Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - where I attended two political conferences in a week, both of them illuminating about where the nationally-oriented Left is going in Scotland, coming up to the May elections for Holyrood. Old comrades reconnected with, new ideas freely circulated. All comments welcome.
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That was a very political week for me: a welcome respite from thinking about bytes and notes. The two events I spoke at - the first at our still-glorious Parliament building, the second in a piper's hall in Glasgow - covered the bases of progressive politics in Scottish public life.
It was fascinating to be at the "Politics of Devolution" conference in Holyrood - especially for someone who's already crossed the line towards desiring a Scottish nation-state. I was most intrigued by those politicians attending who really wanted regional devolution to work, but expressed a tangible frustration that Westminster was deeply uninterested in the whole business.
Ex-First Minister Henry McLeish declared himself "a radically reformist Unionist" - but his anger at the condescension he received from his own party in the hey-days of New Labour was palpable. The former Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan told a fascinating tale of his Assembly's adoption of Scandinavian-style extended kindergartens for early-years education. Yet, as he put it, "London ministers would go to Finland to see how it works, and never realise that we had taken the same decision two or three hours along the motorway".
The impressive Northern Irish ex-Speaker Lord Allardyce - whose soothing manner was explained by his prior career as a medical psychologist - noted how early institutions like the Council of the Isles never really fulfilled their devolutionary potential: a new and inclusive "Unionism of the archipelago" had withered on the vine of London indifference, even antipathy. More than once, the politicians quoted the American Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who thought that American state legislatures could be "laboratories of democracy", providing innovations for the Federal government. But their general mood was that any innovation brought forth to the great Palace would be either ignored, resented or patronised.
On the other side, some speakers complained - particularly in terms of Scottish economics - that devolution was too successful. In the go-go years of a British exchequer pumped up with the revenues from financial speculation, the "Barnett consequentials" - the proportionate size of the Scottish block grant - were automatically inflated by the speculative bounty. Economist David Heald suggested that the Scottish economy didn't have enough "absorptive capacity" to deal with the billions of cash coming down the pipeline.
What I think Heald meant is that successive Scottish governments were able to expand the public sector and their services without any real connection to the country's underlying economic capacity. Which, of course, is the business-leaders-and-SNP-and-some-Tories case for fiscal autonomy: they want a situation where all the elements of income, debt, investment and expenditure can be centrally managed in Scotland, rather than strewn opaquely across various reserved and unreserved powers. (In its contorted structure, the Calman proposals got pretty short shrift all round here).
I left the event feeling strangely sorry for the attendees. For all their smarts, they were unable to plot a path towards the German or American-style federalism (aided by more, but unlikely, English regionalism) that would somehow retain the political Union of Britain. Yet they were entirely unwilling to see Scottish nationhood in the context of any other "Union" - Celtic, Nordic, European or wider - that might allow for, perhaps, a clearer and more coherent expression of self-government.
A few days later, an entirely different event - where the experience was not so much that of swanning around the biomorphic spaces of Miralles' Parliament, but of unforgivng rows of seats facing the tartan-framed stage of the National Piping Centre in Glasgow's Cowcaddens. The Scottish Independence Convention - a doughty attempt by the esteemed ex-Herald writer Murray Ritchie to create a broad, non-party space for independence supporters - was running its "Positively Independent" conference. With Elaine C. Smith in the chair - funny and politically articulate - it was hardly going to be a dour affair.
But neither was it tub-thumping ur-Nationalism. What I'd forgotten (note to self: develop input from Holyrood politics beyond the pompous perpetual-student hustings of First Minister's Questions on podcast) was the Red-Green dimension to sovereignty politics in Scotland. As you scanned the list of parties at the bottom of the flyer, it would be difficult not to wince as your eyes passed over the logo of the Scottish Socialist Party. I enjoyed Green MSP Patrick Harvie's warning the other day, as George Galloway makes noises about entering the Scottish Parliament on a wave of libel cash and talk-radio fame, that the last thing socialism in Scotland needs is "another tanned ego hellbent on splitting the vote".
But for the overall non-Labour Left in Scotland, it's a gey sore yin at the moment. Friends of ours from Stuttgart told us the other week how powerful the German Greens are becoming. According to Business Week, Greens have become "sexy", garnering the support of "the intellectual urban middle class - the latte macchiatos, the Mac users, the iPhone users", and are now credibly vying to be coalition partners in the next German government.
If we briefly forget those events which conspired (and perhaps perspired) against them, we can propose a counter-factual history for the left in Scotland: an SSP-Green bloc gathering momentum in Holyrood from the mid 2000's. In this universe, they would have been in the position to exploit both the Great Slump of finance, and the Coming Storm of climate change, and become a possible coalition-partner to the SNP - which itself would, going by recent behaviour, have been hospitable to such an alliance (given their "Progressive Rainbow" proposals at the last Westminster election).
But with every sales-busting cover of the Daily Record at the moment, that alluring universe - like the briefest of events in a Hadron Collider - goes pop! if you even think about it.
So while many of the presentations were properly stimulating - Mike Small on a low-carbon prospectus for Scottish independence, Joan McAlpine explaining the relative aversion of women to independence, Mike Danton on a new small-banking sector for the Scottish economy, Kevin Williamson on e-democracy - for me there was a certain wistfulness to the whole day.
In my own contribution, I ended up wondering whether our invocations of the late Jimmy Reid in recent months were entirely in good faith. Was it currently imaginable that an occupational group - like the UCS workers-in - could constructively challenge the commercial or strategic logic of their organisation from the inside? How much of the debate about the Scottish future gazes vertically upon Glorious Leaderships of various kinds - and how lacking are we in horizontal activisms that could make independence seem more deeply rooted in everyday empowerment, and more than just a shuffling of the managerial elites?
I'm becoming increasingly interested in the Green perspective on local empowerment and self-production. But surely what's inspirational about politics in Scotland is the "social concertation" that's possible in a small nation: the way we can connect our micro-activisms and idealisms with our macro-policies and structures. That's the vision of a land-reformed, democratically-intellectual, non-nuclear/pro-green, inventive and egalitarian Scotland which has motivated some of us for too many years to comfortably count.
And whatever national conversations we try to hold, if they're not conducted between the well-padded governing classes in a near-enough state building, and the exuberant, do-it-yourself activists in a piper's hall, they're not worth having.
For more on Scottish Affairs, visit Pat Kane's ideas-blog Thoughtland