Posts Tagged ‘Open Democracy’
The First Tony Blair Book and the Failure of New Labour
Gerry Hassan
Open Democracy, September 5th 2010
This week has been a total Blair-fest. The launch of Tony Blair’s memoirs, the carefully crafted and controlled TV interviews, and the even more planned book signing with resulting protests. It has all had a certain cinematic, star quality to it; like outtakes from Piers Brosnan in ‘The Ghost’.
An interesting aspect of ‘Tony Blair: A Journey’ is how little Blair wrote as a politician, and how temporary and superficial it all was. So where Gordon Brown has written or edited thirteen books (most of them not very good one can say – with the exception of James Maxton: A Biography), ‘A Journey’ is only Blair’s second book.
The first Blair book was ‘New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country’ published in the sunny uplands of New Labourland 1996 pre-landslide. It is a fascinating tome. It is light, breezy and chatty – in a nearly totally unself-conscious way. It is also deeply superficial and of the moment – not aspiring to be historic – while hoping that it is part of history in the making. Read the rest of this entry »
The Coming Scottish Revolution and Tony Blair’s Memoirs
Gerry Hassan
Open Democracy, September 2nd 2010
Scottish politics have been in a sense of disbelief since the UK general election. The Con-Lib Dem coalition government is being slowly assessed by the main two parties north of the border, SNP and Labour.
We have an SNP administration under Alex Salmond – which has proven itself a decent, competent, relatively popular administration – which now seems to have run out of money and ideas. And a Scottish Labour Party under the uncharismatic Iain Gray which seems even more bereft of ideas, but which thinks it can win next year’s Scottish Parliament elections by posing as the more effective defender of Scottish interests against the coalition.
Scotland feels like a nation and political community waiting for something dramatic to happen. None of the parties north of the border really seem to be active agents in the climate of public spending cuts and coming age of austerity. Read the rest of this entry »
Where Scotland Stands? The Strange State of the Scottish Left and the Cultural Assembly of a Nation
Gerry Hassan
Open Democracy, August 18th 2010
The left in Scotland is in not in a good state on any level, in terms of numbers on the ground, ideas, the wider environment and its general psyche. Clearly if we were talking about the old Stalin point of how many divisions the Pope has – the Scottish left have very little of an army remaining to call to arms. This sad state of affairs has dawned more upon me in recent years through a number of discussions, and the coming of the Parliament has made the threadbare prospectus of the left more obvious. While recently the significant discussion started by my Jimmy Reid essay posted on Facebook – illustrated some of the left’s worst characteristics (1).
Lets start with the Reid piece and work back. Jimmy Reid was an immense and fascinating character; of that no one can be in any doubt. The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders struggle was totemic and real, a major point of resistance to Heath, an attempt to build a new left in Scotland, and ultimately, an expression of that left’s failure.
I always had numerous problems with Reid’s politics and public persona. And part of this is autobiographical. When I was a young boy growing up in Dundee in a political household with a Communist father and feminist and community activist mother, the political voices I heard were Dundonian or from far away. Reid was my introduction to the West of Scotland political left man; until that point the only comparison I had was with Billy Connolly – who to a young pre-teenage boy making sense of the world – seemed a joy to watch. Read the rest of this entry »
The Last Man of Iron: Who Comes After the Jimmy Reids of this World?
Gerry Hassan
Open Democracy, August 13th 2010
The tributes to Jimmy Reid have been many and fulsome. They have come from across the political spectrum and from near and far – from his hometown of Glasgow to the Govan of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, to across the UK and internationally.
If Reid hadn’t lived and led the public life he did, you almost feel that he would have been invented. His life and persona told the story of a certain part of Scotland: of Red Clydeside, the wider radical tradition, industry, and what it means to be a man in the West of Scotland.
Reid was an important figure and a fascinating and complex one. Yet I find myself feeling unease about the content and scale of the tributes. Something is going on here which does not feel right. It goes much further than not speaking ill of the dead. There is a celebration that moves beyond nostalgia as if hoping that by saying the equivalent of ‘we won’t see his like again’ maybe, magically we can. Thus, Alex Ferguson talks fondly of Reid and the importance of ‘shipbuilding’ and ‘socialism’, and yet Ferguson operates in a world of hi-finance where his football team is the plaything of the US Glazer brothers. Read the rest of this entry »
Where do we go from here?
Part Three: Agency and self-determinations, retaking the future without Marx
Gerry Hassan and Anthony Barnett
Open Democracy, August 5th 2010
This is the third, final, exchange of a wide-ranging three part conversation between Anthony Barnett and Gerry Hassan, touching on the state of British politics and democracy and how the left – weak and disorganised in the face of a resurgent neoliberalism – can propose and build alternatives to the dominant dogmas of the past thirty years. You can read Part I ‘The frustrations of British politics’ here, and Part 2 ‘Challenging the Official Future’ here.
Gerry, Thanks very much indeed,
Your response has sent me into shock. I good one, perhaps, but also painful, hence the delay in my reply. One part of me is trying to sort out what to make of the peculiar new situation here in the UK. Has the Coalition given energy to a conservative modernisation, talking about ‘progressive fairness’ while, despite great legislation on liberty, reasserting traditional forms of centralised control behind a programme of indirect rule known as ‘the Big Society’? Or can its communitarian appeal to self-help gather genuine political momentum?
But you have called for something more far-reaching than a response to the British situation, however sweeping this might be in confronting the entire edifice of British rule. You want to recast the way to think about change in terms of four forms of self-determination: economic, social and cultural and even “futures self-determination” which you see as perhaps the most important. This approach and its terminology to replace socialism.
I want to agree. Let’s put aside the hubris in any claim to “futures self-determination” which I’d certainly argue over as I think modesty is a central virtue not just a character trait (see Philip Pullman at the Convention).
Replacing socialism has to be a practical and strategic ambition not just a theoretical or moral one. It is all very well calling for a better way of life and a political ideology that could replace socialism or social democracy, but who is going to make it happen? What force or agency could deliver your self-determinations? What interests could be gathered around such an approach and successfully defy the currently existing vested interests of the state and corporate capitalism? Read the rest of this entry »
