They shall not pass!

Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, in 1936, where the residents of the East End of London organised and successfully resisted Moseley's British Union of Fascists.

Moseley's blackshirts were seeking to make a deliberately provocative march through London's East End to intimidate the Jewish population, with the full support of the police. This was prevented by the people who erected and defended barricades on Cable Street and declared "they shall not pass."

Yesterday was also the day the current UK Home Secretary, failed business woman and former disasterous Energy Minister, Amber Rudd, made a sickening speech at the Tory Party conference in Birmingham about "British jobs for British workers," declaring that businesses would have to register their foreign workers in order to be named and shamed for employing them.

Amber Rudd is doing her best to ensure unionists in Scotland have to become apologists for a deeply unsettling, creeping fascism today, eminently recognisable from the 1930s, in order to continue to advocate the Union. Her most recent speech at the Tory party conference makes sure of that. At some point, surely, they will have to say "enough is enough?"

Slowly but surely the Tories are whittling away every honourable pretext for their position. We no longer need the UK as a vehicle for continued membership of the EU. We no longer need it as a vehicle for social justice. We no longer need it as a guarantor of pensions or the NHS. We no longer need it for a position of respect in the world. They have made perfectly clear what the UK remains a vehicle for in their conference speeches.

And all that remains as a viable argument for the unionists as a consequence is an assertion that we are somehow deeply, irrevocably dependent on the UK.

But this is no longer just the familiar "too poor, too wee, too stupid" argument of yesteryear. No, it's worse than that now. Because now what is it they would say we are too poor, wee, or stupid to achieve on our own? What creeping fascism are they now compelled to say would or should be the content of our unfulfilled, unfulfillable ambition, which we require the UK to accomplish?

All that remains for them is the assertion that we are somehow reliant on the UK in an even worse and more demeaning way than before. They must now nakedly assert that we are a mere parasite, clinging to the fat, gleaming torso of a Britain resplendent in Brexit, with no ambition other than to feast, leech-like, on its juices. For who would want more than that from what the Tories are making of it? Who would see in it a partner for the achievement of higher ambitions? Who would find in it the means to pursue the kind of society we desire for our children?

This image of the leech is perfectly consistent with the proto-fascist ideology that is coiling its tentacles around the limbs of our ministers of state. It perfectly articulates the politics of envy and blind greed and reckless consumption from which it emerges, a politics they have encouraged and on which they have thrived.

The Financial Times ran an article recently pointing out we have to dispel the myth that the UK somehow has a "leading" economy, if we are to have any realistic approach to Brexit negotiations. This is based on an assessment of the UK's fiscal situation, and productivity and GDP per capita now and in the future.

But the UK economy isn't about the money. The UK has an economy based on envy, not wealth. From this point of view the UK Economy is a leading economy, in the only way that matters. Our low pay, low productivity approach may be inconsistent with normal economic ambition, but it is perfectly aligned with the needs of the leech of envy we are cultivating and fattening up. Sure, our economy may rank poorly in relation to most objective indicators, but it far out-ranks the rest in the only one that matters from this point of view: "income inequality." Is this what we can be proud of in our curtain-twitching, greasy-poled, keeping-up-with-the-joneses, I'm alright Jack, Great British half-baked economy? Don't we lead the world in bitter, poisonous internecine envy? Aren't we loadsa-envy?

We can sell off the NHS on the cheap, as long as I can buy more of it than you. I'll cut off my nose to spite my face as long as I can cut off and keep your nose too. Isn't that the "productivity" and "efficiency" and "competitiveness" to which we aspire?

In the meantime we are distracted by beguiling myths of choice, such as those which have crippled the English education system for decades. In England all other educational priorities are subordinated to the need to have 16 different kinds of school to go to and 20 different variants of GCSE Maths to sit. Standards are never quite as important as having as wide as possible a variety of ways to fail. Grammar schools are held up as means to improve outcomes. But all evidence indicates that they have zero impact on attainment. Grammar schools are not about attainment, they are about selection, in support of privilege. It is the politics of envy again.

This toxic atmosphere of envy ensured that the EU referendum earlier this year was never going to be an opportunity to articulate a positive vision for the future of the UK. The result was only ever going to endorse one of two different kinds of negativity. Unfortunately it turned out to be an endorsement of the worst one, the one based on demonising foreigners, the one for which victory was delivered on a tide of vitriol and intolerance.

Brexit has granted permission to a torrent of hate crime whose perpetrators are perfect proto-fascist recruits. They cannot be reasoned with, as they beat up and intimidate Romanian women and children, stab and kill Poles, and vandalise places of worship and cultural centres. The policy platform they are responding to is not amenable to rational appraisal because it appeals directly to something deeper than logic, some reptilian cluster of nerves lurking at the base of the brain, seething with frustration for millions of years during which it has been denied expression by all the layers of neo-cortex which evolution has accreted around it, all the lobes it has been enveloped in. But now at last they are granted permission to indulge every reflex and slight the ramparts of every civilised inhibition to directly access that inner monster for whom logic is merely a provocation. A serpent uncoils in their brain that will not be charmed by argument.

All of these developments are accompanied by suffocating irony.

As hate crime spikes in England, while declining in Scotland, we see the "anti-English" accusation against the Yes Movement unleashed once again online, supported by conveniently corroborative actions of "useful idiots," in perfect synchronisation with complementary rhetoric from Ruth Davidson and her cohorts at this conference of triumphant bigots, which is then dutifully repeated ad nauseam on all media outlets for the benefit of those who perhaps didn't hear it the first time. I'm sure it's just a coincidence. I'm sure there is no collusion and nothing sinister or co-ordinated behind this.

Meanwhile Theresa May - leader of the party responsible for Brexit - accuses the Yes Movement of "divisive nationalism," and Scotland's only Tory MP observes that the SNP has "no divine right to rule."

At no point are we asked by the Tories, by the Brexiteers, by former mayor of London Boris Johnson, by anyone in the tory chorus of British exceptionalism, to be proud of the people of Cable Street in London's East End. We are asked merely to despise today's equivalent of those they rose up to defend. The UK is not an expression of common cause with the people of Cable Street. The UK is a barrier that must be dismantled and overcome to achieve that solidarity.

Meanwhile John Simpson complains in the Huffington Post that the people were very badly let down by the media during the EU referendum campaign. But the media only behaved the way they did because that behaviour was positively reinforced during the Scottish Independence referendum. At no point was their conduct any worse than on that occasion. They did it twice because they got away with it once. This somehow escapes his attention.

I'm choking to death on the irony.

All the time Nigel Farage lurks somewhere, perhaps overseas advising the harbingers of nascent fascism elsewhere, such as Donald Trump with whom he is happy to share a platform and whom he has possibly coached in debating skills. Meanwhile at home his replacement, Diane James, resigns 18 days after being elected his successor. Perhaps she is just Nigel Farage in some sort of larval form as he regenerates. I bet you she splits down the middle like some sort of gelatinous exoskeleton or carapace and a fully rejuvenated Nigel Farage will emerge in due course.

So, surely, after Amber Rudd's speech yesterday, and everything that preceded it, and everything that must now surely follow, surely not even the most ardent unionist can argue for the Union on any grounds other than those that belittle, degrade and demean us even further than before? Surely they must see the urgency of the situation? Surely enough is now enough?

Indyref 2 is no longer just about Scotland and the assertion of her Independence. It is about Europe and rejecting the fascism that is now emerging in the world. Indyref 2 is where we draw and hold the line. Indyref 2 is where we say for the whole world to hear "they shall not pass!"