the Olympic village itself, Britain managed to close itself off to everything around it. The Olympics made Britain great again, and it ignored everything else. In the week before the Olympics the IRA announced that they would be continuing their armed campaign for a one-state Ireland. Perhaps the biggest threat to the current form of the UK in modern times, this was all but ignored in the media, save for a few Guardian articles on one day only.

Modern Britain has problems – every nation does – and it’s attempt to further ignore these with the Olympics is actually quite dangerous. If you genuinely believed that racism had been dealt a serious blow in the last two weeks you probably wouldn’t take much notice of slow assimilation in society of racist thoughts.

Against Boybands

Ages ago I was asked to write for the For and Against section in my college magazine this month. I was against, and the subject was boybands. The version below I unfortunately had to scrap, because it was too long and jumbled for proper publication. But I liked it too much just to get rid of it, so here it is.

I hate boybands - I don’t think my DNA would have it any other way. I hate ‘pretty-boys’ (jealousy), I hate pop music (snobbery), and I hate solely-for-profit art (early exposure to punk music), and boybands are the saccharine mixture of all of these things. They are bred solely to harvest money from the pockets of teenage girls while not scaring the mothers of those girls – cheeky, but not threatening (this is probably why Charles Manson failed his Monkees audition). It’s all naive smiles, colour-coordinated chinos and expensively ruffled hair, leave any talent at the back door, out by the bins. If more teenage girls were cynical Darias we wouldn’t have this problem.
Gareth Campesinos, frontman of my favourite band and a man who, let’s just say, has to rely on his charms when dating, wrote an article a few months back in which he outlined his belief that ugly people made the best songwriters and lyricists.

If you were ugly, you had nothing to lose by trying to become interesting. Writing songs and poetry is personal, and can be embarrassing, so why risk humiliation and losing the friends that your face had won you. For example, Paul Heaton, who is quoted extensively in Gareth’s article, is one of the great British lyricists, and a man obsessed with his own ugliness. (He feels like London, but looks like Hull. When he was born, the doctor says ‘we’d had some ugly babies, but none were quite you’ then ‘looks as if the nose and chin are definitely here to stay’.)

On a similar note, Morrissey, probably the only British lyricist of the past few decades who was better than Heaton, was obsessed not with his looks but with his own loneliness and misery.
This point segues rather clunkily into the main crux of my argument - against boybands. Boybands are not staffed by men like Stephen Morrissey, Paul Heaton or Gareth Campesinos. Boybands are staffed by pretty-boys who have songs written for them, and instruments played for them, and their smiles, ruffled hair and chinos selected for them.

They might very well have been through some emotional turmoil, but all memories of it have been cast aside (unless it can help to shift a few more copies). It’s not just talent that has been jettisoned by boyband members - their personality has been thrown over to join the shards of flotsam drifting in the sea. Every member of every boyband has the smug veneer of someone who has been popular and had an easy life since they were hurried off to school by their parents. They haven’t risked those friends won by their faces, and they never will.

And I know I’d Paul Heaton, with his chin like a tramp’s juke-box, over them any day.

On 'The Monitor', Bruce Springsteen, and identity crisis

When I first heard The Monitor, the second album by New Jersey band Titus Andronicus, I dismissed it as a punk-rock take on Bruce Springsteen that would provide a bit of short-term fun. I underestimated the power of the album to get under your skin, to open itself further with every listen, and, of course, the phrase ‘punk-rock take on Bruce Springsteen’.

I heard it first over a year ago, and listening to it now, the Springsteen-references are not just a lazy way to describe an album, but actually the key to what the album is trying to say. Springsteen himself embodies the traditional, New Jersey working man. He speaks to blue-collar Americans in the way that politicians wish they could, because he is a working class American. One of the reasons for The Boss’ enduring success, it was once said, is that you can almost imagine that when he isn’t touring, Bruce actually goes back to his hometown and works in a factory with the same people he grew up. At the end of his shift, he goes to the same bar he always has and drinks PBR with those same people again. That is not the case, obviously, but perhaps more than any musician who sings extensively about his roots, he has maintained his pre-fame identity.

The working-class of New Jersey, and all around America, that Springsteen writes about and embodies, has been romanticised in much the same way that British miners were before Thatcherism – it wasn’t a glamorous life, or a desirable one, but it was their life, an honest life that was driven by a ‘honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay’ philosophy. It was the generation eulogised by Frank Sobotka in series two of The Wire, when he says ‘We used to make shit in this country, build shit.’
That quote represents the point where Titus Andronicus and other bands which count Springsteen as their inspiration split. The Gaslight Anthem, with a lead singer who worked for nearly a decade in a car factory before becoming a singer, are in love with the image of Americana that Springsteen promotes. Titus Andronicus, however, see things much differently. Their New Jersey is that of the sons and daughters of the people depicted in the songs of Springsteen and The Gaslight Anthem – some of the many victims of globalised capitalism and the crisis of identity which resulted from it.
The process of globalisation, which has really been happening throughout history, gathered momentum in the second half of the twentieth century. It was bad news for the working class of New Jersey, as their jobs were transported to the other side of the world as using Eastern-based wage slavery became an economic reality for multinational companies. The next generation, the Titus Andronicus-generation, were promised a new start, increased levels of economic freedom, free information, and everything else.

But globalisation, in a bid to create a global identity, tore up the roots that once gave people a real sense of self. Under Thatcherism and Reaganomics, class was apparently dissolved into one.
The real problem this created was that, when it opened new windows for young people, globalised capitalism made sure it bolted any doors closed, and moved those doors out to countries where it is legal to pay people less than a dollar a day. A vacuum of jobs for young people was created, and those that belonged to families of the working class apparently saw their history being erased by ‘trickle-down economics’ which never fulfilled their promise.

The Monitor is filled with references to depression, anxiety, alcoholism and worthlessness – they form the feeling of emptiness that comes from the lack of fixed identity. At the same time, the album reflects what, if anything, was good about globalised society – the spread of knowledge. Titus Andronicus is a consciously-cleverer album than any of those of Springsteen – it’s a concept album based on American history, is strewn with references to myriad other influences. The band name even comes from a relatively obscure Shakespeare play.

If The Monitor was given a human embodiment, it would be the slightly pretentious, university-educated son of a former New Jersey steel factory worker. The clash between the references and the dark lyrics, and the audible influence of traditional American anthemic rock, is the playing out of a struggle between this generation’s past and present.

"Work as if you live in the earlier days of a better nation"

An essay by Alisdair Gray, who wrote Scotlands Ulysses, Lanark.

The editor of the Sunday Herald and Alex Salmond were wrong to call me author of the slogan Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’. I found it in a long poem by the Canadian author, Dennis Leigh.

All should be glad to live where we can be good for others because our work helps them. The essential do-gooders in any nation work to provide food, clothes, and necessary transport. They build our houses and roads, mend the plumbing, empty our middens but such folk are the most lowly paid and have little time to improve their nation, having first to silence (as John Locke said) the croaking in their hungry bellies and those of their children.’ Unlike professional folk, most reach the peak of their earning power in their early 20s, and since Thatcher’s regime destroyed most trade union powers, their only chance of altering their state is through an election like that of May 3, 2007.

But no wonder only about 50% bothered to vote. Every government since Margaret Thatcher has continued her policies. Blair’s only original idea was a Scottish Parliament with no power to do what Westminster did not want. He set up an Edinburgh talking-shop of very well paid MSPs chosen by proportional representation, hoping it would keep Scots dissidents squabbling between themselves without interrupting his management of Britain along lines favoured by its chief bankers and stockbrokers.
Three times in the 20thC the English Establishment let in a Scottish prime minister because it was hard to choose one of themselves. They knew Campbell Bannerman and Ramsay MacDonald were too old, tired and sick to be anything but conformists, knew Tony Blair’s New Labour policy was wholly conformist. But his Scottish Parliament was a small step in a better direction. The May 3 election is a slightly larger good step. I can only explain how I think of Scotland today by giving my personal history of this United Kingdom’s politics for readers too young to remember it.

I grew up believing, with my dad and his friends, that doctors, teachers and Labour politicians were the noblest works of God - doctors worked to reduce pain, teachers to spread knowledge, Labour politicians to reduce poverty and increase social equality. I was born in 1934 Riddrie which, with Knightswood, was the best scheme built by Glasgow Corporation (now called Glasgow City Council) being the earliest built under the Wheatley Act. This, the only Socialist Act of the first brief Labour Government after world war I, let local councils start improving the British workers’ rotten rented homes by building public housing schemes. These were added to a Glasgow whose pure water supply, plumbing, roads, street lighting, public transport and schools had been municipalised by the former Liberal Party that had also introduced old age pensions, labour exchanges and doles, paying for them by taxing more highly the owners of richer properties. In this way Glasgow resembled London, Birmingham and many big industrial towns.

When we add tothesea nationalised General Post Office that ran a cheap firstclass mail service for everyone and the telephone service, with the uncommercial BBC transmitting all radio and television broadcasts, so we knew Britain had the foundation of a completely Socialist state.

When world war II began the London Government was rightly terrified of a Nazi conquest because Britain stood alone against European Fascism. It did not threaten the USA and the USSR had signed a pact with it. A Tory and Labour coalition united the country by nationalising every big British business, industry and bank. Profits were frozen, rents and wages fixed, young men were conscripted into coal mines, girls into factories, rationed food ensured none ate luxuriously while others starved. It signed agreements with our trade unions that lasted for two decades after the war ended. All these Socialist acts had been rejected as Socialist by the same government before the war, leading the novelist Joyce Carey to write, the only good government is a bad government in a fright.’ To make post-war Britain a better nation for everyone a government committee drew up a plan for the future of the welfare state. It was called the Beveridge Report.

The main politicians who accepted and carried out that report were Tories and Labourites who agreed Britain should have more social equality. Many had survived the first world war which the British Government said was being fought to make A Land Fit for Heroes to Live in.’ After it, reduced wages caused the 1920s General Strike followed by a worldwide economic depression with widespread unemployment caused by overproduction of essential goods. Well, the war had cured that. The last bill passed by a Tory minister in the wartime coalition was an education bill which let any student who passed entrance exams enter universities or colleges without them or their parents having to pay. Peacetime Britain was expected to be better for all the well educated folk it could get. Student grants allowed me, many friends and thousands of other working class kids train for professions. They let clever Margaret Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter, pass through Oxford into politics.

Then a Labour government created the National Health Service while keeping railways, coalmines, gas and electricity supplies, steel production and road haulage as public property. We believed Britain had achieved a social revolution better than the Russian one because a democratically elected government had achieved it without killing, jailing or deporting folk. We were also an example to the USA because Britain was not mainly ruled by millionaires. We were naive about money.

The class with greatest power in Britain still came from posh private schools and Oxbridge. They were glad the government had bought their railway and coal mine shares because since the 1920s they had brought a very low return, and now they invested in big private enterprise businesses, allied to petroleum industries. They were still the salaried directors of British Rail, coal, electricity and gas whose boards contained no train drivers, miners or meter readers. When geologists working for British Gas, then a public corporation, found reservoirs of natural gas and oil under the North Sea, these were quickly passed to private corporations. The Norwegian Government kept a controlling share of its offshore oil wells - not the British! The lord put in charge of our oil industries by parliament owned shares in them, Beaching, in charge of British Rail, had shares in road building. He saw no future in public transport and closed most of British Rail’s branch lines. That was before Margaret Thatcher started privatising the United Kingdom.
Let me amuse you with the adjacent poster issued by the Board of Trade when it tried encouraging British industry by appealing to the workforce.  

The designers did not mean it to suggest that Scottish industries should fill English shops. It does, but also reminds us that Scottish industries before the late 1960s were internationally famous. Clydeside made more ships than the USA, with good furniture in ocean liners made by Scottish craftsmen and carpets by Templeton’s of Bridgeton who also made carpets for state capitals in Canada, Australia and elsewhere. Railway trains were exported to South America from Shettleston, cars made in Linwood, cranes in Govan, Ravenscraig made steel for these in furnaces from the coal in Scottish mines.

In 1979 the Westminster Labour Party held a Scottish referendum to find if a majority of Scots wanted their own Parliament. Before it, the leaders of the Tory and Labour parties told Scottish voters that if they achieved independence investors would pull out money, Scottish industries would fail and general poverty increase.

The referendum showed more Scots voted for independence than voted against, and in any other democracy we would have gained a parliament. But the government had changed the normal rules of democracy and announced that since the pro-independence voters had won the race by a short head, they had lost it. After which investors pulled money out of Scotland, more and more of our industries failed and what had been built as reaosnably good housing schemes deteriorated into slums.

Every productive work except farming, and whisky distilling seems to have stopped - Denny’s of Dumbarton who built the first hovercraft, Singers’ Clydebank sewing machine works, Paisley spinning and weaving mills, Bryant & Mays Maryhill Matches, Greenock’s Tate & Lyle sugar and Golden Syrup, Dunfermline bed and table linen, Jean MacGregor’s Scotch Broth, Caithness Glass perished last year - I can hugely enlarge the list but it would bring me to tears. I believe a Scottish government could have protected some of these industries, encouraging them to modernise by putting them in contact with university research departments that were not in the pockets of global corporations. Pessimists will say there is now nothing left in Scotland for Home Rule to improve. I deny that, if we work as if in the early days of a better nation.

Gray’s 2007 piece is essentially a potted, Marxist-ish history of modern Scotland, wrapped up in a plea for indepence from Britain. This piece, although written years before the SNP called a referendum for 2014, sums up better than anything I’ve read the strongest argument for a break-up of the United Kingdom - that, contrary to popular opinion, it offers Scotland no benefit.

Certainly there is no social or political benefit from the union for Scotland - even with our own parliament we are still part of the wider Westminster parliament, which rountinely returns a Tory government, a party largely rejected in Scotland since the fifties and sixties on all levels.

Scotland as a nation is also tied in with the British Empire - no amount of patriotic whitewashing of history can hide the fact that the empire massacred and enslaved its way to global dominance. Despite what the Olympics is trying to say, Britain has a shameful history, the negative effects of which still scar areas of the planet.

Culturally, Scotland is included in the rest of Britain in being marginalised by London in nearly every field.

But one of the main reasons that Scottish independence has been held off for so long is the reliance of the ‘No’ argument on the economic factor - that Scotland simply couldn’t survive on its own. Gray argues that Scotland has been ravaged anyway - Thatcherism and neo-liberalism have attempted to rip the heart out of Scotland.

I believe, still, that the Scottish national identity is built around some idea of socilistic, co-oprative values. This isn’t represented in actual political polls (the SSP is the largest anti-capitalist party in the country, and nearly non-existent in governmental seats) but taking a national character from a country is nearly impossible to do. This is why Thatcher is hated in Scotland, even by people who aren’t in the business of hating Tories. She is fundamentally opposed to everything that underlies the Scottish character.

This is, in essense, what Scottish independence will save. England is lost to the Tories - it is a neo-liberal nation, and unless Ed Milliband can change that at the next election (which is very unlikely) it will stay so for the forceeable future.

The real problem with this is that neo-liberalism does simply not work. The wealth which is meant to ‘trickle down’ as the famous saying goes, doesn’t. The wages the were meant to increase don’t, only working hours go up. The big business’ that were meant to create unlimited growth don’t - away from any watchful eye of regulation they screw everyone over, leading to numerous price-fixing, LIBOR-type scandals.

I don’t know how long it’ll take people to realise that this system can’t function, but hopefully, as Gray says, we’ll be looking at the 2014 referendum behind us, and working as if we live in the earlier days of a better nation.

*I’ll just leave this note here: Gray’s Lanark is probably the best Scottish novel ever written, at least that I’ve read. If you only ever read one Scottish novel, make it that. If two, I’d also reccommend The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg.