The Revolutionary Struggle and Climate Change

The struggle against climate change is a  revolutionary struggle

Introduction/Conclusion
Rural resistance to wind energy is rooted in a refusal to recognise the reality of climate change and the belief that it is possible to protect the countryside (=nature) against industrialisation. But in Galloway and Dumfriesshire, the countryside is already industrialised via farming and forestry. Furthermore, individuals from the region played an active and significant role in the construction of industrial capitalism in England and Scotland  and its spread worldwide.

Just as  the region was involved in the beginnings of climate change, so it will also be affected by the consequences of climate change which threaten the viability of farming and forestry as key regional industries. At the same time, attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and adapt to extreme weather events will require a radical restructuring of rural society and economy. This restructuring will require far more than a few wind farms. It will require a revolution as profound and challenging as the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth century.

For the past 250 years we have lived in a ‘for profit’ society. For just as long there has been a struggle to resist the transformation of ourselves and our worlds into an immense accumulation of commodities. Critical to this struggle has been the  knowledge that even the empire of commodities must one day fall.

Driven by necessity, by the stimulus of greater profits through technological efficiency, nineteenth century engineers and scientists developed and applied a new science of thermodynamics to the heat engines which powered industrial capitalism. Even the earth’s climate could be imagined as heat engine, driven by energy from the sun. Although only a small part of earth’s atmosphere, it was realised that carbon dioxide played a key role in this process so that increasing carbon dioxide levels would  tend to warm the planet and change its climate. The most serious impact of climate change will be on food production. Every civilisation known has depended on their ability to produce food surpluses. No food surplus = no civilisation.

The most likely result of climate change will be the end of a ‘for profit’ society and a return to a ‘for survival’ society. This is a desperately bleak prospect. It should be concentrating minds on the political, social and economic transition to a de-carbonised culture. We need to realise that the struggle against climate change is a revolutionary struggle.


Industrialising the Countryside
If the Letters pages of the local press are to be believed, the biggest threat facing Dumfries and Galloway is the onward march of industry. Unless it can be stopped, the entire population will be driven mad as  monstrous machines stride unchecked across the landscape. Every time the wind blows, the razor sharp blades of thousands of wind turbines will scythe a path of destruction through this green and pleasant land. What was once a place of tranquil, timeless, natural beauty will become a desolate wilderness ruined forever by dark satanic windmills.

So densely gothic is the rhetoric it is difficult to parody. It is also widely reproduced, so well rehearsed that similar sentiments fly from the pens of anti-wind farmers across the UK. What makes the local examples so irritating is the postmodern, ahistorical, depthlessness of these attacks on the future the wind turbines symbolise. The landscape the wind turbines exist within has changed and is changing in response to powerful economic pressures. The economic forces in turn are shaped and influenced by the cumulative impact of 12 000 years of the region’s human history. The human history in turn has been shaped and influenced by the region’s geology and ecology. In addition, national, international and global forces and factors have been important in the past. Such factors are even more important today.

The most significant of these external influences on Galloway and Dumfriesshire is climate change and it is the need to tackle climate change which is driving the construction of wind farms. The anti-wind farmers, if they do not deny the reality of climate change outright, deny that wind-farms will make any difference. In the background to the ‘industrialisation of the countryside’ rhetoric is the idea of rural areas as save havens  from urban modernity. Significantly, Ukip oppose both immigration and wind-energy.

As well as involving a denial of climate change, local opposition to wind energy also requires a denial of this region’s past and its present. Over the past fifty years, the intensification of dairy farming in the region’s lowland areas and the mechanisation of forestry in its upland areas have transformed the countryside. Both dairy farming and forestry are routinely described as ‘industries’.  Both have been responsible for a decrease in biodiversity. In Galloway and extending into Ayrshire,  the Doon, Ken and Dee river systems and their catchments were dramatically altered 80 years ago by the construction of a hydro-electric scheme.  The dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, tunnels, power stations and overhead power lines of this hydro-electric scheme also industrialised the countryside. Yet the anti-wind farmers simply ignore the impact of these industries on the environment.

Of course what the anti-wind farmers are trying to do is equate the spread wind turbines with a forest of smoke-blackened factory chimneys, as latter-day ‘dark satanic mills’ visually polluting a ‘green and pleasant land’. Lacking historical consciousness,  the anti-wind farmers are unaware that it was only thanks to an accident of geology that Dumfries and Galloway did not experience a coal-fired industrial revolution. In the 1770s, William Craik of Arbigland and Richard Oswald of Cavens  became convinced that there was coal to be found in Kirkbean parish. Southerness village was built to house the miners and act as a port for the export of the coal… but no coal was found. Across the Solway Firth, coal was mined from the 1660s in West Cumberland and exported to Ireland. Another search for coal was carried out near  the Isle of Whithorn in Wigtownshire, but again no coal was found.

There is coal around Canonbie in eastern Dumfriesshire, which has been mined. Coal is also found on the north side of the Southern Upland Fault, which runs from Girvan in the west to Dunbar in the east. In 1765, Stewartry of Kirkcudbright landowner Alexander Gordon had a short section of canal constructed  to carry marl (a lime rich clay) from Carlingwark Loch to the river Dee  near Threave Castle. North of this point the rivers Dee and Ken are navigable to New Galloway and Dalry at the head of Loch Ken. Gordon also promoted  a longer canal which would have linked the port of Kirkcudbright with this inland navigation. His aim was to continue the canal (or a primitive railway) all the way to Loch Doon and/or Dalmellington  where coal had been mined since the Middle Ages. A similar idea  was porpsed by civil engineer Robertson Buchanan in 1811,  when  he proposed linking the coal fields around Sanquhar with Dumfries by means of ‘Rail-Way’.

None of these bold plans came to fruition, but if they had, enthusiastic ‘improving’ landowners like James Murray of Gatehouse of Fleet and William Douglas of Castle Douglas and Newton Stewart (briefly renamed Newton Douglas) would have been able to use coal rather than water to power the cotton mills they promoted. Where coal and iron ore were available immediately to the north of the Southern Upland Fault near Dalmellington and Kirkconnell, iron smelting furnaces were built in the 1840s and 1850s. Even after local sources of iron ore were exhausted  by the early twentieth century, deep coal mining continued into the 1980s before being replaced by the open-cast coal mining which still (if only just) survives. Apart from coal/iron, lead was mined at Wanlockhead/ Leadhills and near Carsphairn. There were also a few small copper mines in the Stewartry between Minnigaff and Gatehouse of Fleet. Sandstone and limestone were and still are quarried in Dumfriesshire and granite near Creetown  and Dalbeattie where the Craignair quarry is still in operation.

Less obviously, since the immediate effects were experienced elsewhere, economic migrants from Galloway and Dumfriesshire played a significant role in the industrial revolution. Overlooking the A 75 Euroroute near Ringford in the Stewartry is a monument  celebrating the discovery of  the ‘hot-blast’ technique of iron-smelting by James Beaumont Neilson in 1828. Neilson’s discovery improved the efficiency of iron smelting, making it cheaper to  produce iron and allowed coal rather than coke to be used. It was also found that anthracite coal could be used in hot blast furnaces. This led to the growth of the iron industry in the USA and the development of the USA as a world industrial power. Although Neilson was born near Glasgow, his family were from the Stewartry. They claimed John Neilson of Corsock, who was killed in the 1666 Dalry/ Pentland Covenanter Uprising, as an ancestor. By 1848 Neilson had made enough money through licensing  his innovation to retire to Queenshill near Ringford where he died in 1865.

By 1828, a group of farmers’ sons from the Stewartry  of Kirkcudbright had already made their mark on the industrial revolution. After serving their apprenticeships with machine maker William Cannan (also from the Stewarty) at Chowbent in Lancashire, James McConnel, John Kennedy, Adam and George Murray set up as cotton spinners in Manchester in the 1790s. Their firms of Kennedy & McConnel and A & G Murray soon became the largest in Manchester, both employing over 1000 workers in their factories by 1815. John Kennedy also  helped secure the industrial revolution through his involvement in the Liverpool and Manchester railway, acting as a judge at the Rainhill Trials in 1829 which proved that steam locomotives were the future of transport.

Altogether it is possible to list at least 20 men from the south/ south-west of Scotland who influenced the development of the industrial revolution- plus Dr William Maxwell who was involved inn the French Revolution.

William Kennedy,  1732-?, born Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, became fustian manufacturer in Manchester.
William Cannan 1744-1825, born Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. Became textile  machine maker in Lancashire and James McConnell, John Kennedy, George and Adam Murray (see below) all served their apprenticeships with him.
Edgar Corrie 1748-1819, born Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. Liverpool merchant, John Gladstone’s first business partner. [Possible family link to William and Peter Ewart]
John Loudon McAdam 1756-1836, born Ayr civil engineer and  road builder.
Dr James Currie 1756-1805 born Dumfriesshire. Became doctor in Liverpool and  Robert Burns first biographer.  Friend of Thomas Telford,  Erasmus Darwin, Dugald Stewart, Joseph Priestley and William Wilberforce.
Thomas Telford 1757- 1834, born Dumfriesshire civil engineer with international reputation.
William Maxwell 1760-1834, born Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. Father a  Roman Catholic Jacobite (1745-6), but became active supporter of French Revolution, and witnessed death of Louis XVI before becoming  Robert Burns’ doctor and friend.
Thomas Maxwell 1761-1792 born Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, brother of William. In 1785 became business partner of  Charles Taylor in Manchester where the firm pioneered use of chlorine to bleach cotton. James Watt’s son James Watt junior joined the firm in 1788.
George Murray 1761- ?, born Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. With his brother Adam became major cotton spinning factory owner in Manchester.
James McConnel 1762-?, born Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. Partner of John Kennedy in major cotton spinning business in Manchester.
William Ewart 1763-?, born Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. Liverpool merchant and business partner of John Gladstone.
John Gladstone 1764-1850, born Edinburgh, family from Biggar. Father of  William Ewart Gladstone.
Adam Murray 1766-?, born Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. With his brother George became  major cotton spinning manufacturer in Manchester.
Peter Ewart 1767-1842 born Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. A mechanical engineer and scientist. Was  Boulton and Watts Manchester agent and with John Kennedy (see below) involved with Liverpool and Manchester railway.
William Galloway 1768-1836, born Berwickshire. Moved to Manchester in 1790 to become mechanical engineer and maker of stationary steam engines.
John Kennedy 1769-1855 born Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. Pioneered application of steam power to cotton spinning. Along with James McConnell, Adam and George Murray became leading Manchester cotton spinner. Friend of James Watt and George Stephenson,. active promoter of Liverpool and Manchester railway and judge at the Rainhill locomotive trials.
William Fairburn 1789-1874, born Roxburghshire, important  civil and mechanical engineer, who built bridges, steam ships and locomotives. Close links to George and Robert Stephenson and also John Kennedy in Manchester.
John Ramsay McCulloch 1789-1864, born Wigtownshire. Editor of The Scotsman 1817-24. First professor of political economy at University College London 1828. Highly influential, advising  prime minister Robert Peel and future prime ministers William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.
James Beaumont Neilson 1792-1865, born Glasgow but family from Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. Invented ‘hot-blast’ technique of iron smelting which  revolutionised iron industry and led to growth of heavy engineering in west central Scotland.

It is interesting that these men were able to make the transition from what was still in many ways a medieval economy and society to the first modern society and economy. One explanation for this ease of movement is that across the south-west and especially in Galloway, the feudal system never fully held sway. What limited the imposition of feudalism was the strength of the Gall-Ghaidheil, the Gaelic kindreds or clans. The Gall-Ghaidheil emerged in the ninth or tenth centuries when Vikings settled in Argyll and became absorbed into the Gaelic speaking population. These Vikings Gaels then moved east into Renfrewshire, Ayrshire, Galloway, Dumfriesshire and possibly even Cumbria. During the twelfth century,  Scottish kings settled Norman and Flemish families- the Bruces, Stewarts and Douglasses -in the south-west, but Galloway remained an independent territory ruled by king Fergus of Galloway until 1160.

The power of Fergus and his descendants down to Edward Balliol in the fourteenth century depended on the loyalty of Gaelic speaking families like the McDowalls, McCullochs and McLellans. They held their lands by traditional right, not because a king had granted them a charter. Even after Archibald the Grim declared himself Lord of Galloway after Edward Balliol died in 1365, he still relied on the support of the Gaelic ‘heads of kin’ or kenkynnol. Then in 1388, Archibald became the third earl of Douglas, giving him control of a huge swathe of territory across southern Scotland and even lands as far north as Inverness. This shifted the balance of power in Galloway, reducing the status and influence of the Gaelic clans who became the Douglas lords of Galloway’s feudal retainers. However, the power of the Douglas earls now posed a threat to the Stewart kings of Scotland. The threat was ended in 1455 when James II defeated  James, the 9th earl of Douglas and  the Douglas lands, including those in Galloway, were forfeited to the Crown.

It is only after 1455 that a clear pattern of land ownership in Galloway begins to emerge through charters and other documents. What these reveal through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a bewildering fragmentation of land ownership, with hundreds (700 in the Stewartry alone between 1660 and 1700) of individuals owning small estates  made up of a handful of farms. While some of these small estates were held by the same family for several generations, others were mortgaged, bought and sold in bewildering confusion.  Unlike the rest of Scotland, where land ownership was concentrated in the hands of a few noble families, in Galloway and the south-west, the typical land owner was a ‘bonnet laird’, and owner-cultivator of his (sometimes hers through marriage settlements or widowhood)  farms in partnership with tenants and their cottars.  It was also a paper economy based on bonds (IOUs) often exchanged against income anticipated from future harvests. [Approximately 5000 of the 6000 entries in the ‘Stewartry Sheriff Court Deeds 1623-1700’ are such bonds.]

By the eighteenth century then, although farming practice was still based on medieval techniques, both the traditional and feudal systems of landownership had long since vanished. In their place, hundreds of farmers and their tenants were engaged in a complex financial system in which land, crops and livestock were commodities to be exchanged. Of these commodities cattle in particular, which had been exported to markets in England since the early seventeenth century, were subject to speculative trading and were often bought and sold several times before final despatch across the Border.  It was the disruptive impact of the cattle trade on the internal economy of Galloway which animated the Galloway Levellers uprising in 1724. While the eviction of tenants and cottars to create ‘cattle parks’ provided the initial stimulus, what led to widespread support for the Levellers actions in destroying the enclosures was the belief that the landowners involved were stocking the cattle parks with illegally imported Irish cattle which they planned to pass off as Scottish.

With a background in such a proto-capitalist economy, it was not such a huge leap for Galloway farmers’ sons to make the transition from trading cattle produced in fields to trading cotton produced in factories  in Manchester or trading sugar, tobacco and grain via the port of Liverpool. It is also important to remember that these individuals were only part of a much larger process of economic migration from the south of Scotland to central Scotland, the north of Ireland, England, north America and later New Zealand  and Australia.

Back in 1973, Ted Cowan describe  this movement  of people as the ‘Lowland Clearances’ and in 2003 the Lowland Clearances was used as the title of a radio series and book  to which I  contributed  a section on the Galloway Levellers.  Part of the reason the Lowland  Clearances  are not as well known and documented as the Highland Clearances is that apart from in Galloway it was not a very dramatic process. Gradually, between the 1760s and 1800,  the countryside was improved  by landowners and tenant farmers. This rationalisation of the farmed landscape  resulted in the loss of a whole class- the cottars, along with their crofts and cots. These cottars had provided a source of seasonal labour for the traditional, that is medieval, methods of farming. To retain them on the land, they were allowed their own plots of land called crofts and their own basic houses called cots. Most were re-employed as farm labourers, but others had little choice but to migrate.

In the Lowlands, the drama of the Galloway Levellers uprising in 1724 was remembered and this influenced the gradual approach adopted by improving landowners and their agents. As an example, John Maxwell was factor or agent to the Duke of Buccleuch  and then Richard Oswald of Auchincruive in Ayrshire who also owned land in the Stewartry. As a child in 1724, Maxwell witnessed his uncle’s dykes being levelled  and  the memory was still vivid in 1811 when he described the events in a letter. From estate records of  the 1760s and 70s it is clear that Maxwell very carefully managed the process of improvement to avoid whole scale clearance of the  farms involved. Without the constraining memory of the Galloway Levellers,  Highland landowners  pursued a  more vigorous and ruthless  approach to ’improvement’ leaving an enduring legacy of bitterness which still influences  Scottish campaigns for land reform.

That the construction of cattle parks in Galloway  had already led to depopulation  through clearance before the events of 1724 is illustrated  by  John Clerk of Penicuick. Clerk was the earl of Galloway’s brother-in-law and on a visit to the earl in 1721, Clerk observed that

The inhabitants of Galloway are much lessened since the custome of inclosing their grounds took place, for there are certainly above 20,000 acres laid waste on that account.

The ‘custome of inclosing’ was not new in 1721. According to Andrew Symmson’ Large Description of Galloway, by 1682, David Dunbar of Baldoon had a 11/2 square miles cattle park which could hold up to 1000 cattle. Sysmson also mentions that the earl of Galloway, William Maxwell of Monreith, Godfrey McCulloch of Mertoun,  James Dalrymple of Carsecreuch,  McDowall of Logan and ‘many others’ had  cattle parks and enclosed grounds. Although Symson does not mention them, there also cattle parks near Borgue and Kirkcudbright in the Stewartry in the 1680s.  If there were more cattle parks in Wigtownshire  this helps explain why the population of Wigtownshire grew more slowly than that of the Stewartry between  1690 and 1755.  From estimates based on Hearth tax returns,  both Stewartry and Shire had about 16 000 inhabitants in 1690, but while the population of the Stewartry had grown to  21 205 by 1755, in Wigtownshire the figure was only 16 466.  It is likely then that Clerk was referring to Wigtownshire rather than all of Galloway as having been subject to depopulation via enclosure in 1721. Although  most of the levelling of cattle parks took place in the Stewartry, there was also some levelling in Wigtownshire. However this was on a smaller scale and was opposed by  the tenant farmers, one of whom shot and killed a Leveller in 1724.

By 1851, Wigtownshire with a population of  43 389  had caught up with the Stewartry  which had a population of  43 121. These were to be Galloway’s  highest population levels. By this time, Galloway was  firmly established as the rural and agricultural region t remains today. By 1861, the railway from Dumfries had reached Stranraer. While the railway provided an alternative to coastal shipping and road transport for the export of farmed produce, especially milk, it opened up the region to mass produced manufactured goods from bricks to beer. As local brickworks, breweries and similar small scale local producers began to close, so  population  growth became population decline. By the end of the nineteenth century ,the paintings of the Kirkcudbright artists and Glasgow Boys along with the novels of S. R. Crockett convey the impression of the region as a tranquil rural backwater far from  the smoke and squalor of  more dynamic urban and industrial areas.

This image of Galloway is still the one marketed to tourists and visitors, following the template of S.R. Crockett’s 1902 guide book  ‘Raiderland’. [‘The Raiders’ 1894 was a romantic adventure story set in Galloway and was Crockett’s most popular book. The ‘Raiders Road’ forest drive  is a current tourist attraction based on Crockett’s  work.]  It is this fantasy landscape, frozen in the Edwardian moment before  the industrialised horrors of the First World War, that opponents of wind energy seek to preserve. While opposition to wind energy has managed to slow the turbines’ advance, climate change continues.

The likely impact of climate change in Dumfries and Galloway will be an increase in extreme and hard-to-predict weather events. Such events will have a damaging impact on impact on  the region’s three main industries- farming, forestry and tourism. An increase in rainfall, especially if concentrated into  periods of heavy rainfall, will create problems of water logging of the ground which makes the use of forestry and agricultural machinery impossible. Sudden spates  in streams and rivers can wash out bridges and access roads while wetter days in the summer will discourage visitors to the region.  Along with  the effects droughts, heavy snow falls and severe storms, it will be possible to recover from  severe weather events- at a price and so long as they are believed to be ‘one-off’ or very occasional events.

Once extreme weather events become more frequent then very difficult decisions will have to be made. It may be necessary to abandon smaller and more remote rural settlements if it becomes too costly to maintain essential infrastructure like roads and electricity supply. Problems maintaining the remote rural road network would also affect forestry and upland farming while a persistent increase in water logging and flooding would affect the viability of many lowland farms.

We cannot know for sure what the local effect of climate change will be and this uncertainty helps climate change deniers and the anti-wind energy campaigners. The difficulty is that moves to make major cuts in carbon dioxide emissions will have major social and economic implications. Air transport will have to be cut back, so also will road transport. Moving people and goods by rail is more energy efficient (apart from high-speed rail). Which is fine for areas which have railways but not for rural areas like Galloway which have lost their rail links. Re-building the railway from Dumfries to Stranraer would be  ferociously expensive. Furthermore, when it was built in the 1860s it passed through an area with twice the population of present day Galloway. Even more importantly, the railway was not built for the benefit of Galloway, it was built to connect Belfast (as the industrial centre of northern Ireland) with England. On its own, the best  Galloway might have managed would have been a few narrow gauge railway lines like those built in rural Ireland. Finding a climate change accepting solution to rural transport problems in Dumfries and Galloway may yet require the construction of a narrow gauge railway network across the region.

Conclusion/ Introduction
Rural resistance to wind energy is rooted in a refusal to recognise the reality of climate change and the belief that it is possible to protect the countryside (=nature) against industrialisation. But in Galloway and Dumfriesshire, the countryside is already industrialised via farming and forestry. Furthermore, individuals from the region played an active and significant role in the construction of industrial capitalism in England and Scotland  and its spread worldwide.

Just as  the region was involved in the beginnings of climate change, so it will also be affected by the consequences of climate change which threaten the viability of farming and forestry as key regional industries. At the same time, attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and adapt to extreme weather events will require a radical restructuring of rural society and economy. This restructuring will require far more than a few wind farms. It will require a revolution as profound and challenging as the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth century.

For the past 250 years we have lived in a ‘for profit’ society. For just as long there has been a struggle to resist the transformation of ourselves and our worlds into an immense accumulation of commodities. Critical to this struggle has been the  knowledge that even the empire of commodities must one day fall.

Driven by necessity, by the stimulus of greater profits through technological efficiency, nineteenth century engineers and scientists developed and applied a new science of thermodynamics to the heat engines which powered industrial capitalism. Even the earth’s climate could be imagined as heat engine, driven by energy from the sun. Although only a small part of earth’s atmosphere, it was realised that carbon dioxide played a key role in this process so that increasing carbon dioxide levels would  tend to warm the planet and change its climate. The most serious impact of climate change will be on food production. Every civilisation known has depended on their ability to produce food surpluses. No food surplus = no civilisation.

The most likely result of climate change will be the end of a ‘for profit’ society and a return to a ‘for survival’ society. This is a desperately bleak prospect. It should be concentrating minds on the political, social and economic transition to a de-carbonised culture. We need to realise that the struggle against climate change is a revolutionary struggle.

All crimes are paid

Another Scotland is Necessary. There’s No Future in Ukip’s Dreaming.

‘There is a storm coming that shall try your foundation. Scotland must be rid of Scotland before the delivery come.’ James Renwick’s last words before his execution 18 February 1688. 

God save the queen her fascist regime

It made you a moron a potential h bomb [Sex Pistols, 1977]

Fifty years ago, while staying with my English grandparents in Nairn, I was taken to visit the moor where the battle of Culloden was fought in 1746. I was shown the spot where my ancestors stood before the battle and told the tale of how Donald Livingstone saved the Standard of the Stewarts of Appin from the clutches of the Redcoats. A few years later, after my grandparents had retired to Galloway, they took me to Glentrool to visit the site of another battle, one fought by Robert the Bruce in 1307. There is an inscription on a granite boulder at Glentrool, erected in June 1929,  which reads-

‘In loyal remembrance of Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, whose victory in this glen over an English force in March 1307, opened the campaign of independence which he brought to a decisive close at Bannockburn on 24 June 1314’. 

These battlefield visits left a deep impression. During the 1970 general election campaign I supported the SNP at primary school and even managed to have a fight with a Tory supporting friend. In the two elections of 1974 I helped the campaign of my French teacher who was the SNP candidate in Galloway and who won in October that year. He lost in 1979, by which time I was living in London. I was still there in 1997 when the SNP won Galloway back from the Tories.  I moved back to Galloway later that year and became (briefly) Convenor of my local SNP branch.   

In  May 2007 I was in Dumfries for the Scottish Parliament election count. As the results trickled in via the error prone electronic counting system I remember saying to Michael  Russell (SNP candidate for Dumfriesshire) that it was like watching history happen in slow motion. Fast forward  to 18 September 2014 and history will happen again.

God save the queen she ain't no human being

There is no future in england's dreaming

Except…back in the 1960s I didn’t know that despite the Bruce Stone in Glentrool, forty years after Bannockburn, Edward Balliol had not yet given up his claim to be King of Scots and could still count on the loyalty of Galloway’s Gaelic clans against his rival, Robert Bruce’s son King David II. And, rather than fighting for Bonnie Prince Charlie, my Livingston ancestors were Calvinist Presbyterians who fiercely opposed the Stuarts and their belief in the ‘divine right of kings’. 

Which is where things get complicated. The big problem is that the version of Scottish history passed on to me by my English grandparents is shared by both Scottish and Unionist (British) nationalists. In both versions, the fourteenth century Wars of Independence  secured the existence of a  Scottish nation. In the Unionist nationalist version,  this allowed the Scots (in contrast to the Welsh and Irish) to freely enter the Union of 1707 as equal partners. This Union of equals allowed the Scots to play their part in making Britain the first world super-power, as a global (and uniquely civilised) Empire and as the industrial workshop of the world.  

Don't be told what you want don't be told what you need

There's no future no future no future for you

And, as the post-Union Jacobites discovered, resistance was futile -“We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to serve us.” [The Borg, Star Trek] In a series of neat manoeuvres, the initially feared kilt-wearing, bagpipe-playing and claymore-waving Jacobite Highlanders became the much celebrated (and expendable) shock-troops of Empire. The process of assimilation was completed by Unionist nationalist Sir Walter Scott through his novels and the dressing of  Hanoverian king George IV in tartan for his visit to Scotland in 1822. This tartanisation of royalty continued  via queen Victoria and Balmoral and is still present.

Gerorge IV in a kilt

While the tragic and romantic aspects of Jacobite myth-as-history (or history-as-myth) were assimilated into Unionist nationalist narratives, the Jacobite interpretation of Scottish history has also been assimilated into Scottish nationalism. In particular, what began as Jacobite anti-Union propaganda has become accepted as ’fact’ - that the Scottish politicians who voted through the Articles of Union in 1706 had been ’bought and sold for English gold’ as Robert Burns  so memorably put it. In this version of history, the Union was a betrayal  ( a ‘stab in the back’) of an ancient and independent nation by a corrupt regime of traitorous Scots. 

God save the queen cos tourists are money

And our figurehead is not what she seems

Oh God save history God save your mad parade

Oh lord God have mercy all crimes are paid

In the full blown version  the Scots brought this  fate upon themselves by rejecting the divinely appointed Stuart kings. As a consequence [in echoes of the Wicker Man and pagan myth] the fertility and prosperity of the land was lost. The resulting famines of the 1690s [which strongly affected the Jacobite heartlands of north-east Scotland] were called ‘King William‘s Ill Years’. Combined with the failure of the Darien Scheme, also blamed on king William, the impoverished and confounded Scots were bamboozled into entering a fatal Union rather than choosing to restore their rightful and divinely ordained king- James VIII.

The Stuart myth and the Scottish identity are closely linked  through the loss of Scottish independence and its relationship to the loss of the Stuart dynasty. Mythology can be a kind of history favoured by the dispossessed; and it helps to read influence of the Stuart myth in such a light. Lack of independence goes along with a lack of independent means of securing one’s own history. In such circumstances, in the eighteenth century and afterwards, the mythology and ideology of the Stuart cause became a kind of protest history, a self-expression of identity on behalf of those whose identity was under threat. In this underground history, many of the ideas still current today concerning Scotland’s place in the Union came into being. [Murray Pittock ‘The Invention of Scotland’, 1991, p.5]

In contrast to the Stuart/Jacobite complex of myths, the once significant rival myth of Scotland as a nation with a special relationship (Covenant) with God has faded away. There are three reasons for this. Firstly,  religious belief has declined, especially the austere and unsentimental Calvinist version held by Scots Presbyterians. Secondly, while regionally powerful in Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, Galloway and Dumfriesshire, many, probably the majority, of Scots did not sign up to the Covenanted nation  belief. Thirdly, the religious notion of ‘equality before God’  threatened not only the divine right of kings to rule, but also to unleash a dangerous democratising  movement. This was seen most clearly in England where the Cromwellian revolution had to suppress the Levellers and Diggers.

In Scotland, the political movement of the Covenanters was towards reluctant republicanism (better no king than an uncovenanted king) and frustration at the apparent willingness of the fellow Scots to tolerate Stuart rule. This is the background to James Renwick’s statement from the scaffold -‘There is a storm coming that shall try your foundation. Scotland must be rid of Scotland before the delivery come.’ 

The storm which came was the wind which blew William of Orange’s invasion fleet across the English Channel. But although one uncovenanted king was replaced by another, a change of regimes is neither glorious nor revolutionary. The lack of any structural change, the failure to ‘rid Scotland of Scotland’ left the possibility of a second Stuart restoration wide open. [This fear of an oscillation between rival regimes had a parallel in the oscillation between John Balliol, Robert Bruce, Edward Balliol and David Bruce centuries earlier.]

When there's no future how can there be sin

We're the flowers in the dustbin

We're the poison in your human machine

We're the future your future

The fear of a Stuart return was the key driver of the Union of 1707. The Scots who had gained power via William of Orange’s invasion of England knew they would face fines, forfeiture and death if  James VIII and III became king. The English feared that the French would exploit the Scots’ Jacobite sympathies to repeat William of Normandy’s invasion - drawing English forces north to check a Jacobite advance from  Scotland, thus allowing a French invasion force to gain a foothold on the south coast. [A situation which almost occurred in 1745.]

The Union of 1707 did not prevent  the Jacobite uprising of 1708, 1715, 1718 and 1745/6, but it did allow them to be contained and defeated. Since it was designed to check the Jacobite threat rather than incorporate Scotland into England (and Wales), significant Scottish institutions were conserved- the Protestant (but uncovenanted) church of Scotland, Scots law, local government and  the Scottish  universities. These vestiges of a Scottish nation-state provide an illusion of continuity for Scottish nationalists and a smokescreen behind which Unionist nationalists could claim that the events of 1707 marked an enduring  ‘Union of Equals’.

Only now, 306 years after the fact, has the truth been revealed. Revealed not by the advocates of Independence but by the defenders of the Union. In order to save Scotland, they have been forced to destroy it. In February 2013, the UK of GB and NI government released a Report on the international legal implications of Scottish independence. The authors of the Report advised that [page 75, para.37]

Whether or not England was also extinguished by the union, Scotland certainly was extinguished as a matter of international law, by merger either into an enlarged and renamed England or into an entirely new state.

There was no ‘Union of Equals’, Scotland  was absorbed into a renamed  England and thus extinguished as an actually existing entity. It was swiftly realised that such clarity was damaging to the No campaign, so a degree of backtracking ensued. However, the reality is that the No campaign have nothing but the negation of ‘Scotland’ to offer.  If there really was a Scottish nation existing as an equal partner in the Union, such negativity would be damaging and destructive.

God save the queen we mean it man

There is no future in england's dreaming

No future for you no future for me

No future no future for you

But if, as Marxist historian Neil Davidson has argued the Scotland which seeks independence is the product of the Union of 1707, the Scotland which the No campaign are negating is (as argued above) a mythical Scotland, then the result is the Hegelian ‘ negation of a negation’, the necessary destruction of an illusion. Or as Karl Marx might have put it -

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and Scotland is at last compelled to face with sober senses its real conditions of life, and its relations with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

God save the queen cos tourists are money

And our figurehead is not what she seems

Oh God save history God save your mad parade

Oh lord God have mercy all crimes are paid

The No campaign have stripped away the tartan shroud which covered auld Scotia’s dust dry bones, but that same shroud is entangled with the Union flag. The same movement lays bare the machineries of power,  the tubes and wires which worm from Westminster to animate and synchronise the jerky, disjointed movements of ‘Scottish’ Labour, ‘Scottish’ Conservatives and ‘Scottish’ Liberal-Democrats. Animated by the prime directive - to ensure the survival at all costs of the ancien régime- the outlines of the real struggle begin to emerge.

Before continuing, I will try for a summary of the story so far. The Scotland which entered the Union in 1707 was not a modern state. Most Scots worked on the land, living in scattered fermtouns and practising a still medieval style of farming. This way of life only began to change 60 years after the Union when first the Lowland and then the Highland Clearances created the modern landscapes of rural Scotland. The Scottish Enlightenment, with its emphasis on ‘progress through reason’, helped drive this transformation forward. These changes were followed by rapid industrialisation and waves of mass migration to the industrial areas of Scotland and to north America, Australia and New Zealand, as well as England. 

The background to creation of this new Scotland was the rise of Britain as an imperial and industrial power. Scots as soldiers, engineers, merchants, entrepreneurs and settlers played an active and essential part in the rise of Britain as a world power. The successful modernisation of Scotland from the 1760s onwards was in marked contrast to the situation in Ireland where the Union of 1800 failed. The result was a growth of nationalism in Ireland which was not matched by a similar rise in Scotland. Only once the decline of Britain as a ‘Great Power’ became increasingly obvious after the First World War did a Scottish nationalism begin to emerge. 

However, unlike Ireland, Scotland had become an industrialised country. Labour politicians became convinced that only through access to the resources of the British state could a solution to industrial decline in Scotland be found. This view was also shared by Conservative politicians until the election of Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979. In the neo-liberal ideology of the Thatcher government, any attempt by the state to support ‘failing’ industries was anathema. The Thatcher government was also determined to destroy organised labour and accepted mass unemployment as a necessary consequence. 

Conservative rule lasted for 18 years, by which time, despairing of ever winning an election, the Labour party did a deal with the devil and re-invented itself as ‘New (as in Not) Labour’. This New Party (shades of Oswald Mosley) kindly allowed the Scots to have a ‘Parliament’ but only if it had little real power and was in safe Labour hands. 

Unfortunately the daft Scots then went and elected an SNP government which then broke all the rules by insisting that they had to stick to their manifesto pledge to hold a referendum on independence. More than just break the rules, such a vote might even change the rules. As the anarchist cliché has it ‘If voting could change the system, it would be illegal’. 

A mature democracy, secure in itself and in its legitimacy, would be able to take even such a big step as the independence referendum in its stride. An insecure state, nervous of democracy and uncertain of its legitimacy - for example through lack of a written constitution- is likely to view such a referendum as a dangerous threat to its continued  existence.  Rather than engaging in a rational and respectful manner to the challenge posed by carefully arguing the benefits of the status quo, it will lash out irrationally. It may even attack itself, undermining its own historic claim to legitimacy by denying the very existence of one of its constituent parts. 

During the Tet offensive in February 1968, the town of Ben Tre in south Vietnam was at risk of falling under Vietcong control. Talking to journalist Peter Arnett, a US army officer explained ‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it’.

We are engaged not in a struggle for national liberation, but a struggle to complete a revolution which will finally establish a democratic state in the former United  Kingdom.  What the ancien régime fears is not the emergence of a separate Scotland, but the resurgence of revolutionary democracy.  Bold words, but what might they mean? 

Something of the meaning is captured in the title of a book by Keith Robbins ‘The Eclipse of a Great Power -Modern Britain 1870-1978’ published in 1983. The cover is a 1954 painting of a peaceful square of Victorian  terraced houses near St. Pancras station in London. From the early 1970s it was the scene of 17 year fight by residents to save the area from demolition. For a few years a dynamic community of squatters occupied some of the abandoned buildings. The squatters were part of a counter-culture which in its more radical and political aspects crossed over into a movement for worker control of industry [inspired by the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders actions in 1971] and early attempts to build an ecologically sustainable economy  and society.  

When there's no future how can there be sin

We're the flowers in the dustbin

We're the poison in your human machine

We're the future your future

So successful has the subsequent re-writing of history been that it is all but impossible to grasp any sense of the actually existing potentials of that era. ‘Trade Unions holding the country to ransom’, ’the dead left unburied’ and similar stories have prevailed. The reality was a rightward lurch and the calculated destruction of any and all sources of opposition to the ancien régime. Rather than ‘Anarchy in the UK’, something closer to the Sex Pistol’s ‘fascist regime’ attempted to make Britain a Great Power again. But, as Marx once noted  ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’

The first appearance of the attempt to restore ‘Britain as a Great Power’ ended in tragedy as the Conservative’s monetarist economic policies destroyed the surviving remnants of industries which had once been ‘the workshop of the world’. For the second appearance, England’s dreaming has given us the great world-historic figure of Nigel Farage… I think the Sex Pistol’s got there first.

There is no future in england's dreaming

No future for you no future for me

No future no future for you

Sometimes the political is personal. I’m not thinking of Scotland any more. People living in Scotland will have their chance to negate the negation and say Yes to a future. No, now I am thinking of England, the England where I lived for 20 years. So many places I have known, from Hackney’s grimy streets to the wheat fields of Wiltshire, from the factories I worked in to the sprawling chaos of a free festival. So many people, passionate, caring, angry, wonderful people. The friendships forged in those years have endured  and so has the shared commitment to a future beyond ‘no future’. Another England is possible. 

Sometimes the personal is political. I’m listening to an album released 30 years ago. It is called ‘Let the Tribe Increase’ by the Mob who were (still are?) anarcho-hippy punks from Somerset. I first met them in 1982 when they were living in a row of squatted terraced houses in Hackney.  The Mob split up in 1983 but reformed in 2011. Last year the Mob revived their ‘All the Madmen’ record label. It was Mark Wilson of the Mob’s daughter Tess who encouraged this move and she asked me to write something for the ATM website. This, with some help from my children, is what I wrote.

Sometimes its good to be wrong. In 1980 a group called the Mob released a single called ‘Witch-hunt’. A powerful piece of punk, it reflects and captures the sense of anger and despair felt by their generation as the new decade dawned. A line from the song sums up the situation as the newly elected governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan began  ‘Stubbing out progress where the seeds are sown’…
In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis had shocked a generation into action. The prospect of death by thermo-nuclear war concentrated minds and inspired a life-affirming counter-culture. The renewed threat of nuclear war revived the idealism of the counter-culture. So, despite its ‘never trust a hippie’ rhetoric, as blazing fragments of the punk explosion scattered across the land, there was a fusion with aspects of the existing counter-culture. In particular the ‘Do it yourself’ aspect of punk was able to grow through a fertile relationship with -for example- Joly McFie of Better Badges, Geoff Travis of Rough Trade and Pete Stennett of Small Wonder who were veterans of the sixties counter-culture.
The Mob, along with hundreds of other punk bands released their music on their own independent record label. Alongside the independent record labels there were hundreds of punk fanzines. While most histories of punk focus on the few bands who crossed-over into the mainstream, there is also hidden  history of punk as a creative explosion through which thousands of young people made their voices heard.
Punk did not end when the Sex Pistols split up in 1978. It carried on into the 1980s, given a new edge by the impact of Thatcher’s government on a generation of young people. It really felt that we had ‘No Future’…Radicalised by harsh reality, punks realised that they had to work together and co-operate just to survive. A practical example of this was the creation of punk housing co-ops like the Islington based Black Sheep Co-op which the Mob and other punk bands helped to finance through benefit gigs. The Mob also worked to renovate houses for the co-op which (along with Andy Palmer of Crass and members of other punk bands) they later lived in. All the Madmen was based in a Black Sheep Co-op house for two years before relocating to another housing co-op (originally a squat) house at Brougham Road in Hackney.
Even if most histories of punk forget this hidden history, those involved have not. Against the competitive individualism which has become the norm over the past 30 years, we have held fast to the values of co-operation and mutual aid. But holding fast to a memory of what once was is not enough. Now another generation of young people are faced with a government which offers them ‘no future’.
The revival of All the Madmen as a collective on its own cannot undo the damage done by 30 years of neo-liberalism, but what it can do is offer this generation of young people inspiration in place of despair. The teenagers who created All the Madmen refused to accept that they had no future. Instead they chose to create their own future. And so the seeds of progress were not stubbed out but survived to flower again. 

And that, dear reader, is why I will be voting YES  on 18 September 2014.