Things Can Only Get Better

I have been back in Scotland now for a couple of months. I love Glasgow, it is my home and I was born here. I am a Glaswegian. I was forced to go in search of work and I really objected to having to leave my home and country to do so. However, since my return it has been quite a culture shock and I have come to the conclusion that Scotland is a crazy place because its electorate keep voting for more of the same. It’s like mass self-harming. England where I lived is much more prosperous, vibrant and cleaner than here. It is a nice place to live and in general England favours well out of being part of the union. The thing is, what struck me about England is that you would never know they were part of a United Kingdom. For many, it is just them and the ‘also rans’. Scotland is never reported positively. In English news, unless it’s a murder or bad weather it’s easy to lose touch. Scots may hear news every day about high politics in Westminster but I can tell you it is not reciprocal. In England, Scotland does not register as being remotely important or relevant.

 On my return, what struck me most is how poor and dilapidated Glasgow is. The roads are a complete mess with potholes and faded road markings. Pavements are just as bad. Dog fouling is atrocious. The fabric of buildings, especially public ones are decaying and shabby. It might be a time of recession but a lick of paint is nothing in the broad scheme of things. Indeed it should be compulsory that all buildings are kept and maintained to a tolerable standard. It looks to me that Glasgow is being run into the ground by the Council, whose Leader has a bigger salary than the Prime Minister of the UK.

 We have politicians in Scotland who are not earning their publicly paid wages yet a Government which is actually balancing the books is being attacked from all quarters of the media and unionist politicians for not doing enough!

 Good news is never reported in Scotland either. Invariably if its not a murder, job losses or some scare story about how bad Scotland will be, come independence,  then it just does not  pass the censors approval. Good news when it does arrive is usually reported akin to the Marvin the Manic depressive robot style of. ‘it’s a beautiful day, but it won’t last’. The bias of the MSM, BBC & STV is stark. It is no surprise that people have a jaundiced view of Scottish life, given the diet of doom they are fed each day.

 Having a walk through Partick, West End, Govanhill and attending Blochairn and Polmadie car boot sales, the resigned, downtrodden plight of people is evident on their faces. I have never seen so many miserable people. The shops are cutting prices to the bone yet not enough to stop hordes of Glasgwegians resorting to car boot sales to pick up goods at next to nothing prices. There seems to be a race to the lowest price In Glasgow and that will never work in anyone’s favour buyer or seller. The long term decline of value, of worth, of cost comes at a price of resentment of those more fortunate, lowering of expectation and almost certainly of aspiration. Or economy depends on people spending but somebody has to make a profit. That’s how the world operates.

 What has happened to the once great Scotland? Where has it gone? Where is the fight, the passion? I am not imagining it, it was once like that. There is no rage or anger about how things are and it is so painful to see so many people prepared to settle for less. It is a tragedy. It reminds me of Poland in 1986. Subdued, disgruntled people, scurrying round and doing the best they could to make ends meet. Grey, broken buildings, clapped out buses, infrastructure ignored or patched up. Worst of all, is the absence of hope.  I hope that people will say “enough” and start to fight back.  The next generation is depending on this one to make it better for them. Surely, there is enough self-respect left for that.

  If, like the Better Together supporters, you believe that this is the best that Scotland can do then it might be suggested that your aspiration levels are wanting. If you believe that Scotland, as a stand-alone nation cannot do better for itself than its current situation then by all means vote NO.

 You could also not bother voting at all. This would hammer home the charge of low aspiration and hopelessness I have just mentioned. As Bob Dylan once wrote, ‘a loser knows no success like failure, and losing is no success at all’

 Alternatively, VOTE YES for an attempt at standing on our own two feet and being accountable for ourselves and responsible for the welfare of the people who live here. It is incredible to me and to almost every foreigner I have spoken to about being an independent nation, that there are some people who need to be convinced that their country can be successful on its own. Countries around the world are doing it every day. It is normal. We might not be certain of our future in an independent Scotland, but it has to be better than what is here now.

Written by Frank Wilson.

The Inadequacies of Western Politics

I am struck by the constant struggle for power of the so called ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in western politics and have come to realise that these terms are largely meaningless, so tied up in the bias of their respective proponents that they are simply reduced to terms of abuse. ‘The Left’ has become associated with the excesses of powerful ideologues such as Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Potwhereas ‘The Right’ has been associated with Hitler, Mussolini and Juan and Eva Péron. These individuals, their philosophies and forms of government are more alike than they are different. They have at their root a kind of Social Darwinism and reliance on a totalitarian state. Both were reactions to the failure of Nation States to protect their populations from poverty. Both claimed to be the answer to the failures of capitalism (and serfdom ) whereas there roots lay in a struggle between the haves and the have-nots at times when hunger, poverty and want overcame the fear of the military and police used by the rich and powerful elite. Many in the west proclaimed the victory of capitalism over communism when the U.S.S.R. imploded yet this is simple propaganda, the failure of communism was due to a powerful elite oppressing the rest of society. It was not capitalism that the victor it was the failure of communism to provide for the needs and wants of its peoples.

Today we are experiencing the collapse of capitalism, it is failing to provide for the needs and wants of the majority, the powerful and rich elites that benefit from the laissez faire policies promulgated by Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher are still at work protecting their ill-gotten gains to the detriment of the wider public, but there is one crucial difference. The main stream media, long a supporter of the wealthy and the powerful, are losing their readership to the web; blogs, twitter and other social media tools are opening the doors to the widespread dissemination of views and values that directly challenge that of the ruling elites. Large sections of the media in the UK have been shown to be acting against the interests of the public as demonstrated by the revelations of the Leveson enquiry. At the beginning of the Arab Spring Western governments, led by the USA, lauded the developments as a democratic revolution made possible by social media and encouraged the overthrow of governments that they disapproved of. They failed to foresee the rise of extremist groups equally as dangerous as those who caused the Second World War who seem willing to exterminate, torture and imprison any who disagree with their views. Think tanks funded by the corporate elite promote policies to compliant governments, members of whom are also on the boards of those self-same corporate bodies and who benefit from investments in them.  George Monbiot points out how these think tanks operate and subvert democracy. This is not a battle between right and left, it is a battle for profits and power at the expense of the majority to the benefit of elites.

Extremism from any source must be resisted, if we have learned anything from the Second World War, it is that inflicting poverty on masses of the public leads to extremism. The human costs of that war led to the post war consensus on full employment. “There were good reasons to seek security. The British people had just emerged from a war that had shown that, regardless of how high they were on the social ladder, they could fall to the bottom in an instant. The death and destruction of war were not the only threats; a serious illness could blight a family’s prospects. People wanted to be sure that they would not be on their own if disaster struck, and they were prepared to ensure this through taxes and insurance contributions. They were, literally, “all in it together,” accepting rationing of food and fuel to guarantee that in the face of austerity, everyone had access to the essentials.” The profits from enterprise were shared out across society with the creation of the welfare state in the UK and its glowing beacon, the NHS. The post war consensus and the West fully embraced this doctrine at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 which largely accepted the work of John Maynard Keynes, but western governments were concerned about the ideological challenge posed to them by communism as practiced by the USSR and China (the two largest state proponents). Thus began the “cold war” a battle for not only hearts and minds but a battle for resources. It is my opinion that the west worried too much about the ideological battle, communism (as practiced by those countries, not the true form) failed because central planning was not adequate to provide for the needs and the wants of its populace. It was the people of those countries, striving for a better life and putting pressure on their political masters that caused communism to fail. The price mechanism of the market has been proven to be a much better tool to improve the lot of people and yet that has also failed us. The seeds of that failure lay in Richard Nixon’s abandonment of the fixed exchange rate between gold and the dollar. That single act caused the breakdown of the Bretton Woods Agreement and was the result of the rising costs of the Vietnam War. In effect, because the dollar was the reserve currency of the world financial system, by breaking its link from gold and printing more money, he financed the Vietnam War by exporting inflation to the rest of the western world.

The inflation caused by this act caused great pressure on the old and the working classes in the UK and caused much of the industrial strife of the 1970’s as people strived to maintain their economic wellbeing by using the only weapon available to them, the withholding of their labour. Because of near full employment and the unionised nature of industrial Britain this tool was particularly effective but we could not ignore the world events out-with our control which meant that we were losing competitiveness to other countries. Capital and investment flowed out of the country to low wage economies that became more efficient because of better tooling and lower labour costs.  The public in the UK saw this as the fault of the trade unions as the media began a concerted attack on them using the tools of the think tanks that had started to embrace the thoughts of Hayek and Milton Freidman of the Chicago School of Economics. Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher took the convenient parts of the academic thinking of these economists and allowed the market to let rip with a massive move towards laissez faire.

It is that move to laissez faire economics, the freeing of the market from regulation and constraints that had led us the present economic collapse. The market has been proven to be a good thing but not the FREE market. The market must be regulated to prevent its excesses. We cannot insulate ourselves from the rest of the world but we can seek to build a better society, the threat of war is real as populations around the world seek to improve their lot whilst increasing strains from the exponential rise in world population place more and more strain on the worlds resources and the capitalists who own the means of production seek to retain and increase their wealth. The evidence from history is clear; wealth must be shared equitably if strife is to be avoided. More than this there is overwhelming academic evidence that inequality is bad for all of us, the rich and the poor. The work of Richard Wilson and Kate Picket as published in The Spirit Level examines inequality in countries around the world and indisputable proves that more equal societies fair better and benefit all in society.

It is my experience that both Tory and Labour governments have abandoned the poor. Labour by abandoning the attempt at full employment and a living wage by seeking to redistribute the profits from the big banks through benefits. The Tories by removing benefits altogether from the neediest in society. It is only with the SNP that I see a drive to increase the employment opportunities available to our citizens by investing in our infrastructure which simultaneously creates assets for the future (which are more valuable than the costs incurred in creating them) and provides employment for our citizens who pay taxes, spent their wages in the community and thus create more jobs as demand increases. They seek to use our wealth of energy and natural resources to benefit the people of Scotland by investing its profits for the future growth of our economy. Both Labour and Tory governments have been proven to act against the interests of Scotland people when they buried theMcCrone report. The latest incarnation of these policies is the astonishing abandonment of universal benefits by Joanne Lamont of the Labour Party.

I support the SNP because they are a truly social democratic party, it is to my regret that the Labour Party seems to be abandoning its core principles and moving to the right. I suspect that they seek power more than they seek to improve the lot of the nation’s citizens. That is the route to political oblivion and I earnestly hope that they will turn back from this course.

It is for these reasons among many more that I support the Yes campaign for an independent Scotland. I see hope in the message that we can better target our resources to benefit our people, if we have the tools to do so. We need to be in control of our own destiny to improve our lot we should not abandon that responsibility to others that do not have our best interests at heart.

Vote YES for the opportunity for a better future.

Written by Bill Fraser. To see more of Bill's work, visit http://ofmenandmarkets.wordpress.com/author/ofmenandmarkets/

Tide Power; The power of nuclear, without the deadly legacy.

If Scotland becomes an independent nation in the future, it cannot rely on dwindling oil and gas reserves, as a means of maintaining a healthy trade surplus. Oil itself will of course still flow from the existing and planned fields in Scotland's territorial waters. 

However, oil will be less important as a source of energy, as clean electric transport develops. Emissions targets will limit burning of fossil fuels and eventually, we will abandon oil and coal forever. 

In the overlapping years, as renewable hydro and offshore wind power generation matures, tide power will be waiting to produce perhaps double the output of the renewable arrays already in service. 

With 816 times the energy per cubic metre than wind power, smaller tidal turbines generate enormous quantities of electricity. Not only that, but unlike wind, this electricity will be produced every day, four times a day! 

Tides are predictable on a daily basis and by placing tidal turbines in various inlets, sea lochs and channels all around our coastline, the power may flow constantly. Just a grid management system is needed to switch in turbine arrays as they power up and to switch off machines which are finished their cycle. Arrays can be added to balance peaks at mid winter and pump water into hydro reservoirs to be released when extra base load power is needed (when wind turbines are stationary, for example). 

These undersea "Windmills" are similar to wind turbines, but only need to face in one direction, as the water flows in or out with the gravity of Sun and Moon pulling the ocean water around the Earth. 

Machines like these are currently being tested off the North coast right now, and with the Scottish Government funding, plus massive investment by utility firms, tidal energy will be the motive power for the "Mighty Atom" which Scotland is striving to become. If all this work is to be worthwhile, we as a people need to get behind our Government at Holyrood. We need also, to shake free from the vested interests in the UK oil/gas industry, as we'll as the nuclear lobby. To do this, we need independence and politicians with vision. I think you know who I mean!

Gordon J Ross