A Landscape of Fear Pt 2

(Originally published on Kiltr two months ago)

As is often the case, whilst moving house, I unearthed a few curios I’d almost forgotten. Among them were gifts given to me whilst convenor of the Student Representative Council at my local college.

Returning to higher education after a few years living and working in Greece, becoming a parent and returning to the mining villages where I’d grown up, had also brought the formal notification of my Highers, which I’d always thought would mean an easy return to the educative environment, not giving the direct access to university they would have had I ‘cashed them in’ on immediately leaving school. After a few futile rants and rages, it was knuckle down and consider the alternatives.

Whilst I had to go through an Access course, I also discovered the concealed joys of prior accreditation in the Scotvec system and made those Highers count nonetheless. This meant on a full time course I could dedicate some time to community and local student activism at a time when student loans were just being introduced, so further motivations were fairly easily come by.

I’d also become heavily involved in campaigning for upgrades to the village I’d moved to, having discovered the local council, swiftly becoming dominated by New Labour apparatchiks, refused to adopt the roads, pipes and sewage system, originally built by the mine the village was built to house the workers for.

264 residents in a throwback to an age they were desperately attempting to distance themselves from, didn’t appear to matter much to the newly aspirational politicos, whether the ‘roads’ were literally dirt tracks now or the pipework being predominantly lead based, threatening safety and health every day of delay that ensued, or not. Ultimately the campaign was successful, we raised significant sums of money which was matched by the local council, the total then matched by EU funding. It took four years of fight but the upgrades happened.

The gifts I mention came toward the end of that campaign. Each year we’d contributed significantly to the coffers by hosting a free festival on the same day as T in the Park.

The village lay along a route many took in getting to Balado. We took over the local park, next to the Miners Welfare Club, built stages, brought bands in from all around, augmented the sales for the Club with sales of local home brewed wines and all manner of foodstuff offerings, as well as information leaflets on just why we were doing all this, strategically placed next to huge donation collection buckets. It worked. Attendance year on year first doubled then tripled the population of the village. Never once was there more than a genuinely minor skirmish and hordes stayed for the tidy up missions on the night and day afterwards.

Having succeeded in our mission, we intended having just one last festival as a celebration. Artists were brought in to design commemorative murals. We hosted what we billed as the world’s smallest international exhibition by inviting stamp to postcard sized works from artists around the world and exhibiting them in the local phone box. I blurred my roles as chairman of the fundraising board and convenor of the local college student association, by arranging to bus 32 Slovakian exchange students visiting and staying at the college halls for the summer to the festival under my guidance. I even donned a kilt for the initial journey out and gave them my interpretation of a brief singing shortbread tin tour of the local environs. That’s where the gifts came from.

The students were full of wide eyed enthusiasm following the Velvet Revolution and subsequent Velvet Divorce. In Slovakia they call it the Gentle Divorce. I had just changed my intended course of study from straight up Anthropology to the University of Edinburgh’s School of Scottish Studies cultural anthropological variant of Ethnology, inspired by the 1997 referendum. Whilst I faced blank looks and struggled to explain the subject to friends and family, the Slovakian students knew exactly what it was and what it meant to a culture to have its own variants. We’d developed mutually appreciative friendships beyond me being responsible for their entertainment timetable during their stay.

When it came to time for them to leave I was presented with a beautifully illustrated and framed map of Slovakia, a hamper of Slovakian foods and sundries as well as a hardback, coffee table style, photo journalistic record of Slovakia’s return to independent nationhood. They’d all signed the inside cover around a message written by one of them which read ‘We know we will see you again, in your beautiful country or ours. It wont just be in conversations about ethnology, we will see it together and will all be living it’. I was moved to tears and on seeing them so were a few of the students.

It was this book which I’d unearthed during my house move and the circumstances of that last festival which were on my mind. They seemed relevant, precursors to where I found myself in the week post Brexit vote.

You see, the village I lived in then was a smaller satellite of the larger village where I grew up. This latter is the largest of the West Fife mining villages and was built specifically to both take some of what was once reductively called ‘the Glasgow overspill’ and to house workers for what was called ‘The Pithead of the New World’ (I intend to write more on this too but for now the film which was shown in cinemas both as a propaganda/marketing piece and a recruitment drive is shown above. The site is now Fife Council’s longest lasting derelict site, the ground so contaminated with cyanide poisoning nothing much can be done with it.) Virtually all sides of my family, save that of my paternal grandmother and grandfather, are somehow influenced, derived, descended sociologically from that founding and it has long held a personal and academic fascination for me, indeed there was barely an essay in my undergraduate years which didn’t reference it in some way.

The ‘overspill’ brought lots of Glasgow with it over and above the willing workers. Two schools were built on either side of a road, one catholic the other protestant. Just to keep things symmetrical a protestant church was built on the same side of the road as the catholic school, whilst the chapel was on the side of the protestant school. As with most of the mining villages, it was built to be self sustaining, had its own array of shops, pubs, clubs and entertainment and its relatively remote location meant its social or sectarian divisions remained contained but unchecked.

Into this milieu, in the early 1970s, I was born to a family nominally Roman Catholic on both sides, though more observing of the faith on my mother’s. Circumstances were such that I only lived with my parents until I was eighteen months old, when I went to live with Aunt, my dad’s sister, while he went to work in Libya. This complicated matters slightly, beyond the personal, since I’d been baptised in the local chapel. My Aunt had married outwith the faith, almost as far as it was possible to go; her husband’s father was ‘master’ of the local town’s most prominent lodge of the Orange Order. I am, therefore, more than passingly acquainted with the strains on familial and community bonds sectarianism places in our society, rooted in those summer days spent reading under the covers whilst first preparations were made and then triumphalist bigotries ensued across the length and breadth of the village as the latest march took place.

I learned all too early to keep quiet, to support neither team, to kick with neither one foot nor the other when asked. Later, defiantly always answering with my own wilful choices of ‘Dunfermline’ and ‘I’m better wi ma heid!’ respectively. It often wasn’t enough and they didn’t much like smart arses either.

At this last festival, people I hadn’t seen nor wanted to for some time, who had grown up through all of this too, as well as the ravages of the Strike of ‘84/’85 and subsequent pit closures, from which a community built around a vocation is unlikely to recover quickly without all of the ensuing neoliberal agenda which was to follow and further marginalise them, who had given in to the easier paths of less resistance during those times, for reasons which I could not determine but which did not augur well, had decided to attend.

I almost smiled when I arrived with the busload of eager Slovakian students, who I’d promised a taste of ‘real’ Scottish culture and as we exited the coach I saw the ghosts of times past, heard them announce their presence to the field of some 600 odd souls with a normally wince inducing, group bellow of 'HULLO, HULLO…’. I turned to the students as they filed past, perhaps the most innocent and demure looking among them, one of the female students most enthused by aspects of the ethnological conversations, smiled at me in the passing and noted, with a satisfaction and positivity I had no heart to question or dissuade her from, ‘Ah, that is so nice, they are greeting us as we arrive!’. If only that had been the sum of it.

Unbeknownst to me there had been a festering sore between rival ‘smack’ dealers locally, a late arrival to the ills visited upon the villages. It just so happened a member of one of the bands playing was adjudged guilty of some slight by association apparently, I learned later, and had been singled out for ‘punishment’ that day, his whereabouts timed specifically that afternoon from the running times on our posters. He also just so happened to kick with the ‘wrong’ foot.

I returned after departing briefly to change out of the kilt (honestly, I just don’t have the legs for it!) to find an argument ensuing close to the stage, inevitably involving the guys from the village where I grew up and the band member they’d come seeking. I ran across the field, foolishly thinking, I know these guys, I can stop this before it becomes something worse. I was within a few yards of them when the most horrific scene I have ever had the misfortune to witness first hand erupted before my eyes. 

There’s no hyperbole in saying that, no will here whatsoever to recount the slow motion, graphic detail I remember it in either. Local newspapers followed most of the story if your ghoulish enough to want follow the clues in the narrative here to unearth more details than I’m willing to share.

A baseball bat had been smuggled in. A man’s life was changed irrevocably, his children’s too. Steel plates reconstructing a shattered skull. Brain, neurology, memory beyond repair. Blood spraying across a five year old boy, my son’s friend, soaking his t-shirt to the skin, his eyes wide even though it had sprayed, sticking there too.

A few minutes later, the field emptied of more than half its crowd, everyone left, waiting, looking but doing nothing. A group had closed a circle around him. I walked across to the scrub at the edge of the field, where they paced, and on seeing us thought about running.

The two policemen I was with, one of them coincidentally having also grown up together with me, and everyone in the group caught between a pacing bravado and skulking guilt, quickened stride. They’d been there, having just been driving around the village, likely how a window of hideous opportunity had presented itself. I matched their pace.

‘Him, him, him…’, I’d already given a statement, two other police officers were coming up behind us. ‘What the f*$k, ya f%^&£n wee (insert vile sectarian invective I hadn’t heard directly since I was, at the oldest, fourteen), you’ll ken aw aboot this soon enough!’.

I turned away and headed for the bands area at the back of the stage, the only way to change any of it now being to make sure they played on. I didn’t even feel stupid telling the guy who’s story that actually is, when the ambulance came and he was heading away, that the bands were still going to play. Its probably why, in that moment, foul curses ringing in my ears, I made sure they would.

For all the visceral memory of that though, I don’t think of what happened as a sectarian crime. The hallmarks of all the societal pressures visited on the villages, even then, among the angry, the disillusioned, the dispossessed, were playing out and the language of hate gave its misguided vindication, was an enabler. None of those guys were ardent supporters of any cause. They used the language they associated with violence to help justify their actions, whether to themselves or anyone watching, I really cant say. I do know I saw the easy connection between that kind of violent eruption and the language of hate.

As the ambulance left a small group of Slovakian students approached me and I immediately began apologising for them having to see such ugly spectacle and insisting this wasn’t representative of Scottish life or culture. I should really have given more consideration to the sum of their past experience. Of course they were concerned for the injured man. One or two asked about the children standing nearby. They insisted they didn’t want to know what was being shouted, during and afterwards, but suspected its nature. Then they, almost as a group decision, quite suddenly decided that to understand why they actually had just wandered over mainly to ask if the bands were still going to play, without it meaning they weren’t concerned, I would need to understand their country a little more and what they’d lived through. We resolved to have those conversations over that day and the few more I would see them for.

Of what relevance now is that act, happening nearly twenty years ago? Well, because try as we might, whilst many things have changed, many things have stayed the same. Where Scotland has voted to Remain overall, where do we think those Leave votes came from? Aside from the misdirected protest vote, where does the message of insular British Nationalism land in Scotland? If Scotland finds a way to become something else, what of those who resonate with it, are emboldened by it, are they likely to quietly keep their feelings, their ideologies to themselves, change their minds, let the type of venom shown in George Sq post 2014 referendum vote dissipate? Maybe the historical antecedents of manipulation, of exploitation in religious intolerance for overtly political ends by financial elites, which it is so clearly rooted in, will be recognised playing out again in the protest votes for Brexit, the echoes, the irony seen; maybe one, William, vying for power among the princes of Europe will be seen for the demagoguery he pursued, it's toxic legacy acknowledged, or the later one's outright, started a Glasgow branch of the British Union of Fascists outright, fascism admitted by his self proclaimed 'boys', then again, maybe not.

Just two months ago, having been visiting a friend who still lives in the village where I grew up, taking the bus back to town (I know, I know, I've noticed shit always goes down on the bus too!), it was there again, misdirected, misappropriated, barely understood but trotted out in the same vindicated, triumphalist fashion. Only four of us on the bus, an elderly fella across the aisle from me on the other priority seats, two early twenties lads, one in hoody, the other in football shirt, you can guess the team colours. 'HULLO, HULLO...', 'Could ye go a chicken supper...', and as I got up for my stop, 'Here, mate, mate, what team d'ye support?'.

Really? Still, now? So blatantly and not a word of warning from the bus driver, despite the older man looking clearly intimidated and the driver having to know, from both our bus passes, his for a pensioner mine as a disabled person, that we weren't likely to be the most robust of opposition to any aggression. Swigging on the tonic too, they were, erratic, drunk, unpredictable. I shouldn't, it wasn't the most consideration I could give my safety, nevertheless, it had to be done.

'I'm no intae fitba; and there's laws against you singing that nonsense noo, the driver should be pulling up at the polis station to drop you'se off! It's no big or clever, disnae say who you are, to try and make me and that old fella feel intimidated by your backward tribal bullshit, gie it a rest.', and to the driver as I waited to exit, 'D'you no think you should be dae'in something aboot that? Is that old boy supposed to feel intimidated aw the way to the station noo?', 'No ma job mate', 'It is though, they're breaking the law on your bus, your the very man to sort it; but it's aw oor jobs, it just shoodny happen anymair, shoodny ever have but we've got means to stop it noo and we aw shood stop it in its tracks whenever we can, they're just young laddies, they don't even know what they're saying, if we don't tell them how offensive it is, how intimidating, show them an alternative to the bullshit that tells them it's ok, there's a whole other generation gawny keep that gawn!', 'No ma job mate, hear what yer sayin, but ah just drive the bus, ken.'. As I got off I heard the songs start up again, louder still, vindicated, and I got the finger and a throat cutting motion as the bus pulled away.

Twenty years on and the same potentials were still there, despite whatever the law thinks it does. What would the Slovakian students make of it, of lessons still to be learned?

I wont turn this into a wander through Slovakian cultural history now too, fascinating as it is and those conversations I had with the students after that fateful day were. I’m aware this has gone on for some time already and maybe your wondering, what’s the fecking point, what are you saying?

If you get the chance, and as a current European neighbour as well as one we would have as aspiring EU/Scots citizens, you know, beyond Brexit (I may have mentioned that earlier, I am getting back to it!), and of course that is if your not already fluent in both the language and culture already, getting to know Slovakia is worth the journey. As things stand now, as a destination in that journey, you would of course have to question how, as an ancient yet newly emergent nation, how they transitioned from the promise of the Quiet Divorce to being, alongside Greece and Hungary, one of only three EU countries to have a political party who stood for election on openly fascist platforms represented in parliament.

How any of those parties found their way into mainstream politics and their easy place along the continuum of the right, which, if it wasn’t before, post Brexit vote, is now so much more clearly defined as extending rightwards from the UK Conservative Party, blurring now into UKIP, Geert Wilder’s Dutch Freedom Party, Austria’s nascent equivalent, France’s Front National and on through a plethora of increasingly intolerant right wing opinion into Pegida, Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary and L’SNS in Slovakia (lets not forget also that it was only in 2009 when Nick Griffin, then of the BNP, was given equal airtime with mainstream political parties on the BBC), is clearly a cautionary tale any emergent European nation should ignore at its peril. Across Europe, as it has in the UK, the hard, far and extreme right have offered an easy out for frustration and anger at what are seen as increasingly failed financial and political elites in the post 2008 financial crash landscape. Some 19 years of Nigel Farage and UKIP influencing UK politics, changing the language, the narrative, as perhaps the noisiest minority, in terms of ultimate consequences, these islands have ever seen, they led right here.

Looking at the history, the development of all those groups, both individually and collectively, looking at the embedding of their ideas and language into social and cultural consciousness, somewhere holds the key to understanding the future for Europe. Learning from the cautionary tales of appeasement of the extreme right, as much in the recent past as not so, is crucial to a future beyond a landscape of fear.

For my purposes here, since there is at least a PhD’s worth of work in studying the rise of the right across Europe, in highlighting some of the continuums of ideology and how consent for enacting their manifestos is enabled and ultimately manufactured, I’d like to focus a little on Slovakia.

Discovering that book, that gift, lurking among my unpacked boxes made me realise I hadn’t kept as watchful an eye on developments there as perhaps I should, if for nothing else other than to see how the students I entertained almost twenty years ago now, so soon after the hope of their country’s transition to independence, may have fared. Of course I had heard the worrying basics. More recently, alongside the response of other Visegrad countries, how their Prime Minister sounded with regard to the refugee crisis had given me chills, and with the Brexit vote in context alongside all of the other right wing demagoguery, yes they were multiplying. I decided to fill in a few blanks for myself, maybe you’d like to come along for what is certainly a bumpy ride.

Back in March of this year, when Slovakian citizens took to the polls in a general election, pundits expected the populist right to grow similar to developments across Europe, and grow it did. What was less expected was the sharp rise in support for the extreme right People’s Party Our Slovakia (L’SNS), who garnered eight percent of the vote, gaining parliamentary representation for the first time. The party openly supports the Nazi puppet state installed in Slovakia during WWII.

Amid corruption scandals, economic uncertainty and the refugee/migrant crisis, Slovakia, which has recently taken over the rotating presidency of the EU, is now one among many European countries (of course now including a Brexiting, right wing Conservative led, with an emboldened, hard right UKIP cheerleading, UK) where demagogues, populists and fascists are utilising working class anger and frustration at domestic/global financial and political elites to threaten the European peace, order and stability of the post war settlement. Many worry that, in the Visegrad bloc and post communist countries of the Union in particular, there is a return to the kind of intolerance last seen in the 1930s. In Slovakia, the director of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, Stanislav Miccu, calls it ‘a crisis of moral values’, going on to note:

'Many European countries are supporting extremist parties, even more than in Slovakia. But western European extremist parties are not (openly) fascist parties…When you say, this party is xenophobic or supports a program of racial hatred [supporters] will say this is not true. They say [the party] just wants to establish order here, and that its not possible today what happened during Hitler’s era. They are not aware of how fragile our politics are.’

One of the major questions for Slovakia, and Europe, is has there been a failure to address fully the shortcomings of the transition to democracy. In some apparent failings may be seen the roots of at least some growing intolerance and resentments towards political elites and the EU, giving perhaps a tendency towards a more extreme impetus in the rightward political drift than elsewhere in Europe.

Some twelve years since their 2004 accession to the EU, clearly enthusiasm for it has dimmed in Slovakia. In one recent survey 52.3% were positive about membership, dropping from 68% in 2010.

Slovakian sociologist Michal Vasecka argues that part of the issue is that EU membership was never considered in terms of principles, he points out:

‘The Slovak transformation was very much focused on changes of institution and connected with the building of capitalism. It was not attached to values. It was perceived by most of the population not in terms of quality of life in all possible dimensions, but quality of life in material dimensions.’

The obligations associated with membership were brought back under scrutiny during the EU sovereign debt crisis, which happened just as Slovakia’s growth was showing promise for a nation so often cast as Czechoslovakia’s poorer half. Support for Greece during its first bailout proved so contestable among people and politicians that the government collapsed as a result. Vasecka points out:

'Suddenly Slovaks realised that their membership of the EU is not just taking eurofunds and moving around EU, but there are some responsibilities too. This is the moment when positive feelings about the EU disappeared in a second.’

Further issues have escalated since then and seemed to reach another catalysing point in resonse to the refugee crisis. Prime Minister Robert Fico, nominally a Social Democrat, has been one of the loudest anti refugee voices among Europe’s leaders, even suing over the EU’s relocation quotas. Many blame him for desensitising the public to aggressive rhetoric from all sides.

Editor of daily newspaper Dennik N, Matus Kostolny, sees the thin line between Fico’s rhetoric and that of Marian Kotleba, leader of L’SNS and one of their parliamentary representatives. He points out:

‘Fico opened the door to primitive language. People see Kotleba talks dirty but so does everyone else. And at least Kotleba offers solutions [to the people]. Divisions between normal and extremist politics started to become really thin.’

L’SNS has a clear anti-Roma platform and is expressly anti asylum seekers and refugees, as well as NATO and the EU. The party posted a congratulatory note to the UK for the Brexit vote on their website.

The political elite are still reeling from the rise of L’SNS. No invite was received by their elected members from the president to attend a meeting for all representatives of parliament after March’s vote. The media admit to being unsure of how to direct coverage of the party, unsure whether giving column inches or airtime to Kotleba gives his party unnecessary respect or if ignoring him/them confers further pariah or folk hero status.

Whilst there are those drawn to Kotleba and L’SNS because of their extreme views, the predominant sympathy appears to be with them as anti establishment figures and Kotleba’s carefully cultivated image as ‘a man of the people’. Radovan Branik, who founded a crisis response team to assist during natural disasters like flooding, says that when needed, L’SNS dispatch help with the utmost efficiency, noting ‘When it comes to volunteering, if I ignore their politics, they are objectively the most effective volunteer workers.’

The L’SNS message resonates especially loud in more remote areas neglected by mainstream politicians; but in these towns their rise, and in particular the personality and predominance of Kotleba, has created division and uncertainty. In places like Banska Bystrica, where Kotleba represents in parliament, the results have aggravated a generational divide. A quarter of first time votes went to L’SNS much to the consternation of a majority of older residents in the region with longer memories.

In the small village of Ostry Grun, in the west of the Banska Bystrica region, on Jan 21 1945, Nazi soldiers retaliating against partisans and their supporters living in the hills, burned down the entire village, shooting 64 villagers indiscriminately, men, women and children. In the decades since the village has been rebuilt and appears never to want to forget, having raised memorials, commissioned books and constructed an archival room dedicated to the dead. Bewilderingly for many, more than a fifth of the population voted for the openly Nazi sympathising L’SNS, whose first act in parliament was to demand a minute of silence for the day Josef Tiso, the head of Slovakia’s pro Nazi government during WWII, was hanged in 1947 for treason.

Emiliana Surianski, one of the last living survivors of the massacre, who’s mother and sister were among those killed, was seven years old at the time. She says now, of the vote, as well as the rise of L’SNS and their ideology/policies:

'If someone had to survive what I had to go through, the vote would never have ended like this. People don’t understand what refugees go through. They don’t understand what fascists are. Slovakia is losing empathy. People cant feel for other people anymore.’

Where the extreme right stand ready, where there is a legacy of intolerance, however it is seemingly well managed, there is a clear route, through the enabling language of appeasement among neo liberal governments, for protest to turn into intolerance, for intolerance to turn into fascism in darkening continuum. Where fascism lurks, so too do fear and terror.

The protest vote against political and financial elites is manifesting itself everywhere. It is a phenomenon emerging to varying degrees across the majority of European countries, from Central Europe to Britain, and in Trumpism too; something structural is occurring in the relationship between populations, national governments and political/trade blocs, like the EU and its institutions. Understanding the dynamics of those changing relationships will surely be key to the future of the European project. It will also surely be fundamental, as the notion of the nation state appears to resist ‘ever closer union’ for each to ensure a thorough understanding of where legacies of, as well as nascent, intolerance lurk within them. The lines between protest, intolerance and fascism are blurring and vigilance is clearly required

As Scotland attempts to respond to the post Brexit vote landscape and hopes to take its place somewhere among the small, independent nations of Europe, it's civic nationalism must stand tall in opposition to the revisionist nationalism of right wing zealotry so clearly exemplified in L'SNS and all of the variants demanding attention across Europe. I hope in reading about some of Slovakia's plight the parallels with this disuniting kingdom we live in were easy to see, just a matter of continuums. An outward looking, civic nationalism has the potential among European nations to provide a forward looking alternative, to be an exemplar, a positive node in the battle of networks against hierarchies which rages all around. Where there is that landscape of fear, where change is being co-opted and the threat of fascism stalks, we must look at ourselves, warts and all, and say, no, not here, not ever.

It's not just here, in the UK, that the protest vote is being subverted, is a symptom rather than a cause. A wave of change is building the world over. Faced with the uncertainty of change, as fragile human beings, we tend to yearn for safety. Sadly, often we turn to those who seem to be certain about creating it, it's why, in the face of coming change, the populists, demagogues, zealots and fascists seem to be on the rise. They attempt to conjur images of strength and power, of certainty in past or future glory but root their thinking, their ideologies in a weakness which resists the realities of a changing world.

Somewhere, there are those whose thoughts are rooted in the reptilian brain, where only 'I' matter. And those whose thinking struggles to move beyond the mammalian; only I and my blood relatives matter. Whilst there are those further restricted in the evolution of their thought by allowing it to only be determined by the tribe, whatever it's bonds; only I, my blood relatives and the tribe, eg Slovakians, Britons, Americans, Germans, Christians, Muslims, Hindus. But there are a growing number of people responding to the absolutely necessary demands of planetary, global change with planetary thinking and evolving it to the point where everyone matters, all life matters and all that sustains it matters. What do you think is the most appropriate response?

I couldn't claim to have all, or even any, definitive answers to any of the question marks I've left hanging all throughout parts 1 and 2 here. I have some further thoughts, largely they concern indices, democracy and 2025.  Having gone all around the houses with their forerunners, thankfully I hear you say part 3 will be significantly shorter and will be the last I have to say on these particular topics round here for quite sometime.

A Landscape of Fear Pt 1

(First published on Kiltr three months ago) 

Brace yourself, this may take me some time. I’ll break it up a bit so it doesn’t bore you too much, then I think I’m giving up trying to write my way out of it, to reconcile all the difference with words.

Four times I’ve revised writing this since Thursday last; the post Brexit vote fallout continues apace and I’ve wondered whether to continue writing it at all. Media narratives reassert themselves unashamedly, brooking virtually no notion of complicity in the manufacturing of consent for an inevitable further brutalising of those least able to take the strain whilst the Great British Fake Off garners its forces in both of Westminster’s two ‘main’ political parties. There have been screeds of analysis written in the week (and a half now) since the vote and I have no wish to contribute further to the klaxon calls, the hand wringing or told you so’s.

Mostly I’ve been seeing a landscape of fear. It’s a fairly well established term in looking at the various ways in which eco-systems work. The landscape of fear looks at how the flora and fauna of a given locale interact, in particular at how apex predators often not only determine that environment but how it comes to rely on them.

A simple example would be how the hunting into extinction of the wolf in many areas of Northern Europe, Scotland a prime example among them, didn’t lead to immediate flourishing of herds and agriculture. The natural fear of apex predators, of the wolf, which leads wild herds to graze and migrate, moving to survive, was removed and young forest plantations in particular suffered.

In 2015, with the support of the John Muir Trust, landowner Paul Lister announced plans to reintroduce the wolf back into the Scottish highlands, admittedly with some resistance from other landowners, even if Springwatch’s Chris Packham added whatever weight his support brings to the case ‘for’ too. Perhaps you see where this is going; the whole neoliberal project reintroduced the wolf, long before it was a glint in Mr Lister's eye, first set free coincidentally with the power transferred to the barons by King John’s signing of the Magna Carta, the closest England has ever had to a written constitution, some 801 years ago.

Revisionist historian’s eyes tend to look upon ‘the noble document’ and its intent of curbing the absolute power of monarchy, ruling by divine right, favourably. Rightly so. It should also be noted though that when the words were written upon it which are often seen as the root of Great British democracy, saying ‘No free man shall be taken or imprisoned, or dispossessed or outlawed or in any way ruined’, a ‘free man’ in England, as it was in much of medieval Europe, meant little to the peasantry or ‘ordinary, hard working people’. This was still very much the age of feudalism, having developed since around 700 and only officially ending in the United Kingdoms of England and Scotland with the Tenures Abolition Act (1660).

In undermining the monarch’s power, the Magna Carta gave more power to the barons, it was the beginning of a system of legal entrenchment of power and wealth in land, which we still see the vestiges of today. This was what the landed gentry and nobility were celebrating at all of the events last year, what about you? What were you celebrating, British libertarianism?
So the wolves have skulked and hunted, barely concealed, but now they want the landscape of fear back.

Before the EU referendum vote I published a few pieces here, written in hope, focusing on positive aspects of European solidarity, now however there is a desperate need in me to write myself out of fear.  Yes, there are the inevitable and almost all pervasive worries with regard to an emboldened hard right Conservative government (and any of the prospective candidates for its recently vacated seat at the head of the table are, despite any of their claims to be the moderate choice, further to the right than Cameron by varying degrees); that’s a Government aiming to, regarudless of the Brexit settlement as regards a trade deal or free movement of labour and people, circumvent the protective legislation, the checks and balances the EU has given workers, unions, gender equality, disabilities, human rights, the list goes on. No, my biggest fear is that behind it all is a grinding inanity, an acceptance of inevitability, a Kafkaesque trajectory beyond the rifts of social division, beyond working class anger and frustrations or left wing and liberal cries of despair, where the inevitable and only refuge is the ultimate collective passive acceptance of ‘oh dearism’.

Whilst the room slows from its spin and balms are applied to soothe away the murmurs of ‘r’ words used both about the vote and reactions to it and the settlements to come, my most worrying thoughts bleed out from dark visions of a city state led corporatocracy, a tax haven Britain further transferring wealth from even more to even less of the population. The narrative of othering so firmly embedded in the social consciousness, individual xenophobic actions enabled by systemic institutionalisation in our failing political systems and their media cheerleaders, will swivel like a spotlight outside a grim prison wall, ready to fall on the next easy scapegoat as soon as expediency requires, political or journalistic prestidigitation slickly (or not so) diverting gazes from the real action. Do we believe the initial stories that those who bankrolled the Leave campaign made a killing on expecting a fall in the markets and the pound or subsequent stories that they lost their investments in the campaign to the tune of hundreds of millions but don’t regret a thing?

As the man who called the referendum (which Scottish people had shown no desire for in the first place), his arch nemesis in the public schoolboy bunfight, which the blue on blue bloodletting grew out of, as well now as the bulldog for the British establishment’s clearly manipulated and desired veer rightwards, all drift off into the privilege of the good night, what now for the disaffected whose frustrated act of misplaced defiance enabled the entrenching of their misery even further. In places where it seemed there was nothing left to lose there may still be more yet. What now for the Independence Day declared by two of the three, the one for a country, which John Oliver so rightly points out, was independent all along and is the one other countries around the post imperial world feel the need to declare independence from

 Meanwhile, back at the Westminster ranch, George Osborne ostensibly withdraws his failed and failing austerity driven targets and looks to calm investors and flight in the markets by further reducing corporation tax. Of what relevance will that be to those most affected by his failures, what of those who have borne the brunt of that failed project, many of them the same voters promised ‘control’ by the swashbuckling Brexiteers? What of the more than one in five of the population who have borne 39% of all cuts, including to social care and community services. Or most worryingly for me, given the easy target painted on all our backs, what of the 1 in 13 people of the population who are disabled and who have borne a heavily disproportionate 29% of the burden, making them nine times more likely than the average person to have been affected by them? And this beyond the burning issues of enabled xenophobia and hate crime.

Marked by its absence from front pages in a UK media which reaches ever further rightwards in a continuum which begins just right of the new centre, which is far further right than it has ever been, has been the Old Bailey’s decision to try Jo Cox’s killer Thomas Mair as a terrorist. Of course it should never have been in doubt but there is a predominant, prevailing narrative, which now sees terrorism as overwhelmingly something it isn’t, somehow accepted at an international, societal, cultural, governmental level with barely lip service paid to its endemic racism. Beyond what we all thought was a turning point in a nasty xenophobic campaign, but which was still to see ‘that’ poster, the expediency with which tragedy has served its purpose becomes clear. Wider repercussions other than holding the very public cipher to account seem unlikely, they wouldn’t serve the underlying narrative, as cynical as that sounds and as utterly sad as it makes me. In the UK, terrorism is defined, under section one of the Terrorism Act 2000, as an action, threat, or violent act ‘made for the purpose of advancing political, religious or ideological cause.’. For most, for the media and the right wing demagogues and those led by them, caught in their narrative, that means only one thing.

So, of course, barely a whisper passes in the UK media, which would run contrary to the right wing enabling narrative pursued by almost all of its outlets for more than a decade, linking back from this decision to the Dec 2015 Royal United Services Report indicating the greater threat to the UK, and its communities’, security from right wing, ‘lone actors’ than from that which so predicates worries over terrorism. It seems a journalistic simplicity to me in cross referencing also to the New America Foundation report which found that, post 9/11, of the 26 attacks defined as terror on US soil 19 were perpetrated by non Muslim extremists, by far the majority of which were right wing, anti government organisations and white supremacist groups. Terror has a legal definition and should, within the law always be called out as such. Likewise, so does hate crime. The links between the two are often clear and there are legal frameworks for dealing with them too. We have just witnessed an enabling of radicalisation which needs to be checked and rowed back, for the sake of our communities and for the next easy targets before more tragedy ensues.

Yet when even the Prime Minister uses the enabling language, othering ‘swarms’ and ‘hordes’, at the dispatch box and warnings from the UN Human Rights Commissioner, calling on the UK to curb tabloid hate speech against migrants and refugees, are wilfully ignored, in fact are seemingly reacted against, what hope is there of any decisive action being taken any time soon? It has become an inherent threat to the precariat in all its guises that any and all of its constituent members can and will be used as an easy other to serve the nefarious ends of lining shareholders pockets. It is no coincidence that the same arms companies responsible for selling arms to all sides in the Middle East conflicts, helping fuel the refugee crisis, are the same companies selling arms to increasingly right wing governments closing their countries’ borders across Europe.

This is some of the backdrop, my wholly subjective eye view on a landscape of fear where the demagogues, the investors, those motivated wholly by profit beyond borders, are the apex predators, with scavengers now baying around them to savage the remains of anything they deem rightful prey. And I feel like a wildebeest desperately trying not only to outrun them, dodge them, but attempting also, in what may be increasingly vain attempts, to usher at least a small herd away with me, all the while fearing most for the stragglers, the most vulnerable.

Of course, for us in Scotland there is some hope. The competence and determination of a First Minister acting upon the expressed will of the people, bringing perhaps more than welcome change. And to come also, perhaps respite in a compassionate, more dignified Scottish Social Security provision, but whilst we wait, whilst Westminster plays its internal power games, our lives, our communities remain under constant threat from the project already well under way. Somewhere near you, maybe next door, maybe in that dishevelled figure you cast a glance at in passing on the street, there are ethnographies of fear, of lives governed by it.

I realise now perhaps there were other places to look, to highlight where and how those fears can manifest, but my tendency is always to look for hope first. Right now it feels like it will be a long time in the waiting for hope to materialise. A relative thing, of course, but in a landscape of fear, hope on the horizon, two, three years away, seems as distant as the view from the Juno probe.

Amidst my fevered surveying of the backdrops, the landscape, I was given pause to reconsider those other places and my perspectives on them. They were also thrown into further sharp relief by Scotland’s particular weaknesses when it comes to the tribalism of identity politics in a post truth context.

Given what I’d written for this, given events my personal views were based in, it seemed wholly surreal to read descriptions of a march by an overtly sectarian organisation, held against those same backdrops, in which the crowds attending were outnumbered by those marching, was both allowed to bring areas of our largest city to a standstill on a busy summer Saturday and could be described as passing with no ‘major issues’ and only ‘minor offences’ committed, by both police and the media. In what other context could 13 people arrested for breach of the peace, sectarian offences, the carrying of an offensive weapon and assault during a daytime march through the city streets, be described in such a way? When an organisation exists, at best in part, as an opposition to another religious faith and its demonstration, its celebration of what it is, its march, leads to those occurrences, are we to see them as minor, give them no other context?

That’s not to say this is a contribution to that debate either. My own, nuanced position should become clearer as I continue. I’ve written the foregoing with a degree of removal and hindsight, what follows, given that context, was a little more personal, ethnographical than that.

I often write these pieces drawing on personal experience in attempts to illustrate wider ideas. This isn’t done due to any misguided belief in the anecdotal as universal but rather draws on two strands of thinking. The first is the simpler of the two, drawing on the so often fruitful advice which should remain extended to all writers and not merely aspiring ones, to write from the perspective of what you know. Its not really as simplistic as writing ‘what you know’ or all writing would become autobiography, its more like an exhortation to remember all things are focused through the lens of your own experience, tacitly acknowledging there is no objective standpoint and the best you can muster is knowing your own subjectivity, and owning it too.

The second, slightly more complex, reasoning behind the drives, the framing of what I write is in a commitment to a cultural anthropological approach to modes of inquiry which is markedly less well known beyond the fields which gave rise to it. It is one which, given the widespread adoption and rise in uses and applications of one of its most basic but powerful research and archiving tools, the ethnography, is likely to become far more widespread as the limitations of that tool are questioned or stretched beyond the field which devised it; try not to smirk when I say I’m talking about ‘kinky empiricism’.

I intend to write more on just what that term means in a Scottish ethnological and general cultural context, aside from how it informs my academic work, but for now find it incumbent upon me, not least of all because it has informed virtually everything I’ve written here but also because I realise I cant just throw it out there without at least a basic attempt, to give the term a little further definition or explanation.

Coined by Danilyn Rutherford in a 2012 paper for the University of California, to take account of the adaptation of anthropological techniques for ever expanding fields, ‘kinky empiricism’ was an attempt to reframe contemporary cultural anthropology. It acknowledged that ‘the new kinds of interchanges in which anthropologists are now engaged create obligations of a particularly pressing sort.’, whilst also noting that in the ‘increasingly politically fraught arenas…anthropologists are entering…all too often (it) has appeared to outsiders as having a tangential relationship to the empirical.’. Rutherford’s appeal is for a revision of what empirical means, drawing on the epistemologies of Hume and ‘the long shadow cast by the 1980s, a time when anthropologists developed new allegiances in the humanities’, but not restricted by either, acknowledging their limitations amidst the need for ethnographical immersion, subjectivised by its very nature.

‘Kinky empiricism’ speaks to truisms but acknowledges an absence of absolute, empirical truth and in so doing attempts to reclaim a redefined empirical nature of inquiry. Somewhere it owes a debt to Lyotard. It is ‘always off kilter, always aware of the slipperiness of its grounds and of the ethical demands spawned by its methods.’. In further acknowledging the inherent weaknesses of the wholly empirical approach and of the wholly subjective, Rutherford makes a compelling case for a redefined empiricism, a kinky one, because ‘being off kilter is a strength, not a weakness. For anthropology, it is what comes with getting real.’.

Amidst a landscape of fear, all of our lives are off kilter, every story, every ethnography has equal validity, it always did, it is what comes with getting real. This one begins last Thursday, a week out from the Brexit vote…

...I ventured out on my own yesterday for the first time in a few days. That’s just one of the small indignities I regularly face with my condition. (newcomers chez tumshie may benefit from a perusal of https://www.kiltr.com/tumshie-heid/1782916141-the-politics-of-sleeping-part-1-just-the-fact ) I spent some time, in the first year or two post diagnosis and whilst still struggling with the notion of the restrictions it placed upon me, railing against it but all too often found myself in dangerous, unsafe situations which, if they didn’t impact on my threshold or seizure frequency directly, certainly took their toll later.

So a fiercely independent man had to resign himself, eventually after some inevitable kicking and scratching, to a more prudent management of matters, trying to find a balance between just being able to move around, go about my daily business, freely, acting of my own free will and volition, whilst maintaining, managing situations in such a way as to do so safely and with a minimalised impact on my condition. I still, more frequently than I should, trade off what I know will inevitably impact thresholds later just so as not to feel caged in by the condition, to feel free of it, even if briefly and with consequences which will only give the lie to its fleeting sensations later and with a vengeance.

It struck me, whilst foraying out, that whilst I have adjusted to this constant trade off and management as stark necessity (just an increase from 40 to 60 partial seizures in a day is brutalising, the difference between functioning and being debilitated, the likelihood of clustering into secondary generalised seizures so much higher and more frequent, sometimes just one lack of understanding, one person being a dick, can be the catalyst for that difference; I cant explain that to everyone all the time, so stay at home when my threshold is low and my frequency higher, its safer that way!), that same balance, the same choices, for entirely different reasons, around immediate or deferred and lasting gratification, will be facing many in the sharpest relief they have ever witnessed it, as the UK’s (lack of) social contract takes shape. In my new place of residence, taken up largely to assist with the management of my condition, among the gentle folk and rolling hills of Perthshire, as I stepped warily blinking through the brief sunlight, I saw little direct evidence of it around me.

I was thankful for it, of course, for a brief respite from the emerging scabrous sores of social division writ clear across even the most facile analysis of the EU referendum results, frothed to the surface amidst the tumult of deeper political and social malaise, like even the best, or indeed the worst, home made broths, apparently in need of some skimming, but its bursting bubbles not so visible here. Thankful but still wary of a world which felt changed, less safe, I continued on to the corner shop.

Whilst housebound for a few days and against better judgement in terms of best avoided emotional impacts, when I have had longer, in fuller cognition, inter ictal periods, I have, like so many others, been unable to tear myself away from newfeeds and commentaries as the post Brexit vote week unfolded. Whilst I’ve been proud of the way most Scots voted, I have been under no illusion that the working class dissatisfaction with financial and political elites is not present in the same way it has been clearly articulated across England and Wales and the emboldening that has given to right wing movements across Europe since

In the EU Referendum Result debate in Holyrood this week, Kezia Dugdale, having one of her few fine moments in the chamber, was right to point out that although Edinburgh, where her constituency is, voted so resoundingly to Remain at 75%, whole areas, like Niddrie, when viewed at the count, clearly expressed a desire to Leave. Those areas have the same vulnerabilities as their counterparts in the NE of England or Wales, which have seen them exposed to the right wing demagoguery, to the smoke and mirrors of being led to point the finger in the wrong direction. Those same weaknesses exist in the mining communities I grew up in, the ravages of neo liberalism disaffecting their denizens further almost by the day.

We are fortunate in Scotland to have developed something of a layer of first defence against the easy insidiousness in mass take up of those arguments but we should not consider ourselves immune, whilst those who have been sold a pup, the length and breadth of the UK, should never be criticised for seeking answers, for wishing to be heard, even if they have been to given reason to understand they would find whatever they sought in all the wrong places. A brief survey of the newsstand, replete with headlines proclaiming, from Scottish versions of London based newspapers, that apparently the warm reception given to Nicola Sturgeon’s diplomatic mission to the EU, enacting a distinct Scottish foreign policy, and the standing ovation given to Alyn Smith, amounted to ‘No European Friends for Scotland’, gave rise only to a rueful shake of the head. I was here for a notebook, I had instead thoughts on Slovakia, free festivals and unabashed sectarianism to record, first for me but also for this. Beyond these, I have little else to offer of personal perspective on the EU vote farrago. They are thoughts on roots of things, consequences and continuums too, all of which, by their very nature, have already begun.

(Pt 2 Left, Right, Left, Right? Coming in short measure...)

Kafkaesque

(Originally published on Kiltr three months ago)

As I awoke, in the wee sma’ hours of Friday morning, from uneasy dreams broken by partial seizures, I found myself transformed on my couch into a gigantic insect. ‘What has happened to me?’, I thought, not unlike Gregor Samsa before and countless others simultaneously metamorphosised, in a place and among a people irrevocably changed overnight. It was no dream.

My room, a regular human living room, only rather more claustrophobic now than its dimensions had always been want to suggest, lay almost quiet between the four familiar walls. Almost quiet save for the demands of voices tweetering and woofing incomprehensible from my chest, where my tablet lay fallen. Slowly I remembered, cognition beckoning with implied threat.

My eyes turned next, if briefly only to avoid inevitability, to the window and the overcast sky. Heavy rain beat against the window gutter reinforcing the overwhelming sense of melancholy. What about sleeping a little longer and forgetting about all this nonsense, I thought, but could it be done? Surely even the tightening of seizures, the fear and panic between which they would bring, in ever darkening complicity, even they would be better than this, better than the waking world I'd returned to?

A strident voice cut clear through the reverie, no longer lost in the morass of sound my ailing neurology had reduced it to. I had been following the results of the vote as they came in, switching between sites and channels, searching for a sanity other than the faint hope offered by a polity which had showed a clear distinction from its neighbours, from the country which abutted it in insidious perfidy. There were contortions in the voice, in its questioning, as if Bernard Ponsonby's amateur psephologist shoes were far too tight, ill-fitting but try to walk in them he would nonetheless.

'...it would take a brave First Minister, would it not, to call a second Scottish Independence Referendum in the light of these numbers coming in, which seem to indicate a sizeable percentage of that much lauded surge in membership have chosen to vote against her advice and have in fact voted to Leave?'. Blatantly casting aside all other, perhaps far more significant, figures this was how the results were being framed, the narrative driven by media to fit that of an almost predetermined story arc.

But we did Bernard, get a brave First Minister, a sad but determined and brave First Minister. And like so many others, I needed that. As a disabled man from a working class community, I needed that. As manager of a social enterprise representing other people with disabilities, mitigating the worst the UK establishment has had to throw at them and all the social and economic fallout that entails, I needed that. As an academic doing research vital to and funded by that enterprise, I needed that. As a Scot who believes in the principles and safeguards of European partnership. I needed that. Fuck it, as a European, I needed that Bernard, didn't you? I didn't need the yawning chasm of necessary time, the futility, before that hope has even the faintest chance of becoming reality. I didn’t need the now all too real threat of becoming a footnote in a right wing columnist’s finger point at the next other, the next easy scapegoat; I’d been that, for myself and for my clients, been the easy target and grew weary of standing up again, unwilling to take it.

This time, in this moment, in facing the magnitude, the futility of false revolt and irrevocable choices, this time however, in my present condition, no matter how forcefully, wilfully or violently I tried I could not turn myself over, could not stand, a gigantic insect flailing on his back, closing his eyes to keep from seeing his struggling legs. I only desisted when the dull ache encompassed my entire being.

There was another all encompassing, overwhelming theme here though, which had been there right from the moment the starting gun fired in the most insular and divisive of political campaigns to don the sheep's clothing of demagoguery these islands have ever seen, absurdity. An absurdity I knew was only likely to become ever more Kafkaesque as the consequences of the result bit hard and deep into the social fabric of the places we call home.

Kafkaesque? Surely for those who had voted in anger, for the dispossessed with nothing to lose, even the word was a cliched, overused and abused token of the elitism they had just reacted against, but I could think of no more apt or fitting description.

Adjectives are derived from great writer’s names to encapsulate a mode of expression or sometimes an entire philosophy. Clearly I raise this point not to extol the virtues or mark the demerits of the Joycean, the Shakespearean or the Homeric. No, in light of recent days' events and for all that is to come, I do so to underline the appropriateness of much more dark and stifling visions the adjectivised use of which is likely to increase sharply and in short measure too. There should be no smirks or sighs, raised eyebrows or brushes aside and the value of their currency should not decrease with further use; here can surely be no more fitting descriptions for a just barely still United Kingdom, for the present and immediately foreseeable future, as Orwellian and Kafkaesque.

Whilst we await the final ridiculous, utterly self absorbed and protracted outcomes of the Conservative Party leadership fight, and face its consequences, we know the UK will almost inevitably lurch further right still in a post Brexit political wasteland decimated by the political 'capital' gained from their referendum tactics. Both the visions of Orwell and Kafka seem set to become ever more accurate in their prescience.
Orwellian may indeed be a fitting descriptor for what will inevitably become an increasingly invasive and draconian state with a particularly British fascistic stamp on its modes of governance, once these increasingly reactive and prohibitive measures take deeper root (and I sincerely hope they don't; if you haven't seen them yet Paul Mason, as always talks a lot of preventative sense for the dark days to come, here https://medium.com/@paulmasonnews and here https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/25/britain-rainy-fascist-island-progrexit-brexit/ , whilst Robin McAlpine does his best, measured, home grown initial assessment of the tasks at hand here http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2016/06/24/the-three-tasks/ ), and the reactions of the angry, dispossessed swathes of what used to be easily defined as working class people but are now a growing percentage of a nebulous precariat, come to serve the will of political and financial elites they railed against, the futility of not being heard will only deepen. In post truth politics the votes of the precariat serve only to manufacture consent for bureaucracies of elite power to entrench it further.

The EU may have drifted into unrepresentative austerity as a consequence of neoliberal agendas, ultimately transferring wealth further from the rich to the poor, but it has done so only over a matter of a few decades, quickening in the few long years since the financial crash of 2008. The British establishment has been doing something similar since at least the reinstatement of (an unwritten) constitutional monarchy and parliament post Interregnum, having hundreds of years to become more insidious and layer more complex deceit into its instruments. For all of those times you may have described pen pushing or form filling bureaucracy as Kafkaesque before, consider now the futility of working class revolt which enables the very bureaucracies, the elites it has reacted against. How perfectly does it encapsulate the visions of Kafka?

Perhaps you've avoided the works of Kafka even though you've used the adjective once or twice, maybe even eschewing it along with all the other pretentious moody Lit student adjectives which ring so empty and hollow when set against sharp and stinging reality, allowing them to slip the way of existentialism and postmodernist possibly, and sometimes, somewhere, justifiably so. So, maybe now, if that is your position, (even if its not, there's a short journey still worth taking) as the political, economic, social and inevitably cultural tectonic plates shift beneath us, take a brief departure here for a little Kafka priming. The first of the following short films is from Alain de Botton's excellent School of Life series, which tries to render philosophies, philosophers and writers into bitesize, easily comprehensible chunks, and concentrates on Kafka himself. The second, the payload for our purposes here, by Noah Tavlin, focuses on appropriate, and inappropriate, adjectival use of the term Kafkaesque.

What becomes clear with just a little insight, and as Noah Tavlin rightly highlights in the second video above, the genuine use and application of the term Kafkaesque is in 'not the absurdity of bureaucracy alone but the irony of circular reasoning in reaction to it, that is emblematic of Kafka's writing. His tragicomic stories act as a form of mythology for the (post) modern, (post) industrial age, employing dream logic to explore the relationships between systems of arbitrary power and the individuals caught up in them.'

Across the UK we are about to be reminded further too, as if we needed it, just what an example of arcane bureaucracies and bewildering mechanisms of power its governance holds. Just as exemplified by Kafka's 'The Trial', they have become self perpetuating, entrenching and operate independently of those supposedly in power, whether they claim to have given you your country, your control back or not.

Throughout the process of a wholly insular and reactionary Brexit, I see the dark, tragicomic, absurdist humour which permeates even the bleakest of Kafka's visions. A 'wholly sovereign', anachronistic, isolationist UK government and its ubiquitous attendant civil service will still rely on increasingly convoluted systems of administration and those angry, dispossessed working class people who just wanted to be heard, will still be ruled over by people they can't see, according to rules they don't know, want to or fully understand, provoking at best a more profound anxiety, psychological distress and societal malaise than that which was reacted against in the first place. Where Tavlin describes Kafka's attention to the absurd which 'reflects our shortcomings back at ourselves', he further defines the Kafkaesque world as accurately as a post Brexit vote one as 'the world we live in is the world we created'.

For many Scots, as it is for people in other areas, across London, in Northern Ireland, in communities, in families and homes over the UK, we may feel we contributed less to creating that Kafkaesque nightmare world of the immediate future but must also face the full force of deepening ironies in mass Bregret and a bewilderment at the second most web searched subject UK wide in the days after the vote being 'What is the EU?'. And this before and during a growing futility facing the prospect of a full blooded and unleashed Tory right, aided and abetted by their working class entryists in an emboldened UKIP.

It is perhaps worthwhile remembering then, for all those without even the timescales of hope offered now to Scots, that Kafka never fully denies his protagonists freedom of choice, even if they frequently have no idea what it is they are choosing between and why. From where I find myself now, the UK has never looked so Kafkaesque and for a while, it seems, all of us, the ordinary people, the young who voted in hope, the angry, the dispossessed, those who voted against futility, those who voted in fear, those who didn't vote at all, we all face the prospect of waking up of a morning, any morning, to find we too are the othered and have been turned into cockroaches.