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19 SEPTEMBER 2014 ISSUE
SCOTLAND: WHAT NEXT?
*After the referendum, nothing will be the same again*
JASON COWLEY WRITES FROM EDINBURGH
ALAN TAYLOR: HOW I SAVED AND LOST THE UNION
ANDREW MARR ON MOB RULE AND BAD REVIEWS
HELEN LEWIS ASKS WHETHER DEVOLUTION IS
REALLY SO GREAT
NEW STATESMAN LEADER: AFTER THE REFERENDUM
JEREMY BOWEN REPORTS FROM DAMASCUS
ON ASSAD AND ISIS
Plus
GEORGE EATON: BRITAIN’S FOREIGN POLICY SHOWS CAMERON’S FLAWS
MEHDI HASAN: THE FIRST “WAR ON TERROR” WAS A FAILURE.
DO WE REALLY NEED A SEQUEL?
ERICA WAGNER VISITS NORWAY TO DISCOVER WHAT IBSEN CAN
TELL US ABOUT 21ST-CENTURY LIFE
STEVE RICHARDS COMPARES LABOUR’S TRIUMPHALISM IN 1996
WITH THE MOOD TODAY
FRANCIS BECKETT ON THE RISE AND FALL OF NEIL KINNOCK,
THE MAN WHO SAVED LABOUR
SOPHIE McBAIN MEETS THE SCIENTISTS AND TECH ENTREPRENEURS
PREPARING FOR THE APOCALYPSE
STEVEN POOLE FINDS NAOMI KLEIN’S BOOK ON CLIMATE CHANGE
VEERS INTO MUMBO-JUMBO
MARTIN ROWSON: THE CARTOONIST TAKES A SATIRICAL SWIPE AT THE COALITION’S PROGRESS
ANDREW MARR’S DIARY: WHY I’M TORN OVER
SCOTLAND, THE PLEASURES OF GETTING FATTER, AND
AN AUDIENCE AT No 10
The Scottish broadcaster, journalist and (now) novelist Andrew Marr writes the NS Diary this week, reflecting on the Scottish independence referendum, bloggers, the tattooed troops of the Orange Order and the Downing Street party that launched his debut novel, Head of State.
“I find myself horribly torn,” Marr writes:
What’s happening is essentially a gentle revolution against the British state, directed and circumscribed through the ballot box. Up in Scotland, virtually all my friends are Yes voters, hugely excited about real change. Virtually all my family are iron-clad Nos, deeply upset by the demise of the country they grew up in.
Of course I don’t have a vote; and that’s one area where I am in 100 per cent agreement with the Scottish government. It’s true that the franchise means many people who have settled in Scotland only months ago can vote, while people like me, with only Scots in my family tree (with one French exception) going back for centuries, can’t vote. But what’s the alternative, pray? Digging back through the DNA, talking about who’s racially Scottish? Naw, thanks.
Much has been made of the intimidating tactics used by Yes supporters over the course of the campaign – but nobody has made mention of the “absolutely terrifying” presence of the Orangemen backing the No campaign, who filled Waverley Station when Marr arrived in Edinburgh to interview Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling last week.
Later on, before our interviews, we asked the two politicians to toss a coin to decide
who would go first. I used a fat, gold-coloured “five-ryal” coin, part of a set produced by the International Numismatic Agency as a potential currency for an independent Scotland. Salmond, who has his own set as a keepsake, tossed the coin. He announced he’d lost even before he could see how it had landed, and graciously asked Darling whether he wanted to go first or second. As a tiny piece of political theatre, symbolising bland self-confidence, it was very clever.
After a Guardian journalist refers to him in print as “stocky”, Marr reflects that a daily “meditative pint of IPA” and “the haggis-and-black-pudding breakfasts in Edinburgh, are beginning to tell”. All the same, he is “calmer, and certainly happier, as a result” – even as the reviews for his novel, “some of them . . . keen, others rather less so”, pour in. Finally, he describes a party held at 10 Downing Street on 16 September to celebrate the launch of the book:
A good chunk of the cabinet, plus senior Labour people, turned up at Downing Street on Tuesday night to support the stroke charity that has done a huge amount for me – Action for Rehabilitation from Neurological Injury (Arni). The acronym works because it’s based on hard training – lots of kettle bells, and so on – and members of the Arni team were very visible in the throng. They were mostly genial, tough-looking and thickset men walking with a slight limp.
The Prime Minister had no visible limp. He did look a bit hot but he’d just been for a run. Michael Gove, who as Chief Whip has the PM’s fate in his hands, was watching from the back. Even now, most people I spoke to believe the referendum result will be a No and the main political problem will be placating English Tory MPs angry about Scottish concessions. The previous night, I’d spoken to a very senior parliamentarian about plans for a new federal Britain. There are no plans. “We simply haven’t considered the possibility of the Scots voting to go,” I was told. Hmm. As of Wednesday morning, this feels, to put it gently, unwise.
*Read Andrew Marr’s diary in full below*
JEREMY BOWEN – SYRIA NOTEBOOK: BASHAR AL-ASSAD’S MEN AND THE REBELS AGREE ON ONE THING: ISLAMIC STATE IS A DANGER TO THEM ALL
Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, travels to Syria, where he considers the recent observation by Pope Francis that, “even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third world war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction”. The notion that we are in a continual state of war feels plausible. As Bowen notes: “In recent times I have reported from Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad and Gaza. Everywhere was at war.”
He then describes the situation in Damascus:
Damascus is always a little surreal. Most of the city functions and is not damaged. Lives have been transformed, broken and ended by the war, but the shops are open and yellow taxis cram the streets. The sounds of war are so familiar that most people no longer look up when they hear a military jet screaming its way towards another air strike on the rebels in the suburbs.
But if you go to the edge of the area held by the regime, you can see the damage, and in places it is colossal. Block after block has been flattened. Sometimes we are able to cross over into rebel-held territory. Most of the civilians have gone. Streets are piled high with rubble. Buildings are so tattered by shelling that they could be made of paper. In recent weeks Syrian government troops have been on the offensive, trying to take back suburbs that have been held by armed rebels since they had began appearing openly on the streets some time around the New Year of 2012. The rebels are hitting back. As I’ve been writing this, four rockets came in near our hotel, which is also the main UN headquarters.
And the anti-Assad Syrian rebels have fears about Islamic State:
Many of the armed men I have met who are fighting the regime around Damascus have some of the trappings of Islamist fighters – headbands with extracts from the Quran, beards, and so on – but they have all been Syrians, not foreigners, and they have said that they want an Islamic state on the lines of Turkey, not Arabia 1,400 years ago. A commander I met on my last trip across the lines said that if Islamic State came to Damascus the IS fighters would want to kill them all.
The Syrian end of the war that began as an uprising by demonstrators is a tangled, deadly mess of rivalries and alliances. The danger is that the international response to IS led by the United States will graft another layer of war on to the conflicts that already exist:
The Paris conference on 15 September was designed to add legitimacy to an American-led campaign by enlisting Sunni Muslim countries. British officials who have been giving anonymous quotes to newspapers expressed a hope that the Saudis, or the Emiratis, might even use some of the warplanes they have bought at huge expense from Britain and America to help with the bombing.
Even if they did that, and I think they will be very reluctant, raids would be no less of a recruiting sergeant for the jihadists. Military force is part of the answer against men as murderous as the foot soldiers of Islamic State. But so is making them look less attractive to disaffected and alienated youths. One way to do this might be by working much harder to end those parts of the war in Syria that do not include IS. Enemies here agree that the group is a danger to them all. So get them all talking about ways to stop IS. Some co-operation on the battlefield might even lead to other kinds of deals.
JASON COWLEY – EDITOR’S NOTE: EDINBURGH REACHES FEVER PITCH, SALMOND’S “CONTINUITY CHANGE”, AND NICK ROBINSON SMELLS ANXIETY
Jason Cowley, the editor of the New Statesman, writes from Edinburgh, where the atmosphere is “febrile; there is an imminent sense of an ending – of the end of the long campaign, of the end even of the United Kingdom”. He is reminded of Alex Salmond’s reassurance strategy for Scottish voters, which can be summed up as “continuity in change”, and of how Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote in The Leopard, his acclaimed, melancholic novel about the decline of an aristocratic Sicilian family and the unification of Italy: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
When I visited Alistair Darling at the Better Together offices in Glasgow in June, I asked him what a good result would be. “A good result in September is one that puts the matter [of independence] to bed for a generation,” he said. I pushed him to elaborate: would less than 40 per cent voting Yes be convincing enough? “I’ll tell you when I see it. What you want people to say is we’ve had our referendum and we’ve made our decision. We need a good turnout . . .”
Darling will get his good turnout – it was wonderful that nearly 4.3 million people in Scotland registered to vote, 97 per cent of all those eligible – but surely not the resounding victory he and his allies expected only a few weeks ago. Yet however close the final result, Scotland has experienced something remarkable and precious during these summer months: a democratic awakening that has shaken the very foundations of the British state. If we want things in Britain to stay as they are, things will have to change.
GEORGE EATON: THE POLITICS COLUMN
“It is just 13 months since David Cameron become the first prime minister to lose a vote on a matter of peace and war since 1782,” begins George Eaton, the political editor of the New Statesman, in his column this week. Many have seen that vote, in August last year, as an epochal shift comparable to Suez; the former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown lamented the move as a lurch “towards isolationism”.
And now it seems hard to believe that, once again, the UK is facing the possibility of military action against the jihadists of Islamic State.
Some of the 30 Tory MPs who voted against intervention in Syria are prepared publicly to support military action against Islamic State. One of the rebels, Sarah Wollaston, tells me: “Last time round, we didn’t have Arab League backing and we do this time. The intervention has to be led by local and regional powers; otherwise, it’s just seen as a vendetta against Muslims.” But most Tory rebels remain unmoved. John Redwood, who abstained on the government motion last year, bluntly says: “I am not persuaded that we should be bombing Iraq or Syria.”
It is Labour that will determine whether Cameron becomes the fourth successive prime minister to preside over military action in Mesopotamia. After thwarting the PM last summer, in what the Tories denounced as an act of betrayal (Labour sources maintain that no “blank cheque” was ever signed), the opposition is regarded with suspicion and enmity. But there is as yet no evidence that the two parties’ positions will diverge.
*Read the Politics Column in full below*
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For more press information, please contact Philip Maughan on philip.maughan@newstatesman.co.uk
NOTES TO EDITORS
*Read Andrew Marr, the Politics Column and our Leader in full*
Andrew Marr
The Diary
Why I’m torn over Scotland, the pleasures of getting fatter, and an audience at No10
Sorry, readers: I’m a little too old, writing this a couple of days before the referendum, to call it. The polls are too tight, there are too many newly registered voters; and for once, the last-minute round of canvassing, pleading and cajoling may tip the balance.
I’ve been told by No activists that early returns show them ahead; but Yes are at the moment conveying much greater optimism. I find myself horribly torn. What’s happening is essentially a gentle revolution against the British state, directed and circumscribed through the ballot box. Up in Scotland, virtually all my friends are Yes voters, hugely excited about real change. Virtually all my family are iron-clad Nos, deeply upset by the demise of the country they grew up in.
Of course I don’t have a vote; and that’s one area where I am in 100 per cent agreement with the Scottish government. It’s true that the franchise means many people who have settled in Scotland only months ago can vote, while people like me, with only Scots in my family tree (with one French exception) going back for centuries, can’t vote. But what’s the alternative, pray? Digging back through the DNA, talking about who’s racially Scottish? Naw, thanks.
Scot pols with cyberpunch
I haven’t been a big fan of blogging or bloggers, having come across too much spittle-flecked extremism from angry men skulking behind anonymity. But even for me, it’s time to stop judging the game by the behaviour of a few violent supporters. The Scottish referendum is the first big story I’ve covered where you haven’t got a clue what’s going on if you don’t turn to online media.
On the Yes side, the best site by far is Bella Caledonia, brimming with creativity, political punch and argument. In cyberland the pro-Union campaigners have lagged behind, though recently the Better Together website has successfully begun to mimic the wit and oomph of its opponents.
Anyway, I hold up my hand: on this, I’ve been wrong.
Salmond coins it
Going to Edinburgh last week to interview Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling, I’d been on the train, reading pretty horrifying accounts of aggression and intimidation by Yes campaigners. Then, as we tottered out into Waverley Station, I was greeted by a crowd of angry, burly and heavily tattooed men shouting about the referendum.
They were all No campaigners, waving Union Jacks, and they were absolutely terrifying. Was Alistair Darling – or Ed Miliband, or even David Cameron – bringing in the heavy mob? No, not really; the Orange Order was in town.
Later on, before our interviews, we asked the two politicians to toss a coin to decide who would go first. I used a fat, gold-coloured “five-ryal” coin, part of a set produced by the International Numismatic Agency as a potential currency for an independent Scotland. Salmond, who has his own set as a keepsake, tossed the coin. He announced he’d lost even before he could see how it had landed, and graciously asked Darling whether he wanted to go first or second. As a tiny piece of political theatre, symbolising bland self-confidence, it was very clever.
Ale and hearty
A Guardian interviewer, who came round to the house to talk about my new book, described me in her piece as “stocky”. I know what that means. If it’s true it means: “In real life, he’s a bit of a porker.” And it’s true. I’m getting fatter. It’s the fault of this Indian summer. Just down the road from where I live in London, we have a pub with chairs outside. Almost every day I walk down for a quiet, meditative pint of IPA. That, plus the haggis-and-black-pudding breakfasts in Edinburgh, are beginning to tell. But I am calmer, and certainly happier, as a result.
Critical distance
One needs a bit of serenity. My first novel, a comedy-satire about politics called Head of State, is now stumbling, like a bewildered newborn calf, through the fusillade of the critics. Some of them have been keen, others rather less so. One moment I’m being compared to Tom Sharpe, Dario Fo, Evelyn Waugh and Joe Orton (swollen head); the next moment, I learn that I’ve written a torrent of implausible tosh (stout party deflates). So I’m a little confused. Bad reviews are certainly better than no reviews, though it doesn’t always feel like that at the time.
The best advice I’ve had was from Ian McEwan, over breakfast after a recent Sunday show. He said it’s important to know what the reviews are like, broadly speaking, but equally important not to actually read them, for that is when the devastating little phrases creep into your brain and wake you in the middle of the night – what McEwan calls, crisply, “a waste of neural space”.
No plan of action
A good chunk of the cabinet, plus senior Labour people, turned up at Downing Street on Tuesday night to support the stroke charity that has done a huge amount for me – Action for Rehabilitation from Neurological Injury (Arni). The acronym works because it’s based on hard training – lots of kettle bells, and so on – and members of the Arni team were very visible in the throng. They were mostly genial, tough-looking and thickset men walking with a slight limp.
The Prime Minister had no visible limp. He did look a bit hot but he’d just been for a run. Michael Gove, who as Chief Whip has the PM’s fate in his hands, was watching from the back. Even now, most people I spoke to believe the referendum result will be a No and the main political problem will be placating English Tory MPs angry about Scottish concessions. The previous night, I’d spoken to a very senior parliamentarian about plans for a new federal Britain. There are no plans. “We simply haven’t considered the possibility of the Scots voting to go,” I was told. Hmm. As of Wednesday morning, this feels, to put it gently, unwise.
“The Andrew Marr Show” is broadcast on BBC1 (Sundays, 9am). “Head of State” is published by Fourth Estate (£18.99)
George Eaton
The Politics Column
The decision on whether to intervene in Iraq now rests in
Labour’s hands
It is just 13 months since David Cameron became the first prime minister to lose a vote on a matter of peace and war since 1782. After his defeat over potential military action in Syria, many spoke as if an epochal shift comparable to Suez had occurred. William Hague, the then foreign secretary, considered resigning and told colleagues that he didn’t want to represent “a country that is not prepared to act”. Paddy Ashdown lamented that the UK had lurched “towards isolationism”. One Conservative MP told me after the vote: “We won’t be involved in military action for the foreseeable future and certainly not in this parliament.”
But a year later, Westminster is again contemplating the use of force, this time to halt the murderous advance of Islamic State. The assertion of the Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, that the UK would play a “leading role” in the coalition assembled by the US was the clearest signal yet that parliament will soon be asked to give its approval to air strikes against the group in Iraq. One Downing Street strategist pointedly notes that Tornado fighter jets are already performing reconnaissance missions in the country – and they could easily shift to an offensive role.
While acknowledging the legal, technical and political obstacles, No 10 isn’t dismissing possible action in Syria. Conservative sources downplay suggestions that parliament could be recalled as early as 25 September (“We’re not at that stage yet”) but some Tory MPs can already see the political advantages. “It would blow the Ukip conference out of the water,” notes one with Machiavellian relish.
After Barack Obama’s skilful forging of an international coalition, one that crucially includes ten Arab states, Cameron’s task is to construct a domestic equivalent. Having broken one of the first rules of parliamentary politics last year – that prime ministers shouldn’t call votes they are going to lose – the Conservatives are acting with greater diligence this time. Party whips, now led
by Michael Gove, have canvassed opinion in the tearooms and have concluded that Cameron’s own side, even when combined with the Liberal Democrats, will not be big enough to guarantee him victory.
Some of the 30 Tory MPs who voted against intervention in Syria are prepared publicly to support military action against Islamic State. One of the rebels, Sarah Wollaston, tells me: “Last time round, we didn’t have Arab League backing and we do this time. The intervention has to be led by local and regional powers; otherwise, it’s just seen as a vendetta against Muslims.” But most Tory rebels remain unmoved. John Redwood, who abstained on the government motion last year, bluntly says: “I am not persuaded that we should be bombing Iraq or Syria.”
It is Labour that will determine whether Cameron becomes the fourth successive prime minister to preside over military action in Mesopotamia. After thwarting the PM last summer, in what the Tories denounced as an act of betrayal (Labour sources maintain that no “blank cheque” was ever signed), the opposition is regarded with suspicion and enmity. But there is as yet no evidence that the two parties’ positions will diverge. Beyond opposing the deployment of “boots on the ground” (as the government does), Labour strategists emphasise they are “ruling nothing out”. One tells me the party has adopted a “bipartisan approach”, resisting the temptation to seek political advantage from the government’s often conflicting messages. Ed Miliband has supported the arming of the Kurds, British logistical support and, most significantly, targeted air strikes against Islamic State by the US.
Less than eight months before a general election, when partisan tensions are normally at their highest, some in Labour are even moved to rare praise for Cameron. One shadow cabinet minister commends his “patient multilateralism”, and another senior figure notes: “This is not a macho moment like in August 2013. He’s not doing grandstanding.”
Some of the loudest interventionist voices come from the opposition benches. Peter Hain, the former Labour cabinet minister, tells me that the government should consider “opening back-channels” to the Assad regime in order to enable air strikes in Syria. Ann Clwyd, who served as Tony Blair’s special envoy to Iraq, says that it is “irresponsible” to rule out the use of ground troops ultimately to repel Islamic State. Were Miliband to oppose air strikes, he would face a rebellion greater than that over Syria, when four Labour MPs (Clwyd, Ben Bradshaw, Meg Munn and John Woodcock) refused to vote against the government motion.
His likely support for them should not come as a surprise. Not since 1935, when Ernest Bevin denounced his leader George Lansbury for “hawking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what to do with it”, has Labour been a pacifist party. Unlike the extra-parliamentary left, Michael Foot was resolute in his support for the Falklands war in 1982. And though labelled as a peacenik due to his opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion and his sceptical stance on Syria, Miliband, too, stands in this internationalist tradition. In March 2011, invoking Britain’s failure to act during the Spanish civil war, he supported intervention in Libya to prevent a massacre in Benghazi.
Rather than the dawn of a new age of isolationism, the Syria vote is now identifiable as an accidental pause. After Cameron’s defeat, senior Labour figures confessed that they were surprised by his abrupt rejection of military action. Those events raised the bar for parliamentary approval of intervention. But it is a bar that the Prime Minister, humbled by experience and shorn of bluster, is now in a position to clear.
Leader
After the referendum
The Scottish independence referendum was one that Labour long believed would never come to pass. Optimists were bullish: the former cabinet minister George Robertson confidently predicted that devolution would “kill nationalism stone dead”. Others, among them Tony Blair, recognised the potential for the Scottish National Party to dominate the new parliament but believed that the proportional electoral system used by Holyrood would deny the party the majority it needed to win a mandate to hold a referendum on independence. Both were wrong.
After forming a minority government in 2007, the SNP achieved a landslide victory in 2011. That result, which we predicted, exposed the enfeebled and hollowed-out state of the Scottish Labour Party in a country it once dominated. Having won nearly a million constituency votes in the first devolved election in 1999, Labour achieved just 630,000 in 2011. Its local branches have the lowest membership of any outside of southern England and it now holds fewer council seats than the SNP. In addition, many intellectuals, writers and artists in Scotland have long since given up on Labour. These people matter because they help to create a climate and a culture.
The SNP, once derided as a fringe party of eccentric nationalists and “tartan Tories”, has prospered by colonising the social-democratic territory historically occupied by Labour. As the frontiers of the welfare state have been rolled back in England, Alex Salmond has rolled them forward in Scotland. Since taking office, his government has scrapped National Health Service prescription charges, abolished university tuition fees and introduced free social care for the elderly. When the Scottish Labour leader, Johann Lamont, denounced this settlement as fiscally unsustainable and declared that Scotland could not be “the only something-for-nothing country in the world”, she misjudged the national mood.
From the beginning of the referendum campaign, Mrs Lamont and her colleagues struggled to win over disillusioned voters. Labour’s decision to offer the lowest level of devolution of any of the three main Westminster parties, despite polls showing majority support for “devo max”, left it without an attractive alternative to the status quo, until a desperate late scramble led by Gordon Brown.
With the exception of the quietly effective Douglas Alexander, it was outside the party’s front ranks that the most signs of life were shown. Jim Murphy, the shadow international development secretary, engaged thousands of voters through his admirable “100 Towns in 100 Days” speaking tour. In an age when stage-managed appearances drain mainstream politicians of all authenticity, Mr Murphy’s unrelenting defence of the Union from a platform made of two Irn-Bru crates was proof of the virtues of traditional campaigning. He has the look of a future Labour leader in Scotland, someone who has the qualities to take on and even defeat Mr Salmond and his popular deputy, Nicola Sturgeon.
Against the expectations of many, Mr Brown thrived in the final weeks of the campaign. Having presciently warned in the summer that Westminster had mistakenly framed the contest as a battle between Scotland and the UK, rather than one about Scotland, he seemed to take charge as the cross-party Better Together campaign floundered.
The former prime minister spoke at public meetings with passion and clarity. It was Mr Brown who reframed the debate by proposing a “modern form of home rule” and who, because of his deep understanding of history, articulated the unique achievement of the Union: the creation of a multinational state in which not merely civil and political freedoms but economic and social rights are shared.
Such was his righteous fury at the SNP’s claim that the Scottish NHS was threatened by Westminster, despite health being a devolved matter, that Mr Brown even vowed to stand for election to Holyrood if the First Minister did not desist. If, as expected, he resigns his Westminster seat in May 2015, he could yet thrive as a political pugilist in a new arena.
Yet if Scottish Labour is to be rebuilt, it will not be through the efforts of individuals such as Mr Brown and Mr Murphy alone. Rather, it must draw inspiration from the energy, civic nationalism and creativity demonstrated by the pro-independence movement. The emergence of what Gerry Hassan, the co-author of The Strange Death of Labour Scotland, calls the “Third Scotland” has been one of the most inspiring legacies of an invigorating campaign in which a nation asked itself fundamental questions about identity and purpose and, in so doing, inspired a democratic reawakening.