Loyalist attack resisted in Glasgow

Posted by Jim on September 7, 2019

The following is a first-hand account of a violent and highly orchestrated attack on a peaceful legal march for Irish Unity in Glasgow, Scotland last weekend. (for the Socialist Republican Media blog) As several hundred Republican, antifascists and other various supporters of Irish Unity gathered for a peaceful demonstration in support of a United Ireland, organised by the James Connolly Flute Band it seemed like it would be a fairly peaceful uneventful march.

This was not the case, within 30 minutes of the JCFB and the Coatbridge United Irishmen Band setting up, the entrance to Elder Park was blocked by Crown forces preventing the march from starting, whilst further up Govan Rd and part of our planned route, were several hundred members of loyalist and far right groups hell bent on violently disrupting the march and setting fire to makeshift barricades they had dragged onto the roads and squaring off to Police Scotland.

It wasn’t long before the loyalist thugs breached police lines and charged towards the location of the bands and there followers which was also made up of families with young children.

Shouting ‘f*ck the IRA’, chanting ‘Billy boys’ and displaying the usual butchers aprons and a Brit paratroop regiment flag, they were met by a block of roughly 100 Republicans and antifascists who, although heavily outnumbered, held the hordes off and protected the bands under a hail of bottles stones and pyrotechnics.

Eventually the crown forces managed to separate the two and the loyalists were forced back along Govan Rd, only to regroup and enter through the back of the park, where apparently Police Scotland had left the area unmanned. This resulted in running battles between the two sides.

Again outnumbered and surrounded we stood our ground and fought back an armed loyalist mob. It was several minutes before police realised what was happening and another while to regain some control.

They appeared to be more interested in trying to catch several of the younger Republican youths who came to see the bands but ended up defending themselves rating than dealing with the loyalist aggressors.

Eventually the march was able to proceed with police lines surrounding the march every inch of the new route buy this time it was nearly 8.30pm. Less than 15 minutes later several small outbreaks of violence occurred along the route as loyalists and fascists continued to try and stop us from marching. It was at this point we were surrounded by Crown forces in full riot gear, dog units and riot vans and kettled in.

Due to methods enforced by the riot officers the march moved really slowly, stopping and starting at regular intervals but continued on without any more incidents. The march finished at the Tall Crane Bar in Govan which had also came under attack by a large group of knuckle-draggers who smashed car windows and stole flags that were hung outside the bar.

Despite all the odds stacked against us, be it the violence and hatred aimed at us by loyalist thugs or Crown forces pressuring the organisers to cancel the march, we did not bow down, even though we were heavily outnumbered and under hostile conditions.

Welcome to the United Kingdom of Absurdistan

Posted by Jim on September 6, 2019

Britain’s democracy is built on feudalism and its unwritten constitution is feeble… 
How weak does your constitution need to be when it can’t even stand up to a bluffer like Boris Johnson?

Fintan O’Toole. Irish Times. Dublin.

September 3, 2019

There are two things we know about revolutions. One is that they get more radical as they go along. The revolutionaries start out demanding specific reforms and end up imagining that they are inaugurating a whole new world. The other is that revolutions expose the great cracks in the ancien regime that should have been obvious all along. In retrospect, after the upheaval, it is clear that the old system was doomed by its own failure to manage necessary change.

Brexit is a very strange kind of revolution – the heroic overthrow of imaginary oppression, in which tragedy and farce are not sequential but simultaneous and deeply interwoven. But it is a revolution nonetheless, and it is conforming to these patterns. A goal that was unutterable in 2016 – the Year Zero of No Deal – is now mainstream policy. And the ancien regime of the Westminster system is having all its delusions mercilessly exposed by, of all places, Italy.

 One thing that still unites the warring factions in England is the belief that Westminster is “the mother of all parliaments” and the envy of the democratic world. Well, it sure looks like the mother of all something right now, but it’s not parliamentary democracy. Consider what has happened. Boris Johnson was elected leader of the Tory party by 92,153 people. He was then appointed prime minister by a hereditary monarch with no parliamentary involvement whatsoever. Since July 24th, when he became prime minister, he has appeared just once in the House of Commons to answer questions. And he has now used those monarchical powers to prorogue parliament and make himself even more unaccountable to it. The one virtue of Johnson’s brazenness is that he has surely made obvious to his compatriots what outsiders can see—that the system in which all of this is possible is a democracy built around a solid core of feudalism.

Unconstitutional vs unlawful

To grasp the absurdity of this spectacle, we might turn to one of England’s great minds, Jonathan Sumption. He is simultaneously one of his country’s most distinguished lawyers, recently retired from the UK’s supreme court, and one of its leading historians, whose superb ongoing multivolume history of the Hundred Years War is much better than Game of Thrones. Last week, the London Times asked him to pronounce on the legality of Johnson’s prorogation of parliament. “I don’t think what the prime minister has said he is going to do is unlawful,” he said. But he added: “It might be considered unconstitutional in as much as it might be argued to be contrary to a longstanding convention of the constitution.”

 So what Johnson is doing is probably unconstitutional but probably not unlawful. I don’t think most people in England have any idea how utterly nonsensical this seems to all the rest of us. It’s like saying that a man is almost certainly dead but nonetheless in quite good health. In any other democracy, if it’s unconstitutional, it’s unlawful. Only in the United Kingdom of Absurdistan can it possibly be otherwise. And the heart of the absurdity is that great tautology, the “unwritten constitution”.

The British constitution is so fine a thing that it would be positively insulting, even dangerous, to actually write it down. The people who need to know what it is are able to divine its mysteries – ordinary subjects are not among them. Johnson, for all his habitual mendacity, is exposing the truth that this arcane system of accretions and conventions is of little use when a shameless chancer is given the keys of the kingdom. His maneuver is not even a coup – when you can do all this lawfully, who needs coups?

Right-wing opportunism

Until very recently, most people in England would have pointed to Italy, with its infamous political instability, as the great counter-example that proved the wisdom of the British system. Last week, both countries were faced at the same time with a remarkably similar challenge: a radical right-wing opportunist seeking to bring down his own government and force a general election in which he would run not so much for parliament as against parliament. Matteo Salvini, leader of the prefascist League, has been governing in coalition with the populist Five Star movement. He tried to pull off pretty much the same trick as Johnson and for the same reason: to position himself as the voice of “the people” against the political “elites”.

How puny is Britain when it comes so badly out of a comparison with a country that is a byword for democratic fragility?
But Salvini was stopped – for two reasons. First, enough people within the political system were willing to stop fighting each other and start fighting the radical right. Second, Italy has a written democratic constitution with an elected president who could manage the process of creating an alternative government. The UK does not have the second of these things, and it is not at all clear that its parliamentarians can manage the first.

How weak does your constitution need to be when it can’t even stand up to a bluffer like Boris Johnson? How puny is it when it comes so badly out of a comparison with a country that is a byword for democratic fragility? It has come to something when an Italian might well look at the goings-on at the “mother of parliaments” and exclaim “Mamma mia!”

Official Communication from the UFA

Posted by Jim on September 5, 2019

Simplistic view of Europe has pushed UK into Brexit abyss

Posted by Jim on September 4, 2019

Johnson leads myopic world view where complexity of EU is bulldozed by colonial will …
… ignorance and free-trading powerhouse delusions have made him and his Brexiteers unable to comprehend how Ireland can stand up to Great Britain.

Ian Dunt is editor of political news website politics.co.uk)

You can predict the next action of Boris Johnson’s government quite easily. Simply imagine the approach which would show the least moral, intellectual or political understanding of the situation, and that is the one he will follow.

His strategy with parliament this week is to try and bully it into submission. He shows precisely no understanding of – or interest in – his opponents. He has no capacity to try and provide a compromise position. And he has overestimated his own leverage. It is, in short, a domestic rerun of the Brexiteer’s miscalculations over the “Backstop.”

The Brexit debate often gets bogged down in technical details – parliamentary standing orders, customs procedures, principles of regulatory alignment. But at its heart there is an emotional battle taking place between two different views of the world.

The “Remain” side is generally comfortable with Britain exercising influence through a union of nations. They’re typically open to detail, strategically fairly modest and have an admiration for the competence of European leaders.

The “Leave” side harks back to a period of unchallenged British colonial strength, has a deep-seated hatred of detail, believes in the triumph of the will, and views European politicians as limp technocrats.

That world view has a long history, in which the current prime minister played no small part. When he worked as Brussels correspondent for the Telegraph between 1989 and 1994, he pioneered a new form of quasi-fictional reporting on nonsense news items like size limitations on condoms and bans on prawn cocktail-flavoured crisps.

At the time, it all seemed fairly jolly – an ultimately harmless form of instinctive Little Englander prejudice. But it helped cement a specific variant of the Eurosceptic world view, which took firm hold in what is now the Brexit electorate.

It was distinct from that of its fellow constitutional Eurosceptics, who were wary of legal overreach in the Maastricht Treaty and of the potential volatility of having a monetary union without any overarching fiscal or banking arrangements to complement it.

Hysterical offence

That kind of Euroscepticism was built on an understanding of the complexity of the European project, a grudging admiration for the legal and political achievements that had secured it, and a realistic assessment of Britain’s relative strength within it.
The Johnson brand of Euroscepticism was different. It despised complexity. It dismissed the complex reality of trying to create harmonized regulations for a Single Market in favor of hysterical offense at rules on noise levels for lawnmowers. It convinced itself instead that these rules were the deranged product of a class of European technocrats with nothing better to do but meddle in other people’s jovial prawn-cocktail-crisp-eating lives.

And, as a corollary of that, it viewed Britain as this immensely powerful, freewheeling, imaginative, free-trading powerhouse constrained by continental bureaucracy.

That world view helps explain the sense of bafflement and outrage with which hardline Brexiteers met the “Backstop” negotiations. It was simply incomprehensible to them that tiny Ireland would be able to stand up to Great Britain. It was a reversal of basic historical laws. The idea that smaller nations gained strength by working within transnational organisations like the EU had not occurred to them, because their entire assumption about it was that it weakened member states.

The detail of the proposal prompted a similar reaction. They had not bothered to understand the manner in which a customs union eradicated tariffs, country-of-origin checks and customs declarations within its borders, nor the way Single Market alignment eliminates regulatory checks. This was the world of detail, which was considered at best incomprehensible or at worst some sort of trick played by continental-types on common-sense British pragmatists.

There was no appreciation of the motives, moral commitment or intellectual capacity of their negotiating partners. And this type of myopic approach was not just unseemly. It also made them strategically ineffective.

Jacobean cult

A willingness to compromise was therefore replaced by a commitment to the absolute triumph of the will. If Brexiteers simply believed hard enough, all the details of other countries’ negotiating priorities and the technical requirements of trade would disappear. Brexit thought retreated into a kind of Jacobean cult, in which the content of its beliefs mattered less than its adherents’ undying willingness to commit to them.

When the “Backstop” proposal was published, they simply could not understand what they were looking at, even though the broad outlines of what it would entail had been public knowledge for months. The emotional shock ultimately brought down Theresa May’s administration.

The same process is now playing out in parliament, as it enters its most important week in recent memory – and quite probably in our lifetime.

Johnson is threatening to remove the whip from Tory MPs who back rebel legislation against no deal. It is a spectacular sight. A prime minister with no majority is threatening to slash it even further if he does not get his way, seemingly unaware of the fact that this compromises his own position as much as it does their own.

Some people believe – probably rightly – that his ultimate aim is a general election, either in October or, if possible, just after the no-deal exit is delivered.

Quite why this would be a desirable outcome for him is unclear. His hardline position threatens his seats in Scotland and Conservative-Lib Dem marginals. There is little evidence suggesting he could make up those seats by flipping over Leave voters in traditionally Labour areas.

If no-deal happened, the resulting chaos would make it dramatically less likely that he could secure a majority. Although it is not clear that he has understood the evidence enough to recognise this.

The overwhelming lack of interest in detail and absolute commitment to the triumph of the will, infused with an elixir of unabashed nationalism, dominates the minds of those in No 10, forcing them into the same errors over and over again.

That error is based on a world view which took hold of the right of British politics for decades and which Johnson himself helped create. History has a cruel sense of humor.

Official Communication from the UFA

Posted by Jim on