Is this Scotland's Prague Spring?
Last Thursday night's election count in Scotland was, as reported earlier, chaotic. A complete fiasco caused by the Nu Labor-controlled Scottish Office and executive. Despite any losses it might have made through the confusion, the Scottish National Party (SNP) narrowly won pole position, as the illustration above shows, to form a government in this country.
Nu Labor (or New Labour as it likes to consider itself) has, over the last 50 years, ruled Scotland and this led it to believe that it has some kind of Divine Right to do so. It was a terrible blow to their misplaced pride to discover that this mystical right has finally been denied it. I have never seen Tony Blair looking quite so shell-shocked as he appeared yesterday on discovering the punishment meted out to him by the electorate on both sides of the border.
With characteristic sour grapes at least one losing Labour candidate is now "considering taking legal action", using the claim he might have lost votes in the spoilt ballot papers scandal. Something for which the very administration, in which he played a leading part, is responsible!
Meantime, the astute, some say charismatic, SNP leader Alex Salmond and his 46 stalwart MSPs are faced with a terrible dilemma. How are they going to become the next government in a Scotland they would like to steer towards independence from England?
Proportional Representation is an electoral system which while producing a clearer reflection of the actual votes cast lends itself to government by coalition. In the past the Atlanticist Labour and Liberal Democrat parties have been quite happy to go to bed with each other. After all, they have so much in common that it is really impossible to distinguish between the two.
In foreign policy, both are quite happy for the UK as it presently is to continue being shafted by NATO and Washington's militarist, unipolar world tyranny. In domestic policy both parties oppose Scotland pulling out of the joke that is the United Kingdom because --and most important-- it would not only end an imperialist Union that was brought about by bribery, betrayal and threat but throw the cosy Atlanticist 'special relationship' between the warmongers in the US and UK into a final disarray.
In this 'special relationship', Scotland is one vast military base and exercise ground for Whitehall's war office, the misnomer that is the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The UK's equally falsely named 'independent' nuclear 'deterrent' is based in the Clyde estuary near Glasgow. Hardly anyone in Scotland approves of its presence there.
But Scots have no choice because all military decisions are made in England by the mandarin descendants of a jingoistic and warmongering past only kept alive by the hollow facade of a cosmetic, United Kingdom. The day that travesty is finally brought to an end through Scottish independence the evil old pretence that masks the imperialism of England's ruling classes will finally come crashing down.
That is why neither the English-controlled Nu Labor or Liberal Democrats will entertain the idea of a SNP-led administration in Scotland. And why they both oppose the SNP's commitment to give the Scottish people the right to make up their own minds about independence in a referendum proposed to be held within the first term of an administration led by it.
So finally we see how Scotland's democratic right, compromised by the electoral scandal for which both Labour and the Libdems are entirely responsible, is now being threatened by the same two whose claim to rule is exposed to the world as a thing of corruption and they as the real enemies of democracy.
Scotland is a small nation of slightly over 5 million folk. But small is beautiful and, in its case, powerful because its destiny in the months to come could bring about much greater changes on both sides of the Atlantic. Let's hope that the SNP's victory does not turn out to be another Prague Spring and Alex Salmond become another Dubcek. If that were to happen the militarist, imperialist forces that will be behind the coup against democracy would be, as usual these days, the London and Washington, DC Anglo-Saxon alliance.
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Some observations from a friend:
ReplyDeleteAre we seeing a coup against Scottish democracy?
Some notes on the present moment in Scottish politics
'The hostility shown towards Alex Salmond by the Scottish LibDems is almost pathological. These are parties which agree on almost everything - local income tax, fiscal powers, nuclear power - and yet the LibDem leadership seems determined to relinquish any prospect of having these policies implemented by refusing the Scottish people a say on the constitution.'
Iain MacWhirter in the Sunday Herald, 18 th February 2007.
Many people are assuming that the LibDems will eventually strike a deal with the SNP. I am not so sure. In what follows I place the present impasse in the light of broader consideration of para-political phenomena, many of them little noticed or tabooed to mention or even notice.
Although I hope to see a SNP-led adminstration, I think that the British State is engaged in pulling out the stops to block this, even to the point where we can almost talk of an on-going coup against Scottish democracy.
(Alternatively the SNP leadership may be allowed a share in office, not power, only once they have dropped opposition to Trident, dropped unorthodox plans to raise money by selling bonds, and anything else which doesn't fit with the neo-liberal consensus.)
At the risk of being howled down by waves of insider-metropolitan derision for being conspiracy theorists, let us sceptical Scottish natives begin by recalling the sheer power of secret elites to infiltrate, 'manage' (or else block) a range of civil society organisations, not least political parties and lobbying organisations.
At one level we observe that those who wish to lead 'Western democracies' (plus Nato and many EU bodies) seem to have to attend Bilderberg group meetings for group approval - or otherwise ( http://www.bilderberg.org/bilder.htm#wand)
More directly we recall with researchers like Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril the secret services' plotting against the Wilson government, their work with the CIA to promote the Atlanticist and pro-Zionist SDLP which let Thatcher - supported by Airey Neave and MI5 take over, then break the power of the unions with the aid of big business and the 'media-intel complex', and finally raise up New Labour - with Blair himself an MI5 informer/agent of influence, according to David Shayler www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/westcountry/2005/10/325840.html .
[This is consistent among much else with the coincidence that on first arrival in the Commons he 'happened' to be allocated a room with Militant MP and fellow 'new boy', David Nellist]. (See Ramsay's brilliant little The Rise of New Labour, 2002, and Ramsay and Dorril's Smear: Wilson and the Secret State, 1991]
Now that New Labour has served its purpose for a while, one can see the hand of history (Bilderberg, etc) moving back to support David Cameron, at least so long as he drops his 'traditional tory' objections to neo-con revolutionism abroad.
As for the LibDems I believe that here too a degree of MI5 influence at the top is the rule rather than the exception. One thinks of the eminently blackmailable Jeremy Thorpe, whose long-known-about predatory interest in boys and young men, was eventually exposed by a section of MI5 as a way to destroy the Lab-Lib pact.
[The role of MI5 sponsored boys homes/abuse circles in Northern Ireland (Kincora), Scotland (Dunblane) and probably Cardiff mirrors on a smaller scale the systematic role that State-sponsored child abuse has played in the certain centres of power in the US, also in Brussels. see the work of Glen Yeadon: http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/littleboys.html .]
Staying with the LibDems we've seen military intelligence officer Paddy Ashdown rise to leadership, plus the tendency of 'unreliable' contenders for the leadership to implode, leaving the field clear for St Andrews based safe pair of hands Menzies Cambell, a confirmed Atlanticist who has developed pretending to be critical of the West while pulling all his punches into an art form.
As for the antiwar Left I take it for granted that MI5 manages to play a role in guiding certain key groupings, promoting those perspectives which it may not like but with which it can live, and shutting out as beyond the pale other perspectives, e.g. on false-flag terrorism or on the 'War on Drugs'.
(Of course there are many other difficulties and shortcomings which confront all of us who want serious social change, many of which many better be understood in 'structural' terms, or in terms of institutional, gender, economic, cultural, social-psychological, psychological and even spiritual perspectives, rather than - or rather than mainly - the products of fiendish para-political manipulations by ruling and other secret fraternities .... ). But unless we are alert to the possibility or actuality of the latter, then we can easily over-explain in other terms ('Scottish cringe') or misunderstand what is really going on.
This said, although the then male-dominated SSP will surely have had its fair share of people who tended to see things in dualistic terms, which predisposes the left to splits over many years, who can seriously imagine that MI5 hasn't played some role in possibly entrapping and then exposing Sheridan, and then stirring things further towards a destructive party split? This is a big part of the background to the 'success' that the Scottish parliament has now been 'cleansed' of any serious ideological opposition to neo-liberalism.
However the 'threat' from the left isn't the only threat the British State has to worry about. The 70's saw a rise of a strong Scottish Nationalist tide, whose ebbing is surely connected with the association of nationalism with extremism in the public mind.
Again, one doesn't wish to paint out of the picture the Braveheart syndrome of masculinist nationalism, which deterred and deters many throughtful people, especially women, from embracing and fashioning the SNP as a internationalist and national, not a nationalist party. Yet granted this vulnerability was there in the eighties, we also need to be aware of the role played by the likes of Major Busby and other agents of the British State, and the numerous 'liberation armies' they spawned, ever ready to claim credit for bomb blasts, hoaxes, letter bombs, etc.
Of course they also drew in some naive 'genuine' extremists they were manipulating, inciting, etc (See Tartan Terrorism and the Anglo-American State by Andrew Murray Scott and Iain MacLeay, 1990) For a recent parallel we need to realise that secret services now manipulate and largely create the phenomenon of 'Islamic' terrorism: see Nafeez Ahmed's brilliant online article Subverting 'Terrorism': Muslim Problem or Covert Operations Nighmare? ) .
Both these texts are aware of the determination of the British and 'Western' (US/Zionist) Powers that Be not to give up power lightly. Thus we get the phenomenon of false-flag terrorism, e.g. the use of Brigadier Kitson's pseudo-gangs moving back from Kenya to Northern Ireland (Force Reconnaissance Unit) and then out again to Basra and Baghdad (Joint Services group), all the time being given ideological cover by 'counter-insurgency' 'terrorism' experts in the RAND Corporation-linked Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews, as chronicled by Campaign Against Criminalising Communities http://www.campacc.org.uk/embedded.htm .
Although the SNP leadership is prepared to trim to the needs of business to get into office (witness, many believe, the convenient dropping of the popular demand for re-regulation of the buses just prior to receiving half a million pounds from Brian Souter), Salmond remains too unpredictable, anti-war and anti-Trident for comfort. In any case nationalism has a tendency not just to derail class politics but sometimes to stimulate class and anti-imperialist awareness.
Greater Scottish confidence and mental independence could manifest in dangerous ways, e.g. it might question other aspects of the British (Anglo-American) State, e.g. the right of central banks to make (debt-freighted) money 'out of nothing'; or the British Broadcasting Corporation's slavish endorsement of the absurd 911 nonsense - even down to actively reporting the 'collapse' of the Salomon Brothers Building Seven 30 minutes before it was internally blown up and fell at the speed of air resistance at 5.20! (http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2007/260207building7.htm ; on the demolitions at the World Trade Centre, see www.911review.com and www.911scholars.org )
Hence, as Scottish Nationalism appears to be on the rise again, we can expect the Anglo-American State to revive the use of a panoply of tactics - including false-flag terrorism ascribed to 'extreme nationalists'; attempts to entrap, blackmail and discredit SNP leaders; concerted economic threats and announcements by Unionist business leaders, bankers or even (as in the 1980's) the US ambassador, etc.
The emergence of well-funded groups like Scottish Voice on a policy-free pro-Unionist agenda may or may not be creating a flexible vehicle for future media-interventions - its founder is the son of Col David Stirling whose GB75 citizen army was recruiting people to help maintain order in a coup in the seventies.
Awareness of the record of the British State abroad suggests that it often seeks to cling to power in (and over) a country by means of stirring one ethnic or religious group up against another. Here we all need to be aware of the amount of sectarian tinder which still lies around in many parts of Scotland, with the danger that Rangers-supporters could increasingly be encouraged to define themselves against the Scottish nationalism of Celtic-supporters.
At times the BNP - which sees itself as coming to power via crises - may also play a role in stirring up Islamophobia. Ruling parties desperately clinging onto power also suggest the playing of the nationalist card by Milosovic in former Yugoslavia. Gordon Brown could yet be tempted into further dog-whistle-Protestant British Unionism as the nationalist tide rises closer to Kirkcaldy??
What other techniques might the UKUS use? - or be already using? I see the LD obduracy , when the referendum would be bound to lead to what the Libdems say they want (greater powers short of full indep), along with
the revival of the MI5/'Scottish National Liberation Army' bomb scare stuff from the eighties(Sunday Mail last weekend) and the introduction of Take it on Trust hightech voting is may interest you on dangers of electronic voting - both fraud and
citizen profiling.
http://www.talkdemocracy.org.uk/talk/viewtopic.php?t=118 - see DRS link via Peladon Software to Diebold -
as all part of a pattern which also coincides with
elimination of the Parliamentary opponentsof neo-liberalism (sure the socialists fought among themselves, but some of it was deliberately exacerbated I think).