Archives For November 30, 1999 @ 12:00 am
Scotland voted on Thursday to remain within the United Kingdom – with 55% and 2,001,926 voting ‘No’ to Scottish independence, while 45% and 1,617,989 voted ‘Yes’ – after more than two years of heated debate, but also on the back of a late pledge by the three main Westminster parties to grant Scotland greater devolved powers as part of the UK. The pledge, signed by David Cameron, Nick Clegg, and Ed Miliband and published on the front page of the Daily Record at the beginning of the week, promised ‘extensive new powers’ to Scotland.
More devolution for Scotland in the case of a ‘No’ vote was always on the agenda, but the scope of these late-promised powers is a matter of debate between the three parties and between the parties and the SNP. The Scottish Parliament at Holyrood already legislates for Scotland’s health and social services, education, housing, transportation, agriculture, fisheries and forestry, environment, arts and sport, tourism, and economic development. The Scotland Act 2012 – which amended the Scotland Act 1998, which established the devolved Scottish Parliament – additionally gave Scotland’s Parliament the power to raise or lower the rate of income tax by 10p in the pound, uniformly across all tax bands; as well as some other minor powers relating to taxation and law and order. However the Act is not due to be fully realised before 2016, and is now likely to be superseded. At the moment the Scottish Parliament can alter the rate of income tax by 3p in the pound.
Maximum devolution for Scotland – ‘devo max’ – would imply allowing the Scottish Parliament to legislate on everything except foreign policy and defence. It is clear that any move to extend Scotland’s powers will fall some way short of this. So far, discussion around the pledge for extensive new powers for Scotland has centred upon three issues. The first is greater still Scottish authority over taxation. The SNP would like complete control over taxation within Scotland, including absolute control over income tax rates, corporation tax, and air passenger duty. The Conservatives appear ready to give complete control over income tax rates; while the Liberal Democrats would offer this and more. Labour, however, seem willing to allow the Scottish Parliament to increase tax rates as they see fit, but not to unilaterally cut the top rate of income tax.
Secondly, the pledge vowed to consolidate Scotland’s authority over its NHS. This is against a background of gesture from Westminster threatening cuts and further privatisations; but also in a context whereby the NHS in Scotland apparently faces a funding gap of £400 million. Thirdly, and related to the issue of the NHS, is the promise to retain the Barnett formula: a mechanism for allocating public expenditure levels in the United Kingdom’s four nations, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Based on population, the Barnett formula has resulted in Scotland maintaining a significantly higher expenditure per capita than England: as it stands today, Scotland spends £1,623 – 19% – more per head than England on public services.
Embellishing a timetable established several weeks ago by Gordon Brown, David Cameron announced yesterday morning in his post-referendum speech that Lord Smith of Kelvin – a former BBC governor, and chairman of the organising committee for Glasgow’s 2014 Commonwealth Games – will oversee the process towards greater devolution for Scotland. The timeline is short: detailed proposals are to be written up by October, and they should pass consultation by November before a draft bill is published in January. Any legislation will not be passed until after the general election in May, and the continued implementation of the Barnett formula is likely to prove a sticking point within the UK Parliament.
The promise of greater devolution for Scotland has brought a surge of attention to the West Lothian question, and the proposal for ‘English votes for English laws’. In short, the question – first raised back in 1977 by the West Lothian MP Tam Dalyell, in the build up to the failed Scottish referendum of 1979 – asks why Scottish MPs can vote on English laws, while English MPs cannot vote on Scottish laws as they have no access to the Scottish Parliament. The proposal suggests that where legislation only concerns England, only MPs from English constituencies should be allowed to vote.
It is easy to go back and forth over ‘English votes for English laws’. Superficially, the proposal sounds eminently reasonable; but when you realise that two of its main proponents over the past weeks and months have been Conservative MP John Redwood and UKIP leader Nigel Farage, suspicions grow in the mind as the body is immediately beset by revulsion. On the other hand on Thursday night, as the referendum results filtered through via the BBC, Ming Campbell – former Liberal Democrat leader and current MP for North East Fife – agreed that, with more powers promised to the Scottish Parliament, an end to the ability for Scottish MPs to vote on English laws is not only inevitable, but logical and fair.
In fact, the proposal was part of the Conservative manifesto for 2010; but the coalition government determined to set up a commission to investigate rather than act. The McKay Commission reported in March 2013, broadly supporting procedural change; but averring that ‘Under the Commission’s recommendations, no MPs would be prevented from voting on any bill, and the right of the House as a whole to make final decisions would be preserved’ and ‘Our proposals retain the right of a UK-wide majority to make the final decisions where they believe UK interests or those of a part of the UK other than England should prevail. We expect that governments will prefer compromise to conflict.’
English laws – as opposed to UK laws – would in theory cover the areas of health, education, transportation, and culture. Foreign affairs, defence, energy, and basic welfare provision and pensions are prominent among the realms which would then remain the concern of the UK Parliament. But with greater devolution for Scotland when it comes to taxation, it is unclear to what extent England might be allowed to set its economic policy independently from the rest of the United Kingdom. This is an intractable problem with the concept of ‘English votes for English laws’, because it is arguable that given the population of England and the size of the English economy, the decisions it makes economically will always have a disproportionate impact on its partners north and west of the border.
With Scotland voting to stay part of the UK and the focus turning to the West Lothian question, what also show through upon analysis are both the strengths of the union between Scotland and England, and the divisions within English society. ‘English votes for English laws’ is a populist proposal, and might well appeal to the vast majority of the English population. But it is hard to see how, in practise, it would benefit vast swathes of the country.
In the 2010 general election, Scotland returned 41 Labour MPs to the House of Commons from 59 contested seats. This amounts to 69% of Scotland’s seats won by Labour. In the North East of England, Labour won 25 from 29 seats. In the North West, Labour took 47 seats from a possible 75; and in Yorkshire and the Humber, they won 32 seats from 54. This means that in the north of England, Labour won 66% of seats. Yet in England as a whole, the Conservatives won 298 of 533 seats; giving them an election victory – although not a majority – in the United Kingdom with 307 seats out of 650.
When it comes to politics, the north of England is ideologically and economically closer to Scotland – and to Wales, where in 2010 Labour took 26 out of 40 seats, or 65% – than it is to London and the South East. However it is without its own parliament, and without the benefits brought about in Scotland by the Barnett formula. It suffers from a lack of representation in parliament and from a shortage of investment in jobs and in cultural life. And it seems perverse that one of the consequences of the close referendum in Scotland might be the further diminishing of the north. If ‘English votes for English laws’ becomes implemented – which may not require the passage of any new legislation – then the viewpoint of northern England will be increasingly marginalised as it loses the effective balance provided by Scottish MPs, and sees Labour struggle to attain a majority on English-only issues of legislation.
Other problems are posed by ‘English votes for English laws’. Would this change require a separate parliament building, which would be the preserve of English MPs and English matters of debate – and if so, where would an English Parliament be located? Otherwise an English Parliament could simply sit in the Commons on a rotational basis: sitting two or three days a week, with the UK Parliament sitting the rest of the time. Alternately, the UK Parliament could remain intact, with Scottish MPs even allowed to debate English laws, but voting limited to English politicians.
On Thursday night, the Times political columnist Daniel Finkelstein raised the notion that, more than an English Parliament, such a fundamental change to legislative procedure could require an English executive – a vast and unwieldy undertaking, which would have wide-ranging ramifications for governmental ministers and the civil service. Labour are advertising a constitutional convention to consider the future of political process in the United Kingdom, reluctant to accept ‘English votes for English laws’, especially as David Cameron seems set to bind further Scottish devolution to the enactment of the proposal. Meanwhile on Thursday night, Labour MP Jim Murphy took a pleasantly contrarian perspective and asked, given the breadth of powers enjoyed by the Greater London Authority, whether London’s MPs should also face a limited role when it comes to legislating for the rest of England.
This argument in particular raises the potential solution of greater devolution for England’s regions. The manner and the terms of such would be difficult to agree upon. Would the present tiered system of local councils remain; would a powerful layer of government emerge at regional level, between Westminster and the local councils over England’s nine regions; or would the concept of city-regions, experimented with in Manchester and Leeds, be spread out across the country? The powers handed over would be open to dispute. And where ‘English votes for English laws’ would seemingly benefit the Conservatives, there is the view that greater devolution for the regions would play into the hands of Labour. Any shift in powers could be complemented by a more representative voting system. But to accept that the strength of feeling shown in Scotland extends throughout the UK requires significant devolution to the regions – and the development of a genuine localised politics, a process which appears both viable and necessary in today’s globalised, interconnected world.
These are some of the thoughts I have had, and some of the connections I have made, regarding the attack in Woolwich on Wednesday, in which a man died after being attacked with a machete. Two suspects remain in hospital after a confrontation with the police. My considerations relate more to the reporting of the attack than to the nature of the attack itself; mine is really an attempt to analyse and philosophise the aims and the rhetoric of the reporting.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This epigram – from the French ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’, authored by the critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr – may encapsulate war and warmongering in general, which often seems the continual search for a common enemy, and which has only increased in scope and persistence in the age of the nation state. Yet its play upon the concept of time gives it particular pertinence for me here, and when it comes to terrorist attacks and the War on Terrorism.
The attack in Woolwich was quickly depicted as a terrorist attack; and quickly conceived as demonstrating a new type of terrorist activity in the United Kingdom, owing to its up-close nature and the bold and bloody use of a machete. Keith Vaz, the Home Affairs Select Committee Chairman, called the attack ‘totally unprecedented’; defence experts described it as a ‘departure’ from previous attacks, marking ‘a new round of terror threats in this country’. At the same time, in David Cameron’s press conference upon the attack – given in Paris, alongside François Hollande, whom the Prime Minister was visiting for a scheduled meeting – he stated ‘We have had these sorts of attacks before in our country’, before concluding, ‘and we never buckle in the face of them’.
Thus the Woolwich attack has been portrayed as both new and not-new, something appearing for the first time and something in a process of recurring. Involved here is a sort of emptying out of time which calls to mind Anthony Giddens’ The Consequences of Modernity. For Giddens (the theoretical architect of the ‘Third Way’ in politics), a phenomenon of modern life is ‘time-space distanciation’, whereby time and subsequently space are made ’empty’ in that they are made distinct from any grounding contexts: with the mechanical clock and the standardised calendar, we can know the time without reference to nature and our specific locale; and with such developments as the telephone and improvements in travel (and now again with the internet), we can interact with people without being physically with them, and increasingly conceive the world in a way unlimited by what we see immediately around us.
Time-space distanciation ‘connects presence and absence’; it relates closely to ‘disembedding’, which Giddens defines as ‘the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time and space’. In short, disembedded social relations are those no longer embedded in local contexts. Giddens relates two types of disembedding mechanisms: symbolic tokens – for instance, money – which are accepted as possessing value regardless of when they are used and by whom; and expert systems, where – lacking the requisite knowledge ourselves – we rely on the expertise of professionals. Giddens elaborates how the faith we place in expert systems relates to and becomes trust.
As disembedding allows us to operate without the restrictions that were once imposed by time and space, it offers us much in the way of opportunities. More, disembedding is crucial to our functioning in an increasingly complex world – our trust allows us to accept things and practices as real, even if we lack knowledge of their structure, development and coherence. Yet disembedding comes also with dangers, one of which is the acceptance of expert systems which are not expert, but contain flaws or deceits.
When it is stated that the Woolwich attack is both something new and emerging and at the same time something old and persisting, we lose our sense of the specific interaction and the contexts from which it actually emerged. The endeavour is to make us lose our grounding, and to increase our fear: an ambiguous and perverse fear that something will inevitably happen at any moment. This sort of rhetoric is typical in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, and typical of the war on terrorism: there is frequent talk of phases and new stages, with speculation regarding repeat attacks, copycats, and the spiralling of incidents which may prove not to be one-offs. In the process we are encouraged to give ourselves over to expert systems, in this case to politicians and defence experts. One of these, Jonathan Shaw – former head of counter-terrorism and head of cyber security at the Ministry of Defence until last year – has written a piece for the Evening Standard advocating that the intelligence services be allowed to monitor the public’s internet activities; promulgating the ‘snooper’s charter’ which Home Secretary Theresa May is reportedly keen to revive.
Vague and unhelpful definitions and categorisations.
With the vacuum which is a product of a lack of concrete information, distanciated from the individual occurrence by the leading rhetoric of the media and politicians, meta-narratives and broad categorisations move in. In the case of Woolwich, as in the case of many of the attacks which come to be considered terrorist, these categorisations are twofold. Firstly, the attack is categorised as a terrorist attack. This is understandable with regard to Woolwich, given the recorded public pronouncements made by the two suspects; that they were shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and making political statements (‘This British soldier is an eye for an eye…Remove your government’) led government sources to describe the attack as terrorist within ninety minutes of its first report.
Still, what defines a terrorist attack seems somewhat open to interpretation. A simple definition would suggest that it is any attack which is meant to provoke terror, and which carries a political motive. Yet there is no internationally accepted legal definition of what constitutes terrorism: attempts to arrive at a consensus have faltered upon differences of opinion regarding which political motives should be included in a criminal law definition, and which political motives – for instance, motives of self-determination – should not.
The second problem of categorisation is an extension of the first, and it is that where acts are categorised as terrorist, they tend also to be categorised as belonging to a particular terrorist group or organisation. In the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich attack, by late Wednesday evening, even supposedly liberal news sources were proclaiming the perpetrators’ association with al-Qaeda. The Guardian based their connecting of the organisation tenuously on one suspect’s reference to ‘our land’, calling the attack ‘the first al-Qaida inspired attack to claim a life on British soil’ since 7 July, 2005, and terming the suspect’s claims ‘jihadist’. The BBC’s Home Affairs Correspondent wrote a piece balanced in so far as it distinguished between jihadists, political Islamists, and Muslims, and sought to interpret the typical justification for jihadist attacks; yet the concept of the piece was similarly based on an unestablished connection with al-Qaeda, the piece stating that the ‘long-feared attack’ may be rooted to ‘the heart of al-Qaeda’s violent ideology’.
It has since emerged that one of the two suspects, Michael Adebolajo, attended meetings of the Al-Muhajiroun organisation from around 2003, though the extent of his involvement with the group remains uncertain. Al-Muhajiroun claims to be a purely political organisation, focused on promoting Islam and declaiming the state of Israel; but it has links to several people convicted of terrorist activities. The organisation was banned by the National Union of Students in 2001, for disseminating hate literature; and was banned by the government from the UK in 2005. Hours ago, a friend of Adebolajo’s, Abu Nusaybah, alleged during an interview for Newsnight that Adebolajo was approached six months ago to work for MI5, but declined; Nusaybah was arrested on BBC premises shortly after making the allegations.
Other problematic terms, and parallels in Boston.
There are other problematic terms. Referring to suspects as having been ‘radicalised’ takes away their agency and dehumanises them: the phrase evokes Charlie Chaplin’s depiction of ‘machine men with machine minds’, which is evocative and interesting psychologically, but which is neither clear nor balanced news reporting. It is not a rhetoric otherwise used by media outlets; ‘radicalised’ would not be used even for those political leaders who some outlets accuse of leading their countries into illegal Middle Eastern wars. The UK terrorism threat levels are also vague, with the raising of threat levels inciting fear and substituting for substantive information.
There are clear parallels and extensions to be found in the recent Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath. The decision to charge the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, with use of a weapon of mass destruction is far from straightforward. A weapon of mass destruction originally referred to a chemical weapon, but now the term has no internationally authoritative definition; to be charged with the use of such can subsume an indiscriminate mixture of more specific offences. Theoretically, the phrase arguably implies a level of indiscriminate destruction greater than that carried out in Boston. Again, the term appears more politically than technically descriptive.
Where broad categorisations are so readily made, so condemnation tends to be broad and absolute. That such an attack is inexcusable and ultimately cannot be justified may be so, but this doesn’t mean that it can’t be better understood; it may surpass the sense many have of what is moral, but there remains a logic which impels such attacks and which cannot be dismissed in the face of the actions of Western states, who have engaged for much of the period since the Second World War in global programmes of regime change, arms dealings, and military action.
Finally Social Media to the Fore!
The Woolwich attack is remarkable in that the two suspects remained on the scene of the crime; with Adebolajo readily, and even casually, with a London accent, being recorded on phone camera by a witness as he made his politicised remarks. Another video has surfaced showing the two men charging towards police officers when these arrived, which resulted in the suspects being shot and detained. That the suspects remained in place and spoke so freely to witnesses meant that information about the attack, and its declared motives, rapidly spread across social media.
Both the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, initially responded to the attack via Twitter: Cameron tweeting ‘The killing in #Woolwich is truly shocking – I have asked the Home Secretary to chair a COBRA meeting’; Miliband tweeting ‘Shocked by appalling events in Woolwich. Whole country will be horrified by what has happened’. Later into the evening, the English Defence League gained a significant number of Twitter followers as they attempted to utilise social media to arrange a series of protests.
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Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity (Polity Press, 2010)
culturedallroundman 