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THE recent General Election, which reduced the Tories to a minority government and put UK Labour some 50 seats behind them, has caused shock waves across politics not least in the movement for Scottish independence.

Recent weeks have displayed a range of in-fighting, name-calling, political confusion, bile and in some cases simply personal posturing. This has including attacks on Yes backers who voted Labour, criticism on the topic of who is or isnt acceptable within the Yes camp and how all this should be reported.

This culminated with a series of columns from various Yes luminaries arguing that the Yes movement is really alive and well and citing in one case as a football team the talents in its ranks.

Incidentally, unlike the Scotland teams which used to actually win in the glory years, it was fairly light on working-class talent.

It is probably necessary here to set out two truths about this spat and what it tells about the politics currently facing supporters of independence today.

First it simply flies in the face of reality to suggest that the broad, pluralist mass Yes movement built around the 2014 referendum still exists today. It clearly does not.

Of course a movement exists but it is a changed formation to that which so closely challenged the power of the British state in 2014. Most notably the mass upsurge in support moving from Yes as a movement to the SNP as a party radically changed the dynamics and nature of the former.

Apart from sporadic demonstrations, the public face of Yes has merged with that of the SNP and has, in turn, become linked in the public mind with the fortunes on that party. Bluntly, this has at best becalmed the independence movement and evidence suggests it has set it back.

In place of the vibrant, optimistic mass movement of 2014 which was the Wind that shook the Unionist Barley, Yes is now equated with an ultra-cautious SNP government which looks increasingly like a centrist formation stifling the real thirst for radical change of 2014.

The second truth flowing from this is that in place of being part of a movement, prominent non-SNP independence supporters are now largely to be found in the columns of newspapers, websites and cyberspace where in turn they rehearse the same hand-wringing about when to hold another indyref, how wicked the Unionists are etc.

The evidence strongly suggests that the public, while still winnable for the independence case, isnt sharing those concerns and is seeking a politics which answers the big questions in their lives such as housing, jobs, wages and health.

Of course, work has been done on how many aspects of these issues would be tackled under independence, but they need to escape from the discussion seminars and think tanks into the public space inhabited by the ordinary citizens.

Independence must again become the concerns of far greater numbers than todays stalwarts.

This urgent need was spotlighted by the results in the recent election where, led by the Tories, the Unionist block was given a free run by the SNP who parked yet again the independence issue while voters were showered by LibDem, Labour and Tory anti-independence propaganda leading to tactical voting.

Indeed, the brutal truth is that this toxic combination of SNP feebleness and Unionist boldness on independence has returned enough Tory MPs to keep Theresa May in power in Westminster.

But for the independence movement there is another potentially more pressing issue to deal with, in the shape of the impact of Jeremy Corbyn and his radical politics. No serious socialist can do other than welcome the impact of Corbyn, who is an honest and principled socialist and has played a key role in shifting public debate and placing socialist ideas on the policy agenda and challenging the market knows best mainstream.

It is hardly surprising in this context, then, that numbers of 2014 Yes supporters, hungry for social justice and change yet conflicted about Labours past, plumped for them as an endorsement of the Corbyn agenda.

Unsurprising but wrong. Voting Labour in Scotland had little to do with backing Corbyns socialist politics but everything to do with endorsing Dugdales strident no surrender line against even allowing Scots a vote on the issue.

This view is confirmed both by the relatively small growth in Scottish Labours vote share and by Corbyns allies in the Campaign for Socialism who warned that future Labour advance needs a left turn.

The choice for socialists seeking change is simple. Corbyn puts his faith in winning socialist change through winning a Westminster socialist majority and embarking on a British Road to Socialism. No such road exists in the world of reality.

The entire undemocratic indeed archaic Westminster set-up, with its unelected Lords, powers of the Crown in Parliament and its semi-democratic first-past-the-post voting system is a bulwark against change, not a road to it.

By contrast an independent Scotland, won by a mass Yes movement based on a democratic parliament, can generate momentum for real socialist change putting the needs of people and planet before the profits of an elite few.

For Yes supporters the British Road to Socialism, even with Corbyn at the wheel, will prove a diversion. We need to keep our eyes on the prize of independence as the key to change.

This article was originally published in the Scottish Socialist voice.

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Ken Ferguson: Forget Corbyn, there is no British Road to Socialism only independence can deliver real change - The National

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The Endless Bizarre Allure of Socialism, Part II CNSNews.com Socialism has a technical definition involving government ownership of the means of production and central planning of the economy. But most people today think socialism is big government, with business still privately owned but with lots of ...

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The Endless Bizarre Allure of Socialism, Part II - CNSNews.com

And The War On Trump

I am increasingly of the opinion that the basis for the inflamed, visceral hatred of President Donald Trump in some quarters is neither his occasional vulgarity nor his propensity to toss out un-presidential insults, nor the misogyny and sexism that the left pretends to see in his every word.

Rather, its that his presidency has torn the veil off of the lefts inexorable and until recently largely obscured march toward a socialist America.

Trump has exposed and discredited many of the institutions and mechanisms the left uses to execute its fundamental transformation: The media, the entertainment industry and academia.

Furthermore, he is an unabashed capitalist, a walking manifestation of American achievement through commerce.

And for this, they despise him.

Health care is a pristine example of the battle being waged. Obamacare is collapsing. The GOP is too terrified to repeal it. Democrats know that its failure, particularly in the absence of legitimate free-market alternatives, will virtually ensure the single-payer system theyre now openly pushing.

Single-payer is a recipe for failure and abuse. (Exhibits 1 and 2: The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Indian Health Services.) Except in relatively small, largely homogenous populations, collectivism fails because in the absence of financial incentives, more people want to receive things than want to make or provide them. The government must therefore insert itself into every transaction: You must make X. You can only charge $Y. You only get so much of Z.

Thus does single-payer health care morph from being a provision system to a rationing system. And those who control the rations control the people.

There is plenty historical evidence of socialisms disasters, most recently in Venezuela. Detractors will scoff: The Venezuelan government took over most private enterprise; theres no indication that such a thing would ever happen here.

However, socialist and communist regimes tend to expand not because they succeed, but because they fail.

Instead of admitting the collapse of a failing business model, the lefts impulse is to take it larger: We just need more money. We need higher taxes. We need the government to take control of more.

This produces larger, systemic failure, and more widespread misery. Then cometh the political oppression. To preserve the regime, it becomes necessary to silence anyone who complains or dares to point out the painfully obvious truth that these ideas destroy whatever systems they infect.

When no one in power will face reality, there are few options left, and they are almost always catastrophic: Civil war, revolution, anarchy. Failed policies. Collapsed economies. Political repression.

The examples are so numerous as to strain credulity: Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, China, Cambodia, East Germany, Angola, Somalia, the former Soviet Union. Hellholes created under siren promises that government would provide everything for free.

So much suffering, and so avoidable.

But were not supposed to know any of that. Our educational system is supposed to be indoctrinating children to think that capitalism is greed and collectivism is compassion.

The media willingly conspires to keep us ignorant. (The New York Times is running a series that The Federalist author Robert Tracinski rightly decries as an effort to rehabilitate Communism. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were well-intentioned people trying to build a better world out of a crisis?) Millionaire entertainers dutifully spout politburo propaganda in exchange for escaping the accusations of hypocrisy that should accompany their sky-high incomes and royal lifestyles.

As middle-class voters are realizing, Democrats have been pushing their party in this direction for decades. Republicans (at least at the congressional level) suck their thumbs and pretend it isnt happening, whilst falling for the bipartisanship ploy that makes them ineffectual fools even when as now they hold political power.

Donald Trump may not have intended to be the man who pulled down the curtain, but pull it he did. He has become the face of the opposition to the plans of the cultural elite. For that he must be destroyed.

Ultimately, however, the lefts war isnt with Trump. It is with those of us who see socialisms failures, and who refuse to sit back and watch while our freedoms are dismantled and our country is destroyed.

2017 CREATORS.COM

LAURA HOLLIS

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Socialism's Failures - The Daily Record (registration)

Democrats and democratic socialists were incorrectly linked by some to Nazism following the harrowing protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend that led to one womans death. The allegations were a huge misrepresentation of what each of the terms means and a poor, surface-only reading of what German leader Adolf Hitlers party and government stood for.

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The assertions or accusations listed above appear to stem from the official name of the party that Hitler led to take over Germany in the early 1930s. It was called the National Socialist German Workers Partylater shortened to Nazi partyand gained power by promising voters to alleviate a German economy mired in depression while also restoring German cultural values, reverse the provisions of theTreaty of Versailles, turn back the perceived threat of a Communist uprising, put the German people back to work, and restore Germany to its 'rightful position'as a world power,"according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The party represented an extreme side of Germans right wing, and the key word in its title was not necessarily "socialism," but rather "national." During Hitlers ascension, nationalism was preached and took hold, and excludedanyone who wasnt fully German or considered superior.

"The Nazis opposed all traditional socialism, wanting to substitute something they called German socialism or Aryan socialism, Bryn Mawr College professor Barbara Miller Lane told PolitiFact in October 2015. This meant citizenship and privileges only for Aryans (meaning non-Jews), concentration camps for others."

Indeed, the American Nazi Party, first named the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists by its founder George Lincoln Rockwell in 1959 before he changed the name a year later, specifically states that National Socialism applies to whites. The partys official website describes the two main tenets of the term are the Struggle for Aryan Racial survival, and Social Justice for White Working Class people throughout our land.

By definition, a political party with Nazi roots or affiliations is not democratic since it would apply to only one race, whereas democracy is meant to apply to all people, not a specific race or ethnicity.

Around the countrytoday, a more true form of democratic socialism is not only taking form but growing in the form of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Following last years election and the rise of self-proclaimed democratic socialist and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), the group has reportedly seen its membership grow to about 25,000 people, according to The Guardian.

Earlier this month, the group was represented by 697 delegates from 49 states for its largest convention yet in Chicago. Its main tenets and calls for reform include a significant decrease of the influence money has in politics, as well as empowering ordinary people in workplaces and the economy.

We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo, according to one description of DSAs political perspective on its official site.

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Nazis Are Not Socialists Nor Democrats Despite What Alt-Right Might Say - Newsweek

Let me start with my favourite question. Why is it that, of the thirty/forty nascent nations which emerged from the yoke of imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century in Asia, Australasia, Africa and South-America, India comprises the only country of its size and diversity to have remained a vibrant functioning democracy, while innumerable contemporary wrecks and ruins of constitutionalism litter the global landscape?

No doubt the first answer is possibly sheer good luck. But a close second is that while Gandhi and his atomic weapon of Ahimsa was vital to attain independence, India has remained a functioning & vibrant democracy because of Nehru as Indias first Prime Minister. India was singularly fortunate in getting its sequencing right: Gandhi first and Nehru later.

Nehru, intuitively, typified and practiced Voltaires famous dictum (also the essence of democracy) : I disagree vehemently with you but defend to death your right to disagree with me.

Three of the five tenets which he considered to be foundational to Indias destiny remain a vital part of the less visible non-institutional pillars of Indian democracy (the other two being Parliamentary Democracy and non-alignment). They are Secularism, Socialism and Federalism.

Secularism has been the heart and soul of Indian democracy from its inception, though it found express Constitutional expression much later. There is no more diverse spot on earth than India: the worlds largest democracy, the second most populous, the seventh largest in terms of area and the fourth largest by national GDP measured on purchasing power parity (PPP).

Its diversity is manifested in 22 scheduled languages, over 700 mother tongues, over 2000 dialects, the worlds largest population of 4 religions (Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Parsi), the worlds second largest population of Muslims, and a significant number of other religious adherents. Every major racial grouping is present in India and it has thousands of bewildering rituals, foods, smells, sounds, music in all forms, dances and so on.

With such pluralities, Secularism is a self-protective mechanism for India. India has had a remarkable record of secular, non-theocratic governance, but if truth be told, the more one lets go in India, the more India binds and holds together. Conversely, the more one pulls or tries to bind or impose any uniform ethic, the more India is likely to break apart.

Secularism has been an effective vehicle to manage diversities. It has generated a sense of reassurance and security to Indias multiple diversities and provided a crucial underpinning for democracy. It is meant and intended to convey part ownership of democracy. Without this sense of belonging to and ownership of democracy by each aam admi, democracy cannot succeed.

As usual, the threats are almost entirely from within. There is a sinister and sustained attempt to impose a uniform ethic, to paternalistically decide what a citizen can wear, sing and eat, how he can behave, what he must think on certain occasions and what he must say on others. Instead of celebrating diversity, we mourn it as the biggest obstruction to nationalism.

We distort the idea of India by redefining the India of our dreams as the India of our demands. We live by a new ethic of suspicion and distrust, of glee at the fellow citizens discomfiture and of fear of speaking up in his favour when he is being tormented.

A second non-institutional pillar of democracy is federalism. It is vital for managing diversities. Federalism operates as a safety valve for the three Ds - dissent, discomfort and dissatisfaction. It channels these three Ds into relatively manageable outlets of constitutional structures, whether they are provincial legislatures, district level autonomous councils or models of local governance like Panchayati Raj. Indian federalism has quarantined conflicts within states or sub-state units and thus successfully prevented national conflagration.

Five significant developments have transmuted, over the last 70 years, the heavily unitary, quasi federal India at inception into a significantly more federal entity in operation, rightly resulting in it being called accidental or inadvertent federalism. Linguistic diversity resulted in creation of new states on the principle of linguistic contiguity and the three-language formula largely quietened the language riots of the 1960s.

Secondly, vigorous judicial review by the apex court since the new millennium has repeatedly quashed Article 356 incursions into federal autonomy. Thirdly, Panchayati Raj and local self-government, has created a humongous diaspora of elected local Panchayat officials (including 1.5 million women) who administer local self-government in the worlds largest model of fiscal and administrative decentralisation. Fourthly, economic liberalisation since 1988 and 1991 has considerably diluted the stranglehold of the central government in decision making. Finally, fiscal federalism, results in almost 45% receipts of the centre being transferred to the state either as the sharable tax revenues or as Central grants.

Threats to federalism include Central government discriminatory practices in fund devolution, selective waivers of financial demands according to matching or differing political colors of the Centre and the state concerned and a clearly Presidential style of central governance focused on micro managing everything. Catchwords or jumlebaazi like competitive or cooperative federalism cannot camouflage these aberrations.

Modern arm chair critics who retrospectively criticise Nehrus belief in socialism-a third non institutional pillar-- by saying that it consigned India to a low so called Hindu rate of growth between 3.5. to 4.5%, fail to realise that it was socialist philosophy which laid a firm foundation for the public sector in India and resulted in Indias solidity and self-reliance in core sectors like steel, chemicals, textiles, indigenous defence manufacturing and banking. It gave us both a self-reliant as well as a competitive edge, though, concededly, it overstayed its welcome. Our ability to weather the 2008 global financial crisis with minimum pain and regain the 8.5% annual trajectory of growth within one year owes a lot to these foundations.

One contemporary counterpart of Nehrus philosophy of socialism has been the worlds largest social welfare scheme, MNREGA, which despite opportunistic criticism when in opposition, has been largely followed and reluctantly lauded by the right wing successor government.

This vituperative criticism when in opposition and ready adaptation without attribution when in power model has been perfected by the present dispensation. Manifested across the board-from Aadhar, MNREGA, Food Security, GST to many others these compliments, albeit left handed, say it all.

In conclusion, Indias amazing diversity is its best insurance against degeneration of democracy or institutionalisation of dictatorship. To that must necessarily be added the intrinsic nature of India and of Indians viz. absorbent and highly argumentative.

Democracy in India has many miles to walk and many promises to keep. If it cannot be fairly castigated as an imperfect democracy, it is certainly also nowhere near being a perfect or near perfect democracy.

It is difficult to quantitatively calibrate whether we have covered half or more than 75% of the journey from imperfection to perfection. We have not achieved, for example, the more capacious concept of democracy beyond the narrower view of seeing democracy exclusively in terms of public balloting and not as the exercise of public reason i.e. the larger concept of providing opportunities for citizens to participate in political discussion and, more importantly, to informed public choices in methods that transcend the ballot box.

Personally, I have no doubt, that we are well past the midway mark in the journey and that we will get there in the fairly proximate future. But the story has never been only about the destination or the result. It has been, as much, if not more, about the journey and that has undoubtedly been exciting and unusual.

The author is MP; National Spokesperson, Congress; former Addl Solicitor General of India and Senior Advocate

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Democracy beyond ballots: Threats to secularism, socialism - National Herald