Too Bad

I am talking to my son, and he is describing a lecture he just had at University. It was about archaeology in war zones – what happens when a war rolls over our heritage. The lecturer showed video of military tanks clanking over ancient temples…and then said that the real story was not there, but was in the fact that these sites were looted first, that the statues, the pottery, the art was stolen, packaged and shipped out for sale to the highest bidder. With the funds, of course, coming back in the form of guns, bullets and more tanks. The pillaged loot was re-badged in Basel, and sold in London.

London! Trading in stolen artefacts! Why does so much immoral trade circuit through London?

This week’s Commons vote illustrates part of the problem. London is the node in a network of former colonies including the British Virgin Islands, which have allowed people to set up companies whose ownership is opaque, or directly anonymous. So whether you are dealing in stolen statues or offering ‘riot control’ equipment to dodgy regimes you can trade through London’s former colonies, or its Crown Dependencies.

Westminster could have stopped this years ago. But they didn’t. It took 14 rebel Tories, including the increasingly belligerent Ken Clarke, to force a Government climb-down.

Why? Because we are badly governed. We have a bad government in Westminster, a rotten government. I don’t mean the Tory party, although they are fully part of the problem. I mean the government. Westminster bends its ear too easily to the lobbyists – from the arms trade, from the City, from the architects of tax-avoidance schemes, from the multinationals… Westminster is too full of clubbable chaps who went to school with the chaps who are now doing the dodgy deals.

Westminster is corruptible, and corrupted.

And Westminster rules Scotland. ‘Rules’ in the imperial, Britannia sense, as the Brexit power grab shows. Rules in the expectation that the people of Scotland will be grateful for the crumbs from Westminster’s very fat loaf.


The big decisions – who we go to war with next, how we control the power of wealth, what we do or don’t do about climate change, which American multinational we let off the fiscal hook, how we set quotas for immigration – are all taken by a rotten government on behalf of Scotland.

Scotland needs an independent modern government. A government that is transparent, open and representative, so that everyone can walk into Holyrood and feel that someone there shares their interests or their concerns. We also need, as Lesley Riddoch keeps reminding us, good local government with the power and the money to resolve local issues. We need to pass our own laws, to work out how we live and love together, through a parliament that is not held in the palm of the lobbyists. We need independence.


There is a similar feeling about Madrid. Even the right-wing El País asks whether we should be 'organising public life [by] relying on Mafia techniques.' The corruption, and the extraordinary collusion of the judiciary in locking up elected politicians for their opinions, are leading many Catalans to the conclusion that independence is the only way of getting a government that functions.

An escape from under the heel of a bad government is one of the reasons why half the people of Scotland, and half the people of Catalonia, want independence. We’ve both had more than 250 years of it, and it gives us the dry boke.

Mea culpa

I voted for the Tony Blair Labour party in 1997. 

Mr Blair took Britain into Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. His government, under Blair's Defence Secretary George Robertson also signed up for extraordinary rendition, allowing the CIA to use UK airports to abduct people to torture - the subject of John le Carré's desperate and brilliant "A Most Wanted Man." 

These wars destabilised a region already on its knees after a succession of wars supported by Westminster; the bombing of Libya in 1986 with the collusion of Margaret Thatcher and the 1991 Gulf War under her successor John Major.

The warmongering continues. Westminster licensed for export £537m in arms to the Middle East and North Africa region in the past 12 months including the grenades that maim and the bombers that kill. These are the weapons that are driving people into the waters of the Mediterranean.

And now there are 13 million refugees from Syria, some of whom want to escape the horror by coming to Europe. Half of these people are children, as this week's news dramatically underlined.

This is me. This is us.

I am to blame for the refugee crisis. Me, and the 13.5 million other people who voted for Tony Blair in 1997. We supported a government, another government,  that created death, destruction and a space for anarchy in the Levant. We, all of us who voted for Westminster, created this situation. 

Now we must take action. 

We must provide a home for the people whose homes our bombs have destroyed. It may only be for a while - most refugees want to get back home - but we must open our borders, provide secure routes to safety and share our enormous wealth with these people.

And then we must turn against the Westminster that creates war. We must have a government that creates peace and dialogue, not war, destruction and death. And if Westminster cannot manage that, then Scotland must.

Je suis Charlie

We appear to be at war. Al Qaeda, and ISIS in Iraq and the Levant, have sent their emissaries into our homes and offices – yesterday those of Charlie Hebdo in Paris – to kill, maim and frighten. We, or at least Washington, Westminster and to a lesser degree Paris, have sent back drones, planes and bombs that kill soldiers and civilians.

The newspapers here in Catalonia are predicting that yesterday’s killings in Paris will strengthen the extremists (Marine le Pen et ses plusieurs amies) in France, just as drone strikes must radicalise the populations of Pakistan, Afghanistan or the Yemen. UKIP and the slightly more barmy BNP in the UK are likely to benefit too.

This feels like war. 

There are deaths. There is the cry that these deaths, here, are wrong. There is propaganda, and the involvement of secret services, drones and a Fifth Column (a term devised in Spain).

How should Scotland react?

Scotland could join the war. Send troops, arms, bombs into the Levant.

No. That is not going to stop the killing. Our young men and women, and those living in the Levant, would all lose out from such a policy.

Scotland should do the reverse. We already have active, peaceful, friendly Muslim communities in our cities and towns. We should multiply our efforts to make friends in the Muslim world, to build bridges, to offer people a route out of the poverty and injustice that are part of the background to this stupid, tragic, murderous conflict. Each of us can do that.

We will resolve this conflict, like all conflicts, by listening to the other side, understanding her or him, and then learning that her struggle is our struggle – her call for justice, peace, and an end to poverty is ours too.

I hope that Scotland can do that before the barriers slam down.