Socialist Standard No. 1313 January 2014

• Editorial: 2014 - Year of Xenophobia?
• Pathfinders: Please Don’t Feed the Drones
• Letters
• Where Mandela Failed
• Halo Halo!
• Tribal Politics in Africa
• Cooking the Books: ‘I’m Not Going First’
• Material World: Myth of Peaceful Buddhism
• Greasy Pole: Catching The Eye
• What About the Roma?
• What is History?
• Nationalism and Destruction in the Balkans
• Marx, Co-operatives and Capitalism
• Cooking the Books: Co-ops Again
• Book Reviews: 'The Revolution Will Be Hilarious', ' Can Income Redistribution Rescue Capitalism?' & ' Spindleopolis - Oldham in 1913'
• Proper Gander: Screening The Working Class
• 50 Years Ago: Death of a President
• Action Replay: Counted Out
• Voice From the Back
• Cartoon: Free Lunch

Scottish Nationalism and European Nationalism

Nationalism, as we have seen, is always the tool of the bourgeoisie, historically.  The Socialist Party will argue in this June the 8^th General Election that liberation for Scottish workers can come about only by overthrowing capitalism itself. If this is not done, no amount of sovereignty can ever succeed in bringing freedom, but the only diversion. At present Scottish nationalism and the SNP have the appearance of being a progressive movement to some honest people and those sincere people in and around the nationalist movement will only discover, in some years’ time, that they have been most cruelly misled and have been wasting their time.  Instead of tragically wasting their time fostering nationalism (in whatever form), they must build a powerful socialist movement.

Many who will vote for the SNP will do so in the hope that eventual Scottish independence will bring re-membership with the EU which is routinely presented as an internationalist project for an ever closer union between peoples of the region as a means of overcoming national differences and state rivalries which therefore appeals to many on the left, who often identify the EU with modernisation, economic and social advance.  Although it was not a nation state, the EU is already mimicking the state ideologically, producing a Europeanism constructed of nationalism. The EU has the appearance of a body in which national differences, if not dissolved, are at least partly reconciled. While Eurocrats and politicians in member states have declared for internationalism and harmony, they have simultaneously organised a regime of exclusion which divides ‘Europeans’ from ‘non-Europeans’ as effectively as any imagined differences which were earlier said to separate Germans, French, or Italians. Fortress Europe has a class character, intended to deny entry to almost all of those seeking a buyer for their semi- and unskilled labour power, as well as those seeking sanctuary from civil conflict and repression. The vast majority of those denied entries are poor and vulnerable; those with wealth and privilege are invariably admitted such as the Russian oligarchs with well-padded bank accounts to buy up football clubs.

‘Fortress Europe’ in fact draws upon ideas which earlier underpinned Europe’s rival nationalisms. It has encouraged racism in general and helped to provide rationales for the extreme right, where the vocabulary of Nazism has reappeared in the form of defending “European” and “Christian” culture. The EU has begun to construct its exclusionary regime with razor wire and border police, with the idea of securing Europe against ‘threats’ from without. EU states were focused intently upon removing migrants and refugees deemed ‘bogus’, ‘clandestine’ or ‘illegal’.  The vast majority of those targeted were poor and vulnerable people, almost invariably of African or Middle Eastern origin. But EU states have also targeted an ‘enemy’ long present within European territorial boundaries. Roma people were identified by fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s as one of their two greatest enemies: conservatively at least 200,000 Gypsies were sent to the death camps. In a crisis-stricken Europe images of the divided past are returning. Immigration policies are now formed in response to the collective insecurities and imaginings of public opinion; the clampdown on illegal immigrants, the need for tighter border controls, the threat of religious fundamentalism, the perceived loss of national identity, and the fears of demographic invasion are characteristic reactions of the right-wing revival. The media regularly carries stories of an Islamic menace, with Europe depicted as a target zone for migrants who could make common cause with resident Muslim communities which are increasingly depicted as a fifth-column within European society. The EU’s progress towards a fortified Europe and the heavy cost in terms of intensified racism and growth of the right presents a dismal picture.

Yet SNP propaganda depicts a happy transnational Europe in which old conflicts are being erased but it is the commercial trade-offs that drive the SNP to remain with the EU.

Edinburgh, Scotland - Edinburg, Texas - The same poverty

In Edinburg, Texas, 200 miles south of San Antonio, Denise Acosta, 36, a mother of four children aged 14 and under, described how being laid off from her job as a healthcare administrator seven months ago  had caused a crisis.  An $800 medical bill, no longer covered by insurance, meant Acosta quickly fell behind on the $1,200 monthly payments on her house, then the car. She lost both, and was forced to move in with her sister.

In October, the family's food stamp scheme, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (Snap) benefits were $113 a month, a sum that lasts them about a week and a half. In November there was a $11 cut for each family member. An expansion of the programme designed to keep low-income Americans out of hunger put in place when the recession was biting deepest, was allowed to expire in November, cutting benefits.

Acosta has learned to be creative with the children's meals. “ I used to buy Lunchables [lunch packs] for snacks, now I get a big pack of ham and cheese and we make our own. They say: 'Why can't we have Lunchables?' I tell them, 'This way they get more.' I buy larger packs of cheaper meat and stretch it out...The younger ones will have a tuna sandwich or Roma noodles, around 19 cents a pack. The older ones say 'This isn't even a meal.' ”

As these cuts begin to bite, even harsher reductions are in prospect. Republicans in the House of Representatives have proposed $38bn cuts over 10 years, in their latest version of a long-delayed farm bill that would also require new work requirements and drug tests for food stamp recipients. The House bill would deny Snap to 3.8 million low-income people in 2014, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, and to an average of 3 million people a year for 10 years. Those who would find themselves no longer eligible include some of the nation's neediest individuals, working families, children and senior citizens. In addition, 200,000 families would lose access to subsidised school meals.

That would make it really difficult for people who struggle to find work like me to get back on their feet,” Acosta said.

Even since the November cuts took effect, those involved in emergency food distribution reported higher demand and longer lines, with new clients they had not seen before.  Demand is outpacing supply. Of the 58,000 clients fed by the San Antonio Food Bank every week, Cooper said, half are working families, many are underemployed, the rest are seniors and people who, through mental or physical disability, cannot work. There are a lot of veterans in Texas, some of whom have been disabled through military service. But on the whole, Eric Cooper, the CEO said “Hunger is biased towards women and kids. A divorce, a separation can put a lot of women in poverty.”

The Unwanted People

"I never ever realised how much hatred there is towards me." - Noah

Katharine Quarmby’s book “No Place To Call Home” shows so clearly that there is a long and horrible history of hatred towards Gypsies and Travellers, from medieval days when they were killed, enslaved and branded in Britain to the slaughter of perhaps half of Europe's Roma in the Holocaust.

In Britain, they are our most excluded group. Gypsies and Travellers are at the bottom of the pile when it comes to education, health and housing, with lower life expectancy exacerbated by living on polluted sites.  Women die 12 years before the national average, while children are at higher risk of dying in infancy and adults more likely to kill themselves.  Travelling people are frequently victims of abuse and violence that they do not bother reporting. "Gypsies and Travellers are often victims, not perpetrators, of crime," Quarmby writes.

 She tells the story of one boy taken by officials from his family's tent in Fife and placed in children's homes, where he was sexually abused. His mother spent the rest of her life hunting for him, dying at the age of 41 without seeing her son again. Scottish authorities have never apologised for such disgraceful actions, which continued into the 1960s.

Gypsy elder Billy Welch thinks the solution lies in travellers opening up and opting in. After all, two-thirds of them now live in settled sites. Only 30 families in Britain travel all year round. Times are changing. "We live in a democracy," says Welch, "and we don't use it. We are our own worst enemy."

Scottish Racism

Racist murders are more common in Scotland than in the rest of the UK, according to a shock academic study into the extent of prejudice.

A new book insists the belief Scotland is immune to racism and “culturally different” to England is condemned as a “misleading fantasy”. The authors of No Problem Here: Understanding Racism in Scotland cite official crime figures to prove there is a very real problem.

The analysis shows the rate of racist murders is higher on average in Scotland than in the UK as a whole. Between 2000 and 2013, there were 1.8 murders per million people with a known or suspected race element in Scotland. The equivalent figure for the UK was just 1.3 murders per million people.

Carol Young, senior policy officer for the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights, said the stats show the idea that Scotland doesn’t have a problem with racism is false.  “There’s a perception that Scotland has less of a problem with racism than other areas of the UK, perhaps best summed up by the phrase, ‘we’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns’.But, regardless of popular opinion, the statistics suggest otherwise. In 2013-2014, 4807 racist incidents were recorded by police in Scotland. That’s equivalent of 92 incidents every week, without accounting for the many cases that go unreported.” Young added: “You could be white-skinned and still identifiably minority ethnic in many circumstances. Skin tone has not protected Jewish people, Irish people, Gypsy/traveller communities or new European migrants from racism.”

Neil Davidson, a sociology lecturer at Glasgow University said: “The idea that there is ‘no problem’, or at least much less of a problem, has grown for three reasons. One is that the Irish-Catholic presence – the largest-ever migrant group to settle in Scotland – tends to be discussed in the context of ‘sectarianism’, a concept which treats Catholics and Protestants as equivalent and ignore the racism directed towards the former. The second is the relatively small size of the migration to Scotland from the Indian sub-continent and especially from the Caribbean, which did not mean that migrants did not suffer racism, just that it was much less visible than in Birmingham or London.

“Finally, the movements for devolution and independence have involved the idea that Scotland is ‘culturally’ different from England, and that part of this difference involves the Scots being more ‘welcoming’, ‘tolerant’ and so on...these are misleading fantasies, which ignore the historical experience of Irish Catholics and the contemporary experience of Muslims, Roma and other BAME groups...'