Lazy summer evenings demands the air be filled by quality house tunes, and here's a great slab of dance music from the Year of our Lord 2004. Apologies for the awful music video. It is very much a creature of its time.
Friday, 7 August 2020
Thursday, 6 August 2020
The USA, China, and the New Cold War
Politics Theory Other deals in all the cheery topics, and in the latest episode Alex speaks to Tobita Chow and Jake Werner about US antipathy to China and how politicians across the party divide are stoking anti-Chinese racism.
There are plenty more where this came from, so check out the PTO archive here, and help build new left media by giving the show some cash!
There are plenty more where this came from, so check out the PTO archive here, and help build new left media by giving the show some cash!
Wednesday, 5 August 2020
Opposition as Colourless Managerialism
The reasons for the persistent Tory lead aren't difficult to fathom. 60,000+ dead is not enough to shift the Tories from their we're-managing-a-national-crisis bonus, the promise to do Brexit come what may, and being seen to be doing stuff while the bulk of the Tory coalition of voters, thanks to their age and retirement status, don't have to live with the consequences of Rishi Sunak's "largesse." But this support also persists because Keir Starmer's approach to opposition is to challenge Johnson and the Tories on detail and not on the substance of what they're doing.
This is a fully conscious strategy. Introduce yourself to the public as a serious, statesmanly figure, one who's a safe pair of hands that won't bring the Home Counties out in a cold sweat nor frighten the city boys. Keep the criticism of the government measured so you're not looking like a point scorer or an opportunist, and hope your constructive approach to public health strategy will lead to a popular perception of you (and Labour) as better crisis managers. This orientation has certainly helped improve the party's standing in the polls as well as Keir's figures, but this can only go so far.
Some lessons from recent Labour Party history. In 2010, the summer's long leadership contest conceded Dave, Osborne, and their new friends in the Liberal Democrats time to shape the post-election politics and start moving on their programme of cuts and privatisations without vigorous opposition. Once Ed Miliband was elected, he was forever playing catch-up as the moment for contesting their framing of the crisis had passed. Then in 2016 after the EU referendum, Labour was consumed by a pointless - and again, lengthy - effort to oust Jeremy Corbyn while Theresa May got on with the business of defining Brexit in hard terms, and setting us on the road to where we are today. Perhaps had Labour MPs accepted the result from 2015 and set about opposing the Tories with the same energy they deployed against their leader, May's Brexit strategy might have withered under more scrutiny, more contestation, and the crisis that was later to consume her premiership could have come sooner. And then, at the beginning of this year, Labour's NEC ridiculously mandated another months' long contest as Johnson and Cummings warmed their feet under the table and prepped politics for their cracked schemes. They were not able to take advantage of Labour's three-month virtual absence from the field thanks to the arrival of Covid-19. Instead, we now see Keir now giving them the space to breathe they lost at the beginning of the year. How very sporting.
By focusing on process, Keir is defining himself as a man without ideas. By deliberately eschewing a root and branch critique and taking the Tories to ask for their litany of fatal failures, when he and Labour does venture them after the fact in 18 months to two years' time, it will be a dredging up of an unfortunate past people would rather forget. It runs the risk of an accusation of a lack of serious intent - after all, if Labour were bothered about excess deaths why didn't Keir hang, draw, and quarter the Prime Minister at the despatch box at the time? This failure has other repercussions too. On what the world should be like after the pandemic, how things should change, how public services need redesigning around people's priorities, and the reconfiguring of lives based around work in an age of economic depression, not one shred of hope, not a single glimmer of a better future has shown itself amid the grey plod of Keir's colourless managerialism. This stuff matters, because offering a critique, providing an alternative, and showing how it is better than what is is the very basics to any kind of oppositional politics. You cannot hope to win without it.
We're not seeing any of this so far, and the longer Keir redefines 'opposition' in the most timid and technocratic of terms, the more the government will get away with depoliticising the crisis and foist blame for their catastrophe onto people who don't wear their masks properly, or are careless with the social distancing rules. There is comfort to be found in the tiny number - just six per cent - of Labour supporters dissatisfied with bis performance so far, but as they say only one poll matters. Unless he and Labour politicise this crisis and pin it on Tory carelessness and psychopathy, we might as well begin planning our 2024 leadership contest - following the loss of yet another election.
Tuesday, 4 August 2020
The Liberal Distaste for Steve Bannon
Naturally, there are degrees of opposition and antipathy. Given a choice between Bannonism with British characteristics and left Labourism, we know from recent experience how they always prefer the former to the latter. The politics of Johnson and Cummings, as empty as they are, is a familiar politics. A politics of the establishment and the elites, regardless of the populist spin it's given. Corbynism, for all its limitations, could have opened the door to a more popular politics by destabilising the received balance of class relationships. Yet despite this, they're still far from keen on Bannon. Why?
He's a crude racist and an unapologetic white supremacist. And, shudder, he's Catholic. The very antithesis of a particular brand of ruling class identity politics with its bourgeois internationalism, transatlanticism, EU cretinism, and affectations of progressive social values (ust don't expect them to act on them). Bannon with his straight forward racism holds a mirror up to their collective conscious and reminds them how their posture is built on hypocrisies. Their anti-racism was absent in the 00s when US and UK governments demonised and victimised Muslims, their solidarity was absent from anti-deportation and refugee support campaigns, and they cared for nothing as Theresa May sent her racist vans prowling around inner city London. They wrung their hands over the Windrush scandal and the Black Lives Matter protests, but can't bring themselves to offer a word of support for black MPs on the receiving end of racist abuse. On a basic level they know nothing essentially separates them from Bannon, who really believes his racism, and their own anti-racism which is deployed selectively.
And Bannon is also open about what politics is. It's a clash of interests, of power and privilege working on retaining their power and privilege against those who don't have it. Bannon identifies himself with the strong and favours so-called strong men and authoritarian governments as the natural and correct projection of strength, and is a-okay with scurrilous means if manipulation gets or is seen to get the desired result. He is the ultimate cynic in the most cynical game of all, and is unabashed about it. In their heart of hearts, liberal elites know this is true too. They are quite happy to crank up the smear machine and lie if they think their position is directly threatened, but the rest of the time they pretend fealty to honest debate, freedom of expression, polite discourse and reify them as values under threat from the unwashed to their left and right. Bannon is a reminder of their cant, an unwelcome interrupter to their great game who cares nothing for their liberal reticence and, again, shows them up for hypocrites. They hate him because he's rude and won't play up to their confected decency. This is why Bannon boils their piss.
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Monday, 3 August 2020
The Zoomers and Class Politics
Goodwin has placed the Zoomers under the microscope because they are the most liberal generation in history. Obviously a matter of some interest to any right-wing thinker. The Zoomers are also more chill when it comes to state intervention and are more radical on matters economic than preceding generations. Okay, but why? The 2008 crash cast a long shadow and in some countries, and particularly so in southern Europe where unemployment among young people was its very own pandemic before the pandemic. This badly affected the millennials, who were just coming of age when the stock markets broke. For the Zoomers, the coronavirus crisis and its subsequent depression are likely to have similar effects when it comes to value systems and politics. True, true, but the trend to social liberalism and economic radicalism was pronounced among Zoomers before Covid-19, and this was the case among Millennials before Lehman Brothers vanished in a blizzard of shredded documents. Events can catalyse more or less latent tendencies, but from whence do they issue in the first place?
The fact larger number of young people have degree-holding parents is certainly true, as there is a strong-correlation between being a graduate and the propensity to be liberal-minded (and why the right are hostile to universities), but for Goodwin we can list the backlash against Trump, the take up of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the cultural clashes of the campus wars as proximate causes. These result in a "hyper-liberalism" in which radical ideas flow freely - feminism and critical race theory merit a mention. Yet this still doesn't provide anything like a satisfying answer. Most Zoomers don't have parents with degrees, most Zoomers of age don't go to university and among those who do, most are not party to the Red Guard-style militancy imagined by plodding and ignorant newspaper columnists. And Trump, as foul as he is, isn't a shadow demon responsible for driving politicisation among young people across different societies with different politics. Indeed, the loathing most of them have toward Trump is a symptom of their politics, not its cause.
Here and there, Goodwin alludes to the significance of class but only in the most superficial, economistic terms. Indeed, we know he's in thrall to mechanistic abstractions when he says our generation of hyper-liberals are "far more heavily on identity than economics, and less interested in traditional drivers like social class." This opposition of class to identity is common enough, there are plenty of people who fancy themselves Marxist who do the same. Indeed, there is a Stalinist sect on the margins of British politics that explicitly markets itself as "anti-woke". However, to understand how class operates in the really existing real world, this guff simply will not do.
The dominant form of labour in the advanced economies, and an increasingly important vector of accumulation in Eastern economies like China and India is immaterial production. This covers a vast range of occupations, but more or less boil down to what mainstream economists call intangibles. Immaterial labour produces information, knowledge, care, and services. The brain or, rather, our social being is mobilised in the process and what our outputs are are less the bushels of wheats and the coats of Marx's Capital, but social relationships themselves. Indeed, as social animals the production of social relationships, in turn, produces human beings. The stuff of immaterial labour is the generation of subjectivities, the manufacture of people of of particular types. And these workers grow more numerous by the day.
The Italian autonomists, particularly Antonio Negri and Maurizio Lazzarato argued that as the welfare state expanded in the post-war period to fill the gaps in the social left by market failure, it effectively meant more workers were drawn into the process of patching the system up. Instead of producing surplus value, they were producing the conditions for the production of surplus value. During the 1980s, some of these activities were parcelled up in institutions and sold off to the private sector, while others were to become sustainable businesses by acting as brokers and surrogates for connectivity and information. The contracting industrial sector in the advanced countries enabled by advanced manufacturing and cheap labour, above all in China, saw the proliferation of ever more niche and specialised forms of service provision. This was accompanied by the reinvention of many a traditional job by embedding them in a digital architecture. This has had a number of consequences, such as more parasitic but visible forms of exploitation, and, because intangible production produces subjectivities and identities, new forms of alienation that fetishise identities emerge as persistent social pathologies.
Why does this matter? Because it conditions successive generations' experience of class, of what it means to sell your labour power. More people from Generation X, my generation, were so employed than the Boomers. More Millennials have experienced immaterial work than the X'ers, and the Zoomers were on track - and still will be when the crisis is over - to spend their entire careers generating intangibles than their predecessors. Therefore the phenomenon of successive generations becoming more liberal and tolerant is rooted in the social capacities demanded of immaterial labour, capacities themselves that have not arisen according to an ineluctable immaterial logic but have become incorporated into them thanks to the efforts of the women's, LGBT, black liberation, and anti-racist movements. Tolerance is a basic property of sociality, which in turn is entirely fundamental to an economics based on intangibles produced by cooperative, social activity. It follows then the nonsense Tories and their dull retainers fulminate against is not a left wing plot, but is an education process appropriate to the demands of capital accumulation.
This presents new vectors of class struggle as it multiplies across the circuits of identity production, but does not in and of itself lend itself to capitalism's spontaneous overthrow. However, what might hasten its demise is the dull compulsion of economic necessity. Zoomers and Millennials tend to be more left wing than Gen X and the Boomers because they're locked out the system. There are not enough jobs to go round, and far too many of them are intrinsically unrewarding, low paid, insecure, and do not lead on to better things. Property acquisition is disproportionately an activity and characteristic of the old, and the double whammy of 2008 and 2020 - with the pandemic, the costs of Brexit, and climate change making itself felt - these are very clear and present reasons for Zoomers not to be cheerful. Corbynism appealed to and represented their interests in conventional politics, and with it gone the greater the likelihood these frustrations will strongly manifest in anti-system protest and action. Dumping statues into the drink is but a foretaste.
Understanding the Zoomers as a generational cohort, their values, their politics,and their understanding of their own position requires much more than reckoning with conjunctural difficulties, counting people with degrees, and pretending the social world is anything like a handful of university campuses. Their strengths lie in the class relations and the struggles that birthed them. And their anger, entirely right, entirely righteous, is bound up with how in stymies them, exploits them, and is content to currently let them rot. No wonder the Tories and right wingers are obsessed with the outward "woke" trappings of this angry, socially liberal generation: they recognise a growing existential threat when they see one.
Sunday, 2 August 2020
The Ends of Scottish Labour
The biggest problem Scottish Labour has is its refusal to come to terms with what happened in 2015. Joke deputy leader candidate Ian Murray fancies himself an expert on the rout, what with his being the only MP to survive that year's massacre and pull through again last December. Apart from restating the need to "win elections" (stunning insight), in February he said Labour had to "learn the lessons" from the fall of the tartan wall without saying what they are beyond the need for "better comms". Pathetic. None are so blind as those who do not wish to see, so let's set it out in simple terms. A chunk of Labour's base up and left the party because, effectively, the party had left them. Political science ain't rocket science. If you spend decade after decade ignoring the aspirations of your support, allow your party machine to become an apolitical corrupt vehicle of place seekers and careerists, and then are seen to line up with your alleged enemies to tell your voters you will screw them over if Scotland goes for independence, a reckoning will come. And boy, did it come.
Effectively, what Labour clung onto in the last three elections was its legacy vote. The hang over of a decaying labour movement that once provided Scottish unionism its political backbone still responds, in ever diminishing numbers, to the trappings of labour-inflected British patriotism. Sadly, the increasingly numerous and dominant sections of the new working class, which Labour elsewhere attracted now look to the SNP for protection from the Tories, despite the Scottish government's own poor record. This very basic fact of political life is lost on some, among whom you can find the bulk of the Scottish Labour establishment.
Richard Leonard won the leadership in 2017 by a huge majority because he appeared to understand this problem. However, understanding something doesn't necessarily mean you can or will do anything about it. Recovering Labour's position did, and still does, lie in becoming the sort of movement it tried to be and still needs to be in England and Wales, a reality even recognised by the soft left Labour Together report. Some comrades, most notably those in the Campaign for Socialism have tried but it has not had full backing from the top nor have they prioritised a community-minded strategy for rebuilding the party and its influence. Instead, Leonard and the leadership are bogged down in neverendum positioning. This is fair enough to a degree. It would be stupid to ignore the big issue in Scottish politics, and substituting it for economistic campaigning around good causes won't, in and of itself, make the problem go away. Do then the Labour right have an alternative?
They think they do. Ian Murray wanted "clarity" on a second referendum, and Scottish Labour has it: the party has reaffirmed its opposition to a second referendum. But so what, everyone knows Labour is a unionist party. People haven't stopped voting for the party because they don't know where it stands on the union, they've stopped because the party isn't speaking to the people it needs to win over. i.e. People who turned SNP in 2015 and haven't come back. There is, however, a kernel of insight coming from the Labour right when it comes to playing the Holyrood game. It's their natural habitat, after all.
Readers will recall the the rise of Ruth Davidson. Personable and approachable, some might even describe her as charismatic. She was a different kind of Tory who spoke plainly, but without none of the populist bullshit and anti-immigration drum beating typical of right wing politicians. As such, the Scottish Tories rebranded their toxic party around her personality. The Conservatives became "Ruth's Team", and their leaflets asked punters not to vote Tory but to vote "for Ruth." And to seal the deal with the sceptical, they offered a wee gateway drug. They were honest with the punters and said they weren't about to win the 2016 Holyrood elections, but the SNP demanded a decent opposition and Labour (then led by Our Kez) just weren't providing it. Vote Tory not to support the Tories, but to keep Nicola Sturgeon honest. And, to a point, the strategy paid off. The Tories displaced Labour as the official opposition, laid the groundwork for the 2017 Tory resurgence, and gifted Theresa May the model for her own ill-fated election campaign. Might this work for the Scottish party, as the Labour right hopes?
It could. Jackie Baillie is an experienced figure, having served as a MSP since the parliament opened and worked with his holiness, Donald Dewar. She's probably better known than the Tories' heir apparent, Douglas Ross, but not exactly on the tips of pundits' tongues, let alone a name oft mentioned around the kitchen table. She has a good record of piecemeal achievement in Holyrood as well, winning cross party support on protections for disabled parking spaces and having overseen and participated in complex inquiries. This could be leveraged along with Keir Starmer's image as A Very Serious Man - a politician that can draw on decades of experience to hold the SNP's feet to the fire over education, the NHS, and its awful Covid figures. Have the Labour right hit upon their woman and the right strategy?
The old Labourist proverb goes that Labour needs both wings to fly. If Leonard is deposed and Baillie moves in quickly a, for want of a better phrase, "Ruthist" reorientation could eat into Tory support and win over some soft SNP/Labour floaters. That would be a good start, but knowing the Labour right anything that isn't an election is a waste of time - presumably the history of the party is one of working people automatically voting for Labour as soon as it appeared on the ballot paper. The project of weaning people off the Liberal Party, winning over layers of Tory voting workers, because of the collapse in Scotland this work has to all be done again. Different opponents, same grind. And so the prospectus Leonard's election opened up must be carried to completion, with him or not. A savvier parliamentary game to detoxify the party and knock the Tories back, and a ground game organising communities, workplaces and, this cannot be emphasised enough, avoids the impression of preferring the Conservative Party to the Scottish National Party might, over the medium term, start winning people back. If Scottish Labour wants to win, it must first act like a proper opposition on all fronts. If it doesn't, the party will remain a husk. It will die.
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New Left Media August 2020
1. JS Titus (Twitter)
2. LabourList Podcast
3. Lives on the Left
4. The Left Wing Society (Twitter)
5. Thurrock Labour Left
6. Unite Member
If you know of any new(ish) blogs, podcasts, channels, Facebook pages or whatever that haven't featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email, Facebook, or Twitter. Please note I'm looking for blogs etc. that have started within the last 12 months or thereabouts. The new media round up appears hereabouts when there are enough new entrants to justify a post!
Saturday, 1 August 2020
Are the Scottish Tories Doomed?
While the SNP pursues its split trajectory between realo and fundi nationalism, another nationalist force - British, this time - has developed a headache of its own. On Thursday, the Scottish Tory leader Jackson Carlaw unexpectedly resigned. Without much hint of ulterior dissatisfaction, he said "In the last few weeks, I have reached a simple if painful conclusion – that I am not, in the present circumstances, the person best placed to lead that [ Unionist] case over these next vital months in Scottish politics prior to the Holyrood elections." Deary me. In the interim, Ruth Davidson is expected to stand in at First Minister's Questions while her peerage is in the post. There is, however, an element of Carlaw jumping before getting pushed. His performance since Davidson announced her departure has been less-than-stellar. He was all over the place on Dominic Cummings's celebrated trip to Barnard Castle, was universally mocked for poorly performing at FMQs, got brickbats from Tory MSPs for going unilateral on a no deal Brexit, and losing seven seats at the general election. Rubbish polling sealed his fate. So dud, meet open window.
How do we know this was engineered and not Jackson acting on a self-conscious whim? Enter stage right Douglas Ross. Who he? Ross is the honourable member for Moray and, in 2017, won back the seat from the SNP for the first time since 1983, and disposing of Angus Robertson too. He retained it last year with a much reduced majority. He has emerged from semi-obscurity to the attention of Scottish politics thanks to having a, to coin a phrase, oven-ready leadership campaign ready to go. Fancy that. Despite upsetting the London-based In Defence of Our Dom faction by resigning from the Scottish Office over Cummings's behaviour, Johnson appears reconciled to his taking over. Apparently, Ross is fancied as having something about him - some of what you might call the Davidson magic. Or, to translate into plain English, is pliable as far as Number 10 are concerned.
What else does Ross have to offer, assuming the Scottish party accepts London's writ without question? Well, also in line with the otherwise empty Tory manifesto Ross has a thing for scapegoating travellers. Indeed, in 2017 he said cracking down on "Gypsy Travellers" would be his top priority if he was Prime Minister for a day. What a charmer. Apart from this, he's voted as directed by the whips' office - speaking out against Cummings was a rare moment of independent thought, albeit one likely powered by grumbles and disgruntlement across the wider party. Prior to his elevation to the Commons, Ross enjoyed a somewhat elastic relationship to the Tories, as Angus Robertson deliciously recounts. Another interesting feature of Ross's pitch is his decision not to resign from Westminster when he's selected and elected to Holyrood. This brings up the politically toxic issue of double-jobbing - claiming twice the salary for doing half a job for each isn't going to endear him to anyone, and just shows how much contempt the Tories have for their voters if they think they'd just swallow this. A hay-making opportunity for the SNP, and perhaps even the comatose Scottish Labour might find it in themselves to make a populist splash on this too.
Whether Ross prevails or not, he's come to prominence under the steerage of others. And I suppose this is just as well, because as Scottish Tory leader he won't be the master of his own destiny either - boxed in as he will be by SNP hegemony and despatches from Dom's office. And there is the ever-present underlying problem: the unionist vote is in an advanced state of decrepitude and long-term decline. With the SNP having locked down rising layers of workers by speaking to their interests and offering a vague enough vision of an independent Scotland allowing the projection onto it or all things fine and fair, the only place the Tories can go is to feast on Labour's vote. It could work yet having one declining force feed off another is, at best, a recipe for the shortest of short-term gains. How the Tories might take votes off the SNP is looking more difficult with every passing day Johnson sits in Downing Street and shafts Scotland. The Tory position then is bad. Their recent rejuvenation is time limited, and the expiration date is fast approaching. Hope for Scottish Conservatism lies in the developing split in Scottish nationalism, and that is entirely out of their hands.
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Five Most Popular Posts In July
1. The Weakness of Starmerism
2. Obligation and Class Consciousness
3. On Jeremy Corbyn's Defence Fund
4. Why are the Tories Invulnerable?
5. The Biopolitics of Herd Immunity
Critical Keir studies does the job yet again with the vacancy at the heart of the Labour leader's politics on the receiving end of the analytical scalpel. Coming second was a brief meditation on the breakdown of family bonds as a transmitter of voting behaviour as older, Labour loyal generations pass away and their now middle-aged to elderly children disproportionately punt for the Tories. The post on Jeremy Corbyn's legal fund does exactly what it says on the tin, while the next piece considers the polling quandary stumping politics at the moment: how high does the body count have to go, how many people have to suffer for the Tory figures to diminish significantly? And bringing up the rear is a look at the biopolitics of encouraging people to go back shopping and, to use Rishi Sunak's suspect phrase, eat out to help out. And what do you know, in an eventuality not at all foreseen the infection rate is climbing again as I write. Well done the Tories.
Walking into the second chance saloon, who might you find propping up the bar this month? I'm going to select three posts you might have missed. Here is the class politics of points-based immigration. i.e. Why are the Tories so intent on this scheme? Conditional and transactional politics considers the nature of contemporary politics and something the left needs to grasp if it's going to get anywhere. And lastly, you should read this piece on the SNP, because a sequel post is highly likely over the next few days.
Any guesses for next month? Well, I'm not entirely sure what my pour out from my fingertips yet! But chances are more Keir Starmer, more Tories, more Coronavirus. Make sure you tune in to find out.
Thursday, 30 July 2020
Is the SNP Going to Split?
Basking in international adulation, in as far anyone's had a good crisis Sturgeon certainly has. Largely staying in step with the catastrophe we've seen in England, Scotland has the worst excess death rate in Europe after England and Spain. Yet her fronting up the daily press briefings and being seen to be hands on, as well as pursuing a containment and elimination strategy has played extremely well. The perception Sturgeon has handled the crisis better than Johnson is what counts, and this is likely to help the SNP to an easy victory in next year's Scottish parliamentary elections. Yet, an Alex Salmond-shaped shadow is throwing shade on this skip along the sunny path to Holyrood. Following his acquittal of sexual assault charges back in March, some commentators have salivated at the prospect of a split in the SNP between those who feel he was stitched up and those supportive of Sturgeon's conduct. Those alleging Sturgeon attempted to throw her former friend and mentor to the wolves considering the slapdash way the Scottish government went about investigating the allegations. There is added rowing over when Sturgeon knew what and when, with her and Salmond providing differing accounts, and now matters aren't helped by the Scottish government's failure to hand documents over into the inquiry. What a mess.
Immediately, the knives were out after the court case and the cry of conspiracy went up. Salmond, who resigned from the SNP when he was charged, is looking for a come back and is seeking readmission to the party and selection for a seat for next year's election. Additionally, Joanna Cherry is looking to move from Westminster to Edinburgh. Writing for The National, she said "The sad reality is that because Johnson won big in England and has an 80-seat majority, the SNP group at Westminster have less power in this parliament with 48 seats than we had with 35 seats in the previous hung parliament." Perhaps if the SNP hadn't led the charge with the Liberal Democrats in enabling another election, we wouldn't be in this situation. This is by the by. The point of Cherry's article is the idea Brexit can only be fought by pushing independence, and this (implicitly) demands a new leadership. I.e. Her and Salmond.
Sturgeon loyalists are spooked. Since the 2014 referendum, the fortunes of the independence-at-any-price wing of Scottish nationalism has waxed and waned in the SNP. There is a palpable sense of impatience with Sturgeon who, despite her portrayals by the southern Tory press, is every inch the cautious constitutionalist. She learned from the resurgence of Scottish Toryism that the timing of a referendum push is a political art, and so going hell for leather might stir up the dying embers of Scottish unionism. With politics fatigue being a thing, this is a very real danger. The hardcore nationalists are uninterested in nuance and want to force the issue. A Salmond/Cherry ticket is the vehicle of choice, but others are stirring. Perhaps the most credible of these are fronted by former SNP MSP and 55 year veteran of the party, Dave Thompson. He has argued for an 'Alliance for Independence' to stand in the list section of next year's elections, and has backing from a sitting MSP. If Salmond is blocked from standing as a SNP candidate, an alternative list is a possibility - with all the consequences that has for diminishing the party's representation in Holyrood.
Unfortunately for Sturgeon, it appears her side are unwittingly set on engineering such an outcome. Squashing Salmond is a toughie, so they've come for a softer target. Cherry's hoped-for jump back to Holyrood would be at the expense of former SNP Westminster group leader, Angus Robertson. Both are looking to get selected for Edinburgh Central. And it just so happens Robertson is a close supporter of ... the First Minister. In a move worthy of Scottish Labour's stitch up culture, a rule change for parliamentary candidates was up for consideration by the SNP NEC on Thursday evening. Prospective candidates who are presently MPs would be forced to quit Westminster if they are selected to run for Holyrood, and find £10,000 to pay toward the subsequent by-election bill. Ouch. This wouldn't present much of a problem for Cherry, but could prove off-putting for future politicians who'd want to make the move - and send a signal that any challenge to the leadership will be met by administrative as opposed to political means.
This then is where the slow burn Salmond/Sturgeon split is at. Can the SNP keep the camps together? The political differences aren't insurmountable, but we're talking about careers and place-taking. As we know from Labour's internal problems of recent years, the denial or defence of established positions can provoke the most intense and bitter infighting. Presently, Sturgeon has the apparatus and the upper hand, but if Scottish politics since the independence referendum has taught anything, a seemingly invincible hegemony can evaporate if conditions are just right. A misstep now could split the forces of nationalism and perhaps concede enough space for the Tories, now in search of a new leader, and Labour, currently in search for a political strategy, to crawl back into contention. Stranger things have happened in politics, whether desired or not.
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