“In Scotland , the People are sovereign” says the top line
of the new Scottish Constitution proposed this week by Nicola Sturgeon. Well, I’ve looked it up. And in Scotland, in England in Wales and
Northern Ireland, Elizabeth Windsor Saxe-Coburg Battenburg is sovereign.
To say otherwise is treason, I’m delighted to
report.
The word “sovereign” is not just a word in a constitutional
monarchy. It is the origin and principle of every
authority in war making and law making, tax raising and spending. Our
politicians are fond of describing Britain as a democracy. But Britain HAS
democracy. Not IS a democracy. Democracy
is just a way of administering. The
crown exercises sovereignty through parliament.
Parliament is a conduit of power, not the source of it.
Now some will say this is pedantry, that the Royal Family
are just window dressing for the tourists, and they’d be right about that. The living individual members of the brood
are incidental. What matters is that
power in this country, by which I mean the UK, is ultimately unaccountable to
the people. The people are not sovereign in the UK. Let alone the Scots in Scotland! The people are subject. You ask a lawyer.
Scotland, with its paradoxes of a powerful bourgeois culture
with no aspiration to take charge of their own destiny, can stand for the whole
for which it is, again paradoxically, the most representative historical
constituent. It is a constituent part of the whole, under the crown, but it is
just a bunch of constituencies under the Crown in Parliament at
Westminster. In exists as an
administrative unit. It does not exist,
as such, in democratic terms at all. Let alone as a sovereignty.
(Glasgow Cathcart exists, as a parliamentary
constituency. Scotland, like England, Wales and Northern Ireland, doesn't. The parliament in Holyrood exists as democratic window dressing to the administrative devolution of powers that existed before 1999. These powers are loaned, not sovereign in themselves. Again, ask a lawyer.)
Unwritten results of old wars and horse-trading aside, the
deeper crisis afflicting this pre-democratic polity of ours is the decision by
its rulers that democracy, in the sense we have understood it, has rather had
its day. Among those in the know, ever since Alan Greenspan, architect of the
nineties and noughties speculative boom and bust, went into Bill Clinton’s
office the day after his inauguration in 1993 and told him to forget everything
he had promised by way of state action to improve the lives of the population during
the campaign, the world’s elite have operated their casino on a post-democratic
basis.
The market, Greenspan told Clinton, has replaced the polity
as the arena of free choice. Extend
participation in the market place and you serve freedom better than any
occasional plebiscite. Wealth will
accumulate hugely for the elite, while the extension of credit will mean that
everybody can play within limits set by the rule makers of the market. The rule makers of the market will in every
case outrank the rule makers who have been elected in the frankly antique
exercise of “democracy.” There are laws in draft and about to come into place
that will enshrine the interests and legal status of transnational corporations
so that they will forever be able to ignore the merely voted for laws in the
localities in which they happen to find themselves and sanction any government
who attempt to stand up to them.
Underpinning this bleak enthronement of the dismal science,
this sovereignty of the market, is the exhaustion and corruption of the
Enlightenment Project. Smart people don’t
believe in anything anymore. They talk
about the Wisdom of Crowds, they talk about the money markets. They don’t talk about freedom and justice and
truth. I should feel embarrassed even to
type the words. Such ideas are fine for
the public prints, but proper grown up folk only ever talk about power.
And it is this power, as ever, in its modern, weary guise,
that guides the flow of what Kurt Vonnegut called “The Great Money River”, with
that flow of capital being the only good, the only value that anyone believes
in. Everything else is dust and ashes.
In this weary atmosphere of nihilism and wealth accumulation,
the words “In Scotland, the People are sovereign” are not only treasonable,
they are revolutionary. In six words,
they potentially upset everything, like the five words from the beginning of
the democratic era : “all men are created equal.” They are a throwback, an absurdity, a joke. A slogan.
Aren't they?
If we vote for them, on September the 18th, then
we are not merely upsetting the apple-cart of our local elite, we
are denying the very structure on which the glorious revolution of 1688 was
founded, and of which the Treaty of Union was the capstone. We are fatally undermining the
deal that built the Empire and that sustains the unrepresentative exercise of
power in these islands and well beyond.
We are darting at the heart of the elite everywhere. What’s not to like about that?
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