ANOTHER WEEK OF POSTURING AS MULTIPLE CRISIS DEEPEN

By Ken Ferguson

If we believe what the increasingly insipid Scots media tell us we have just witnessed a historic vote at Holyrood in which  fast dissolving Scottish Labour voted with SNP and Greens to assert that Scots have a right to self determination on independence.

Voice readers may consider that such a right is self evident and hardly breaking news but in reality it is the latest example of diversionary debate which is increasingly the response both of the SNP government and the wider Scottish Parliament to the gathering storm of crisis facing voters.

For example the announcement on yet another council re-organisation asks us to believe that returning to what older Voice readers will remember as regional and district councils alongside mass sackings will lead to improved services stretches credibility to breaking point.

Likewise this formulation of moving the deck chairs–or corridor beds– on the deck of the crisis ridden NHS Titanic, shuffling structures and sackings will not solve the crisis in our most cherished public service now facing a crisis of public confidence. It convinces nobody.

The cynical nature of the revelation of  these plans with a “consultation” lasting three months and culminating just as people gear up for Xmas and are even less interested in the small print of the outcome strongly suggests that the outcome is probably already written.

However this approach displacing  policy action  with posturing goes well beyond structures of services and reveals a government in office but not in power and baulking at any idea that it should even mildly challenge the rich minority dominating our politics.

A prime example was the recent debate in Holyrood on the issue of Data Centres and their gargantuan appetite for  water and electricity which has sparked mass  opposition in locations such as Auchtertool and Larbert and across the USA.

Concerned citizens sought a moratorium on such centres to allow time to examine the conditions, environmental impact and so forth of such developments but after a day of debate the moratorium does no appear in the outcome with an outcome which is at best opaque.

This despite the fact the national council of the governing SNP has supported just such a moratorium policy. Instead in the debate government ministers stressed the need–clearly uppermost in their minds–not to frighten off possible inward investors.

A similar thread runs through the crisis in the NHS which is locked into astronomically expensive PFI  contracts which we have covered in many articles in the Voice which can be summed up as buying one hospital and paying for three.

Despite calls to break these insanely expensive contracts and plough the cash into healthcare successive SNP ministers have failed to act on them preferring instead to introduce their own tweeked version and embark on a path of tinkering with NHS structures and jobs.

However probably the most heinous failure on the part of the Scottish Government has been its refusal to deliver on their pledge, first made in 2007, to abolish the Tory designed council tax instead–that theme again–pretend to act by years of freezing the level of council tax.

This, of course, simply added to the Tory and Tory /Lib Dem austerity to bail out the banks and played a significant part in the decimation of public services we are still living with as the price of cynical SNP inaction on the Council Tax.

Now after twenty years of inaction where vital services and jobs and services from a basic as public toilets to youth clubs and elderly care and libraries  have been slashed public discontent is translating to apathy and even support–as in much of Europe–for the far right.

Yet, as we set out in fresh detail in this edition of the Voice, throughout that entire period a ready made alternative, designed within the powers of the existing Holyrood parliament, based on income and capable of raising £Billions in extra money for services has sat on the shelf.

Pioneered by the Scottish Socialist Party

And, given that it is based on incomes it also takes thousands of people out of tax altogether.

 The vote in Holyrood on self determination’s most notable aspect was Labour’e damascene conversion to it but that is more about desperately seeking survival than it is about a real commitment to a living, breathing Scottish democracy.

Perhaps in the reality where polls show a fairly consistent but narrow Yes lead the most interesting finding was that respondents polled saw the question of an independence referendum as a demand for the future perhaps as much as 10 years away.

It is this hiatus between everyday  pressing concerns such housing, NHS, cost of living, public transport and so forth and the–for many voters– abstract question of independence which exists, for many, in the political middle distance.

Like the Scottish Socialist Party the Voice ’s support for independence is not about flags and anthems but as a way to open the road to a Scotland breaking with the profiteers and warmongers meeting the needs of people and planet.

Only be forging an unbreakable link between independence and the meeting of peoples’ needs and aspirations can we win an independence which, in the words if Hamish Henderson ‘A the bairns i Adam shall have Breid, Barley Bree and painted room.’

Action not timidity needs to be the priority.