The Union: Safe and Sound

Martin Kelly writes:

"David Lindsay has put a couple of comments on this post concerning his belief that the banking bailout has saved the Union.

In my replies, I have tried to articulate my belief that the impact of recent weeks' events go far beyond the political in their scope; that what we are seeing is a change to a different, even less citizen friendly form of government than we have had before - what is, to all intents and purposes, British fascism. No matter which ideology comes out on top, none of us are ultimately going to be better off.

In the shortest of short terms, of course, the political stock of Alex Salmond and the Scottish National Party is now sub-prime, perhaps even toxic. All of their financial projections were based on demand for a dwindling commodity, the price of which is now falling, while they enthusiastically bought into the whole globalist, neoliberal economic agenda; indeed, seemed absolutely convinced that that model had defeated all others completely. Salmond never answered the question why an independent Scotland should be like Iceland, when it could model itself on Switzerland instead. One hasn't heard reports of the Swiss banks running to the governments for bailouts.

If Salmond is a busted flush, then one would have to say that this is a good and wholesome thing. An independent Scotland under his leadership, indeed under that of any member of the SNP, would soon have become dominated by those worst aspects of the Scottish character - pettiness, aggression, intolerance - which the SNP laud as positives. 'Wha's like us?' the SNP cry. Not the Swiss, we answer. Proud Alex has been sent homewards to think again, his gamesmanship of games which he was happy to play up to the edge of treason shown to be completely discredited.

I once wrote of the similarity between the SNP and the pre-unification Italian nationalists of the 19th Century; in particular, that your average SNP politician fitted completely the description given of Benedetto Cairoli, that he "was one of the most conspicuous representatives of that type of Italian public men who, having conspired and fought for a generation in the cause of national unity, were despite their valour little fitted for the responsible parliamentary and official positions they subsequently attained; and who by their ignorance of foreign affairs and of internal administration unwittingly impeded the political development of their country." Peas out the pod. The SNP will still drink their wee drams, and sing their wee folk songs; and will remain as unsuited to governing Scotland as Cairoli was to governing Italy.

I don't think we'll be hearing talk of the McCrone Report for quite some time."

No, indeed.

I only have any problem with the second paragraph of this. Alas, Martin seems to be with "Break Dancing Jesus" (as to whose identity I am beginning to have doubts - the culprit universally assumed up to now, and who seems to have left very broad hints in the past, certainly has his faults, but really isn't quite as bad as recent published and unpublishable comments would require him to be) that the policies long advocated here, and now implemented by Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, are "fascist".

But we recently witnessed the death of one of Europe's two or three most important Fascists. In his virulent opposition to social democratic economics, to moral and social conservatism, and to the specifically Catholic basis (mine, but by no means the only one, though, I submit, the most comprehensive and coherent) for holding such views, Jörg Haider was the authentic view of Austria's German-nationalist third Lager, of which Haider was not the most famous son. Do those views sound familiar?

Indeed, they even appeal to much the same sort of people sociologically in Britain as in Austria. Well, of course they do. In his heyday, Haider himself said that there was no other party in Europe with which his had more in common than New Labour. And he was right. He was simply stating a fact there.

New Labour seems to have come to an end as a serious political force this week. In other words, not least including more or less the words of Jörg Haider, Fascism seems to have come to an end as a serious political force in Britain this week. Both in the form of New Labour and in the form of the SNP.