The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Scotland: After Sturgeon – what we have learned from the SNP leadership election March 31, 2023

From the Republican Communist Forum.

Mike Small and Sean Bell are signatories to the 2023 Declaration of Calton Hill. Quite independently, they have been making their own observations and commentaries about the current political situation in Scotland in Bella Caledonia.

Recently, Mike has written The Sturgeon era is over: Now what? and Sean has written What have we learned from the SNP leadership race?. In his comments on these two articles,  Allan Armstrong takes their thinking a little further.

Signs of Hope – A continuing series March 31, 2023

Gewerkschaftler suggested this a while back and it’s as good an idea now as it was then. Whatever else those of us on the left need some hope, need some tangible achievements to hold on to, something that gives a sense of how things can be made better:

“I suggest this blog should have a regular (weekly) slot where people can post happenings at the personal or political level that gives them hope that we’re perhaps not going to hell in a handbasket as quickly as we thought. Or as the phlegmatic Germans put it “hope dies last”.”

Any contributions this week?

If only we could ‘chew gum and walk at the same time’ or… an old trope gets an airing this week March 31, 2023

If there’s one trope on the conservative right that really irritates – well, actually there’s many, but this one is particularly so, it is the one where there’s an effort to pitch generations against one another. 

Who is giving the trope a renewed airing? Why none other than Gerard Howlin in The Irish Times. 

The younger generation are screwed, and the system is stacked against them. The brouhaha in the Dáil about housing may be potent politics but there is little at stake in terms of serious policy changes. Generation rent may be the preferred political football, but with friends like Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Sinn Féin, Labour, Social Democrats, Greens and PBP, younger people don’t need enemies.

Uh-huh. Says a man who was a Fianna Fáil advisor. From which he goes on to argue the following remarkable line:

As the monolith of Irish politics of the 20th century dissipates into ever more factions and the noise of political debate surges, there is ever less at stake. At the core of a grand alliance of nearly all Dáil parties is a soggy social democratic consensus of Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

Think about that. ‘Ever less at stake’. A housing crisis. A crisis over the manner in which asylum seekers have been accommodated. A crisis over energy and cost of living costs. ‘Ever less at stake’.

And then on to:

The political potency of housing and the tactical mishandling by the Government of the eviction ban issue means Sinn Féin is currently strapped into the driving seat. They have a mortgage on key words including “eviction”, “cruel” and importantly “change”. It may end in Government for them. For now, and the life of this Government, they are setting the pace on policy. A conspicuous exception is climate change, on which the Greens retain clear ownership and Sinn Féin’s footprint is negligible.

But the parties of the grand alliance are, by conviction or expediency, committed to structures and systems that actually undermine the larger State they promise.

Now contemplate what he says there. Supposedly a soggy social democratic consensus that cannot even provide social and state built housing. That’s a pretty wretched consensus, were it social democratic. But it’s not. In the aversion to state measures the reality is that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party (and other parties who were in government prior to that) have eschewed social democracy entirely. Why he throws SF into that mix escapes me.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Social democracy isn’t the be all and end all, but even that would offer something of an improvement on the partial and patchwork approach taken in this state across the decades. 

What’s telling is that he then avoids the economic aspects of this – the key one being the willingness to use the state or municipal and semi-state approaches. And as we know, and as is exemplified in the housing crisis there is indeed a consensus on that amongst some of the above parties – and it is anything but soggy social democratic. The idea FF/FG seek a larger State is a nonsense.

 Next up is rhetoric:

The irony is clear in housing policy. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar says we need an extra 250,000 homes. Last weekend Labour leader Ivana Bacik promised to build 1 million. In a country struggling to meet Government targets of 29,000 new homes this year, these levels of blather show a withering contempt for the facts. But it is not the extravagance of the language that matters most. It is the insidiousness with which resources to fund what is promised are squandered that is the cruellest blow for the young.

So we are treated to a “don’t look here, look over there” paragraph. Now few of us would feel any great need to defend the Labour Party but… 

Labour’s only significant impact on economic policy since it left Government in 2016 was to jump start the Stop67 campaign in the 2020 general election campaign. It could have made Ireland fairer for the fewer younger workers who must bear an ever-greater burden, by increasing the qualifying age for an old-age pension to 67, but now it won’t. Houseless, pension poor and precarious, the young are pack animals and voting fodder.

Except in a genuine social democratic approach there would be the ability to do more than one thing at the same time. For example, one could build houses and support those who are older. This almost childish effort to reduce this to simple exclusive binaries is purely diversionary. 

Then it’s on to Right2Water and water charges. And on to property taxes or wealth taxes and the failure to implement them as he would like. 

Yet his chosen political vehicle was one of those – and this encompassed Fine Gael and the PDs and the Labour Party in 2007 too come to think of it, that was happy to see income taxes cut down and down. He talks about the ‘lamentable state of public administration at the heart of policy failure’ but given his proximity to a party that was predominant in Irish politics and pushed that anti-taxation line itself as and when it suited it (and while he references 1977 he doesn’t appear all that exercised by later examples) perhaps he could consider the destruction of a discourse where taxation of all forms, but particularly income tax, was regarded with hostility. How does he think that worked in terms of delegitimising taxation?  

The problems this state faces are multiple but one key element was the broader deconstruction of a post-war consensus on the centrality of income tax as an element in the taxation mix. This impacted here, despite the reality that our social democratic compact was largely conspicuous by its absence. So given decades, arguably a century, of no social democratic state whatsoever it seems perverse to suggest that somehow soggy social democracy is the problem. If only some might say. At least it would offer a different approach.  

And as always to dismiss the resources the state, semi-state and municipal and other areas still harbour is to compound the error. 

No serious social democrat, let alone anyone left of there, would envisage lifting an evictions ban in the middle of a housing crisis with no measures able to be utilised immediately put in place to assist those who were facing eviction. We know this, he knows this. Everyone knows this. So why pretend otherwise?

‘The darkest chapter in American history’ March 31, 2023

Hyperbole ramped up as usual from the Trump crew on foot of the news of the indictment over hush money to a porn star.

Waking up to the housing crisis March 30, 2023

Pat Leahy continues a run of hard-headed analysis in The Irish Times where the scale of the evictions ban lifting and the broader housing crisis appears to have come home to him. 

One has the unpleasant feeling that (as was put to me by someone years ago when the housing crisis was gathering steam) ‘it’s affecting the middle-classes’ and therefore it somehow coalesces into an immediate and real threat and problem in a way that when those who are working class or marginal can be essentially ignored. 

But still, no greater joy in heaven, etc, etc.

This week demonstrated that the housing issue will continue to dog the Government for the remainder of its term of office. The chronic shortage of housing – even if it is partially eased in the coming two years, and there’s no certainty of that – will make it hard for the Coalition parties to compete for votes among the under 40s, a rather hefty chunk of the electorate to be writing off. Nobody realises this better than Sinn Féin.

If the opposition is right and there is a “tsunami” of evictions in the coming months, then the politics of this will become immediately more difficult, and possibly unmanageably so. The ending of the ban will be blamed for evictions; there is a strong chance that the Government is blundering into something it might not be able to control.

But he goes further:

There are two things to consider here. The first is the specific hames that the Government has made of ending the eviction ban; the second is the longer-term failure to get to grips with the housing crisis. Both raise questions of basic competence.

The Government has now been struggling to shore up its position since the ending of the eviction ban was suddenly – and unexpectedly – announced. There has been a mad scramble to come up with measures to mitigate the ending of the ban, culminating in basically allowing the Independents to write much of the Government’s countermotion to the Sinn Féin motion on which the Dáil voted on Wednesday. The failure to prepare all this in advance I find inexplicable.

You and me too, brother.

This marks the utter failure of public policy making that this represents. We’ve seen echoes of this in other areas – related areas too. A lack of even a cosmetic consultation with residents of complexes that refugee centres are placed in. I can completely understand the pressures that necessitate such actions. But not to sit down and talk through what this means with those who live there is an abdication of responsibility. All this suggests a miserable and self-defeating detachment on the part of the government from communities, the electorate and even those it purports to represent. This

Leahy notes:

Several insiders have spoken of a peculiar disconnect, a sort of fatalism, around Government on the issue. If that persists, then there are dangerous times indeed ahead for the Coalition.

And Leahy is right on the political side too:

Sure, the Government won the vote, and its working majority remains substantial. But the whole mess has resulted in a significant loss of authority for the Coalition. When you have to go cap in hand to the Independents to save your majority, that’s a not a sight that either the Independents or the voters will quickly forget.

He points to Sinn Féin’s effort to table legislation extending the ban on evictions as more politically clever than Labour’s no confidence motion as it places the spotlight firmly on the Independents who supported the government. Just on that, he describes that Labour motion as ‘clumsy’. I wonder is this a function of Labour finding itself not just in opposition but also having now to oppose. Those are two quite different states to be in. 

Leahy has broader thoughts on the housing crisis, which he notes was always going to be the ‘defining policy problem’ for the government. He argues that it hasn’t managed to dominate the issue. Indeed, his conclusion is that at the best ‘the very best [all] that you can say is that the jury is out’. Sheesh! If Pat Leahy thinks that then the government is in really deep trouble. 

In fairness he points to the Ukrainian crisis – 70,000 refugees, and so on. But he doesn’t linger too long on that, noting that there was a failure of ‘perception, planning, capacity and will’ by the government. 

He doesn’t think this is ideological. 

I don’t think this is because – as some of their opponents insist – the Coalition parties are wedded to any particular ideology. The idea that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael don’t want to build social housing because they are allergic to the State’s involvement in the sector is fervently believed by many of their opponents but is contradicted by the Coalition’s willingness to massively expand the State’s influence in all sorts of areas and by its own desire to build public housing.

I think that is too kind an analysis. For a start, expanding State influence is not the same as expanding the State. And most distinctly not the same as putting the resources of the state behind a state led building programme for housing. 

Surely this is born of an ideological approach (one all too familiar to us across the last twenty or thirty years) where the very idea of state endeavour, at whatever level, is anathema. Only the market can decide is the way it goes. This is also self-defeating and profoundly dangerous in a society. Indeed one could argue that this crew can’t even appreciate the idea of what a mixed economy means. That mention of fatalism he notes above is of a piece with this. Even with the levers of power and state they cannot comprehend how to do this. 

He asks: do you think if the Government believed it could solve the housing crisis by spending a few billion euros on public housing a few years ago, it would have demurred because it thought the plan was a bit socialist? The Government is desperately trying to build public housing; it has just not been very good at it.

But if at every point you believe that only the private sector can deliver outcomes then you are hobbled from the get-go. As hobbled as someone who argues there’s no scope in a mixed economy for private enterprise to build housing. It’s not either or. It’s not even relevant. Private enterprise cannot deliver, has not delivered and will not deliver public housing on the scale needed. There’s no one else who will step in to do so. At this point in this society the need for the state to put its shoulder behind public housing is key. A government that cannot, will not do so, is a government that is failing and Leahy acknowledges this. 

Government retains the ultimate political tool: the power of executive action. It has been unable to use this to overcome the barriers to delivery. And it is by that yardstick – delivery – that the Coalition will ultimately be judged.

Fine Gael’s defence on the housing crisis March 30, 2023

All very well, but when there’s a generally acknowledged crisis in housing, there’s a generally acknowledged crisis in housing. 

Cattle Driving Under the Tricolour – Divided Land: Episode One – A Podcast with Terry Dunne March 30, 2023

Available from various podcast platforms and on Youtube and hosted by Terry Dunne.

This first episode is on what happened when the First World War hit Irish farms and Irish kitchen tables, and we’ll be looking at the tillage movement of 1918 – a time with an intersection between the rise of Sinn Féin and agrarian social conflict and a grievous food crisis. This episode highlights a specific incident in the hinterland of Clonaslee at the foot of the Slieve Blooms in February 1918. We’ll end up then with the conscription crisis of April 1918 – an important turning point in Irish history but one often overlooked.

Tony Varley will be giving an online talk on the 1923 Land Act next week – https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-civil-war-and-hogans-land-act-tickets-598245667897

Tony Varley is a former lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Sociology in Galway University. Tony has written widely on rural sociology with a particular focus on agrarian parties and community development.

The talk will look at (1) The new state and its agrarian trouble – the background to Hogan’s bill (2)The passage of Hogan’s bill into law and (3) Reactions to Hogan’s 1923 legislation over time.

Respect, populism, political theatrics: That motion of confidence in the Government debate…  March 30, 2023

Does anyone think that Micheál Martin and Leo Varadkar’s performative irritation at the temerity of the opposition in, well, opposing, has run out of road quite some time back. It was on display again during the debate on the motion of confidence yesterday. 

The Taoiseach defended the Coalition’s track record, saying it “led Ireland through the pandemic saving lives and livelihoods,” as well as secured a new Brexit deal and worked for solutions to the cost-of-living crisis.

Well, sure. But when Pat Leahy argues that the approach of the Coalition on the issue of housing is baffling (more on that later this morning) you know that all the FG rhetoric isn’t going to cut it.

Mr Varadkar said that he believes the housing crisis “cuts so deep” because it “offends our sense of fairness”.

“I admire and respect the passion, and indignation, shown by those trying to find solutions, whether in this House or outside of it,” he said.

“My only criticism of proceedings in this House is that, too often it allows critics of the Government to show passion and indignation without presenting new ideas, let alone having them tested.”

That’s a bit absurd. Whatever else the opposition has had numerous ideas, none of them in truth particularly new, but certainly different to those adopted by the government. And as always it’s back to SF.

He accused the opposition of providing no solutions to the housing crisis during today’s debate, adding that Sinn Féin had instead engaged in “a personalised diatribe towards the Minister for Housing”.

Interesting how FF and FG sought to turn the guns on Labour. Check this out:

Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien said he is used to planning objections from Sinn Féin, but warned the Labour Party – who he adds he has “a lot of regard for” – not “to go down that road”.

Which drew this response:

Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik roundly rejected Government criticism of her party, saying the Government has made a “disastrous” political choice, which is the wrong one in ending the eviction ban.

Ms Bacik said that Mr Varadkar has engaged in “some political theatrics” himself in spending more time attacking Labour than in setting out solutions.

“You just don’t have the answers. Your conservative coalition is just not working. It’s all spin and no substance,” she said.

The Government has overseen a “catastrophic failure” which is a “failure of ideology”, which is why she has no confidence in the Coalition.

“We are the only opposition party ever to have served in Government”, she added.

Ouch. Though is that the best tack to take – to remind people about government?

How about this?

Labour’s finance spokesperson Ged Nash accused Mr Varadkar of “entitlement” and “an arrogance born out of disrespect for the constitutional right of an opposition party to hold the Government to account”.

Interesting to see the parties (and some Independents) presenting a broad if not very cohesive front on this in the Dáil. Holly Cairns noted that whatever else this is now a permanent fixture politically. 

The public has lost confidence, and it “is not coming back”, she said, warning that there would be more motions of no confidence.

And Richard Boyd Barrett noted:

“Workers, pensioners sick people women, and worst of all children,” he told the Dáil chamber.

He said the Government is allowing it to happen and saying it is somehow justified.

The government will survive this. Of course it will. But. It looks awful for them. And it looks awful because it is awful. 

But there’s another angle to this. Note the push back from Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil against the LP. It will be educative to see if this has any mild impact on relations between those parties. But then another lower key aspect was the attacks on Labour by Fianna Fáil TDs – attacking Labour’s record in government with the very same party FF is not in government with. Cognitive dissonance how are you?

Minister of State James Browne was another Government TD who spared the niceties with a strident attack on Labour. He ran through some of its rhetoric and promises when in Opposition pre 2011 and claimed: “You broke all your promises.”

Not that Fine Gael was behind in coming forward to attack:

Government Chief Whip Hildegard Naughton has followed with a cutting attack on the Labour Party saying: “I remember when the Labour Party stood for something.”

Then there’s another point. Clearly a good tranche of Independents will prop up the government, and this has implications the far side of an election too. So while FF and FG may collectively have a certain support in the polls, it’s probably as well to factor in 7% or even more of Independents support in polls on that side of the equation. In some ways we may well be getting a sneak preview of some of the dynamics of government formation after that next election.

Speaking of performative irritation shading into performative anger, Martin has been particular notable in that respect – doling out contempt for Sinn Féin, despite the fact that this was to no particular political effect whatsoever. 

Again, the question has to be asked, what did he think that the outcome of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement (signed when he was Minister in the then FF Cabinet for Education and Science) would lead to other than, at a minimum, Sinn Féin increasing its representation in Dáil Éireann to some degree or another?  

British in a united Ireland  March 29, 2023

Interesting phrasing in that Der Spiegel interview with Mary Lou McDonald this last week.   

Invited to provide reassurance to unionists facing the prospect of a united Ireland, she said there were “no circumstances” in which Sinn Féin would stand for discrimination of unionists along the lines that “Catholics and nationalists suffered in the North”. She added that for many concrete issues, such as healthcare, would be more important when considering support for unification than symbolic issues, such as flag and anthem.

“What we can guarantee, as the basis of a new reunified Ireland, is a society built on full and equal citizenship for everyone,” she said. “And in the case of our unionist friends, they are now British living in a partitioned Ireland. In the future, they would be British in a united Ireland. We have no right to steal people’s identity.”

That’s all well and good. Necessary indeed. But how to give effect to that identity? And what about the more tangible aspects of that identity, in terms of political representation? How does that work? 

No reason to adjust strategic nuclear posture March 29, 2023

Fred Kaplan, who remains a sane voice in matters military around Ukraine and other areas, argues that while rash and baffling, the latest announcement by Putin that Belarus would store nuclear weapons was: ‘To the extent that talking about nukes near Ukraine’s borders is provocative, then, yes, it is also provocative, but entirely as show—not worthy of a fuss.’

He notes the US department of Defense was more measured in its assessment of the announcement with the line above in the headline “We have not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture.” . 

And he further notes:

Here’s the thing: Russia has about 2,000 “tactical nuclear weapons,” meaning weapons of fairly short range and fairly low explosive yield, designed to be used against military targets on a battlefield. Some are missiles, some are bombs that can be dropped from airplanes; most are either in western Russia or could be moved there.

Putting another dozen or so on Belarusian soil gives Putin no advantage, nor does it alter the strategic situation in any way. It doesn’t put Russian nukes any closer to Ukraine than many already are. Nor would a nuclear weapon launched from Belarus exempt the Russian homeland from nuclear retaliation by the West. The weapon would be owned and launched by Russia. (Putin has made it clear he is not transferring control of these nukes to authorities in Minsk; Moscow would remain in control, just as Washington is in control of U.S. nuclear weapons on NATO bases.) As a result, Russia would be the target of a return blow.

Indeed given the rhetoric around Kaliningrad this announcement means less than that. And even that meant little material difference. 

That said Kaplan makes a very striking point:

Meanwhile, Putin might have simply caused himself a bit of very avoidable harm. Just four days earlier, at their gaudy Kremlin summit, he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping signed a joint declaration, noting, among other things, “All nuclear-weapon states should refrain from deploying nuclear weapons abroad.” This was meant as a slam against the United States, the only country that does base some of its nukes abroad—about 100 of them, which could be loaded onto bombers, in five NATO countries.

It might be a daring move for Putin to tear up one article of his new accord with his “dear friend” to the east, but, more than that, it is a stupid move. The joint statement—and the summit in every dimension—reflected, above all, Moscow’s distinctly junior role in this partnership, and Xi, like his fellow dictator, has no patience for insubordination from lesser, dependent powers.

Xi had already backpedaled from his description of China-Russia relations, just before the invasion of Ukraine, as an alliance of “no limits.” The phrase was not repeated at last week’s Kremlin summit; nor, despite Putin’s desperate hopes, did Xi issue any moral or material support for Russia’s stalled military.

In a way there’s a familiar aspect to this. To in no way dismiss the very material impacts on Ukraine, beyond that so much of what Moscow offers in the contemporary period is rhetoric. A lot of bombast. On one level that makes sense. This allows some greater leverage than doing nothing at all. And yet the problem arises when one compares the rhetoric to reality. That is where weaknesses and flaws are apparent – as in the realty of Sino-Russian relations. 

Kaplan makes a call for the US to ‘reintroduce diplomacy’ into their relationship and he’s absolutely correct in that. He notes that the ‘balloon’ incident was – as a crisis ‘turned out to be much less fraught than many tried to portray it. A renewed overture is quite plausible in the near future.’

Ironic if it were possible to have a renewed detente between the PRC and the US on foot of Moscow’s actions.