Considering patriotism in the context of anti-establishment politics

Two things happened to me this week that made me consider what it means to be patriotic.

First, I got hold of a copy of the new Titus Andronicus album Local Business. Titus Andronicus, especially on their last two albums, have a strong sense of patriotism and love (sometime begrudging) towards America.

A photo from the lyrics booklet of Local Business

Second, a few days after that, I attended a Yes Scotland meeting/debate in Falkirk, which aimed to continue the spread of grassroots activism which many people say will be the key to Scottish independence.

Throughout my life I have been uncomfortable with the concept of patriotism and, especially, nationalism. Not just uncomfortable, in that I felt these terms could never apply to me, but also struck with a sense that to pride yourself on what imagined community (to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase) you were randomly born in was absurd.

Similarly, although until recently my politics were ill-defined I’ve always desired to be ‘anti-establishment’ in some way. I’ve long idolised punk music and the protests of May ’68. I was enthralled by the anti-globalisation protests in Scotland against the G8 when I was younger, even though I had no real idea what they meant. Patriotism/nationalism – essentially, allegiance to ‘the state’ and its historical, usually conservative context – was against what I scratchily believed in.

Back to Titus Andronicus – one of the reasons I love them is that they are a proper punk-rock band, in ethic more so than aesthetic. They, like all punk should, eschew the mainstream, corporate music industry. And yet they, as I pointed out above, have a strong current of patriotism that runs through their music. Is this compatible? An excellent Stereogum article by Liz Pelly asks this question, framing the attempts of Titus Andronicus to bridge the void between punk and patriotism (a quest made explicit on several occasions by several members of the band, as Pelly notes) in a wider sense of where Americans, of their generation, also belong in this context. Pelly, like TA, believe it is possible to be both and patriotic. In fact, to be both can even be radical - the virtues of the Founding Fathers are so different from the current American values, yet actually similar to the values of punk. Therefore, embracing true' Americanism, and at the same time punk ethics, are a rebellion against contemporary neo-liberal, Christian right America. 

This I find very interesting, mainly because listening to Titus actually makes me feel faintly patriotic for the US (to put this in context, I never been to America and, as befits my radical politics I talked about earlier, have long considered them 'the enemy'). I feel as if I can believe in the early disciplines of America, which were based on liberty and equality. Current America has twisted the 'American Dream' to mean that the only way to be truly free is economically, and this, to some extend, makes me sad. America could - should - be a great country. It is not. It may never be.

So how does this fit into Scottish patriotism? I could not consider myself an American patriot, as I am not American. Can I consider myself a Scottish patriot?

I do not love Scotland - at least, I do not love it unconditionally. There are things I love about Scotland, certainly. The country has a fantastic scientific and cultural legacy for it's size. Two of the greatest novels I've ever read, Alisdair Grey's Lanark and James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner are both particularly Scottish novels, in that they would lose their impact of separated from their national context. Both novels aim to say something about Scottish national identity - Lanark through politics, Confessions... through religious mortality (I'm aware this is a hugely simplistic explanation).

I love that in certain parts of Scotland (Glasgow, and the general Western Scotland area) it's acceptable to use the otherwise offensive word 'cunt' as a term of affection (e.g. "See that cunt over there?" "You're an alright cunt!"). I even love Scottish football, grudgingly. 

On the other hand, combined with a dislike for kilts and bagpipes, I still cannot feel comfortable with patriotism. Therefore, I could never love Scotland in the way that many of the people at the Yes Scotland meeting certainly did.   

In that case, why am I so devoted to the cause of Scottish independence? Other than a hatred for Britain as an entity and identity, I love what Scotland could be. I've written before about the strain of working class pride that is deeply ingrained in parts of Scotland, and that these would come to the forefront of Scottish politics were independence to be achieved. The Scottish Labour party, traditionally the main Scottish party (although heavily defeated by the SNP at the last general election here) are inexcusably tied to the reactionary British Labour party, which is still shrouded by New Labour and ashamed of it's working class, trade union roots. It is hopeless, and the Scottish Labour party is tainted by association*. People on Scotland (including myself, until recently) overwhelmingly voted for Labour as a way to combat the legions of Tories from across the border. We would no longer need to do that in an independent Scotland. At the Yes Scotland meeting, local author Alan Bisset laid out his vision for the future of Scottish politics. It goes:

• Under independence, the centrist SNP would become the party of the establishment
• The current largely pro-union, right of centre Labour party would disintegrate, being reborn as a smaller but left-wing Labour party, comprised of those MSPs who were pro-independence
• The Tories, entirely pro-union, would also wither away to even greater political insignificance than they already have**. The Lib Dems have already done so.
• The Green party, currently with two MSPs and numerous councillors around the country, would be resurgent, as would the SSP (or, even better, a Left Front-type group of the various small 'People's Front of Judea' parties of the Scottish left)
• Therefore, the shape of the Scottish parliament would be overwhelmingly left-leaning to openly left-wing.

This all brings me back to what we can justifiably be proud of - what we are working to. In this context, patriotism could be seen as something to earn. We must build a country to be proud of, not just settle with mild pride for what we have. Independence is just a facet of this. The problems in Scotland will not disappear overnight come a Yes vote in 2014. Years of hard work will follow. What differs from the rest of Britain (I could be a British patriot, but I am vehemently not) is that in Scotland this remains a faint possibility. The nature of Britain, with it's power structure concentrated in the hands of the rich and the privileged, a power solidified through time.

As Alisdair Grey said in my linked article above, "Work as if you live in the earlier days of a better nation". A nation that one day we could concievably be proud of. 


*A month or so ago two incidents concerning these two Labour parties almost motivated me to write a mocking obituary of the party. The first being Ed Miliband admitting in an interview with the Telegraph that he admired Thatcher. The second being Johann Lamont attempting to remove Scottish Labour's dedication to the welfare state. I never wrote it, but I meant it - the Labour party can no longer be seen as the party of social progress.

** I follow the situation of the Scottish Conservative party with some interest, and, given my hatred for all things Tory, a good deal of laughing. They exist in a strange nether-zone - big enough to have a good presence in the Scottish parliament, but not quite big enough to actually have any real impact on the goings-on. The Greens only have two MSPs, but they a fringe party, and so shouldn't be expected to have a huge number. The Tories also have such a toxic reputation in Scotland that no one dare work with them - there are certainly smaller parties with less supporters, but perhaps no major party endures the hatred that the Tories have in here. It's so bad that one of the contenders for the party leadership wanted to disband the entire party and re-brand it as something non-Tory, as to avoid the bad rep.


http://500revolutions.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/album-review-titus-andronicus-local.html

"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.