Jay Stringer's Blog, page 5

Where Next For England?

Ever since I moved to Scotland, I’ve consistently argue back against one particular idea; “England is simply more right-wing than Scotland.” Initially, I argued against it in defence of the union, because I saw the idea as a calculated tactic to bring about independence. Then, after being given endless better arguments on the case for […]

Agree To Disagree

We’ve given up on the idea, not just that we can change people’s minds through conversation, but that people’s minds can change at all.  We accept that art and commerce are linked at the hip, but see no value in linking art and politics. In fact, we are actively discouraged from doing so.  There are […]

Bob Stinson, 1959-1995

My favourite guitar player passed away twenty years ago today. Robert Neil Stinson was born in 1959. It’s not my place to guess about his upbringing or to make any calls about what his younger days may have been like, but by his teen years he’d clearly seen a few things. We know this because, […]

Transcend The Genre

Richard Price has a new book coming out. There are few guarantees in life, but we can all rely on the stone cold fact that a new Richard Price book is a good thing to have in your life. Mr. Price was interviewed in advance of publication by The New York Times , and, as these […]

Freedom of Speech, But….

I wanted to let the dust settle before I posted anything. With all the chatter being thrown around over Charlie Hebdo, and freedom of speech, and Islamophobia, and over the Pope’s weird comments, there’s a fundamental point that all too often got missed. But first let’s look at the “buts.” “I believe in freedom of […]

Detective Mittens – Cat Noir

Here’s me reading a short story I wrote last year, after my trip to Seattle. Over a long and….strange….conversation with friends on the last day of a writing conference, the idea was born of using an idea that’s usually associated with cozy crime to tell a hardboiled tale. Some stupid fucker (me) followed through on it, and wrote a hardboiled detective story narrated by a cat.

Because cats.

I read a much shorter version of this story at Nor At The Bar during Bouchercon this year. And so many (okay, about three) people have asked for the longer version. Mittens may see print at some point soon, but until then, you can hear me reading the full story.

 

Detective Mittens

Who Owns Halloween?

We need to talk about paganism.

I’ve written a lot in the past about atheism. I’ve taken Christianity to task, and talked at great length about the problems that I see inherent both in the bible and in picking and choosing which bits of the mythology to believe. In order to continue to do this, and to feel I have any intellectual honesty,  I need to write a mea culpa. I wasn’t raised Christian. I wasn’t christened. It’s never played a big part in my life and although I do have family members who are christian, they’re always very tolerant of my opinions and critiques. There is another belief system that is closer to home. One that I was raised to have more belief in, and that some members of my family still care deeply about. So if I’m comfortable taking pot shots at a religion that I have no stake in, I should say a few words about one that I have had more involvement with.

So let’s get one thing very clear about paganism. It’s not what people say it is.

Modern paganism is fun, sure. It’s interesting, and it has some great parties attached to it. It’s also not one unified thing. For the purpose of this piece I’ll be talking about it as if ‘paganism’ is all one homogenous belief system, but that’s just for ease of reading (and writing.) in truth, it is a many splintered thing. There are a lot of different groups, each with their own customs and rituals. But we need to be clear on one fundamental point. They are modern. Around this time of year, sat in the chill air between Halloween and Christmas, we hear talk of how these holidays are really pagan, how they were co-opted by Christianity, and that the modern pagans are upholding ancient traditions.

Well…..no.

There is a grain of truth to those statements, but noting more than that. Yes, Halloween roughly coincides with a number of ancient festivals, including the Irish Celtic Samhain. And yes, Christmas also roughly coincides with a similar number of mid-winter festivals. Also yes, Christianity did deliberately place it’s feasts at times that matched up to exiting rituals. But that’s as far as the truth really travels. Modern paganism isn’t continuing an unbroken line that reaches back to those pre-Christian traditions. What it does do, and what its practitioners do, is to take some of what we know about those ancient customs, and many things we’ve learned since, and combine them into a new and interesting narrative.

That would be fine. There is nothing at all wrong with starting new customs. In fact, it’s something that we should embrace and celebrate. It shows progress and creativity. Each culture, and each generation within that culture, gets to invent and reinvent itself. Even for atheists like myself, there is something important about customs and traditions, things that bind us together. The key, the real aim, is to have them be done out of honesty, not out of myth-making. The problem is that we’re not being entirely honest about paganism. For every person who embraces modern paganism for what it is, there are others who genuinely believe they’re joining a fictional unbroken line that dates back to a bygone age. As such, modern paganism is in danger of doing what all religions do, and of distorting itself for political gain (largely identity politics. I’ll return to this.)

Let’s take Samhain as an example. What do we know about it?

Well, we know there was a festival called Samhain. We know it was a seasonal celebration, mostly a kind of harvest festival that marked the start of winter. And, like most seasonal celebrations around these parts in winter, it involved bonfires.

That’s…kind of it. Was it simply a harvest festival, or did it contain more mystical elements? We don’t really know. There’s not much actual historical proof to go on, and there is very little evidence to say there was any link to death or to spooky beasties. The people who really celebrated Samhain were a culture who were not very literate (in the way we understand it today) and a lot of what is written, was written a long time after the fact, mostly by christian or christianised scholars. Most of the symbolism over death, magic and demons appears to have been added onto these celebrations by christianity. Sure, you can go on websites and find all sorts of entries about the various traditions and customs of Samhain, and of how many of them have carried through to Halloween. You’ll even find reputable news sites picking up on this. But in truth it’s pretty much all guesswork. And that’s the best case scenario.

There is a problem inherent in the bible that’s worth revisiting here. One of the single most important problems with that text, is that everything was written after the fact. The stories of Jesus were put together by second and third hand sources (at best). Because of this, it’s impossible to really say the documents are accurate (as a note, it’s also extremely difficult to say they’re all innacurate for exactly the same reason. The truth is, and the atheist position is, that we simply don’t know. Anyone claiming divine authority on the issue is lying to you.) If we’re going to hold christianity to that standard, we need to do the same for paganism. If you’re a pagan, and you choose to believe that all of these customs and traditions are true, then that’s fine. However, you have to accept that there’s very little in the way of verified historical veracity to that position, and that you can’t then moan about christians choosing to believe their own version of events on the same amount of evidence. Just as we can make a case that christians co-opted ancient festivals for their own purposes, so we can make the same case against modern paganism.

So if we don’t know how much, if any, of the ancient Samhain is replicated in the modern Halloween, what do  we know?

Well, we know that Halloween and Christmas as we know them are modern developments. Most of  our current version of Christmas was gathered together around the time of Charles Dickens (early Christians didn’t celebrate it at all. In some parts of the christian world it was actively banned.) In the case of Halloween, most of what we see now dates back to the romantic era of novelists and poets. Indeed, the Oxford Dictionary Of English folklore says, “from the Middle Ages through to the 19th century, there is no sign in England that 31 October had any meaning except as the eve of All Saint’s Day.” (http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-English-Folklore-Paperback-Reference/dp/0198607660) We could point out that the quote is only talking about England and that the Celtic traditions that pagans point to were from Scotland and Ireland. But there’s an important point to make here. Whilst archeologists could talk for hours about the many things they’ve discovered about these ancient groups, that needs to be separated from what we think we know about them from pop culture. A lot of what we came to see as markers of “celtic identity” were created, adapted and spread during the Victorian era, and largely by the English ruling class. It was essentially a means of ghettoisation. They reduced the people of Scotland and Ireland to cliche (anyone ever wonder why the Royal family wear such stupid looking “Scottish” clothes when they’re in Scotland? They created them.) Around this time we see a huge boom in romantic poets and writers, and they were imbuing their work with ideas that persist to this day. They were great writers, and the work should be celebrated, but instead we’ve absorbed them as historical documents. Robert Burns, for instance, wrote the poem “Halloween” in 1785, with stylised and evocative references to fairies and Scottish history, and it became a template not for preserving an old tradition, but for exporting a new one.

Modern paganism is very effective. It’s exciting, it’s evocative, and for people looking for something a little different to the mainstream religions, it’s a good way of forging a different identity and feeling more connected to nature. But it’s not a note-for-note continuation of ancient traditions. It’s a relatively new belief system that uses some trappings of ancient beliefs -from across many regions- and melds them together into something new and cohesive. That’s what religions do. That’s what christianity did. But there is a danger that comes with that, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to write this.

We are in an interesting age for identity politics. The term used to be negative, a sign of people manipulating voters based on colour, sex or background. But identity is increasingly important, and old class-focused left-wing thinking is struggling to adapt to a world where people want to be both distinct and united. Intersectional feminism, for instance, is regarded by lefties of older generations as something divisive, not to be trusted. But it’s a movement that seeks to open up a debate, to encourage room for more people in the conversation. We’re in an age where a variety of different voices and experiences is vital. When it comes to religion, though, I can’t help but see the identity politics of old. A form of division and control. If we seek to pretend that modern paganism is part of an unbroken tradition, then we allow room for the argument that these beliefs were here first. By extension we allow that there are indigenous beliefs that have an older and stronger claim to the piece of dirt we stand on than anything new.

We don’t have to go far in the world to see what happens when religions and belief systems are left unchecked to get into identity politics. We can see all to well what happens when two or more religions in a region start playing games of one-upmanship and we were here first.

In the debates over who owns christmas and halloween, both sides lose. Modern pagans and modern christians are both using ancient names and dates in the service of having a party. Neither of them have any great claim to be carrying on the traditions of Samhain, or any other winter festivals, because we simply don’t know enough about the traditions and rituals they entailed.

Personally? I love a good bonfire. There is something about the combination of the fire, the winter air, and a mass gathering of people that feels right. It feels like we’re doing something simple and basic that humans have been doing ever since we first discovered fire. If you want to do this at the start of winter, or in the middle of winter, then chances are you are doing something that people on these islands did thousands of years ago. But that’s the extent of the connection, and anything more than that is simply a good story.

The Future Is Yes

“We’ve done the impossible, and that makes us mighty.”

-Mal Reynolds.

 

Well. Didn’t that hurt like hell?

I took a quick walk into Glasgow yesterday, and the city was as numb as I was. Everyone looked like they’d lost something. Apart from that one part of town, where unionists rioted and set fire to flags. They were having a great old time.

The referendum has become the main focus of this site for the last few months. One post in particular, “An Open Letter To England,” still continues to draw up to a hundred views a day, seven months after I wrote it. I’m grateful for the readers, and for the people who embraced me into part of the Yes movement once I woke up.

For those of you who have been coming to the site only for this, please stick around. I’ll be returning to normal service but that still contains a lot of politics.  Before moving forward, I want to try and gather my thoughts on what we’ve seen, what we did, and what we almost did.

The independence movement had no chance. No chance at all. It was impossible. There was no mass interest in independence in the Scottish mainstream and the entire forces of the Westminster system were going to be funnelled into stopping it from happening. What’s more, Scottish Labour have very few lengths they will not go to in order to try and maintain the bit of ground they have. None of the national newspapers were going to endorse it. And the BBC were not going to give it fair coverage. Polls on the independence issue tended to put support somewhere between 25 and 30% at best.

And yet.

45%

We got 45%

We almost did the impossible.

A grass roots campaign, which started off with no funding, no national voice, and no great experience, has taken on the entire might of the British establishment. A mouse taking on a lion. And in Glasgow, my adopted home town, we went further than that. We stared the lion down and refused to bow. As did Dundee, a great city and one of the best kept secrets of the radicals of Britain. As did North Lanarkshire and West Dumbartonshire. I don’t know the full break-down of each ward, I can’t give a town-by-town analysis, but I do know that Paisley also voted yes.

It wasn’t enough, but boy was it something.

I was stood outside a polling booth almost all day. I was in an area that was very much no, but still people came to vote yes. Quietly at first, giving me a subtle nod or a wink, a brief smile. Later on they were louder, bolder, showing colours. Some people stopped to ask me to pose for selfies with them, so sure were they that history was being made. And by 10pm that day, we had taken the city. The country didn’t follow us, but it has noticed.

Even in defeat, I feel part of something. For the first time I can remember, I truly felt hopeful and connected. I’m proud to have been a small part of it, and proud of everyone who shared the hope and the ambition.

Where do we go from here?

We build. This amazing grass-roots network is still figuring itself out. If this is what can be achieved with our first act, just wait until we get to the second. Westminster has noticed us, but that could be a problem. Glasgow is a large city and, though our poverty levels are high, so our voice is also loud. The years ahead are going to bring further cuts and hardship to us, we will stand as unbowed as we have during the referendum. But we also need to think of those who stood with us. Dundee is exposed, as are the other yes regions. We need to argue for each other, protect each other. This may sound divisive, and I don’t mean it to. The whole point of course is that we want something better for all of Scotland (and I want something better for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, too.) But we do need to keep an eye on those who’ve drawn attention to themselves.

We can use the community we’ve built to help those in need as Westminster’s neo-con consensus bites harder. We can man the food banks, we can campaign for the homeless, for the poor, we can fight for the people being left behind until the chance comes around again to take the full power into our own hands.

We build a language, a network, an idea. We build a structure and a voice. We continue to campaign for the same end-point, but the route there has changed. We make sure that a second referendum doesn’t need to be the hobby-horse of the SNP. Hell, if we do this right, they don’t even need to mention it. They won’t need to put it on the table, because they can simply respond to us when we demand it. And if Labour somehow get back in, that changes nothing, we continue to build the voice until such time as they are unable to ignore it. We can continue to push the agenda now just as we did during the campaign. When the next referendum comes around, we’ll be ready. We’ll have the tools. We will be able to outflank the media, we will be able to expose the lies, and we will be able to show that hope is a better motivation than fear.

Why, you might ask? We’re already growing accustomed to hearing the phrase “the settled will of the Scottish people,” and Westminster –in addition to Scottish Labour- will continue to use it. They’ll dismiss calls for a further referendum, and they will try to label those of us who speak of it as troublemakers, as nationalists, as a distraction and a menace. They will try to isolate our voice and make us seem like a far smaller minority than we are.

You’ve all seen the stats by now. The decisive vote was from pensioners. If we briefly remove their demographic from the results, we see a clear and strong vote for independence with 54%. And drilling further down, we see that 71% of 16-17 year olds voted for independence. Even if we allow that people may vote different ways in future referenda, what we see in this referendum is that the people who represent the future of Scotland voted for an independent state.

So if we’re really going to talk about the ‘settled will of the Scottish people,’ then let’s be honest about it. What the country has just said, loud and clear, is that it doesn’t want independence right now, but that the people who will be leading the way in future do want it.

The genie is out of the bottle and it won’t go back in. Westminster has stalled things for a period of time, maybe enough to drain more of Scotland’s resources, but not for long. Thursday’s referendum was a victory for independence, just not yet.

And Scottish Labour simply don’t get it. Every time they point to Salmond’s phrase of the question being settled for a generation, they show why they’ve become so out of touch. They feel that a vague promise of a politician can be used to bind the people. It doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid. It’s down to the people to decide.

I spent a large part of Thursday listening to labour councillors and activists talking about the Yes movement in terms that showed they simply don’t get it. They honestly believe that the anti-BBC demonstration was a “pro-government rally arranged by Alex Salmond,” as one of them said to me. They honestly believe that the yes flash-mobs in town were “orchestrated centrally by the SNP.” They seem to genuinely believe that the rise of the far-right groups of the last few days is the fault of the yes camp for stirring division, rather than their own failure to honestly address the social issues that led us to the point of breakaway.

No is the current answer. But the people behind that campaign don’t understand who or what they were campaigning against. They may well be in step with 55% of the current population –or at least enough of that 55% to get by- but they are clearly out of touch with the 45% of Scotland that represents the younger generations, and show no signs of trying to understand them. They are far, far out of step with 16 and 17 year olds, and we now have the most politically energised youth anywhere in Britain.

We almost did the impossible this week. And in doing so, we’ve shown just how possible it really was. We’ve shown ourselves the future. It’s just going to take more work to get there.

Joe Strummer famously said “the future is unwritten.” Not for us. Not now.

The future is yes.

Voting Is Personal? Bullshit.

This isn’t a post about the Scottish referendum.

Although it kind of is.

There has been an expansive, open, and encouraging debate on the streets of Glasgow over the last few months. The national conversation has been going on for much longer, but it’s been noticeable that the city has come alive with political engagement as the referendum has drawn nearer.

There is an old attitude that puzzles me, and one that is still on show around the fringes of the discussion. It might still play a big part in the way the vote goes.

Voting is personal, some will say.

We shouldn’t be discussing it.

It’s for people to make up their own mind.

While the last line is true, the very idea that it can be done while sticking to the first two utterly boggles my mind. It’s a fundamental reason why democracy has stopped working for the people. Debate, discussion, even division and disagreement, are at the very heart of democracy. You talk. You ask. You answer. You test other people’s arguments out and -more importantly- you test your own ideas out.

Sure, the moment when you’re in the booth, the moment when you’re ticking a box, that moment is private. The box that you tick can remain personal if you’re more comfortable. But there is an idea that has been allowed to grow in the working and middle classes that conflates the privacy of the booth with an idea that none of the process is up for discussion.

Voting is one of the most public things we do. It’s at the heart of our civic process. We all come together at the same place on the same day to give our opinion on something that will affect everybody.

I changed my mind on the referendum. After living in Glasgow for nearly eight years, arguing at first for a NO, and then to abstain, I changed to a YES. The final part of that process was all about me sitting down and thinking, reading a few more books, and then writing my own arguments for and against. My argument for independence was the one that swayed me, and formed the basis of my first “coming out” post on the subject. So, yes, it ultimately came down to me sitting and making up my own mind. But that came after years of debating, years of arguing, years of some real flaming stand-up rows (because division in political debate isn’t automatically evil) and of the patient counter-points of friends and loved ones.

The notion that politics is something we do on our own, in a dark quiet room, just by sitting and thinking, is one that’s been deliberately given to us in order to stop those in power from being challenged. The very idea that someone can make a fully rounded, informed, decision on something as important as politics without testing out their opinions on someone else, without being challenged, and without encountering another point of view, is the very reason our society is broken.

So, by all means, disagree with someone. By all means, ignore them. By all means argue with them. But expect them to shut up? Expect them to not want to challenge you? Well, that is an expectation for nothing to ever improve.

Scottish Independence; A Second Open Letter To England

Don’t you just hate sequels?

Never as good as the original.

Back in February this year I wrote a piece called Scottish Independence; An Open Letter To England. It went a wee bit nuts for a while. I had more views on my website in the first week of that posting that I’d had in total since 2008. It still brings more readers to my site than anything else I’ve written. That open letter was about some of the spin and lies that you are blanketed with south of the border.

I’m back today to talk about one. Only one. It’s a big one.

I know you guys don’t get to vote in this referendum. I also know, from debating it with many of you, that there is a sense of being left out of the conversation. Here’s the thing, you can play a massive part in winning this thing for Scotland. I’ll tell you how at the end, but first I’ll tell you why you should.

“The English subsidy.” You’ve heard the term, or are at least familiar with the concept. The idea that English money is used to prop up Scotland. I’ve heard it raised many times in debates and jokes. As recently as my trip to the crime writing festival in Harrogate, I was dispelling this notion.

Yes, more money is spent per head in Scotland than England. Yes, Scotland still has free university education, is absorbing the bedroom tax in it’s budget, and yes, more money is spent per head on the NHS. You are told, repeatedly, that this is subsidised by your money. If there’s only one thing you take from this piece, make it this; the English subsidy doesn’t exist.

Money is collected, from all of Scotland’s various means of income and taxation, and is sent to Westminster. Westminster then send a smaller figure back to Scotland. The money the devolved Scottish government spends is, in all ways that matter, Scotland’s money.

The truth is that the Scottish Government chooses to spend more of it’s money on education and the NHS per head than Westminster does. It’s a choice on both sides of the border. Westminster could match it, if they did their budget differently, but they don’t.

One of the reasons they don’t, is they don’t need to. They’re not currently held to account over it. Any time people asks questions, they are reminded of the subsidy. The lie that England’s money is propping up Scotland is a two sided blade; not only does it help make Scots question whether they can afford independence, it also stops the English working class from questioning why their own government doesn’t care about them. And I’m not blaming London here. I’m not a great fan of the city, and I’ve been known to throw insults it’s way, but some of the worst poverty levels in the UK are in London; that shows just how little the Tories mean it when they say “we’re in this together,” they can’t even be bothered to help people on their own doorstep. The problem is Westminster.

Make no mistake, England, you could have free university education. You could have higher spending on the NHS. But even if you didn’t want it, even if you decided you’d rather spend your money elsewhere, you at least deserve the ability to make that decision and to have a government who don’t lie to you.

Now imagine a different way. Imagine, just for a moment, if Scotland were removed from the situation. Imagine if there were only some chance that Westminster could be robbed of their favourite excuse. A world where there is no northern state for them to claim to be subsidising, and yet people still see lower levels of spending on all of those vital services. A chance to see where the problem really lies. A chance to see the agenda that is driving places in the middle and north of England off the map forever. And a chance to finally hold them to account. To demand and expect better, with no lame excuses about all the money being used to prop someone else up.

Think about this, England, and then think about how you really want us to vote on the 18th.

You’re not getting a vote, but you are playing a part. There are many progressive, left wing voters up here who can’t bring themselves to vote YES out of a sense of duty to you. They don’t want to abandon you. And Better Together -the most negative and wilfully deceitful political campaign I’ve ever seen in the UK- know this. They are using this. The polls are narrowing. The entire state of the UK is working for a NO vote. All of the newspapers bar one -a sunday paper at that- is in favour of NO. All of the biggest political parties in the UK have joined together to campaign for NO. And yet, somehow, those polls are still narrowing. Yes campaigners are out knocking on doors. They’re in our cities and our towns. They are going into sink estates, to people who’ve been ignored by politicians for decades, and they are somehow making it work. Better Together are going to be using you. They are going to be playing to the sentiment of the many old and lost Labour voters who are thinking of you.

The single best chance for the working class in England is for a YES vote on September 18th. You can help. You can show support. You can get out and tell us how much you’re backing us, how much you’re standing with us on this. Think of all those progressive voters, the ones who are thinking of you as much as of themselves, and tell them you want YES. Twitter, Facebook, skywriting, whatever.

It’s going down to the wire, folks. This can be won, it can be lost. If we win, so do you. Make yourselves heard.